ISSUE 4 SPRING 2020
FreshThinking MAGAZINE OF THE CENTER OF THEOLOGICAL INQUIRY
LEADING IN THE NEW NORMAL OF A PANDEMIC WORLD CTI’s digital workshop for global religious leaders
OUR MISSION: We convene leading thinkers in an interdisciplinary research environment where theology makes an impact on global concerns, and we share those discoveries to change the way people think and act.
ISSUE 4 SPRING 2020
FreshThinking M AGA Z I N E O F T H E C E N T E R O F T H EO LO G I C A L I N Q U I RY
FROM THE DIRECTOR 4
Solidarity amid Fragility
THEOLOGICAL INQUIRY
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Ephraim Meir: A Jewish Philosopher’s Perspective
on Religious Violence
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Religion & Economic Inequality: Meet the Research Team
12 Leslie Wingard: Rethinking Sin, Servanthood,
and Social Inequality
16 The Word Made Digital: Deepfakes and Talking Pictures
20 Nico Koopman: Mandela’s Dream:
page 4
Democracy in South Africa 25 Years On
THEOLOGICAL IMPACT
page 12
24 Antti Pentikäinen: Developing Support Mechanisms
for Reconciliation
26 Hannah Strømmen: From CTI to the United Nations
28 Conversations with Freeman Dyson by Linda Arntzenius
33 Remembering Reinhold Niebuhr
On the cover: Leading in the New Normal of a Pandemic World CTI’s digital workshop for global religious leaders
page 16
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FROM THE EDITOR
Making Theological Connections
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ust as this issue of Fresh Thinking was in the final stages of production, the world was facing the global pandemic, Covid-19. Steadfast in our mission of sharing our discoveries with you, we bring you this latest edition of our magazine, now online. Our thoughts are with each and every one of you, our CTI community, as we all adapt to a new way of life and work. Our work of connecting research with practitioners and policymakers, informing the way they think and act, is even more relevant at this time. In the opening article, CTI Director William Storrar discusses how CTI is collaborating with Religions for Peace to reflect on what leadership means in the new normal of a pandemic world. This issue of Fresh Thinking highlights the kind of theological inquiry CTI is engaged in, as well as the impact of our theological work. Ephraim Meir, a Jewish philosopher who participated in our research workshop on religion and violence, discusses in his article how his understanding of dialogue works against religious tendencies toward violence. Two members of CTI’s recent workshop on religion and economic inequality, Leslie Wingard and Nico Koopman, each gave public lectures on their projects and their work is discussed in articles here. Our entire cohort focused on religion and economic inequality, an interdisciplinary group of researchers from around the world, is profiled in a further article. “The Word Made Digital” points toward an emerging area of study at CTI: the challenge of the digital age and the resources theology brings to bear on this global concern. In the fall of 2019, CTI held a joint conference with Dr. Hanna Reichel of Princeton Theological Seminary on Theologies of the Digital. The themes discussed build on previous work at the Center undertaken by scholars such as Susan Schneider and Dirk Evers, as well as a public lecture by Heinrich Bedford-Strohm on “The Ethical Challenge of the Digital Age.” CTI undertakes theological inquiry in order to have an impact on global concerns. Articles by Hannah Strømmen and Antti Pentikäinen highlight such impact. Hannah Strømmen discusses how she shared her CTI research with policymakers at the United Nations. Antti Pentikäinen is a practitioner of religious peacebuilding and reconciliation who has worked in conflict zones around the world. His time at CTI gave him a space to reflect on the practice of peacebuilding alongside experts in the field of religion and violence. Finally, we include an essay by Linda Arntzenius on scientist Freeman Dyson, who died aged 96 in February of this year. Dyson was a polymath who wrote on a range of scientific topics. What perhaps is less well known is that he interacted with theologian Reinhold Niebuhr when Niebuhr was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. We include a brief story on Niebuhr alongside the essay on Dyson. Dyson as a scientist and Niebuhr as a theologian represent the kind of interdisciplinary work CTI fosters: rigorous, open to dialogue, focused on basic questions, with a sense of urgency given the global problems we face. As ever, we welcome your comments and insights by email at editor@ctinquiry.org. —Joshua Mauldin
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FreshThinking MAGAZINE OF THE CENTER OF THEOLOGICAL INQUIRY
DIRECTOR William Storrar EDITOR Joshua Mauldin DIRECTOR OF PHILANTHROPY Karin Morse CONSULTING EDITOR Linda Arntzenius DESIGNER Debra Trisler CONTRIBUTORS Linda Arntzenius Nico Koopman Ephraim Meir Antti Pentikäinen Hannah Strømmen Leslie Wingard PHOTOGRAPHER Frank Wojciechowski EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS Clarence Hammond Jade Talag
Henry R. Luce Hall 50 Stockton Street Princeton, NJ 08540 609.683.4797
ctinquiry.org
CTI Board of Trustees DIRECTOR William Storrar ACADEMIC ADVISORY PANEL John Bowlin Peter Casarella Francis Clooney Angela Creager David Fergusson Agustín Fuentes Michael H. Hecht Jan-Olav Henrikson Cathleen Kaveny Nico Koopman Robin Lovin Friederike Nüssel Peter Ochs Peter J. Paris Jeremy Waldron
CTI’s Impact
BOARD OF TRUSTEES Fred Anderson, Chair Charles Wall, Vice Chair Jon Pott, Secretary Roy Lennox, Treasurer Brian Fix Robert Gunn Robert Hendrickson Dale Irvin Carter Karins Douglas Leonard David Markus Gayle Robinson Judith McCartin Scheide William Storrar Jay Vawter
HONORARY TRUSTEES Craig Barnes Robin Lovin Richard Mouw Krista Tippett EMERITUS/EMERITA TRUSTEES James Armstrong Judy Wornat Ralph Wyman
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FROM THE DIRECTOR
What can we do as a global network of researchers in theology and related fields of inquiry? We too are working in solidarity with others to make our own hallmark theological contribution. Allow me to share the news of our collaboration with a global partner to respond to this global crisis. It is a remarkable story of how our trustees and donors have enabled CTI to play our part. Leading in the New Normal of a Pandemic World
I
Solidarity amid Fragility
n the midst of the world’s present turmoil with the coronavirus pandemic and public health emergency, we are all experiencing both the fragility and the solidarity of human life. Solidarity amid fragility—these are theological themes over millennia that resonate at this hour of our common peril. Any comment on our current plight must therefore begin with compassion for the sick and dying and condolences for the bereaved. Such solidarity with the vulnerable is followed by support for all those bravely on the frontline of health care and community service around the world, so often at the risk of their own lives. And then comes gratitude for the faith communities and concerned citizens who are reaching out to neighbors and for the scientists working across borders to develop vaccines for a cure. Along with our own loved ones, these are the people and organizations who are first in our thoughts and prayers at this time, those working for the repair of the world in its extremity. But what of CTI in the present crisis? CTI is a research institute on God and global concerns.
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It was only in early January, but it seems a world away now. One of CTI’s trustees generously hosted a dinner in New York City to share our research on economic inequality with invited guests. Professor Nico Koopman, one of the scholars in our research workshop, spoke movingly of the value of being at CTI as a theologian and university leader, thinking in dialogue with colleagues on how to tackle the inequalities in his home country of South Africa (see page 20). Among the guests our trustees invited that evening was Azza Karam, a senior advisor on religion and global issues to UN bodies and a professor of religion and development at the Free University, Amsterdam. As a Muslim scholar and global leader, Professor Karam welcomed this introduction to CTI’s interdisciplinary program. She looked forward to future collaboration with CTI on our common ground of theological and global concerns. Little did we think that January evening that our collaboration would happen so soon. But it did and it has, all thanks to the trustees who supported that outreach event and the donors who fund our mission on God and global concerns. As the COVID-19 virus was spreading alarmingly around the world in February and March, Professor Karam was preparing to take up her new leadership responsibilities as Secretary General of Religions for Peace International. Religions for Peace (RfP) is a nonprofit organization that has been working for fifty years with religious leaders around the world in peacemaking. In analyzing the global public health emergency and the appropriate response of Religions for Peace, Azza saw the situation not as a passing crisis but as the ‘new normal’ of a pandemic world. This radically altered global context called for fresh thinking on religious leadership for peace. As CTI’s mission is to foster fresh thinking on religion and global concerns, Azza proposed a partnership between our two nonprofit organizations to run a joint digital workshop for global religious leaders on these challenges. And so in the coming weeks, research scholars in our interdisciplinary network will be in dialogue with global leaders in RfP’s multi-religious network to think together on the complexities of ‘Leadership in the New Normal of a Pandemic World.’
