The Georgetown Companion to Interreligious Studies

Lucinda Mosher, Lucinda Mosher

• Editorial: Georgetown University Press
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781647121648
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Comparative Religion

The Georgetown Companion to Interreligious Studies provides fifty thought-provoking chapters on the field's unique history, priorities, challenges, pedagogies, and practical applications, written by an international roster of experts and practitioners across religious traditions. This will serve as a valuable reference to students in the field.

Part I

Contours and Concerns

Orientation to the field of interreligious studies: its history and essential characteristics; its relation to comparative theology, interfaith dialogue, the interfaith movement, and campus interfaith work. Reflections on the field’s definitional difficulties and other challenges.

1

What Is Interreligious Studies?

Considerations from the “Between”

Lucinda Mosher

Every definition needs to be interrogated by new and emerging content. Even if we end up reverting to it at the end of our inquiry.

—Laurie Patton

It is an academic pursuit that “can only be meaningfully undertaken in a willingness to reflect critically on one’s own position in the spaces between.” So says Oddbjørn Leirvik of interreligious studies in his foundational monograph on this topic.¹ As a demonstration of such willingness, the editor has inserted herself into this volume as an author and invites you to eavesdrop as she ruminates on just what interreligious studies might be.

A Sphere of Interest and Activity

Field: territory that is bounded and enclosed for cultivation; a site containing a natural resource; a sphere of interest and activity. Metaphorically in the first two senses, actually in the third, interreligious studies is a field—and it has to do with religious manyness.

Exactly when and why I became fascinated with religious manyness I cannot pinpoint; but I do know that, when I, a classically trained multi-instrumentalist with long experience as a music educator, was presented with the opportunity to make religious manyness the focus of a second career, I embraced it. For three decades, I have tilled rocky, brambly, muddy academic terrain as a specialist in religion and its complexities: researching, writing, editing, consulting, lecturing, and teaching— presiding over classrooms in preparatory schools, colleges, universities, seminaries, churches, a federal prison, and cyberspace. Upon reflection, I believe it fair to claim that, if interreligious studies be a distinct field, it is one in which I began to dig well before it had a name.

Territory Bounded and Enclosed for Cultivation

Names distinguish; definitions delineate boundaries. As an aid to several projects, the development of this Companion to Interreligious Studies chief among them, I began to collect definitions of “interreligious studies.” That enterprise has proven to be useful. So, too, has Laurie Patton’s reminder that “every definition needs to be interrogated by new and emerging content. Even if we end up reverting to it at the end of our inquiry.”² To assess descriptions and definitions put forth by others and then to arrive at a satisfactory definition of my own, I begin by unpacking our topic’s three elements. It is beyond dispute that studies refers to an academic field of critical inquiry. Therefore, we move on to religious. However, I feel compelled to precede that discussion with a close look at its root noun.

Beginning with “Religion”

The American Academy of Religion (AAR) has more than eight thousand members (I am one)—a great many of whom teach in a college or university Department of Religion (or Religious Studies). Yet a significant number of AAR members speak about “religion” pejoratively or dismissively.³ (“Well, you’re a theist,” the “not religious” Religion Department chairperson said to me; “I try to avoid hiring theists.”) While definitions of religion abound, there is no broadly agreed-upon explanation of the meaning of this term.⁴ Therefore, disputants about “religion” may be talking about different things entirely. Those who know something about the long history of this term are not surprised. As the esteemed Jonathan Z. Smith points out, many of the ways in which this term “religion” was used before the sixteenth century have little or nothing to do with its present usage.⁵ Similarly, Brent Nongbri goes to great lengths “to emphasize that religion is not a universally applicable first-order concept that matches a native discursive field in every culture across time and throughout history.”⁶ Students of interreligious studies will do well to keep these important points in mind, especially when reading a premodern source about “religion.”

If we cannot agree on what “religion” is, can we simply proceed without defining it? A number of scholars would be fine with that.⁷ Or might we stop using that word? As alternatives, advocates of this move offer lifeway or worldview.⁸ While I have long made use of worldview, I see efforts to eradicate religion as a term as futile. More fruitful, I contend, is to follow H. Byron Earhart in defining religion as “a distinctive set of beliefs, rituals, doctrines, institutions, and practices that enables the members of that tradition to establish, maintain, and celebrate a meaningful world,” thus tantamount to worldview.⁹ My students often seem pleasantly surprised that religion can be thought of in this way. The notion that almost everyone can admit to having a constellation of things by which they make meaning of the world: that makes sense to them. That constellation need not bear a name that commands a chapter in a “world religions” textbook.

Religious

Regarding the term religion, contributors to this book populate the full range of the expunge/embrace continuum. Some disclose their attitude; most do not. Nor are they explicit about what they mean by religious (or its opposite). If religion is “the quest to affirm that things are as they ought to be despite evidence to the contrary,” as John Thatamanil mentions might be the case, or if its numerous instances be “interpretative schemes linked to therapeutic regimes,” then (simply enough) to be religious is to be engaged in the quest or to be committed to one of the regimes; to be nonreligious would be to eschew them.¹⁰ But if, as I see it, religion is tantamount to worldview, what then would nonreligious mean?

