Remembering the Theological Conversation
Marbled through all of these institutional developments and interdisciplinary inquiries is the theological conversation that defines CTI. As Storrar looks back over two decades, a galaxy of theologians and Biblical scholars comes to mind.
It was a joy to invite Robert Jenson out of retirement as CTI’s Senior Scholar for Research and back to CTI as a resident Member, as it was to welcome the German pioneer of interdisciplinary theology Michael Welker as a returning Member and Witherspoon Lecturer in theology and science. Storrar remembers especially from his early years as Director such highlights as Christiaan Mostert’s masterly exposition of Wolfhart Pannenberg’s theology, Christiane Tietz’s study of theological discourse in American public life, and Margot Fassler’s scholarship on Hildegard of Bingen. He treasures the theological exchanges of Janet Soskice and Kate Sonderegger in residence. He remains in awe at the dedication of New Testament scholar Tom Wright and theologian Ola Sigurdson in writing major works of scholarship while participating fully in the Center’s life. And in his later years, Storrar saw that same focus in theologians like Jan-Olav Henriksen and Gerald McKenny on completing book-length projects while engaging generously with colleagues’ work in progress in the weekly colloquy.
It was in those later years of themed inquiries that Storrar was privileged to work with theologians who saw dialogue with the sciences and humanities as integral to their work. He recalls with admiration the intellectual rigor of Jean Porter, Sarah Coakley, Niels Gregersen, and Werner Jeanrond in their exchanges with leading scientists like Piet Hut, Paul
Provocative Question
Fortified with his clear understanding of McCord’s original conception for CTI, the burning question Storrar put to himself—and subsequently to the first annual meeting of the Board of Trustees in May of 2006, was a provocative one. “We have these crown jewels—twelve houses and twelve studies in the heart of Princeton with access to libraries and world-class scholars on our doorstep. We’re giving those crown jewels away to individuals overwhelmingly within one field and trying to do collaborative research by occasional meetings—the very methods CTI was founded to replace. What is it to be, are we a sabbati cal hotel or an Institute for Advanced Study?”
It’s a moment Storrar well remembers. William Scheide, the only founding trustee still active on the board, then aged 92 and in a wheelchair, but mentally sharp as ever, was the first to respond. “What he actually said, rather enigmatically,” recalls Storrar, “was if we could only get two, only have two. By that he meant, we’re here to find the best research scholars and convene them on our agenda. His wonderful way of putting it was if we can only find two, we’ll only have two in residence. In other words, go for advanced research and quality. CTI is not a sabbatical hotel!”
“Scheide’s support was critical at that juncture because what I was saying was provocative.” Even so, Storrar is quick to point out that a lot of outstanding scholarship and fine collaboration had taken place under the old model he’d inherited. “This is not in any way to denigrate it, but there are other places for that, not least our neighbor Princeton Seminary’s excellent program for individual visiting scholars on sabbatical. The point was, were we going to devote these world class resources to our own mission of interdisciplinary collaborative research?”
This is arguably the most fundamental of the developments that Storrar introduced as the third Director of CTI. It stemmed from interests he felt passionate about as a practical theologian. “I determined that CTI would do one thing and do it as well as we can. We’re going to identify important interdisciplinary questions where theology has some-
“The prominence of microbial life significantly expands and enriches the broader context for considering the place of humans as well as for what it may mean to talk about the God of life.” —Douglas Ottati
thing to contribute and much to learn and we’re going to dedicate each year to one of these themes, or maybe sometimes over two or even three years.”
To realize McCord’s vision was the course he set. It would take several years.
Early Years and the Challenges
The year after that provocative first annual meeting, and for the first time in CTI’s history, Storrar held a strategic planning exercise with the board. He took the trustees back to the founding documents to inform their sense of the original vision. From the beginning, the founders wanted CTI to work in theology and science but not only that. They included the comparative study of different religious traditions, and the changing nature of religious
consciousness and belief. In other words, interdisciplinary theology, comparative theology, and the study of contemporary religious life—as listed in the Center’s 1978 certificate of incorporation as a New Jersey nonprofit corporation. But, even with this clear sense of his mission and a board that supported it, it would take years of work before CTI’s new Director felt it was strong enough to substantiate itself to potential funders. First, there were some administrative and financial hurdles to overcome.
And then . . . the financial crash of 2008/2009. “It was devastating,” recalls Storrar. “Our endowment dropped by a third and an office bearer proposed that the Center close. Fortunately, our auditor and the Board of Trustees disagreed! I’d set out my vision to the board and they said ‘no, we believe in your strategic plan and we want to give you time to realize it.’ But it was touch and go. That was a very hard time. I had to keep my hand to the plough. The steady support of the board Chair, Dr. Fred Anderson, was invaluable in those first years.” As Storrar went on to raise over $8 million in external research grants for his proposed model of a resident interdisciplinary program, the board’s confidence in his leadership at that critical juncture was more than vindicated.
Forming Connections
Early in his time here, Storrar reached out to a lot of people in Princeton and across the United States. One was Wentzel van Huyssteen, who held the McCord Chair in Theology and Science at Princeton Seminary and was a key supporter of the interdisciplinary direction in which Storrar was taking the Center’s resident program. Another was Jeffrey Stout, the eminent philosopher of religion and politics at Princeton University and author of Blessed are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America. Storrar had been impressed by Stout’s earlier book, Democracy and Tradition, which was published in 2004 when he [Storrar] was at CTI as a visiting scholar from the University of Edinburgh. Conversations with Stout led to Storrar’s first initiative in public engagement at the Center.
Bloom, and Melvin Konner in CTI symposia. He is proud to have invited Celia Deane-Drummond, Friederike Nüssel, Stephen Pope, and Robin Lovin to provide theological leadership in the early interdisciplinary inquiries on human nature, religious experience, and freedom of religion, fostering dialogue with scientists like Agustín Fuentes and Michael Spezio and legal scholars like Hans-Martien ten Napel. He was especially impressed by the ways in which theologians like Douglas Ottati, William Werpehowski, Ulrike Auga, Anne-Marie Reijnen, Andrew Davison, and Frederick Simmons rose to the challenge of dialogue with scientists in CTI’s NASA-funded astrobiology inquiry. When planetary scientist David Grinspoon asked the theologians what they meant by “God,” Bill Werpehowski did not miss a beat. “Not Big God, Little Us,” he replied, introducing the scientist to non-contrastive ways of thinking about God and
William Werpehowski
Stout was passionate about community organizing as first developed by Saul Alinsky in the Chicago of the 1930s. Alinsky believed that the methods of trade union organizing could also be used to help very poor communities to get better housing, better jobs, better schools, and more employment in their community. Today there are several networks across the United States who use these organizing methods to help local communities improve their conditions, often working with local religious leaders and faith communities. Stout was also concerned about the future of democracy in America. He thought that its future depended on organizing movements at the grassroots, mobilizing citizens in the skills of citizenship. The best and most effective way to do this, he suggested, is to train religious communities and leaders in organizing methods, because they are, most often, on the ground in local, particularly poorer, communities. But, at that time, the five national organizing networks were in effect in competition with each other; collaboration among them would have much more nationwide impact.
CTI received two small grants to bring the leaders of these five networks together for several days. The goal was to bring them into dialogue with theologians and social scientists studying community organizing who wanted to be helpful to them and share their research. Four of the five networks turned up and CTI held two fruitful exchanges between scholars and practitioners. Storrar went on to commission and edit a book on faith-based organizing in the United States, Yours the Power (Brill, 2013). This commitment to public engagement in the dialogue between theologians and faith-based organizers has continued into the present with a recent exchange with Black Church leaders in Baltimore on urban renewal.
Another fruitful Princeton University connection in those early years was with the sociologist of religion Robert Wuthnow, founding director of the Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion (CSR). Wuthnow became a great friend and supporter of CTI, co-sponsoring lectures between the two centers at Princeton University. Storrar also
formed friendships in these years with the Princeton University sociologist of law Kim Lane Scheppele, discussing questions of law and religion, and economist and Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton, who presented his research on poverty and health at an early CTI symposium on the wealth and wellbeing of nations. These were crucial connections in building relationships with Princeton University that would later have a formal institutional and public character to them.
International Law and Globalization
As Director of CTPI at Edinburgh University, Storrar completed a five-year research program on local and global civil society, in tandem with civic leaders, religious leaders, and government leaders. One natural upshot of that was a project on the (then) new concept of a Global Civil Society, emerging from the economic globalization occurring in the early years of the 21st century. “My swansong as CTPI Director was an extensive international interdisciplinary conference on the ethics of global civil society, ‘A World for All? The Ethics of Global Civil Society.’”
Questions raised by the conference were ripe for investigation. What is the place of international law in globalization? What’s the place of law? What are the civic and legal dimensions of globalization? These questions prompted the first themed inquiry in international law that Storrar launched at CTI. With help from a colleague at the seminary, Storrar identified several leading thinkers to consult on the feasibility of the prospect. Jeremy Waldron teaches legal and political philosophy at NYU School of Law and has written extensively on jurisprudence and political theory, including numerous books and articles on theories of rights, constitutionalism, the rule of law, democracy, property, torture, security, homelessness, and the philosophy of international law. Mary Ellen O’Connell is an expert on international law, particularly on the use of force, international dispute resolution, and international legal theory. Kim Lane Scheppele, a sociologist of law and a world expert on constitutional law, is
humanity. And when Biblical scholar William Brown interpreted the Book of Job through the lens of life in the universe, ancient wisdom met modern science in mutual enlightenment. These are two of many exchanges prized by Storrar in which ways of thinking in theology informed the interdisciplinary conversation with the sciences and humanities.