Bridging Theory & Practice
What are some of the leadership challenges and complex problems our joint workshop will address? They have been well articulated in our partner’s account of our collaboration: The intention of this workshop is to pioneer an intensive dialogue between scholars and religious leaders on the intersectional nature of “Leadership” as it relates to and is shaped by diverse areas of focus, in and beyond a time of pandemic. A critical conversation on these diverse subjects will enhance a holistic perspective on the global effects of COVID-19, will allow for the drafting of inclusive and creative solutions, and will produce a vision of leadership to navigate the “new normal.” The interaction between theory and praxis in one domain necessarily enlightens the other areas of focus identified for this workshop. Environment, gender, and peacebuilding, all of which are key strategic priorities of RfP and reflect the areas of global concern investigated by CTI, are inclusive and intersectional in nature. In a time of COVID-19, these areas have been recognized as profoundly impactful and in need of closer scrutiny. The environment is one such critical area of focus, as the international scientific community recognizes the causal link between human-led environmental degradation and the ever-increasing exposure to novel viruses and diseases such as COVID-19. And yet the absence of human activity in only this limited time has, in many cases, improved environmental health and stability, raising the question of how global leadership can maintain or even expand this outcome moving forward. The outbreak of COVID-19 has a strong gender implication as well, with new literature slowly emerging and challenging the absence of a gendered perspective on COVID-19. Women constitute the vast majority of care and health workers globally, which puts them at the forefront of pandemic responses and exposes them to a greater threat. Women also often work unpaid or in informal working structures supporting the overall functioning of societies. During times of crisis, with the rise of financial insecurity, women are disproportionately affected. And, in the ongoing situation of physical and social isolation, domestic violence towards women becomes an imminent threat. Contexts surrounding efforts for peacebuilding and conflict transformation are inherently unstable and exacerbate the effects on the most marginalized in society. When instances of global crisis emerge, such as the
ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, conflict situations are further aggravated as resources grow scarce, communities become isolated, and interventions become nearly impossible. RfP’s own efforts to promote peaceful, just, and inclusive societies have been disrupted, postponed, or even cancelled in an effort to prioritize and comply with global health standards. Yet, in this time of heightened tensions, the cessation of hostilities has never been more crucial. Religions for Peace, with over 50 years of experience facilitating multi-religious and multi-stakeholder partnerships, has identified faith leaders whose areas of expertise strongly align with the above focus areas. These faith leaders, who are equipped to contribute based on their unique regional and religious identities, will join CTI researchers in bridging theory and praxis in informative ways, as they envision the responsibilities and opportunities for leadership in the “new normal.” CTI’s Contribution to Leadership in a Pandemic World
The Center of Theological Inquiry is honored to be working in this way with global religious leaders to help them envision their responsibilities and opportunities in this new normal of a pandemic world. Our contribution will be to draw on the expertise of the research scholars in our interdisciplinary program. The issues of concern to Religions for Peace in responding to the pandemic—environment, gender, and peacebuilding—are precisely those we have been investigating in our recent research inquiries: the complex relationship between violence and religion, especially gender-based violence; the environmental interconnectedness of planet, biology, and human life; and the appeal of international law as a basis for peacemaking. Our partnership with Religions for Peace has shown the relevance of theology and CTI’s mission for religious leaders on the frontline of peacemaking in a pandemic world. I am deeply grateful to Professor Azza Karam and her RfP colleagues for their collaboration in our common cause of seeking the global good. But CTI’s public impact in this global emergency would not be happening without the support of CTI’s trustees and donors. Your connections introduce us to visionary partners like Azza Karam. Your donations enable CTI to answer the call for an informed vision to navigate a pandemic world. Your solidarity with CTI as trustees, scholars, and supporters makes our response to the new fragility possible. Thank you for your support, now more than ever. —William Storrar, Director
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THEOLOGICAL INQUIRY
EPHRAIM MEIR
Religious Violence A Jewish Philosopher’s Perspective
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s history demonstrates, the effects of religion are not always benign. A Jewish perspective on the concepts of “belonging” and “truth” offers remedies against exclusivity and claims to absolute truth. In an interreligious, dialogical theology from a Jewish vantage point, “trans-difference” respects the differences between the religions and, towards a peaceful society, seeks connection between the religions by bridging, translation, hospitality and epistemological humility. Instead of forming oppositional identities with little tolerance for difference, one may celebrate diversity and learn from religious others. Consciousness of diversity and of various degrees of belonging is therapeutic for religious dissimilative aberrances or religious over-attachment. In a misconception of belonging, religions refuse to be in contact with the world; they pursue otherworldly aims even as they function within the world. Jewish dialogical philosophers offer some remedies for this. Emmanuel Levinas denounced the violence in the myth of participation in the numinous or the Sacred. Martin Buber deemed that belonging to God and to humanity go together. Abraham Joshua Heschel combined a pious life with humanism, in which human rights took center stage. As a religious man, Heschel felt impelled to engage with the world. He acted against racism since the whole of humanity is God’s beloved child. Observing the sanctity of every human life, he defended the rights of black people in the United States and discussed the Vietnam War with the likes of U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (1961-
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68) and U.S. Secretary of State (1973-77) Henry Kissinger. He defended Jewish rights in the Vatican and denounced anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. Heschel did not reserve religious language for the synagogue. He brought it with him into his protest marches and daily conversations. Sanctification of God’s name in public would take place whenever indifference was breached and replaced by empathy for the suffering of others. For Heschel, the world had to be repaired and transformed. It was not a wall, but a gateway to God. Another great Jewish thinker, Franz Rosenzweig, noted that God did not create religion: He created the world, which had to be mended in the process of redemption. In Jewish dialogical philosophy, “belonging” implies relating to all, especially to the excluded and underserved, the poor and the stranger. According to Lev. 19:34: “The stranger who dwells among you shall be to you as one born among you and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” In the Jewish tradition, Rabbi Akiva cites Lev. 19:18: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” as a great principle of the Torah. However, since this verse suggests concerns only for one’s own people, Ben Azai cites Gen. 5:1: “This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him,” as a greater principle. Thus, Ben Azai saves the love of neighbor from an overly constricted interpretation. Tribalism, triumphalism and dehumanizing actions hamper our interconnectedness with all. Belonging always implies belonging to the whole of humanity.
The stranger who dwells among you shall be to you as one born among you and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God. —Lev. 19:34 Remedies Against Absolute Truth Claims
A second form of religious violence, not unrelated to the problem of belonging, is present in absolute truth claims and in eschatological dreams of victory over religious others. In absolute truth claims, one disregards the historical contextualization of religious texts. Being in possession of the absolute truth or the “right” explanation of religious texts is a source of violence. Religious dogmatism is blind to religious alternatives. One way of healing interreligious violence as a result of absolute truth claims comes from an interreligious theology. From this perspective, all religions are valid paths to the Transcendent. Religions are finite understandings of the Infinite. “Trans-difference” humbly recognizes many views on the Transcendent. The Transcendent cannot be encompassed by one tradition; all religious traditions offer a partial and finite perspective. Truth is born in dialogue with others, not just in tolerating others. In Jewish thinking, one does the truth. Instead of searching for abstract truth, one searches for a meaningful life and for cross-bordering values. The aim of truth is peace, and peace conditions the search for truth. The Hebrew word for truth is ’emet and its semantic field points to trust, not to cognition. ’Emet in Judaism is an ethical attitude. Jewish pluralistic tradition offers resistance to the rigid position of those who claim absolute truth. In the famous Talmudic story of the oven of Achnai, Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrkanus discusses with other rabbis whether an oven is kosher or not. He has miracles and a “divine voice” on his side. But one of the disputants, Rabbi Joshua says: “It is not in heaven” (Deut. 30:12) and in the end, the decision is against Rabbi Eliezer. The majority goes against the divine truth. The saying “It is not in heaven” challenges absolute positions. Even if the majority decides, the singular dissident voice is preserved. Absolute truth claims lack contextualization. When texts are understood literally, one pulls them out of their context and neglects subsequent re-reading. In the course of its his-
tory, Jewish tradition mostly interpreted the sources in a non-violent way and rabbinical re-reading often mitigated the violence in biblical sources. Present-day ethical sensibilities focus on texts that restrain us from being violent. Contextualization not only understands the historical situation of texts, but also how these texts are used in different eras. Bold and creative ethical re-readings of the Bible might search for what unites people rather than what divides them. The lack of contextualization present in a fundamentalist reading of sacred scriptures, leads to absolutizing texts and to fanatical behavior. One frequently hears “Judaism says,” as if different texts, voices and doctrines do not belong to specific times and specific people. Essentializing religions prevents one from perceiving the historical conditions in which religious texts came into being. Contextualization concerns the consciousness that texts function in later contexts. Texts may be interpreted in opposing ways. A philosophy of the other, however, allows for an ethical reading as well as for a new “we” in which diversity is celebrated. Samuel Huntington has argued that identities are essentially religious and, since the tendency of religions is to become rigid, they lead to a clash of civilizations. Is this necessarily so? Is an other-centered religiosity unimaginable? The prophetic words of Isaiah 57:19: “Peace, peace to the one who is far or near” provide inspiration here. Peace is realized in an openness of particular groups to all and in the attentiveness of all to people’s specificity. Universality and particularity are twin poles, which belong intrinsically together; dropping one leads to a lack of respect for others and to a neglect of one’s own situation. In Conclusion
Respecting boundaries and crossing them in communication and loving relationships is the task of the day. The creation of a bond between God and human beings lies in overcoming the religious/secular divide and in the humble service to others. This does not entail the religious conquering of the secular but making religion a transforming energy relevant and useful again for the world. Against identity-politics, one may extend relatedness from belonging to one group to belonging to all. Against privatization of religion, the humanizing forces in religion may prevail. Religious and secular persons may rediscover the tremendous might of goodness, mercy and loving kindness inherent in religion. —Ephraim Meir
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Examining Religion & Economic Inequality Meet this Year’s Research Team
clockwise from top left: Leslie Wingard, Nico Koopman, Manitza Kotzé, Robert Gascoigne,
Simon Yin, Marcia Pally, Zhenshuai Jiang, Claudia Hoffmann, Paul Oslington, Devin Singh
