NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. Eboo Patel, “Toward a Field of Interfaith Studies,” Liberal Education 99 (2013): 38.
2. For greater elaboration on this point, see Eboo Patel, Interfaith Leadership: A Primer (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016), 97–100.
3. Patel, “Toward a Field of Interfaith Studies,” 38–43.
4. This estimate comes from the organizational metrics and tracking of Interfaith Youth Core’s (IFYC), which are largely taken from its grant programs that support the development of interfaith-focused courses and academic programs. IFYC’s tracking in this regard is almost certainly incomplete, and we imagine that these estimates are conservative.
5. IFYC’s records indicate that more than twenty undergraduate institutions have launched programs in interfaith and interreligious studies. Information about graduate programs can be found through the Jay Phillips Center for Interfaith Learning, University of St. Thomas, https://www.stthomas.edu/jpc/resources/academicprograms/graduateandseminaryprograms.
6. Boston University School of Theology, in collaboration with Hebrew College and Andover Newton Theological School, cosponsored this gathering of authors thanks to a grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.
(INTER)RELIGIOUS STUDIES
1. Patel, “Toward a Field of Interfaith Studies,” 38.
2. James Simpson and Sean Kelly, The Teaching of the Arts and Humanities at Harvard College: Mapping the Future, Harvard University Arts and Humanities Division (2013), http://artsandhumanities.fas.harvard.edu/files/humanities/files/mapping_the_future_31_may_2013.pdf.
3. Jennifer Doody, “Building a Discussion Around the Memorial Church,” Harvard Gazette, April 4, 2016, http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/04/building-a-discussion-around-the-memorial-church.
4. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, “Nones” on the Rise: One-in-Five Adults Have No Religious Affiliation (Pew Research Center, 2012), http://www.pewforum.org/2012/10/09/nones-on-the-rise.
5. This includes a recently endowed chair for the study of “atheism, humanism and secular ethics” at the University of Miami. See Laurie Goodstein, “University of Miami Establishes Chair for Study of Atheism,” New York Times, May 21, 2016.
6. See, for example, Michael Hout and Claude S. Fischer, Explaining Why More Americans Have No Religious Preference: Political Backlash and Generational Succession, 1987–2012 (New York: NYU Population Center, 2014); Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010); and James Allen Cheyne, “The Rise of the Nones and the Growth of Religious Indifference,” Skeptic 15 (2010): 56–60.
7. See, for example, Buster G. Smith and Joseph A. Baker, “Atheism, Agnosticism and Irreligion,” in Emerging Trends in the Behavioral and Social Sciences: An Interdisciplinary, Searchable, and Linkable Resource, ed. Robert A. Scott, Marlis C. Buchmann, and Stephen M. Kosslyn (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2015), 1–9; Chaeyoon Lim, Carol Ann MacGregor, and Robert D. Putnam, “Secular and Liminal: Discovering Heterogeneity Among Religious Nones,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 49 (2010): 596–618; and Linda A. Mercadante, Belief Without Borders: Inside the Minds of the Spiritual but Not Religious (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
8. Interfaith and interreligious studies programs reviewed were offered by Augustana College, Barton College, Benedictine University (Illinois), California State University, Chico, California Lutheran University, Concordia College (Minnesota), Dominican University (Illinois), Drew University, Earlham College, Elon University, Elizabethtown College, Loyola University Chicago, Nazareth College, Oklahoma City University, Saint Mary’s College of California, University of La Verne, and University of Toledo. Religious studies programs reviewed were offered by Brandeis University; Brown University; California State University, Chico; California State University, Humboldt; California State University, San Diego; George Mason University; Grinnell College; Hamilton College; Illinois Wesleyan University; Indiana University Bloomington; Michigan State University; New York University; Randolph-Macon College; Stanford University; University of California, Riverside; University of Alabama; University of Arizona; University of Colorado Boulder; University of Houston; University of Iowa; University of Kansas; University of Missouri; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; University of Oklahoma; University of Pennsylvania; University of Tennessee, Knoxville; University of Wisconsin–Madison; University of Texas at Austin; Utah State University; Vanderbilt University; and Wesleyan University. They were selected for analysis based on availability of program descriptions, mission or goals statements (or both); balance of public and private institutions; and breadth of geographic representation. Interfaith/interreligious studies program descriptions were based on a list of all known programs provided by Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), which has supported the development of such course sequences through grants and conferences. This list included institutions associated with IFYC initiatives as well as others. Interfaith/interreligious studies programs reviewed here are those that had adequately developed program descriptions to allow for meaningful comparison.
9. D. G. Hart, The University Gets Religion: Religious Studies in American Higher Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 191.
10. Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen, No Longer Invisible: Religion in University Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 24–25.
11. School Dist. of Abington Tp. v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203, 225 (1963).
12. Bruce Lincoln, “Theses on Method,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 8 (1996): 225–27.
13. Leonard Swidler, “Sorting Out Meanings: ‘Religion,’ ‘Spiritual,’ ‘Interreligious,’ ‘Interfaith,’ Etc.,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 49 (2014): 380.
14. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, “Comparative Religion: Whither—and Why?” in The History of Religions: Essays in Methodology, ed. Mircea Eliade and Joseph M. Kitagawa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 42; Russell McCutcheon, Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), xi.
15. Anne Hege Grung, “Inter-religious or Trans-religious: Exploring the Term ‘Inter-religious’ in a Feminist Postcolonial Perspective,” Journal of Interreligious Studies 13 (2014): 11. Emphasis in original.
16. See, for example, Michelle Voss Roberts, “Religious Belonging and the Multiple,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26 (2010): 43–62; Jeannine Hill Fletcher, “Shifting Identity: The Contribution of Feminist Thought to Theologies of Religious Pluralism,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (2003): 5–24; and Kwok Pui-Lan, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2005).
17. Lucia Hulsether, “Out of Incorporation, Pluralism,” Journal of Interreligious Studies 17 (2015): 8. See also Courtney Bender and Pamela E. Klassen, eds., After Pluralism: Rethinking Religious Engagement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); and Peter Gardella, “Pluralisms in the United States and in the American Empire,” Religious Studies Review 29, no. 3 (2003).
18. Bruce Grelle, “Promoting Religious and Civic Literacy in Public Schools: The California 3 Rs Project,” in Religion in the Public Schools: Negotiating the New Commons, ed. Michael D. Waggoner (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013), 103.
19. Ibid.
FROM THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS TO INTERFAITH STUDIES
1. Patel, “Toward a Field of Interfaith Studies,” 38.
2. Ibid.
3. See my section “From Theologies of Exclusion to Interfaith Engagement” for examples of such initiatives in multifaith education. Of the 66,464 students in member institutions of the Association of Theological Schools in the US, only 491 designated non-Christian affiliations in 2017 (76 Jewish, 84 Buddhist, 147 Muslim, and 184 “other”). See “Church/Denominational Affiliation of Students Currently Enrolled, 2016,” 2016–2017 Annual Data Tables, Table 2.16, Association of Theological Schools, Commission on Accrediting, https://www.ats.edu/resources/institutional-data/annual-data-tables.
4. See my treatment of seminary programs below and Kate McCarthy’s survey of religious studies and interfaith/interreligious studies programs in her chapter in this volume, “(Inter)Religious Studies: Making a Home in the Secular Academy.”
5. Adam Becker, Revival and Awakening: American Evangelical Missionaries in Iran and the Origins of Assyrian Nationalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 14–15. See also Ninian Smart, Religion and the Western Mind: Drummond Lectures (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 1.
6. Daniel L. Pals, Nine Theories of Religion, 3rd ed. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015).
7. Defined by Eric Sharpe as “the historical, critical and comparative study of the religions of the world,” the discipline of comparative religion is sometimes treated interchangeably with the history of religions. See E. J. Sharpe, Understanding Religion (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), vii.
8. Richard D. Hecht, “The Study of Religions in America and the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara,” Pantheon 8 (2013): 4.
9. Amy Kittelstrom, “The International Social Turn: Unity and Brotherhood at the World’s Parliament of Religions, Chicago, 1893,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 19 (2009): 245.
10. Justin Nordstrom, “Utopians at the Parliament,” Journal of Religious History 33 (September 2009): 352.
11. Richard Hughes Seager, The World’s Parliament of Religions: The East/West Encounter, Chicago, 1893 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
12. Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History, 2nd ed. (London: Duckworth, 1986), 1.
13. Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), xi–xii.
14. Ibid., xiv.
15. Seager, World’s Parliament of Religions, xxii; D. Keith Naylor, “The Black Presence at the World’s Parliament of Religions, 1893,” Religion 26 (1996): 252.
16. Donald Wiebe, “Promise and Disappointment,” in Modern Societies and the Science of Religions: Studies in Honour of Lammert Leertouwer, ed. Gerard A. Wiegers and Jan Platvoet (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 189–90. See also Hecht, “The Study of Religions in America,” 3–16; Joseph M. Kitagawa, “The History of Religions in America,” in The History of Religions ed. Eliade and Kitagawa, 1–30.
17. Ninian Smart, “The Future of the Academy,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion (JAAR) 69 (2001): 542. See also Hecht, “The Study of Religions in America,” 6, 9.
18. Smart, “Future of the Academy,” 545; Hecht, “The Study of Religions in America,” 4. Exceptions within theological schools included the University of Chicago Divinity School, where Eustace Haydon (1880–1975), Mircea Eliade (1907–86), and Joseph Kitagawa (1915–92) advanced the history of religions as an academic discipline that moved away from apologetic approaches of comparative religion. See A. Eustace Haydon, “From Comparative Religion to History of Religions,” Journal of Religion 2 (1922): 581–82.
19. Geoman K. George, “Early 20th Century British Missionaries and Fulfillment Theology: Comparison of the Approaches of William Temple Gairdner to Islam in Egypt, and John Nicol Farquhar to Hinduism in India,” in Christian Witness Between Continuity and New Beginnings: Modern Historical Missions in the Middle East, ed. Martin Tamcke and Michael Marten (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2006), 15. See also W. H. T. Gairdner, The Reproach of Islam (London: Young People’s Missionary Movement, 1909).
20. Jan Van Lim, Shaking the Fundamentals: Religious Plurality and Ecumenical Movement (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 94. On the limitations of the interreligious approach at the Jerusalem conference, see Deanna Ferree Womack, “A View from the Arabic Press, 1928: The International Missionary Conference in Jerusalem,” Exchange: Journal of Missiological and Ecumenical Research 46 (2017): 180–205.
21. Charles Carroll Bonney, “Address of President Charles Carroll Bonney of the ‘World’s Congress Auxiliary,’” in The World’s Parliament of Religions: An Illustrated and Popular Study of the World’s First Parliament of Religions, Held in Chicago in Conjunction with the Columbian Exposition of 1893, vol. 1, ed. John Henry Barrows (Toronto: Hunter and Rose, 1893), 72.
22. Catriona Laing, “A Provocation to Mission: Constance Padwick’s Study of Muslim Devotion,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 24 (2013): 30, 33.
23. Certain approaches to religious studies also promote such interreligious awareness. For example, Ninian Smart upheld the notion of “informed empathy” as a way of learning from and about the “other.” See Smart, “The Future of the Academy,” 648. See also Oddbjørn Leirvik, “Interreligious Studies: A Relational Approach to the Study of Religion,” Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue 13 (2014): 15–19.
24. “Reaching Beyond Ourselves: ATS Schools’ Response to Multifaith Context,” Colloquy: The Magazine of the Association of Theological Schools 20 (2011): 3. The Auburn study analyzed in this ATS publication is Lucinda Mosher and Justus Baird, Beyond World Religions: The State of Multifaith Education in American Theological Schools (New York: Auburn Theological Seminary, 2009). The new accreditation requirements for multifaith education instituted by the Association of Theological Schools in 2012 means that such emphases will only increase within American theological education. Justus Baird, “Multifaith Education in American Theological Schools: Looking Back, Looking Ahead,” Teaching Theology and Religion 16 (2013): 309.
25. See Paul Knitter, “Doing Theology Interreligiously: Union and the Legacy of Paul Tillich,” Crosscurrents (2011): 117–32; Richard Fox Young, “Obliged by Grace: Edward Jurji’s Legacy in the History of Religions at Princeton Theological Seminary, 1939–77,” Theology Today 69 (2012): 333–43; Diana Eck, A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation (New York: HarperCollins, 2001); John B. Carman and Kathryn Dodgson, Community and Colloquy: The Center for the Study of World Religions, 1958–2003 (Cambridge, MA: Center for the Study of World Religions, 2006).
26. “Reaching Beyond Ourselves,” 5, 7; Scott C. Alexander, “Catholic-Muslim Studies at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago,” Religious Studies News (2016): 13–17.
27. “Reaching Beyond Ourselves,” 7–8; Feryal Salem, “Fulfilling the Need for Muslim Chaplains,” Religious Studies News (April 2016): 11. On Andover Newton, see Jennifer Howe Peace and Or N. Rose’s chapter in this volume, “The Value of Interreligious Education for Religious Leaders.”
28. For further thoughts on the distinctions between interfaith/interreligious studies and theological studies and religious studies, see Hans Gustafson, “Interreligious and Interfaith Studies in Relation to Religious Studies and Theological Studies,” State of Formation, January 6, 2015, http://www.stateofformation.org/2015/01/interreligious-and-interfaith-studies-in-relation-to-religious-studies-and-theological-studies.
29. Knitter, “Doing Theology Interreligiously,” 124.
30. Russell T. McCutcheon, “The Study of Religion as a Cross-Disciplinary Exercise,” introduction to The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion, ed. Russell T. McCutcheon (London: Cassell, 1999), 17; Kenneth L. Pike, “Etic and Emic Standpoints for the Description of Behavior,” in McCutcheon, The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion, 28–36.
COMMON GROUND
1. Kenji Yoshino, Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights (New York: Random House, 2006).
2. Allen F. Repko and Rick Szostak, Interdisciplinary Research: Process and Theory, 3rd ed. (Los Angeles: Sage, 2017), 3–6.
3. Alice E. Ginsberg, The Evolution of American Women’s Studies: Reflections on Triumphs, Controversies, and Change (London: Palgrave, 2008), 10–12.
4. Repko and Szostak, Interdisciplinary Research, 268–320.
5. Tracie McMillan, The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Apple-bee’s, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table (New York: Scribner, 2012), 236.
6. Repko and Szostak, Interdisciplinary Research, 25.
7. J. Courtney Bourns, Do Nothing About Me Without Me: An Action Guide for Engaging Stakeholders (Cambridge, MA: Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, 2010), http://www.d5coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Do_Nothing_About_Me_Without_Me.pdf.
8. Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Bloomsbury, 2000), 50.
9. Catherine M. Orr, “Women’s Studies as Civic Engagement: Research and Recommendations,” Teagle Foundation white paper, prepared on behalf of the Teagle Working Group on Women’s Studies and Civic Engagement and the National Women’s Studies Association, September 2011, http://www.nwsa.org/Files/Resources/WomensStudiesasCivicEngagement2011Revised_Finalpdf-1.pdf.
10. Noam Scheiber, “The Pop-Up Employer: Build a Team, Do the Job, Say Goodbye,” New York Times July 12, 2017.
CONSTRUCTING INTERRELIGIOUS STUDIES
1. On the importance of this critique and debate, see Elizabeth Kubek’s preceding chapter in this volume, “Common Ground: Imagining Interfaith Studies as an Inclusive, Interdisciplinary Field.”
2. David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 6.
3. Ibid., 11.
4. David Pinault, “The Field Trip and Its Role in Teaching Ritual,” in Teaching Ritual, ed. Catherine Bell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 59. On site visits, see also “Spotlight on Teaching: Teaching with Site Visits,” ed. Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger, special issue, Spotlight on Teaching (American Academy of Religion) 19, no. 4 (October 2004), http://rsnonline.org/images/pdfs/oct04sot.pdf.
5. Eck, A New Religious America; Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); McCutcheon, Critics Not Caretakers.
6. Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
7. Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, “Religion Naturalized: The New Establishment,” in Bender and Klassen, After Pluralism, 82–97.
8. Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
9. Lucia Hulsether, “Out of Incorporation, Pluralism,” Journal of Interreligious Studies 17 (2015), http://irstudies.org/journal/out-of-incorporation-pluralism-by-lucia-hulsether.
10. Roderick A. Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
11. Tracy Leavelle, “The Perils of Pluralism: Colonization and Decolonization in American Indian Religious History,” in Bender and Klassen, After Pluralism, 156–77.
