Fresh Thinking (Issue 3)

ISSUE 3 FALL 2019

FreshThinking MAGAZINE OF THE CENTER OF THEOLOGICAL INQUIRY

ETIN ANWAR Islam and Violence NICO KOOPMAN Economic Inequality in South Africa LESLIE WINGARD Religion and Inequality in the U.S. PETER OCHS Diagnosing Religious-Group Conflict

Our Mission:

research environment where theology makes an impact on global concerns, and we share those discoveries to change the way people think and act.

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We convene leading thinkers in an interdisciplinary

ISSUE 3 FALL 2019

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

CTI’S IMPACT

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William Storrar: A Place for Inquiring Minds

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Peter Ochs: Diagnosing Religious-Group Conflict

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Interview with Susan Schneider:

From CTI to the Library of Congress 8

Interview with Mary Ellen O’Connell: Viewing Law Through the Lens of Beauty page 8

THEOLOGICAL INQUIRY ACROSS TRADITIONS

10 Wolfgang Palaver: The Sacred and the Holy

12 Interview with Etin Anwar: Discussing Islam and Violence

13 Paul Middleton: Violence in Early Christianity

15 Friends of CTI: Honoring our Donors

18 Religion and Violence: A Complex Relationship

22 Spotlight on CTI Member Books

24 Interview with Leslie Wingard:

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African American Christianity in the 21st Century

NEWS & EVENTS

27 Leading Scholars Explore Cutting-Edge Questions in Theology & Science

30 Tea & Talk at CTI

31 Nico Koopman to Deliver William H. Scheide Lecture

32 CTI Welcomes New Director of Philanthropy

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FROM THE EDITOR

Making Theological Connections

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FreshThinking

TI’s five-year Inquiry on Religion & Global FALL Concerns began with the topic of migration, then 2019 grappled with religion and violence, and this year MAGAZINE OF THE CENTER OF THEOLOGICAL INQUIRY is focused on religion and economic inequality.

DIRECTOR Next year we tackle religion and the built environment, William Storrar followed by religion and the natural environment in 2021EDITOR 2022. In our complex and globalized world, none of these Joshua Mauldin issues can be studied in isolation. Our inquiry aims to DIRECTOR OF PHILANTHROPY highlight connections between our themes, distilling insights Karin Morse from each inquiry to foster deeper understanding of these CONSULTING EDITOR pressing social issues. As we read in the news each day, people Linda Arntzenius are on the move around the world, in many cases escaping DESIGNER situations of violence, often connected to religious conflict.

Debra Trisler Others seek to escape economic inequality and poverty, CONTRIBUTORS leaving their homelands in the hope of a better life elsewhere.

Etin Anwar For many people, this includes more adequate housing and a Paul Middleton built environment conducive to human flourishing. Likewise, Peter Ochs the natural environment impinges on all these decisions and is impacted by them.

Mary Ellen O’Connell This third issue of Fresh Thinking demonstrates how CTI is engaged in theological inquiry Wolfgang Palaver on these issues, thinking across religious traditions and in conversation with various disciplines Susan Schneider Leslie Wingard outside of theology. Peter Ochs, a professor of modern Judaic studies, reflects in these pages on how his development of Scriptural Reasoning at CTI in the 1990s led him later to be invited by PHOTOGRAPHER the US State Department to provide a model for predicting how religious language and acts of Frank Wojciechowski violence might be correlated. In the course of telling this story, Ochs recounts how CTI has been EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS an intellectual home for his research across three decades. Etin Anwar, a scholar of Islamic studies, Clarence Hammond Jade Talag discusses how she challenges stereotypes of Islam as a “violent” religion from her own context as a Muslim and a scholar of religion. Paul Middleton, a scholar of New Testament studies, discusses how simplistic readings of the New Testament as pacifist prevent us from thinking theologically about religious violence in our world today. A professor of English Literature, Leslie Henry R. Luce Hall Wingard discusses her CTI project analyzing African American Christianity through the lenses of 50 Stockton Street literature, visual art, and black cultural studies. I invite you to join with us in making theological Princeton, NJ 08540 connections between these themes as you read this issue of Fresh Thinking. Email me with your 609.683.4797 ideas at editor@ctinquiry.org.