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ith the 2013 publication of his Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty brought the subject of wealth and income inequality to the forefront of public debate. The French economist argues that the rate of capital return in developed countries is persistently greater than the rate of economic growth. In short, the world is set for increasing wealth inequality. “Economic inequality separates people from each other in a confronting and alienating way,” says theologian Robert Gascoigne, professor emeritus at the Australian Catholic University and a member in CTI’s workshop on Religion and Economic Inequality. “Although material well-being is only one aspect of the development and flourishing of the human person, it is the pre-condition for many others—and spiritual development is put under grave stress. Authentic religious faith is called to draw attention to this, and to encourage and challenge human communities to achieve some degree of material equality.” At CTI, says Director William Storrar: “Economic inequality calls for dialogue across disciplines to deepen our understanding of its contested relationship to religion.” Hence the focus of the 2019-2020 workshop on Religion and Economic Inequality, the third in a five-year series focusing on Religion and Global Concerns. This year, the Center’s finely-tuned selection process is bringing together a multifaceted set of individuals, eleven senior, mid-career, and promising scholars—from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and North America—in economics, religion, literary studies, sociology, biblical studies, Catholic theology, cultural and political studies, and bioethics. Most straddle multiple fields, making them open to the sort of interdisciplinary dialogue that characterizes CTI’s method. While Gascoigne focuses on ways in which Catholic tradition “can foster economic equality as a key part of the Church’s witness to human dignity,” fellow member Marcia Pally is developing a framework for economic policy and practices that address inequality and its consequences. To this end, Pally, who participated in a 2017 CTI preparatory consultation on Religion and Economic Inequality, examines concepts of relationality in the Christian and Jewish traditions. “If we took our relationality seriously, then we would all need to see and to see to, to recognize and to attend to, all of our relationships, starting with those nearby but with our global connectedness as those relationships extend out. And, if we took that seriously, our economic policies might be considerably different from what they are today,” she says. Besides teaching at New York University, Pally is a regular guest professor at Humboldt University in Berlin. Her
most recent books are Commonwealth and Covenant: Economics, Politics, and Theologies of Relationality and America’s New Evangelicals: Expanding the Vision of the Common Good. “What I’ve been looking at for a long while are the theological, the cosmological ideas in the Christian and Judaic traditions that emphasize relationship with the transcendent and simultaneously relationship among persons as mutually constitutive—you don’t get relationship with God without relating to other people and our relationship to God supports us in our relationship to other people. You really don’t get one without the other. It’s a very covenantal idea. At the moment, our economics is not very covenantal and we suffer from a lot of difficulties because it isn’t.” Born and raised in Manhattan where her first love was dance, Pally was ultimately drawn toward scholarship in cultural and political studies. Her interest in Reformed Covenantal Political Theory stems from earlier work on the cultural history of the United States that led her to examine aspects of the American experience (the immigrant experience, the frontier experience, British liberalism) that, along with a very robust synergy with many religious traditions, contributed to the basket of cultural ideas, presuppositions, values, and norms that came to undergird America. This led her to look specifically at Reformed Protestant traditions and to covenantal political theology as it developed in Europe. “Reformed Covenantal Political Theology is based on the notion of covenant and of situating the individual within networks and layers of relationships; it is these bonds, these people, that forms sovereignty and the polity. This is the ground for the work I’m doing now.” Relational Economics
When it comes to economics, Pally regards markets as inherently relational. They will “only flourish this way within society and within societal relational values,” she says. “Markets don’t work if you don’t understand that they are set within relational societal entities and the worldview that separates the individual or the individual enterprise out is foundationally incorrect. We get into trouble if we pretend that is the way things work. When you have runaway greed, without concern for any other actor in the market, you get financial crashes like we had in 2008/2009, which was devastating.” In terms of her commitment to potential real-world solutions, Pally is a good fit for CTI. Having explored policies that fail to recognize the individual’s relational embeddedness such as the out-sourcing of work with its concomitant lack of retraining or redevelopment for workers made redundant, she suggests policies that would address inequality, such as “broad-based investment in education, through-life fresh THINKING
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job training, and infrastructure with combined funding and organization from business and government.” Practical as well as theological matters also preoccupy Nico Koopman, Vice-Rector for Social Impact, Transformation and Personnel at South Africa’s Stellenbosch University. Cognizant of the urgency to develop the deep and transformative understandings that are needed to guide universities, churches, faith communities, civil society, political, economic and ecological life, public discourse and opinion toward a society in which everyone can enjoy equal dignity, Koopman appreciates CTI’s environment as a safe space for experiment and creativity. “CTI facilitates hard work individually and hard work together,” he says. “In this interwovenness of individuality and communality new insights and knowledge come to the fore. We can do the work in heuristic fashion. Such lightness and risk-taking is crucial for new understandings and new knowledge.” Gascoigne also expresses his appreciation of the Center’s environment: “I value both the freedom it gives to focus on a topic of shared interest, and the focus it enables by bringing together a group of scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds and a shared interest in the topic.” Creative Freedom
Bringing such a group together however is no small matter. As economist Paul Oslington sees it, much depends on the quality and mix of scholars. Oslington is Professor of Economics and Theology at Alphacrucis College in Sydney, Australia, and has been involved in dialogue between economists and theologians for many years. “Those who want to participate in interdisciplinary conversation are a small and non-random sample of scholars in a discipline and CTI has a fine record of attracting people,” he observes. At CTI, Oslington, whose books include The Theory of International Trade and Unemployment; Economics and Religion; Adam Smith as Theologian; and Political Economy as Natural Theology, plans to work on “Economic Thinking about Inequality in Christian Context.” This will form part of a book he is writing for Harvard University Press. Economic Thinking in the Christian Tradition will examine the connections between Christian theology and the rise of economics as a discipline in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and also how economics has been shaped by and has shaped Christian thought. “With the increasing extent to which theologians on both sides of the inequality debate draw on economic arguments, deeper understanding of the relationship between Christian and economic thinking on inequality is important,” says Oslington. “There is no single simple answer to how theology relates to
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economics, and history helps us learn what is fruitful and unhelpful in particular contexts. Knowing about the history of our disciplines enriches the conversations.” The long history of money and Christian theological doctrine is the subject of Devin Singh’s book, Divine Currency: The Theological Power of Money in the West. The Associate Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College has been working in this area for well over a decade and is currently looking at the economic concept of “debt.” The Language of Christian Concepts
The term, says Singh, “emerges in history and society as an economic notion and it has since ballooned to capture, or colonize, other ways that we speak about obligation—with a sense of fealty, loyalty, gratitude, gift.” Instead, Singh argues, the term “debt” should be relegated to the economic sphere for something that is quantified with an explicit obligation to repay. “We tend to speak loosely about debt as a way to explain how we feel obligated to one another. I might say casually, I am in your debt, or I feel a debt of gratitude to you. Part of what I’m suggesting is that we might be doing ourselves a disservice by letting ‘debt’ be this umbrella term to explain these kinds of relationships or senses of obligation.” Although he was born in California, Singh spent much of his early childhood in international contexts and describes his early influences as both inter-religious and cross-cultural. His father is a Punjabi Sikh; his Anglo-American mother served in the Foreign Service and he lived with her in Cameroon and Morocco from the ages of three to ten. Early exposure to questions of economic development and poverty through his mother’s work with USAID (US Agency for International Development) led him to study biology and then medicine until his own personal spiritual quest led him in another direction toward religion. “The questions that I looked at were connected to poverty, to religion and revolution, and development and social change.” Given his background and interests, CTI’s workshop on Religion and Economic Inequality seems tailor-made for Singh and he is aware of the serendipity that brought him here. Early influences also had an impact on the future career of Leslie Wingard, Associate Professor of English at the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio. Wingard grew up in Westchester, Pennsylvania, where her father was a teacher, then a School Principal, and then Superintendent of Schools. A born teacher herself, even at a young age, she looked for ways to “pull the potential out of students.” Immediately before coming to CTI, Wingard was helping to develop Princeton University Graduate School’s new Graduate Scholars Pro-
gram for incoming first-generation, low-income, and otherwise under-represented graduate students. Wingard’s current project is a book, under contract with the University of Georgia Press, titled, Being, Belonging, and Beyond: Redefining African American Christianity in the 21st Century. Inspired by the Kathleen Norris best-seller, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, Wingard’s book is geared toward a general audience. Unlike Norris’s work, written in the form of memoir, Wingard’s will use literature and visual culture to analyze three pairs of Christian concepts: grace and peace, communion and virtue, and sin and hell. By exploring their 20th- and 21st-century histories and their particular resonance and significance in African American Christianity and culture, Wingard will unpack the expansive meanings of these concepts.
Diverse Mix of Scholarly Expertise Contributing to the intellectual mix are scholars who bring a diverse variety of expertise to bear. Claudia Hoffmann is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Basel in Switzerland. A former pastor, she completed her PhD in 2016 and is currently working on a case-study that examines migrant churches in Switzerland. Zhenshuai Jiang, Associate Professor at the Center for Judaic and Inter-Religious Studies, Shandong University, China, and Research Associate at the University of
Zurich, also completed his PhD in 2016. At CTI, he
Works-in-Progress
is furthering his research into how writings by the
At the heart of CTI’s program are small group work-in-progress sessions that bring close scrutiny to an individual Member’s work with comments requested and received in turn from colleagues who have read the work in advance. “I’ve benefited enormously from the conversations I’ve had with my colleagues here at CTI,” says Singh, who has been prompted to think about “debt” in connection to race and treatment of racial minorities. Wingard too speaks of insights gained. “To be able to talk to other CTI scholars is a once in a lifetime opportunity for me. As a literature scholar it’s really helping to develop my religious and secular vocabulary and other members have helped me to think more about the section of my work that is steeped in issues of economic inequality.” Such sessions demonstrate what CTI Director William Storrar calls “thinking aloud together.” During them, scholars invariably discover parallels between their respective understandings. Alternative interpretations and challenges are weighed. Scripture, among myriad resources, is often cited and anecdotal experiences often reinterpreted from new perspectives. Definitions rarely fail to elicit requests for further explanation. Subtle themes and nuances are drawn out, presuppositions exposed and queried, lines to follow and examples suggested. It’s a nitty-gritty process that deals with complexities, “footnotes to footnotes” as Storrar puts it; an experimental approach of “what if ” questions. It is also a process that demands openness to other interpretations and to unforeseen consequences that a scholar may not have anticipated. It is a painstaking process, to be sure, but one where cumulative effort takes the participants closer to the goal of informing the way people think and act.
prophets Hosea, Amos, Micah, and Isaiah that were critical of socio-economic injustice—the exploitation of the poor and the weak—were transposed into law in ancient Israel and Judah. Simon Yin, a professor of economics at Hefei University of Technology in China, examines religion in the development of China’s economy, with a particular interest in how Buddhist entrepreneurs think about and respond to economic inequality with respect to their religious convictions. Manitza Kotzé́ received her PhD in Bioethics and Systematic Theology at the University of Stellenbosch and now teaches Bioethics and Systematic Theology at South Africa’s North-West University. Her research focuses on a Christian response to ethical issues related to biotechnology. Kotzé is especially interested in transhumanism (the idea that humans can evolve beyond current physical and mental limitations by means of science and technology) and human biotechnological enhancement. Her CTI project looks at how transhumanism could exacerbate existing economic inequalities and social divisions and may even give rise to new inequalities: How will experimentation in the development of bio-technology be conducted, for example?
