The Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion is pleased to announce a Spring 2025 program focused on Shi’a-Catholic Dialogue, to tackle global challenges at the intersection of religion, ethics, and democracy. The program promotes the goals outlined by the University of Notre Dame’s initiative on Global Catholicism, as outlined in its Strategic Framework, emphasizing a commitment to making the most meaningful contributions to questions of national and international concern. The dialogue focuses on both theological and practical topics, seeking to build better understanding while also engaging questions of pragmatism.
As the world’s most global, multicultural, and multilingual institution, Catholicism promotes interfaith dialogue with leaders and thinkers. The University of Notre Dame’s Democracy Initiative and Ethics Initiative establish it as a premier global destination for civically engaged global citizenship and moral leadership to forge insights into some of the most significant issues of our time. Shi’a Islam is the second largest branch of Islam with adherents located primarily in Iran, Iraq, Yemen, and Lebanon.
The Shi’a-Catholic Dialogue Series builds a platform for interfaith engagement between Catholic scholars and leaders and Shi’a scholars and clerics in three key areas, each inflected by the theologies and social teachings of the respective traditions: dialogue among civilizations, geopolitical dialogue, and gender dialogue. The task is to center the dialogues against the background of contemporary Shi’a-Catholic perspectives on the good society, geopolitical tensions, and human rights. The goal is to advance Catholic social teachings on contending visions of “the world as it should be.”
The Ansari Institute strives to build compassionate dialogue across our many differences. “In the past few decades, scholars and world leaders have suggested that there is a ‘clash of civilizations’ and called for a 'dialogue among civilizations.’ 9/11 brought to the fore the urgency of such a dialogue with the Muslim world. But we have never spent time really understanding what a dialogue among nations and civilizations really meant and what its parameters might be,” says Mahan Mirza, the Ansari Institute's Executive Director.
This dialogue series will be co-led by Gabriel Reynolds, Jerome J. Crowley and Rosaleen G. Crowley Professor of Theology at Notre Dame and a faculty fellow at the Ansari Institute, and Banafsheh Keynoush, an affiliate faculty member at the Ansari Institute.
“We welcome dialogue to address several key questions in each of the thematic dialogues we explore, so that rather than having endless discussions, we can find a few good answers to help build social justice,” said Banafsheh Keynoush.
Gabriel Reynolds, who served on the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, said in a recent interview: “The beautiful and challenging thing for the Catholic Church is that it is tasked by Christ Himself with the faith that the Gospel has given and the Church's principal responsibility is to preserve and share that faith with the world. But then the other element of the Church's experience is always listening to what's happening in the world today.”
This will not be the first dialogue among Catholics and Shi’a thinkers. The Vatican-Shi’a Dialogue on Social Justice under Pope John Paul II has expanded over the years to engage with Shi’a leaders in the Middle East, and it culminated in a visit to Iraq by Pope Francis in 2021. The Ansari Institute at the University of Notre Dame will build on these initiatives to address key topics on theology, civilizational dialogue, geopolitical challenges and opportunities, and gender issues to encourage faith-based conversations on democracy, ethics and social justice.