THE VALUE OF INTERRELIGIOUS EDUCATION FOR RELIGIOUS LEADERS

Jennifer Howe Peace and Or N. Rose

All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

—LEO TOLSTOY

If we have no peace it is because we have forgotten we belong to one another.

—MOTHER TERESA

This chapter draws on multiple sources. It stems from work we have done individually as educators, activists, and writers as well as work we have shared over the last ten years as coteachers and codirectors of the Center for Interreligious and Communal Leadership Education (CIRCLE).¹ It also draws upon conversations with fellow educators, students, and communal leaders and insights and questions that have arisen from our particular experiences as a Christian and as a Jew.² In all of this work, we have seen firsthand the value of interreligious education in the cultivation of effective and transformative religious leaders.³ Interreligious education attends to the relationships among individuals and communities with different religious commitments and the intersection of this dimension of identity with other elements of human experience (for example, race, class, and gender). Interreligious education includes what happens in the classroom but goes beyond this to what happens in various cocurricular contexts, including worship services, peer group gatherings, fieldwork, retreats, and travel experiences. When done well, interreligious education helps nurture religious leaders with a deep understanding of their identities in relation to others, their responsibilities to various communities to which they are accountable, and a broader sense of commitment to the well-being of our religiously diverse democracy and to the world as a whole.

As we reflect on the value of interreligious education for religious leaders, we realize that most of our strongest held pedagogic convictions are encoded in stories: stories of encounter in the classroom, cafeteria, clergy meetings, prayer services, and rallies. These are stories of insight, questioning, kinship, and struggle. At the core of these stories, and of our work more broadly, is an abiding commitment to cultivating and sustaining authentic relations in which people are open to learning and growing with and from one another, both in moments of agreement and disagreement. For us, respectful and honest interactions are the essential building blocks of this endeavor. Thus we have designed this chapter around three brief vignettes involving encounters among people from different walks of religious life. These anecdotes serve as the primary “raw data” as we analyze and articulate our model of interreligious education. We hope that this narrative approach provides readers with a textured understanding of our educational vision as it has grown out of our lived experiences.

THE VALUE OF INTERRELIGIOUS EDUCATION FOR PERSONAL RELIGIOUS FORMATION

Basma always sat near the back of the classroom. She had come to the United States from Egypt with her husband, who was enrolled in a PhD program at a nearby university. While taking care of their two young children, Basma was continuing her own writing as a PhD candidate at Al-Azhar University in Cairo. Fluent in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, Basma was also leading a peer group for students from both Hebrew College and Andover Newton focused on exploring attitudes toward the religious other in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim sacred texts.

Our weeklong intensive course Religious Leadership in a Multireligious Society focused on the rich and diverse religious landscape of Boston. Capping the class at thirty, we found ourselves with a lively group of Jewish, Christian, and Unitarian Universalist students along with one Muslim—Basma. Soft-spoken by nature, Basma tended to listen more than speak. But one day she raised her hand and began describing how limited her encounters with non-Muslims had been before coming to the United States and how varied and rich her experiences had been since arriving. She ended by saying: “Our experiences change who we are.”

“OK,” we thought, glad that she had spoken up, though the observation seemed mundane. The next day, Basma raised her hand again, and said, a bit more slowly, “Our experiences change who we are.”⁴

Embedded in Basma’s simple assertion are three ideas that help frame our work as religious educators with interreligious commitments: the power of interreligious encounters, our emphasis on transformative learning, and the impact of interreligious education on religious identity formation.

Taking each point in turn, if “our experiences change who we are,” it is incumbent on us as teachers and mentors to think carefully about the kind of educational experiences—classroom-based and cocurricular—that are essential in forming and informing effective religious leaders with interreligious capacities. Like Basma, many of our students enter our classrooms with limited experiences engaging with people outside of their own religious circles or reflecting critically on these encounters.⁵ To help address this, we strongly favor an educational model in which our Jewish, Christian, Unitarian Universalist, and Muslim students learn with and not simply about one another.

