Journal of Interreligious Studies

From the Editor-in-Chief

2024-03-27T14:17:11-07:00

Issue 41 is a special issue: "The Art of Interfaith: A Festschrift in Honor of Lucinda Mosher on Interreligious Engagement and the Arts."

Special Issue Introduction

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Sounds of the End

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The purpose of this paper is to bring into conversation the musical vision of the French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908–92) and the role played by music in the Tibetan practice of gCod (spelled phonetically as chöd), a traditional tantric ritual aimed at the suppression of negative influences and the recovery of primal awareness. The comparison illumines the distinctive claims that the two traditions make on eschatology and individual redemption, while also exploring the role that music can play in the broader context of comparative theology. Messiaen and gcod practitioners draw inspiration from other forms of sacred music and ritual performance, but ultimately create an idiosyncratic musical genre that disrupts conventional boundaries between eternity/ultimate reality, on one hand, and temporality/ ordinary reality, on the other. A conversation between these two musical visions discloses a variety of surprising points of contact between their claims as to individual transformation and the role of transcendence, but also a number of irreducible differences concerning their distinctive soteriological and cosmological visions.

“How Easily Things Get Broken”

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This essay offers a theological interpretation of two musical works on Christian themes by Jewish composers: Leonard Bernstein’s MASS (1971) and Osvaldo Golijov’s La Pasión según San Marcos (2000). My claim in this article is that a comparative theological understanding of living Jewish traditions can enable Christians to understand and appreciate theological implications of the interaction between two Jewish composers and traditional Christian forms of liturgical art, specifically music.

Is It “Praying Twice?”

2024-03-23T17:37:55-07:00

This paper begins with the stipulation that every religion indeed has something akin to what Guy Beck calls a “sonic theology”—an accounting for the relationship of sound (and, by extension, the relationship of recitation, chanting, singing, instrument-playing) to the divine/human economy—and a reminder that comparative theology involves taking a deep dive into a different faith via close reading of its sacred literature and other theological sources. It then proceeds to argue that sacred song and chant belong among those sources through which we can become deeply familiar with the concepts and vocabulary of a religious tradition—a major goal of comparative theology. This will involve maintenance of comparative theology’s core practice of close reading and adding to it—and even give priority to—the practice of close listening.

“One Sees Oneself in the Eye of Another”

2024-03-23T17:37:55-07:00

Increasingly, art is recognized as a way to promote interreligious understanding. Gegenüber (German for “vis-à-vis”) is a work for two cellos and reciter that draws on themes of three different religious traditions. The project Gegenüber aimed to contribute to the growing genre of interreligious art. In this article, the composer and the lyricist (who is also an academic working on interreligious relations) reflect together on the creative process behind this work and more generally on the challenge of working creatively with religious elements belonging to more than one religion. The authors give insight into the collaborative process and their approach to the religious narratives as an example for how interreligious art and interreligious studies or comparative theology can intersect.

Art and Interreligious Dialogue

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This article is an interreligious theological reflection of the author’s eleven-year pastoral experience as Chair of the Commission on Interreligious Relations of the Archdiocese of Semarang, Indonesia. In that position, one of my tasks was to knit harmony and fraternity in diversity, especially among Catholics and Muslims, where art was chosen as one possible medium. I thereby discovered how art has contributed to interreligious dialogue and helped maintain a harmonious life in diversity. Nostra Aetate 2 encourages Catholics and Muslims to train themselves to understand each other sincerely and jointly defend and promote social justice for all, moral values, peace, and freedom. In this article, I first explain art’s role in establishing interreligious dialogue, especially in the Catholic and Islamic traditions. After that, I highlight the phenomenon of the use of art to engage in religious harmony in the Archdiocese of Semarang Indonesia, specifically between myself, as a Catholic priest, and Muslim figures. I suggest, through the lens of theological aesthetics and in the Indonesian context, that art has significantly promoted interreligious dialogue for a harmonious and peaceful life in diversity.

Being Experienced By and Experiencing the Divine

2024-03-27T13:14:49-07:00

This paper offers an introduction to the intersection of Womanist and Shakta traditions by exploring the relationship between “us experiencing the Divine” and “the Divine experiencing us.” Having noted that Alice Walker defined the term Womanism in her book In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983), this paper compares Walker’s poem “There is a Flower at the Tip of My Nose Smelling Me” to the Bangla Shama Sangeet (or Ma Kali devotional song) “Mayer Payer Jaba Hoye” by Ramprasad Sen (a Shakta poet of Bengal). It suggests that grappling these pieces can lead to a mystical experience that opens us up to the ability of our sense organs beyond seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching the Divine. This experience moves us beyond dualistic perspectives and false dichotomies to multiple ways of being. From this interplay, we come to grasp the Divine as the Dark Mother in all her forms.

