WCC mourns loss of Dr John Taylor, an interreligious bridge builder

He also served as a consultant for the WCC for more than a decade.

He then went on to be secretary general of Religions for Peace and, in the 1990s, was involved in peacekeeping initiatives in the Balkans with his work for the Conference of European Churches.

He also attended and helped support the 9th WCC Assembly in Porto Alegre in 2006.

In 2001, he began serving as the UN representative for the International Association for Religious Freedom.

Taylor and his wife, Margaret, have lived in Switzerland since 1972 and they are well-known with the human rights community.

Born in 1937 in Birmingham, England, he studied and taught Islamics at Cambridge University (England), University of Punjab (PakistanI), McGill University (Canada), University of Birmingham (England), and Harvard University.

Throughout his academic life as a university professor, Taylor learned from his students, and attended the WCC assembly in 1961 as a student observer himself. In a chapter included in the book “World Christianity in Muslim Encounter: Essays in Memory of David A. Kerr,” Taylor describes his journey in helping to develop the interreligious dialogue programme at the WCC.

“I taught Muslim students who had been educated to a high level of understanding and sophistication about Islamic philosophy or jurisprudence in Pakistan, India or Saudi Arabia; they welcomed new opportunities to understand the sometimes more critical methods of enquiry in Western scholarship,” he wrote. “Among my Christian students I had Greek Orthodox and Romanian Orthodox students who, sometimes with difficulty, shed their prejudices about Islam.”