Cold outside

It's chilly today - so cold that the flowers in front of the delis have not been put out. It was also the day for teaching evaluations in "Religion in Dialogue," so to refresh the students' memories of what it's all about, I left the class with Ray Charles and Betty Carter in a little dialogue of their own, "Baby, it's cold outside." A little naughty, perhaps!

Now, plus or minus 50 years

Another interesting session of "Religion in Dialogue." MH, a Catholic priest who is also an authorized Zen teacher, came to class today. It was he who recommended Knitter's Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian, whose last chapters and conclusion we read for today's class. Knitter (who, we learned in the conclusion, while still a Catholic theologian has recently also taken Refuge in a Tibetan Buddhist tradition) is a champion of what he calls religious "double belonging," but it was much more interesting to have a double-belonger in the room with us!

Actually, double-belonging doesn't really describe MH fully, whose calling to be a Catholic priest has not swerved since he was 13. (Knitter left the priesthood after a quarter century, though he's still a Catholic theologian.) The Zen tradition in which MH received the dharma transmission is an American Soto tradition led by Roshi Bernie Glassman which doesn't require that one become a Buddhist: "Zen transcends Buddhism." MH is one of several Catholic priests who've become authorized teachers in this tradition - not Zen priests, he stressed - and he leads both masses, centering prayer and Zen meditation sessions at his church. His friend Knitter would describe MH as an instance of religious double belonging, MH said, but for him there's never been question that the Catholic call is the major one. On the other hand, Zen practices have immeasurably deepened his Catholic practice. (And not only Zen: MH is a serious student of yoga, and is also familiar with Kabbalah.) And ultimately, there's just one reality, to which all traditions try to deepen our relation, and everything you need to know is right here in the Now - though it may take us 5 minutes or 50 years to understand that.

Students were fascinated by MH and his journey. It isn't every day you meet someone who spent 22 years as a Carthusian, not to mention has gone on to build such interesting religious bridges (all practice-based, not just theory) - and received the dharma, too! They asked about his sense of vocation, how he decided to become a priest, a monastic, how his family responded, and then how he decided to return to society, if that was difficult, etc. "It makes me realize I've been really lazy in my religious life so far," said one. Other questions were about his religious explorations (not syncretism, which he cited Swidler as rightly deploring), whether he felt conflict or contradiction (never), had encountered negative responses (none, but he doesn't have a web presence which would attract hateful "pajamahadeen"), how he would talk to an exclusivist, even what his politics were. Two students with Southern Baptist sympathies became nearly inquisitorial though in a more baffled than aggressive way: but doesn't the Bible say that only...? (it's a hard book to read, symbolic, requiring prayer and study), how do you understand being saved? (saved from what?), the afterlife? (you mean eternal life, 'afterlife' sounds like an afterthought: eternal life starts now), heaven and hell? (some people live in them already now, and nothing is infinite but God). I'll be interested to see what they made of his responses!

We ended with a few minutes of silence, punctuated by the chiming of a little bell he uses as a Zen teacher.

(Picture source)

Dialogin'

Well, discussion of Swidler's "Dialogue Decalogue" went well today (except for the student who kept calling him "swindler," and then observed that perhaps it was more than just a slip). We discussed the ten "commandments" avidly for more than an hour, surprising each other (or at least me!) by our reactions. While I wasn't surprised at who understood that Swidler's concerned with a broader reality than you or me or your tradition or mine and who didn't, I wouldn't have been able to predict who would find him idealistic and who naive, who would understand that he's describing a process rather than a mere attitude or outcome, or who would interpret the call to quasi-convert to the other tradition as "blasphemous" and to whom it would be the most obviously true thing. Guess it all goes to show that dialogue's a gift that keeps on giving. It was the 25th class session but we're still learning about each other! (Picture source)

InterBeing

At the suggestion of a Catholic priest/Zen teacher (!) who will be visiting my "Religion in Dialogue" class next week - as a living embodiment of interreligious dialogue) - I've been reading his friend Paul Knitter's newest book, the provocatively titled Without Buddha I Could not be a Christian (Oxford: OneWorld, 2009).

