No Religion is an Island : The Nostra Aetate Dialogues

These dialogues began in 1993 as an outgrowth of a 1990 conference on Catholic-Jewish relations that commemorated the 25th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, the Vatican II document encouraging dialogue between the Catholic church and non-Christian religions.

This volume contains a record of the first five Nostra Aetate dialogues, and it brings together an impressive array of Jewish and Catholic scholars.

The conversations here take up "the Jewishness of Jesus" (John Meier and Shaye Cohen); "the Death of Jesus" (the late Raymond Brown and Michael Cook); "Catholic-Jewish Dialogue and the New Millennium" (Ismar Schorsch and John Cardinal O'Connor); "Jerusalem in Jewish and early Christian Thought" (Robert Wilkins and Michael Fishbane); and Abraham Joshua Heschel as "prophet of social activism" (Eugene Borowitz and Daniel Berrigan).

Moderators and respondents include religion journalist Peter Steinfels, Rabbi Burton Visotzky and Susannah Heschel, Abraham Joshua Heschel's daughter.

The volume is a solid introduction to some of the most important historical work on Christian origins, Jewish-Christian relations and the historical Jesus.

The discussion of contemporary issues, especially between Brown and Cook and between Heschel and Berrigan, is lively and accessible.

This collection serves as a model for interreligious dialogue.