Pluralisms

In "DIY Religion" today we started thinking about pluralism, with the help of two figures important to New School history. 

One was the long-serving Horace Kallen, who endorsed what's still referred to as "cultural pluralism" over the assimilationist "melting pot" already in 1915. Our discussion showed that for it to work you need to be able to think about cultures plurally, indeed not as opposed outsiders to each other but as potential neighbors: we called this "pluralist culture." If you think this way, Kallen suggests, you will not only engage other cultures better but understand your own better (not confusing it with nation, for instance). When thinking about religion, Kallen recommends a similar pluralist self-understanding, praising the secularism of democracy as the "religion of religions" - the best way to regard and engage not only other religions but your own, too. I think the idea that cultures or religious traditions might appreciate each other in relation rather than compete for dominance seemed quaint to the class... but hopeful too, in an unfamiliar way. Pluralism as the gift (and work) of participatory democracy is a taste of the "Kallenism" that has defined The New School from its beginning!

The other figure was my colleague Katherine Kurs who, after a quarter century teaching at our college, has had to take the past few semesters off for health reasons. We read an autobiographical essay she published just as she started teaching at Lang, which presented a further iteration of religious pluralism, encountered now not only between traditions but within individual lives. For fascinating biographical reasons, Kurs describes becoming a member of both Jewish and Christian religious traditions - not amalgamating them syncretically, but seamlessly passing from one to the other each week. (She tells us this mobility, confounding to some others, is made possible by grounding in early mystical experiences.) This is a spiritual life that requires one to journey forth and then to return - over and over again with complete memory of where one has been in order that one might use such experiences to then assist others in their own passage. Mission statement of a spiritual guide! And a fine description, I might add, of Kurs' inspiring work as a teacher, too.

It was fun to introduce the adventure of pluralism, which Kurs' friend Diana Eck has argued is a practice of dialogue (something you can't do alone), in a free-wheeling seminar at The New School, a temple to the promise of personal and societal pluralism, to the religion of democracy.

Katherine Kurs, "Between the Mystic and the Mainstream," CrossCurrents 50/1-2 [Fiftieth Anniversary Issue] (Spring/Summer 2000): 121-30, 128