This chapter begins with discussion of the three organizations drawn from numerous comparable ones established in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: the interfaith center of New York, the Interreligious Council of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue (KAICIID). The chapter seeks to understand where interreligious dialogue came from and where is it headed. It also evaluates its broader historical, social, and ethical significance. The chapter hazards answers to these questions through an inquiry into several major turning points in the history of interreligious dialogue, for even as many today extol, practice, theorize, and/or theologize about interreligious dialogue, few have attended carefully to its genesis and past. The chapter takes the premodern world as a starting point, where it examines several harbingers of interreligious dialogue. Canvassing the premodern world for harbingers helps us to see that while contemporary interfaith dialogue is in some respects a novelty, it is nonetheless not altogether discontinuous with the past. Ultimately, the chapter recognizes the distinction between interfaith dialogue and interfaith social action.