Scriptural Relating: Towards an Interreligious Dialogue Methodology Inspired by Relatefulness and Scriptural Reasoning

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Attention is the just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality. 
- Iris Murdoch 

Abstract

This article introduces the framework of “Scriptural Relating,” a methodology for inter-religious dialogue inspired by Scriptural Reasoning, the interreligious study of holy texts, as well as Relatefulness, which aims to cultivate deeper interpersonal encounters. The term Scriptural Relating is coined to emphasise that this approach is concerned with our way of relating to scripture, and through scripture, to each other: participants are invited to recognise, through close attention to and expression of their moment-to-moment experience, how their assumptions, judgments and normative-theological commitments affect what they experience. Thus, it serves to counter the human tendency to turn both scripture and other human beings into projective surfaces, aim to cultivate more reflective, emotionally attuned relationships between people of other faiths, as well as a more self-reflective relationship with scripture. The methodology remains to be tested in practice, but its theoretical grounding and possible design are sketched here.

Author information

Name: Tamara Falcone

Background: B.A. in Philosophy and Islamic Studies from Tübingen University, practice in Tibetan Buddhist mind-training, as well as relational modalities like Circling, Authentic Relating and Relatefulness.

Affiliation: M.A. Student in Islamic Studies at Marburg University, Research and Outreach Intern at the Royal Institute for Interfaith Studies in Amman, Jordan

E-mail: tamara.falcone@outlook.com

Substack: https://substack.com/@tamarafalcone 

Conflicts of interest: none.

Originality: I declare that this paper is my own original work and has not been published elsewhere.

Permissions: Any illustrative examples are hypothetical.

I. Introduction

What happens in the space between two people? What is it that makes those two people misunderstand each other, reject each other, unable to connect? For me, these questions have arisen naturally from many interpersonal and cross-cultural encounters, yet I have never heard them asked aloud. It seems to me that the problem of distance can, in part, be traced back to the interpretive process itself—the lenses through which we perceive the other, which often take us far away from the just and loving gaze of which Iris Murdoch spoke. 

While this problem exists even within the in-group, it manifests in especially strong form between people of different faiths, ranging from more subtle misunderstandings and disagreements, to outright intolerance, hostility and violence. It is in interfaith dialogue that I hoped it might be most directly confronted. But my questions remain partially unaddressed: the dialogue I have experienced has been, by and large, a dialogue of texts and ideas, in which the inner life of the participants tends to stay in the background.

By inner life, I mean not only private thoughts and opinions, but everything else besides: moment-to-moment emotional responses, some of them not quite what we would like; the assumptions we bring to other human beings and to their scripture, which may twist what we perceive out of its true shape; the subtle shifts in how we perceive the other person; the distance created when that perception diverges from reality. These remain in the background, as if paying attention to them would distract us from whatever we deem more important. This raises the question: what would happen if we learnt to see the mind as it sees, and let that illuminate the way we relate to our traditions?

To bring these internal processes into the dialogue itself, this paper proposes a methodology I am calling Scriptural Relating. I begin by introducing the two practices that inspire this methodology, Scriptural Reasoning and Relatefulness, before sketching out how Scriptural Relating might be practiced. After this, I describe the problems this approach seeks to address, and close with some reflections on what problems might arise and what Scriptural Relating may offer. My interest is ultimately not in a specific methodology, but in what becomes possible when we engage with people of other faiths while remaining aware of, and willing to express, our internal processes—whatever arises in the process, and however this can best be done. 

II. Sources of Inspiration

One source of inspiration for this practice is Scriptural Reasoning. This practice, which was developed in the 1990s, involves people of different faiths—usually Islam, Judaism, and Christianity—reading and discussing passages from their scriptures together. Emerging from the Jewish theological and philosophical practice of Textual Reasoning, it was primarily developed by the scholars Peter Ochs, David Ford and Daniel Hardy: first as a dialogue activity for Jews and Christians, though it later expanded into a trilateral one including Muslims, and now also adherents of other religions (van Esdonk & Wiegers, 2019).

