5 – 7 July 2026 | Berlin, Germany
Interreligious dialogue has built much of its legitimacy on an unexamined syllogism: that contact generates understanding, understanding generates trust, and trust eventually yields peace. This sequence is breaking down in practice. The Russian Orthodox Church’s theological framing of the war in Ukraine, the collapse of dialogue spaces following 7 October and the subsequent war in Gaza, and the rise of antisemitism and anti-Muslim racism across Europe have exposed how readily encounter can coexist with, or provide cover for, ongoing harm. Rafael Tyszblat of our partner organisation Connecting Actions stated: “Looking for common ground too soon is often a result of not being honest when it comes to power dynamics. Peace cannot be achieved through good intentions alone.” What is required is not a further format, but the willingness to interrogate whom a given space of encounter actually serves.
This problem was substantiated most forcefully by keynote speaker Prof. Cyril Hovorun, defrocked by the Moscow Patriarchate in December 2023 for his opposition to the war, who argued that the Russian Orthodox Church did not merely fail to prevent the invasion — it furnished that war with theology.
The workshop proceeded to a broader interrogation of the field’s premises. It situated dialogue within its contemporary European context — advancing secularisation, growing religious diversity through migration, and a resurgent Christian nationalism that risks instrumentalising religious belonging itself. It then turned to more conceptual terrain, examining how trans- and posthumanist thought unsettles dialogue’s foundational assumption of a stable human subject capable of speaking for a position, an assumption already under pressure from AI and algorithmic systems.
Theoretical reflection was paired with practical engagement, including a multilingual, cross-community magazine presented as a model of dialogue conceived as an ongoing practice rather than a discrete event. Structured group sessions returned repeatedly to four questions: what dialogue is, what has worked, where it has failed, and who remains absent from it.
DialoguePerspectives director Jo Frank extended this scrutiny to the network’s own practice, arguing that a field reluctant to question itself requires at least one space that insists on doing so regardless. What remained unresolved was who determines when a room is sufficiently safe for such questioning, and whose difficult subjects are named while others are quietly deferred.
Responsibility for this work now falls to the Future 500 network’s own participants, who are tasked with translating the workshop’s naming of power into a standing practice — redefining and reimplementing dialogue, inviting in the mediators, experts, and communities identified as absent, and retiring formats that no longer merit the designation. This inquiry continues this autumn at the Future 500 Autumn Workshop, “Religion as a Weapon – Violence and the Challenge of Solidarity” (13–15 October 2026, London, held in partnership with the EPNA programme).
Fotos: Natalia Reich