Knitter, a Catholic theologian (and a priest for 25 years until he left the priesthood and married), is one of the guiding spirits behind the Buddhist-Christian Dialogue, and in this autobiographical work he explains the interesting place to which four decades of this dialogue have taken him. He's disarmingly honest, to the point of posing the question whether he's a Buddhist Christian or Christian Buddhist, and his deliberate use of clichéd phrases grates on me a bit. But his argument that most Christians' religion is stuck at a grade school level, hard to take seriously as they grow into adulthood without further religious development rings true. It's a bit uncomfortable as he names things he has difficulty believing: a transcendent God, a personal God, and all the exclusivist "only" claims of Christianity, among them.

He suggests that Buddhist understandings of Emptiness (which is really a readiness for fullness, not a void) resonate with trinitarian ideas as well as with the experiences of Christian mystics, and appropriates Thich Nhat Hanh's translation f emptiness, "InterBeing," as a name for God (18). God seems to him more the energy field of all that happens than a distant unmoved Mover. And yet, having "passed over" into Buddhism, in each of his discussions he "passes back" to Christianity. The Buddhist interludes enables him to see with new eyes, often discovering and reviving neglected Christian traditions, and also a new sense of what's central to Christianity - like that God is love.

[F]or me God is no longer a Person, but God is definitely, and all the more engagingly, personal. … When I say “personally present,” I mean that I have sensed that this Mystery touches me and affects me in ways that I can, and must, describe as personal. The kinds of experiences that have stimulated my awareness of being part of the energy field of InterBeing have also made me aware that this energy is not blind, and its field is not inanimate. The energy is, as it were, up to something. There is something personal about it, even though I can’t call it a person. … The two principal fruits or characteristics that Buddhists discover in Enlightenment, wisdom and compassion, have enabled me to focus the two most fundamental experiences by which I know that the Spirit, while not a person, is a personal presence in my life: a sense of groundedness that produces peace within myself, and a sense of connectedness that produces caring for others. (41-42)

It's been a while but I've been moved by many of the same mainly Mahayana Buddhist ideas as Knitter, and have felt in an inchoate way that they are harmonizable with Christianity... but haven't gone beyond that. Haven't had to - my conversations on religion are with other Christians, and with religious studies scholars and students. Risking inter-religious dialogue, as Knitter has done for so long, might take me where it has taken him. Let me read some more and get back to you!

Arguing with an exhibition

When the "Religion in Dialogue" class went back to the "Embodying the Holy" exhibition at the Rubin last week, I asked students to write a reflection: "What is the argument of the exhibition? How does it make its case, and does it succeed?" Responses were not impressive - "it doesn't have an argument, but just puts two traditions together and lets you decide what it means" was representative - but they were illuminating. They confirm my growing sense that learning how to read an art exhibition may be a very useful liberal arts skill, and perhaps especially useful for religious studies.

Not that I can really read an exhibition, either, though I've seen many! But understanding how an exhibition is put together, and how it hangs together, could resonate in useful ways with research presentations, papers, and other student projects. In all these cases, one has to put together something defined from a larger field of possibilities. One has to have a principle of relevance, and, within one's resources and elegance, strives for comprehensiveness or representativeness - and the elusive "so what?" factor. One is probably building on or responding to earlier exhibitions or collections in books, and is judged in part for the part one plays in this conversation. One wants to avoid being criticized for being superficial, trivial, too broad, random, unrepresentative - or for abusing or misrepresenting the objects one is showing.

All of these have analogs in an essay's or presentation's use of "evidence." (The catalog of potential criticisms I just offered describes many of the student essays I see.) Perhaps students would see the point of avoiding them in the highly artificial context of a college essay better if they saw the analogy? Recognizing the artifice behind a successful exhibition, especially in our visually saturated age, might powerfully make the point that the essay as skilled artifice can be useful for learning, for thinking, for assessing, for communicating.

But such an analogy could do more, because the options for persuasive citation in a museum exhibition are different from those in an essay. In many ways they are more restricted - we can cite anything that's been published, not requiring permissions (let alone the original), and of course we can cite others' citations in footnotes and bibliographies! But in other ways, the exhibition has options we don't have: how pieces are positioned, the colors of walls and lights, the relationship to other objects and to explanatory sources... And then there's the language of art itself: the power and charm and persuasiveness of figure, composition, color and material.