One pedagogical tool that has been a touchstone for us is the ancient rabbinic model of havruta (companion) study. In this dialogical framework peers engage in regular and ongoing discussion of both theoretical and practical matters.⁶ This practice encourages students to move beyond an exclusively intellectual focus on the basic tenets of the “world religions” to a broader relational awareness of how individuals enact their beliefs and values in particular times and places. Havruta study helps students explore vital spiritual, ethical, and communal issues, while establishing meaningful personal connections that often have bearing well beyond their years of formal study.⁷

Basma’s comment offers a second insight about the nature of our work. It is about transformation: “Our experiences change who we are.” Reflecting on her encounters with non-Muslims since coming to the US, Basma recognized a personal shift—a shift toward greater understanding and appreciation of religious similarity and difference, both within and across traditions.⁸ Analogous comments from students over the years have led us to think about interreligious education as a form of consciousness raising. The kind of change in awareness we see in our students is not characterized by a weakening of religious commitment but rather a more nuanced understanding of the complex relationship among religious people, ideas, and practices. In a yearlong seminar we cotaught, Jewish and Christian Dialogue and Action, one of our students described moving from a posture of “basically we are all really the same” to a recognition that simply celebrating our commonality is not enough. As he wrote in his final reflection, “What I had yet to realize was that there is even more need to understand and appreciate each other’s differences . . . [for] in our difference lies our dimensionality, our depth, our richness.” This insight led this student to spend more time studying the particularities of his own Baptist tradition so he could return to the “interfaith table” better equipped to articulate the distinct contributions he had to offer out of a deeper understanding of his own religious roots.

This brings us to the final point encapsulated in Basma’s remark: “Our experiences change who we are.” Basma’s comment suggests that she was no longer the same person as when she first arrived from Egypt. If religious identity formation is one of the goals of seminary education, a fundamental assertion that underlies this chapter is that we are formed in relationship, not in isolation. Engaging with peers and mentors from different traditions provides students with the opportunity to reflect on both their core commitments and ongoing questions.⁹ Further, doing so in the presence of the religious other can be very helpful to students in gaining greater skill and confidence articulating their beliefs, values, and uncertainties. We have come to describe this educational process, in which students engage in sustained learning and exploration during this time of intensive personal and professional development, as one of interreligious “coformation.”¹⁰ This reorientation of seminary education to prioritize interreligious engagement can have a profound impact on the personal formation of religious leaders in their preparation to lead and serve in the kinds of challenging situations described in subsequent sections of this chapter.

THE VALUE OF INTERRELIGIOUS EDUCATION WITHIN AND ACROSS RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES

Hebrew College (HC) and Andover Newton Theological School (ANTS) had been building a close collaborative relationship for a few years when the staff and student fellows of CIRCTE raised the possibility of holding a joint program for Yom Ha’Shoah (Holocaust Memorial Day).

For many years (dating back to before HC moved to our shared hilltop in Newton) ANTS had held its own annual service of remembrance. Hebrew College had a tradition of joining the wider Boston Jewish community for an evening service to commemorate Yom Ha’Shoah and typically held a brief candle-lighting ceremony during school hours. It seemed to us that there was an opportunity to develop a meaningful joint program.

In discussions with the presidents and deans of our respective schools, CIRCTE was charged with coordinating a joint Holocaust memorial service. A small planning team was assembled to craft a midday program that included songs, poems, and prayers. Members of the CIRCLE team also called on Jewish and non-Jewish students and faculty to participate in facilitating the event.

While the service we led was meaningful for many people from both communities, there was more critical feedback than we expected. One HC faculty member explained: “I need a time and place to be with just my fellow Jews at HC to mourn and reflect on this horrific tragedy that decimated my family and people.” A student leader from ANTS said to us, “As a Christian I feel a great deal of shame on this day, and I need to process this and other feelings openly with other Christians.” A senior administrator from HC added, “This can’t be the one time during the year when we cancel classes and ask students and faculty to come together.”

