Fresh Thinking Issue #14

ISSUE 14 SPRING 2025

INQUIRIES Religion & Violence Religion & Migration Law & Religious Freedom Evolution & Human Nature Thriving in Diverse Contexts Religion & International Law Religion & Built Environment Religion & Economic Inequality Religion & Natural Environment Societal Implications of Astrobiology Machine Intelligence & Pastoral Care Religious Experience & Moral Identity

SYMPOSIA Future of Theology Theology’s Global Futures The Wellbeing of Institutions Ethics of Artificial intelligence Future of Systematic Theology Theology in the Enlightenment Wealth & Wellbeing of Nations Islamic Law & International Law Cooperation & Virtue in Business Global Network for Public Theology Religion & Public Values: USA & UK Religion & Public Values: East & West Spiritual Progress with Robert Bellah Theology & Race with J. Kameron Carter Orthodoxy in Russia & Ukraine with Shaun Casey Ways of Knowing in Science & Religion with Piet Hut Theology & Faith-Based Organizing with Jeffrey Stout Health & Inequality with Angus Deaton and Anne Case Planetary Life in World Religions with David Grinspoon Foundations of International Law with Jeremy Waldron Origins of Good & Evil with Paul Bloom and Jean Porter Countering Violence in God’s Name with Jonathan Sacks Writing Workshop for Theologians with Marilynne Robinson Future of Institutes for Advanced Study with David Nirenberg

OUTREACH Fresh Thinking Magazine Theology Matters Podcast Leading Thinkers Live Videocast ‘Migrations’ with Princeton Nonprofits Salon on Stockton with Morven Museum Astrobiology, Religion, and Society (CUP) Research Workshops for Emerging Scholars Witherspoon Lectures in Theology & Science Psychology MOOC & Handbook for Theologians Theology as Interdisciplinary Inquiry (Eerdmans) Scheide Lectures on Religion & Global Concerns Consultations with St George’s House, Windsor Castle Knowledge Exchanges in Africa, South America, Oceania Symposia with Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study Partnership with Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality Forum Cooperation with Law & Public Affairs Program, Princeton University Collaboration with International Bar Association & Salzburg Global Seminar Partnership with Leverhulme Centre for Life in the Universe, Cambridge University

ISSUE 14 SPRING 2025 DIRECTOR William Storrar ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR Joshua Mauldin CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Linda Arntzenius CENTER MANAGER Michelle Tan EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT Kamal Ahmed DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS Robert Jones

CONTRIBUTORS Etin Anwar Linda Arntzenius Celia Deane-Drummond David Grinspoon Agustín Fuentes Kanan Kitani Robin Lovin Joshua Mauldin Ephraim Meir Friederike Nüssel Mary Ellen O’Connell Peter Ochs Marilynne Robinson

CONSULTANT ON DIGITAL RESEARCH Clifford Anderson

Susan Schneider

SOCIAL IMPACT FELLOW John Walker

William Storrar

DESIGNER Debra Trisler

Ulrich Schmiedel Jonathan Sacks Edwin Turner Jeremy Waldron John Walker

ACADEMIC ADVISORY PANEL John Bowlin Peter Casarella Francis Clooney David Fergusson David Ford Agustín Fuentes Tammy Gaber Eric Gregory Michael Hecht Jan-Olav Henriksen Jennifer Herdt Cathleen Kaveny Nico Koopman Ian McFarland Friederike Nüssel Peter Ochs Peter Paris Esther Reed Susan Schneider Mona Siddiqui Rothney Tshaka Jeremy Waldron Leslie Wingard

BOARD OF TRUSTEES Roy Lennox, Chair Gayle Robinson, Vice Chair Jon Pott, Secretary Robert Wedeking, Treasurer George Aberdeen Fred Anderson Darrell Armstrong Bette Jane (B.J.) Booth Robert Gunn Douglas Leonard William Storrar Robert Traynham Charles Wall EMERITUS/EMERITA TRUSTEES Robert Hendrickson Carter Karins Jay Vawter Judy Wornat Ralph Wyman

OUR MISSION We convene leading thinkers in an interdisciplinary environment where theology makes an impact on global concerns, and we share our research to inform public thinking.

OUR PROGRAM Thriving in Diverse Contexts

CONTENTS 2 From the Director For Whom the Bells Toll

5 Center Director Reflects on the Past Twenty Years

by Linda Arntzenius

22 Retrospectives CTI Members discuss the Center’s enduring impact in the academy and beyond

38 Joshua Mauldin Looks back on the past ten years, and looks ahead to the future

40 Member Books The latest books from our scholars

46 News Shaun Casey delivers William Scheide Lecture Andrew Davison delivers Witherspoon Lecture David Nirenberg visits CTI

BACKGROUND IMAGE: MICHAEL GRAVES ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN

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— FROM THE DIRECTOR —

For Whom the Bells Toll

T

he turn of the year in Scotland is often called “The Bells.” It is the moment between Old Year’s Night and New Year’s Day when the bells on church and town steeples chime at Midnight, ringing out the old and ringing in the new. Those bells came to mind in writing this farewell column as Director, ringing out not just the past year but the last twenty years.

As I looked back on my two decades in office, and started to make lists of all the research topics we covered and events we held over that period, three bell-shaped word clouds emerged, now graphically illustrated on the front cover of this issue of Fresh Thinking. Allow me to ring each of these bells in turn, and not just to mark my passing as the old Director! Rather, I want to recall what I heard in each of their sonorous chimes.

The Inquiry Bell This first bell cloud names the twelve inquiries CTI has run over twenty years, convening research groups in residence and online to work together on interdisciplinary themes, everything from the foundations of international law to the sources of human flourishing. What I heard from these inquiries at their best was the sound of thinkers chiming in tune with one another across disciplinary borders. This was best expressed by Francis Clooney SJ, Professor of Comparative Theology at Harvard and a longstanding CTI Member. Frank said this after participating in CTI’s inquiry on the societal implications of astrobiology: I think all of us go away from this consultation with a certain sense of confidence that the great knowledge of the past, the expertise of science in the current moment, and our global planetary future can be usefully connected and that if we really want to face up to issues that concern us today, we have confidence that we can draw on all the resources of our human race.