—Joshua Mauldin ctinquiry.org

Inquiry on Global Concerns 2017-2022

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2017-2018: Religion & Migration 2018-2019: Religion & Violence 2019-2020: Religion & Economic Inequality 2020-2021: Religion & the Built Environment 2021-2022: Religion & the Natural Environment

FROM THE DIRECTOR

A Place for Inquiring Minds CTI’S IMPACT

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love the word “inquiry” in CTI’s name. As a Scot in America, I have had to learn to pronounce it “in-kwir-y” and not “inchoir-y”! Inquiry takes us to the heart of our appeal to scholars and supporters alike. CTI is a place for inquiring minds.

As Director of the Center of Theological Inquiry, it is my privilege to meet so many people with an inquiring mind. They are theologians, scholars in the humanities, natural and social scientists, and people from all walks of life who welcome our free exchange of ideas across the disciplines and whose intellectual curiosity is fired by our research agenda.

Let me introduce you to two such inquiring minds who are joining us at CTI this Fall.

Gayle Robinson is the newest member of our Board of Trustees. A graduate of Columbia University, she had a distinguished career in New York’s financial and banking sector before devoting her professional expertise and skills to church administration and academic governance.

Now retired, Gayle’s intellectual curiosity has led her to study math and serve CTI. As she wrote to me, “It’s impossible not to be excited about what the Center is undertaking.” Gayle brings not only her wisdom on nonprofit governance to our Board, but also her love of inquiry, which we all share in our commitment to CTI as its stewards and staff, scholars, and supporters.

Nico Koopman is the Vice Rector (Vice President) for Social Impact and Transformation at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. Under apartheid, Nico personally experienced enforced racial segregation. After serving as a church pastor, then a university professor of theology, he was appointed to the senior management team of one of South Africa’s leading research universities. His task is to help what was once the elite citadel of apartheid transform itself into an inclusive community of academic excellence for all South Africans. Nico returns to CTI this Fall to share his insights on social justice in our inquiry on inequality.

Gayle and Nico share a passion for the other key word in CTI’s name,“theological.” By studying the question of God and all else in relation to it, with intellectual humility as well as curiosity, they are naturally committed to a life of mindful inquiry. Like Gayle and Nico, I hope you will join us as fellow inquirers this Fall, through the Theology Matters podcast and videos on our CTI website.

—William Storrar, Director

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PETER OCHS

Diagnosing Religious-Group Conflict

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TI’s 2018-19 Research Workshop on Religion and Violence provided a wonderful setting for my current research on “Value Predicate Analysis” (VPA): a field-testable technique for diagnosing tendencies toward violence or peace among religious groups in regions of potential conflict. I recall smiling, sometime during my spring residency, when I realized that, since 1992, CTI had been the nurturing environment for the entire line of thinking that preceded and cradled my current work. While reporting to you a bit about my work on VPA, I will also reflect on links between CTI’s environment and the direction of almost three decades of my thinking.

The Relationship Between Religion and Violence The title of my project is Value Predicate Analysis, How to Diagnose Religious Dimensions of Ongoing Violent Conflicts. Joined by a team of University of Virginia researchers, my work addresses Religion-Related Violent Conflict, by which I mean violent conflict that in-

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cludes religious stakeholder groups. Our team seeks to help change the ways that political scientists, government agencies, and NGOs address the subject of religious group behavior. Until the last decade, government agencies followed the lead of academic social-political scientists who denied that “religion” represented a distinct category of study. They argued that conventional tools of social, economic, political, and psychological science were all the academy needed to account for the behavior of groups and individuals that called themselves “religious.” Most foreign policy experts and agents are trained by these scientists and make policy out of their teachings.

I belong to a smaller, less conventional company who argue that the dominant socio-political sciences have erred on this particular matter and that the error helps engender unsuccessful State Department, Defense Department, and related NGO policy concerning religious groups in conflict zones. Over the past eight years, our team has developed and field-tested social-scientific tools for identifying religion-specific behavior in zones of conflict or tension

and for measuring probable near-future changes in the behavior of one religious group toward another in such zones. Our first goal is to provide experimental evidence showing that by employing instruments of language-based analysis it is indeed possible to diagnose the probable, near-future behavior of modest-sized religious groups toward other groups. We seek to show, furthermore, that the successful instrument of language analysis is not semantic (meaning-based) but performative. Having successfully tested one instrument in areas of high tension, short of violent conflict, we now pursue a second goal: to refine four instruments and, if successful, to offer them for use by peace builders and peacekeepers.

