Dialogue with atheists can teach about other faiths, Anglican says

Published: 2004-04-01

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Christians "can learn better how to understand other religious believers if we learn better how to understand unbelievers," the Anglican archbishop of Canterbury said in a March 29 talk at Georgetown University in Washington. Both dialogue with atheists and conversations with Jewish and Muslim adherents can lead Christians to an improved knowledge of their own beliefs, Archbishop Rowan Williams said in his address on "Analyzing Atheism: Unbelief and the World of Faiths." "We should certainly not be looking for a common core of belief between believer and atheist, but for a language in which to acknowledge and understand the difference," he said. "And in interfaith conversation, we continue to make the claims we make out of conviction of the truth, but seek to break through the assumption that everything can be reduced to whether people say yes or no to a set of simple propositions."

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