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After twenty years of convening these interdisciplinary inquiries, I can say with confidence that CTI can draw on all the resources of the academy to face the issues that concern us today. Why? Because theology as practiced at CTI has shown itself to be a humble field of inquiry, inviting dialogue with neighboring disciplines and concerned publics while speaking of God and all things in relation to God, authentically in its own academic voice.

The Symposium Bell The second bell cloud names the symposia CTI has convened in my time to explore new areas of research, learn from leading thinkers, or engage with new publics. So many moments chime in my memory from these special gatherings and conversations but one stands out. I think of the time I introduced the UK’s Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks to Robert Bellah at a CTI symposium reception.

Sacks was visibly moved to meet the sociologist whose research had so richly informed his own thinking as a Jewish religious leader and public intellectual. Bellah in turn was deeply moved by the Hebrew blessing on meeting a sage that Sacks spontaneously offered him. More than that, Bellah sent me this note about his experience of being at that CTI event: I don’t remember ever being at a conference where the general level of discussion was so extraordinarily high and where I learned something from every speaker, and they were all from such different fields. The academy is divided into a whole series of iron cages. All that is just smashed through by this conference, and the effort of the Center along these lines is extraordinarily noble and the degree to which they have achieved it is remarkable.

This memorable encounter between Sacks and Bellah gives the clue to what time and again moves people about CTI. As the womanist theologian Katie Geneva Cannon said of her experience in CTI’s workshop with Marilynne Robinson, here we learned to write soul to soul again, and not just in the technical language of the doctoral program. After the privilege of witnessing such testimonies from leading thinkers at CTI over 20 years, I can say with conviction that James McCord’s founding endeavor to bridge thought, belief, and borders is a noble effort, not least as the world divides once more into a new series of iron cages.

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The Outreach Bell

The Peal of Bells

My third bell cloud lists just some of CTI’s many initiatives over the past twenty years to reach out beyond the Center to the wider academy and public.

As Director of CTI, I have not only led a research institution for advanced study but also served as president of a New Jersey nonprofit corporation.

For me this has meant taking very seriously the official definition of a nonprofit. It is an organization that enjoys tax exempt status because it performs a public benefit. One of the greatest experiences of my time in office has been to work closely with the Board of Trustees to develop our current strategic plan and the design of our renovated building.

Each shares the same aim of going public with CTI’s nonprofit benefit, fresh thinking on the problems of religion and society. Both show clarity about CTI’s calling to go public.

As the late Judith McCartin Scheide was wont to say in Board of Trustee meetings, drawing on Biblical imagery, for too long CTI has hidden its light under a bushel, doing great things but all but unknown to the Princeton community and wider world. No longer. Our new building is the talk of the town. Tom Greggs’ new program will be the talk of the town meeting.

These then are the three bells that ring out for me after twenty years directing CTI. After twelve interdisciplinary inquiries, I am confident in CTI’s way of doing theology.

After many symposia with leading thinkers, I am convinced of CTI’s gift for changing lives. After multiple instances of going public, I am clear about CTI’s record of casting light on global concerns.

I have so many people to thank for this peal of bells.

First and foremost, I must thank my visionary Board of Trustees past and present for the great honor and privilege of serving as their Director and for their unfailing support and guidance under the wise leadership of Fred Anderson and Roy Lennox, adding special mention of my mentors in good governance, Robert Hendrickson, Jay Vawter, and Charles Wall. Then I must thank my superb staff team past and present; I am so grateful for the administrative skills of Shirah Brown and Jade Talag over the years and Michelle Tan today, the executive assistance of Kamal Ahmed, and the facilities management of Bob Jones. A special tribute to my Associate Director Joshua Mauldin for his academic acumen in programing, podcasting, and editing and his collegial contribution to CTI’s strategic development—our common cause, Josh. I must record my thanks to all those CTI members and academic advisors who have exemplified McCord’s virtues of dedication to scholarship, openness to fresh thinking, and generosity of spirit, realizing his hopes for CTI. In this my final issue of Fresh Thinking, I want to thank graphic designer Debra Trisler and writer Linda Arntzenius for working so well with Josh to produce a magazine worthy of the newsstand. And finally I must thank the donors, funders, and vendors who have enabled CTI’s nonprofit mission to flourish through their gifts, grants, and services. In all these things, I thank my wife Joanna and our three sons, Ian, Keir, and Neill for their love and prayers. Above all these things, I thank God who heard them.

Godspeed then CTI as you ring out the bells to welcome in your new Director.

—William Storrar

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Center Director Reflects on the Past Twenty Years

BY LINDA ARNTZENIUS

William Storrar is a happy man.

Looking back over his twenty years at CTI, he has much to be happy about. And, let me say it, much to be proud of. When asked to consider the appointment as Director of the Center of Theological Inquiry (CTI), Storrar was the Professor of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology at the University of Edinburgh where he directed the Center for Theology and Public Issues (CTPI). Although well-suited to the challenge that lay ahead, he never imagined he’d be here for two decades nor where those years would lead. Here we look back on the accomplishments of those years . . .

PHOTO: JEFF TRYON

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I

n the light-filled space of the Center following its transformation into a space for 21st century ways of working, Storrar reflects on the several decades of professional and academic experience that ultimately prepared him for CTI. “In terms of research and teaching, there were four areas of practice I was deeply interested in as a practical theologian: the practice of collaboration, the practice of interdisciplinarity, the practice of public engagement, and the practices of institutions— their purpose, how they work, how they should be run and how they can be improved.” All four would prove valuable assets over the next two decades, as would a naturally gregarious disposition and generosity of spirit.

