Rogue Counselor

🌿 The Living Library: In Conversation with Taniya Hussain

JCM in Dialogue: Jews, Christians & Muslims Meeting Across Difference

What happens when interfaith dialogue moves beyond being polite—and creates enough trust for people to bring their whole selves into the room?

In this Living Library conversation, Michael Shoeman sits down with Taniya Hussain to explore her decades of involvement with JCM, a Jewish-Christian-Muslim interfaith encounter with a history spanning approximately 50 years. Taniya first encountered JCM in 1992. She shares how that early experience challenged her, as well as how her later involvement introduced her to a different kind of interfaith encounter—one increasingly willing to make room for difficult conversations alongside spiritual connection.

Together, Michael and Taniya explore:

🕊️ What makes meaningful interfaith dialogue possible

🤝 Moving beyond polite conversation into genuine relationship

🕌 Islamophobia, othering, racism, and the historical wounds we continue to carry

✡️ How Jewish, Christian, and Muslim participants encounter one another through worship, meals, conversation, and everyday life

❤️ Creating spaces where difficult emotions don’t automatically end the conversation

🌍 The relationship between spirituality, politics, culture, and collective trauma

📖 How listening to someone’s lived experience can challenge the stories we have been taught about one another

Taniya describes a model of interfaith encounter that isn’t limited to sitting around a table discussing theology. Participants experience one another’s religious services, eat together, spend informal time together, wrestle with contemporary conflicts, and sometimes develop friendships that continue long after the gathering has ended.

The conversation also explores a question at the heart of the Living Library: «What changes when we encounter another human being before we encounter the labels we have been taught to place upon them?»

Michael and Taniya discuss trauma-responsive and peer-to-peer approaches to conversation, including the importance of creating spaces where disagreement, woundedness, faith, politics, and lived experience can be explored without requiring participants to erase their differences.

Ultimately, this isn’t a conversation about getting Jews, Christians, and Muslims to agree.

It’s about discovering whether we can know one another more deeply while disagreement still exists.

📚 Your time has value.

All time invested in watching or listening to this conversation—as with all Living Library conversations—is creditable in hours through the Living Library Time Bank. Listening, learning, reflection, and meaningful participation are contributions worthy of recognition.

🌿 The Living Library invites us to replace assumptions with curiosity, argument with understanding, and the question “Who is right?” with another question: «”What might I understand differently if I really listened to your story?”»

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