Beauty as a Practice of Interreligious Leadership

by Rev. Dr. Michael Trice, Trustee & Secretary, Parliament of the World’s Religions

In a fractured world, the work of interreligious engagement is not only about dialogue, representation, or public witness. It is also about formation: the shaping of attention, habits, relationships, and institutional norms that teach people what to expect from one another and what to believe about human dignity.

One way I have come to understand this work is through the language of beauty, an area I am writing about professionally this year. By beauty, I do not mean ornament, sentiment, or aesthetic preference. I mean something closer to a moral and spiritual condition: those patterns of life in whose presence human beings become more alive, more recognizable to one another, and more capable of inhabiting a shared world.

If cruelty fractures, beauty binds. Cruelty works by withdrawing recognition. It trains communities to see some people as problems to be managed, threats to be contained, or abstractions to be debated. Beauty moves in the opposite direction. It restores visibility. It insists that no person, community, or tradition is exhaustively describable by suspicion, stereotype, or fear.

This is why the Parliament of the World’s Religions matters so profoundly in our time. At its best, the Parliament creates conditions in which communities meet not as distant categories, but as living traditions carried by real people. Such encounter is never merely symbolic. It is formative. It reminds us that pluralism is not the passive coexistence of difference, but the active cultivation of relationship, responsibility, and shared moral imagination.

In my scholarship today, I see four practices of beauty that belong especially to interreligious leadership.

The first is connection. Connection is the practice of recognition. It asks whether our speech, gatherings, policies, and institutions help people appear as persons rather than as instruments, liabilities, or representatives of a caricature.

The second is meaning. Religious and wisdom traditions carry deep reservoirs of moral language. They help communities interpret suffering, obligation, dignity, restraint, and hope. In a time when public life often reduces people to slogans or roles, interreligious engagement keeps human lives attached to stories larger than fear.

The third is coherence. Communities lose trust when they proclaim one thing and practice another. Coherence is not perfection; it is integrity across speech, action, and relationship. Interreligious work becomes beautiful when our commitments to dignity, care, and mutuality are embodied, not only announced.

The fourth is limit. Limit teaches reverence. It reminds leaders where power must stop, where domination must be interrupted, and where restraint becomes a form of care. In many traditions, spiritual maturity is measured not by limitless expansion, but by the capacity to honor what is sacred, vulnerable, and finite.

The Global Ethic at the Parliament of the World’s Religions calls us toward a shared moral horizon: a world shaped by human dignity, mutual responsibility, nonviolence, justice, truthfulness, and partnership. These commitments do not erase religious difference. They invite us to bring the depth of our differences into relationship for the sake of the common good.

To practice beauty in interreligious life is to refuse a world organized by cruelty, isolation, and caricature. It is to insist, through encounter and shared action, that human dignity remains real for all.