Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 staged dozens of ancillary congresses on everything from labor to literature, and the World's Parliament of Religions was, on paper, just one more of them, the brainchild of a Swedenborgian lawyer named Charles Carroll Bonney who had been pushing the idea of an international religious congress for years before the fair gave him a venue. What made it different from the start was scale and seriousness of intent: the Presbyterian minister John Henry Barrows, appointed chairman, spent two years corresponding with religious leaders worldwide to secure real representation rather than a token gesture, and for seventeen days in September 1893, Christian denominations sat on the same platform as Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Muslim, Jewish and Zoroastrian delegates, several of whom had crossed oceans to attend.
No single tradition presided. That was itself the organizing principle, not an accident of scheduling, and it was new: earlier religious gatherings on this scale had assembled one tradition's own branches to argue points of internal difference, not brought essentially unrelated traditions together to speak in turn before a shared audience. Historians of religion in America now treat the 1893 Parliament as the moment interfaith dialogue became a recognizable public genre rather than a private curiosity, the ancestor of every comparative religion panel and interfaith council that followed it, including its own direct descendant a century later.