Nazrul’s Gift

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In this paper, I illustrate the power and potential of the third space through the poetry of Nazrul Islam in order to articulate what I argue to be Nazrul’s true legacy: the genuine potential of liminality in the discovery and embracing of difference. In doing so, I seek to clarify Nazrul’s gift as one that offers us the opportunity to examine the ways in which we attach power and privilege to difference and, finally, reflect on the ways in which aesthetics, liminality, and dialogue are necessary for the flourishing of our world. This paper then constitutes a contribution to the interdisciplinary project of aesthetic interreligious dialogue in that it illustrates the kinds of transformation that may be experienced in the liminal spaces those dialogues create. Through Nazrul, we have an opportunity to imagine what impact these dialogues can have on the dialoging individuals and their respective contexts, especially in relation to shared problems such as war and climate change.

Liturgical Letters

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Although comparative theology typically focuses on texts, calligraphic art from many religious traditions shows that text can also be art, artifact, and liturgy. This paper pairs works by contemporary calligraphers Izzy Pludwinski and Ewan Clayton to create a Jewish-Christian conversation around sacred text in its visual, aesthetic, and artifactual dimensions. On the one hand, Pludwinski and Clayton both shape sacred texts into letters and words which communicate beyond mere signification. Their works express the bodily gesture and character of the scribe. Such verbal-visual art both reveals the presence of God and points to the limits of language to describe God. Yet Clayton’s insights into the liturgical and artifactual dimensions of calligraphic art also illuminate Pludwinski’s works in their Jewish contexts. Clayton shows how writing is not merely letters, but letters on objects which exist and function in social and liturgical spaces. Such objects spark dialogues between people, and between people and God.

Art and/as Religious Syncretic Border Crossing

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Art in museums often portrays the so-called world religions paradigm, so Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, or Islamic (and so on) art and artefacts are regularly found in their own distinct section. However, art—like the religious worlds depicted—does not exist in monolithic silos. While art studies, and museum displays, often mention cultural context and how the art of a particular “religion” changes in relation to this, what is often neglected is the religio-socio-philosophical worldview that is entailed in such supposedly culturally adapted art. Buddhist art in Gandhara, for instance, does not simply show a Greek influence in how the Buddha is portrayed, but also how he is thought, for early Buddhist aniconism has given way to a new Buddhist iconographic display. This paper argues that the distinction often built of religion and culture hides the deeper syncretic exchanges that occur when an image of Jesus or a statue of Buddha appears elsewhere. Indeed, we can even speak of art expressing an interreligious global dialogue of worldviews and cultures. Highlighting the interreligious connections in embodied artefacts, with a particular but not exclusive focus on the collection of Singapore’s Asian Civilizations Museum, this paper will note some of these syncretic flows and hybrid creations as a step towards decolonising the way we imagine both “religion” and “culture”. To this end, it engages debates in the critical methods and theory debates around the term religion, how interreligious studies may help decolonize the wider study of religion, and the display of religious artefacts in museums in Singapore and globally.

A Contrapuntal Discipline

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This essay is offered as an encouragement to continue paying attention to how we do interreligious studies. That is why I pay attention to how my colleagues explain it. I note a proliferation of landscape metaphors that seem oblivious to how landscapes are representations of the power relations that govern societies. What do these metaphors say, I wonder, about some of our conceptual grammar, some of the instincts that subtend and suffuse this discipline? Here, I use “discipline” as practice. My suggestion is for us to stay attuned to relations, the “inter-” in interreligious studies, while appreciating possible dynamics signaled by “-religious.” An emphasis on hearing multiple, often contrapuntally “flowing currents”—concurrent with a refusal to reflexively prioritize one of those clusters of notes—might be of help to those working across the spectrum of interreligious studies. My use of “contrapuntal” relies on Edward Said’s simile of counterpoint, music’s “capacity for plurality of voices.” I stress, through the epigraph, the final note in Said’s last masterpiece, his Out of Place. Freed from the task of speaking from within an academic enclosure, or belonging to a particular vision of humanism, he invigorates his sonic expression by motioning toward clusters and currents that are independent yet somehow related contrapuntally.