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Rethinking Sin, Servanthood, and Social Inequality
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eslie Wingard, Member of CTI’s Religion & Economic Inequality Research Workshop delivered a public lecture in the fall entitled, “Sin, Servanthood, and Social Inequality in African American Literature and Culture,” prompting her audience to rethink domestic lives and economic inequalities as she explored how black writers and visual artists imbue Leslie Wingard, Associate common symbols of domestic Professor of English at labor—such as washtubs, launthe College of Wooster dry baskets, irons, and ironing boards—with spiritual and political resonance. She showed how writers and visual artists redeem and reconfigure implements of servitude into symbols of grace, beauty, and black people’s spiritual perseverance. In her 1942 autobiography, Dirt Tracks on a Road, the American author, anthropologist, and member of the Harlem Renaissance Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), remembers being puzzled as a child when her father decried people as sinners. Hadn’t Christ died in order to save the world from sin? She expressed her confusion to her father and brother. Chastised, she never spoke of it again (at least out loud), although she remained puzzled. Leslie referenced Hurston’s work alongside that of noted contemporary American sculptor, printer, and conceptual artist Willie Cole in her lecture. “Wingard is bringing a distinctive voice in African American literature and the arts to this year’s workshop on Religion and Economic Inequality,” said Director William Storrar as he introduced the speaker to an audience of scholars, students, and members of the public as well as her parents, and friends from the Princeton community. Like Hurston, Wingard is interested in definitions of sin from various perspectives. Her talk brought together the fictional washerwoman from Hurston’s 1926 story, “Sweat,” with Cole’s powerful statements about racial and economic
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equality as manifest in his use of irons, iron scorches on fabric and wood, and ironing boards (shown via a short PBS film). Wingard elucidated the ways in which such work addresses economic inequalities as they intersect with race, class, and gender. Hurston portrayed racial struggles in the early-20th-century American South. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. Cole uses familiar domestic tools, steam irons, in an artistic fusion of the physical, the symbolic and the narrative: irons that evoke African tribal masks, ironing boards that evoke slave ships. These are tools familiar to Cole as used by the women in his family, his washerwomen grandmothers, great grandmothers and aunts. Cole describes himself as a “perceptual engineer,” one who engineers new ways of seeing society. Going further, Wingard used Hurston’s story and Cole’s artwork to analyze the ways in which economic and other related inequalities are a form of violence: “The violent sin that is implicitly addressed in Hurston’s story and Willie Cole’s artwork, both invoking black female washerwomen, is the sin of slavery. The Hurston and Cole texts focus on more than just the violence inflicted on black washerwomen’s hands and backs. The texts implicitly or explicitly fight against other violences, like the humiliation, separation from families, no pension, low wage, sexual harassment, and rape that often came with being a washerwoman.” “Black Americans were often relegated to domestic service as a badge of dishonor; corrupt interpretations of religious scripture associated people of African descent with being the divinely intended ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’ based on presumed inherent and inherited sinfulness and inferiority. Recall, for example, the curse of Ham in the book of Genesis utilized as a justification for slavery.” Early Influences
Although Wingard now considers herself pretty much non-denominational, her upbringing in the Baptist Church her parents still attend in West Chester, Pennsylvania, fostered her questioning mind. “I was really active in the youth group and all the way up until going to college, it was a big part of my life. We would
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have Friday night socials and we were encouraged to ask a lot of questions about God and how he applies to our everyday life. We used to debate and I found that fun and important and I’ve always liked to go to churches where it was okay to openly ask questions and not have everything figured out.” With a BA in English, Wingard set out to be a journalist until drawn toward an academic career and teaching by the example of her professors at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. Since then, she’s held research positions in the Departments of English and African American Studies at Princeton University, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion, among others. Productive Dissonance
In 1907, writing in The Negro in the South, W. E. B. Du Bois asked: “Since we are not humble, merciful, or peaceful, isn’t it absurd to call the practical religion of this nation Christianity?” In 2010, Eddie Glaude Jr. (James S. McDonnell Distin-
guished University Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University) deliberately chose a provocative title for his Huffington Post article, “The Black Church is Dead.” His aim, said Wingard, was to start a conversation and the article succeeded in provoking heated responses from academics, clergy, congregations, and the general public. “I loved how Glaude provoked conflict to make his point,” said Wingard, who, inspired by both Du Bois and Glaude, authored a manuscript arguing that “20th-century and contemporary African American cultural texts purposely stage conflicts between the so-called strictly sacred and secular realms, conflicts meant to represent how central controversy is to inspiring pointed discussion about and a subsequent better understanding of the intersection of religion, politics, and sexuality.” According to Wingard such writers, filmmakers, visual artists, and musicians, persist in erecting a sacred/secular division seemingly to tear it down to demonstrate that dissonance can be productive.
Wingard’s articles have appeared in Religion and Literature, Religion and the Arts, South: A Scholarly Journal, and American Quarterly; her book manuscript Being, Belonging, and Beyond: Redefining African American Christianity in the 21st Century is under contract with University of Georgia Press.
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Cole uses familiar domestic tools, steam irons, in an artistic fusion of the physical, the symbolic and the narrative: irons that evoke African tribal masks, ironing boards that evoke slave ships.
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Why I Support CTI Having been a fellow in residence at the Center of Theological Inquiry on two different occasions, it seems like a small effort on my part to be a regular annual donor. I also try to promote the Center whenever I can at the various academic associations that I attend because I know of no better place than CTI for collegial discussion about theological concerns. Its excellent facilities of housing, office space, staff support amidst a stimulating consortium of international scholars within walking distance of major libraries at Princeton University and Princeton Theological Seminary constitute an academic paradise for scholars pursuing their respective goals.
Peter J. Paris, CTI Member Elmer G. Homrighausen Professor, Emeritus Christian Social Ethics Princeton Theological Seminary
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The Word Made Digital Deepfakes and Talking Pictures
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The event was a collaboration by CTI, PTS, and participating theologians from the United States and Germany. It followed on the heels of two important public lectures at CTI: the 2018 William H. Scheide Lecture in which leading German theologian Heinrich Bedford-Strohm examined “The Ethical Challenge of the Digital Age,” and the 2019 William Witherspoon Lecture in which Dirk Evers, Professor of Systematic Theology at Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg addressed “Artificial Intelligence: Friend or Foe of Human Flourishing?” Both lectures outlined the impact and history of the digital revolution and artificial intelligence that has yielded profit-maximizing algorithms, political opinion building and the spread of propaganda, the potential replacement of the human work force, and military research into autonomous weaponry. But while Bedford-Strohm and Evers examined questions raised by the digital age in multiple fields, the October colloquium was designed for a specific look at questions for theology and theologians. Theologies of the Digital
More than 30 enthusiastic and mostly young theologians gathered to look into the ways in which their discipline can contribute to the analysis, conceptualization, and assessment of the uses and abuses of emergent technologies, specifically at questions relating to “the Human Person,” “Freedom,” “Scripture,” and “Memory and Knowledge.” Questions, in other words, about: what it means to be human, to have free will, the implications for access to and understanding of religious scripture, its interpretation and its authority, and the challenge of deepfakes and implications of digital preservation. “Theologians think about the individual, the society, about knowledge and power and how these interact, all in light of the history of God with the world; we draw on traditions that are relating God and who God is to what we see happening in the world,” said conference organizer Hanna Reichel, Associate Professor of Reformed Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. “It’s not that we are using tech-
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magine this. You’re standing in front of the Mona Lisa, wearing a particularly snazzy augmented reality headset. Before your very eyes her enigmatic smile expands into a grin as she tells you (in the language of your choice, of course) some surprising snippets about her life and about the painter Leonardo da Vinci. Further on, you spot Lucas Cranach the Elder’s portrait of Martin Luther. Courtesy of your headset, Luther turns to face you and launches into a detailed description of the early stages of the Protestant Reformation. Welcome to a new world of museum informatics, where exhibits move and talk and relate their own history. Perhaps this all sounds too much like the wizarding world of Harry Potter? According to Clifford Anderson of Vanderbilt University, the technology already exists and is becoming more and more available. In today’s world, intelligent software can finish our sentences and even edit sermons for multiple language audiences. Using Lyrebird to enable audio overdubbing, editors can insert new audio into an existing recording that blends seamlessly with the words that came before and after. Synthetic videos, known as “deepfakes” can put words into the mouths of people who never uttered them in real life and place people in situations they were never in. As Anderson points out, while many such innovations are benign, created to educate or to inform, for fun or for satire, they can also be used for nefarious purposes, to deliberately misinform, embarrass, harass, even to blackmail. “With the democratization of off-the-shelf software, there is a lot of propaganda, for example, with the ability to create a facsimile of someone saying something in their own voice with their own facial movements,” Anderson notes. As with any new technology, there is positive and negative potential. And yet, Anderson warns against the danger of resisting technology outright rather than taking more challenging action. With other conference participants, Anderson shared his thoughts on the uses and abuses of emergent technologies at a “Theologies of the Digital” research colloquium held at the Princeton Theological Seminary (PTS) and the Center of Theological Inquiry (CTI) over two days last October.