The astrobiology inquiry was also an opportunity to welcome scholars of Asian religions into the Center’s research program. Again, Storrar felt fortunate to enlist the eminent scholar of Hinduism Francis Clooney SJ, Professor of Comparative Theology at Harvard University, to join him in convening conversations with scholars of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Daoism on how these ancient traditions might respond to scientific notions of life on a planetary scale. The later five-year set of inquiries on religion and global issues was attractive not only to scholars of Christian theology but also to scholars of Judaism and Islam. Storrar recalls mutually attentive exchanges between Jewish scholar Peter Ochs and Muslim scholar Etin Anwar on religion and violence, and between Christian theologian Murray Rae, Muslim professor of architecture Tammy Gaber, and Jewish architect Alexander Gorlin on their respective design traditions. It was in this period that CTI’s global theological conversation was expanded by theologians like Kanan Kitani from Japan, Seforosa Carroll from Fiji, and Elijah Baloyi from South Africa, and by the indigenous knowledge of Maori architect Whare Timu from Aotearoa New Zealand.
Learning from African American traditions of Black theology was a concern Storrar brought with him to CTI from his student days when he sat in on a James Cone seminar while visiting Union Seminary. Building on the legacy of Deotis Roberts at CTI, Storrar worked with Peter Paris to convene a joint symposium on
an expert on Hungary and its current autocratic illiberal regime. They were later joined by Christian ethicist Esther Reed and legal scholar Amanda Perreau-Saussine from the United Kingdom.
Storrar sought their advice on likely participants for this inquiry. “I met them thinking they would be very skeptical of me and the Center and perhaps a little defensive. I wanted to think aloud with them about whether there was energy for an inquiry on the crisis in international law given what was happening in the world with the Iraq war, torture and so on but I made clear it was not to focus on any of the hot button issues. It was more foundational—to look at the history of international law, its relationship to religion, and whether religious traditions could be part of the renewal of international law.” As it turned out, Storrar’s timing (and luck) was spot on. “Instead of advising me on people to start a research group, they said when can we start.” That evening they gathered for the first meeting of what became a four-year inquiry.
FRED SIMMONS
Not coincidentally, this first inquiry would initiate Robin Lovin’s involvement with CTI. Storrar knew of Lovin’s work at Southern Methodist University (SMU) where he’d written and taught about ethics across several disciplines. A former president of the Society of Christian Ethics, Lovin had received a Guggenheim Fellowship in recognition of his outstanding scholarship. When Lovin visited Princeton a few weeks later, Storrar asked if he would be open to joining the group as the lead theologian, working in tandem with Jeremy Waldron. The upshot was a rich set of conversations over the next four years where papers were exchanged but not towards a book of essays. “It is important to point out,” says Storrar, “that I told them I’m not interested in setting up a research group to produce a book, I want to have a high-level set of conversations that you’re free to take in any direction you want in the confidence that the value of that conversation to each of you will inform your work. You’re going to write your books and articles anyway but what I’m looking for is to create a space where there can be this deep exchange among
theologians, scholars of law of various kinds, international lawyers, legal philosophers.”
And that is exactly what happened.
As Storrar puts it, these early conversations with Waldron and Lovin were seminal; forming a friendship across disciplines between legal philosophy, political philosophy, theology, and social ethics at a very high level. “Both were very reflective on what we were doing methodologically and why CTI was a distinctive if not unique environment for that.”
With Mary Ellen O’Connell and theologian Esther Reed, Waldron and Lovin formed the core of the conversations on theology and international law, exemplars of the kind of conversations and the kind of ethos that Storrar was seeking to establish at CTI. They set a benchmark for his aspirations. It is appropriate that in his final weeks as Director, Storrar organized a hybrid reunion of these four colleagues in CTI’s new digital studio.
Robin Lovin would later retire from SMU and come to CTI as its Director of Research. “Robin was both a senior scholar and an experienced academic institutional leader—he’d been Dean of the divinity school at Drew University and then Dean of the divinity school at Southern Methodist University and then became a university professor, in other words a professor across the disciplines, at SMU. To have such a respected senior figure in the theological and academic world come here and work with me to develop the Center was a huge asset.”
“Regarded by many as the world’s leading legal philosopher, Jeremy Waldron made me realize how special CTI was for scholars in other fields. It was a place where they could come—whether out of academic interest or in part because of their own personal religious faith—and engage in high-level scholarly conversation. And while we are not a religious or confessional organization, they could feel comfortable in relating their own personal convictions, beliefs, and ethical outlooks and integrate them with the scholarly conversation in a more seamless way at CTI than might be the case elsewhere.”
Way Leads On To Way
Since that first inquiry focused on international law in the Christian tradition, Storrar sought to expand the perspective to include other religious traditions. Peter Ochs, a Jewish scholar with longstanding connections to CTI and a good friend of the Center, contacted Robert Gibbs, a Jewish philosopher at the University of Toronto, who then suggested the American Muslim scholar of law Anver Emon, who was working with the International Bar Association (IBA) in a project to find common ground between Islamic law and International Law on human rights questions. The Bar Association was looking for an academic partner to convene a group of Islamic and international law scholars to exchange papers on how they approached human rights.
So, in 2010, Storrar worked with the IBA in convening these scholars and preparing the research papers to be presented to an array of law and human rights practitioners from Muslim majority countries at a Salzburg Global Seminar on this theme of finding common ground. The subsequent volume of essays, Islamic Law and International Human Rights Law: Searching for Common Ground? (OUP, 2012), paid fulsome tribute to CTI’s skill in convening such sensitive scholarly conversations on a topic with global ramifications, exchanges in which Robin Lovin played a key role. This was a busy year. While running the Center, convening the individual scholars-in-residence, and addressing the financial challenges he had inherited, Storrar was constantly alert for ways to achieve the kind of program that he had put to the board at his first annual meeting.
Breakthroughs
CTI was being seen. And it was reaping the benefits of contacts made by Storrar in his early years at CTI. According to Storrar, a degree of serendipity is also evident in these developments.
In 2011, Wentzel van Huyssteen introduced Storrar to a senior staff member at the Templeton
J. Kameron Carter’s book on theology and race with Princeton’s Center for African American Studies. He later invited Carter back to deliver CTI’s first Scheide Lecture on Religion and Global Concerns after Covid. Among CTI Members, the contributions of womanist theologian Katie Cannon, African American literature scholar Leslie Wingard, and Black feminist theologian Elise Edwards stand out for Storrar, casting light on the theological conversation from the perspective of Black women’s experience. Storrar will be forever grateful to national organizing leader Michael Gecan for introducing Black Church leaders like Bishop Douglas Miles of Baltimore into CTI’s conversations, comparing the role of faith communities in the renewal of racially divided cities in the USA and post-apartheid South Africa with Pretoria University urban theologian Stephan de Beer. CTI’s historic links with South Africa go back to the apartheid era and founder James McCord’s championing of anti-apartheid theologians, strengthened by CTI Director Wallace Alston’s initiative in holding international theological symposia with Stellenbosch University and inviting theologians like Dirk Smit, Russel Botman, and Etienne de Villiers into residence. Storrar developed these ties, engaging in
J. Kameron Carter and Judith Scheide
Foundation, a key potential funder for the work of CTI, given that Sir John Templeton was a founding trustee of the Center. Michael Murray was visiting Princeton University and could drop by, he was told, for an hour. Storrar prepared an hour-long presentation but when Murray arrived, he had just twenty minutes before he had to leave to attend a performance by his daughter at her school in Philadelphia. Concentrating on the essence of his practical theologian’s vision, Storrar told Murray that deep interdisciplinarity is hard to do and that CTI, as a place where scientists and theologians would be in residence together over months so that deep daily exchange of ideas and dialogue could happen, is uniquely placed to do it. Murray agreed wholeheartedly. The two men collaborated on a grant proposal on three interdisciplinary themes: Evolution and Human Nature, Religious Experience and Moral Identity, and Law and Religious Freedom.
The result was a $3.5 million grant. A game changer. CTI now had the funding to attract high caliber scientists and legal scholars—sufficient funding for them to tell their deans or heads of department, this Center of Theological Inquiry is not some out of the way religious operation, it’s a serious research center with competitive research fellowships comparable to those at Princeton University or the Institute for Advanced Study.
As CTI was focusing on Law and Religious Freedom in the third year of this new program, Kim Lane Scheppele, who had consulted on that initial inquiry in international law, and who directed Princeton University’s Program in Law and Public Affairs (LAPA), offered CTI scholars the opportunity to engage with those at LAPA. As a result, the University allowed CTI to describe its program as operating “in cooperation with Princeton University.” It was not a joint program, but this cooperation, says Storrar, “made the point that we were bringing theology into the wider world of research; that our mission was not, like the seminary, theology and the church, but theology and the academy, in the broader European sense.”
