A Centenary Revival

The 1893 Parliament of Religions was never repeated as a standing event. For a hundred years it existed only as a single, celebrated occasion, cited constantly and reconvened never, until two monks of the Vivekananda Vedanta Society of Chicago proposed marking its centennial with a second gathering. The organizers who took up the idea did something the 1893 event had not attempted: they founded a permanent body, the Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions, explicitly so the centenary would not become another single occasion.

More than 8,000 people came to the Palmer House hotel in Chicago in 1993, roughly the scale of a modern academic conference rather than the more intimate 1893 gathering, drawn from a wider spread of traditions than the earlier Parliament had managed to seat, including movements and communities the nineteenth century organizers had never thought to invite. The Council has convened further international assemblies since, in Cape Town, Barcelona, Melbourne, Salt Lake City and beyond, none of them replacing the 1893 original in significance but each extending a pattern the 1993 gathering was the one to establish: that the Parliament of the World's Religions is now a recurring institution rather than a Chicago memory.