A conversation with Rev Dr Yoshinori Shinohara, Secretary General of the Asian Conference of Religions for Peace
He had read my questions in advance. “I received and read your questionnaire beforehand,” Rev Dr Yoshinori Shinohara tells me at the start of our call. “I prepared.” It is a small thing, but it says something about the man: that he takes seriously what others might treat as routine, that he shows up ready. He has been showing up ready, in one form or another, for most of his adult life.
His title is Secretary General of the Asian Conference of Religions for Peace. He tells me to call him Yoshi.
We started off our conversation by looking back 50 years ago. In November 1976, the very first ACRP assembly was held in Singapore: a gathering of religious leaders from across Asia who believed, with the particular conviction of people who had seen enough of the world to know better, that faith communities working together could do what governments operating alone could not. They had come to talk about peace. Mid-session, word came that a boat carrying around 500 refugees from the Indochinese peninsula had arrived in Singapore Bay.
They stopped the meeting, and they chartered three boats. The religious leaders went to the port, providing food, clothing, medicine, and shelter to people who had nowhere to go and no reason to expect that anyone was coming.
“This is action, not talking,” Yoshinori says. “This is the DNA of the ACRP.”
Fifty years later, the organisation is returning to Singapore this November to mark its anniversary, and they are taking action by bringing something its founders never had: a map. “Our predecessors acted on passion and experience,” Yoshinori says, and the reverence in his voice is unmistakable. “But passion can only do so much. When we look toward the next fifty years, we need maps and compasses — not just the will to move, but a way to see where we are and where we need to go.”
That map is the Cities of Dialogue Index.
Most global city rankings measure what Yoshinori calls “hardware,” such as GDP, infrastructure, physical connectivity, the things that are legible to spreadsheets and satisfying to place in order. What they don’t measure is whether the people inside those cities actually trust each other. Whether the social fabric is strong enough to absorb a shock, hold through a crisis, and come out the other side intact.
“You can build the smartest city in the world,” he says. “But if the people don’t trust each other, it remains fragile.”
The CDI measures social capital, specifically, how deeply different faith communities are included in a city’s daily life and decision-making. Not how many religions exist within a city’s borders, but whether they have a seat at the table, whether they show up for each other, whether the trust between them is practiced rather than merely declared. A city can be statistically diverse and still have communities that never truly meet: present but not connected, coexisting but not cohesive.
That gap, Yoshinori argues, is as big an economic risk as a social one. “Peace is the most fundamental economic infrastructure.” A city without interfaith cohesion carries invisible risks — the kind that disrupt supply chains, deter long-term investment, and drive away the diverse talent that modern cities depend on. When faith communities are genuinely woven into a city’s fabric, they create what he calls a “social cushion,” the kind of resilience that doesn’t appear on a balance sheet until you desperately need it and discover, too late, that it isn’t there.
The CDI is built on three pillars: Dialogue Vitality, Governance for Cohesion, and Faith Fluency at Work. When asked which one most cities need to confront first, Yoshinori doesn’t hesitate.
“Faith Fluency at Work. It is the most urgent frontier.”
For too long, he says, the professional world has run on an unspoken instruction: leave your religion at the door. Show up, perform, produce, but as a version of yourself that has been edited down to what the institution finds manageable. For billions of people, that edit is not minor. Faith is not a weekend practice, separate and containable — it is the lens through which they understand ethics, purpose, and identity. Asking them to set it aside is not neutrality. It is a cost, paid quietly, every day.
“If global cities want to attract diverse, world-class talent,” Yoshinori says, “they must move beyond tolerance — and develop the professional literacy to respect these identities.” Tolerance, in his framing, is only the floor. What the CDI asks cities and organisations to build is something more demanding and more valuable: environments where people don’t have to choose between who they are and where they work, and where that wholeness is understood as an asset rather than a complication.
The index is open to cities of every nation. What it looks for is not a perfect city, but a city where real dialogue is already alive — what Yoshinori describes as a “vibrant ecosystem,” visible in the texture of daily life rather than in policy documents. You see it when religious leaders have direct access to the mayor’s office. You see it when neighbours of different faiths show up for each other during a flood or a fire without being mobilised or organised, simply because the trust was already there. “The CDI takes this invisible trust,” Yoshi says, “and turns it into visible strength for the future.”
He is not describing an ideal, but he is describing something that already exists in cities that have done the quiet, unglamorous work of dialogue over time, and he emphasises that it deserves to be seen, measured, and built upon.
The world the CDI is entering makes that argument harder to dismiss. Armed conflicts are at their highest number since World War II, as are casualties, refugee counts, and military budgets. International climate commitments have softened into inaction. The last COP ended without concrete proposals, and the United Nations has reported that only about 35% of Sustainable Development Goal targets are on track for 2030. About a decade ago, companies were publicly committing to the SDGs as a matter of course. Today, almost no one mentions them.
“Rather than law, rather than negotiation, rather than dialogue,” Yoshi says, “some world leaders are seeking only power.”
It is a bleak picture, and he states it plainly, with the measured clarity of someone who has watched it unfold over decades and has chosen, despite everything, to keep working. The CDI is that work made concrete: a framework for cities that want to be part of the answer rather than a casualty of the question.
Near the end of our conversation, I asked him to distill what the ACRP is working toward. He gives me three words.
Restore Global Trust.
In the world as it currently stands — divided, loud, exhausted — it is either the most obvious thing anyone could say, or the most ambitious. Possibly both. Yoshi says it like a man who has decided, a long time ago, that the difficulty of a thing is not a reason to stop pursuing it.
The CDI launches as the ACRP marks fifty years. The methodology exists. The map is drawn. What remains is whether the cities of the world are willing to be honest about what it shows.
Submissions for the Cities of Dialogue Index Year 1 Pilot are now open through June 2026 and are open to cities across all nations. If you represent a municipal government, economic development board, or civic organisation, ready to make the invisible visible, reach out to us at info@consulus.com.
About the Partners
ACRP (Religions for Peace Asia): Founded in 1976, ACRP is the world’s largest regional body of religiously inspired leaders working for peace, justice, and human dignity across Asia and the Pacific.
Consulus: Founded in Singapore in 2004, Consulus is a global creative change firm working with persons, organisations, and cities in their transfiguration toward an Economy of Communion. With a presence in 23 countries, Consulus believes that purpose and unity are essential to innovation and inclusive growth. Consulus shapes economic impact through indexes, such as the Economy of Communion, Design and Impact, and Multifaith Economy.
About the Author
Dorothy Borromeo is the Senior Creative Change Content Strategist at Consulus, bringing her experience in brand and content marketing across multiple global markets. She began her career in media monitoring and later pivoted into content creation for a wide range of B2B and B2C industries, including healthcare, logistics, and retail. She is passionate about how information reaches people and is committed to making complex topics accessible and meaningful.
Her work is guided by intentionality—ensuring every project serves a purpose and contributes to something that matters. With a strong interest in development communication, she is particularly drawn to how information empowers communities at the grassroots level.
Beyond her professional roles, she continues to broaden her perspective through backpacking and learning from diverse communities. She also contributes to Noise Hanoi, where she writes about the city’s independent music scene and its emerging creative culture.
