Originally published on November 1, 2021 (Episode 232)
Introduction
In 1924 the eminent nerve-specialist Sir Roderick Glossop urged Bertie Wooster and his friend Charles “Biffy” Biffen to attend the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley. “It is the most supremely absorbing and educational collection of objects,” Glossop enthused, “both animate and inanimate, gathered from the four corners of the Empire that has ever been assembled in England’s history.”
After arrival at Wembley, Bertie’s genius-level manservant Jeeves shimmered off, and the heat, exertion, and education of it all became so overwhelming that Bertie and Biffy sought solace in ice-cold glasses of Green Swizzle, served up by a bartender in the Jamaican Tent. Perhaps Jeeves—known to curl up with a volume of Spinoza in his off-hours—attended one of the principal intellectual attraction at Wembley: the Conference on Some Living Religions within the Empire.
This awkwardly named gathering of world religions is one of several chronicled by my guest Tal Howard in his new book The Faiths of Others: A History of Interreligious Dialogue. In doing so, Howard traces how interreligious dialogue was defined; how it in turn defined religion; and how it reflected and reinforced ideals such as pluralism, cosmopolitanism, and orientalism—not always in the ways one might expect.
About the Guest
Tal Howard is Professor of History and Humanities, and Richard and Phyllis Dusenberg Chair of Christian Ethics, at Valparaiso University. This is his second appearance on Historically Thinking; he previously joined us to discuss the historian Jakob Burckhardt.
For Further Investigation
Tal Howard, The Faiths of Others: A History of Interreligious Dialogue (Yale University Press, 2021)
Tal Howard, God and the Atlantic: America, Europe, and the Religious Divide (Oxford University Press, 2011)
The proceedings of the Conference on Some Living Religions within the Empire, Wembley, 1924
Episode 67: Jakob Burckhardt, Historian of Culture, with Tal Howard
💬 Listen & Discuss
What do interreligious dialogues reveal—not only about religion, but about politics, culture, and empire? Share your thoughts in the comments, and consider forwarding this episode to a friend who loves history and ideas.