What if we thought of the objects of our academic research as objects in this way? Opportunities and exciting new questions abound, starting with this: In what ways are aesthetic and argumentative persuasion similar and different? (This might have been why my students thought an exhibition need and indeed should have no "argument.") Well worth thinking through, especially in religious studies, where our research objects are often more like an artifact constructed and presented in a particular way than like words on a page!

Long story short, I'm pushing for a new course on Religion and Museums for 2011-12, and I'll be the first to enroll!

Thresholds

In "Religion in Dialogue" we are reading Martin Buber's iconic I and Thou (1923). I haven't taught it before, and am finding it rich and difficult... and much more complex than I remembered! (Why it's a good thing to teach what you think you know!)

The difficulty of I and Thou led Buber himself to offer some clarifications in the second edition (1957). Here's what he says about the question of relation with nature. His account of knowing a tree as a "thou"was already famous (for some infamous). It's not pantheism or mysticism.

[I]f we are to suppose that the beings and things in nature that we encounter as our You also grant us some sort of reciprocity, what is the character of this reciprocity, and what gives us the right to apply to it this basic concept?
Obviously, no sweeping answer can be given to this question. ... [W]e must consider [nature's] realms separately. ... Animals are not twofold, like man: the twofoldness of the basic words I-You and I-It is alien to them although they can both turn toward another being and contemplate objects. We may say that in them twofoldness is latent. In the perspective of our You-saying to animals, we may call this sphere the threshold of mutuality.
It is altogether different with those realms of nature which lack the spontaneity that we share with animals. It is part of our concept of the plant that it cannot react to our actions upon it, that it cannot "reply." Yet this does not mean that we meet with no reciprocity at all in this sphere. We find here not the deed of posture of an individual being but a reciprocity of being itself - a reciprocity that has nothing except being. The living wholeness and unity of a tree that denies itself to the eye, no matter how keen, of anyone who merely investigates, while it is manifest to those who say You, is present when they are present: they grant the tree the opportunity to manifest it, and now the tree that has being manifests it.Our habits of thought make it difficult for us to see that in such cases something is awakened by our attitudes and flashes toward us from that which has being. What matters in this sphere is that we should do justice with an open mind to the actuality that opens up before us. This huge sphere that reaches from the stones to the stars I should like to designate as the pre-threshold, meaning the step that comes before the threshold.

(trans. Walter Kaufman [NY: Scribners: 1970], 172-73)

Does this help? It helps him move on to the equally difficult relation with the divine, which he defines as an "over-threshold." I may be misreading it but I think part of Buber's gift to us is an understanding of relation which is neither humanist nor antihumanist. The human way of relating - to other humans but also to the nonhuman - is part of a broader spectrum of relations, in each part of which we also participate. This doesn't relativize the human, making it of value only under particular circumstances or only to us, but places it in a context which shows that being human is the human way of participating in the greater-than-human...

Earlier in the course we considered that words are not the only form of interpersonal dialogue or even necessary to it, though there is a sense in which words make explicit what dialogue is about even where it is wordless. With Buber we consider that the non- and superhuman may be part of the story too, even in human words.

Triage

While I was in Nepal, the students in my "Religion in Dialogue" class had a Himalayan experience, too. The nearby Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art had just opened an exhibit pairing Russian Orthodox Christian icons with articles from their collection of mostly Tibetan Buddhist materials. They were guided through it by L, a gifted art historian who's teaching a course around iconography for us. L gave the class readings including Diana Eck on darsan, Pavel Florensky on how orthodox icons work, and Janet Gyatso on how tangka work. They loved it (I'm not surprised - my last first year seminar went to the Rubin too, and was wowed). In fact, the students asked if we could go again. I was happy to oblige - we're going again next week! In preparation, I went to see the exhibition today, with ever-generous L showing me around too. It's a beauty, like everything the Rubin does, and thought-provoking, like all their comparative exhibitions. (Remember the one on cosmogony.)

Primed by the readings on icons as windows to transcendence and tangka as devices for visualization, I was ready to be blown away - and was. The details, the colors, the layouts, the symbolism of each piece were fascinating. And the way they were exhibited, fascinating as well... and a bit disconcerting. When you notice a visual echoing of circular forms and feminine powers between a tangka of Tara and an icon of the Theotokos (first picture above), what are you seeing? Is it a superficial resemblance, aesthetic or archetypal, or is it a window onto something deeper? Is this inter-religious dialogue of some profound sort (the pretext for sending my class to see it), or something else? The captions of the exhibition sedulously avoid making strong claims, almost warning viewers not to draw conclusions from the juxtapositions... Do they protest too much, or too little?

