World Parliament of Religions

The World's Parliament of Religions opened in Chicago in September 1893 as one of several congresses attached to the World's Columbian Exposition, the world's fair marking the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's voyage. It was organized chiefly by Charles Carroll Bonney, a lawyer and lay interfaith advocate, who wanted the fair's intellectual congresses to include religion alongside science and industry. The event assembled representatives of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, Shinto and other traditions on a shared platform for seventeen days, a scale of interfaith meeting that had no real precedent in the West.

The Parliament is remembered above all for introducing several Asian delegates to a mass American audience for the first time, most famously the Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda, whose opening address, delivered without prepared remarks, is widely credited with introducing Vedanta philosophy to American religious life and helping launch the broader Western reception of yoga and Hindu thought that followed. The Buddhist delegate Anagarika Dharmapala and the Zoroastrian priest Jinanji Jamshedji Modi were also present among the many voices the event carried, at a moment when comparative religion as a field was still new and largely organized around Christian categories the Parliament itself began to unsettle.

The 1893 Parliament was not repeated for a century. It was reconstituted in Chicago in 1993, on the original event's centenary, as the Parliament of the World's Religions, a continuing organization rather than a single occasion, and has since convened further international assemblies bringing together representatives of the world's religious and spiritual communities, indigenous traditions among them, alongside interfaith and secular humanist participants. The organization's own account of its purpose emphasizes dialogue, mutual understanding and cooperative response to shared global problems rather than doctrinal agreement or a merged theology, and it takes no institutional position on which tradition, if any, holds the truth.

The distance between the 1893 event and its 1993 revival is itself part of the story this atlas records: the original Parliament was widely read afterward, including by some of its own Christian organizers, as an experiment that had gone further toward genuine religious pluralism than late nineteenth century American Protestantism was prepared to sustain as an ongoing institution. Its long dormancy, and the choice to revive it explicitly as a standing body rather than treat 1893 as a closed historical event, reflects a twentieth century shift in how mainstream Western religious institutions came to regard interfaith dialogue, from a novelty to an ongoing expectation.