The Scriptural Reasoning Society - Scriptures in Dialogue
"Better Quality Disagreement"
Shalom Aleichem - As-Salamu Alaykum - Peace be with You
Welcome to the website of the Scriptural Reasoning Society, a diverse network of local Scriptural Reasoning groups in universities, religious seminaries and synagogues, churches, temples and mosques, dedicated to Scriptural Reasoning - the shared reading by Jews, Christians, Muslims and others of their sacred scriptures.
Through this practice of Scriptural Reasoning, and reading our sacred texts together, we seek to understand and respect each other's important differences of belief. Unlike some other kinds of interfaith dialogue, we aim not to pretend a consensus between our often divergent religious teachings and practices, but rather we seek to understand our disagreements more deeply through scripture study - and build friendships out of that better quality disagreement. Please see our founding Community Ethic - the Oxford Ethic by which all our member Scriptural Reasoning groups are officially bound.
In addition, in order to support the participation of our Orthodox Jewish members, we seek advice on matters of Jewish halakha from the London Beth Din and other rabbinical authorities, while for the benefit of our Muslim members, independent senior Islamic authorities at the Shari'a Court of the London Central Mosque have issued a fatwa sanctioning the participation by Muslims in our work.
As the largest Scriptural Reasoning organisation in the UK, part of our founding history is our explicit and official critique as a whole community of what some SR practitioners have newly introduced and called "asymmetries of hospitality" - rather we believe firmly in scrupulous parity between participating faiths in SR at all times, and in all respects. We reject officially any construct of a "Scriptural Reasoning Reference Group", or notion of SR "Elders" of oversight as has previously been proposed by one or two SR founding practitioners. We believe that Scriptural Reasoning is a practice of women and men all in equality, and we express concern that SR and interfaith dialogue in some contexts has been instrumentalised and commodified by some in order to attract financial sponsorship from government agendas of interference in faith communities. We defend the freedom and autonomy of each participating faith, and the integrity of each faith's customs and traditional authority - and we read holy scriptures for the sake of God and the love of the practice alone.
The Trustees of the Society have issued a statement concerning recent events.
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