(Pictures are taken from the Rubin's flickr page.)

Nice religion

More results of the Faith Matters Survey (reported in American Grace) which I assembled in a handout for my Religion in Dialogue class. How very pluralistic and latitudinarian we are! How generous religious people are (but some of us knew that)! And how out of date most understandings of American religion - from all sides - turn out to be.

Getting there

In "Religion in Dialogue" today, we discussed the role of dialogue in the Book of Job - something everyone had just written a paper on. I'd told them that part of the assignment was defining "dialogue." Many students simply quoted an online dictionary definition. "If dictionaries settled all questions," I observed tartly, "there'd be no need for universities."

By the time we'd broken the Book of Job down into six or seven component exchanges, and weighed ways in which each could be seen as a dialogue - or a failed dialogue - or no dialogue at all, two students moaned "I'm so confused!" Before I could say something acerbic, another student said "But we're getting somewhere!" Vindication!

The Quarrel

Great film, but nearly unknown, and hard to come by. In order to show it to the "Religion in Dialogue" class I had to buy a copy, since none of our libraries (not to mention Netflix) had it. Read the original story by Chaim Grade, "My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner," on which the film is based (there was a stage adaptation along the way, too), and I think the film's much more effective - certainly for a class on dialogue! In the story, secular writer Hersh and super frum rebbe Chaim - friends from childhood who have seen each other only rarely since Chaim left the yeshiva, and as their world was destroyed by Soviets and Nazis - sit side by side in front of the old Hôtel de Ville in Paris; Hersh gives a long speech, then Chaim does, the end. The film, directed by Eli Cohen, is much warmer and in its way more optimistic about alternatives to mutual judgment - perhaps because the world had changed again between 1954, when the story was written, and 1990, when the film appeared. Chaim and Hersh meet in a park in Montréal and walk together, see other walkers, lose their way, get caught in the rain, part ways and come together again, and even dance. The unspoken, perhaps unspeakable, has a visible part.

Stage setting

"Religion in Dialogue" hit the ground running today with Plato's Euthyphro, a widely cited text in the philosophy of religion I confess I hadn't read in years, and have never taught before. Even if I had, though, I'm sure I would have taught it differently. Teaching "Religion & Theater has really affected the way way I understand things - in the best way! (If we get to do R&T again, I think we should include Euthyphro.)

Euthryphro is a young man who claims a special understanding of piety. Because of this knowledge, he is prosecuting his father for murder in a somewhat ambiguous case - which his relatives, in turn, think an act of terrible impiety. Socrates, who has himself been indicted on the charge that will lead to his unjust execution, meets Euthyphro near the court. He learns of his case and is rather taken aback by it, and engages Euthyphro in a dialogue on the nature of piety. How lucky, Socrates says, that he has met someone who really understands piety and can teach him about it!

Over the course of the dialogue Euthyphro offers definition after definition of piety - six in all.

to do what I am doing now, to prosecute the wrongdoer … whether the wrongdoer is your father or your mother or anyone else (5d)

what is dear to the gods is pious, what is not is impious (7a)

the pious is what all the gods love, and the opposite, what all the gods hate, is the impious (9e)

the godly and pious is the part of the just that is concerned with the care of the gods, while that concerned with the care of men is the remaining part of justice (12e)

if a man knows how to say and do what is pleasing to the gods at prayer and sacrifice, these are pious actions such as preserve both private houses and public affairs of state (14b)

honor, reverence, and what I mentioned just now [prayer and sacrifice], to please them [the gods] (15a)

Socrates considers each, then raises objections to it (including what's ever since been known as the "Euthyphro dilemma"). At the end, Euthyphro, who has complained that Socrates makes his arguments move on their own, winds up returning to an argument from the start (the second definition). You've come full circle, Socrates observes, will you stop playing with me? Euthyphro excuses himself and departs (whether in exasparation or epiphany or anger or doubt is ours to imagine) leaving us without a conclusion - just where Socrates wants us. We discussed each of these definitions in turn, and paraphrased them in contemporary terms. (Try it yourself: they really cover the waterfront - Plato knows what he's doing.)