12. Gardella, “Pluralisms in the United States and in the American Empire,” 255–59.
13. We are grateful to our colleagues Jennifer Hart, Lynn Huber, Ariela Marcus-Sells, Toddie Peters, Michael Pregill, Jeffrey Pugh, L. D. Russell, and Pamela Winfield for discussions that informed this essay and the shape of Elon’s interreligious studies minor.
LEARNING FROM THE FIELD
1. Patel, “Toward a Field of Interfaith Studies,” 38–43.
2. Ibid., 38.
3. IFYC is grateful to have received funding from the Teagle Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation, and Arthur Vining Davis Foundations to support our faculty-focused programming.
4. Patel, Interfaith Leadership, 39.
5. See Margarita M. W. Suárez and Wakoh Shannon Hickey’s chapter in this volume, “Meeting Others, Seeing Myself: Experiential Pedagogies in Interfaith Studies.”
6. See Ellie Pierce’s chapter in this volume, “Using the Case Method in Interfaith Studies Classrooms.”
7. See Amy L. Allocco, Geoffrey D. Claussen, and Brian K. Pennington’s chapter in this volume, “Constructing Interreligious Studies: Thinking Critically about Interfaith Studies and the Interfaith Movement.”
8. IFYC has elsewhere promoted the examples and activities in this chapter, with permission from the individuals mentioned. See “Experiential and Engaged Learning in Interfaith and Interreligious Studies Courses,” Interfaith Youth Core, 2017, http://ifyc.org/resources/experiential-learning.
9. The full description of Rose Aslan’s “Park 51 Role Playing Activity” is accessible on the IFYC website: https://www.ifyc.org/resources/cic-resources/park-51-role-playing-activity.
10. The full description of Hans Gustafson’s “Interfaith Service Learning Assignment” is accessible on the IFYC website: https://www.ifyc.org/resources/cic-resources/interfaith-service-learning-assignment.
11. See Elizabeth Kubek’s chapter in this volume, “Common Ground: Imagining Interfaith Studies as an Inclusive, Interdisciplinary Field.”
12. See Mark Hanshaw and Usra Ghazi’s chapter in this volume, “Interfaith Studies and the Professions: Could Heightened Religious Understanding Seed Success Within Secular Careers?”
13. See Rachel Mikva’s section on intersectionality within her chapter in this volume, “Six Issues That Complicate Interreligious Studies and Engagement.” See also Kubek’s section on gender identity in her chapter, “Common Ground,” and Jeannine Hill Fletcher’s chapter for a more thorough discussion on race, “The Promising Practice of Antiracist Approaches to Interfaith Studies.”
14. See, for example, Dan Schawbel, “Liberal Arts Majors Are Screwed,” Business Insider, May 20, 2014, http://www.businessinsider.com/liberal-arts-majors-are-screwed-2014-5.
15. One example of this is the “Careful Conversation” activity, which Hickey and Suárez describe in their chapter in this volume, “Meeting Others, Seeing Myself.”
16. The full syllabus for Nancy Klancher’s “Spiritual Autobiographies: Many Paths, One World” course is available on the IFYC website: https://www.ifyc.org/resources/cic-resources/manypathsoneworld.
17. We are defining religious literacy as “the ability to understand and use in one’s day-to-day life the basic building blocks of religious traditions—their key terms, symbols, doctrines, practices, sayings, characters, metaphors, and narratives.” See Stephen Prothero, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn’t (New York: HarperOne, 2008), 15.
TRANSFORMING INTRODUCTORY COURSES IN RELIGION
1. Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, 1.
2. Ibid., 20.
3. Ibid.
4. Roland Robertson, “Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity,” in Global Modernities, ed. Mike Featherstone, Scott M. Lash, and Roland Robertson (London: Sage Publications, 1995), 40.
5. The commitment to study religious traditions glocally reflects the growing collection of scholarship on the history, presence, and interrelation of “world religions” in the United States, including Eck, A New Religious America; Stephen Prothero, A Nation of Religions: The Politics of Pluralism in Multireligious America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); and William Hutchinson, Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).
6. The commitment to encounter lived religion closely reflects the humanistic method for the study of religion advanced by Tyler Roberts in conversation with the works of Robert Orsi and Saba Mahmood. See Tyler Roberts, Encountering Religion: Responsibility and Criticism After Secularism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 114–18.
7. For a more thorough description of these four models, see Patel, Interfaith Leadership, 72–82.
8. This model’s presence in the world religions classroom has been most affected by Huston Smith. See Huston Smith, The World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 73.
9. Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (New York: HarperOne, 2010), 11–12.
10. Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955).
11. Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 221.
12. In this model, I seek to redress Jonathan Z. Smith’s critique that the study of religion has had “an ideological emphasis on purity of lineage” that fails to accurately represent the intermingling of religious ways of being in the world. See Jonathan Z. Smith, Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 171. Instead, I emphasize the multiplicity of religious ways of being, shaped by the intersection of social difference, including race and gender, and constituted through the interaction of religious traditions. See, for example, Devaka Premawardhana, “The Unremarkable Hybrid: Aloysius Pieris and the Redundancy of Multiple Religious Belonging,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 46 (2011); Jeannine Hill Fletcher, “We Are All Hybrids,” chapter 4 in Monopoly on Salvation? A Feminist Approach to Religious Pluralism (New York: Continuum, 2005); and Michelle Voss Roberts, “Religious Belonging and the Multiple,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26 (2010): 43–62.
13. I regularly use four real-life case studies of interreligious conflict produced by the Pluralism Project at Harvard University and the Interfaith Youth Core. These include Karla R. Suomala, “Chalking Mohammad,” in “Case Studies for Exploring Interfaith Cooperation: Classroom Tools,” Interfaith Youth Core (2013), 5–8, https://www.ifyc.org/resources/case-studies-exploring-interfaith-cooperation-classroom-tools; Ellie Pierce, “Fliers at the Peace Parade,” Harvard University (2009); Ellie Pierce and Emily Sigalow, “A Question of Membership,” Harvard University (2012); and Ellie Pierce, “A Sign of Division” Harvard University (2008), Pluralism Project, http://pluralism.org/casestudy/selected-case-studies.
14. Jennifer Howe Peace, Or N. Rose, and Gregory Mobley, eds., My Neighbor’s Faith: Stories of Interreligious Encounter, Growth and Transformation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2012).
USING THE CASE METHOD IN INTERFAITH STUDIES CLASSROOMS
1. Elinor Pierce, “A Mosque in Palos Heights,” Pluralism Project case study (2006).
2. “Questions for Class Discussions,” Harvard Business School: Christensen Center for Teaching and Learning (2008), http://www.hbs.edu/teaching/Documents/Questions_for_Class_Discussions_rev.pdf.
3. Diana Eck, interview with the author, July 25, 2016.
4. “What Is Pluralism?,” Pluralism Project, http://pluralism.org/what-is-pluralism.
5. “Inside HBS,” Harvard Business School, http://www.hbs.edu/teaching/inside-hbs.
6. David A. Garvin, “Making the Case,” Harvard Magazine, February 26, 2010, http://harvardmagazine.com/2003/09/making-the-case-html.
7. Louise A. Mauffette-Leenders, James A. Erskine, and Michiel R. Leenders, Learning with Cases (London, Ontario: Richard Ivey School of Business, 2005), 5–6.
8. John Boehrer and Marty Linsky, “Teaching with Cases: Learning to Question,” New Directions for Teaching and Learning 42 (1990): 41–57.
9. Benson P. Shapiro, “Introduction to the Case Method,” Harvard Business School Publishing (1975), http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=17156.
10. Mauffette-Leenders, Erskine, and Leenders, Learning with Cases, 2.
11. Boehrer and Linsky, “Teaching with Cases,” 41–57.
12. Extensive resources related to writing and teaching cases are available for free to educators through Harvard Business Publishing, https://cb.hbsp.harvard.edu/cbmp/pages/home.
13. Diana Eck, email interview with the author, July 29, 2016. All quotations below are from this interview.
14. Jennifer Peace, interview with the author, July 10, 2016. All quotations below are from this interview.
15. Marcia Sietstra, interview with the author, January 6, 2017. All quotations below are from this interview.
16. Matthew Hoffman, interview with the author, January 5, 2017. All quotations below are from this interview.
17. Brendan Randall, interview with the author, December 21, 2016. All quotations below are from this interview.
18. Brendan Randall made significant contributions to the Pluralism Project’s case initiative as a student, teacher, researcher, and fellow. He passed away while this chapter was still being written. For more of Randall’s research and reflections on the case method, see Brendan W. Randall and Whittney Barth, “The Case Study Method as a Means of Teaching About Pluralism,” in Teaching Interreligious Encounters, ed. Marc Pugliese et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); and his unpublished Harvard dissertation, “Religious Belief, Free Expression, and ‘Lightning Rod’ Issues: Agonistic Pluralism and Civic Education in a Religiously Diverse Democracy.”