One distinguishing feature of Scriptural Reasoning is that it does not seek consensus or  agreement between traditions. The tent, as practitioners call the convening space of Scriptural Reasoning, becomes a place where each tradition remains fully itself while being genuinely exposed to the others. What emerges from this is friendship based on hospitality, as well as higher-quality disagreement (van Esdonk & Wiegers 2019, 13). Thus, Scriptural Reasoning is not purely intellectual: it engages the traditions’ theological resources seriously, but also values the relationships that develop in this way. However, this principled focus on the text—what has been described as its textual fixation (Moyaert 2018)—means that it leaves a particular level of the encounter unaddressed.

What exactly do I mean by this? Practitioners of authentic relating distinguish between three levels of conversation. There is the informational, where news, facts, and ideas are exchanged; the personal, where feelings about that content are shared; and the relational, where participants attend to what is happening between them in the present moment. The inner life of participants, including the projections, reactions, and withheld judgments described above, belongs to the relational level (ART International, 2017), whereas most interreligious dialogue operates on the informational and personal levels. Scriptural Relating proposes to bring the encounter to this third level, aiming for a different kind of outcome than most interreligious dialogue: not the correction of incorrect beliefs about a religion and its followers, nor the transformation of hostility into friendliness, nor the maintenance of these friendly relationships, but the heightening of the awareness participants bring to their own minds, to each other, and to their scriptures.

This is where the tools and principles of Relatefulness come in. Relatefulness grew out of a specific ecosystem of relational practices that developed from the mid-20th century onward. Pioneered in particular by Jordan Myska Allen, it is a set of awareness practices aimed at creating more truthful and loving interpersonal encounters. To this end, it offers tools with which participants attend to their present-moment experience in connection with others (to be described later). By applying these tools in interreligious dialogue, participants can bring the introspective awareness usually cultivated privately to bear on the encounter with the other.

III. Problems addressed by Scriptural Relating

Much goes wrong in the space between us and our holy texts, and between us and other people. When we encounter scripture, we see it through the lens of our prior formation:  associations learnt from repeated experiences, defensive investments in certain readings, ideological commitments that affect what we can accept in our own traditions. A similar process operates when we encounter another person. We arrive with our cultural scripts, prior experiences of people we consider like them, assumptions about what their tradition teaches and what kind of person it produces, and these direct our thoughts without our realising it. In both cases, the encounter is mediated by an interpretive apparatus that is largely invisible to the one operating it.

The practice of Scriptural Relating can counteract two ways in which this happens in particular. The first is something termed cognitive fusion in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which is when there is a lack of separation between oneself and one’s thoughts. As David Gillanders writes: “Fusion refers to the relationship a person has with his or her own cognitive events, on a continuum from fused (dominated by, entangled, believed, taken literally) to defused (experienced as mental events and not necessarily needing to be acted upon)” (Gillanders et al., 2014, p. 84). When this happens, we cannot question the literal content of our thoughts, and so what we think about someone becomes, simply, what they are, radically shrinking the space available for curiosity. Closely related to this is a tendency known in Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy as mind-reading: the habit of wrongly assuming that we know what the other person is thinking. Together, these can produce an encounter that may seem open outwardly, in the sense that one’s words, gestures, and expressions appear cordial and welcoming, but that remains closed internally, with countless micro-assumptions of which one is mostly unaware.

To this end, an important aspect of Scriptural Relating is the practice of “bracketing.” I borrow this term from the phenomenological concept of epoché, which refers to the deliberate, temporary suspension of habitual assumptions in order to encounter what is actually present (Benseler 1911). Participants are invited to suspend judgment about what thoughts, intentions and character traits they infer others to have, helping them recognise that these are, in fact, inferences, not obvious truths. Unlike what it means in phenomenology, however, this is not a philosophical exercise; it is an attempt to recognise what is hindering us from seeing other human beings justly and lovingly.

Even where the tendency to make assumptions is held in check, however, something else can undermine the quality of encounter: the withholding of judgments. In any dialogue between people of different faiths, subtle negative reactions are likely to arise continuously: a suspicion of criticism, a flicker of offence at how a text was read, an assumption about someone’s ulterior motives. The requirement to be measured and respectful, which may exist in other social settings but can be even stronger in dialogical contexts, means that these reactions are likely to be repeatedly suppressed. While it may be preferable to hostile, combative interactions, the issue with this is that suppressing negative emotions does not make them disappear; they continue to exert an influence on us even without our awareness. Scriptural Relating aims to address this by giving participants permission to express this judgment, as well as the tools to do so skilfully, in service not just of truthfulness but also of connection. 

