Room at the Table

I was  pleased to be able to attend the conference in April sponsored by Andover Newton Theological School and Hebrew College Rabbinical School, “Educating Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Leaders for Service in a Multi-Religious World: The American Seminary Context.”

Like my colleague Nancy, who blogged about the experience below, I came away impressed and inspired, also noting many of the recurring themes that Nancy listed in her last post.

One of them- including Evangelical Christians in inter-religious dialogue- resonates deeply with me. A course that I am currently co-teaching with Professor Emmanuel Itapson at Palmer Theological Seminary (PTS) is doing exactly that.

“Jewish-Christian Encounter Through Text”- a course offered jointly by the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC) and PTS brings together 8 Rabbinical students from RRC and 8 seminarians from PTS to study in interfaith pairs. For a semester, the students engage deeply with one another, with Biblical text as a foundation for their explorations and conversations.

What happens when you bring these seemingly disparate groups of emerging religious leaders together?
A lot.

They seek commonality. They tell stories. They bring their vulnerabilities. They navigate issues of accessibility and ownership of the text. They are offered a new lens through which to view their sacred text. They are forced to articulate their beliefs and explain aspects of their traditions to their partners, helping them to clarify their relationships to their tradition, their sacred literature and to God. As the semester progresses and trust develops, they share their challenges. They question their partners. They practice humility. They come to understand their differences-and respect them.

As the relationships deepen between the pairs, and among the group, so too does understanding. What results is a broadening of the definitions of “Progressive Jew” and “Evangelical Christian” –to include nuance, personal narratives and diversity.

While there is much I could say about the ways this experience has been thus far transformative for the students (and the instructors!) I would rather share a few words from one of the Rabbinical students taking the course. She writes:

“Each study session with [my partner] takes us deeper into the text, into our curiosity about one another and each other’s faith tradition, and into the spaces where we differ, which is where the energy and excitement (and fear of what we will encounter) lie. When we first met, we were a bit shy and polite, almost like a first date when you are excited and want to make a good first impression, and most of all do not want to get off on the wrong foot. Now we jump right into our dialogue, not wanting to waste a second and I feel slightly annoyed when someone comes to the door of “our space” and says we have to stop!…Anyway, the conversations now are beyond intellectually stimulating – they are soul stirring!”

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RRC Multifaith Salon Welcomes Prof. Theodore Friend

A Jesuit priest and a Medical Mission Sister, two scholars of Islam wearing hijabs, a healthy dose of rabbis, rabbinical students and ministers, and assorted colleagues and friends gathered to hear a learned historian who is a former college president and a Presbyterian elder……

We were there as part of our ongoing salon series, Praying with Your Feet: Conversations with Socially-Engaged Religious Activists, a program sponsored by RRC’s Department of Multifaith Studies and Initiatives. Over the last three years these salons have brought a diverse group visionary leaders of many faiths to speak to our rabbinical students and to the larger community, to share the spiritual and intellectual journeys that guide their work.

Last week our guest was Professor Theodore Friend.

Friend is an historian, novelist and educator. He is the former president of Swarthmore College, a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and an active member of Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church.

Friend shared some of the journey that brought him to be writing his book-in-progress, Toward an Open Islam: Woman, Man, and God in Five Muslim Cultures.

He also shared some of his research with us-which is in the form  of hundreds of interviews with Muslim women and men across 5 countries. Not lost on Friend, or the group, was the irony of his endeavor. He opened the session by asking himself, and us, “What’s an old Protestant white guy like me doing studying the Islamic world?”

Listening to Friend was powerful and instructive- not only because of the personal stories he shared, but also in the way he modeled humility and integrity, stopping often to seek input from the group, welcoming interpretation and even gentle critique, as he affirmed the collective wisdom in the room. In doing so, he modeled a person seeking to engage deeply with persons of another faith, taking seriously the responsibility to accurately represent complexities and nuance within Islam. He brings to his work an awareness that facts are not just facts- they land in a social context and become part of that context in ways that can be harmful as well as helpful.

We look forward to our final salon for the year, to take place in late April, when we will welcome Rabbi Sheila Weinberg author of the forthcoming Surprisingly Happy-An Atypical Religious Memior, and a graduate of RRC who has engaged deeply with Buddhism.

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Abrahamic Interfaith Dialogue that “Gets to the Point”

An article in the New York Times today introduces the reader to three clergy- and to three friends- who are working to “increase interfaith understanding” not just through seeking out commonalities, but through respecting difference- even as they broach difficult issues, such as Israel.

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Eva Fleischner: Pioneer of Jewish-Christian Dialogue

At a recent speaking engagement at the Claremont(California) Presbyterian Church, I was thrilled to discover in the audience one of my personal interfaith heroines, Professor Eva Fleischner, an early pioneer of Catholic-Jewish dialogue. When I told Eva that I heard her speak at a conference in New York City in 1974 that changed my life, she was as thrilled as I was by our encountering one another.

Later that day, we sat in her home in the wonderful senior community, Pilgrim Place, and talked about the journey that brought her to that conference and the journey she has taken since. (Herbert Heavenrich has written a biography of Eva entitled In Search of the Sacred.)

Eva was born in Vienna in 1925 to Catholic parents.  Because  her father was a convert from Judaism, the rise of Hitler led her parents to send her as a young girl to England for safety. Eventually, the family was reunited in America. After graduating from Radcliffe and a Fulbright in Paris,  Eva committed herself to a life of faith based service through the Grail, an organization founded in 1921 as a “lay apostolate” addressed to young  Catholic women and independent of the church heirarchy.

Eva’s eventually discerned her own calling: to be a scholar of religion with a focus on the issue of Catholic-Jewish relations. In the post-Holocaust era, Fleischner was among the early Catholic writers undertake this mission. “I had found my life’s work: awakening my fellow Christians to the riches of the Jewish tradition(our roots) and the horrors of the Holocaust in which Christianity had played a part.” After earning a Phd in theology, Fleischner went on to have a distinguished teaching career at Montclair State University and other institutions.

Her most widely read contribution, still in print and still influential, is Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era?, the volume she  edited based on the 1974 conference that I had attended.

In our conversation, Eva and I reflected upon the 35 years that have elapsed since the last time we were together. We found ourselves returning in our conversation to the topic of Israel. Eva has been a passionate supporter of the Jewish people and, by extension, the Jewish state.

In recent years, support for Israel has become a more complex issue for Christian allies of the Jewish people,  just as it has for many Jews.  A case in point is a  another  Catholic theologian who early took up the battle against anti-Judaism in the Church(and  also spoke at the conference in 1974), Rosemary Ruether.  Ruether, like Fleischner, saw the connection between the Church’s failures with regard to the Jewish people and other flaws in its theology. Her 1974  book, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism, profoundly influenced many to re-examine their Catholic faith and their views of Jews and Judaism. Ruether went on to write and edit many books of liberation theology, particulary  feminist theology , but also books relating to the Palestinian cause.

Interestingly, Rosemary Ruether lives in the same senior community as Eva  Fleischner. Recalling the revolutionary fervor of Fleischner’s and Ruether’s early years of anti-anti-Semitism work in the church, I wonder about the causes that are stirring the hearts of young Catholic  theologians today.

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