View over Washington Square Park from the ninth floor of NYU's Kimmel Center, where I attended a talk on religious literacy and chaplaincy - subjects new to me but interesting. (Who knew that NYU has seventy
chaplains?!) The speaker was Diane Moore, the coordinator of the HDS "World Religions" MOOCs I've been using in "Theorizing
Religion,"
and she basically laid out that project's understanding of religions as internally diverse, evolving and changing, and embedded in all dimensions of human experience. Religious literacy, she argued, is more than knowing the 4 noble truths, 5 pillars, 10 commandments but is rather a method of seeing religion's involvement in life and culture at every scale. (The idea that religion is or should be private was laughed off as unserious.) It's an ambitious project: approaching religion in this way, as scholar, religious person or interfaith chaplain, means resisting understanding faith traditions (including one's own) as monoliths and also becoming aware of how faith traditions (including one's own) support cultural peace or cultural violence. Retreat into one's own spiritual bubble isn't an option!
Moore's call is in a to me unfamiliar place between a scholar's agnosticism (it's not my business to judge who is and who is not X) and the theological and perhaps democratic commitment to listening to all voices within one's own tradition, especially those most challenging to you (which I take from Rowan Williams). Perhaps I'm less comfortable accepting (is that the word?) internal diversity than I think I am.
and she basically laid out that project's understanding of religions as internally diverse, evolving and changing, and embedded in all dimensions of human experience. Religious literacy, she argued, is more than knowing the 4 noble truths, 5 pillars, 10 commandments but is rather a method of seeing religion's involvement in life and culture at every scale. (The idea that religion is or should be private was laughed off as unserious.) It's an ambitious project: approaching religion in this way, as scholar, religious person or interfaith chaplain, means resisting understanding faith traditions (including one's own) as monoliths and also becoming aware of how faith traditions (including one's own) support cultural peace or cultural violence. Retreat into one's own spiritual bubble isn't an option!Moore's call is in a to me unfamiliar place between a scholar's agnosticism (it's not my business to judge who is and who is not X) and the theological and perhaps democratic commitment to listening to all voices within one's own tradition, especially those most challenging to you (which I take from Rowan Williams). Perhaps I'm less comfortable accepting (is that the word?) internal diversity than I think I am.
