When, yearly, on Good Friday, Church of England clergymen prayed:‘Have mercy upon all Jews, Turks, Infidels and Hereticks, and take from them all ignorance, hardness of heart and contempt of thy Word: and so fetch them home blessed Lord, to thy flock, that they may be saved among the remnant of the Israelites’, 99.9 per cent of them in the late nineteenth century had little expectation of encountering a Jew, Turk or Infidel. This paper seeks to explore how the few Church of England clergy in London who in the 1890s did have a significant presence of Jews in their parishes responded as ministers of the established Church, with a charge to be responsible for the spiritual well-being of all the inhabitants of their parishes, including the call to save the Jews ‘among the remnant of the Israelites’.

The assassination in London on the evening of 1 July 1909 of Sir Curzon Wyllie, aide-de-camp to the Secretary of State for India, by a twenty-six-year-old Indian student named Madar Lai Dhingra stunned the nation. The background to the shooting and its consequences shed light on the attitudes of British Christians to Indian Hindus. In turn light is shed on the response of Hindus, most crucially that of the eventual leader of the successful campaign for Indian independence, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, in the crucial decade before the First World War.

In 1905, Madame Hyacinthe Loyson published her travelogue To Jerusalem through the Lands of Islam among Jews, Christians, and Moslems. In this work, Emilie Loyson, who had some experience as a journalist, described the couple’s travels in the Orient and their encounters with those of other religions, which – unusually for the time – took place on a footing of equality. This essay will first introduce the author, before turning to the religious and interreligious commitment of Emilie Loyson and her husband. Whilst in the 1870s they were engaged in ‘ecumenical’ efforts, over time their interest in interreligious encounter developed. The essay will examine – primarily from Emilie’s point of view – how the couple perceived Islam, and in particular Muslim women, as well as their understanding of Judaism and Eastern Christianity. Finally, it will ask what the couple were able to achieve.

This essay focuses upon a significant place, Glastonbury, at an important time during the early twentieth century, in order to shed light on a particular aspect of Christianity which is frequently overlooked: its internal plurality. This is not simply denominational diversity, but the considerable heterogeneity which exists at both institutional and individual level within denominations, and which often escapes articulation, awareness or comment. This is significant because failure to apprehend a more detailed, granular picture of religion can lead to an incomplete view of events in the past and, by extension, a partial understanding of later phenomena. This essay argues that by using the concept of vernacular religion a more nuanced picture of religion as it is – or has been – lived can be achieved.

On 4 April 1917 the British steamship SS City of Paris was torpedoed by a German submarine in the Gulf of Lions, and sank with considerable loss of life. Among the passengers was the Wesleyan Methodist scholar James Hope Moulton.’ Paying tribute to his friend and colleague,Arthur Samuel Peake recorded the ‘tragic irony’ of the death under such circumstances of an eloquent advocate of peace and of a scholar whose international reputation in New Testament studies was signalled by plaudits from Harnack, a doctorate from the University of Berlin and a longstanding academic friendship with Adolf Deissmann. Moulton, however, was more than a New Testament scholar. His presence in the Mediterranean in the spring of 1917 came about through his expertise in the history and thought of Zoroastrianism, which had taken him to India for eighteen months’ work with the Parsee community under the auspices of the Indian YMCA.

My theme is religious encounter in the crucible of three faiths. Its focus is a building and its impact. The encounter as yet has no conclusion. The faiths are Christianity, Islam and Judaism. The building is one of two belonging to the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) now in Jerusalem. It expresses the personalities who shaped it and the events which surrounded it. It is an essay in imperial Christian mission, inter-faith dialogue and the chemistry of human personality. Religious pluralism is the name of its game, community its watchword, as caught in a streamlined and golden expression of Bible-Land Deco. It is rich in the symbolism of faith, integrated in stone; but what does such pluralism signify?

