Interreligious Dialogue: Myths and Reality (Interview with Professor Leonard Swidler)

Leonard Swidler, Professor of Catholic Thought & Interreligious Dialogue at Temple University since 1966, Founder/Editor with Arlene Anderson Swidler in 1964 of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies, Founder/Director of the Dialogue Institute (1978), holds degrees in History, Philosophy, and Theology from St. Norbert College (BA), Marquette University (MA), University of Wisconsin (Ph.D.) and Tübingen University, Germany (S.T.L.), was Visiting Professor at Universities of Graz, Hamburg, Tübingen, Nankai University (Tianjin, China), Fudan University (Shanghai), Temple University Japan (Tokyo), University of Malaya (Kuala Lumpur), Chinese University of China (Hong Kong), and Khazar University (Baku, Azerbaijan). He has published more than 200 articles and 75 books, including: After the Absolute: The Dialogical Future of Religious Reflection (1990), Death or Dialogue. From the Age of Monologue to the Age of Dialogue (1990), A Bridge to Buddhist-Christian Dialogue (1990), For All Life: Toward a Universal Declaration of a Global Ethic. An Interreligious Dialogue (1998), Confucianism in Dialogue Today (2005), Trialogue. Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Dialogue (2007), Dialogue for Interreligious Understanding (2014), and his latest Religion for Reluctant Believers (2017).

Mikhail Sergeev (Ph.D. in religious studies from Temple University, 1997) is a religion, philosophy, and modern art historian. He has served as an editor of the book series Contemporary Russian Philosophy at Brill Publishers in the Netherlands (2016–2019) and as chair of the Department of Religion, Philosophy, and Theology at the Wilmette Institute (2017–21). Sergeev teaches courses in humanities at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, and the Graduate Theological Union (Berkeley, California). He is also an Affiliate Professor at the United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities in New Brighton, Minnesota. Sergeev has published more than two hundred scholarly, literary, and journalistic articles in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Poland, the Czech Republic, Greece, Slovakia, Russia, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Azerbaijan. He is the author and contributing editor of fourteen books, including Russian Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century: An Anthology (Brill, 2020).  Web site: http://uarts.digication.com/msergeev/. See Faculty Bio