Religious Studies Scholars as Public Intellectuals

Sabrina D. MisirHiralall, Christopher L. Fici, Gerald S. Vigna, Sabrina D. MisirHiralall, Christopher L. Fici, Gerald S. Vigna

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780815352549
• eBook ISBN: 9781351139106
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

The prominence of religion in recent debates around politics, identity formation, and international terrorism has led to an increased demand on those studying religion to help clarify and contextualise religious belief and practice in the public sphere. While many texts focus on the theoretical development of the subject, this book outlines a wider application of these studies by exploring the role of religious studies scholars and theologians as public intellectuals.

This collection of essays first seeks to define exactly what makes an intellectual "public". It then goes on to deal with a few questions of concern: How do public intellectuals construct knowledge in religious and theological scholarship? What is the link between public intellectuals of higher education and their role in society? Do higher education institutions have a responsibility to endorse public intellectualism?

Looking at the individual and collective role of religious studies scholars and theologians in public life, this book will be of great interest to all scholars and academics involved in religious studies and theology across the academy.

1
Introduction

Sabrina D. MisirHiralall

This book is part of a three-year arc project of the Mid-Atlantic Region of the American Academy of Religion (MAR-AAR) that began in 2016 with the conference theme of Why We are Here: Aims and Practices in Religious and Theological Scholarship Today. With the 2016 conference theme as a point of departure, the 2017 conference theme aimed to continue the discussion, as we extended beyond our position in higher education and into the public sphere at large. The 2017 conference theme was The Future of Religious and Theological Studies: What Is Our Responsibility as Public Intellectuals? The broad theme explored our role as public intellectuals involved in religious and theological scholarship today. For 2018, the conference theme evolved to Religion and Theology in a Crossroads Age: The Anticipatory Scholar. This volume comprises of selected papers from the 2017 regional conference. A multi-year project of this nature requires the effort and cooperation of many.

Matthew E. Vaughan served as President during the 2016 conference and as President, he developed the 2016 conference theme. During the 2016 conference, we explored key questions that reflected on risky pedagogical practices and the goals of religious and theological scholarship. In 2016, the MAR-AAR received an AAR Regional Grant to develop The Colloquium Speaker Series on Teaching and Learning in the Religious Studies Learning Space. This series provided ample opportunity for professors to gather together to think about the connections between teaching and learning. In addition, undergraduates had the chance to engage in scholarship in the Undergraduate Section that ran throughout the entire conference program.

During the 2017 MAR-AAR regional conference, I had the opportunity to serve as President. At that time, Christopher L. Fici served as Vice President/President-Elect. Dave Brewer was the Regional Coordinator. Dan Christy Randazzo was the Graduate Student Representative. The Executive Board worked diligently to plan the MAR-AAR regional conference, which occurred on March 16–17 as we returned to the Hyatt Regency in New Brunswick, New Jersey. We also coordinated the first Undergraduate Symposium for the region, which also took place at the Hyatt Regency as a preconference activity on March 15.

Immediately after the 2017 regional conference concluded, Christopher L. Fici who became President, Gerald S. Vigna who was nominated as Vice President/President-Elect, and myself who was nominated to serve as Regional Coordinator began to oversee the editing of this publication. Overall, the intellectual rigor present in past MAR-AAR conferences led to the idea among the Executive Board to publish selected papers in an edited volume.

This volume reflects on an examination of our collective responsibility as public intellectuals who engage in scholarship in religious studies and theology as we ask several questions. First, we must ask, what is a public intellectual? Once we have a working framework of what a public intellectual is, we may explore a few questions of concern. How do public intellectuals construct knowledge in religious and theological scholarship? What is the link between public intellectuals of higher education and their role in society? Does higher education have a responsibility to endorse public intellectualism for scholars to engage in teaching and learning despite the “business model” that many campuses engage in? Several sections of the 2017 MAR-AAR annual meeting addressed the conference theme and provided opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration as we thought about our individual and collective role as public intellectuals who are a part of society at large. This volume presents the fruit of this interdisciplinary, pluralistic, and interreligious dialogue focused on the role of scholars in religious studies and theology as public intellectuals. With this role in mind, we developed four parts to this text.

Part I includes selected Addresses given at the MAR-AAR 2017 Regional Conference. First, I offer my Presidential Address The Future of Religious and Theological Studies: What Is Our Responsibility as Public Intellectuals? Michael D. Waggoner served as the main AAR Plenary Address. His Plenary Address is entitled Claiming Our Voice: Religious Studies and Public Scholarship. Nathan C. Walker served as a respondent for Waggoner’s Plenary Address. Walker shares his response as he emphasizes the urgency of this discourse.