In 2012, as CTI embarked on these themed three years, Storrar organized two symposia that brought
together the leading minds on their respective subjects. A “Symposium on Spiritual Progress” marked the centenary of Sir John Templeton’s birth and was held over three days at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. It was organized around recent publications by three superstars from the wider academic and public cosmos—Religion in Human Evolution by Robert Bellah; The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning by Jonathan Sacks; and Absence of Mind by Marilynne Robinson. The 2013 “Symposium on the Wealth and Wellbeing of Nations” brought world leading economists like the later Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton into CTI’s new interdisciplinary conversations on questions of global concern.
Themed Inquiries
Selecting themes was in part fortuitous and in part following certain criteria. They had to be new and emerging questions of global concern, global in the sense of encompassing different disciplines, different religious traditions, different parts of the world—i.e. concerns across these borders. And, importantly, they had to be concerns to which theology has something to contribute and much to learn
Robert Bellah
In a communications culture of the immediate and the contested, CTI is among those few places where you can do long-term, deep, reflective thinking.
—William Storrar
from the exchange. They must have these qualities: they’re emerging, they’re complex, they’re not in that sense solvable—how you get fresh water or mosquito nets—but rather questions that continually must be addressed and thought through, that have a history and continuing relevance.
Interdisciplinary questions are by their very nature complex. Such intractable problems are unlikely to meet with immediate solutions. Long term solutions take time and demand deep understanding. In today’s world, we’re bombarded with information, dizzy with social media fatigue that makes it hard to know what’s true and how to make informed decisions. When life becomes complicated, there’s a tendency to default to simplistic positions (switches rather than dials): black/white, on/off, yes/no, good/bad, and to forget that most of these rigid dichotomies are simply linguistic tools for understanding the world when the world is better understood in terms of spectrum thinking. Defaulting to the simplistic is the antithesis of what CTI does. “In a communications culture and a political culture of the immediate and the contested,” notes Storrar, “CTI is among those few places places where you can do long-term, deep, reflective thinking that acknowledges differences and disagreements but tries to wrestle with them in a way that is respectful of those who might disagree with us or come at the question from different perspectives, traditions, or sets of convictions.”
From the beginning the Center has taken a strong position in support of the best of contemporary science. The first research project and the first book
dialogue with leading theologians like Tinyiko Maluleke and John de Gruchy and bringing CTI scholars to lecture in several South African universities. He also served as a visiting professor at Stellenbosch University, collaborating with his close colleague Nico Koopman in public theology and with Dirk Smit and Robert Vosloo in CTI’s symposia with the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study.
As Storrar prepares to demit office, his thoughts turn gratefully to those who have been his guiding lights over twenty years. Among senior theologians, he thinks fondly of the late Don Browning, Max Stackhouse, and Bill Placher, who were his American mentors in his first years. Among academic advisors, he is especially thankful for the wisdom and encouragement of David Ford and David Fergusson at Cambridge, Iain Torrance, Peter Paris, and John Bowlin at Princeton Seminary, Robin Lovin at SMU, Cathleen Kaveny at Boston College, Ian McFarland and John Witte at Emory, Jennifer Herdt at Yale, Esther Reed at Exeter, Peter Ochs at UVA, Rothney Tshaka at UNISA, and Eric Gregory at Princeton University. Among early career scholars, Hannah StrØmmen and Ulrich Schmiedel stand out as exemplary members in residence who have since gone on to hold senior university appointments. Among Senior Fellows, the first and only two residents in the Center’s new building in its first months were theologian Andrew Davison from Oxford University and astrophysicist Edwin Turner from Princeton University, reminding Storrar of founding trustee William Scheide’s injunction to him as the new Director to go for excellence, “If you can only get two, only have two!” And so it proved. If the Center’s mission as theology’s institute for advanced study is to convene thinkers of proven accomplishment and exceptional promise, Will Storrar can retire knowing CTI has excelled in this enduring endeavor on his watch.
published under the auspices of the Center was one by Roland Frye called God is Not a Creationist, a defense of the compatibility of theological traditions, particularly Christianity, and evolutionary science in terms of views of the natural world and humanity’s place within it.
Seminal Years
The first inquiry in the new resident interdisciplinary program, on Evolution and Human Nature, brought together six evolutionary scientists and six theologians of a high caliber. With one or two exceptions, the evolutionary scientists had never engaged with theologians. “Theology is a term used primarily in the Christian tradition,” Storrar explains. “It’s not unknown in the Jewish or Muslim traditions but their focus is more typically on the interpretation and application of law in religious life and practice. Here was an instance where two groups in different disciplines had to travel a long way to understand each other. The marvelous thing about this group was that they worked for a whole year to understand each other. Evolution and Human Nature was one of the most serious engagements across disciplines that has had lasting fruit and impact.”
That impact is clearly illustrated by the conversations of anthropologist Richard Sosis and theologian Eugene Rogers. Rogers got Sosis reading classic theological texts and Sosis, like Agustín Fuentes, began to realize that theological writings about religion were richer in their insights than those from religious studies scholars who use a variety of social science methods to understand religion—the sociology of religion, the anthropology of religion, the psychology of religion. Theologians look at the beliefs in a sense from the inside and say what are the claims to truth, what are the normative claims, what do these claims look like by those who live them and live inside these belief systems. Fuentes and Sosis, as they would be the first to avow, gleaned a deeper understanding of the dynamics of religion as seen from the inside, but not uncritically. Here was a good example of deep interdisciplinarity where each had to work hard to understand
where the other discipline was coming from. How do evolutionary scientists understand human nature? How do theologians understand human nature? What happened was the development of conversational expertise in another discipline, so much so that Sosis now assigns theological texts for his graduate students in anthropology.
Incidentally, the term conversational expertise was one to which Storrar was introduced by a group of women researchers studying interdisciplinarity at the University of Edinburgh, particularly how interdisciplinary collaboration could happen between the social and natural sciences. It’s a useful term for what happens at CTI when scholars from two research fields face each other. Individuals with research expertise at a high level in more than one field are rare. Interdisciplinary research is extremely demanding of its participants. While research expertise in the other field isn’t always achievable, conversational expertise can be. In other words, you can learn how practitioners of another discipline think, their key concepts, key methods, key debates, key contested notions, and you can learn how to speak in that language, read research papers in that language and draw on it and engage with it in your own discipline in a way that the scientist/ psychologist/economist says, “you’re understanding our field and using those terms the way we would.” A good example of developing such conversational expertise is exemplified by the Center’s current study program in psychology for theologians, and in particular by the Principal Investigator of this program, Michael Spezio.
Richly Rewarding Areas of Inquiry
Working on questions of how theologians and evolutionary scientists see human nature was a rich area. And with the development of moral psychology and neuroscience, questions about moral behavior and moral agency were of interest. And, following on from the work on international law, it looked as though dialogue with legal scholars on theology and law would be equally rewarding. “These topics were within the scope of the interests
of the Templeton Foundation at that time and resonated with my criteria for the kind of themes we might work on.” In looking for good disciplinary dialogue partners for theology, Storrar and his team identified three: anthropology, psychology, and law. All three would prove fruitful, particularly an thropology, not least because of the participation of Agustín Fuentes, Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, for whom, as he would say himself, engagement with theology and being at CTI has been transformative for his life and work. Anthropology is concerned with the meaning of being human. Dialogue with evolutionary scien tists interested in religion as part of the origins of human evolution, notions of transcendence, mean ing making, and ritual, has been productive. When Fuentes gave the distinguished Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh University on why belief is intrinsic to being human, it was fitting that Storrar and Wentzel van Huyssteen were his respondents in the Gifford Seminar that accompanied the lectures.
An Extraordinary Experience
EPHRAIM MEIR on Religious Violence: A Jewish Philosopher’s Perspective
On a CTI outreach visit to the New Zealand Center for Theology and Public Issues at the University of Otago, together with a scholar from the law and religious freedom program who was to lecture there, Storrar was delighted to discover that another CTI Member was the guest speaker for the 50th anniversary of Otago’s religious studies program— anthropologist Richard Sosis from the University of Connecticut, a participant in CTI’s Evolution and Human Nature Program (2012-13). “Rich didn’t know I was there, and I sat at the back of a packed lecture hall. He spoke of what religious studies might learn from developments in anthropology and the way in which anthropology had transformed its fundamental assumptions and learned to work with other disciplines. At the end of his lecture, he put up a slide of his group at CTI and said: ‘The only place I’ve ever experienced this kind of deep interdisciplinary exchange is at the Center of Theological Inquiry.’ We were almost in tears when we met afterwards.”
Respecting boundaries and crossing them in communication and loving relationships is the task of the day. The creation of a bond between God and human beings lies in overcoming the religious/secular divide and in the humble service to others. This does not entail the religious conquering of the secular but making religion a transforming energy relevant and useful again for the world. Against identity-politics, one may extend relatedness from belonging to one group to belonging to all. Against privatization of religion, the humanizing forces in religion may prevail. Religious and secular persons may rediscover the tremendous might of goodness, mercy and loving kindness inherent in religion.