“I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how many of the nonreligious folks I know, including myself, are actually steeped in vaguely Protestant language and morals,” noted one such collaborator in a recent email. “To me, being nonreligious means that I’m not identified with a particular tradition. Then again, I know plenty of people who are loosely affiliated with a certain tradition, or who belong to multiple traditions. So how useful is the term nonreligious? I’m not exactly sure.” Indeed. When religiousness is taken to refer only to engagement in very particular practices, or to membership in certain kinds of communities of belonging, then the category nonreligious certainly does have meaning, but only because the definition of religion operating here is so restricted. When certain of my authors press for inclusion of the nonreligious, I can only surmise that they work with a much narrower definition of religion and religious than I do. Yet we can and do still collaborate.

“Religiousness is a leaky business that refuses to be quarantined,” quips Thatamanil; and I appreciate the reminder.¹¹ Because religiousness leaks—because it will not be pinned down or boxed in—the spaces between expressions of it are murky, fluid, colorful, and fertile. We have come to inter—as in interreligious studies.

“Inter–”

Inter signifies “between.” Recalling the definitions of religion (mentioned above), we can say that inter + religious signifies between adherents of two or more constellations of beliefs, practices, institutions (and more) by which members of a tradition establish, maintain, and celebrate a meaningful world; between two or more individuals or groups who embrace different interpretative schemes linked to therapeutic regimes.

Indeed, for interreligious studies, attention to the between is the paramount activity, the defining aspect. Interreligious studies is a “relational” discipline, stresses Oddbjørn Leirvik—one that examines the spaces, moments, and encounters between religious traditions and persons.¹² Its emergence as a field that prefers “interactive, intersectional, and interpersonal approaches,” which shine a spotlight on “the interactive nature of lived religion as emerging from the dynamic encounters of religious persons with their environments,” is indicative, says Kevin Minister, of a major shift in “how we theorize the nature of religion.”¹³ We see this in the preference of interreligious studies scholars for postcolonial and decolonial approaches.¹⁴

Minimally, says Paul Hedges, participation in interreligious studies requires engagement with “a least two religions (but it also includes non-religions or secular worldviews) and the dynamic encounter or relationship this entails.”¹⁵ Put more robustly, scholarly endeavor qualifies as interreligious studies when at least some of the following five assertions can be made of it:

• That it goes well beyond simple comparison to involve “religious encounter as a dynamic lived reality,” all the while exhibiting an abundance of concern for “the relational aspect of religion and the dynamic change and interaction of traditions”;

• That it is interdisciplinary;

• That it sees no “clear boundary between the scholar and the practitioner” nor a necessary separation between “theological questioning” and “scholarly reflection”;

• That it “involves self-critical reflection” with regard to power and identity; and

• That it “pushes against the hegemonic boundaries.”¹⁶

“Boundary” is an aspect of (if not another name for) the “between” to which interreligious studies gives pride of place; others are border, edge, and margin—and each term hints at why interreligious studies is so interesting. Boundaries and borders place limits, but they are also beginning places. Regarding edges, C. Rosalee Velloso Ewell explains that “in biodiversity terms, an edge might be between a field and a lake, or a forest and a river. Researchers have found that . . . there are unique species that thrive only at the edge. They cannot survive in either separate ecosystem alone. Edges need tending; they need care and protection if they are not to be swallowed up by one or the other side. And they promote life.”¹⁷ Thus, for her, the edge is an apt metaphor for the potentiality of interreligious work. Regarding the margin, Paul Tillich called it “the most fruitful place for knowledge.”¹⁸ Indeed, margins are sources of new, creative, controversial energy.¹⁹ For its part, pedagogy in the arena of interreligious studies has been tapping into that same creative energy to develop curricula, programs, and courses that feature interdisciplinarity, intersectionality, experiential learning, and critical thinking as they broaden religious literacy.²⁰ In fact, says Brian Pennington (following Deanna Womack as he does so), it may be that it is in the middle space between religious studies and theology that interreligious studies can make its most valuable contribution.²¹

Contours

Having said all of this, the question remains: What is interreligious studies? What are the contours of this field? Having considered what sort of description would account for all aspects of the work I do in its name, having pondered how other scholars have delineated it, and having borrowed turns of phrase from several of them, I reply: Interreligious studies is an interdisciplinary, integrative academic field that promotes deep understanding of worldviews different from one’s own and cultivates the dynamic link between theory and practice as it engages in critical investigation of relations between people (whether individuals or groups) who orient around religion differently (howsoever religion may be defined). The problem? In crafting this working definition, three of the formulas from which I have drawn (those of Patel, Womack, Peace) actually define interfaith (rather than interreligious) studies!²² What is at stake, and (ultimately) does it matter? Here is one perspective.

The Conundrum

Since the middle of the twentieth century, religious manyness ...