The field of Oriental studies was the main context in which amateur and professional scholars developed the academic study of Islam before World War II. The role of religion in the rise of this discipline is now widely acknowledged, but the role of religion, particularly Christianity, in the critique and transformation of Orientalism after World War II has never been explored. Given the prevalence of Christian scholars in Islamic studies after 1945, why has this been the case?

Since June 2014 the Chaldean Catholic Church has faced an existential crisis. The recent attacks of the terrorist forces of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in the northern Iraqi provinces of Duhok, Erbil, Mosul and Sulaymaniya have resulted in increasing levels of persecution and forced displacement. This essay reflects on a more secure period in Chaldean history, during which the community made a strong contribution to the development of the modern state of Iraq, established in 1921. Although proportionally small in size, the essay will show that the Chaldean community contributed in ways which far outweighed their numbers, especially in the sphere of inter-communal relations.

The twentieth century saw the opening of wider spaces in which the settled historic Christianity of the UK could encounter other faiths. By the time Michael Ramsey became archbishop of Canterbury in 1961, developments both in England and in the international Anglican Communion made the task more present and more urgent. Ramsey was enabled by the expansion of air travel to visit more of the countries of the former empire in which Anglicans still worshipped, as Geoffrey Fisher before him had begun to do. Added to this was his willingness to intervene in international affairs, whether the war in Vietnam or the apartheid regime in South Africa. As such, there were new opportunities for Ramsey to come into contact with leaders of the other world faiths, and with local conflicts in other nations that had religious elements to them.

In 1985, Faith in the City, The Church of England’s report on Urban Priority Areas, commented that Christians frequently had an excess of church buildings, while ‘people of other faiths are often exceedingly short of places in which to meet and worship’. The challenge of securing sacred space has been common to migrant groups in Britain, and during the 1970s sharing of space between national historic denominations and migrant religious groups was identified by the British Council of Churches (BCC) and its Community and Race Relations Unit as a leading issue for interreligious relations. In the case of the Church of England, ancillary parish buildings were occasionally shared with non-Christian religious congregations for limited use: for example, later that decade the church halls of All Saints, Gravelly Hill, Birmingham, were being used by Muslims and Hindus for festivals and clubs.

Surveys of the historical relationship between Christianity and other faiths often suggest that through a process of theological enlightenment the churches have moved from crusade to cooperation and from diatribe to dialogue. This trajectory is most marked in studies of Christian-Muslim relations, overshadowed as they are by the legacy of the Crusades. Hugh Goddard’s A History of Christian-Muslim Relations proceeds from a focus on the frequently confrontational inter-communal relations of earlier periods to attempts by Western theologians over the last two centuries to define a more irenic stance towards Islam.1 For liberal-minded Western Christians this is an attractive thesis: who would not wish to assert that we have left bigotry and antagonism behind, and moved on to stances of mutual respect and tolerance? However laudable the concern to promote harmonious intercommunal relations today, dangers arise from trawling the oceans of history in order to catch in our nets only those episodes that will be most morally edifying for the present. What Herbert Butterfield famously labelled ‘the Whig interpretation of history’ is not irrelevant to the history of interreligious relations. In this essay I shall use the experience of Christian communities in twentieth-century Egypt and Indonesia to argue that the determinative influences on Christian-Muslim relations in the modern world have not been the progressive liberalization of stances among academic theologians but rather the changing views taken by governments in Muslim majority states towards both their majority and minority religious communities. Questions of the balance of power, and of the territorial integrity of the state, have affected Christian Muslim relations more deeply than questions of religious truth and concerns for interreligious dialogue.

The history of Christian-Muslim encounter is a growing field in areas of Christian theology and Islamic Studies. While there is arguably no particular systematic discipline or approach, anyone who enters the history of the theological encounters between these two religions is met with a large body of work which reflects an unusual complexity and degree of nuance. These range from polemical and irenic approaches by those who were writing in response to critiques of their faith without any direct contact with one another, to those Muslim and Christian writers who lived and wrote within the shared culture and civilization of the Arab East.