Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Evangelical-Mormon Dialogue Conference, and Seminary Course on Interreligious Dialogue

Standing Together will be presenting a National Student Dialogue Conference on October 19-20 at Salt Lake Christian Center. The event will feature a number of plenary sessions and workshops that exemplify and explore Evangelical-Mormon dialogue. The list of plenary sessions may be found here, and the event poster can be downloaded here.

In connection with the conference, I have been asked by Salt Lake Theological Seminary to teach a course that is titled "InterReligious Dialogue: Foundations for Discussion Beyond Debate, Ecumenism, and Relativism." The draft course description reads:

Dialogue between Christians and adherents of other religions has been part of the inter-religious encounter for quite some time, but it is still relatively new in the context of evangelical Christianity and Mormonism. Evangelical-Mormon dialogue takes place in differing ways in differing contexts, and the response has been mixed on both sides of the religious divide. This course will look at a variety of facets that provide a foundation to inter-religious dialogue, including why it is important in a pluralistic and post-9/11 world, a spectrum of definitions of dialogue, biblical precedents for the process, theological considerations related to the process, evangelical concerns about dialogue, and how dialogue relates to Christian mission and evangelism. A solid foundation for dialogue will be put down and then specific application will be made to evangelical-Mormon dialogue.

The course is open to those who attend the Student Dialogue Conference and want to explore the issues surrounding interreligious dialogue in general, and Evangelical-Mormon dialogue in particular, in more depth. The course includes a Student Resource Packet of relevant academic articles, a helpful bibliography, and will use Robert L. Millet and Gerald R. McDermott's Claiming Christ: A Mormon-Evangelical Debate (Brazos Press, Forthcoming 2007) as the textbook. A syllabus and registration should be available at the seminary website as they post course information for the fall semester.

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