Around the time of CTI’s game-changing Templeton grant, Storrar received an e-mail that would lead him in a direction he had never anticipated. It was from the Library of Congress, and it asked him to join the selection committee for the new NASA chair in astrobiology. “I wrote back saying this is a great honor, but I think you may have the wrong person.”
The Baruch S. Blumberg Chair in Astrobiology fosters collaboration between scientists working in this new field and people in the humanities and social sciences, including religion scholars. NASA wanted to promote public understanding of the field and someone on the council of scholars who advises the Librarian of Congress knew about CTI and had given them Storrar’s name. Since its inauguration in 2012 until earlier this year, Storrar has sat on the selection committee advising the Librarian of Congress on this appointment, the only person who has done so every year. “It’s been an enormously enriching experience. Such was my growing excitement about this new field of scientific inquiry into life in the universe and its societal implications that I applied for a peer-reviewed grant from NASA’s Astrobiology Program to convene scholars in the humanities in a symposia series at CTI with astrobiologists.”
On the heels of a $3.5 million grant from Templeton, CTI got a $1.1 million grant from NASA. Furthermore, the Templeton Foundation heard about the NASA grant and added their support. It led to the next three-year Inquiry on the Societal Implica-
Storrar worked closely with the Board of Trustees, seen here at their first meeting in the new Center building, February 2024
tions of Astrobiology. Over this period, CTI convened some one hundred scholars and scientists in its resident program, as well as early career research workshops, and symposia, including joint events with the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study in South Africa, making a strategic contribution to the development of the new interdisciplinary field of the astrobiological humanities. Along with the many publications of scholars in this CTI Inquiry, Storrar has edited with theologian Frederick Simmons and astrophysicist Edwin Turner a flagship CTI volume of essays from the Inquiry, Astrobiology, Religion, and Society: Considering Life on a Planetary Scale, to be published by Cambridge University Press.
If CTI’s involvement in NASA’s initiative to create what is being called the astrobiological humanities raised some eyebrows, Storrar felt confident that the program was entirely consonant with CTI’s founding commitment to theology and science. James McCord would have approved wholeheartedly. As McCord set out in his acceptance speech for the Templeton Prize in 1986, he was inspired to create a research center for theology because of the intellectual values he saw in scientists at neighboring universities—their dedication to scholarship, openness to new ideas from whatever source, and generosity of spirit in human relations. As Storrar sees it, if there is any surprise with respect to the astrobiology program, it’s that it is funded by a scientific agency for dialogue with the humanities. That’s a real breakthrough.
“Having a program in cooperation with Princeton University, getting funding from a scientific agency like NASA, those are the kinds of breakthroughs that have come out of focusing on doing one thing and doing it well—playing to our niche strength of convening small-scale high-level research groups with global reach. For five years from 2012 to 2017, we had, in effect, over a million a year for research fellowships, which allowed me to convene not only theologians but scientists, legal scholars, scholars of other religious traditions.”
Thanks to Andrew Davison, one of the resident scholars in the astrobiology program and now Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford, even more was to follow. After producing a book following his time here at CTI (Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine, published by Cambridge University Press), Davison subsequently formed an academic friendship with the Nobel prize-winning Swiss astronomer/astrophysicist at Cambridge, Didier Queloz, who was then applying to the Leverhulme Trust for funding on origins of life research and was looking for a humanities partner. When Davison recommended CTI, Queloz was not averse to looking to a center for scholarship on religion, given Storrar’s track record in developing a research program in the astrobiological humanities with NASA funding. When Queloz received the £10 million grant for a new research center in the UK—Cambridge University’s Leverhulme Centre for Life in the Universe— CTI was named its partner in the humanities. CTI is now in a 10-year partnership with Leverhulme and a cutting-edge consortium of scientists. Storrar recently signed the Center’s collaborative research agreement with Cambridge University, Harvard University, University College London, ETH Zurich, and the University of Colorado at Boulder. “Out of an e-mail from the Library of Congress asking me to sit on a committee has come what will be a 20-year inquiry on life in the universe and its religious and societal implications. This long-term work on the societal implications of astrobiology germinated at CTI around 2012 and will continue into 2032 with the support and partnership of Cambridge University’s Leverhulme Center for Life in the Universe.”
Ongoing Meaningful Dialogue
“Given the interests and practice that shaped my time here,” says Storrar, “what means a lot to me is the way we can institutionalize the dialogue over a long period, because that also reflects on the nature of interdisciplinarity. It takes a long time to do it well. I’m very excited that Fred Simmons has a twoyear research fellowship with Cambridge University’s Leverhulme Centre for Life in the Universe, having been in our astrobiology inquiry for three years. Fred is coming back to CTI next October as a Senior Research Officer on staff. He’ll continue that partnership as part of his job remit and will organize an annual “Origins of Life Symposium in the Humanities” as CTI’s contribution to the Leverhulme Network.”
Religion and Global Issues
After astrobiology, CTI came back to Earth with a five-year series of inquiries on global issues selected in consultation with others to identify areas within theology where useful work was being done. The intention was to foster dialogue toward a new understanding—a totally new basis to think and act on the global concerns of our time—connecting migration, violence, inequality, the future of cities, and the future of the planet as linked issues. Among these, Storrar was keen to include architecture and the built environment. “Of all the topics we’ve done, only two have reflected my personal interests. One was on international law, and one was on the built environment. From the beginning, it was important to recognize that the Center was not about my personal research agenda. But when I was in residence here for six months before I was invited back as Director, one of the topics I was working on was how to understand religious life in spatial terms.”
In modern times, churches are often understood (in the narrative of growth and decline, secularization, religious practices or behaviors) over time. That’s a temporal understanding of religion. Through fieldwork Storrar did when teaching at Edinburgh University, he became interested in understanding religion in terms of space—how religious people, communities, ministers, and pro-
fessionals use and occupy space and how they understand space in relation to religion. Significantly, in his last year at CTI, he hosted a hybrid meeting in the Center’s new digital studio with a core group of American, South African, and New Zealand theologians in CTI’s built environment inquiry with Black Church leaders working in urban redevelopment in the city of Baltimore. Following his retirement from CTI, he’s looking forward to resuming his own research on this theme.
Designed for an Innovative Research Cycle
As the five-year research program on global issues was in its concluding phase between 2020 and 2022, Storrar faced two final leadership challenges. In March of 2020 he moved the Center’s resident scholars and families safely home around the world and the CTI staff team, administration, and research program seamlessly online in response to the global pandemic; with Associate Director Joshua Mauldin, he developed a new program of webinars to maintain CTI’s public presence under the Covid lockdown. And with the Board of Trustees, Storrar planned the renovation of the Center’s main building, Luce Hall, which had opened in 1984 and by then required a total refurbishment after almost forty years.
“It was a challenging time to embark on a major building renovation in the wake of the pandemic with its disruption of global supply chains and a sharp rise in building costs and interest rates. But two things enabled us to meet those challenges. First and foremost, rather than upgrading the existing building, our visionary Board of Trustees led by Roy Lennox pressed for an architectural redesign of the Center’s interior to create more collaborative spaces for our research program, more welcoming spaces for our public outreach program, and more digitally connected spaces to convene our global conversations. And second, as with our first game-changing major grant from the John Templeton Foundation in 2012, ten years later in 2022 we won our third major Templeton grant to run a study program in psychology for theologians. And so I found myself in the privileged position of
designing a new kind of research program, a research cycle including virtual and public as well as resident phases while working simultaneously with world class architects to design a new kind of research building for that cycle with three linked floors for collaborative research, global communication, and public conversation. It introduced me to a new word, concinnity: the harmony of form and function.”
Magic Formula?
Looking at the topics of these past inquiries, it’s striking to see that CTI was ahead of the curve in most of its inquiry themes. So many problems that are now of public concern have been investigated at CTI in recent years. Did Storrar have some kind of magic formula for choosing the next inquiry? “From the beginning CTI was pretty prescient,” he says,” although not always able to follow through on its prescience.” As an example, he cites one of the founding trustees, David Lilienthal. Having an international consultancy on major public works, advising governments on how to run large-scale civil engineering projects, Lilienthal had worked in the Middle East and the Gulf. With the fall of the Shah, he was very aware of the rise of militant Islam and strongly urged the Center to look at politicized Islam. Sadly, Lilienthal didn’t live long after the founding of CTI but surely would have been heartened by CTI’s collaboration with the International Bar Association on the topic of Islamic and International Law.
Personal Impact
It’s clear to see the many ways in which Storrar has had a profound impact on CTI. But how did CTI change its Director? “I didn’t come here as anyone who worked in or was particularly interested in religion and science, but I would say the intellectual love affair of my time here has been astrobiology. To sit on the committee advising the Librarian of Congress on appointing the NASA chair in Astrobiology has been an extraordinary experience. The chair is named for Baruch Blumberg, the Nobel Laureate who identified and found a cure for Hepatitis B. He was a polymath Renaissance figure and an early champion of the new field of astrobiology. He was also a dedicated student
of the Torah. CTI’s work in astrobiology has led to a partnership with a world-leading center for scientific research, Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for Life in the Universe, a rare thing for a center in the humanities, and a first in the history of CTI.”