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nology to do theology or, like digital humanities, thinking about tools and the way these reorganize the conversation; we are thinking about theology as giving a certain kind of reading and interpretation of what is happening.” According to Reichel, theologians, as well as sociologists, media theorists, and philosophers, are trying to offer new models of thinking that will make sense of recent rapid transformations. Theologians may have useful tools to offer here. Tools that may not have originated with thinking about the digital but might be applicable. “We are digital beings, unless you go all cash and off the grid, you are known by your digital footprint,” offered Kate Ott of Drew University, kicking off the first session. “Digital technology is under our skin, so to speak.” Ott described ways in which digital technology is fostering a sense of the self as plural. Her paper, “Digital Spiritual Embodiment: Power, Difference, and Interdependence,” looks at contemporary networked ways of being in the world. Florian Höhne of Humboldt University in Berlin furthered this examination with his paper, “The Porous Mask: A Theological Reflection on Concepts of Personhood and Personal Agency.” Taking part in the colloquium from Germany, via Skype, Peter Dabrock of the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg opened the session on “Freedom” when he addressed the impact of big data on western Democracy and spoke of ways in which theological approaches apply to digital age problems. Many of the questions raised around data-based surveillance, for example, seem to be variations on themes Christian theologians have wrestled with for centuries, noted Reichel: “Today we may ask: To what extent does data-based targeted advertising manipulate our purchasing behavior, desires, even our political choices? Calvin used to ask: How does divine providence guide and steer our actions and fate in mysterious ways according to a divine plan? Today we may ask: Can algorithms read our minds and predict our behavior? Boethius would have asked: If God knows everything, can my choices be considered free?” Reichel, a founding co-editor of the online academic journal Cursor: Zeitschrift für explorative Theologie, explores how digitization is in some ways comparable to divine omniscience. The theologian of German origin is currently working on a
book about the subject and her colloquium paper, “Digital Omniscience and Practices of Freedom,” examines knowledge and power intertwined; “reading the predictive capacities of big data through a Molinist lens, that is, an understanding of divine omniscience as the knowledge of what any particular person would have done in any possible world.” Benedikt Friedrich of Universität Bochum went on to compare the free software movement with the Reformed Protestant Church, explaining how the free software movement emerged and how its attention to fostering concrete practices of freedom in community could serve as models for ecumenical conversations. The conference’s second day opened with Michael Hemenway of the Iliff School of Theology speaking on “Scripture as Interface.” In front of the portrait of Henry R. Luce, the influential co-founder and editor-in-chief of Time, Inc. that hangs in CTI’s Luce Hall (named in his honor), Hemenway described his Luce Foundation Funded project. “Machines are not just our tools but our partners,” said Hemenway, before going on to demonstrate the uses of the open source AI interface Gpt-2, which generates biblical commentary that may one day be indistinguishable from that generated by humans. As he explained, an interface is something that provokes probabilistic prediction and Hemenway offered a different perspective in his thinking of machines as partners and of AI as different rather than superior. Even so, in the last few years, machine learning has begun to raise questions as to what it is to be a creative person. Frederike van Oorschot of the Forschungsstätte der Evangelischen Studiengemeinschaft, Heidelberg focused on how theologians use scripture and what that tells us about their understanding of scripture and its authority. She wondered whether some media are more appropriate than others for reading the Bible. Following on from Hemenway’s descriptions of the possibility of machine learning, van Oorschot speculated upon new interpretations that might result from the digitization of scripture informed by a mass of translations, interpretations, and histories. Would this result in new knowledge or would it move us further from the truth? The question arises as to
“It’s not that we are using technology to do theology or, like digital humanities, thinking about tools and the way these reorganize the conversation; we are thinking about theology as giving a certain kind of reading and interpretation of what is happening.” fresh THINKING
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“We must think beyond the economic, legal, and even ethical dimensions of deepfakes to consider their spiritual implications. The best way to assess the spiritual impact of any new technology is to spend time exploring its potential for good and bad, examining its components, and exercising our theological imagination.”
the relative value of sources (considering gender, racial and other possible biases). Should all be given equal standing or should some be privileged over others? “We need non-objectivity,” said Reichel. After all this is what every teacher does, curates information, selects and weighs and guides. Innovative Process
As well as focusing on cutting edge technology, the colloquium itself demonstrated a new, more intimate, collegial and interactive format. Before it took place, drafts of participants papers were published online (https://cursor.pubpub.org/issue3-theologiesofthedigital), advertised via twitter (#theodigital2019) and published in a forthcoming special issue of the online journal Cursor: Zeitschrift für explorative Theologie. Unlike traditional conferences, presenters didn’t read their papers. Students opened the discussion by giving responses to the contributions, volunteers acted as notetakers and tweet-watchers as well as a sort of “concept-meaning-monitor” ready to ring an alarm whenever a concept was introduced that someone thought needed elucidation. A collective notebook on the website PubPub allowed for comments. Developed at the M.I.T. Media Lab, PubPub is a collaborative, evolving, and open publication platform that fosters a process of thinking together. Participants were able to share initial drafts for live and online discussion and revision. Papers were discussed in the room while comments were recorded online. This was conversation in 3D, reminiscent of a 3D chess game. Epistemic Crisis
In a time of epistemic crisis in which deepfakes have spawned a crisis of trust, how is knowledge discovered? How do we arrive at wisdom? How do we sift through the mass of media and distinguish fact from fiction? Do our technological advances
make us knowledgeable or wise? Can they make us wise? Can the digital revolution be shaped in a responsible way? Can an ethics of algorithms be formulated? In speaking of “The Challenge of Deepfakes to Theological Epistemology,” Anderson noted both the need to stay skeptical and the impossibility of questioning everything. As he pointed out, complete skepticism runs counter to core principles of human psychology. Humans are wired to believe what they see with their own eyes. When that comes under question, when everything is open to doubt, our ability to act is undermined. How then can we re-invent trust in this digital age? How can people be helped to distinguish between true and fake? Anderson asks: “Will the proliferation of deepfakes push us as a society to become more critical about the mediascape about us? Will this critical perspective lead us into a postcritical stance that opens onto vistas of meaning? Or will we simply become more suspicious, refusing to believe the evidence of our eyes even when all signs indicate we are facing the truth?” The answers to such questions are far from academic. As Anderson related, the dissemination of fake videos can have fatal consequences. In October 2019, four protesters in Bangladesh died in riots sparked by a Facebook post that criticized the Prophet Mohammed. The post was thought, falsely as it turned out, to have come from a Hindu whose account had been hacked. Police arrested the hackers but it was too late to stop the riots. “As theologians, we have particular reasons to take care,” says Anderson. “We must think beyond the economic, legal, and even ethical dimensions of deepfakes to consider their spiritual implications. The best way to assess the spiritual impact of any new technology is to spend time exploring its potential for good and bad, examining its components, and exercising our theological imagination.”
Conference presentations are available on the PTS YouTube channel. The lectures by Heinrich Bedford-Strohm and Dirk Evers are available at ctinquiry.org.
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William H. Scheide Lecture on Religion and Global Concerns
Mandela’s Dream:
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Democracy in South Africa 25 Years On
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wenty-five years after Nelson Mandela became the first black head of state in South Africa’s first fully representative democratic election, the third annual William H. Scheide Lecture on Religion and Global Concerns examined Mandela’s legacy. On December 5, 2019, exactly six years to the day after the death of the great South African anti-apartheid revolutionary and political leader, the public lecture was delivered by Nico Koopman, Vice-Rector for Social Impact, Transformation and Personnel at Stellenbosch University and Member of CTI’s Religion & Economic Inequality Research Workshop. Mandela’s Dream, first expressed in the Freedom Charter (adopted in 1955 by the South African Congress Alliance), was for a country governed by its people, in which all national groups would have equal rights, share in the country’s wealth, own the land they work, live in security and comfort, with rest, leisure and recreation, peace and friendship. It would also be one in which the doors of learning and culture would be open. The Dream seemed to be realized, in 1996, two years after his inauguration, when President Mandela signed the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa together with a Bill of Rights articulating the vision of a new South Africa, one upon which South Africans of diverse backgrounds, even those who had been in conflict with one another, agreed. Especially important, said Koopman, was the fact that the Bill of Rights acknowledged all three dimensions of human rights: civil and political, socio-economic, and developmental and ecological rights. Taking stock, twenty-five years later, however, “we can conclude that our progress in building democracy in South Africa is ambivalent,” said Koopman. “We have to a high extent fulfilled political and civil rights,” he added, citing six free and fair elections, the establishment of well-functioning democratic institutions, and a legal and judiciary system of international repute. Nevertheless, socio-economic rights remain a major challenge as South Africa struggles with poverty, unemployment, and inequality.
Nico Koopman and CTI Trustee Judith McCartin Scheide
The task of promise-keeping is to keep Mandela’s vision alive. As Proverbs 29 verse 18 says: “Without vision, the people shall perish.”
