Concepts and Practice of Interreligious and Socio-religious Dialogue

This contribution distinguishes between inter-religious and socio-religious dialogues. Interreligious dialogues are encounters between members of religious communities. Even if they don't speak about religious issues in a strict sense they speak from different religious angles. In socio-religious dialogues, however, representatives of religious communities (who are also citizens) speak with politicians, with representatives of civil society or simply with their nonreligious co-citizens. The following reflections mainly focus on such socio-religious dialogues. They consider the relevance of the place where that dialogue is conducted, the agents who are involved in it, and the forms in which it occurs, and provide many examples of such religious dialogues in the public sphere.