Interreligious Dialogue and Cultural Change

Cornille, Corigliano

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781621894230
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The challenges and changes that take place when religions move from one cultural context to another present unique opportunities for interreligious dialogue. In new cultural environments religions are not only propelled to enter into dialogue with the traditional or dominant religion of a particular culture; religions are also invited to enter into dialogue with one another about cultural changes. In this volume, scholars from different religious traditions discuss the various types of dialogue that have emerged from the process of acculturation. While the phenomenon of religious acculturation has generally focused on Western religions in non-Western contexts, this volume deals predominantly with the acculturation in the United States. It thus offers a fresh look at the phenomenon of acculturation while also lifting up an often implicit or ignored dimension of interreligious dialogue.

1

The Mutual Shaping of Cultures and Religions through Interreligious Dialogue

Peter C. Phan

The theme of my essay is the process in which culture and religion shape each other and the role, if any, of interreligious dialogue within it. The topic, while fascinating, is undoubtedly vast and complex. In postmodernity, all the three realities under inquiry, namely, culture, religion, and interreligious dialogue, are vigorously contested, which makes considerations of their mutual relationships even more intricate and controversial. Yet it is urgent to broach these relationships, as religions, contrary to their vastly premature and much-trumpeted obituaries, have not only endured but also flourished, and in places least expected. There is widespread talk of the “return of religion,” especially to the public sphere. Furthermore, globalization and migration, to mention just two important contemporary movements, have rendered the encounter among the followers of different religions not only a daily necessity but also opportunities for either peace building or a “clash of civilizations.”

In general, the connotation of culture is larger than religion, insofar as there can be no religion except as inculturated in a particular culture, whereas there may be a culture that has no religion as one of its intrinsic and institutional constituents. Similarly, religion is connotatively larger than interreligious dialogue, since there can be no interreligious dialogue without at least two religions, whereas there may be a religion that regards interreligious dialogue as theologically impermissible or even impossible. Theoretically, then, it is not inconceivable that culture and religion can exist apart from each other as two hermetically sealed circles, without any interaction, either one-way or two-way, between them, just as it is possible that a particular religion can shut itself off from interreligious dialogue.

From a historical point of view, however, it is indisputable that culture and religion, as traditionally defined, have interacted with each other, mutually shaping and reshaping their identities and their spheres of influence through the course of their developments, so much so that often it is not easy to tell where culture ends and where religion begins. The issue then is not whether there has been a reciprocal interaction between culture and religion—the answer is embarrassingly obvious—but rather how this process of mutual fertilization has taken place. In surveying this process, which may be called the “inculturation” of religion, or better still, the “interculturation” between culture and religion, it may be asked whether there are new factors in our time that impact, positively and negatively, on this process. Among these factors no doubt interreligious dialogue obtains pride of place. The central issue for our reflections may then be formulated thus: How does interreligious dialogue affect the process of mutual shaping between culture and religion?

Even with this narrowed scope, the theme is still too vast and remains at a boringly abstract level. To avoid bland and banal generalities about the relationship between culture and religion, I propose to examine the mutual shaping of culture and religion, and the role of interreligious dialogue within it, with historical references to Christianity, though it is hoped that my reflections will also prove helpful in understanding the relationship between other religions and their cultures, in particular Judaism and Islam, the other two Abrahamic faiths or “Religions of the Book.” As to the time frame for our inquiry, it is limited, for all intents and purposes, to the last fifty years—for the Roman Catholic Church, to the post-Vatican II era—since interreligious dialogue as a genuinely dialogical activity between Christianity and other religions was undertaken officially only since the end of the Second Vatican Council in 1965. I begin with brief considerations of contemporary understandings of culture and religion. I then move to inquire into how they mutually shape each other. Finally, I explore the role of interreligious dialogue in the dynamics of the interaction between culture and religion for our time. To describe the mutual shaping between culture and religion it may be helpful to give here a brief outline of the postmodern understanding of these two realities.

Culture: From Integration to Contest of Relations

Since our theme is the mutual shaping between culture and religion, and more specifically between culture and Christ/Christianity, H. Richard Niebuhr’s classic Christ and Culture, though published sixty years ago, can still serve as a helpful launching pad for our discussion of culture in the modern and postmodern usages of the term, and later, of the relationship between culture and religion/Christianity.1 Niebuhr argues that culture should not be taken simply as secular (godless), or idolatrous (anti-God), or particular (e.g., Greco-Roman), or referring to a particular human activity (e.g., economics and politics). Rather, culture (or civilization) is “that total process of human activity and that total result of such activity.”2 In this sense, Niebuhr notes, culture is characterized by seven features: (1) it is always a social and communal activity; (2) it is an achievement of human creativity (as opposed to nature); (3) it is a design guided by a world of values; (4) it is geared toward serving the human good; (5) it aims at realizing this human good in temporal and material terms; (6) it concerns with both creating and conserving values; and (7) it is pluralistic, in the sense that the values that it seeks to realize in any time or place are many in number.3

Niebuhr’s notion of culture as outlined above faithfully reflects the modern anthropological understanding of culture, one to which American readers of the second half of the twentieth century could readily relate. It is this concept of culture, much in ascendancy during Niebuhr’s time, that accounts for the enormous success of Christ and Culture in the United States in addition to its illuminating typology of the relation between Christ and culture. It was operative in modern anthropology, whether functionalist, structuralist, or symbolic, in which culture is commonly taken to mean a human construction or convention, universally present but diversified according to social groups. It is composed of various elements such as language and patterns of communication, beliefs and values, social mores and institutions, rituals and symbols, and sundry artifacts into which the members of the group are socialized and according to which they pattern their way of life.