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As demonstrated by a recent (October 2019) Statistics South Africa Report, Koopman noted that continuous poverty runs mainly along color and gender lines and that the unemployment picture in South Africa is also bleak. In short, “income inequality, intergenerational inequality, wealth inequality and inequality with regard to social and cultural capital, have reached morally unacceptable levels.” Today, said Koopman, “South Africa is viewed by many as the country with the biggest gap between rich and poor in the world.” Some claim that socio-economic inequality has increased in post-apartheid, democratic South Africa. Koopman suggests that the situation fuels social pathologies of violence and cruelty, especially against women and children, as well as crime, substance and sexual abuse. While Koopman stopped short of concluding that Mandela’s dream had become a nightmare, he warned of the potential for that to happen if South Africa’s many social ills are not addressed.
promise with respect to the Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC), established under the leadership of archbishop emeritus Desmond Tutu. Mandela prioritized and centralized forgiveness and reconciliation at the expense of justice, the argument runs. He played into the hands of white business with an arrangement by which Pretoria, the center of political power, was given to mainly blacks, and Johannesburg, the economic heart of South Africa was given to mainly whites. A younger generation of public thinkers, said Koopman, opine that Mandela “helped us to implement first dimension human rights, i.e. mainly individual civil and political rights, but not second dimension socio-economic rights and third dimension developmental and ecological rights.” According to these views, the Constitution of South Africa is seriously flawed and the negotiation process that created the democratic model for South Africa in the years 1990 to 1994, are characterised by wrong compromises, reconciliation without justice, and political freedom without economic freedom.
Is Mandela to Blame?
Keeping the Dream Alive
So, is Mandela to blame for the failure of his dream to be realized? Koopman examined the arguments of those who accuse Mandela of opting for a morally unacceptable com-
As Koopman sees it, this climate of criticism challenges all institutions in all walks of life, to respond. For churches, he advocates a role derived from “the Threefold Office of
From Dream to Nightmare?
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“Compromises become morally wrong where the cause of the most vulnerable is excluded from discourses. The voices of vulnerable groups like women, children, the aged, minorities should be prioritized in public discourses. The big picture perspective of policymakers should be brought into conversation with the snapshots of particular vulnerable groups.”
Christ, which teaches that Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One, is separated to be our Perfect Prophet, Perfect Priest, and Perfect Royal Servant.” “Amidst the accusation of morally unacceptable compromises, we are called to prophetic promise-keeping. Amidst the accusation of reconciliation without justice, we are called to priestly justice. Amidst the accusations of the fulfilment of political and civil rights without the fulfilment of socio-economic rights, we are called to royal-servant discipleship and citizenship.” For Koopman, the task of promise-keeping is to keep Mandela’s vision alive. As Proverbs 29 verse 18 says: “Without vision, the people shall perish.” While acknowledging that Mandela compromised during negotiations for a new South Africa, and in the initial years of the young democracy, Koopman believes that his compromise was not morally wrong. “Compromises become morally wrong where the cause of the most vulnerable is excluded from discourses. The voices of vulnerable groups like women, children, the aged, minorities should be prioritized in public discourses. The big picture perspective of policymakers should be brought into conversation with the snapshots of particular vulnerable groups.” Citing Mandela’s 1994 biography, Long Walk to Freedom, Koopman pointed out that Mandela assumed that those after him would fulfil the promise. Mandela wrote: “I have walked that long road to freedom. I have tried not to falter; I have made missteps along the way. But I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb.” Acknowledging Past Injustice
Koopman’s detailed and wide-ranging assessment of Mandela’s legacy referenced past and contemporary church lead-
ers and theologians, including John Calvin, Martin Luther, Reinhold Niebuhr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dirk Smit, Allan Boesak, James Gustafson, and William Storrar, among others. Bringing his discourse closer to home, he described the efforts of Stellenbosch University to acknowledge deep regret for its contribution “towards the injustices of the past.” The University’s Centenary Declaration, formulated in 2019 under the leadership of University President Wim De Villiers, apologizes “unreservedly to the communities and individuals who were excluded from the historical privileges that SU enjoyed.” In conclusion, Koopman spoke of the role that educational institutions, churches, and the rest of civil society can take to ensure that Mandela’s dream does not become a nightmare, but a reality for all, in South Africa and globally, especially for the most vulnerable. As a return Member to CTI—he spent a year in residence from 2007 to 2008—Koopman observed “at least six reasons” for feeling privileged to be delivering the 2019 Scheide Lecture. He described CTI as a place where reason and scientific reflection are brought to bear on concerns of the world today; a place in which deep thinking develops transformative and innovative knowledge with public impact. Furthermore, he said, it is a place of compassion, driven by values such as dignity, justice, freedom, equality. As such, he said, CTI is a place of logos, pathos, ethos, kosmos, telos, and Theos. “It is not without reason that this public lecture series is titled the William Scheide Lectures on Religion and Global Concerns—concerns, not issues.” The 2019 William H. Scheide Lecture on Religion and Global Concerns can be heard on the CTI website at ctinquiry.org.
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THEOLOGICAL IMPACT
Developing Support Mechanisms for Reconciliation A Peace-Practitioner’s Journey
Antti Pentikäinen
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econciliation is a complex process. To work, it has to be based on a local and shared understanding of vocabulary, tradition, and practices. How these traditions and practices relate to efforts at the political level is regularly missing or absent from the process. Too often reconciliation has meant, for the United Nations, solely political agreements, which often do not enable sufficient individual and collective healing and relationship renewing. Increasingly, the role of reconciliation is critical not only in post-war societies, but also around the world. While I was a Member of CTI’s Inquiry on Religion & Violence in 2018-2019, I was also a Special Envoy for the Prime Minister of Finland helping the Government of Finland and the Sámi indigenous people initiate a truth-and-reconciliation process. My time at CTI was devoted to reflecting on my experiences as a peace-practioner and how, in conversation with the other visiting scholars, we can improve the reconciliation process and
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its impact. CTI’s process of convening scholars and practioners to meet and exchange ideas is, and remains, key in helping to develop new international support mechanisms for reconciliation. The Role of Tradition in Reconciliation
Through my work with the Sámi indigenous people in Finland and a Somali tribal elder, Suldaan Abdisalam Mahmoud, I learned how important traditions are in the peace and reconciliation process. With tragic consequences, they are too often overlooked or dismissed. To be able to influence and create change, you have to get close—close enough to discover people individually and collectively, appreciate their traditions, and why they are meaningful to a group. It is impossible to work sincerely toward peace while staying safely on the sidelines. Working closely with Abdisalam impacted my life and my work. He is both friend and mentor. He introduced
me to the effectiveness of reconciliation in sustaining peace and I have seen this in practice, on the ground. Abdisalam and I were coaching Libyan tribal elders when he told me a harrowing story of his life in the service of peace. We were sharing what we had learned from peace efforts in Somalia, where tribal elders and the United Nations were working to help rebuild the nation. After the ousting of Muammar Gaddafi, Libya was falling into expanding chaos. Many senior tribal elders were still in denial as to where this chaos could lead. They felt insulted that we were comparing their country to Somalia. Nevertheless, we wanted to alert them to the potential dangers of fragmenting armed struggles if not addressed early. At first, I didn’t notice anything unusual in Abdisalam’s demeanor, but when I approached him during a break, I realized that he was shaking. “They almost got me. The cleaning lady of my compound was forced to bring bombs inside. It was very close.” The story he told me was a first-hand account of a near miss for both suicide bomber and Abdisalam, the intended target. The young suicide bomber had been working for Abdisalam for over three years: “My wife loved her and suggested that she should live with us. She was like one of my own children. I took her to school, taught mathematics, English, computers, Quran.” Abdisalam taught me that peace is important to prevent fire reaching you. It is essential in traditional understanding of how to survive and inter-clan reconciliation was at the core of it. While he had not intended to become a peace mediator, Abdisalam was touched by the displacement and suffering and felt that he, too, could do something “to reduce the cost of conflicts to ordinary people.” His efforts eventually led his clan to crown him, at age 23, as their leader. “Becoming Clan Leader meant that I was responsible for not only my own clan, but also all human beings living in that shared space. Our responsibility is to find solutions, prevent conflicts through reconciliation and maintain opportunities for future generations. This is also the responsibility coming from our religion and past generations.”