“Working so closely with astrobiologists has made me think about life differently and realize how fragile and astonishing life is. The only life in the universe might be a little layer of a few miles deep around this planet and the conditions for life are so exceptional. It’s extraordinary to think about life in its richest, fullest, broadest sense. To have had the privilege of working with scientists like the discoverer of exoplanets Didier Queloz and NASA’s strategist for astrobiology David Grinspoon and to think about the implications of their work for humanity has been tremendous.”
One aspiration Storrar had for CTI at the start was having the Center’s collaborative research published by Cambridge University Press. This, Storrar told himself, would be a benchmark of success.
It has also been achieved. CTI’s book out of that initial inquiry on the religious and societal implications of astrobiology has just been accepted by Cambridge University Press. “That for me, along with welcoming Institute for Advanced Study Director David Nirenberg to CTI to address our board was the capstone of my time here.”
“As David Nirenberg said so eloquently when he spoke to the board recently, places such as IAS and CTI are rare in the world. They are counter-cultural spaces where thinking can happen without restriction, across all the borders. A human conversation, not a national conversation, not a conversation in one discipline, but to be able to take that where it will, with responsible people wrestling with hard questions and doing deep thinking.”
“Having the fruit of that long-term astrobiology inquiry published by Cambridge University Press and welcoming David Nirenberg here as a peer to speak about CTI in the same breath as the Institute in terms of fostering collaborative research is the happy culmination of my 20 years at CTI. I know Bill Scheide would be pleased, and I dare to think Jim McCord would be too.”
In the past William Storrar has been heard to describe CTI as a mini-Institute for Advanced Study and told people that CTI was “punching above its weight.”
After two decades as Director, it’s clear that these figures of speech are no longer necessary. CTI has come into its own as a robust public institution that stands side by side with its global peers.
Psychologist Michael Spezio and Practical Theologian Elijah Baloyi, Colleagues in the Current Inquiry on Thriving in Diverse Contexts
CELIA DEANE-DRUMMOND on Being and Becoming
Celia Deane-Drummond is Director of the Laudato Si’ Research Institute at the University of Oxford. She was Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame from 2011-2019 and participated in CTI’s 2012-2013 Inquiry on Evolution and Human Nature. Here we reprint her article Human Being and Becoming: Reflections on Human Nature and Evolution from The Commons 2012-2013.
The Center of Theological Inquiry is one of those special venues for exploring academic ideas that scholars daydream about amidst the everyday tasks of university administration and teaching. But for those of us who assembled in the year beginning in September 2012, that dream became a reality. Right from the start of the project, which brought together scholars from diverse backgrounds and departmental affiliations, something unusual was promised through the conversation. We had in the mix those whose prime training was in philosophy, religious studies, anthropology, social science and theology; and within those traditions those who were differently orientated in terms of experience and background.
The first task was therefore to try to understand each other’s perspective and work out how each of us approached the broad topic set before us. The challenge for those of us leading the group was to find ways to persuade those who already had a substantial project to fulfill to go beyond that and work collaboratively. The fact that we succeeded in this task shows the strength
of the residential program, which helped to build up trust among us through the sheer proximity of living and working together, drawn as we were from different parts of the United States, Europe, and Australasia. Some of us brought families with us, and the shared play of our children mirrored the playful exchange of ideas that accumulated over the months that we were together. But our interactions were far from frivolous, since what was at issue is one of the most knotty problems in the conversation between religion and science. It therefore lent itself to a multidisciplinary approach, so that each of our projects became subtly transformed by conversations with our peers. I know that my own project shifted significantly over the year we were together, so that the final product was different from how I had originally envisaged it. Of course, there were still lines of continuity, in terms of vision, but the new thinking that emerged in our discussions cried out to be incorporated into my individual work. The genius of working together showed up in the transdisciplinary insights that gradually accumulated over the year. I have consistently worked to try to bring together different fields in my writing and research, but using a library source is very different from the kind of human contact that CTI permits, exposing us to new ideas at the cutting edge of research in different fields. The library facilities, of course, backed up this process, but what was striking to me was the extent to which we trusted each other with newly formed and nascent ideas that then gradually became fleshed out over the course of the year. Mini-collaborations arose as well, so that I worked with Agustín Fuentes in generating a paper for the new journal Philosophy, Theology and the Sciences, and so did many others. The task of writing together so that our voices could be heard in a way that reflected our disciplines, but still gave credence to the other, proved challenging, but we discovered some fascinating resonances in terms of shared obstacles within our own discipline to the ideas that we were wishing to promote. In our case this was the shared resistance in our respective disciplines to the importance of other species in human being and becoming. I found a new way to integrate anthropological studies in the science and theology dialogue, and theology opened up new questions for anthropology.
The mutual synergy was exciting and is still ongoing. In a sense the very process of being at CTI contributed to our own being and becoming as academics, and we all left with a sense that we were different as a result of our encounters with each other. I am immensely grateful for this opportunity, and I know that this sentiment is one shared by my colleagues.
SUSAN SCHNEIDER
From CTI to the Library of Congress
Susan Schneider is the founding director of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University where she also holds the William F. Dietrich Distinguished Professorship. A Member in the Inquiry on the Societal Implications of Astrobiology 20152016. She held the Baruch Blumberg Chair of Astrobiology at the Library of Congress in 2019-2020. Here is an excerpt from an interview in the Fall 2019 issue of Fresh Thinking in which she speaks about her time at CTI.
While at CTI I wrote the book, Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind, drawing from the work we were doing with NASA in astrobiology and all the wonderful conversations I had about the nature of life with theologians and scientists visiting CTI. At several points in the book, I draw from these discussions with members of CTI, and I’m very grateful for the wonderful, thought-provoking opportunity to work in astrobiology, and draw from insights from my colleagues in theology and religious studies.
Artificial You is intended to be a sober-minded philosophical exploration of what AI can and cannot achieve. It begins with the observation that humans may not be Earth’s most intelligent species for much longer: the world champions of chess, Go, and Jeopardy! are now all AIs. Given the rapid pace of progress in AI, many predict that it could advance to human-level intelligence within the next several decades. From there, it could quickly outpace human intelligence. I then ask: What do these developments mean for the future of the mind? I suspect that it is inevitable that AI will take intelligence in new direc-
tions. But it is up to us to carve out a sensible path forward. As AI technology turns inward, reshaping the brain, as well as outward, potentially creating machine minds, it is crucial to beware. Homo sapiens, as mind designers, will be playing with “tools” they do not understand how to use: the self, the mind, and consciousness. I urge that an insufficient grasp of the nature of the mind, consciousness, and self could undermine the use of AI and brain enhancement technology, bringing about the demise or suffering of conscious beings.
This book has given me an opportunity to explore the range of intelligent systems that various scholars have been discussing. Over the past few months, I’ve found myself keynoting conferences contrasting different kinds of cognitive systems. At the University of Toronto, we compared systems seeming to exhibit at least a minimal level of intelligence: slime molds, plants, AIs, brain-based intelligences (e.g., humans, octopuses). At Cambridge’s Leverhulme AI Center, we met to discuss taxonomizing the space of intelligent systems, with an emphasis on comparing the capacities of kinds of AIs to humans and nonhuman animals, like the octopus. And at Arizona State University’s Beyond Center, teaming up with Paul Davies, David Grinspoon, and Sara Walker, I began to hypothesize that resources in physics could help explore the idea of a planet as an intelligent system. A section of the book traces my journey of discovering a range of intelligent systems, and it asks whether other intelligences might exhibit a greater potential for advanced intelligence than the human mind. Biologists have long explored the question of whether there is a universal biology; in a similar vein, it is time to examine a range of cases of intelligent systems (AIs, savants, planets, plants) and explore what is common in all the cases, if anything, and asking whether there are universal features of cognitive systems. Here, I draw from fascinating work on convergent evolution, my earlier academic book on whether there is a lingua franca of thought, and recent discussions of whether intelligence is dependent on hierarchical reasoning in multi-layered neural networks of the sort exhibited by deep learning systems and the brain.
After exploring the range of intelligent systems, and discussing whether it is even possible, from our vantage point, to explore the scope and limits of our own minds, I turn to the question: would there be limits, or design ceilings, on enhancing our own intelligence? Some neuroscientists and evolutionary psychologists observe that there are intrinsic limits to the expansion of intelligence of the brain. Some tech leaders propose that AI and neuro-technologies will eventually get around these evolutionary limits. I believe we may encounter other sorts of ceilings—ceilings that aren’t imposed by evolution but which are philosophical in nature.
The Trustees have named the
in honor
Colloquy Room
of William F. Storrar at the request of Charles & Nancy Wall, donors.
IMAGE: © JEFFREY TOTARO, 2024
MARILYNNE ROBINSON on the Importance of Theology
There’s a great deal of wealth in religious tradition that needs to be restored to its place in peoples’ awareness and attention. I think that there’s a kind of condescension to the modern audience that is reflected in many ways, but certainly in the idea that they would not have any interest in the historical tradition or intellectual tradition of their faiths. I think that this has been a real impoverishment and has made people feel that religion itself is a much less profound and grounded thing than it in fact is. Theology has always been an interest of mine and it’s a luxury of my life that I’ve been able to pursue it, through fiction and other things. Theology, of all modes of thought, integrates all the elements of human experience more exhaustively than any of them. Its purpose is to integrate at every level and that in itself means that meaning becomes pervasive rather than being isolated in narrow interests or purposes. It’s very beautiful for that reason, and I think it properly does animate the church, which ought to, in turn, animate theology.