As Director of the Center for Theology and Public Issues (CTPI) in Edinburgh, Storrar had brought together colleagues in the social sciences, humanities, law and medicine, to conduct research on issues of public concern such as the high suicide rates among young men, the contested notion of the rights of the child, and what citizenship looks like in the digital age, to name a few. He’d learned just how generative interdisciplinary collaboration could be and was convinced that theologians should be engaging with practitioners, policymakers, concerned citizens and civil society groups in the public sphere; actively engaging in public issues—not talking in ideal terms about how Christians should be involved but thinking of what contribution they could make. To that end, he’d initiated the Global Network for Public Theology to foster collaboration among university centers and programs in theology and public issues. CTI hosted the founding consultation in 2007. Today the GNPT links some fifty such research centers world-wide.

The opportunity to direct a center that was intended to be interdisciplinary was irresistible. “The prospect of working full time in the prime of my life dedicating myself to interdisciplinary research, fostering collaboration, engaging in public questions, was exciting,” he says.

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A Perfect Match Perhaps, most significantly (with hindsight), was the opportunity to employ his interest in the practices of institutions. Storrar was particularly influenced by the insights of two thinkers. German-American theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich averred that among the matters practical theologians should be concerned with was the the ideal institutional settings in which theology should be done. The Australian Catholic theologian and anthropologist Gerald Arbuckle believed that the way to consider the future of an institution is to examine its founding vision. If it is still relevant, let that founding intention for the institution cast light on its present life and future direction. But, if the founding vision is no longer relevant no number of attempts at reform will save it; find something else.

Prepared to Dive In With these thoughts in mind, Storrar spent his first year at CTI immersed in the Center’s founding documents, primarily the writings and recordings of James McCord. “I saw a clear vision for an independent research center for theology that was, in McCord’s words, interdisciplinary in character and modeled quite explicitly on the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, albeit, as he acknowledged, on a modest scale. I was deeply persuaded of its continuing relevance.”

According to McCord, theologians would be in residence alongside natural scientists, social scientists, scholars in the humanities and law, generating fresh thinking on the problems of religion and society through the free exchange of ideas for extended periods—he suggested between a semester and three years. “The whole point of a resident program that was interdisciplinary in character,” says Storrar, “was precisely that scholars and scientists living and working alongside each other every day for extended periods was the only way to get to a deeper level

Remembering the Theological Conversation of interdisciplinary understanding; where you understand how a scientist thinks, how a theologian thinks, how a Jewish scholar thinks about particular questions.” Like mastering another language, one needs to be immersed in a culture, speak it every day and think in it.

“After my immersion in the founding documents, I saw myself as a steward of McCord’s vision and was heartened to discover that this was something I shared with the Center’s first Director Daniel Hardy.” Storrar’s immediate task was to think how best to realize that vision in practice.

First, however, there were some institutional, financial, and administrative problems to be addressed. In 2005, CTI had twelve townhouses for its visiting scholars. Luce Hall, which was purpose built for the Center, had opened in 1984. The resident program had been running for 20 years.

Storrar found a Center that was working in many commendable ways. But, with the notable exception of a few scientists, philosophers and historians, the scholars-in-residence were all within the field of theology and divinity—theology, biblical studies, ethics, and church history. Under his immediate predecessor, there were also two ongoing collaborative research groups, typically meeting twice a year for three days, over three years, and at the end of that time doing a book of essays together. “CTI had become focused on scholars on sabbatical leave pursuing their own entirely individual research projects in divinity overwhelmingly within the Christian tradition. There had been a handful of Jewish scholars-in-residence over the 20 years; hardly any scholars of Islam or of Asian religions.”

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

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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 sabbatical 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-

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“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.

William Werpehowski

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

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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.

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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

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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.

Not coincidentally, this first inquiry would initiateSIMMONS Robin Lovin’s involvement with CTI. StorFRED rar 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

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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 and Judith Scheide

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

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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 14

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Robert Bellah

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

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.

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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

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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 anthropology, 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 scientists interested in religion as part of the origins of human evolution, notions of transcendence, meaning 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.

EPHRAIM MEIR

on Religious Violence: A Jewish Philosopher’s Perspective

An Extraordinary Experience

Respecting boundaries and crossing them

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.”

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.

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Storrar worked closely with the Board of Trustees, seen here at their first meeting in the new Center building, February 2024

Further Breakthroughs 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-

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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-

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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

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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.”

Psychologist Michael Spezio and Practical Theologian Elijah Baloyi, Colleagues in the Current Inquiry on Thriving in Diverse Contexts

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.

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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

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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.

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IMAGE: © JEFFREY TOTARO, 2024

The Trustees have named the Colloquy Room in honor of William F. Storrar at the request of Charles & Nancy Wall, donors.

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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JEREMY WALDRON on the Working Group on Theology and International Law

“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 transformative force in long-standing conflicts where the participants are coming close to despair.”

—Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (1948-2020)

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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.

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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.

William Storrar, Peter Ochs and Friederike Nüssel

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,

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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.

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

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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?

CTI’s Director visiting Doshisha University with Kanan Kitani

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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-

Historic Oura Church, Nagasaki, Japan

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.

PHOTOGRAPGHS: SEANPAVONEPHOTO / ADOBESTOCK

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

Orthodox Church, Hakodate, Japan

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.

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ETIN ANWAR on Changing Perceptions of Islam Etin Anwar is Professor of Religious Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. She teaches classes on Islam, gender, and comparative ethics and has authored multiple books and articles on those topics. She has been featured in a TV documentary called Muslim Women in our Midst: The Path to Understanding and is the co-founder of One-on-One Friendship, which is a youth network that promotes friendship with conscience for social justice, cultural exchange, and creative collaboration. She was a resident member in CTI’s Inquiry on Religion and Violence, 2018-2019.

The following interview originally appeared in Fresh Thinking, Issue 3, 2019.

