Dialogue among religious traditions is challenging, since traditions vary enormously, and especially from one societal context to another. Some constitute all the spiritual insights, reflections, observances, and practices that have been part of a community's life over many centuries. Other religions originate as the result of an intense religious experience of a prophet or leader who becomes the founder of a new religious tradition. Still others begin as protest or reform movements within an existing religious tradition and gradually evolve as separate religious entities. Historically, religious traditions have, by and large, been in mutual isolation or at times seen themselves as mutually exclusive or even rival communities. In some periods, religious communities have been at war with each [Page 1070]other. In some places, as in ...