work brings risks, I have narrowly escaped five assassination attempts.” He emphasized to the participants to be cognizant and mindful of a group’s traditions in negotiations of any kind: “One of the most touching tools of Tribal Elders is hospitality. We have the view that if people eat together, they have become ready to reconcile. The role of prayer is equally important; it softens the heart to accept solutions.” Abdisalam’s mission is to collect and codify the Somali reconciliation tradition, XHEER. Though each clan follows slightly different traditions, he is creating a written dictionary of Somali XHEER derived from various oral narratives. His hope is that Somali traditional mediation mechanisms will help to reconcile and heal his nation through its unique approach. Reconciliation in Sustaining Peace
Just a few months ago in November 2019, UN Secretary General Antonio Gutierrez spoke to the Security Council emphasizing that without a better understanding of how to make reconciliation more effective, the UN will fail in its main objective. Further collaboration is needed to define the questions we must ask of the reconciliation process, to develop common research methodologies, and how we can ensure we get timely feedback on the approaches so we can continue to refine our practices. The engagement of scholars and practioners is critical and needs to continue. Now based in the United States, I am eager to resume my conversations with CTI and discover how the Center can continue to be an incubator for new ways of supporting communities to reconcile and heal their relationships. —Antti Pentikäinen
Scholars and Practioners Coming Together
In addition to the weekly workshops and discussions with fellow scholars, CTI held a joint symposium with Princeton University’s Center for the Study of Religion (CSR) in December 2018. Abdisalam was a participant and shared his real-life experiences with our group. As he spoke, I could hear the pain of his experience in his voice, “This
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From CTI to the United Nations
Hannah Strømmen
D
uring the fall semester of 2018, I was one of nine scholars, and one of two biblical scholars, working on the topic of “religion and violence” at the Center of Theological Inquiry. My project was titled, “Biblical Violence in the Far Right.” Before my time at the Center, I had been working on the case of far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway on July 22, 2011. I had examined the role the Bible played in the far-right ideology that Breivik cited to justify his violence. As a scholar in biblical reception history, my interest in this case emerged out of a more general set of questions about the continued influence and impact of the Bible in the modern world. Questions about the extent to which Europe is secularized, the permeation of biblical allusions in Western culture, popular perceptions of “the Bible,” and the question of biblical literacy (or the lack of it) structured my inquiry into the rise of the far right in contemporary Europe. What I was interested in doing was not to look at one case of far-right
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As a result of my work at the Center, I was invited to participate in an expert consultation on “Religion and UltraNationalism” at the United Nations in New York, and at the Second Global Summit on “Religion, Peace and Security: Building Bridges, Fostering Inclusivity and Countering Hate Speech to Enhance the Protection of Religious Minorities, Refugees and Migrants,” organised by the United Nations Genocide Prevention office and the International Association for the Defence of Religious Liberty, in Geneva. Both events brought together academics, activists, UN representatives and faith leaders, to discuss effective ways of responding to the rise of far-right populism and extremist nationalism.
Bible-use in isolation. Rather, I was interested in tugging at the different threads that led to such Bible-use and to follow the lines of thought that make the Bible a component of European far-right rhetoric today. The interdisciplinary and collaborative environment that CTI expertly curates was perfect for precisely this kind of investigation. During my time there, I was able to theorize and contextualize the material I was examining. Both the facilities linked to CTI, particularly the library resources, and the discussions with colleagues pushed me to reflect on the wider ideological trends, events and issues that have prompted the rise of far-right populism in Europe. This wider theorization is what makes it possible to understand an event such as a specific far-right act of terror as the product of a complex set of pressures—psychological, cultural, social, political, theological—and to reflect on the far-ranging “afterlives” of such an event. Reading about, and reflecting on dominant ways of understanding “cultures” and the way “religion” and “culture” are
drawn together to form strong identities and counter-identities helped me to see the way the Bible can be mobilized as a foundation for “Western culture” in opposition to “Islamic culture.” Working with colleagues drawing on a number of different theoretical resources pushed my thinking by introducing me to questions I would otherwise not have thought to pose and to make connections I would not otherwise have made. In our weekly (and, more informal, daily) discussions at CTI, there was not only a focus on each of our projects and their details, but also on what we are doing as scholars of religion working on the theme of violence. My colleagues challenged me several times when it came to how to respond more normatively to the far-right uses of the Bible I was seeking to understand. This push arose no doubt out of CTI’s stated mission to be a place where “theology makes an impact on global concerns,” and to “share those discoveries to change the way people think and act.” The ambitious aims of CTI nudged us in our discussions towards holding each other accountable for our responsibility as scholars. The focus on public outreach has continued to influence my work on the European far right, also since my time at CTI. Over the last year I have co-written a monograph with Ulrich Schmiedel, a colleague in systematic theology (and also a CTI Member), entitled The Claim to Christianity: Responding to the Far Right, to be published in June 2020. The idea behind this monograph was to outline how the far-right in Europe is claiming Christianity by explaining particular ideological trends and examining particular cases. We go on to explain and evaluate how Christian churches have responded to the far right. And finally, building on this evaluation we offer suggestions for how to respond—critically and constructively, in practice. The book is targeted at a general readership, particularly for faith communities and faith leaders. In all of this work, the Center of Theological Inquiry was invaluable for offering ideal conditions for research, and for proffering the challenge to engage in global concerns and hope for change. —Hannah Strømmen Hannah Strømmen participated in CTI’s Research Workshop on Religion and Violence during the fall of 2018. She is Senior Lecturer in Biblical Studies at the University of Chichester. Her work focuses on the influence and impact of the Bible in contemporary culture.
CONNECT with CTI! Podcasts Videos Research Magazine Always available on our website:
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Conversations with Freeman Dyson by Linda Arntzenius
(1923-2020) As Director, I have the privilege
Science and joined the lecturer
Linda Arntzenius, drawing on in-
of welcoming the Center’s distin-
and me for dinner after the event. I
terviews she conducted with her
guished guests to Luce Hall, ev-
treasure Dyson’s recollection that
friend at his office at the Institute.
eryone from the Chief Rabbi of the
evening of his conversations with
Linda captures his intellectual
United Kingdom to Pulitzer and
Reinhold Niebuhr, when the great
brilliance as she draws out his
Nobel Prize winners. They have all
American theologian was a Mem-
thoughts on science and religion
had in common an interest in our
ber of the Institute for Advanced
and that encounter with Reinhold
mission. Among them, I remem-
Study in the late 1950s.
Niebuhr. Dyson was one of the
ber the scientist Freeman Dyson
It is therefore sad to mark
most original if at times contro-
with affection. Some years ago,
Freeman Dyson’s recent death.
versial scientists of our time and,
he kindly attended our endowed
But it is also a pleasure to
I am proud to say, a donor to CTI.
Public Lecture in Theology and
introduce this fine article by
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—William Storrar
PHOTOGRAPH: LINDA ARNTZENIUS
O
ctober 31, 2018: When I popped my head through the open door of Freeman Dyson’s office at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), he had just finished talking to a group of high school students in California via Skype and was keen to tell me about them and about the young local boy who visited him regularly for conversation. “He’s very smart,” said Dyson,” so it’s difficult for him to find conversation that’s on his level, at least with his peers.” He must be very smart indeed to keep up with Dyson who, even in his tenth decade, was as sharp as ever. He was expecting me. We were old acquaintances, since my time as IAS Publications Officer which coincided with the venerable institution’s 75th anniversary celebrations and centennials for J. Robert Oppenheimer, John von Neumann and Kurt Gödel. I had the privilege––perhaps I should say the temerity––of writing biographical features about each of these for the Institute’s newsletter. Dyson was a great resource, and critic. I did my best. He was kind.
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A Merry Heart Just a few years shy of 100, Dyson retained much of the questing school-boy: the thin angularity, wide open eyes, and quizzical expression. When he laughed, his whole upper body shook with mirth. A merry heart is a good medicine (Proverbs 17:22) and Dyson had a merry heart. Mathematician Roger Penrose called him a philosopher in the broadest sense, “puzzling over the meaning of life, the purpose of the universe and the nature of God.” Phillip F. Schewe was spot on with the title of his 2013 biography: The Pioneering Odyssey of Freeman Dyson, Maverick Genius. Regarded for decades as the Institute’s most treasured professor, Dyson was described as “heir to Einstein—a visionary who reshaped thinking in fields from math to astrophysics to medicine, and who conceived of nuclear-propelled spaceships designed to transport human colonists to distant planets.”
Over tea, Dyson spoke about his current reading: Thomas Sprat’s book, The History of the Royal Society of London. Founded in 1600 by Charles II, it began recording its history in 1607. Its French counterpart, founded by Louis IV, is less well-documented. “Charles had a sense of humor,” Dyson said, “unlike Louis who had none.” It was as if he was speaking of personal acquaintances. Dyson’s memory was long and, as a scientist, there was a real sense in which he was in dialogue with his predecessors back to Newton and beyond. England Between the Wars
Born in England in 1923, Dyson was a civilian scientist for Royal Air Force Bomber Command in World War II. He graduated from Cambridge University in 1945 with a bachelor’s in mathematics and came to the United States in 1947 to work with Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman at Cornell. Even before he acquired his Ph.D., Cornell made him a full professor. Appointed to the Institute’s permanent faculty in 1953, he’s celebrated there for unifying the three versions of quantum electrodynamics invented by Feynman, Julian Schwinger, and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga. Throughout a long career, he contributed to an astonishing range of theoretical subjects, from astrophysics to number theory, and worked on applied sciences as well: from nuclear reactors, to solid state physics. He also wrote numerous highly readable books about science and the history of science and regularly contributed to the New York Review of Books. “Young men do science, old men write books,” he told me, quoting his old Cambridge math professor G.H. Hardy. “I think I was lucky to grow up in the 1930s which, in so many ways, was much worse than now. We didn’t expect to survive. We all saw WWII coming and we knew the horrors of WW I, we knew about Anthrax bombs and we expected to die of plague. I never thought that we would survive the war with so little damage. It was amazing. We never imagined at the beginning that we could survive the way we did and there were other things too. I mean, the country was much more polluted then than it is now. When I went to London for the day, my
“The difference between knowledge and wisdom is that knowledge is something we do individually and wisdom we do together.”