Our tool examines what we call changes in semantic range: changes in the number of meanings that group members tend to associate with a group’s elemental value terms (terms that the group associates with its elemental behavioral tendencies). We examine the terms when they appear as predicates of value judgments by group teachers/influencers. We discovered a correlation between certain quantities of change and each of nine categories of change in a group’s behavioral tendencies toward other groups. My work at CTI was to evaluate the overall results of our VPA field tests to date and to explore broader theoretical implications.

Research Nurtured at CTI In retrospect, I believe the CTI environment nurtured significant antecedents to my work on religion and violent conflict. In 19911992, I spent a year at CTI completing the book Peirce, Pragmatism, and the Logic of Scripture, which examines the implications of Charles Peirce’s philosophic pragmatism for the reasoning of Scripture: that is, the kinds of reasoning that emerge from Scriptural study and interpretation. During that year, I began what became years of discussion with then CTI Director Daniel Hardy, of blessed memory, and his son-in-law, David Ford. We discussed our love of Scripture as a cradle of reasoning and our discomfort with the disconnect we sensed in the contemporary academy between reasoning and Scripture. The discussions continued over several summers, leading to our developing the practice of “Scriptural Reasoning” (SR): the shared study of Scripture across the borders of different canonical traditions.

Some features of Scriptural Reasoning resemble what I consider features of the study environment at CTI: intentionally shaped spaces that welcome participants who value religious tradition and intellectual discipline and also value study and engagement across differences (of belief, tradition, and discipline); that promote intense individual inquiry as well as group reflection and interpersonal engagement; and that integrate learning for its own sake with learning for the sake of societal repair. Participating in either environment tends, over time, to nurture habits of thinking that provide alternatives to disjunctive tendencies in contemporary society: tendencies, for example, to identify “reasoning” exclusively with propositional or binary discourse and to isolate religious and social or relational discourse as extra-rational. The alternatives I have in mind are “non-binary” types of thinking that, for example, situate propositional claims

within specific lines of inquiry that were undertaken for specific purposes, or that identify religious (or relational/societal) and scientific thinking as complementary and at times interdependent.

Within the Scriptural Reasoning environment, members of different religious traditions sit side-by-side around small tables. Participants welcome one another to comment on brief excerpts from the Scriptural canons of each of the religions. No one speaks too much or too little; no one’s comments on any of the excerpts are more authoritative than another’s; comments and discussion move around the table. One participant is a qualified facilitator, who offers brief procedural comments only occasionally, when it seems time to nudge the discussion back on track. Over 25 years and thousands of meetings, I found that it takes about eight sessions of ninety minutes each (during an intense week or spread out over several months) until the group begins to experience the “reasoning” in Scriptural Reasoning: a directional movement of discussion that displays something of each of the participants’ traditions and disciplines but no one of them more than another. The movement has a character unique to that session. After the session it seems to vanish like a sand painting, but its effects remain in those features of Scriptural Reasoning that remind me of the environment of CTI. During the first years of William Storrar’s directorship at CTI, William Stacy Johnson and I co-hosted a Scriptural Reasoning research group at CTI, on topics that led to the essay collection Crisis, Call, and Leadership in the Abrahamic Traditions (Palgrave).

Reasoning across differences of tradition and discipline, the group generated a spirit of play, friendship, challenge, and deep thinking that, like overlapping waves, seemed to redouble the spirits of both CTI and Scriptural Reasoning.

Applying Scriptural Reasoning to some of Society’s Big Questions In 2012, I received a surprising phone call from Jerry White, just appointed Deputy Secretary of State in Hillary Clinton’s new Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations (CSO). I was assigned to CSO’s Working Group on Religion headed by Mr. White. But why would Mr. White call me? David Ford suggested it! Having studied scripture and Scriptural Reasoning with Ford, White asked him to recommend a US citizen with a comparable approach to religion. White asked me if I could draw on my Scriptural Reasoning experience to fashion a tool to help peacebuilders recognize the characteristics of religious groups they encounter in conflict zones. After a year of work, I offered him an initial version of what later became Value Predicate Analysis.

CTI addresses society’s big questions in ways that draw on the deep resources of religion and of science. Nurtured at CTI and extended through research in religion and in political and socio-linguistic science, Scriptural Reasoning may, hopefully, contribute to the ways we address the big question of religion and violence.