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Where did your scholarship in Islamic studies begin?

My undergraduate major was comparative religion. And that major was very important in shaping my understanding of Islam because, growing up a Muslim in Indonesia, I looked at Islam in terms of faith. In studying comparative religion I learned about Islam in terms of an academic subject matter. Islam is faith and Islam is a subject matter, but the two approaches, that of faith and of academic subject, are different. So, by the time I was in university, I was able to raise the question “What is Islam?” Now I can add some sophistication to it. Before I was asking “what is Islam?” and “what does Islam say about X?” But now I am asking “How would Islam respond?” That is a very different question because the first is more dogmatic, more doctrinal. The second is more inquisitive.

After my education at the State Institute for Islamic Studies where I studied for four years, I went to McGill University in Canada. My experience at McGill was transformative. For the first time, I learned how to become a scholar at the global level and not just in Indonesia. My approach to Islamic studies is now different from my approach to Islam in Indonesia.

Let’s discuss your project in CTI’s Research Workshop on Religion & Violence.

My project questions the Western perception of Muslims as violent people. How did such a perception emerge, and what allows it to proliferate in the United States and elsewhere? While at CTI I have been studying these fundamental concepts and terms. As of now the title of my work is going to be “Let’s pray they are not Muslims: Debunking Myth and Fostering Hope.”

This title comes from a phone call conversation I had on the morning of September 11, 2001. My best friend from McGill called me and said, “turn on your TV.” It was

“The most important part of the CTI workshop for me is the space to give voice to one’s own views while

difficult to watch. And my friend said to me “Let us pray that they are not Muslims.” Of course, later in the day we learned that they were. So this project is a reminder of what radical Muslims did. And we see these again and again. And in my opinion, Muslims need to own it. That yes, there are problems with some Muslim followers. Not all. It is small, but still. How can Muslim communities and Muslim scholars address violence done by Muslims?

As a scholar of religion, how do you think about religion and its connection to violence?

The word “religion” itself is distinctively Western and we are basically asking the rest of the world to define religion in Western terms. I don’t know if we can think differently about the word, whether it needs to be religion or maybe something else. If we agree on the word religion, then we can start addressing which part or aspect of religion we should focus on. We know that there are many factors that contribute to violence. Political instability, economic competition, lack of social cohesion. But if you were to address the question of violence from a religious perspective, then the question is how would Islam address violence? Which parts of Islamic teaching should be emphasized?

How has the CTI workshop impacted your research project?

The most important part of the CTI workshop for me is the space to give voice to one’s own views while at the same time being open to ideas that are articulated by scholars from different fields and perspectives. I benefitted from each conversation I have had at CTI. Each scholar would think from his or her own perspective and we would debate how if the concept is X then the implication would be Y. That is the scholarly part. But more important is the collegiality. CTI organized a program that brought together scholars from around the world. I am Muslim. My colleagues at CTI are Christians and Jews. And we get along fine. What this shows is that if we are educated enough about religion, then we are able to see similarities and differences. Perhaps that is the key to understanding religion. It is important for all of us to understand what religion is and why it is important to people.

being open to ideas from different fields and perspectives.”

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JOSHUA MAULDIN

I

Looks back on the past ten years, and looks ahead to the future

arrived at CTI over ten years ago, in August 2014.

As we look ahead with excitement to the arrival of our next Director, Tom Greggs, the turn of a new decade naturally leads me to reflect on these years working with and for Will Storrar.

I had the good fortune to receive a Junior Research Fellowship at CTI during the 2014-2015 Inquiry on Law and Religious Freedom. That was a wonderful year, bringing together six theologians and six legal scholars to collaborate on questions of law, freedom, religion, and society. The balance between theologians and lawyers meant that no one field had the upper hand. I got the chance to see what it was like to be in a law seminar. Law cases were cited as though we were in a courtroom. In order to take part in the conversation we had to read various judicial opinions alongside theological treatises. These were heady times, and even today I continue to harvest the knowledge gleaned during that seminal year.

Through a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, in the spring of 2015 I moved into the posi-

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tion of Outreach Officer at CTI, a role that allowed me to think more about how academic ideas might be made available to broader publics. In the years since I have continued to do a lot of that outreach work, even as my role expanded to Assistant Director and since 2019 to that of Associate Director.

A colleague of mine at another institution recently told me that when he thinks about what academic research centers fundamentally are, in their basic essence, he thinks they are all about people. That seems right to me, and when I look back over the past decade, and look ahead to the next, I think primarily about the people I have encountered and will encounter. I think above all of the colloquia, symposia, and other research conversations convened at CTI, far too many to recount here, but the flavor of which is found throughout the pages of this magazine.

Secondly, I think of the people I have encountered through the Theology Matters podcast, which has afforded me the opportunity to engage a wide range of scholars on issues where theology makes a

difference to global concerns. The first episode of the CTI podcast was released on October 29, 2015, when podcasting was relatively new. I recall a few people at the time asking me “Now, what is a podcast?” The first episode featured a conversation with Lucas Mix, Susan Schneider, and William Brown, on astrobiology and society. Since then we have published more than 100 episodes, with countless downloads on various platforms. We will continue to scale up the podcast in the coming years, empowered by our new digital studio purpose-built for podcast recording.

During my early years at CTI my work involved helping to edit our yearbook, The Commons. That gave me the toolkit to help launch and edit the Fresh Thinking magazine, now in its 14th issue. Editing the magazine has been a true joy, not least because it involves working with such wonderful colleagues, including especially Director William Storrar alongside our wonderful writer Linda Arntzenius and our superb designer, Debra Trisler. More recently, since August 2024, I have benefited greatly from working alongside John Walker, CTI’s Social Impact Fellow in cooperation with Princeton University’s GradFutures program. A doctoral student at Princeton, Johnny offers immense intellectual gifts to the theological academy. When I think about this decade at

CTI, I think about particular people, and indeed about particular moments. I recall arriving at the CTI housing at sundown in late August of 2014, having driven all day from Knoxville, Tennessee and with much anticipation for the year ahead. I recall carpooling with a colleague to the Center each day and how the car-ride conversations led to research insights that I continue to work with today.