[Quote from The Commons, 2009-2010]
AGUSTÍN FUENTES on Intensive and Demanding Inquiry
Agustín Fuentes is a Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. In 2018, he delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. At CTI, he participated in the 2012-2013 Inquiry on Evolution and Human Nature. Here is an excerpt from his article in The Commons in which he discusses the impact of CTI on his research.
Spending the 2012-2013 year in the Center of Theological Inquiry’s Inquiry on Evolution and Human Nature enabled an intellectual growth and development I could not have achieved elsewhere. My time as a fellow was intensive and demanding; it was a journey of fearless intellectual exploration, wonderful camaraderie, and exciting discovery. For this I am extremely thankful. In short, and to borrow a favorite term of my theological colleagues, I flourished at CTI. In generous dialogue with theologians and fellow scientists I was able to expand on my grounding in anthropological and biological approaches and emerge more familiar with a broader range of theoretical views on becoming and being human. I augmented my intellectual toolkit to include exchange with wider philosophical, and some theological, traditions and perspectives. This enabled me to be truly innovative and explore new ways to think about, and model, human evolution. During my time at the Center, I developed the concept of the human niche, and the role of community, as a central aspect of what one might call a human nature. My approach, grounded in material evidence and emerging evolutionary theory, demonstrates that a fuller understanding of what it means to be human is
facilitated by examining our evolution with a focus on our need to be in community, on our dynamic relationships with the world, and on our distinctive and remarkable ability to cooperate, imagine, and hope.
My intellectual growth during the Inquiry followed two tracks. First, I was able to delve deeply into the fossil/archeological, behavioral and neurobiological data sets and the hypotheses that are emerging from them. I moved beyond standard approaches to human evolution and reflected on a wider range of ideas and perspectives. I am fairly confident that I have developed a proposal that could shift the ways anthropologists, and others, examine and model our past. I was able to accomplish this breakthrough, in part, due to the remarkable seminars and discussions of the Inquiry, and the engaging insights of the other fellows there. A distinctive and very influential aspect of the year at CTI was my interface with theologians—it impacted me in a significant and profound manner.
This aspect had its own interesting outcome and is the second track to my intellectual growth: I have become convinced that integrating approaches, including voices from theology and philosophy, is simultaneously the best and the most difficult way to move us closer to probable truths about being human. This presents a problem. As an anthropologist and a primatologist, working largely in the boundary between the social and biological sciences, the acknowledgement that humanistic approaches are important in our endeavors is a tough sell to colleagues, journals, and standard funders. And, unfortunately, for many of my colleagues my position might smack of lunacy (or better put, heresy). Propagating a truly integrative agenda wherein theology is one of the partners is not going to be an easy task, but it is worthwhile.
Given the position just stated, I remain surprised that one of the core questions I am wrestling with is: “What specifically did I get from the theologians at CTI and what did they get from me?” I can say that my work has benefitted from the interface with humanities scholars who are sincerely interested in evolutionary histories as significant in their intellectual journeys and constructions of what it means to be human. I might also add that, to me, theology (at least my theologian colleagues at CTI) contemplates becoming and being human in ways that resonate more richly and deeply with my approaches than those of many other humanists I have encountered, and their insights help illuminate the human experience. I do not make positive or negative assertions about religious truth claims but I do argue for an importance of imagination, metaphysics, and religious belief, in the human experience and in our evolution.
So, I am left pondering the question of how to integrate, entangle, and enrich the discussions between science and theology—a question that I am certain will continue to stimulate engaged discussion and learning, and continue the environment for fresh thinking that was ever-present at the Center of Theological Inquiry.
EDWIN TURNER on Astrophysics at CTI
Edwin Turner is Emeritus Professor of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University and was a Senior Fellow at CTI in 2023-2024.
My involvement as a frequent visitor to CTI’s program on the Societal Implications of Astrobiology has greatly enriched the context in which I view my own astrobiological research and that of my colleagues in the field. Indeed, despite decades of professional interest in the search for life outside the Earth and it being a major focus of my personal research agenda for now approaching 20 years, I had scarcely even stopped to consider that the topic has significant impacts on society. That now seems staggeringly naive to me, but it is true nonetheless. But this “blindness” on my part quickly dropped away when I began to hear the ideas and insights of the magnificent and diverse group of scholars CTI assembled in Princeton to consider the issue. The swirl of religious, philosophical, historical, and sociological expertise and knowledge around the table was occasionally dizzying and humbling but always stimulating and inspiring. There is no doubt in my mind that my own work on finding and characterizing exoplanets and on the origin of life in a probably infinite universe will now proceed along a different and more thoughtful arc. I could not be more grateful.
DAVID GRINSPOON
An Astrobiologist Talks with Theologians
Planetary scientist David Grinspoon contributed to CTI’s symposium series on astrobiology in 2015-2016. The inaugural holder of the Baruch S. Blumberg Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress, he is the Senior Scientist for Astrobiology Strategy at NASA. (from The Commons, 2015-2016).
Astrobiology is a multi-disciplinary attempt to understand the distribution and role of life in the universe. When we start to pursue these questions, and start to explore the universe in trying to answer them, we come up against some profound questions that philosophers and theologians have long been wrestling with: What is life? How does it fit in with the rest of the universe? Do we have ethical obligations to extraterrestrial environments and biospheres? And when we consider, as I have been doing, the anthropocene and the role of humanity in the future of Earth, we have to grapple with questions about the role of science. Should scientists be activists or try to be “neutral, honest brokers?” If we perceive dangers to humanity, is it enough to report on them in a detached way or do we need to advocate for certain behaviors, policies, and actions? Is there a danger to science when we become advocates? These questions take science beyond our traditional boundaries, beyond our comfort zone. We can make our own amateur attempts at finding answers, but why not engage with those communities of scholars who have long been considering such questions? We can use the help!
If you look at what is happening to Earth now, you realize that it is undergoing a transition as profound as any in its history and
that we ourselves are the agents of that transition. The evolution of life has caused huge planetary changes in the past, but what is happening now is unlike any other planetary transition, in that the agents of change have the ability (or at least the potential) to be aware of the changes they are causing, and to make choices based on this awareness. This gives us a huge new responsibility. But it should also be a source of great hope.
Science, art, and other aspects of learning and culture can all be seen as incredible transgenerational, globe-spanning enterprises that have survived and flourished through even the worst episodes of our histories. Now we are being tested in new ways and it’s clear that only global responses to global challenges will see us through. Perhaps in the nick of time we have new tools that may allow us to meet these new challenges. There is a slowly dawning awareness that we are all in this together.
During the first afternoon at a CTI symposium when scholars were asking me questions related to my morning talk, one of them asked “Are there any questions you want to ask us?” I realized that there was one, perhaps embarrassingly basic, question I was dying to ask: “What do you mean by ‘God’?” This was prompted by the fact that there are many in the scientific community, perhaps a minority but a very vocal minority, who are extremely hostile to the notion of God. They feel that all religion is nonsense, and that believers are childish and simple-minded. They believe that religion is responsible for a great deal of cruelty and oppression and an enemy of human progress. It’s been my impression that what these super-atheists mean when they say the word “God” has little in common with what is actually meant by religious scholars using this term. This feeling was reinforced by my experience working at the Library of Congress as the Astrobiology Chair where all the religious scholars I met were very bright, sophisticated, learned, thoughtful people. I got the sense that what I was observing was not so much an actual disagreement as a great misunderstanding, and that these radical atheists who feel they are defending science by critiquing “God” are actually criticizing their own notion of “God.” So, I decided, why not ask?
What then followed was remarkably interesting to me: A long discussion of what is meant by “God,” with as many answers as there were people in the room. I took a lot of hurried notes. I now feel that I still don’t really understand the meaning of this word but that it is certainly deep, mysterious, and complex. But it strikes me now that “God” is, for many, a description of some ineffable aspects of the universe and even a way of describing the nature of human consciousness, perhaps a way of approaching some deep philosophical questions which are arguably beyond science. It gave me a lot to think about.
MARY ELLEN O’CONNELL
on The Art of Law in the International Community
Mary Ellen O’Connell is the Robert and Marion Short Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame, where she is also a research professor of international dispute resolution at the Kroc Institute for International Peace in Studies. She is also a CTI Member, having participated in CTI’s 2014-2015 Inquiry on Law and Religious Freedom.
O’Connell discussed her book, The Art of Law, and its beginnings at CTI in Fresh Thinking, Issue 3, 2019.
The Art of Law investigates why we should care about the rule of law in the world. It builds on an earlier book, The Power and Purpose of International Law, which looked at what law is and how the enforcement mechanisms of international law work. The Art of Law goes further, answering why we should comply with the law regardless of coercive enforcement. It aims fundamentally at building new respect for the law of peace. In researching this book, I found that people say they obey the law to avoid punishment or to realize some advantage—the pain and gain arguments. They are mostly unaware of the critical third reason: to do the right thing.