19. Richard Fossey and Gary M. Crow, “The Elements of a Good Case,” Journal of Cases in Educational Leadership 14 (2011): 4–10.
TEACHING THE “MOST BEAUTIFUL OF STORIES”
1. Prothero, God Is Not One.
2. Qur’an 12.3.
3. Patel, Interfaith Leadership.
4. Tariq Ramadan, The Quest for Meaning: Developing a Philosophy of Pluralism (New York: Penguin Books, 2010), 150.
5. Ibid., 138–39.
6. Stanley Hauerwas, Truthfulness and Tragedy: Further Investigations into Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 78.
7. Richard M. Gula, Reason Informed by Faith: Foundations of Catholic Morality (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1989).
8. Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 377c.
9. Russell B. Connors Jr. and Patrick T. McCormick, Character, Choices, and Community: The Faces of Christian Ethics (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1998), 88–89. See also Darrell Fasching, Dell deChant, and David M. Lantigua, Comparative Religious Ethics: A Narrative Approach to Global Ethics (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 3; and Hauerwas, Truthfulness and Tragedy, 35.
10. 2 Samuel 12:1–10.
11. M. Carolyn Clark, “Off the Beaten Path: Some Creative Approaches to Adult Learning,” New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education 126 (2010): 7.
12. Robert Kegan, “What ‘Form’ Transforms? A Constructive-Developmental Approach to Transformative Learning,” in Learning as Transformation: Critical Perspectives on a Theory in Progress, ed. Jack Mezirow (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), 35–69.
13. Jack Mezirow, “Learning to Think Like an Adult,” in Mezirow, Learning as Transformation, 3–34.
14. Peace, Rose, and Mobley, eds., My Neighbor’s Faith.
15. Jerome S. Bruner, Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux: 2002).
16. Jack Mezirow, Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1991).
17. Gary M. Kenyon and William L. Randall, Restorying Our Lives: Personal Growth Through Autobiographical Reflection (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997).
18. Fasching, deChant, and Lantigua, Comparative Religious Ethics, 283.
19. M. Carolyn Clark and Marsha Rossiter, “Narrative Learning in Adulthood,” New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education 119 (2008): 61–70.
20. Robert Schoen, What I Wish My Christian Friends Knew About Judaism (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2014); Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner and Saint (New York: Jericho Books, 2013); Eboo Patel, Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim and the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007).
21. Patel, Acts of Faith, 70.
22. Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), 17.
23. Van Wyck Brooks, America’s Coming-of-Age, rev. ed. (New York: Amereon House, 1990).
24. Ellie Pierce, “‘What Is at Stake?’ Exploring the Problems of Pluralism Through the Case Method,” Interreligious Studies 17: (2015), http://irdialogue.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/FINAL-What-is-at-Stake.pdf.
25. Martha E. Stortz, “Why Interfaith Work Is Not a Luxury: Lutherans as Neighboring Neighbors,” Intersections 44 (2016): 9–20.
26. Matthew Maruggi, “The Promise and Peril of the Interfaith Classroom,” Intersections 44 (2016): 21–23.
A PEDAGOGY OF LISTENING
1. This essay is particular in its focus on Islam and the Qur’an, but the approach proposed here can be used in teaching many religions.
2. The Jesus Seminar was an ongoing gathering of scholars who first met in the 1980s and continued early into the twenty-first century to assess the historical reliability of the New Testament Gospels. Eventually the seminar concluded that less than 20 percent of the words and deeds attributed to Jesus were authentic. Numerous studies emerged from this group, such as Robert. W. Funk, The Gospel of Jesus: According to the Jesus Seminar (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 1999); and Robert W. Funk, The Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds of Jesus (San Francisco: Harper, 1998).
3. See, for example, Eboo Patel, “His Holiness and the Art and Science of Interfaith Cooperation,” Huffington Post, July 18, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eboo-patel/dalai-lama-interfaith-cooperation_b_901392.html. In Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice, and the Promise of America (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012), Eboo Patel speaks of three elements of an interfaith triangle that mutually reinforce one another: positive attitudes, appreciative knowledge, and positive behaviors and relationships.
4. Michael Birkel, Qur’an in Conversation (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014).
5. Since the publication of Qur’an in Conversation, other studies of contemporary interpretation have appeared. See, for example, Suha Taji-Farouki, ed., The Qur’an and Its Readers Worldwide: Contemporary Commentaries and Translations (New York: Oxford University Press, in association with Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, 2015); Abdullah Saeed, Reading the Qur’an in the Twenty-First Century: A Contextualist Approach (London: Routledge, 2014); and Asma Lamrabet, Women in the Qur’an: An Emancipatory Reading, trans. Myriam François-Cerrah (Markfield, UK: Square View, 2016).
6. These sentiments are found in Birkel, Qur’an in Conversation, 203, 84, 155–57, 98.
7. Ibid., 13.
8. This story is found in Sura 18:60–82.
9. Maria Dakake is a professor at George Mason University and an editor of The Study Qur’an: A New Translation and Commentary (New York: HarperOne, 2015).
10. There has been much recent study of “nones” and the spiritual but not religious. See, for example, Mercadante, Belief Without Borders; Elizabeth Drescher, Choosing Our Religion: The Spiritual Lives of America’s Nones (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Corinna Nicolaou, A None’s Story: Searching for Meaning Inside Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and Islam (New York: Columbia, 2016).
11. “Uno itinere non potest perveniri ad tam grande secretum.” Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, “Relatio III De ara Victoriae,” Bibliotheca Augustana, http://www.hs-augsburg.de/%7Eharsch/Chronologia/Lspost04/Symmachus/sym_re03.html.
MEETING OTHERS, SEEING MYSELF
1. “An Interfaith Conversation about Womanhood,” event sponsored by students in Dr. Hickey’s Women in World Religions course, Notre Dame of Maryland University, Baltimore, September 11, 2016.
2. “Hate Crimes,” Federal Bureau of Investigation, https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/civil-rights/hate-crimes.
3. Charlotte Aull Davies, Reflexive Ethnography: A Guide to Researching Selves and Others, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008), 4.
4. See Elizabeth Kubek’s chapter in this volume, “Common Ground: Imagining Interfaith Studies as an Inclusive, Interdisciplinary Field.”
5. Linda Elder and Richard Paul, The Thinker’s Guide to Intellectual Standards: The Words That Name Them and the Criteria That Define Them (Foundation for Critical Thinking, 2008), 63, https://www.criticalthinking.org/store/get_file.php?inventories_id=338&inventories_files_id=349.
6. Ibid., 62.
7. Patel, Sacred Ground, 71.
8. For example, Jain tradition stresses nonviolence (ahimsa), nonattachment (aparigraha), and non-absolutism (anekantwad). The Eight Limbs of Yoga include social disciplines (yamas: nonviolence, non-deception, non-stealing, sexual restraint, nongreed) and personal disciplines (niyamas: purity, contentment, discipline, studiousness, and surrender/humility). Any of these virtues or practices might make a useful focus for this exercise.
9. Andrew O. Fort, “Awareness Practices in an Undergraduate Buddhism Course,” in Meditation and the Classroom: Contemplative Pedagogy for Religious Studies, ed. Judith Simmer-Brown and Fran Grace (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), 179–85.
10. Sid Brown, A Buddhist in the Classroom (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 121–26.
11. Ibid., 123. Emphases in original.
12. Emily Schreiber, “Careful Conversation Reflection,” unpublished manuscript, November 24, 2014.
13. Ibid.
14. “Research Guidelines,” Pluralism Project at Harvard University, http://pluralism.org/research-guidelines/.
15. Ruth Behar, Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997).
16. The 613 Commandments.
17. “Value Rubrics,” Association of American Colleges and Universities, https://www.aacu.org/value-rubrics.
18. James Shiveley and Thomas Misco, “‘But How Do I Know About Their Attitudes and Beliefs?’ A Four-Step Process for Integrating and Assessing Dispositions in Teacher Education,” Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues and Ideas 83 (2010): 9–14.