Following this, Part II focuses on Public Intellectual Theology for the Common Good in the Post-Truth Era. Joel C. Daniels centers on Tragedy and Resistance: Religious and Theological Studies for the Common Good. L. Callid Keefe-Perry writes Chess Boards and Boxing Gloves: Public Theology, Aesthetics, and Post-Truth Politics. Marc DelMonico focuses on Theological Inquiry and Leadership in a “Post-Truth” Era: Insights from Blessed Oscar Romero.

Next, Part III emphasizes the importance of Pedagogy and Praxis of the Public Intellectual. Gabriel C. Crooks writes Decolonizing the Classroom: Experimental Strategies for Decolonial Pedagogy and Praxis. Adam Tietje pens The Responsibility and Limits of Military Chaplains as Public Theologians. Marian Maskulak focuses on Religion and Leadership: Taking Some Cues from Focolare’s “Inundations”. Rev. Dr. Jane Huber and Rabbi Seth Wax emphasize The Faithful Frame: Interfaith Conversation and the Role of the Public Intellectual.

Part IV centers on Public Intellectualism Across the Borderlines of Religion and History. Ayşenur Sönmez Kara writes Welcoming Syrian Refugees in Turkey: The Role of Religious Discourse in the Case of Diyanet. Walead Mosaad pens The Philosophy of Islamic Sufism in Public and Private Piety. Sara Jolena Wolcott focuses on Public Intellectuals at the Dawn of the Anthropocene Age: Can We ReMember? Roberto E. Alejandro focuses on Theological Anthropology: Christianity’s Metaphysic of Oppression.

This text wraps up with a conclusion by Christopher L. Fici and Gerald S. Vigna, who serve as co-editors with me. We hope that this text provides a sense of the urgency of the role of religious studies and theology educators who are public intellectuals. We wish to link theory, pedagogy, and praxis throughout this text as we consider public intellectualism. Thank you for sharing this journey with us. This text challenges you, the reader, with its insistence on the urgency of scholars in our field to enter the public sphere confidently and with conviction.

Part I
Our role as public intellectuals

2
Presidential address

The future of religious and theological studies: what is our responsibility as public intellectuals?

Sabrina D. MisirHiralall

Introduction

The MAR-AAR 2017 conference theme, which this book builds on, explores our role as public intellectuals involved in religious and theological scholarship today. First, we must ask, what is a public intellectual? When we think of the term public, we may often think about the people and politics that constitute society as a whole. It is my contention that is what is public can be private and vice versa. There is the gray area where what is public may overlap with what is private. The public is the private simultaneously.

When I think of an intellectual, I start with the belief that an intellectual is someone who understands how to apply the knowledge that the individual holds. I maintain that there is a distinction between a knowledgeable person and an intellectual. Knowledgeable people may have certain beliefs that they believe to be true but they do not test these beliefs. They hold these beliefs within indifferently. Intellectual individuals may maintain beliefs that they test internally and in the external world through action. The intellectual person applies knowledge with ethics in mind throughout the daily actions that are a part of life’s journey. There is an engagement between theory and practice. This engagement involves a constant philosophizing about theory that informs practice.

This leads me to my working definition of what a public intellectual is. A public intellectual is someone who works to improve society through the application of an ethical framework, which is constantly renegotiated, with the good of society in mind. The public intellectual engages in rational deliberation. The sphere of education makes us think about our relationship in the world and how we become citizens who become a part of the world through relationships with others. Liberal educators will argue that the school will help us mediate the sphere of the family and the sphere of the state. Because culture does not remain stagnant but rather is in a constant state of flux, we must consistently rethink these relationships between the self, others, and the world.

Constructing knowledge

Once we have a working framework of what a public intellectual is, we may explore a few questions of concern. First, how do public intellectuals construct knowledge in religious and theological scholarship? It is imperative to acknowledge that postcolonial authors, such as Edward Said (2014), are less concerned with what is accurate knowledge and more concerned with revealing unequal power relations as knowledge develops. Accuracy always relies on an authoritative understanding of a kind of pure or traditional interpretation that is out of time and outside of power dynamics. This denies historical realities which suggest that culture is always changing, that power is always working, and that cultural identities are never pure but rather hybrid, contaminated, and thus ambiguous.