We have largely lost this third insight into law compliance. Without it, we can have little hope of ending armed conflict, protecting the environment, or upholding human dignity through law. In the West, we once understood that compliance with law was a divine command. Law compliance was not reduced to two dimensions. With the suppression of theology from public life, however, we no longer recognize the divine component of law compliance. It lives on in tradition. Our world reveals, however, that the tradition is fading as even national leaders openly flout the law. The talk today is of the end of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism—other ways of saying the rule of law is in crisis.
This book offers a way back to understanding the normative dimension of law compliance. It is a way compatible with religious belief but open to all perspectives. Aesthetic philosophy offers an attractive insight into complying with law solely for the good of another. It supports humanity’s capacity for altruism, which is essential for functioning law that can create the conditions for a flourishing international community. In other words, the book revives natural law theory for our times. It responds to the main theory that has taken up the space left vacant by the retreat of theology, which is the political theory of realism. This theory largely accounts for the narrow understanding of human nature as responding only to material reality—pain and gain.
With the third reason in place, the book goes on to provide a new understanding of the central purpose of all law: the prohibition on the use of force and the provision of alternatives for the peaceful settlement of disputes. The final chapter draws once again on aesthetic theory to recast the vocabulary of dispute resolution, from one of competition—war and games—to one of performance. The courthouse as theater.
Without the academic year at CTI the book would not have been written. Our year’s group of legal scholars and theologians focused extensively on the deep interconnections of law and theology and how much we have lost in the narrowing of the human mind to focus on material things alone. Our many guests, events, and resources in the Princeton academic community created an atmosphere of intellectual excitement that I felt privileged to experience. It was also a year of personal spiritual growth for me. I continue to marvel at the creativity and generosity of William Storrar and Kim Lane Scheppele, former director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton, in organizing us. I hope the book is a fitting tribute to them, as well as an expression of my gratitude.
“Hope
is not optimism. Optimism is the belief that things will get better. Hope is the belief that, if we work hard enough together, we can make things better. It needs no courage, only a certain naivety, to be an optimist, but it often needs a great deal of courage to maintain hope. No one with a sense of history can, in this turbulent age, be an optimist; but no one with deep religious faith can be without hope. Hope itself can be a trans formative force in long-standing conflicts where the participants are coming close to despair.”
—Rabbi
Jonathan Sacks (1948-2020)
JEREMY WALDRON on the Working Group on Theology and International Law
The depth of connections that can be established among eight or ten or a dozen people far outweigh the influence of other more shallow connections that can be established among 100 people, particularly when the eight or ten or twelve are returning to their own positions elsewhere in the academy. They are engaging in other conversations. They are organizing other conferences. They are working as public intellectuals and as professional scholars in other ways. So they are taking out into the world what has been nurtured and built here. I don’t see that the Center wants to depart very much from this model. I do think it is unique the way that our working group has engaged, has been not just ecumenical in a theological and doctrinal sense, but it has been ecumenical in a broader sense of bringing people together from genuinely other disciplines. We are all men and women of faith, but half our members are not theologians and they would not ordinarily find themselves in a theological conversation sustained in the way that we have sustained it. The Center’s commitment to encourage working groups of that caliber and of that character I think has been a huge achievement. It doesn’t happen elsewhere. Normally the tendency would be to not make it interdisciplinary for fear of diluting the conversation, for fear of diluting the results. Somehow, and this is under William Storrar’s leadership, we have managed to make it interdisciplinary as well as ecumenical without sacrificing, in my view, any element of depth.
ULRICH SCHMIEDEL on Thinking Theology Together
Ulrich Schmiedel is Professor of Global Christianities at Lund University in Sweden. His research combines theology with sociology of religion and philosophy of religion. In 2018, he was a member of the Center’s Inquiry on Religion and Migration. Here is his article Thinking Theology Together from Fresh Thinking, Issue 2, 2019.
Max Weber has had a lot of bad press among scholars of religion in recent years. But during my time at the Center of Theological Inquiry, his lecture on “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” delivered a century ago at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in Germany came to my mind again and again. Comparing the German and the American academic systems was interesting for me as a German scholar living in Princeton. Weber’s lecture explores what he calls the “external conditions” and the “internal callings” of the scholar who engages in “science as a vocation.” The German concept of Wissenschaft, which the translator of the lecture rendered as “science,” covers all academic approaches, including the humanities. Such science, Weber suggests, is about ideas. But where do ideas come from? Weber cautions that “the soil of very hard work” can foster ideas but cannot force ideas. We cannot have ideas without “brooding and searching at our desks” but we can have “brooding and searching at our desk” without ideas. Looking back at CTI’s workshop on religion and migration, I can confirm that there was a lot of brooding and searching at my desk. But that wasn’t all there was. CTI fostered ideas because the international and inter-disciplinary set-up of the workshop allowed for what I would call estrangement, engagement, and encouragement between scholars from different and diverse disciplines. Estrangement. Weber suggests that the scholar has to be a “strict specialist.” Because of this specialization, she or he (admittedly, for Weber the scholar is a “he” rather than a “she”) has “to put on blinders” that screen out what is not the subject of her or his study. Specialization elicits estrangement. But during my time at CTI, I experienced this estrangement as creative. Surprisingly, the questions from non-theologians prompted me to delve more deeply into theological disciplines and the questions from theologians prompted me to delve more deeply into non-theological disciplines. The challenge to translate my own concepts into the
languages of my colleagues and my colleagues’s concepts into my own language was precisely what provoked new ideas. Engagement. Engagement ran through all our conversations. When Weber speaks of “science for the sake of science,” he envisions distance as part and parcel of the scholar’s vocation. Of course, one would want to counter this vision. The controversies stirred up by migration call for interventions by scholars: their engagement instead of their disengagement. What I learned, however, is that such counters can come too quickly. In order to think through migration in a way that considers its complex ethical and its complicated political implications, thinking needs to take detours. It is a responsibility of theologians to engage in politics and ethics, as a colleague emphasized over a cup of coffee. But in order to meet this responsibility, we need open-ended thinking that takes the time to explore the complex configurations of migrations past and present.
Encouragement. Weber is correct that “no amount of enthusiasm, however sincere it may be, can compel a problem to yield scientific results.” But to work with others who are enthusiastic about the problem surely offers the scholar the encouragement both to try and to keep trying for results. At CTI, scholars from around the world who would not normally sit around one table learned that their ideas about religion and migration might be useful to each other. It was the most effective encouragement I can think of.
Weber was mindful of both the “internal callings” and the “external conditions.” At CTI, these conditions left nothing to be desired, which meant that all of us could concentrate on the “soil of very hard work” that might foster ideas. CTI set up an excellent and exciting environment—both in the internal terms and in the external terms of Weber. Re-reading Weber in light of the experience I gained, however, I am puzzled that one concept never comes up in his lecture: “collaboration.” Although it seems both impudent and imprudent to take issue with the wisdom of Max Weber, who could look back on a stellar career when he delivered his lecture, I would suggest that the vocation of science must be collaborative. CTI facilitates the creation of ideas through estrangement, engagement, and encouragement, because it brings scholars together
PETER OCHS
Diagnosing Religious-Group Conflict
Peter Ochs is the Edgar M. Bronfman Professor of Modern Judaic Studies at the University of Virginia and an influential thinker whose interests include Jewish philosophy and theology, pragmatism and semiotics. He is also a co-founder of the Children of Abraham Institute, which promotes interfaith study and dialog among members of the Abrahamic religions. Here, in this edited excerpt from his article in Fresh Thinking, Issue 3 Fall 2019, he reflects on links between CTI’s environment and the direction of almost three decades of his own thinking.
CTI’s 2018-19 Research Workshop on Religion and Violence provided a wonderful setting for my research on “Value Predicate Analysis:” a field-testable technique for diagnosing tendencies toward violence or peace among religious groups in regions of potential conflict. Since 1992, CTI had been the nurturing environment for the entire line of thinking that preceded and cradled this work.
. . . In retrospect, I believe the CTI environment nurtured significant antecedents to my work on religion and violent conflict. In 1991-1992, I spent a year at CTI completing the book Peirce, Pragmatism, and the Logic of Scripture, which examines the implications of Charles Peirce’s philosophic pragmatism for the reasoning of Scripture: that is, the kinds of reasoning that emerge from Scriptural study and interpretation. During that year, I began what became years of discussion with then CTI Director Daniel Hardy, of blessed memory, and his son-in-law, David Ford. We discussed our love of Scripture as a cradle of reasoning and our discomfort with the disconnect we sensed in the contemporary academy between reasoning and Scripture. The discussions continued over several summers, leading to our developing the practice of “Scriptural Reasoning:” the shared study of Scripture across the borders of different canonical traditions.
Some features of Scriptural Reasoning resemble what I consider features of the study environment at CTI: intentionally shaped spaces that welcome participants who value religious tradition and intellectual discipline and also value study and engagement across differences (of belief, tradition, and discipline); that promote intense individual inquiry as well as group reflection and interpersonal engagement; and that integrate learning for its own sake with learning for the sake of societal repair. Participating in either environment tends, over time, to nurture habits of thinking that provide alternatives to disjunctive tendencies in contemporary society: tendencies, for example, to identify “reasoning” exclusively with propositional or binary discourse and to isolate religious and social or relational discourse as extra-rational. The alternatives I have in mind are “non-binary” types of thinking that, for example,
situate propositional claims within specific lines of inquiry that were undertaken for specific purposes, or that identify religious (or relational/societal) and scientific thinking as complementary and at times interdependent.