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shirt collar would be black. It was really filthy. There were no fish in the rivers. And we had huge unemployment. In almost every way it has improved since then. So, I just find it absurd to imagine that the problems today are worse than they were then. It’s obvious that they are not so bad.” The Templeton Prize
Awarded annually for progress in religion, the Templeton Prize is one of the world’s largest monetary awards, valued at almost $1 million. The first went to Mother Teresa in 1973. Subsequent winners include the Rev. Dr. Billy Graham, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, physicist and theologian Ian Barbour, astrophysicist Paul Davies, Jonathan Sacks, Martin Rees, Desmond Tutu, John Polkinghorne, and CTI Founder James McCord. As Schewe put it in Maverick Genius, Dyson’s Templeton Prize acceptance speech sounded the themes that had won him the award: “that both science and religion are exciting because they grapple with mysteries; that God and mind, to his way of thinking, are one and actively present simultaneously at the microscopic level of atoms, at the macroscopic level of human beings, and at the cosmic level of the universe itself; that green technology, such as biotech and solar power, is re-exerting its primacy over gray technology, such as machines and fossil fuels; that the marketing of high-tech goods and the capitalist system in general, useful as they may be, must be tempered by ethics; that this attention to social justice will both help to alleviate human misery and enlarge the global economy; and that we must utilize both windows, science and religion, if we’re going to get a better view of our immense universe.” Science and Religion
As a child, Dyson was nominally Church of England, taken to church every Sunday––his father played the organ in the chapel of the school he attended. Dyson’s church-going habit persisted and he recalled being impressed by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s sermon at the Princeton University Chapel in 1948. Later, Dyson interacted with Niebuhr at the Institute (See Sidebar) and got to know him and his wife Ursula. On a larger scale, Dyson hoped that science and religion working together might abolish the gross inequalities in today’s world. “Science and religion are two windows that people look through, trying to understand the big universe outside, trying to understand why we are here. The two windows give different views, but both look out at the same uni-
verse. Both views are one-sided, neither is complete. Both leave out essential features of the real world. And both are worthy of respect.” And Dyson reminded us that the stakes here are of the highest order. “For religion and science to come together is a prerequisite for the world’s future health and well-being, even survival,” he said. This is especially urgent when it comes to free markets in human bodies and human genes. “The human body is not a commercial commodity. And now in the twenty-first century, for the sake of equity and human brotherhood, we must maintain the principle that the free market does not extend to human genes.”
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Knowledge and Wisdom
October 31, 2019: Any Dyson interviewer inevitably comes away with numerous book recommendations. On this occasion, he enthused over Norbert Weiner’s 1950 publication The Human Use of Human Beings. “Weiner saw all this coming,” he told me. Although published long before digital computers, Weiner, a math professor at M.I.T. who had worked on analog computers, anticipated machine learning and predicted many of the problems that are now being recognized in this digital age: economic upheaval and the possibility of what the Dominican friar, Père Dubarle, called a machine à gouverner, what today we call artificial intelligence. “It’s a wonderful book, full of wisdom,” said Dyson. Wiener wrote: “Perhaps it would not be a bad idea for the teams at present creating cybernetics to add to their cadre of technicians, who have come from all horizons of science, some serious anthropologists, and perhaps a philosopher who has some curiosity as to world matters.” Prescient indeed! So how did Dyson perceive wisdom? “Wisdom comes about when a lot of people get together and find out how to do things right. We are social animals and the difference between knowledge and wisdom is that knowledge is something we do individually and wisdom we do together.” The father of six, plus one stepdaughter, and grandfather of sixteen, settled the matter of what was most important to him early on in life. As he wrote in the preface to his 2018 Maker of Patterns: An Autobiography Through Letters, “I had three main concerns, with a clear order of priority. Family came first, friends second, and work third.” Maker of Patterns is a collection of letters to his family (mother, father and sister Alice) from 1941 to 1978, from his days as a precocious 17 year-old mathematics and physics student at Trinity College, Cambridge, through the post-war period when his letters reflect “the quandaries faced by an entire scientific generation . . . dealing with the aftereffects of nuclear detonations and concentration camp killings.”
To wrap up another interview session together, we had fun playing Desert Island Discs, the game, devised by BBC radio, in which a celebrity selects a favorite book and a favorite piece of music to have while marooned on a fictitious deserted island. Which book and which piece of music would Dyson take? His response was immediate. Outline of History by H.G.
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Further Reading In addition to his numerous popular scientific articles for Scientific American, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books, Dyson has written a number of books about science for the general public. Recent titles include: • Maker of Patterns: An Autobiography Through Letters, 2018 • A Many-colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe, 2007 • The Scientist as Rebel, 2006 • The Sun, the Genome and the Internet, 1999 • From Eros to Gaia, 1992 • Infinite in All Directions, 1988
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Wells, published in 1920—“an amazing piece of writing; something that you can read over and over again and actually a best-seller at the time.” And his one piece of music? Again, no hesitation: his father, Sir George Dyson’s most famous work, a version of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. It was written when Dyson was just ten for the Three Choirs Festival held each year in one of three English cathedrals, Worcester, Gloucester and Hereford, in turn. “Each of the characters is a movement. The wife of Bath is this flamboyant soprano and the merchant is a very beautiful tenor. When they sang it in Hereford some years ago, they invited my wife and me to go over. It was a wonderful performance. It needs a cathedral and I’m very, very fond of it.” Those of a sentimental turn of mind, may find consolation in the thought of Dyson listening to sublime music in an English cathedral. —Linda Arntzenius
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• Origins of Life, 1986 • Weapons and Hope, 1984 • Disturbing the Universe, 1979
Remembering Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)
Reinhold Niebuhr was just two years away from retirement after three decades at Union Theological Seminary (UTS) in New York and not in the best of health when he set out to write an ambitious book at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS). At J. Robert Oppenheimer’s invitation, the theologian became a Member in the School of Historical Studies for 1958. The physicist and the theologian had much in common. Both had been accused of pro-Communist sentiments. Niebuhr had been a vocal critic of McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee whose methods of guilt by association, he felt, were both a travesty of justice and an example of totalitarian techniques arising from within the ranks of those ostensibly
tion to the valuable analysis of the specialists, the mod-
fighting totalitarianism.
ern world also needed the attempted—and less easily
Niebuhr’s IAS stay resulted in The Structure of Nations
proved—synthesis of the generalists.”
and Empires: A Study of the Recurring Patterns and Prob-
In short, he must have felt compelled to write: “This
lems of the Political Order in Relation to the Unique Prob-
study of the perennial patterns, recurring problems and
lems of the Nuclear Age. He had been reluctant to take
varied, but similar structures of the political order was
on such a potentially controversial topic, feeling that he
undertaken with an eye on our present perplexities,” he
would be crossing disciplinary lines. According to biog-
says in the preface. “It was prompted by the conviction
rapher June Bingham: “In order to achieve perspective
that our generation, which faced the seemingly novel
on all of history, Niebuhr would be poaching on realms
perplexities of the nuclear stalemate and of our en-
of learning that were not within his already broad field of
counter with the new secular religion of communism,
competence. Having lived in an academic community
might be tempted to forget the lessons which the past
for thirty years, he knew how jealously the interdisciplin-
history of man offers every new generation.”
ary fences are guarded and with what persistence the
Niebuhr found respite from the demands of research
guards can shoot. Yet his conviction was that, in addi-
and writing in the company of a set of young and en-
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thusiastic physicists whom he met and talked with
Freeman Dyson described Niebuhr’s conversations
over lunch each day in the Institute’s dining hall and
as being as “illuminating as his sermons.” His 2018 pub-
afternoon tea in the common room. Interviewed later
lication, Maker of Patterns, An Autobiography Through
by Mike Wallace, Niebuhr said he had found some of
Letters, recalls the sermon Niebuhr had preached on
them wiser than many social scientists. And, in a letter
the morning of October 10, 1948, at Princeton University
to his friend George Kennan, after her husband’s death,
Chapel: “The main attraction, the sermon, did not disap-
Ursula Niebuhr, who chaired the Religion Department
point. Niebuhr spoke on the text ‘Except a grain of corn
at Barnard College, emphasized how important these
fall to the ground, and die, it abideth alone; but if it die,
lunches were to him.
it bringeth forth much fruit.’ He spoke fast, and it took
Physicist Jeremy Bernstein wrote to Bingham that
all my wits to follow him. But what he had to say was
while there was “almost no exchange between Profes-
worth the effort, and I found his words both stimulating
sor Niebuhr and the physicists on any kind of a specific
and consoling; he did not hesitate to apply his remarks
technical level,” there was “a wonderful interaction with
to political and international problems. The gist of them
him on general subjects—contemporary politics, the
was, just as the individual man can save his soul only by
meaning of history, the relation between science and
ceasing to worry about himself and immersing his ac-
society, etc. We had a regular lunch group and he regu-
tions in some larger ends, so also we shall stand a better
larly came and ate with us. I think he enjoyed the vigour
chance of saving our civilization if we do not worry too
of the discussion and the vitality of the group. The av-
much over the imminent destruction of the little bit of it
erage age was about thirty. We enjoyed his humour,
to which we happen to belong.”
wisdom and wide experience. I was, myself, always
At Union Theological Seminary he influenced gener-
very fascinated by the way in which he would extract
ations of students and thinkers, including the German
the general from the particular, using a language which
theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Political scientists and
was deceptively simple, but really enormously subtle
political historians, such as George F. Kennan, Richard
and abstract. He had never met any of the younger gen-
Hofstadter, and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. note his in-
eration of physicists before and he found it interesting
fluence on their thinking. Martin Luther King Jr. drew
that they are quite normal and human. It was a kind of
upon his social and ethical ideals and President Barack
mutual friendship toward which we all look back with
Obama called him his “favorite philosopher” and “favor-
great pleasure.”
ite theologian.”
—Linda Arntzenius
For more on Reinhold Niebuhr, see his books: • Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic (1930) • Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study of Ethics and Politics (1932) • Interpretation of Christian Ethics (1935) • The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation (1943) • An American Conscience: The Reinhold Niebuhr Story, PBS documentary (2017)
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The Center of Theological Inquiry is designed to be the environment most conducive to fostering fresh thinking on a host of problems facing religion and society. —James I. McCord, Founder
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