19. Richard Paul and Linda Elder, A Guide for Educators to Critical Thinking Competency Standards (Foundation for Critical Thinking, 2007), http://www.criticalthinking.org/files/SAM_Comp%20Stand_07opt.pdf.
SIX ISSUES THAT COMPLICATE INTERRELIGIOUS STUDIES AND ENGAGEMENT
1. Harry Stopes-Roe uses “life stance” to include secular perspectives in religious/interreligious discourse, focusing on relationship with that which is deemed of ultimate importance and its implications for living. Stopes-Roe, “Humanism as a Life Stance,” New Humanist 103 (1988): 21.
2. For a genealogy of interreligious studies and engagement, see Rachel Mikva, “Reflections in the Waves,” in Experiments in Empathy for our Time: Critical Reflection on Interreligious Learning, ed. Najeeba Syeed (Brill, forthcoming).
3. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak discusses the native informant in Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), ix.
4. The definition comes from the Pluralism Project, http://pluralism.org/what-is-pluralism. See also Marion H. Larson and Sara L. H. Shady’s chapter in this volume, “The Possibility of Solidarity: Evangelicals and the Field of Interfaith Studies.”
5. For example, after the US Council of Catholic Bishops issued “A Note on Ambiguities Contained in Covenant and Mission” (2009), asserting that Christians are always giving witness in a way that invites others to join, several Jewish organizations responded, “Once Jewish-Christian dialogue has been formally characterized as an invitation, whether explicit or implicit, to apostatize, then Jewish participation becomes untenable.” “Christian Conversion of Jews? National Jewish Interfaith Letter on USCCB ‘Note on Ambiguities,’” Council of Centers on Jewish-Christian Relations, August 18, 2009, http://www.ccjr.us/dialogika-resources/themes-in-todays-dialogue/conversion/574-njil09aug18.
6. See Janet Jakobsen, “Ethics After Pluralism,” in Bender and Klassen, After Pluralism, 31–58; and Paul Knitter, “Is the Pluralist Model a Western Imposition?,” chap. 3 in The Myth of Religious Superiority: Multifaith Explorations of Religious Pluralism, ed. Paul Knitter (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2005).
7. See Jeannine Hill Fletcher’s chapter in this volume, “The Promising Practice of Antiracist Approaches to Interfaith Studies,” and Deanna Ferree Womack’s chapter in this volume, “From the History of Religions to Interfaith Studies: A Theological Educator’s Exercise in Adaptation.”
8. See Knitter, Myth of Religious Superiority.
9. Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” Peace and Freedom Magazine (1989): 10–12.
10. See Kate McCarthy’s chapter in this volume, “(Inter)Religious Studies: Making a Home in the Secular Academy.”
11. See Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed. and trans. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 81; and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 66–111.
12. See Rosemary Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1996); Katharina von Kellenbach, Anti-Judaism in Feminist Religious Writings (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994); Jasmin Zine, “Between Orientalism and Fundamentalism,” in (En)Gendering the War on Terror: War Stories and Camouflaged Politics, ed. Kim Rygiel et al. (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2016), 27–50; Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012).
13. Lewis Z. Schlosser, “Christian Privilege: Breaking a Sacred Taboo,” Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development 31 (2003): 44–51.
14. Jennifer Peace, “Coformation Through Interreligious Learning,” Colloquy 20 (2011): 24–26.
15. Leonard Swidler, “The Dialogue Decalogue,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 20 (1983): 2. Although its name privileges Bible as scripture, the format is still popular.
16. See Jennifer Howe Peace and Or N. Rose’s chapter in this volume, “The Value of Interreligious Education for Religious Leaders.”
17. From a 1985 press conference in Stockholm decrying opposition to the construction of a Mormon temple.
18. Diana Eck, “Prospects for Pluralism,” JAAR 75 (2007): 771.
19. Robert Orsi, “Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion,” in Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice, ed. David Hall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 5.
20. In Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), Said contends that geopolitical power in the Christian West distorts perceptions of difference, making scholarship a tool of Western imperialism.
21. See Ninian Smart, The Religious Experience of Mankind (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969); and Smart, Religion and the Western Mind, 50. For more recent work, see Meredith McGuire, Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Nancy Ammerman, ed., Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007).
22. Tamar Saguy and Eran Halperin, “Exposure to Outgroup Members Criticizing Their Own Group Facilitates Intergroup Openness,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, February 28, 2014, 1–12.
23. See Mary Boys and Sara Lee, Learning in the Presence of the Other (Nashville: Skylight Paths, 2006).
24. William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, act 1, scene 3 (1951).
25. Ellie Pierce, “A Sign of Division,” in “Selected Case Studies,” Pluralism Project, http://pluralism.org/casestudy/selected-case-studies. Iftar: the meal eaten by Muslims after sunset during Ramadan.
26. Judith Plaskow, “The Academy as Real Life,” JAAR 67, no. 3 (1999): 521.
27. Paul Hedges, “Interreligious Studies,” in Encyclopedia of Sciences and Religions, ed. Anne Runehov and Luis Oviedo (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2013), 1077.
28. See Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43 (1991): 1241–99.
THE PROMISING PRACTICE OF ANTIRACIST APPROACHES TO INTERFAITH STUDIES
1. Eck, A New Religious America.
2. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th anniversary ed., trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Continuum, 2007), 126.
3. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994).
4. For an overview of changes in race categories of the US census, see D’Vera Cohn, “Race and the Census: The ‘Negro’ Controversy,” Pew Research Center, January 21, 2010, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2010/01/21/race-and-the-census-the-%E2%80%9Cnegro%E2%80%9D-controversy.
5. James W. Perkinson, “Reversing the Gaze: Constructing European Race Discourse as Modern Witchcraft Practice,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72 (2004): 619.
6. Will Sarvis, “Americans and Their Land: The Deep Roots of Property and Liberty,” Contemporary Review (2008): 41.
7. Eric Kades, “History and Interpretation of the Great Case of Johnson v. M’Intosh,” Law and History Review 19 (2001): 72, http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/facpubs/50. John Winthrop, the Puritan governor of the Massachusetts Colony, used the biblical text of Genesis 1:28 to argue that God had given the land to “sonnes of men, with a general condition: increase & multiply, replenish the earth & subdue it,” and since Native inhabitants had failed in this, God’s plan could be rightly carried out only by Christian colonialists.
8. Daniel Murphree, “Race and Religion on the Periphery: Disappointment and Missionization in the Spanish Floridas, 1566–1763,” in Race, Nation and Religion in the Americas, ed. Henry Goldschmidt and Elizabeth McAlister (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 35–60.
9. Craig S. Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 177. The curse of Ham centered on a biblical figure who was cursed by his father, Noah. Biblical interpretation in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries argued an etymological connection between ‘Ham’ and ‘black,’ rendering Ham as the accursed father of all of black Africa. Contemporary biblical scholarship finds no justification for this etymological connection. David M. Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 149.
10. Steven Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land: The Roots of Domination in US Federal Indian Law (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2008).
11. Kades, “History and Interpretation of the Great Case of Johnson v. M’Intosh,” 70.
12. See, for example, Steven Newcomb’s discussion of Native sovereignty and the Dakota Access Pipeline: Newcomb, “The Dakota Access Pipeline and the Law of Christendom,” Indian Country Media Network, August 29, 2016, https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/news/opinions/the-dakota-access-pipeline-and-the-law-of-christendom.
13. David Whitford, “A Calvinist Heritage to the ‘Curse of Ham’: Assessing the Accuracy of a Claim about Racial Subordination,” Church History and Religious Culture 90, no. 1 (2010): 27.
14. William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619, vol. 2 (New York: R. & W. & G. Bartow, 1823), 491.
15. Larry R. Morrison, “The Religious Defense of American Slavery before 1830,” Journal of Religious Thought 37 (1980–1981): 16–29.
16. As late as 1861, Auguste Martin, bishop in Louisiana, defended slavery theologically with the argument that “slavery [is] an eminently Christian work . . . [entailing] the redemption of millions of human beings who would pass in such a way from the darkest intellectual night to the sweet . . . light of the Gospel.” Cited in Cyprian Davis, “God of Our Weary Years: Black Catholics in American Catholic History,” in Taking Down Our Harps: Black Catholics in the United States, ed. Diana Hayes and Cyprian Davis (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998), 25.