With this in mind, I construct knowledge in my religious and theological scholarship with an acknowledgment of the ambiguous nature of how knowledge develops. I maintain awareness of how knowledge influences my personal sense of ethics and my interactions in the public sphere. My sense of epistemology develops based on who I am as a faith-based Hindu and Kuchipudi Indian classical Hindu dancer. The Hindu scriptures (Yogananda 2001) serve as an ethical stimulus for me as I dance through the journey of life. I interpret the Hindu scriptures based on a metaphorical as opposed to a literal interpretation, which causes me to engage in constant renegotiation.

I would like to share my theoretical stance of how I engage in this constant renegotiation as I construct knowledge. Drawing on the theory of postcolonial scholar Homi Bhabha (1993) as a point of departure, it is my contention that Bhabha illustrates how newness develops in the space of hybridity, which I claim leads to Cultural Becoming. The dominant West exists in an illusionary isolated sphere and the subordinate East subsists in a separate fictitious secluded sphere. The in-between space of hybridity joins these two mythological spheres. Cultural exchange moves past the fabricated boundaries. The in-between space of the made-up boundaries of the West and the East grows with cultural exchanges. This growth becomes a sphere of its own that encompasses the made-up isolated compartments of the West and the East. The tension of this growth of newness breaks down the false boundaries of the West and the East. The tension continues to fill the entire sphere of newness until a rupture occurs. This rupture causes the emergence of a new cultural identity that is neither Western nor Eastern. The rupture is continuous because of the never-ending movement that occurs over the illusionary boundaries. This points to the constant development of cultural identity through the joining of histories through cultural exchange as opposed to the preservation of archaic narratives.

A complexity is present when the rupture occurs in the hybrid space. Although Western and Eastern histories are not preserved, they always remain present even through the rupture. The illusionary boundaries of the West and the East dissolve but the reality of the histories of cultures remain in Cultural Becoming. Here, the complexity of Cultural Becoming is always present because there is a constant renegotiation of identity through a constant rupture. This causes individuals to write their own history and narrative based on Cultural Becoming.

While this might seem like a neat space, messiness fills this chaotic zone full of complexity. Some individuals who live in the imaginary Western sphere and the fictitious Eastern sphere will refuse to move across the illusionary boundaries. Those who refuse to move past the illusionary boundaries run the risk of developing a cultural relativism that does not acknowledge the diversity of cultures at large and also is in risk of supremacist ideals of morality based on an isolated cultural dynamic. At any rate, there is also the danger of Orientalism once in the hybrid space. Edward Said coins the term Orientalism as he points to the way the West often develops a fictionalized, imaginary knowledge of the East that misrepresents Eastern religion and culture. This calls for a de-Orientalized (MisirHiralall 2015) pedagogy and interreligious as well as intercultural dialogue that treads with sensitivity.

Public intellectuals of higher education

Each individual constructs knowledge frequently based on lived experiences and reasoning abilities. Public intellectuals of higher education should become aware of how they construct knowledge so that they can share knowledge and reevaluate knowledge that they develop. Essentially, I believe there is a link between public intellectuals of higher education and their role in society. First, I must be clear that I do not believe that a person with a doctorate degree is superior to someone without a doctorate degree. We each have a role to fulfill in society. We should perform our duty to the best our ability as we contribute to society in our own way. However, having a doctorate degree or a higher education usually implies that the individual has gone through an educative process with a state of enlightenment that causes the individual to have an insightful outlook that often manifests in the actions of the individual. Therefore, these individuals frequently have the ability to help others come to find their own individual purpose and fulfill their own duty in this world.

Higher education has a responsibility to endorse public intellectualism for scholars to engage in teaching and learning despite the “business model” that many campuses engage in. Kwame Anthony Appiah (2015) refers to this model as Utility University because college as a business emphasizes students as consumers who are concerned more about their own investment in higher education as opposed to enlightenment. In many cases, students pursue higher education simply to acquire their degree and begin a career. On the contrary, Gary Gutting (2015) emphasizes the return to a Utopian University model that focuses on enlightenment. Higher education should provide students with an education that helps them to live insightful lives as informed beings who consider the individual and collective good.

For this reason, I engage in contemplative pedagogy as I teach in higher education. I recently published Re-Envisioning Contemplative Pedagogy Through Self-Study (MisirHiralall 2016, 84–96) in the journal entitled Teaching, Learning, and Professional Development. In the article, I point to how my students and I engage in a circle-set up, secular meditations, philosophy for children discussions, and class closure activities. As an educator, I believe these components help my students develop t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Our role as public intellectuals
• PART II Public intellectual theology for the common good in the post-truth era
• PART III Pedagogy and praxis of the public intellectual
• PART IV Public intellectualism across the borderlines of religion and history
• Index