The Aesthetics of Interreligious Connections

2024-03-27T14:10:46-07:00

Seeing is one part of human biological processes devoted to perception. As with the other senses, past experiences control the way we sense the world in the present, while our physical and bodily surroundings impact the ways we understand the world we are living in now. All sense-based operations are fluid and flexible, operating through brain and body, as they produce order, meaning, and purpose in our lives. In this short article, I take this malleable nature of perception and use it to prompt a renewed take on interreligious work through attention to aesthetics (from the Greek, aísthēsis, related to “sense perception”). Aesthetics, in its primal forms, relates to the senses, and through human sense experience we humans developed more abstract theories of “art” and “beauty.” Beginning with some comments on the linguistic basis of “dialogue,” I shift our attention to aesthetics-as-perception, ultimately returning to the perception of art, and specifically the medium of film, in order to provide an example of an interreligious aesthetics.

“Don’t Let Us Lose This Memory”

2024-03-24T17:11:13-07:00

My reflective writing or public speaking often has an accompanying playlist. For this essay, the list features Canadian musician Nancy Reinhold’s poignant song, “This Memory”, and two songs about Muhammad Ali. Their lyrics underscore points I make as I reflect on the reality of American Muslim life and how Muslims have helped to make America the country that it is, including through service and the arts.

Bearing

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Bearing • the manner in which one conducts or carries oneself, posture and gestures • the act, capability, or period of producing or bringing forth • something that is produced • the act of enduring or capacity to endure • reference or relation • a supporting part of a structure • Often bearings, direction or relative position.

Three Poems from House Crossing

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Indologist and poet Laurie L. Patton, Ph.D., is the seventeenth president of Middlebury College (Vermont). Her many publications on religion, mythology, and literature include Bringing the Gods to Mind: Mantra and Ritual in Early Indian Sacrifice (University of California Press, 2006), Who Owns Religion? Scholars and their Publics in the Late 20th Century (University of Chicago Press, 2019), her translation of The Bhagavad Gita (Penguin Press, 2008), Fire’s Goal: Poems from the Hindu Year (White Clouds Press, 2003), and Angel’s Task: Poems in Biblical Time (Station Hill Press, 2011). Dr. Patton has selected three entries from her House Crossing (AmazonUs/INDPB, 2018) for inclusion in this issue focusing on interreligious studies and the arts.

Dr. Patton and Dr. Mosher were participants in a roundtable session on Interreligious Aesthetics: From Dialogue to the Senses at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion. During her term as president of the AAR, Dr. Patton appointed Dr. Mosher to the Religion and the Arts Book Award jury, which she now chairs.

Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism

2024-03-23T17:37:59-07:00

Review: Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism. Edited by Atalia Omer and Joshua Lupo. Contending Modernities. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2023. ii+302. $125.00 (hardcover); $35.00 (paper); $27.99 (eBook). Paper ISBN 9780268205829

With the Best of Intentions: Interreligious Missteps and Mistakes

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Reivew: With the Best of Intentions: Interreligious Missteps and Mistakes. Edited by Lucinda Mosher, Elinor J. Pierce, and Or N. Rose. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2023. xi+220pp. ISBN 978-1-62698-545-2. $35.00 (paperback) $28.50 (Kindle).

bell hooks’ Spiritual Vision: Buddhist, Christian, and Feminist

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Review: bell hooks’ Spiritual Vision: Buddhist, Christian, and Feminist. By Nadra Nittle. Fortress Press, 2023. 147 pages. $24.00 (paperback). ISBN 9781506488363

The Paradox of Trauma and Growth in Pastoral Care: Night Blooming

2024-03-23T17:37:59-07:00

Review: The Paradox of Trauma and Growth in Pastoral Care: Night Blooming. By Mary Beth Werdel. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2024. pp. 113. ISBN 978-1-4985-1993-9. Hardcover, $90.00. e-book, $45.00.

Queer Religiosities: An Introduction to Queer and Transgender Studies in Religion

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Review: Queer Religiosities: An Introduction to Queer and Transgender Studies in Religion. By Melissa M. Wilcox. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020. xv+239pp. $100.00 (hardcover); $36.00 (paperback); $34.00 (eBook). ISBN: 978-1-4422-7566-9.

A Śākta Method for Comparative Theology: Upside Down, Inside Out

2024-03-23T17:38:00-07:00

Review: A Śākta Method for Comparative Theology: Upside Down, Inside Out. By Pravina Rodrigues. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2024. vii+145pp. $95.00 (hardcover). ISBN: 1666905054.

What Would Jesus See? Ways of Looking at a Disorienting World

2024-03-23T17:38:00-07:00

Revew: What Would Jesus See? Ways of Looking at a Disorienting World. By Aaron Rosen. Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2023. x+199 pages. $29.99 (hardcover). ISBN 9781506478654.

Afterword

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