The CIRCTE team went back to our interreligious drawing board to reflect on and modify our approach to Holocaust Memorial Day. We realized that we needed to think about this event not in isolation but in relationship to our programming throughout the year and our broader interreligious educational agenda. Several important lessons emerged. To begin with, we came away with a deeper appreciation of the importance of carefully gauging the interest and willingness of one’s community to participate in such events, particularly if the focus is on an emotionally charged subject. While the CIRCTE team had held internal discussions and brought the idea for a joint remembrance service before school administrators, we did not discuss it in advance with a sufficient number of faculty and students. Had we done so, we would have likely concluded that, for different reasons, each community needed an opportunity to grapple with the pain and horror of Yom Ha’Shoah independently, whether or not the schools might also come together for a joint gathering. In subsequent years we experimented with this model of separate events followed by a shared gathering. We also expanded the joint event beyond a single ritualized remembrance to incorporate related programming the day before and the day after the service that included time for discussion, study, multimedia presentations, and meetings with Holocaust survivors. Participants were much more receptive to this model, as it respected the distinct needs of our two communities.

In the wake of these experiments with different models we also recognized the need to provide a wider range of people (beyond the core group of those who regularly chose to participate in CIRCLE programming) with a more diverse set of opportunities for interreligious engagement.¹¹ The HC school administrator we quoted above was right: Holocaust Memorial Day could not be the only time when we changed our class schedules and brought our communities together. Because the experience of planning the Yom Ha’Shoah program brought several complicated and painful issues to the surface, we were also reminded again of the need to tend carefully to the complex histories and power dynamics that exist between our communities. Ignoring the darker chapters in Jewish-Christian history or downplaying the asymmetries that exist between a majority and minority group run the risk of undermining our attempts at cultivating authentic relationships and transformative educational programming.

It is only by thoughtfully delving into the depths of these matters that we can move toward the kind of honest and informed interreligious engagement that we are advocating here. The differences and dilemmas are real, and the historical record is complicated. Without some understanding of this complexity, our students will have a limited understanding of their own traditions and of the various connections across our communities—both positive and negative—and they will not be easily able to think critically about how to advance their interreligious initiatives thoughtfully in light of these challenges.¹²

THE VALUE OF INTERRELIGIOUS EDUCATION FOR CIVIC LIFE

The Reverend Dan Smith of the First Church in Cambridge has been a frequent visitor to our classrooms and community events. A United Church of Christ minister in his mid-forties, he is equally passionate about leading his mainline Protestant church and working with other religious and civic leaders from across the city on various social justice issues. Dan often says that he has “one foot firmly planted in his church and the other out in the world.” Among the stories Dan regularly shares with our students is one about a moment of serious challenge in the life of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO), an interfaith community organizing group in which he serves as a member of its strategy team.

In 2004, organization leadership played an important role in helping to reform health-care coverage in Massachusetts. Working with a number of grassroots organizations and governmental agencies, their intensive organizing led to the passage of new health-care legislation, providing seventy thousand previously uninsured people with much-needed coverage. Just as GBIO and its allies were gaining ground with the health-care campaign, the issue of same-sex marriage emerged as a hot topic throughout Massachusetts. Politicians, activists, journalists, and others were speaking, writing, and organizing with great fervor both in favor and against the introduction of a new bill to legalize same-sex marriage. Leaders within GBIO found themselves on opposite sides of the debate and the picket lines. The public discourse was intense, and it became painful for the clergy and lay leaders who had been working together so closely on health care to be so divided on this bill.

Feeling that the fabric of the organization was fraying, GBIO leaders and their constituents needed to find ways to rehumanize one another. And so, in keeping with the relational ethos of the organization, they arranged to meet with people on both sides of the issue, inviting them to tell their stories and to explain how these personal experiences informed their perspectives. In one such meeting, Hurmon Hamilton, then senior pastor of Roxbury Presbyterian Church, met with members of Temple Israel of Boston. Reverend Hamilton was lobbying against the passing of the same-sex marriage bill; the Temple Israel clergy were working for its passage. Among the assembled group that evening were LGBTQ members of Temple Israel and allies.

After an evening of heartfelt conversations that included personal storytelling, Pastor Hamilton closed his remarks by saying that when he walked into the house earlier in the evening, he’d felt as if there was a “brick wall” separating the two groups, but as he prepared to leave he felt as if that barrier had been replaced by a “glass wall.”¹³