I recall, a few years later, having lunch in CTI’s kitchen with Jewish philosopher Ephraim Meir and Christian theologian David Tombs. After completing our simple brown bag meals, Ephraim pulled out a small Ghirardelli piece of chocolate, about one square inch in size. He then broke it into three pieces and offered sections to David and me. To my surprise there was plenty to go around. I was reminded of the parable of the loaves and fishes. I was reminded of the breaking of bread in Jewish and Christian liturgy.

Looking back with fondness over the past decade, I approach the coming years at CTI with gratitude and expectation, ready for many more encounters and conversations in the next chapter of the Center’s history, with our new Director Tom Greggs.

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Member Books The latest books from our scholars, showcasing advanced research BIBLICAL THEOLOGY: Essays Exegetical, Cultural, and Homiletical | by Clifton Black Clifton Black is well known and widely loved for his exegetical acuity, his theological seriousness, his pastoral kindness, and the most delightful sense of humor in the biblical studies guild. All these qualities are amply displayed in these thirty essays written across four decades of his career, including four essays that are published here for the first time. Biblical Theology: Essays Exegetical, Cultural, and Homiletical represents the fruit of a lifetime of studying, preaching, praying, training pastors, walking in the light, and laughing in the valley of the shadow of death. Black’s keen mind and pastoral heart make this volume a rich contribution to the field of biblical theology.

WHY READ PAVEL FLORENSKY? | by John Burgess This book offers an excellent, accessible introduction to the life and thought of Father Pavel Florensky, one of the most prominent religious philosophers of Russia’s highly creative Silver Age at the beginning of the twentieth century. Florensky, an Orthodox priest, died in Stalin’s gulag in 1937. His writings were long suppressed in the Soviet Union, and Western Protestant and Catholic theologians have known little about him. John Burgess argues that Florensky’s worldview is as important today as it was during his lifetime: a deep sensitivity to the beauty of the natural world; a conviction that the religious cult—acts of worship and ritual—make human culture possible; and an understanding of the Christian faith as, above all, a way of seeing God’s glorious presence in all of creation.

THE NICENE CREED: An Introduction | by Phillip Cary This readable book presents a brief commentary on the Nicene Creed, the most important confession of faith in the Christian tradition. Designed to be useful to pastors and scholars as well as accessible to ordinary readers, it explains unfamiliar vocabulary and displays the biblical background of the creed’s formulations.

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HINDU AND CATHOLIC, PRIEST AND SCHOLAR: A Love Story | by Francis Clooney This autobiography traces Francis X. Clooney’s intellectual and spiritual journey from middle-class American Catholicism to a lifelong study of Hinduism.

It explains how he came to fashion comparative theology as a way of learning interreligiously that is boldly intellectual and deeply personal and practical, lived out in intersections of his roles as theologian and scholar of Hinduism, as professor and Catholic priest, and over the tumultuous decades from the 1960s until now, in his role as Parkman Professor of Divinity, Harvard University. Clooney sheds fresh and realistic light on the idea and ideal of scholar-practitioner, since his wide learning, Christian and Hindu, is grounded in his Catholic and Jesuit commitments, as well as in a commensurate learning with respect to several Hindu traditions that are most accessible to scholars willing to learn empathetically and in a participatory manner.

REFORMED HUMANISM: Essays on Christian Doctrine, Philosophy and Church | by David Fergusson This volume comprises a collection of essays ordered in three parts, each of which describes broadly the sub-fields of theology to which these belong.

The essays tackle core themes in Christian doctrine, the longstanding relationship of theology to philosophy, and a series of challenges facing churches today. While the volume represents a Reformed theological approach often with a historical focus, it self-consciously reflects an ecumenical and critical perspective. The term “humanism” reflects an openness to insight, understanding and correction from different fields of knowledge, while its “Reformed” designation positions the work within a recognized theological tradition though seeking to avoid imprisonment by it.

BACKGROUND IMAGE: SOZH / ADOBESTOCK

STUDIEN ZUM BUCH GENESIS | by Jan Christian Gertz This volume includes studies addressing the history of the origin and interpretation of the Book of Genesis, the significance of the biblical Primeval History in the context of the literary and intellectual history of the ancient Near East, and the question of the relationship of Genesis to the subsequent Exodus narrative.

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Member Books The latest books from our scholars, showcasing advanced research EXPERIENCES PROCESSED BY RELIGIOUS MEANS | by Jan-Olav Henriksen The practices of religious traditions contribute to processing human experiences in different ways: Sometimes by engendering experiences, sometimes by contributing to interpreting experiences as religious. By analyzing various established positions on so-called religious experience, Henriksen’s book contributes fresh analyses of these positions and approaches them by combining a hermeneutical and pragmatist approach. He develops an argument that focuses on the need to consider experiences processed by religion from both a first-person perspective and a third-person perspective. He argues for a non-reductionist, naturalist approach to these without eliminating their potential theological significance. Against the backdrop of the discussions about established scholarly positions, Henriksen also provides concrete empirical examples that partly elucidate and partly challenge these. Thus, the book contributes to the ongoing debate about how to discuss experiences people understand as having religious significance.

HUMILITY in the Writings of Charles Wesley and the Early Church Fathers / Mothers | by S.T. Kimbrough Humility is a central focus of the early church fathers/mothers. Similarly, it is at the heart of Charles Wesley’s thought expressed in his poetry, sermons, and journal. For Wesley, humility plays an active role in the process of salvation.

