Learned Ignorance

James L. Heft is a member of the Society of Mary (Marianists). In 2006, he became the Alton Brooks Profess of Religion and the President of the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California. Along with three other leaders in Catholic higher education, he founded in 1996 Catholic Education: A Journal of Inquiry and Practice. He has published and edited twelve books and written over 160 articles and book chapters. Reuven Firestone is professor of medieval Judaism and Islam at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles and founding co-director of the Center for Muslim-Jewish Engagement. His published works include Jihad: The Origin of Holy War in Islam, Children of Abraham: An Introduction to Judaism for Muslims, and Jews, Christians, Muslims in Dialogue: A Practical Handbook.Omid Safi is the Chair for the Study of Islam at the American Academy of Religion. A leading Muslim public intellectual in America, he is a professor ofReligious Studies at University of North Carolina. He is the author of The Politics of Knowledge Premodern Islam and Memories of Muhammad: Why the Prophet Matters.

• 1. Preface James L. Heft ; 2. Introduction James L. Heft ; Part I: Learned Ignorance and Interreligious Dialogue ; 3. Some Requisites for Interfaith Dialogue David B. Burrell ; 4. Learned Ignorance and Faithful Interpretation of the Qur'an in Nicholas of Cusa Pim Valkenberg ; 5. "Seeing the Sounds": Intellectual Humility and the Process of Dialogue Michael Signer ; 6. Finding Common Ground: "Mutual Knowing," Moderation, and the Fostering of Religious Pluralism Asma Afsaruddin ; Part II: Must Particularity Be Exclusive? ; 7. Humble Infallibility James L. Heft ; 8. Chosenness and the Exclusivity of Truth: What does it Mean to be "Chosen"? Reuven Firestone ; 9. The Belief in the Incarnation of God: Source or Religious Humility or Cause of Theological Pride? Oliver-Thomas Venard ; 10. Supernatural Israel: Obstacles to Theological Humility in Jewish Tradition Shira L. Lander ; 11. Arrogance and Humility: a Quranic Perspective Afra Jalabi ; Part III: Violence, Apologies and Conflict ; 12. After Augustine: Humility and the Search for God in Historical Memory Elizabeth Groppe ; 13. Apology, Regret and Intellectual Humility: An Interreligious Consideration Michael B. McGarry ; 14. Islamic Theological Perspectives on Intellectual Humility and the Conditioning of Interfaith Dialogue Mustafa Abu-sway ; Part IV: Religious Pluralism ; 15. A Meditation on Intellectual Humility: A Fusion of Epistemic Ignorance and Covenantal Certainty Stanislaw Krajewski ; 16. Saving Dominus Jesus Daniel Madigan ; 17. Between Tradition and Reform: The Pre-modern Sufism and the Iranian Reform Movement Omid Safi ; 18. Epilogue: The Purpose of Interreligious Dialogue James L. Heft, Reuven Firestone, and Omid Safi ; Index

This explicitly theological and exceptionally engaging collection of scholarly essays represents trilateral dialogue in its most refined yet attractively challenging form. Here Jewish, Christian and Muslim authors address core mysteries of their faiths that bear consequentially on the whole 'Abrahamic' monotheistic tradition. Their compelling unity of purpose is to unravel, by thinking pluralistically to the limits of knowledge beyond specific questions, that condition of wonderment and intellectual humility before ineffable truth.