What can we learn from Hamilton’s statement and from other elements of this story? First, while GBIO focuses on issues of common concern—like health-care reform—inevitably there are areas where there is disagreement, including potentially painful disagreements. We should not be surprised by this. Diversity and divergent perspectives go hand in hand. The question at such moments is how deeply one is motivated to continue to be in relationship with the person or people with whom one disagrees. This is true of personal and communal relationships. How much tension can we hold individually or collectively? There are, of course, some issues that simply cannot be overcome without severely altering or even ending relationships. In this case, however, the leaders of GBIO felt that the relationships they had cultivated were too valuable to give up. As Jonah Pesner, then a rabbi at Temple Israel and a key GBIO leader wrote, “We became a community . . . not just a coalition,” and it was a community that made the choice to press forward together.¹⁴

Further, the GBIO leaders recognized that there was too much good work they could do together where they did agree on matters of substance. They understood that they had built a powerful community of change agents that had the capacity to work across lines of difference to make a real and lasting difference in the lives of tens of thousands of people. Imagine all of the people—preschool children, young mothers, out-of-work professionals, senior citizens, et cetera—who could not previously access basic health care but were finally receiving the critical medical attention they needed. If GBIO could play a constructive role in this campaign, what else could its members do together? This does not mean that the pain of their differences over the same-sex marriage bill was erased or even blunted. How could it be, as it touched on several critical issues of individual and collective identity, including biology, sexuality, religious belief, social mores, and human rights? It also did not mean that GBIO members were going to stop advocating passionately for their positions.

However, as Hamilton’s comment indicates, the GBIO leaders and constituents made a genuine effort to engage one another humanely. They sought to topple the walls that allowed them to speak of the “other” at a distance without having to see their faces or hear their voices. Meeting together gave people a chance to share their stories—their pain, fear, hopes, and dreams. For Hamilton and others, the brick wall was replaced with a glass one. This relational renovation was invaluable as it helped many people within the GBIO community weather the storm of disagreement and continue their commitment to be in relationship. And as several leaders have reported, it had a direct impact on the ways in which they spoke both privately and publicly about the issues at hand and the people with whom they disagreed.

As we reflect on our commitment to interreligious education for future religious leaders, it is stories like this one that remind us what is at stake: namely, the quality of our relationships across communities and the health of our civil society. Religious leaders are often on the front lines of critical social and political struggles regarding housing, hunger, and health care. As GBIO and other organizations like it demonstrate, interreligious solidarity can create the necessary leverage to make transformative change. While not all of our graduates become community organizers, learning from such activists can help students think critically about the possibilities and challenges of working for common goals and maintaining personal and professional relationships in the face of serious theological or ideological differences.

CONCLUSION

As Mary Elizabeth Moore of the Boston University School of Theology wrote to us in 2016,

The value of interreligious education in religious leadership formation is to touch worlds beyond your own, to discover and appreciate spiritual beauty wherever it is found, to encounter the ‘other’ with deeper understanding, to engage new insights and challenging questions, and to know yourself more deeply. These are all related. . . . The results cannot be guaranteed, but interreligious education can cultivate the ground for a more compassionate, just, peaceful, and ecologically sustainable world.

While both of us are strongly committed to teaching our students about the richness of our particular Jewish or Christian traditions, we believe that future religious leaders also require training as interreligious bridge-builders. Living as we do in a religiously diverse society and a highly interconnected world requires that our graduates develop the skills, knowledge, and experience to navigate the interreligious terrain thoughtfully and effectively. As the great scholar of religion Wilfred Cantwell Smith wrote several decades ago, “Unless [we] can learn to understand and to be loyal to each other across religious frontiers, unless we can build a world in which people profoundly of different faiths can live together and work together, then the prospects for our planet’s future are not bright.”¹⁵ These words remain as important today as when he wrote them in 1962. While our religious identities and institutional loyalties are of vital importance, we must not forget that we are also accountable to a global community that extends far beyond our particular religious frontiers.

As we have argued in this chapter, we believe it is incumbent upon religious educators to provide ample opportunities for future religious leaders to learn with one another and not simply about the other. To be religiously literate today requires that our students not only read theological and historical texts but also expand their experiences by meeting and developing relationships with peers from diverse religious backgrounds, exploring their commonalities and differences, and having firsthand experience with what does and does not work when they collaborate on issues of common concern. The stories in this chapter serve as touchstones for us in our ongoing work as educators. Our commentary reflects our belief in the transformative power of interreligious education for the individual, for our religious communities, and for the possibility of “a more compassionate, just, peaceful, and ecologically sustainable world.”