This scholarly collection of essays consists of papers presented at a conference on religious pluralism held in conjunction with the 1993 Parliament of the World's Religions that took place in Chicago. The contributors are well-established religious scholars.

In one of the linchpin pieces in this work, Raimon Panikkar describes the challenges of living in a religiously plural world. Believers in different faiths have to find a fundamental harmony while coping with irreconcilable beliefs and doctrines. Paul F. Knitter discusses that one of the contexts for pluralism is conflict and suffering. He proposes that the world's religions all accept global responsibility as an ethical task for the new millenium.

Other essays in this collection include Julia Ching on the patterns of her religious identity, Samuel Ruiz Garcia on encounters of Christianity with religious diversity in South America, and Maseo Abe, Donald Mitchell, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr on the question of unity.