The House of One started 2021, as a project of small local communities: with the protestant congregation St.Petri-St.Marien for Christianity, the Jewish Community of Berlin and the Abraham-Geiger Kolleg as Jewish partner and Forum Dialog e. V. for the Islam. Right from the beginning all partners obligated themselves to invite other religions, confessions and institutions to participate. Since then, the House of One is slowly but steadily growing.
With the idea of the House of One, existential questions concerning the role of religions in our societies come into play. In present times, religions are predominantly perceived as motors for conflict, that fight each other either on ideological base or instrumentalized by third parties. This way, conflicts of interest become conflicts of identity ("So werden „Interessenkonflikte zu Identitätskonflikten“) (Hans G. Kippenberg). It often leads to a higher level of mobilisation among the involved parties.
It is the responsibility of religions to come up with counterproposals that make the potentials for peace visible and let them become reality. In an international context the awareness for such religious potentials has grown in the past years, even as a systematic exploration of this role of religions is still just at the beginning.
Religious peace work can be carried out in form of punctual conflict management. Strictly speaking, it can also form peace diplomacy. With the House of One in Berlin, religious peace work becomes peace work in the methodology of a collective building process.
As important as the building in its unique architecture is the entire process. Constructing the House of One implements in the methodology of building together, which initiates defined processes of understanding in planning and construction among the Jewish, Muslim and Christian builders:
The collective construction process alone already becomes a peace work of the religions.