THE POSSIBILITY OF INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE IN TIMES OF WAR: THE EXPERIENCE OF UKRAINE

Abstract

The article is devoted to the problem of interreligious dialogue in Ukraine during the war. Ukraine is a country that unites different cultural traditions, religious communities, and systems of beliefs and values. During the years of independence (since 1991), this multiculturalism and polyreligiosity has not caused civil conflicts. Moreover, forming a national identity based on interethnic and interreligious dialogue, and thus a civic idea, has become increasingly pronounced over the years of independence. Only external interference from the Russian Federation led to the war in 2013, which in 2022 turned into a full-scale invasion and occupation and illegal annexation of part of Ukrainian territories. As a conceptual framework for understanding the processes in Ukrainian society related to interreligious dialogue in times of war, the authors choose the theory of Leonard Swidler and his understanding of dialogue as two-way communication between persons who hold significantly differing views on a subject, with the purpose of learning more truth about the subject from the other. One of the tasks of our article is to correlate this theory of interreligious dialogue and the principles that have been developed on its basis (DCEC: Deep-Dialogue, Critical Thinking, Emotional-Intelligence, and Competitive Cooperation) in order to strengthen the practice of dialogue in Ukraine (in particular, religious dialogue), to understand possible ways of developing interfaith relations in a country that, on the one hand, is characterized by ideological and religious pluralism, and on the other hand, is experiencing a profound existential crisis caused by the state of emergency (with all its legal, economic, and social restrictions, and a real threat to security and life) due to the war.