For some, the idea of expressing judgment in order to connect with another person may be counterintuitive. However, it makes more sense when we think about the effect withheld judgments can have in other relationships: the accumulation of misunderstandings or resentment towards the other person, without them having a chance to respond to them—that is, until they are expressed, in a much more inarticulate and unkind form, in moments of acute conflict. Sharing the withhold prevents this, and it does so by bringing what was once hidden behind a polite but tight smile out into the open, where it can be examined and dissolved. However, this isn’t just about negative judgments: the same willingness to share frees us to share positive judgments about and feelings towards the person, our appreciation for the way they are, and the emotional impact of something they did or said, given that all of these can be suppressed when we prioritise appropriateness. In this way, we can create connection through truthfulness, rather than despite it.

These tools are already enough to elevate interreligious encounters to a different level. But the presence of a sacred text as a third party means that it is not just relating between people of faith; it is relating in the presence of what each tradition considers most sacred, most true, and most in need of defence, and therefore, of what is most prone to inspiring disagreement and much more. In dialogue, the moment where radical, irreconcilable difference reveals itself is the moment when judgment and assumption-making, but also careful management of impressions, are most likely to kick in. Scriptural Relating specifically works with that moment rather than around it. It asks: what is happening in you right now, in the presence of this disagreement? Can you stay with that, and tell me what you really think?

This repeated practice of staying with difference, as well as with the judgment and discomfort it may provoke, gradually builds a different kind of tolerance than that produced by cordial accommodation. This is not the tolerance that says your difference doesn’t bother me: it is a tolerance that says your difference may bother me, but I can be with that, and be curious about what it reveals, and remain in connection with you despite it; that says your judgment may hurt me, but I can be with that, and be curious about what it reveals, and also remain in connection with you despite it. And while it asks far more of us, it may prove to be a deeper and more durable foundation for interreligious friendship. 

IV. Sketching the practice

What would a Scriptural Relating session look like? While the methodology remains to be developed through practice, I am going to sketch out what it might involve. 

The first important choice is the selection of the text. Scriptural Reasoning chooses short, thematically linked passages from each tradition, chosen to be rich enough to sustain multiple readings without being so long that the encounter becomes a lecture. Scriptural Relating would follow a similar approach, with one additional consideration: the theme should be chosen for its capacity to surface genuine difference. 

Before the text is introduced in the session, the Relatefulness container must be established. This is the foundation on which everything else rests, and so it needs to be done clearly and solidly, so that the participants do not revert to their habitual ways of reading and relating. This might begin with the facilitator introducing the principles of Scriptural Relating, followed by a check-in: each participant is invited to name, briefly, what is present for them in this moment. After this, one of the participants is asked to read their chosen text out loud, and to share what it means to them; the facilitator invites the participants to share their experience of the text and of the speaker’s sharing; others notice and share what arises in them as they hear that response.

Several Relatefulness tools can help orient participants towards their experience. The first and most foundational is noticing and naming: noticing what is in one’s experience, and naming it. Importantly, this includes the full range of our internal experience—stories, sensations, impulses, assumptions, images—rather than just thoughts. An example of this: “When I read that verse, I notice that something tightened in my chest.” Or: “I notice I'm finding it hard to stay with this text. Something in me wants to move away from it quickly.” Sentence stems like “I notice that” have an important function: they help cultivate mindful attention to what is in our experience, but also a certain distance from it. This Relatefulness tool is crucial because everything else requires an ability to defuse from thoughts and emotions.

The second tool is the observation-interpretation distinction: the practice of separating what was said or done from the meaning we are assigning to it. A participant might respond to another’s reading with something like: “When you read that passage that way, I noticed that I felt agitated and started coming up with reasons why your reading is wrong.” In doing so, they are distinguishing their experience from their interpretation of it. Sentence stems are also helpful for this: “When you said that, I had a story that you were being dismissive, that you’re not being sufficiently respectful, that you were virtue-signalling etc.” Consistently practising this distinction can loosen the tendency to collapse the experience with our assumptions about it, the observation and the inferences we draw from it. In this way, we can reduce the unreflective certainty we often have that the meaning we are deriving from something reflects its true meaning. This in turn expands the space available for curiosity, for wondering what is actually going on. 

