Jean-Luc Marion’s Hermeneutics of Charity and its Relevance to Religious Pluralism and Interreligious Dialogue
MST Review July 14, 2026 Ben Carlo Atim
This paper argues that Jean-Luc Marion’s hermeneutics of charity, rooted in his phenomenology of givenness, offers a methodological framework for religious pluralism and interreligious dialogue. Marion’s approach contends that interpreters lack total epistemic control over a text because the text has an independent phenomenal life and transforms readers into active, receptive witnesses. This establishes an irreducible, infinite encounter with the 'text-as-other,' where the text asserts authority by giving and showing itself unconditionally. Applied to interreligious discourse, the framework suggests that treating the 'other text' as inherently valuable fosters a receptive disposition among dialogical partners and provides critical epistemic resistance against cultural harmonization and assimilation.