The Future of Religious Leadership: World Religions in Conversation

This essay offers a critical reading in The Future of Religious Leadership: World Religions in Conversation, a collection of articles edited by Alon Goshen-Gottstein. The essay suggests a few ways of reading this book. In one way, it should be appreciated as a history of ideas, allowing us to trace the development of the concept of leadership in various religions, allowing us to understand how leadership came to be what it is today. The question posed to all the authors who wrote texts for this book pertained not only to the significance of leadership in their respective religions, but to the future of religious leadership. They were asked to address the challenges they have faced, the ways in which they have contended with them, and, equally important, the manner in which they have dealt with the cumulative significance of the many challenges to a new formulation of leadership in the future. Therefore, before readers embark on their encounter with each of the different accounts contained in the book, it is important to start by first considering the significance of the project as a whole. To this end, this review begins by presenting the book’s potential readers with its major challenge, which also appears to have been the goal of compiling all of its essays into one text: identification of the shared elements of the challenges facing the different religious leaderships.Phrased more precisely, it is the argument that the future of religious leadership depends entirely on interreligious discourse. It is the divergence into interreligious study and interreligious theology—which the book’s authors and editors regard as necessary at this point in time—that constitutes the primary motive for the anthology’s compilation into a single major project.