Third, this process of coming to grips with the complex heritage of the Enlightenment is an ongoing one. The experience of the Catholic church in recent decades has demonstrated, however, that an ancient religious tradition can appropriate certain aspects of Enlightenment thought, and can come to appreciate the institutions of freedom that emerged from the Enlightenment, without compromising its own core theological commitments.

Fourth, it is precisely on this ground - the ground where faith meets reason in a search for the truth about how just societies should be structured - that interreligious dialogue should be constructed.

Thus, in Benedict's view, interreligious dialogue must begin with the hard questions: Islam's capacity to accommodate the idea of religious freedom as an inalienable human right, and the idea of separating religious and political authority in a rightly ordered state. In other words, the interreligious dialogue of the future should focus on helping those Muslims willing to do so to explore the possibility of an Islamic case for religious tolerance, social pluralism and civil society - even as Islam's interlocutors (among Christians, Jews and others, including non-­believers) open themselves to the possibility that the Islamic critique of certain aspects of modern culture is not without merit.

The initial responses to this bold proposal have not been entirely encouraging - but neither have they been entirely discouraging. Two "open letters" to Benedict from a mixed bag of Islamic religious leaders (including more than a few government functionaries) showed that the Pope had clearly got the Islamic world's attention. Those letters proposed a different agenda of conversation than Benedict imagined; the Pope calmly and courteously replied that religious freedom and the separation of religious and political authority had to be on the table, openly. It remains to be seen what will happen when this new dialogue formally opens in Rome in November. Still, the questions that must be addressed have been clearly identified, which is a major step forward in an interreligious dialogue too often characterised in recent decades by mutual exchanges of admiration rather than serious intellectual encounter.