17. Aaron Augustus Sargent, Chinese Immigration: Speech of Hon. A. A. Sargent of California, in the Senate of the United States, March 7, 1878 (Washington, 1878), 23.
18. O. Gibson, Chinaman or White Man, Which? Reply to Father Buchard [sic], Delivered in Platt’s Hall, San Francisco, Friday Evening, Mar. 14, 1873 (San Francisco: Alta Printing House, 1873), 9, 13, 29, http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/hb7c6005dw/?&brand=calisphere.
19. Alexander McKenzie, pastor of the Shepard Memorial Church, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in John Henry Barrows, The World’s Parliament of Religions, vol. 1 (Chicago, 1893), 85. For further discussion of the religio-racial project at the Parliament, see Jeannine Hill Fletcher, “Warrants for Reconstruction: Christian Hegemony, White Supremacy,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 51 (2016): 54–79.
20. Daniel B. Lee, “A Great Racial Commission: Religion and the Construction of White America,” in Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas, ed. Henry Goldschmidt and Elizabeth McAlister (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 85.
21. During this time, arguments were regularly made that a group or individual’s Christian identity brought them closer to the American ideal. In 1914, when a group of Syrians sought citizenship through the American courts, they were granted citizenship in part because their “membership in the Christian fold” served as marker that they were part of the “Caucasian or white race.” See Sarah Gualtieri, “Becoming ‘White’: Race, Religion, and the Foundations of Syrian/Lebanese Ethnicity in the United States,” Journal of American Ethnic History 20 (2001), 42. Just five years later, Bhagat Singh Thind was recognized as “Aryan” and therefore “Caucasian” on the basis of linguistic and genealogical criteria, but his case for citizenship was overturned on the basis that his “Hindu-ness” would render him inassimilable to white culture. See Jennifer Snow, “The Civilization of White Men: The Race of the Hindu in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind,” in Goldschmidt and McAlister, Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas, 259–80. The Supreme Court case is accessible online at http://www.bhagatsinghthind.com/court01.html. We might note that Christians painted others with broad (and inaccurate) brushes—Thind was not Hindu but Sikh.
22. Douglas S. Massey and Karen A. Pren, “Unintended Consequences of US Immigration Policy: Explaining the Post-1965 Surge from Latin America,” Population and Development Review 38 (2012): 1. Massey and Pren explain: “Countries of the Western Hemisphere had never been included in the national origins quotas, nor was the entry of their residents prohibited as that of Africans and Asians had been. . . . The 1965 amendments were intended to purge immigration law of its racist legacy by replacing the old quotas with a new system that allocated residence visas according to a neutral preference system based on family reunification and labor force needs.”
23. Simran Jeet Singh chronicles this contemporary religio-racial project in his essay “Muslimophobia, Racialization, and Mistaken Identity: Understanding Anti-Sikh Hate Violence in a Post-9/11 America,” in Muhammad in the Digital Age, ed. Ruqayya Yasmine Khan (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), 158–73. See also Jaideep Singh, “A New American Apartheid: Racialized, Religious Minorities in the post-9/11 Era,” Sikh Formations 9 (2013): 114–44.
24. For a further discussion of the structural outcomes of America’s religio-racial project of White Christian supremacy, see Jeannine Hill Fletcher, “When Words Create Worlds,” chap. 3 in her The Sin of White Supremacy: Christianity, Racism and Religious Diversity in America (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2017).
25. Wilder, Ebony and Ivy.
26. The “Undoing Racism” training of the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond explains: “Persons who work in institutions often function as gatekeepers to ensure that the institution perpetuates itself. By operating with anti-racist values and networking with those who share those values and maintaining accountability in the community, the gatekeeper becomes an agent of institutional transformation.” “Our Principles,” People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, http://www.pisab.org/our-principles#gatekeeping.
27. Ibid.
THE POSSIBILITY OF SOLIDARITY
1. See Kate McCarthy’s chapter in this volume, “(Inter)Religious Studies: Making a Home in the Secular Academy.”
2. See, for example, Gregory A. Smith and Jessica Martínez, “How the Faithful Voted: A Preliminary 2016 Analysis,” Fact Tank, Pew Research Center, November 9, 2016, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/how-the-faithful-voted-a-preliminary-2016-analysis.
3. The campaign was started in the fall of 2015, by students taking a course on the modern Middle East at Bethel University.
4. John Azumah, “Evangelical Christian Views and Attitudes Towards Christian-Muslim Dialogue,” Transformation 29 (2012): 128.
5. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25.
6. Patel, Interfaith Leadership, 93.
7. Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 26.
8. Patel, Interfaith Leadership, 93–94.
9. There is notable disagreement among evangelicals on issues like sexuality, climate change, and the 2016 election. See, for example, Thomas S. Kidd, “Polls Show Evangelicals Support Trump. But the Term ‘Evangelical’ Has Become Meaningless,” Washington Post, July 22, 2016.
10. Wesley Wildman, “When Narrative Identities Clash: Liberals Versus Evangelicals,” Congregations (2005): 30.
11. R. Khari Brown and Ronald E. Brown, “The Challenge of Religious Pluralism: The Association Between Interfaith Contact and Religious Pluralism,” Review of Religious Research 53 (2011): 328.
12. Christopher Lamb, “Ninevah Revisited: Theory and Practice in Interfaith Relations,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 8 (1984): 156.
13. Brown and Brown, “The Challenge of Religious Pluralism,” 337.
14. Brian McLaren, Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road? (New York: Jericho Books, 2012), 15.
15. Azumah, “Evangelical Christian Views and Attitudes Towards Christian-Muslim Dialogue,” 131.
16. Ibid.
17. Charles Soukup and James Keaten, “Humanizing and Dehumanizing Responses Across Four Orientations to Religious Otherness,” in A Communication Perspective on Interfaith Dialogue, ed. Daniel S. Brown Jr. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 51.
18. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000), 52.
19. Ibid., 55.
20. Christian Smith, Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 4.
21. Robert Wuthnow, “Living the Question—Evangelical Christianity and Critical Thought,” CrossCurrents 40, no. 2 (1990), http://www.crosscurrents.org/wuthnow.htm.
22. Nicholas Kristof, “A Confession of Liberal Intolerance,” New York Times, May 7, 2016.
23. Scholarship in interfaith studies could explore whether all instances of apparent religious discrimination are treated consistently. For example, should we treat the case of Muslim taxi drivers in Minneapolis refusing to transport alcohol in the same way we address the case of Christian bakeries refusing to make cakes for LGBTQ weddings? While we do not propose that the answer to this question is automatically clear, simply asking the question can draw attention to issues where inclusion and solidarity may be lacking.
24. Smith, Christian America?, 21.
25. Wendy Martineau, “Misrecognition and Cross-Cultural Understanding: Shaping the Space for a ‘Fusion of Horizons,’” Ethnicities 12 (2012): 164–65.
26. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 59.
27. Eboo Patel and Cassie Meyer, “The Civic Relevance of Interfaith Cooperation for Colleges and Universities,” Journal of College and Character 12 (2011): 5.
28. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 70.
29. See McCarthy’s chapter in this volume, “(Inter)Religious Studies.”
30. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 74.
31. Ibid., 222, 197.
32. Ibid., 225, 226.
33. Ibid., 117.
34. Martin Luther King Jr., “Palm Sunday Sermon on Mohandas K. Gandhi,” March 22, 1959, in Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Global Freedom Struggle, Stanford University, Martin Luther King Research and Education Institute, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/palm-sunday-sermon-mohandas-k-gandhi-delivered-dexter-avenue-baptist-church.
WATER, CLIMATE, STARS, AND PLACE
1. On Christian hegemony, see the essay by Rachel Mikva in this volume, “Six Issues That Complicate Interreligious Studies and Engagement.” On white Christian privilege in particular, see the essay by Jeannine Hill Fletcher in this volume, “The Promising Practice of Antiracist Approaches to Interfaith Studies.” My own location places me as a scholar of Christian spirituality especially as it moves outdoors, a professor at a Lutheran-affiliated but strongly interfaith university, and a resident of the Calleguas Creek watershed, living in a place sacred to the Chumash people of Southern California.