Within the Scriptural Reasoning environment, members of different religious traditions sit side-by-side around small tables. Participants welcome one another to comment on brief excerpts from the Scriptural canons of each of the religions. No one speaks too much or too little; no one’s comments on any of the excerpts are more authoritative than another’s; comments and discussion move around the table. One participant is a qualified facilitator, who offers brief procedural comments only occasionally, when it seems time to nudge the discussion back on track. Over 25 years and thousands of meetings, I found that it takes about eight sessions of ninety minutes each (during an intense week or spread out over several months) until the group begins to experience the “reasoning” in Scriptural Reasoning: a directional movement of discussion that displays something of each of the participants’ traditions and disciplines but no one of them more than another. The movement has a character unique to that session. After the session it seems to vanish like a sand painting, but its effects remain in those features of Scriptural Reasoning that remind me of the environment of CTI.
During the first years of William Storrar’s directorship at CTI, William Stacy Johnson and I co-hosted a Scriptural Reasoning research group at CTI, on topics that led to the essay collection Crisis, Call, and Leadership in the Abrahamic Traditions (Palgrave). Reasoning across differences of tradition and discipline, the group generated a spirit of play, friendship, challenge, and deep thinking that, like overlapping waves, seemed to redouble the spirits of both CTI and Scriptural Reasoning.
CTI addresses society’s big questions in ways that draw on the deep resources of religion and of science. Nurtured at CTI and extended through research in religion and in political and socio-linguistic science, Scriptural Reasoning may, hopefully, contribute to the ways we address the big question of religion and violence.
William Storrar, Peter Ochs and Friederike Nüssel
FRIEDERIKE NÜSSEL in Conversation
Friederike Nüssel is Professor of Systematic Theology and director of the Ecumenical Institute at Heidelberg University where she directs the interdisciplinary Marsilius-Kolleg. She was a Resident Member during CTI’s Inquiry on Religious Experience and Moral Identity (2013-14) and in the spring of 2022, delivered the prestigious Warfield Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminar. Following the lecture series she spoke with CTI’s Associate Director, Joshua Mauldin. Here is a reprint of their brief conversation.
Josh Mauldin: What was the topic of your recent Warfield Lectures?
Friederike Nüssel: The lectures were titled “Dynamics of the Spirit,” and the subtitle tells you the program, “A Pneumatological Approach to Dogmatics.” My goal was to develop the central dogmatic themes from the perspective of the spirit or pneumatology; to go through the different themes of Trinity, creation, redemption, reconciliation, and discuss what the role of the spirit is throughout.
You are the director of the Ecumenical Institute at Heidelberg University. How do you define ecumenical theology?
Ecumenical theology is the part of theology that responds to the ecumenical movement of the churches as it developed since 1910 with the World Missionary Conference; since that time churches have built up various ways of interaction in dialogue but also in charity work and in mission. The task of theology here is to facilitate research and findings that are important for this dialogue and also for understanding contextual matters in theology. So ecumenical theology looks very much to churches and their interaction, but since churches themselves have a number of interreligious connections, ecumenical theology has to go beyond denominational discussions and reach out to interreligious topics.
How do you think about the role of theology in society and in the university?
What we in Germany would call systematic theology or dogmatic theology involves interpreting central Christian themes in a way that connects scripture, the tradition, and contemporary questions people have today. Theology connects these areas, and the main task is to provide orientation. In my view, theology is first of all important in terms of education. My primary aim is to help students to receive the formation they need to do their jobs in various fields in which theology is required; in the church, of course, but also in Germany there are many other fields where theology is a required part of the curriculum.
As the director of an interdisciplinary institute at the University of Heidelberg, how do you think about theology as an interdisciplinary endeavor?
I would begin by noting that theology is itself interdisciplinary in nature. If you look at the combination of different disciplines and their methods within the field of theology or religious studies, you find historical methods, systematic methods, a number of practical methods, and so on. So, theology is already interdisciplinary. And since the Christian faith relates to all important questions about the world, about human beings, about the ground of being, about political and social issues, it must be interdisciplinary from the beginning. But today we have a very large variety of disciplines and many of them feel very disconnected from theology, so it is important for theology to take part in conversations with other disciplines in order to discuss findings in those fields, but also to take into account what other disciplines are interested in, what their research methods are, what their principles are, in order to incorporate this knowledge into one’s theological perspective. And this should be seen as a mutual conversation among disciplines.
The interdisciplinary institute in Heidelberg is a special type of institute for advanced studies. It connects researchers from various disciplines in Heidelberg in the first instance, and it has quite a good impact, because it helps disciplines like theology get into conversation with disciplines that have not been interested in theology for a long time. For theology that is certainly a very good thing.
“Nothing changes the future as much as ideas. If you want to affect what happens in the world, you have to change ideas, the way that people think; at their best that is what scholars do. CTI tries to be a place where scholars can be at their best.” — Robin Lovin
KANAN KITANI on Doing Theology in Japan
Kanan Kitani is Associate Professor of Theology at Doshisha University, Kyoto, and was a resident Member in CTI’s Inquiry on Religion and Migration in 2018. The following interview originally appeared in Fresh Thinking, Issue 6, 2021.
Joshua Mauldin: Kanan, welcome to Colloquy, our conversation on theology as a field of study. How did you first become interested in theology and who influenced you?
Kanan Kitani: Actually, there is no dramatic story behind why I attended university to study theology. I chose the university I graduated from because it was well-established and the graduates’ job opportunities were promising. I even did an internship at Apple Japan Inc. while I was in school. My mentor, a professor of historical theology, recommended that I carry on with my studies in graduate school. If not for his advice, I probably would be working in a corporate job right now.
When I was in school, I read whatever theological books that were translated into Japanese. The textbooks in college were usually written by famous theologians, such as Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Jürgen Moltmann. Japanese theologians tend to praise German theology as the pinnacle of theology, so I didn’t have many opportunities to read books by Asian theologians while I was in college. After I graduated and became involved in the ecumenical movement through the World Council of Churches, I started reading many of the Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama’s works.
Of course, I was greatly influenced by reading these theologians’ books; however, I was also influenced significantly by artists and writers who expressed their faith in secular society, such as Shusaku Endo and Martin Scorsese. I think their books and movies are important because they initiate a dialogue about faith between Christians and non-Christians. Naturally, I read the novel and watched the film Silence. It is interesting to see the difference between the two, in that for Endo, Kichijiro is the protagonist who embodies human weakness, but for Scorsese, the protagonists are the Catholic missionaries who sacrificed their lives to go on a deadly mission to Japan.
What do you see as the role of theology?
I think theology plays a bridging role between the Church and secular society. The gap between the values of secular society and the Church will probably become wider. I am not saying that the Church should adjust to whatever real-
CTI’s Director visiting Doshisha University with Kanan Kitani
ities these worldly values offer. However, conflicts among values inevitably will deepen. In such circumstances, theology provides a space in which to examine societal events through God’s eyes—for example, I am currently writing a paper on climate change and theology.
What are the specific challenges of doing theology in the Japanese context?
There are definitely some challenges to doing theology in Japan. The three most significant challenges, in my opinion, are the language barrier, the small Christian population, and the unique spirituality of the Japanese.
First of all, the language of higher education in Japan is Japanese, and most theological books published outside Japan will not be translated into Japanese because the number of readers of theological books is very small. Throughout history, the Christian population in Japan has never been more than 1% of the total population ever since Christianity’s arrival in the 16th century. Therefore, few theological books are available to theology students in Japan. Publishers only want to publish books that are likely to sell to a certain extent.
The number of Christians in Japan currently stands at about 950,000 and is decreasing every year. With a smaller Christian population, there are fewer people studying theology, and it may soon become difficult to maintain theology departments in universities.
The reason for the Christian population in Japan being so small lies in the unique spirituality of the Japanese. Throughout history, the government and feudal lords have
forced the general public to follow a particular religion. At one time, the people were urged to follow Buddhism, and when Buddhists revolted, the government favored Christianity and suppressed Buddhists. From the early modern period until the end of World War II, the people were forced to worship the emperor by forming the state Shinto religion. Although freedom of religion has been guaranteed since the end of the Second World War, the spirituality of the Japanese is a syncretism of various religions due to these historical circumstances. I think Japanese people are not used to choosing their religion or belonging to just one religion.
What advice would you give to someone interested in studying theology?
Here’s what I would like to tell my 18-year-old self: If you are thinking of becoming a theologian, you’d better think twice. I jumped into the world of theology without knowing much about what it was. Now that I have studied it a little, I can say that theology is a very profound and intricate discipline. It has accumulated so much research over a long time period that theologians must continue studying it throughout their lives. Even in a lifetime, it is impossible to read all of the theological books. Theology is about looking for the possibility of the impossible because it is impossible in principle for finite human beings to understand the infinite God fully.
With that wise call to humility, Kanan, thank you for all you do for theological inquiry in Japan.
Historic Oura Church, Nagasaki, Japan
Orthodox Church, Hakodate, Japan
