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Yale to host high-level Christian-Muslim dialogue

* Dialogue also being attended by evangelicals

NEW HAVEN: Senior Christian and Muslim scholars and leaders are meeting in the United States this week to seek common ground in their different faiths and foster better understanding between Islam and the West.

Hosted by the Yale University Divinity School, the conference is the first public dialogue launched by Muslim intellectuals in the Common Word group that had appealed to Christian leaders last year for discussions among theologians to promote peace.

Most of the US participants are Protestant theologians and church leaders, including some prominent evangelicals, but some Catholics and Jews are also taking part. The Muslims, both Sunnis and Shia, hail from all across the world.

The Yale conference began on Friday with closed-door talks among 60 theologians about how the two faiths understand the concept of loving God and loving one's fellow man. It will expand to include 150 people in public sessions from Tuesday to Thursday.

Evangelicals: An important aspect of the meeting is that evangelical Christians are among the participants. While some US evangelical preachers denounce Islam as a false and violent religion, several evangelical leaders support this dialogue.

"One of the most interesting places of Christian-Muslim confrontation in the world is where evangelicals meet Muslims," said John Stackhouse, a Canadian evangelical theologian from Regent College in Vancouver. "Evangelicals want other people to convert and in Islam, the worst thing you can do is convert."

Rabbi Burton Visotzky of New York's Jewish Theological Seminary was among the conference speakers on Friday. "If religious leaders can help move political issues to peace rather than war, then we've done God's work," he said.

The conference comes just more than a week after King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia hosted an unprecedented meeting of Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists in Madrid and pledged to pursue interfaith dialogue.

"We have broken the ice of mistrust between the West and Islam with this initiative," said Mustafa Ceric, grand mufti of Bosnia. "In world affairs today, the rule should not be the argument of force but the force of argument."

The Common Word project, started by Muslim clerics, says Christianity and Islam share two common core values – love of God and love of neighbour. The group says discussions on this among experts can help defuse tensions between the faiths.

Christian leaders have responded positively to the appeal.

"The common understanding here is that we have different theological languages but the ultimate object of our discussion is the same," said Ibrahim Kalin, a spokesman for the group. "There is only one God but we approach God with different languages." reuters

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