And Relatefulness emphasises acting on this curiosity too. This can look like saying: “I had the assumption that you disliked my comment earlier, but didn’t want to say something out of politeness. Is that true?” Which in turn offers an opportunity for the other person to correct a misunderstanding, or to otherwise fill in the gap in the other person’s knowledge: “Not at all! It surprised me, but it didn’t really bother me,” or: “I felt some irritation for a second, but after a moment I realised that I had misunderstood you.” Thus, the cognitive defusion we have cultivated through Relatefulness does not serve our own self-knowledge only: it allows us to go towards the other person with curiosity, rather than withdrawing into ourselves in silent judgment. 

Another helpful tool is that of sharing withholds. This is an explicit invitation to express reactions that would ordinarily be managed diplomatically, through polite non-expression and the maintenance of an outwardly, but not inwardly pleasant demeanour. Importantly, it must be made clear that in the container of Scriptural Relating, no negative reaction is a bid to change the other person's behaviour, understanding, or tradition. “I notice I felt some irritation at the way you responded to my question earlier” is not asking the other person to read it differently, but rather, making visible what was already present, but hidden. 

A caveat should be made about the way I have described this practice. Scriptural Relating involves attending to three different things: the text, our internal responses to it, and our responses to the other participants. While this doesn’t require us to do so simultaneously, this could be demanding in a way that Relatefulness and Scriptural Reasoning are not. Scriptural Reasoning keeps the focus primarily on the text, which gives participants a clear and stable object of attention. Relatefulness keeps the focus on the intra- and interpersonal, which creates an equally clear orientation. Scriptural Relating asks for both, and the question of whether this is enriching, or simply overwhelming, is one that only practice can answer. 

One possible way to deal with this is through sequencing. Participants who are already familiar with Relatefulness—to whom the basic moves of noticing and naming, distinguishing observation from interpretation, and sharing withholds come naturally—are likely more able to engage with the additional cognitive complexity that scripture introduces than someone encountering these tools for the first time. It might therefore make sense to introduce participants to Relatefulness, teaching the most important moves sequentially until they no longer feel effortful, before introducing the text. Because of this, the complexity of this trifecta is not necessarily a reason to abandon it. But it is certainly a reason to be especially thoughtful about the design of the sessions and responsive to the participants’ feedback. 

V. Other considerations

The practices and principles of Relatefulness, and the results it tends to yield, are not culturally universal. It has historically been practiced in Western, spiritual-but-not-religious, socially liberal contexts. Because of this, it not only carries the risk of importing assumptions that conflict with the respective traditions of the participants, but also of simply having very different results. 

That is to say: since the average practitioner of Relatefulness is likely someone who has already done some personal growth work, who is comfortable with emotional disclosure, and who does not carry strong confessional religious commitments, it is hard to predict what results the practice of Relatefulness might have in a radically different social context. It may provoke responses less likely to come up in more homogeneous groups practicing Relatefulness, and potentially, more difficult to deal with skilfully: historical grievances, power dynamics, theological disagreement. This terrain is what makes Scriptural Reasoning—which Peter Ochs has said is potentially the “most dangerous form of inter-religious dialogue” (Ochs 2015, 488)—so risky, and what may make Scriptural Relating even riskier, given that it additionally takes away the buffer zone created by polite intellectual distance.

But does this mean that it is less applicable, less valuable to people of faith? I don’t think so. In my view, the potential risk makes skilful, sensitive, well-informed facilitation, as well as precautions for the psychological safety of the participants, even more important. For example, to reduce the number of complicating factors, it may be wiser to begin with individuals of one or two religious traditions before developing the practice into a trilateral activity. Moreover, as suggested earlier, ensuring that the participants have a strong understanding of Relatefulness in general could also decrease the risk of things going wrong unpredictably. As for the possibility of conflict between the practice and the participants’ traditions, it is worth making clear that Scriptural Relating is not intended to be a fixed protocol, to be followed regardless of whether it coincides with participants’ values and beliefs. Rather, it involves a set of tools that can be engaged selectively: embraced to the extent that they honour participants’ beliefs, and set aside, or held more lightly, if they do not. 