2. Many recent works explore how various religious traditions engage the religious significance of the natural world. See, for example, the four-volume series edited by Roger Gottlieb, Religion and the Environment: Critical Concepts in Religious Studies (New York: Routledge, 2010); and the ten-volume Harvard University Press series edited by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, Religions of the World and Ecology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997–2004). Climate change and other looming catastrophes, such as the ongoing mass extinction crisis, are forcing us collectively to ask bigger questions of what it means to be human—and religious traditions are, after all, meant to respond to such questions. Other related questions not addressed in this essay but important for ongoing thinking include how climate change and ecological threats already affect particular religions, religious practices, and places on Earth; how these crises challenge or critique ecologically inadequate forms of religious belief, practice, or worldview; and how new forms of nonbelief or non-affiliation with religious community (the rise of religious “nones” and increasing numbers of professed atheists) shape these questions.
3. In January 2017, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to resume construction on the pipeline. At the time this essay was written, that order was facing challenges in court.
4. LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, “Why the Founder of Standing Rock Sioux Camp Can’t Forget the Whitestone Massacre,” Yes! Magazine, September 3, 2016, http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/why-the-founder-of-standing-rock-sioux-camp-cant-forget-the-whitestone-massacre-20160903.
5. I prefer the term “interreligious” to name the emerging field of study this volume explores. I find compelling the rationale for this terminology found in the chapter by Kate McCarthy in this volume, “(Inter)Religious Studies: Making a Home in the Secular Academy.” Because of its currency in public life, I tend to use “interfaith” when describing the phenomenon or lived practice of encounter, dialogue, conflict, or collaboration between persons or communities of different religious orientations.
6. Linda Hogan, “We Call It Tradition,” in The Handbook of Contemporary Animism, ed. Graham Harvey (New York: Routledge, 2014), 22.
7. To test your own bioregional knowledge, see “Bioregional Awareness Quiz,” https://indigenize.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/bioregional-quiz.
8. Jennifer Price, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 164. A convincing literature has documented the alienation from the natural world coded in Price’s phrase, perhaps most hauntingly in books on childhood like Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 2005) and Jay Griffiths, A Country Called Childhood: Children and the Exuberant World (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2014).
9. Kirkpatrick Sale, Dwellers in the Land (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1985), 43. A classic work on love of place is Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974). See also Michael S. Northcott, Place, Ecology, and the Sacred: The Moral Geography of Sustainable Communities (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). Theories of religion emphasizing place include Thomas A. Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006)—though this analysis remains mostly anthropocentric—and Graham Harvey, Food, Sex, and Strangers: Understanding Religion as Everyday Life (Durham, NC: Acumen Publishing, 2013).
10. In referring to animism, I am following the definition of Graham Harvey: “Animists are people who recognize that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others.” Animism: Respecting the Living World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), xi.
11. Such language also fails to represent religious diversity adequately, since it ignores so-called “Eastern” religious traditions and communities. I am limiting this section’s analysis to worldviews shaped broadly by or within the Abrahamic monotheistic traditions and more specifically the Christian tradition (the dominant architect, for better or worse, of the “Western” world). But the problems noted extend beyond Christians; they are visible throughout the overdeveloped West and its globalizing effects elsewhere.
12. The work of Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer brings together both dimensions of such attention. See, for instance, Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2015).
13. Many collections include perspectives from a range of indigenous communities. See John A. Grim, ed., Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The Interbeing of Cosmology and Community, Religions of the World and Ecology Series (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); and Harvey, ed., Handbook of Contemporary Animism. Better, however, is to get to know the history of one’s own place, its pre-European inhabitants and their forms of life in that place, and—best of all—contemporary members of that community.
THE VALUE OF INTERRELIGIOUS EDUCATION FOR RELIGIOUS LEADERS
1. CIRCLE was founded in 2008 as a joint initiative of Andover Newton Theological School (ANTS) and Hebrew College, with generous and ongoing support from the Henry Luce Foundation. Although the center closed in 2017, when ANTS relocated to New Haven, Connecticut, both schools remain committed to interreligious education.
2. We wish to thank the following scholars and educators for responding to an open-ended query about the nature of religious leadership and interreligious education as we prepared this chapter: Justus Baird, Judith Berling, Rahuldeep Singh Gill, Heidi Hadsel, Celene Ibrahim, Sheryl Kujawa-Holbrook, Reuven Firestone, Gregory Mobley, Mary Elizabeth Moore, Nancy Fuchs Kreimer, Najeeba Syeed, John Thatamanil, and Homayra Ziad. While we could not include all of their insights, we are deeply grateful for their collegiality, mentorship, and leadership.
3. While we use the term “religious leadership” throughout this essay to refer primarily to those preparing for ordination and careers as religious professionals, we recognize that such leadership takes different forms. As Rahuldeep Singh Gill of California Lutheran University writes: “A religious leader could be a member of a congregation who wants to organize a food or clothing drive to benefit the local community. A religious leader could be someone who wants to make her workplace more amenable to prayer requirements and dietary restrictions of various peoples.” Email to authors, October 30, 2016.
4. A version of this story was first published by Jennifer Peace in “Conversation Partners: We Need Each Other,” Reflections: A Magazine of Theological and Ethical Inquiry from Yale Divinity School (2016): 40–42.
5. As Diana Eck has written, while religious “diversity” is a fact of life in the United States, religious “pluralism” is a self-conscious act of “energetic” engagement across lines of difference. See “What is Pluralism?,” Pluralism Project, http://pluralism.org/what-is-pluralism.
6. On the use of this classical Jewish pedagogic practice in an interreligious educational context, see Melissa Heller, “Jewish-Christian Encounter Through Text: An Interfaith Course for Seminarians,” Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue 8 (2012): 29–42.
7. As sociologists have reported, when a person forges a positive relationship with even one member of a different religious group, it is much more likely that she will be open to others from that same group. See, for example, Putnam and Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, 443–92.
8. Judith Berling of the Graduate Theological Union comments on such internal differences, using her own local parish as an example: “Even within my single parish, seemingly religiously monolithic, different convictions about what is vital to the . . . [community] are creating deep and dangerous ruptures. Religious leaders need skills to help parishioners learn how to understand persons who hold different religious views and practices, how to sustain relationships of mutual understanding and respect across lines of difference.” Email to authors, October 30, 2016.
9. Encouraging our students to be honest about their questions is particularly important because of the pressure they often feel as emerging clergy and leaders to present themselves as experts and role models.
10. Jennifer Howe Peace coined the term “coformation” in the context of interreligious seminary education in the article. See Peace, “Coformation Through Interreligious Learning,” Colloquy 20 (2011): 24.
11. It is important to add in this context that the CIRCLE staff has worked extensively with administrators, faculty, students, and board members at both of our schools to articulate why interreligious leadership education is vital to the missions of our institutions and reflective of the Jewish and Christian values we seek to inculcate in our graduates. Without such theological and pedagogic reflection, it is very difficult to weave this learning into the fabric of a school. This is especially true of a seminary (liberal or conservative), where there is a strong emphasis on the preservation of existing traditions and whose primary purpose is to supply their particular communities with new leaders. Hand in hand with this visioning work, there is, of course, the equally important task of thoughtfully integrating this educational element into the life of a school.
12. Several of the colleagues we contacted in the course of preparing this chapter reflected on the complex connections across religious traditions, past and present. As Justus Baird of Auburn Theological Seminary notes, “Our faith traditions did not develop in a vacuum; they were shaped by each other in negative and positive ways. . . . As the saying goes, to know one tradition is to know none.” Email to authors, November 9, 2016. Gregory Mobley of Andover Newton expresses the benefits of uncovering this complexity through interreligious engagement in the following poetic reflection: “We find through interfaith learning that our neighbors have preserved certain stories we neglected but never discarded, stories and practices whose addition will allow our cathedrals to remain sanctuaries and portals into the future. Interfaith learning allows us to bring our beautiful cathedrals up to code.” Email to authors, November 10, 2016.
13. A version of this story was first published by Jonah Pesner with Hurmon Hamilton, “A Community, Not Simply a Coalition,” in Peace, Rose, and Mobley, My Neighbor’s Faith, 249–51.
14. Ibid., 251.
15. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 9.
FROM PRISON RELIGION TO INTERFAITH LEADERSHIP FOR INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE
1. For a history of the case, see Rouser v. White 630 F. Supp. 1165 (E.D. Cal. 2009). To disrupt Rouser’s efforts, officials moved him to various institutions and sent his “converts” elsewhere, thus spreading Wicca throughout the California correctional system. Wicca became the second or third largest religious group in several prisons.
2. Cruz v. Beto 405 U.S. 319 (1972), 322n2.
3. For a brief history, see Laura Magani and Harmon L. Wray, Beyond Prisons: A New Interfaith Paradigm for Our Failed Prison System (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2006).