But first we talked about Euthyphro as if it were a piece of theater. How do you imagine the character of Socrates, I asked? (Arrogant, sarcastic, sassy, amusing himself, teasing, etc.) And Euthyphro? (Vain, innocent, clueless, proud, etc.) How do you picture them interacting? (In togas in front of a temple, no Socrates is lounging in a fountain, etc.) And finally: If you had to stage this, how would you do it?

As I'd hoped this got us (which includes me) thinking in a really creative way about the larger shape of the story, the nature of their interactions, the significance of the philosophical dialogue. Perhaps Euthryphro stands in the center of the stage and is turned around without his noticing by it by a Socrates circling him? Perhaps Socrates appears and disappears like a djinn, perhaps behind Greek columns. Or is it Socrates who stays in the same position, Euthyphro circling him over the course of the dialogue? Is there a religious statue at stage center which Euthyphro never sees? Or is the stage empty, and the characters' movement random through it? Does Euthyphro face the audience when he arrives at what he thinks is a final definition, always on the same spot or on another? Does Socrates ever play to the audience, or an audience on stage, or the religious courts in the distance? It really brought it to life!

And we're all set to explore the territory of religion and dialogue!

Translations from Plato, Five Dialogues, trans. G. M. A. Grube
and revised by John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002)

Back in business

From this morning's first official session of Religion in Dialogue.

Elevated discussion

Thinking about images I might use for my "Religion in Dialogue" syllabus, I remembered the galleries of commentators and discussants atop the remarkable winged altar (c. 1465) in the Reglerkirche in Erfurt; the fact that the altar may have been commissioned by Nicholas of Cusa only made it better. But finding images isn't always that easy. The two above are from a booklet I bought there, but lose the vividness of the colors and, especially, the gilt background. This picture, which I took on a grey day in June of 2005, gives a better sense of the colors. 24 figuresdiscuss the Passion and Pentecost scenes behind an elegant architectural curtain below them, above them 16 angels! (And this is only one layer of the altar. In ordinary time the wings shut, leaving paintings of a dozen saints. The festal center contains carved and gilded scenes from the life of Mary - who stands above the alter, too - and St. Catherine.)

Why this here?

Had a first meeting with my first year advisees this morning. I decided to follow up on the orientation speech they heard Monday, which put Lang in the context of the long and colorful history of higher education in the US. The speaker emphasized how the content, mission and constituencies of colleges have changed over time, and how Lang brings together many of the most valuable. My questions, bringing it home (and introducing my inconvenient-facts pedagogy!) were buttressed by devil's advocate arguments for more conventional schools:

Why go to college, why liberal arts? Is it to better lead society well - our speaker told us that Thomas Jefferson intended his University of Virginia to cultivate a "natural aristocracy" - or to develop yourself, in a career, as a citizen, as an individual?

Why go to college in a city? We'd learned that most institutions of higher learning are quite deliberately located far from the corruptions and distractions of cities, and there's something to that. Shouldn't college be a step out of the hurly burly of everyday life, allowing for more sustained and disinterested reflection? On the other hand, perhaps the reality-checks of a city can give you better and longer-lasting academic insights and commitments.

Why go to a seminar college? Lectures convey more information, and give students a more secure connection to expert knowledge. Seminars offer something else, and demand a more engaged learning, but still: most of the voices you hear will know little more than you do. Why is this worth while? I made the radical democratic assumptions of it clear in as bald a way as I could...

...and look forward to continuing the discussion as we explore the delights, disappointments and discipline of dialogue.

Cordoba Center

This is the vision behind the 92nd Street Y-inspired Cordoba Center (or Park51), which Newt Gingrich and others seem to think will be a sleeper madrassa for anti-modern, anti-democratic Islamists. Who's anti-modern and anti-democratic here? The phrase conversations across our identities is a good one, even better than between or even among. The across part is what democracy's all about - America too, if you ask me. But it's the very thing the nativist chauvinists can't abide (akin, in a way, to their suspicions of "empathy"). And notice that identities allows that we might each already be a crossing, a conversation. A dangerous idea?

I'm teaching a first year seminar this Fall (starting end of this month!) called Religion in Dialogue. It might be interesting to follow discussion about the Cordoba Center as we explore dialogue within and between religions - and the religious significance of dialogue itself.