Jesus stood on the edge of a different ethnicity and a different religion from his own, and he was speaking to a person of a different gender.
“If Sept. 11 (the 2001 terrorist attacks) didn’t wake us up to this, we’ll never get it. Our most important agenda for the next 50 years is our dialogue with Islam. We face the whole issue of how different races, religions and genders interrelate,” Father Rolheiser said.
Increased global awareness, he said, also brings negative reactions — fear, insecurity and growing fundamentalism.
“This is happening all over the world and in every religion — in Roman Catholicism, in Islam, in Buddhism and so on. People fear losing their identity, and security begins to trump wider concerns,” he said.