In a similar vein, my use of ideas originating in Western therapeutic modalities, like CBT and ACT, may give the impression that Scriptural Relating has therapeutic aims. This is not my intention either. I refer to concepts like mind-reading and cognitive fusion solely because they can help recognise the internal obstacles to understanding and connecting with each other. Like Relatefulness, Scriptural Relating is likely to have psychological benefits, but does not aim to heal or better anyone; it simply creates the conditions in which a particular kind of introspective and interpersonal awareness becomes accessible.

As for what Scriptural Relating offers to Relatefulness, I would argue that interreligious dialogue is a new, and perhaps uniquely challenging frontier for it. There is one main reason for this. Relatefulness’s guiding values, love and truth, are generous in the sense that they, in theory, make the practice available to everyone, precisely because they are unmoored from any specific religious tradition. But this also comes with a kind of weightlessness: these values come with no history of exile, no text that has been wept over and argued about for millennia, no claims that specifically this is what God said and specifically this is what it demands of you. While I do not think there is anything wrong with this, it means that a particular kind of encounter—encounter with otherness that is rooted not only in history, but in what is believed to be sacred and even infallible—may be out of reach. It may be precisely in the friction between this practice and the teachings of centuries-old religious traditions, the constraints they come with, and their emotional and historical weight, that certain insights emerge. 

Practitioners of Scriptural Relating may, for instance, find that the practice shifts something in how they see or inhabit their tradition. But the reverse is equally possible: that encounter with profound religious commitment reveals something as yet unrecognised in Relatefulness itself. The cross-pollination, if it occurs, is unlikely to be one-directional. Because of this, Scriptural Relating brings with it emotional stakes of a different order, but also a different order of potential.

VI. Conclusion

It is likely that the questions this paper began with—what happens in the space between two people that makes them unable to reach each other—have many possible answers. Scriptural Relating proposes one: that what stands between us is not only theological disagreement, but also our habitual ways of relating to each other—the interpretive habits that cement themselves over time, the reactions we suppress in the name of politeness, and the moment-to-moment assumptions we make that we fail to see, let alone question. While its methodology remains hypothetical, the premise is not without support: relational practices like Relatefulness show that awareness of these processes, brought into connection, can change the quality of interpersonal encounter. Whatever form this takes, the practice points toward something that interfaith dialogue has not yet fully attempted: the possibility that people of irreconcilable beliefs might meet each other not only with tolerance, or with the friendship that Scriptural Reasoning cultivates, but with genuine presence, in which nothing need be managed and nothing withheld.

References

ART International. (2017). Three levels of conversation. Authentic Relating Blog. https://authenticrelating.co/blog/2017/11/10/the-three-levels-of-conversation/. 
Benseler, G. E. (1911). Ἐποχή. In Griechisch-deutsches Schulwörterbuch. B. G. Teubner.
van Esdonk, S., & Wiegers, G. (2019). Scriptural reasoning among Jews and Muslims in London: Dynamics of an inter-religious practice. Entangled Religions, 8. https://doi.org/10.13154/er.8.2019.8342
Gillanders, D. T. et al. (2014). The development and initial validation of the cognitive fusion questionnaire. Behavior Therapy, 45(1), 83–101.
Moyaert, M. (2018). Towards a ritual turn in comparative theology: Opportunities, challenges, and problems. Harvard Theological Review, 111(1), 1–23.
Ochs, P. (2015). Possibilities and limits of inter-religious dialogue. In A. Omer, S. Appleby, & D. Little (eds.), The Oxford handbook of religion, conflict, and peacebuilding (pp. 488–515). Oxford University Press.

What I would be particularly interested in feedback on:

Does the description of Relatefulness tools feel accurate and recognisable to you, or have I misrepresented anything?

Do you think the trifecta of attention I’ve described (scripture - internal processes - relational space) would be too complicated?

Do you think any changes should be made to the methodology in general? 

Is there anything in the practice as sketched that seems unworkable or naïve?

@jordan