Case Study 5: Community Consultation

Abstract

This chapter analyses interreligious community consultations, an activity in which people of different religious or non-religious identities are brought together to consult with each other on community issues or negotiate specific community projects. Religious thinking in the context of community consultations is often related to secular actors although the internal motivations may be religious. The former is due the fact that interreligious groups are situated in western secular society and as a consequence of this rely on a secular discourse. It is clear that a secular language impacts on theology and the possibilities for adopting religious thinking. However, this is not the case for all consultations. Our results point to the hybridity rather than the homogeneity of talking and thinking in public. The necessity of community consultation is thus clearly related to the mundane situatedness of interreligious dialogue rather than to a transcendent reality. In such an environment, theology implies different ways of relating religious motives to the mundane situatedness of interreligious work.