4. From 2005 until 2013, I provided legal expertise for McCollum v. CDCR, 647 F.3d 870 (9th Cir. 2011) and Hartmann v. CDCR, 707 F.3d 1114 (9th Cir. 2013).
5. The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), 42 USC §2000cc, defined “religious exercise” as “any exercise of religion, whether or not compelled by, or central to, a system of religious belief” (§2000cc-5(7)(A)), and it also applied that definition to an earlier federal law, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA), 42 USC §2000bb. RLUIPA applies the “strict scrutiny” test for religious accommodations in prisons and in other limited areas. Government cannot “substantially burden” a “sincere” “religious exercise” unless the government has a very important reason (“compelling governmental interest”) to do so. Even when there is an important reason, the government has to serve it with the lightest impact on religious exercise possible (“least restrictive means”). The RFRA also applies strict scrutiny to federal government institutions.
6. Inmates are able to obtain such items through gifts or purchase from approved vendors when allowed.
7. Patrick McCollum and Steve Herrick started the annual American Academy of Religion program in 2003. Rev. McCollum continues as session cofacilitator. Since 2015, Armed Services and Veterans Administration senior chaplains and endorsers have been included in the training.
8. Howard J. Ross, “If You Are Human, You Are Biased,” in Everyday Bias: Identifying and Navigating Unconscious Judgments in Our Daily Lives (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 1–16.
9. I discovered this when I invited new religion scholars to our chaplaincy directors program in 2015.
10. For similar methods, see Carol A. Marchel, “Learning to Talk/Talking to Learn: Teaching Critical Dialogue,” Teaching Educational Psychology 2, no. 1 (2007): 1–15; and Ellen E. Fairchild and Warren J. Blumenfeld, “Traversing Boundaries: Dialogues on Christian Privilege, Religious Oppression, and Religious Pluralism among Believers and Non-Believers,” College Student Affairs Journal 26, no. 2 (2007): 177–85.
11. John C. Maxwell, The Five Levels of Leadership: Proven Steps to Maximize Your Potential (New York: Center Street, 2011), 2, 133.
12. See Barbara A. McGraw, “Toward a Framework for Interfaith Leadership,” Engaging Pedagogies in Catholic Higher Education 3, no. 1 (2017), http://digitalcommons.stmarys-ca.edu/epiche/vol3/iss1/2. See also Susan R. Komives, Nance Lucas, and Timothy R. McMahon, “The Relational Leadership Model,” in Exploring Leadership: For College Students Who Want to Make a Difference, 3rd ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2013), 93–149.
13. James MacGregor Burns, Transforming Leadership: A New Pursuit of Happiness (New York: Grove Press, 2003).
14. Of course there are inmates who use the law to see what they can get away with; however, in my experience, most often inmates’ requests are sincere.
15. See cases in notes 2 and 4 above.
16. Devdutt Pattanaik, East vs. West: The Myths that Mystify, TED, video, November 19, 2009, https://www.ted.com/talks/devdutt_pattanaik.
17. See Wendy Cadge, Paging God: Religion in the Halls of Medicine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
INTERFAITH STUDIES AND THE PROFESSIONS
1. Patel, Interfaith Leadership, 39.
2. Matthew J. Mayhew, Alyssa N. Rockenback, Benjamin P. Correia, Rebecca E. Crandall, and Mark A. Lo, Emerging Interfaith Trends: What College Students Are Saying about Religion in 2016 (Interfaith Youth Core, 2016), https://www.ifyc.org/sites/default/files/u4/208423049283045.pdf.
3. Ibid., 7.
4. Advancing Diversity and Inclusion in Higher Education: Key Data Highlights on Race and Ethnicity and Promising Practices (Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development, U.S. Department of Education, 2016), 36–39, https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/research/pubs/advancing-diversity-inclusion.pdf.
5. College Learning for the New Global Century (Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2007), 11–12, https://www.aacu.org/sites/default/files/files/LEAP/GlobalCentury_final.pdf.
6. Interfaith Cooperation and American Higher Education: Recommendations, Best Practices and Case Studies (Interfaith Youth Core, 2010), 13, https://www.ifyc.org/sites/default/files/best-practice-report.pdf.
7. Hart Research Associates, Falling Short? College Learning and Career Success (Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2015), 3, https://www.aacu.org/sites/default/files/files/LEAP/2015employerstudentsurvey.pdf.
8. “Remarks by President Obama in Address to the United Nations General Assembly,” United Nations Assembly Hall, New York City, September 24, 2014, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/09/24/remarks-president-obama-address-united-nations-general-assembly.
9. Ibid.
10. Benjamin P. Correia, Alyssa N. Rockenbach, and Matthew J. Mayhew, “Bridging Worldview Diversity through Interfaith Cooperation,” Diversity and Democracy 19, no. 2 (Spring 2016), https://www.aacu.org/diversitydemocracy/2016/spring/correia.
TOWARD AN INTERRELIGIOUS CITY
1. An overview of the ICJS Imagining Justice in Baltimore (IJB) initiative, as well as links to digital content, is accessible online at http://www.icjs.org/programs/imagining-justice-baltimore.
2. Many people are fearful to directly engage in discussions of religious difference, or difference of any kind. Oftentimes this fear rests on a lack of personal connection and genuine encounter between people, and impressions of religious difference are filtered through larger narratives shaped by biases and prejudices that animate the media, as well as our religious communities. At the founding of the ICJS, careful pedagogical choices were made to confront anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism within Christian traditions (and Western thought) prior to raising religious literacy about Judaism with Christian audiences. This sequencing was based on the conviction that most Christians could not understand Judaism as Jews practiced it without first understanding the prejudicial lens through which they had perceived Judaism and Jews. Successful interreligious encounters must recognize existing power dynamics and educate majority cultures about the lens through which they see and understand minority cultures. The ICJS has committed to replicating this pedagogical practice, by educating our audiences in Islamophobia prior to, or alongside, literacy in Islam.
3. “Clergy Marches Against Violence” WBAL-TV 11, April 27, 2015, http://www.wbaltv.com/article/clergy-marches-against-violence/6923905.
4. Ibid.
5. Lawrence Brown, “Two Baltimores: The White L vs. the Black Butterfly,” City Paper, June 28, 2016.
6. Antero Pietila, Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010).
7. Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren, The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility: Childhood Exposure Effects and County-Level Estimates, National Bureau of Economic Research (2015), http://www.nber.org/papers/w23001.
8. Emma Green, “Black Activism, Unchurched,” Atlantic, March 22, 2016.
9. In Martin Luther King Jr., “The Power of Nonviolence,” 1958, in The Essential Marin Luther King Jr.: “I Have a Dream” and Other Great Writings (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013).
10. In Kelly Brown Douglas’s Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (New York: Orbis, 2015), she both explores the political, historical, legal, and theological contexts surrounding the shooting deaths of black boys and girls in America today, and offers a prophetic Christian theology in response, interrogating both the justice and freedom of God as experienced in black American life. Brown Douglas’s theology grounds itself in her experience as a theologian, a church leader, and a mother, and is an important reflection of the possibilities of Christian leadership today.
11. Michael Lipka, “A Closer Look at America’s Rapidly Growing Religious ‘Nones,’” Pew Research Center, 2015, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/05/13/a-closer-look-at-americas-rapidly-growing-religious-nones/.
12. Our participants included college students from HBCUs, public universities, and Catholic universities; college professors; retirees; young professionals with young families; educators; trustees of the ICJS; clergy; clergy-in-formation; local parishioners; people already on our mailing list; and people from the general public.
13. Ron Cassie, “A Tale of Two Cities: West Baltimore Before and After Freddie Gray,” Baltimore Magazine, April 11, 2016.
14. Tom Hall, “Inter-Faith Dialogues Seek a Vision of Justice in Baltimore,” WYPR, Baltimore, December 19, 2016.
15. Tom Hall, “Imagining Justice in Baltimore: A Jewish Perspective,” WYPR, Baltimore, March 28, 2016; Tom Hall, “Imagining Justice in Baltimore: A Christian Perspective,” WYPR, Baltimore, January 25, 2016; Tom Hall, “Imagining Justice in Baltimore: An Islamic Perspective,” WYPR, Baltimore, April 25, 2016.
16. ICJS’s Huffington Post blog is accessible online at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/icjs.