This book began with an overview of theology of religions and has sought to develop a spirituality of dialogue. I have spoken of theology as the ‘work of religious intellect’, spirituality as the ‘right channelling of desire’. Both are necessary for interreligious learning. Without being anchored in the life-giving if sometimes diffuse wisdom of the great religious traditions, theology risks turning itself into an intellectualist system that totalises ‘the other’. Without proper attention to the reasoned critique of faith and religious practice, spirituality is always in danger of splitting experiences of interiority from the broad context of social and ethical relations. In Christian terms, Logos and Pneuma – the givenness of form and the endless generation of meaning that is properly the work of the Spirit – reinforce and support each other.

Interreligious learning, as I have tried to describe it in this book, is not, therefore, a variation on the threefold paradigm that locks Christian thought into predictable categories but a more self-reflective account of Christianity-in-dialogue, a school of faith that responds to God’s imperative to give and receive love by forever moving across boundaries and translating its faith into forms that others can understand. My aim has been to construct a Christian ‘social imaginary’ and to offer a Christian contribution to a ‘school of schools’. In choosing to focus on particular experiences of interreligious encounter I have tried to account for a life of dialogue in which moments of insight and glimmers of understanding enhance Christian learning about the ways of God’s Spirit.