This anthropological usage of culture, which emerged in the 1920s and predominated in Britain and the United States, highlights its socially constructed nature, its group-differentiating function, its holistic character, and its context-dependent development. As opposed to what is found in “nature” and made by “animals,” culture is the product of human creativity and the defining hallmark of being human. At the same time, culture, itself a human convention, forms and shapes the way its creators live and interact with each other and constitutes them into separate social groups, each with its own distinct culture. Thus, culture sets up identity-marking ways of life for the group, characterizing observant members as good citizens and transgressors as deviants. Culture in this sense, as distinct from the social behaviors, is conceived as an integrated and integrating whole. The constituent elements of this whole are seen as functionally interrelated to one another because they are perceived to express an overarching meaning system, to be mutually consistent, to operate according to certain common laws or structures, or to maintain and promote the stability of the social order. Lastly, because culture is a human product, it evolves and changes, but always in dependence on the context of the group. To understand a particular cultural practice, then, one must place it in relation with the other elements of culture, even cross-culturally, and analyze all the relevant elements in a synchronic manner.

An important feature of the anthropological approach to culture is its nonevaluative posture. Unlike the proponents of the elitist notion of civilization with its uniform and universally binding ideal, or of Kultur with its claim to intellectual, artistic, and spiritual nobility, or of high culture as the principle of social reform and the standard for individual self-discipline, cultural anthropologists look upon cultures (note the plural!)—including local and popular customs—as self-contained, clearly bounded, internally consistent, and fully functioning systems. Consequently, they successfully eschew ethnocentrism, concentrating on an accurate description of a particular culture, rather than judging it according to some presumed norms of truth, goodness, and beauty.4

The modern anthropological concept of culture has its own advantages. As Robert Schreiter has noted, the concept of culture as an integrated system of beliefs, values, and behavioral norms has much to commend it. Among other things, it promotes holism and a sense of coherence and communion in opposition to the fragmentation of mass society, is congenial to the harmonizing, both/and way of thinking prevalent in oral cultures, and serves as an antidote to the corrosive effects of modernity and capitalism.5

In recent years, however, this modern anthropological concept of culture has been subjected to a searing critique by self-styled postmodern thinkers. The view of culture as a self-contained and clearly bounded whole, as an internally consistent and integrated system of beliefs, values, and behavioral norms that functions as the ordering principle of a social group and into which its members are socialized, has been shown to be based on unjustified assumptions.6

Rather than being viewed as a sharply demarcated, self-contained, homogeneous, and integrated and integrating whole, culture today is seen as “a ground of contest in relations”7 and as a historically evolving, fragmented, inconsistent, conflicted, constructed, ever-shifting, and porous social reality. In this contest of relations the role of power in the shaping of cultural identity is of paramount importance, a factor that the modern concept of culture largely ignores. In the past, anthropologists tended to regard culture as an innocent set of conventions rather than a conflicted reality in which the colonizers, the powerful, the wealthy, the victors, the dominant can obliterate the beliefs and values of the colonized, the weak, the poor, the vanquished, the subjugated. This role of power is, as Michel Foucault and other masters of suspicion have argued, central in the formation of knowledge in general. In the formation of cultural identity the role of power is even more extensive, since it is constituted by groups of people with conflicting interests, and the winners can dictate their cultural terms to the losers.

This predicament of culture is exacerbated by the process of globalization in which the ideals of modernity and technological reason are extended throughout the world (globalization as extension), aided and abetted by a single economic system (i.e., neoliberal capitalism) and new communication technologies. In globalization, geographical boundaries, which at one time helped define cultural identity, have now collapsed. Even our sense of time is largely compressed, with the present predominating and the dividing line between past and future becoming ever more blurred (globalization as compression). In this process of globalization, a homogenized culture is created, consolidated by a “hyperculture” based on consumption.

Like the anthropological concept of culture as a unified whole, the globalized concept of culture as a ground of contest in relations has its own strengths and weaknesses. On the positive side, it takes into account features of culture that are left in the shadow by its predecessor. While recognizing that harmony and wholeness remain ideals, it views culture in its lived reality of fragmentation, conflict, and ephemerality. Cultural meanings are not ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Mutual Shaping of Cultures and Religions through Interreligious Dialogue
• Chapter 2: Forests, Food, and Fighting
• Chapter 3: “God Loves an Infant’s Praise”
• Chapter 4: Hinduism, Interreligious Dialogue, and Acculturation in North America
• Chapter 5: The Misplaced Immediacy of Christian-Buddhist Dialogue
• Chapter 6: Does a Bodhi Tree Grow in Brooklyn?
• Chapter 7: Intersections of Buddhism and Secularity
• Chapter 8: Hindu Identity in a Multicultural World
• Chapter 9: Converts to Islam as Culture Brokers
• Chapter 10: Changing Faces of African American Islam
• Chapter 11: Speaking with Sufis
• Chapter 12: Transmitting the Rudao 儒道
• Contributors