“It can but lead to faith,” he says. For the fathers and mothers of the early church, salvation void of humility is unthinkable. For Wesley the words “humble” and “humility” pervade almost every aspect of Christian character, personality, and experience. A careful examination of Wesley’s writings reveals congruences with and a close relationship to the thought of the early church fathers and mothers on the subject of humility. Throughout this study, examples from witnesses of the Eastern church emphasize the closeness of their thought with that of Charles Wesley. A careful comparative study is made of St. Basil the Great’s “Homily on Humility” and Wesley’s multiple references to humility in prose and poetry.

This leads to an interesting response to the question: How does one practice humility? St. Basil says, “Everything that Christ did was a lesson in humility.”

This study suggests that in the cycle of the Christian year and the liturgical rehearsal of everything that Christ did, one learns to practice humility.

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SPIRITUAL CARE IN OUR MULTIFAITH WORLD | by Daniel Schipani Across the helping professions, and as a compassionate response to human suffering, spiritual care is a special process of companioning. Furthermore, all forms of spiritual care always consist in connecting diverse wisdom traditions with care receivers’ spiritual resources, longings, and struggles in socio-cultural and contextually pertinent ways. This book thoroughly explicates such understanding with interdisciplinary lenses. Its main purpose is to offer a comprehensive response to the new challenges and opportunities for excellent care presented by increasing cultural and religious-spiritual pluralization. Practical guidelines and case studies are connected with models of spirituality, spiritual toxicity and injury, communication strategies for engaging difference, patterns of caregiving work, and profiles of professional competence.

FAITH: A Very Short Introduction | by Roger Trigg What is faith? It usually means religious belief, and sometimes diverse religions are grouped together as “faiths,” with reference to “faith leaders” or “faith schools.” What we have faith in matters, and that involves our reason, involving claims to truths that affect everyone. Faith is not just a personal attribute, like tastes, but should be open to public examination and debate.

In this Very Short Introduction, Roger Trigg argues that all faith needs reason.

He puts contemporary discussions into historical perspective, particularly in the context of Christianity. Because religion is typically directed at what is seen as of crucial importance for human life, faith should not be marginalized or privatized. It will permeate every idea of how people should behave, and has a role in the public square, however respectful it should be to competing views within a democracy.

A PLURALISTIC AND JUST SOCIETY: An Interpretation of Sino-Christian Ethics | by Zhibin Xie With reference to significant Christian thinkers, Confucianism, and social circumstances in the Chinese context, this book examines the two topics of social pluralism and love and justice from the perspective of Christian ethics.

It aims to respond to the idea of “World-Formative Christianity” (proposed

by Nicholas Wolterstorff) from the perspective of Sino-Christian ethics by developing a public and interdisciplinary approach. This book envisions the relevance of Christian theology and ethics to the wider world and encourages the public responsibility of Christians and Christian scholarship in Chinese academia and society. This responsibility engages with cultural and social contexts, in which Christian values are appropriated and unfolded.

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Member Books The latest books from our scholars, showcasing advanced research

Review Essay by John Walker

PAUL AND TIME: Life in the Temporality of Christ | L. Ann Jervis

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The uneven traffic between biblical studies and theology continues to be mourned as a casualty of theology’s modern fragmentation. Divided into relatively autonomous and often non-conversant sub-disciplines, even scholars with a desire to transgress these boundaries often find the exchange-rate too high to be worth the trouble. The great exception, if there has been one, has been the study of Paul’s letters. In particular, the rediscovery of the New Testament’s eschatological outlook has had a dramatic effect upon theology in the twentieth century and into the present day. Even among the two dominant blocs of Pauline scholarship, the so-called salvation-historical school and the apocalyptic school, there is agreement on one point: eschatology is decisive for understanding the apostolic kerygma. Whatever else theologians have learned from their biblical studies colleagues, this stands at the top of the list. It is hardly an overstatement to say that the schema of the already and not yet has become common currency across confessional and ecclesial-academic divides. The schema is filled out in different ways, but the notion of an overlap between an old age and a new age is almost universally assumed.

In Paul and Time: Life in the Temporality of Christ, L. Ann Jervis wants to overthrow this consensus. Despite claims to the contrary, she argues, the Apostle did not think in terms of two overlapping ages. He did not claim that believers co-exist simultaneously in a passing old age and an-inbreaking new. A simple fact has escaped the rival interpretations of Pauline eschatology: in the uncontested writings, “Paul does not speak of the new age.” (p. 48) In those places where commentators identify references to the new age, Paul himself speaks of Christ. Jervis believes that Paul’s interpreters mistakenly subordinate chris-

tology to eschatology and so reverse the order of Paul’s own thinking. For Jervis, Paul is first and foremost a christological thinker, not an eschatological one.

To foreground christology is not, however, to deny the centrality of historical and temporal categories for Paul. It is rather to place them in a new light. The tendency has been to assimilate Paul to a chronological framework thought to be ubiquitous in second-temple Jewish apocalyptic texts. The strategy is reasonable but overlooks the diversity among apocalyptic conceptions of history and historical periodization. Drawing on the work of Loren Stuckenbruck, Jervis argues that we are not justified in importing into Paul a two-age framework solely on the basis of apocalyptic features in his thought. We need to ask how the Pauline texts conceptualize temporality on their own terms. Jervis’s argument is that, instead of two ages, Paul thinks in terms of “two types of time,” or “two temporalities”—what she names “life-time” and “death-time.” This is not merely another label for the two-age framework. It is an alternative, a way outside it. “Paul conceives of believers living not in an age but in the being of Christ.” (p. 117) Christ shares with believers his own mode of temporality, which is equally God’s temporality. His time is the “now time” (Rom 8:18) of unending life. Thus, union with Christ is entry into a new form of temporal existence.

