We spoke only briefly while preparing for what was supposed to be a full interview on Created in the Image of God. He had a medical procedure coming up. From what I understood, it was not expected to be especially dangerous. We scheduled around it. Then he died.
That fact alone was enough to bring certain things back to the front of my mind.
The last few years have already forced me to think a great deal about grief, mortality, and the shortness of time. I have written elsewhere about the deaths in my own family. So when John died suddenly, before we could have the conversation we had planned, it sharpened something that has already been sharpening in me for some time: life is short, time is uncertain, and we had better learn to focus on what matters most.
That is why we went ahead with the memorial episode.
Not because I had some long personal friendship with John, but because his life’s work touched something important, and because death has a way of stripping away secondary concerns. It forces the question: what was worth giving a life to?
In John Esposito’s case, one answer is clear. He gave much of his life to helping Christians and Muslims understand one another.
That does not mean he believed all religious claims are identical. It does not mean he erased differences. It means he thought understanding mattered. And he thought it mattered enough to build institutions around it, teach it, write about it, and defend it in public, especially after 9/11, when fear and ignorance were feeding each other at scale.
That work matters because unity, harmony, and love matter.
I do not mean a shallow unity built on avoiding hard questions. I mean something simpler and more demanding. If we claim to love God, then we cannot treat other human beings as abstractions. We cannot reduce them to slogans, inherited hostilities, or caricatures. And if our spiritual calling includes loving even our enemies, then it certainly includes trying to understand our neighbors.
Understanding is not the same as agreement. But it does come before any serious disagreement.
You cannot love what you refuse to understand.
You also cannot correct what you do not first understand. Much of what passes for religious conviction is really just reaction. We inherit stories about the other side. We absorb habits of suspicion. We repeat things we have heard from our own camp. And before long we imagine ourselves defending truth when in fact we may simply be defending ignorance.
John’s work stood against that.
He founded the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown in the early 1990s, in part because there was already concern that Islam would be cast as the next global threat. After 9/11, that concern was obviously justified. Islamophobia did not emerge from nowhere, but it spread with new force. In that environment, John became one of the public voices insisting that Islam had to be understood on its own terms, not simply through inherited polemics or political fear.
That was not a small contribution. It was a necessary one.
In the memorial episode, Mekye Abdus Salaam and I talked about this from a number of angles. Mekye has his own interfaith work through the Interfaith Library. He has also had a near-death experience, including heart failure and a transplant, so the conversation naturally carried a certain gravity. But one theme became especially clear as we reflected on John’s remarks.
Religion has an ego problem.
John put it plainly in the brief material we had from our pre-interview. He referred to the ego of religious traditions. That phrase is worth sitting with.
By that he meant, at least in part, the tendency of every tradition to say: I have the truth, therefore the other does not really count. Or if the other does count, it must count only on my terms. That instinct is old. It is not unique to any one religion. It is a human problem that becomes especially dangerous when dressed in sacred language.
The ego of religion is what turns conviction into self-importance.
It is what makes traditions defensive rather than truthful. It is what makes argument more important than understanding. It is what makes people less interested in what God has actually said and more interested in proving that their camp is superior. It is what makes religion a badge of identity rather than a path of transformation.
And once that ego takes over, the center does not hold.
What should hold the center? Not vagueness. Not relativism. Not indifference to truth. The center that must hold is humility before God and love toward other human beings made by God.
Without that, religion hardens.
With it, religion can still have conviction without becoming idolatrous about itself.
This is where understanding before agreement becomes so important. If I must love even an enemy, then I must at least try to understand him. If I cannot do that, then my religion may still be full of words, but it is already losing its center.
This applies with particular force to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, because the rivalries here are not superficial. They are old. They are bound up with family, lineage, revelation, inheritance, and competing interpretations of sacred history.
In the memorial episode, I touched briefly on some of those disputes. Ishmael and Isaac. The children of Abraham. The persistence of sibling rivalry in religious memory. These are not minor matters. They have shaped civilizations. They still shape assumptions today.
But this is exactly why the ego of religion is so dangerous. Once those rivalries are absorbed into identity without humility, they become permanent fuel. Every side can tell a story in which it is the rightful heir and the other is the problem. Every side can nurse grievance. Every side can confuse chosenness with possession.
And yet the deeper truth is simpler.
We are all brothers.
That does not erase real differences. It does not solve doctrinal disputes by magic. It does not mean there are no hard questions about prophecy, scripture, history, or authority. It means that ancient rivalry is not the highest truth about us.
John understood that serious religious understanding had to include these hard matters, not avoid them. In the material we aired, he was quite willing to discuss Abrahamic lineage, Islam’s recognition of biblical prophets, the role of Mary in the Quran, and the way Jews and Christians often fail to grasp that Muslims see themselves as standing within, not outside of, a line of revelation. He was not afraid of complexity. But he did not use complexity as a weapon.
That is a rare discipline.
Too often, people use difficult religious questions as a means of exclusion. John used them as an invitation to deeper understanding.
That seems to me part of his legacy.
It also points toward the final issue. If we can learn to set aside the ego of religion, at least enough to seek understanding honestly, then we may be able to build communities that are not based on total agreement, but on something deeper.
This is very close to the stated purpose of my show: building vibrant communities.
A vibrant community is not one in which everyone is identical. It is one in which people can remain truthful about differences without turning those differences into permanent hostility. It is one in which the image of God in the other is not erased by disagreement. It is one in which understanding is treated as a duty, not a luxury.
I know from my own background how hard that is.
I came out of a religious world that had real zeal, real love within its own boundaries, and real seriousness about God. But it was also isolated. One of the great difficulties was welcoming others in without first requiring that they become exactly like us. That is not a new problem. The early church wrestled with versions of the same issue. How much must a person become like us before we can receive him as a brother? That question never fully goes away.
But if we begin with the ego of religion, we answer it badly.
If we begin with humility, understanding, and the recognition that we are all answerable to God, then perhaps we answer it better.
That does not mean all paths are the same in every respect. It does mean that any path toward God ought to make us less arrogant, not more. More honest, not less. More capable of recognizing a brother, not less.
That is one reason John’s death mattered to me, even though I did not know him well. It interrupted a planned conversation and turned it into a memorial. But in doing so, it also clarified the conversation.
Time is short.
The world has enough religious ego already. More than enough. What it needs are people who can hold conviction and humility together. People who can seek understanding before condemnation. People who can remember that unity and love are not sentimental extras, but central obligations.
John Esposito gave much of his life to that work.
That is worth remembering.
Sneak Peek
Because I am still behind in the written sequence, the sneak peek here refers to the next essays, not to upcoming broadcasts. The shows themselves have already aired, and you can find them on YouTube as part of the Created in the Image of God series.
This past Sunday I had a conversation with Graham Tomlin, reflecting on the church’s role in today’s culture and on how Christians can engage the world with wisdom, imagination, and hope.
And in the Tuesday evening show my conversation was with Derek Vreeland, exploring what it means to keep Jesus at the center and how his way reshapes communities, relationships, and everyday life.
So that is what lies ahead in writing, even though the interviews themselves are already available to watch.
And as always, thank you for reading, thank you for your patience, and remember: you are created in the image of God, and God loves his creation.
