On November 22, 2012, early morning snow flurries silently fell over the lake from gray overcast skies on the late autumn earth-toned Minnesota landscape outside my brother’s country house. Our mother died the day before after a battle with ALS,¹ and my siblings, their spouses, my wife, and I were gathered with my father , who had been fighting pancreatic cancer for the last 8 years. We sat in silence watching the snow fall. My wife profoundly remarked in a somber tone, “It’s as if the earth is weeping for your mother.” My mother was gone. The days were rapidly growing darker and the reality that we were alone, that my father was now alone, was slowly settling in. We had all been virtually living together in my brother’s house for the past week to be with my mother in her final days and now, with her gone, it was time for all of us to get back to our own homes in an attempt to move on. Something wasn’t right. How could we simply move on back to our own spaces and our own lives, especially with my father now alone? I shared with my siblings about the Shiva tradition in Judaism and suggested that with the long Thanksgiving weekend upon us, and even though we are not Jewish , that we allow ourselves to be inspired by this intimate practice and all move in (with all of our own children in tow) to my brother’s house for the remainder of the week, where my father was now living. In Judaism, Shiva (“seven”) refers to the seven days of mourning following the burial of a loved one and is observed by parents, children, spouses, and siblings of the deceased. They usually gather in the deceased’s home, sit on low stools or the floor, refrain from body grooming (shaving, haircuts, makeup, etc.), work, sex, and other activities of comfort. Prayer services are held with family, friends, and neighbors. My father was so taken with the idea that in the original draft of my mother’s obituary , he had a line inviting the public to come “sit Shiva” with us.²

We didn’t follow the strict code of Shiva. We had no right to “grab” or “claim” a Jewish tradition as our own. After all, we were not Jewish nor did we desire to represent ourselves as such. We did not want to practice Shiva. Shiva is for Jews to practice. Rather, we simply told friends and family that we all moved into my brother’s house for the week and that they were welcome to come spend time with us, which of course they all did. It was a time for us to stop, be together, and remember my mother . We needed it. I remember being envious that the Jewish tradition has such a rich practice of mourning built into their tradition, and I reflected on how non-Jews could be inspired by this. This was a powerful instance of holy envy.

The well-known theologian and Lutheran Bishop of Stockholm Krister Stendahl³ made popular the phrase “holy envy,”⁴ by which he meant to always leave room for finding beauty in traditions and practices of others. Stendahl allegedly spoke about recognizing “elements” in traditions other than our own that we might envy as one of his three rules for interreligious understanding at a 1985 Stockholm press conference in which he offered support for the Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints building a temple there, against which there was growing opposition. Later, his language evolved to become the now well-known phrase “holy envy.”⁵ In a 1993 article, Stendahl described holy envy as moments “when we recognize something in another tradition that is beautiful but is not in ours, nor should we grab it or claim it. … Holy envy rejoices in the beauty of others.”⁶ Michael Reid Trice captures well this attitude in the face of another tradition:

I experience your expressions of the “holy” as beautiful. I admire that beauty , and am also somehow formed by it, and even yearn for those very expressions in my own faith life or community . I do not covet the beauty in you as though to control it; I am not required to convert from my own beauty as though to lose it. I experience this beauty as a gift, and invitation, and as a preamble to new cultivation and further invitation in the future.⁷

Jesper Svartvik, Krister Stendahl Professor of Theology of Religions at Lund University and the Swedish Theological Institute in Jerusalem , defined holy envy as “the willingness to discern, to recognize and to celebrate what is good, beautiful and attractive in other religions – and to let it remain what it is, i.e., something which is holy but which wholly belongs to the other.”⁸

Stendahl possessed the knack for popularizing catchy phrases, to be sure. His call to always leave room for holy envy offers a refreshing alternative to interreligious understanding by pivoting away from, what for centuries served as the Christian default modus operandi vis-à-vis other religions, apologetics , a practice that sought to defend, often arrogantly, the Christian God and Bible . Stendahl likened apologetics to the sound of “mosquitos coughing,”⁹ a rather pathetic sound indeed. Stendahl understood the need for traditions to evolve with the world and unceasingly strive for ever-new expressions in the context of the rapidly growing interreligious world. The editor of a volume dedicated to Stendahl, George W.E. Nicklesburg, declares that “Krister has emphasized the importance of Nachgeschichte – the ongoing history of early traditions – doubtless because he sees this as the bridge to the modern expression of these traditions.”¹⁰

Avoiding the task of replicating the sound of mosquitoes coughing, this volume represents rather an effort, from scholars and leaders of various religious identities , to reflect on instances of holy envy in various traditions. The contributors offer examples of this virtue of remaining open to finding beautiful elements in religious traditions other than one’s own – aspects that others might learn from and perhaps even incorporate into their own religious life if applicable and appropriate. These elements might include stories, practices, values, and concepts that inform and constructively help us to rethink and revise our own religious identities and practices. They raise questions, insights, and challenges in so doing, which serve as, all the more, constructive parts of the process.

This book contains nine chapters that are either from, or draw on, traditions such as Ásatrú Heathenism , Catholicism, Hinduism , Judaism , LDS Mormonism , Lutheranism , Presbyterianism , Sikhism , Sufism , Western Buddhism , and Zen Mahāyāna Buddhism . The volume opens with Chap. 2 on “Nietzsche and the Jewish Jesus: A Reflection on Holy Envy” by Benjamin E. Sax, which explores how Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ inspired not only an unexpected charitable reading of Jesus’s life and thought in the New Testament, but also an unlikely sense of “holy envy.” The reader is reminded that the topic of Jesus can be rather tricky for Jews and, to be sure, the legacy of Christian anti-Judaism often provides the hermeneutical lens for how many Jews interpret the life and teachings of Jesus in the New Testament. Sax admits that incorporating and appreciating aspects of Jesus’s life and teachings into a Jewish religious way of engaging the world can be an anathema to classical and to many forms of modern Jewish thought. The irony and power of how Nietzsche’s Jesus could inspire a contemporary Jewish thinker to admire and connect to the Jesus of the New Testament is explored in this chapter.

In Chap. 3, “Ibn al-‘Arabi and the Virtues of ‘Holy Envy’ in Islam,” Meena Sharify Funk explores ‘holy envy’ in Islam and argues that it can be understood as implicit to the thought of Muhyi al-Din Ibn al-‘Arabi (1165–1240 CE), a Sufi mystic and Muslim philosopher. In particular, Sharify-Funk focuses on Ibn al-'Arabi's conception of the insan al-kamil (the perfected human being), who ...