“All Humans Are Strangers-Almost Everywhere”: Reflections on Human Belonging

Abstract

This chapter is an attempt to approach interfaith consciousness from the vantage point of personal lived experience. To this end, I give an autoethnographic account of living across cultures, countries and communities comprising diverse faith orientations. These lived experiences have formed and informed my interfaith awareness, which was nurtured over a lifetime of what I call ‘longing for belonging’. I complement this autoethnographic account with biblical reflections on home and homelessness and conclude that my own sense of ‘strangeness’ can lead to a deferential appraisal and appreciation of the perceived ‘foreignness’ of others. This implies extending intellectual hospitality to adherents and proponents of other faiths as a conduit for nurturing and propagating interfaith awareness and practice. The reason is simply this: on the face of it, everybody alive today is a stranger in this world-almost everywhere.