The crucial contrast between Jervis’s two-times interpretation and the standard two-ages view is that she denies any possibility of overlap. There is a clean break between death-time and life-time. “There is no both/and but only either/or.” (p. 133) When one enters into fellowship with Christ, one leaves death-time behind. To put this in more familiar terms— which admittedly Jervis might resist—she is attributing to Paul a more “realized” eschatology than many have claimed to find in him. She doesn’t deny the presence of a future eschatology, but she qualifies and relocates it. She writes, “Creation’s current situation is

drastically different from what it will be, whereas the circumstance of the children of God is not.” (p. 112) Believers are already living in life-time, wholly free from the grip of death-time. The future will bring about certain changes, but the “unveiling that believers await at Christ’s day/parousia will not, however, change their temporality.” (p. 126) The central consequence, then, for Jervis, is that Paul underscores the “completeness and adequacy of Christ’s present life for believers.” (p.

132) The apostle’s view of life in Christ is not concerned with a not yet. His attention, according to Jervis, is fixed on the life-giving presence of Christ for believers now.

Jervis concedes that an attraction of the two-ages view is that it provides an accessible framework for thinking about evil and suffering. If believers exist simultaneously in the old age and the new, then the miseries and horrors of life can be attributed to the ongoing subjection to evil powers. If Jervis is right, however, Paul does not think this way. “The apostle does not source suffering in the present evil age.” (p. 136) For Paul, the suffering and death of the faithful has been radically transformed. It is now “with-Christ suffering” (p. 137) and “the death of believers’ bodies is not fatal.” (p. 129) Despite the air of paradox, the pains and injuries of believers exist within life-time. Influential interpretations of 1 Corinthians notwithstanding, “Paul does not think believers’ death is a problem.” (p. 105) Undoubtedly, Jervis has authored an ambitious book.

In under 200 pages she attempts to overthrow a central pillar of New Testament scholarship. Even the unpersuaded will be grateful for the provocation to revisit fundamental questions deserving more careful scrutiny. One virtue of Jervis’s book is the way it challenges the reader to reflect more deeply on assumptions too easily taken for granted. Paul’s letters evidence a strange and unfamiliar experience of time’s constitution and unfolding. Jervis is right to point this out and we can hope that her provocative proposal will yield increased attention to this theme.

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of the Office of Religion and Global Affairs from 2013-2017 under the Obama Administration.

Casey recounted how he was recruited by Secretary of State John Kerry, who had come

NEWS

to recognize the need for American diplomacy to take seriously the role of religion in foreign policy. As a Professor of Christian ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC, Casey was well-suited to articulate the public significance of religion and to understand the varied concerns and priorities that animate its practitioners. Despite the formidable presence of religion in many of the most prominent geopolitical conflicts of the last 50 years, no one had yet to see to it that the US Foreign Service was equipped to attend to these realities. The causes for this oversight were multiple, but undeniably one was fear. As Casey quipped, dealing with religion in diplo-

Shaun Casey Gives Public Lecture at CTI on Religion in American Diplomacy

macy is “akin to brain surgery—necessary, but fatal if not done well.”

With no formal precedents, Casey had to construct his team from the ground up and publicize and interpret its role to others in the State Department. There were potential sources of resistance. No one had ever done this before and diplomats often have troubled relations

46

On October 23, the Center of Theological

with external organizations. Nevertheless, Ca-

Inquiry hosted Shaun Casey to give the

sey insisted that their purpose was to serve and

William Scheide Lecture on Religion and Global

equip, not to demand or point the finger. As a

Concerns. In the first public event held in CTI’s

result, they came to be appreciated and re-

newly remodeled building, Casey addressed

spected by the Foreign Service. The task of the

a room of theologians and the civic-minded

Office of Religion and Global Affairs was three-

public on the “The Future of Religion in Amer-

fold: (i) to advise the Secretary of State when

ican Diplomacy.” His lecture reprised themes

religion came across his screen, (ii) to equip the

from his 2023 book, Chasing the Devil at Foggy

over 200 embassies and consulates to analyze

Bottom: The Future of Religion in American Di-

religion on the ground, and (iii) to provide a

plomacy, which reflects on his tenure in the US

point of contact for anyone (individuals, NGOs,

State Department as the Special Representative

institutes, nations) who wanted to discuss reli-

for Religion and Global Affairs and the Director

gious affairs. Much of the work was pedagogi-

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cal, educating those in diplomatic posts about the religious realities of their host countries and encouraging them to make contacts with religious communities and their leaders. Diplomats are often skittish in talking to religious leaders—especially about religion—and yet, as Casey reminded them, most clergy love to talk and love to be heard. If the diplomat’s role is to interpret America to the host country and the host country to America, then religious communities cannot be barred from the table.

Over his tenure, the Office worked on a number of high-profile cases—the Paris Climate Accords, a campaign against public corruption in Nigeria, the Disability Treaty, the global refugee crisis—which he recounts in detail in Chasing the Devil at Foggy Bottom. In the lecture, Casey shared two vignettes. In the first, he recalled writing his first memorandum for Secretary Kerry, who was to meet the following day with the Vatican Secretary, Pietro Peralin, of the newly installed Pope Francis. In the second, he told of his visit to Cuba, meeting with a seasoned Cuban official to discuss how US and Cuban

Andrew Davison Delivers Witherspoon Lecture in Theology and Science

religious communities might deepen ties with one another. Unexpectedly, given past rebuffs,

On March 10, the Center of Theological Inquiry

she was receptive.

was pleased to welcome Andrew Davison to

Casey concluded by commending the value

deliver the Witherspoon Lecture in Theology

of interdisciplinary work on religion and diplo-

and Science on the subject Life from Lifeless

macy. He recalled that decades ago, George

Matter: A Theological View.

Kennan, Reinhold Niebuhr, and J. Robert

The newly appointed Regius Professor of

Oppenheimer met for lunch at the home of the

Divinity at Oxford University, Davison is no

Oppenheimers in Princeton, where they dis-

stranger to CTI. For two years he was the Dis-

cussed theology. These giants of international

tinguished Fellow in Theology and Science at

affairs, one of whom was a leading theologian

the Center (2022-2024) and Project Co-Leader

of his generation, had cultivated relationships

of the current Study Program on Thriving in Di-

of mutual collaboration and cross-disciplinary

verse Contexts. Davison is a founding member

discussion. Where might such collaboration

of the pioneering Leverhulme Centre for Life

take place today? Perhaps, he suggested,

in the Universe at the University of Cambridge.

