In 1893, the first World Parliament of Religions was held in Chicago, Illinois, USA. About one hundred religious leaders from around the globe met to discuss the need to respect differences in religious expression and to find other ways to settle conflicts than through religious violence. After two world wars in the beginning of the twentieth century, many leaders worked to create the United Nations that published the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 in the hope of helping all countries work to secure individual rights in their own societies and to help prevent further world war. The World Council of Churches was also formed in which people of differing Protestant faiths would agree to cooperate to do the same. By the 1960s the Catholic Church took up a major revision of its thinking toward faith traditions other than their own of Catholic Christianity; Vatican II reformations of doctrine opened that door to interfaith understanding and cooperation.
Today, interfaith groups are forming in every part of the country carrying a concern that we work as much as we can to increase interreligious dialogue as a form of religious diplomacy. Especially since 9/11, persons in the United States have awakened to a very pressing need to understand Islam in its many differing traditions around the globe, and by extension, to understand religious traditions different from their own but represented in US society.
