Dialogue vs. “doing”: Running without aim for improved interfaith relations in Luxembourg

Abstract

This article analyses an annual interfaith run in Luxembourg. Across diversities of backgrounds, ideas about interfaith, and how running works to achieve such a thing, participants maintain that the run is a meaningful and effective way to “do interfaith” and build cross-faith understanding and relationships. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted from 2022 to 2023, I argue that runners cultivate a disposition of play across the event, emphasizing group effort and experience over winning and the unpredictability of race outcomes. These efforts, marked by openness and possibility, are felt by runners to offer new grounds for coming into relation with people of different faiths in contrast to standard interfaith activities, like dialogue. At the same time, the run remains dominated by Christian participants and frames, and involves both silences and assumptions about religion and the disposition required for the run that ultimately reiterate many of the same issues the group aims to counter.