Princeton is still the place.

He is also the author of a recent volume,

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To accept life’s natural origins is to say that there is a natural story to tell of life’s emergence, involving no divine interruptions or disruptions.

Such a story, however, does not exclude God. Properly understood, God is not only the cause of all things, but the author of their causing.

NEWS

Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine: Exploring

abyss” between the living and the dead. In

the Implications of Life in the Universe (Cam-

later years, however, Oparin came to be more

bridge University Press, 2023).

optimistic. Along with British scientist J.B.S.

Davison invited the audience to consider

Haldane, his work lies behind the Oparin-Hal-

what resources the theological tradition might

dane theory that matter possesses a dyna-

have to make sense of the natural origins of

mism that harbors a propensity to assemble

biological life. Although classical theologians

into life. Subsequent research has pursued this

did not countenance the emergence of life

trajectory with promising results, such that the

by natural processes, they were not whol-

once impassable abyss may yet be crossed.

ly devoid of related notions. Keeping with

Davison pointed out that both Oparin and

the biblical account in Genesis, they af-

Haldane were Marxists whose metaphysical

firmed direct divine creation for the majority

commitment to dialectical materialism sup-

of species, but they also allowed for sponta-

plied them a notion of matter as more than

neous generation of certain lesser creatures,

inert, lumpen stuff. That philosophical theory

such as worms and vermin. In the fifth century,

could play such a generative role in scien-

Augustine even speculated that God repop-

tific advance is one reason to suppose that

ulated animal life after the flood by its emer-

theology might serve scientific inquiry. The

gence from the earth, bypassing reproductive

ordinary, routine work of scientific research

means. The theory of spontaneous generation

may do well enough on its own, but for break-

was discredited in the early modern period,

throughs at the edge of present knowledge,

but its widespread acceptance among earlier

the conceptual and imaginative resources of

theologians demonstrates a theological imagi-

theology serve as vital stimulant. This convic-

nation capacious enough to welcome non-mi-

tion animates the interdisciplinary project be-

raculous beginnings to life. It only came to be

gun at Cambridge University’s Leverhulme

opposed by church authorities when it was

Center for Life in the Universe.

seen as funding atheistic and deistic criticisms of traditional religion.

48

Davison argued that theology should respond to new discoveries without anxiety. If

The desire for a naturalistic account

a natural account of the origins of life is avail-

of the origins of life intensified after Dar-

able, there is no reason to think that clashes

win’s discoveries. These efforts initially were

with the substance of the theological tradition.

frustrated. The great Soviet bio-chemist

To accept life’s natural origins is to say that

Alexander Oparin spoke of an “impassable

there is a natural story to tell of life’s emer-

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gence, involving no divine interruptions or disruptions. Such a story, however, does not exclude God. Properly understood, God is not only the cause of all things, but the author of their causing. Thus, we should look for mediation, Davison counseled, not miracles. Thomas Aquinas, writing in the 13th century, argued that God “wishes to act by means of nature in order to preserve order in things.” The establishment of immanent powers of causation was, for Thomas, an act of divine generosity.

God shows benevolence to creatures by not causing everything directly, so that they might themselves play a causal and communicative role in sharing the good of existence. According to Thomas, “In the first founding of the order of nature we must not look for miracles, but for what is in accordance with nature.”

From this perspective, the natural emergence of life from lifeless matter is no theological scandal. Augustine saw the potential of creatures to bring forth new instances of life

IAS Director Visits CTI

as a source of praise. He wrote, “As a mother is pregnant with the unborn offspring, so is

William Storrar was honored to welcome David

the world itself pregnant with the causes of

Nirenberg, the Director of the Institute for Ad-

unborn things.” Because God magnanimous-

vanced Study and Leon Levy Professor to CTI

ly works through the mediation of creation,

in February. After a tour of the Center’s new

scientists are right to look for a natural mecha-

building, Professor Nirenberg made a presen-

nism. Yet, Davison also argued that we do well

tation to the Board of Trustees on “The Past

to recognize that matter is not so unliving after

and Future of Institutes for Advanced Study,”

all. When we look back at matter from the van-

highlighting IAS’s new Center for Collaboration

tage point of life, we see in it a potential, even

which will foster cross-disciplinary exchange

an orientation toward life. Matter is not inert,

among its four schools. He also took part in

without process, without meaning. The emer-

a panel discussion on the nature and prac-

gence of life may not have been caused by mi-

tice of interdisciplinary scholarship with CTI’s

raculous intervention, but it remains a source

Director Designate, Professor Tom Greggs,

of wonder all the same. Astonishingly, mat-

and Princeton University Professor of Anthro-

ter shows itself to be poised toward life. Davi-

pology Agustín Fuentes. In thanking Professor

son concluded, “And I would add that matter

Nirenberg for his visit, Director William Storrar

cannot be entirely estranged from life if it is

looked forward to growing links between the

the gift of the living God.” —John Walker

two institutions under his successor.

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50 Stockton Street Princeton, NJ 0854o

But what can we do? This is a question I am often asked as Director of a research center that studies problems of global concern. It is an impassioned plea that returns me to CTI’s mission of sharing our discoveries to inform the way people think and act. In what practical ways can we help solve today’s most pressing global problems? CTI is dedicated to making a theological impact through interdisciplinary and interreligious inquiry.

By pursuing the theological task in this way, we face the tension between a sense of moral urgency to resolve the questions we study and the need for slow, patient scholarly work to understand them.

We work in the tension between urgency and understanding.

—William Storrar

ctinquiry.org