Peter Ochs is the Edgar Bronfman Professor of Modern Judaic Studies at the University of Virginia.

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INTERVIEW: SUSAN SCHNEIDER

From CTI to the Library of Congress

What will be the project you’re working on during your year holding the Blumberg chair, 2019-2020?

I’m starting a new project on the future of intelligence, which is an outgrowth of a new book coming out at the beginning of October called: Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind. The main issue explored in the book on the future of intelligence is the following: When it comes to the future of human intelligence, is the sky the limit? Or, could other kinds of intelligences, such as our own AI creations, outthink us?

In the book, I take the approach of the storyteller, drawing from colorful real-world cases such as conjoined twins with connected brains, cryogenically frozen humans awaiting digital revival, savants, and more. In some cases, I have a unique personal connection to the patient discussed. Drawing from these cases, my NASA project on superintelligent AI, current thinking on the intrinsic processing limits of the brain, and cutting-edge work in machine learning, I identify a range of possible intelligences—hive minds, planetary computroniums, complex neural networks and more.

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Then, I ask: what, if anything, is distinctive about the human brain? Could other kinds of intelligences exhibit greater intellectual potential than us, even if we enhance?

I also consider whether we humans can even consider these questions, for doing so requires a stupendous feat of self-examination: an attempt to grasp the scope and limits of our own capacity to reason, from within the confines of these very capacities.

I urge that we can get at least a basic, initial sense of where we stand within the space of those intelligences we can identify. While this is hopeful, my ultimate conclusion is unnerving. It turns out that the very thing that makes each of us special—that we are the embodied, conscious selves we are—is also something which may impose several “design ceilings” on human enhancement.

How did your time at CTI during our Inquiry on the Societal Implications of Astrobiology impact your current research?

While at CTI I wrote the new book, Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind, drawing from the work we were doing with

PHOTOGRAPH, THIS PAGE: COURTESY OF THE SUSAN SCHNEIDER

The Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/ Library of Congress Astrobiology Program establishes a focus in the nation’s capital for the exploration of issues surrounding life’s future in the universe, for humans and other species, on Earth and beyond. The program encourages discussion and reflection on the potential impacts of discovering whether there is life beyond our planet.

One researcher is appointed annually to be in residence at The John W. Kluge Center, to make use of the Library of Congress collections, as well as to convene programs that ensure the subject of astrobiology’s role in culture and society receives considered treatment each year in Washington, D.C. CTI Member Susan Schneider holds the Blumberg Chair in Astrobiology in 2019-2020.

NASA in astrobiology and all the wonderful conversations I had about the nature of life with theologians and scientists visiting CTI. At several points in the book, I draw from these discussions with members of CTI, and I’m very grateful for the wonderful, thought provoking opportunity to work in astrobiology, and draw from insights from my colleagues in theology and religious studies.

Artificial You is intended to be a sober-minded philosophical exploration of what AI can and cannot achieve. It begins with the observation that humans may not be Earth’s most intelligent species for much longer: the world champions of chess, Go, and Jeopardy! are now all AIs. Given the rapid pace of progress in AI, many predict that it could advance to human-level intelligence within the next several decades.

From there, it could quickly outpace human intelligence. I then ask: What do these developments mean for the future of the mind?

I suspect that it is inevitable that AI will take intelligence in new directions. But it is up to us to carve out a sensible path forward. As AI technology turns inward, reshaping the brain, as well as outward, potentially creating machine minds, it is crucial to beware. Homo sapiens, as mind designers, will be playing with “tools” they do not understand how to use: the self, the mind, and consciousness. I urge that an insufficient grasp of the nature of the mind, consciousness and self could undermine the use of AI and brain enhancement technology, bringing about the demise or suffering of conscious beings.

What other projects are you looking ahead to in your research?

I’m very excited about researching the new book because it will give me an opportunity to explore the range of intelligent systems that various scholars have been discussing.

Over the past few months, I’ve found myself keynoting conferences contrasting different kinds of cognitive systems. At the University of Toronto, we compared systems seeming to exhibit at least a minimal level of intelligence: slime molds, plants, AIs, brain-based intelligences (e.g., humans, octopuses). (Believe it or not, slime molds can successfully navigate complex mazes, and increasingly, it is being recognized that certain plants communicate and learn). At Cambridge’s Leverhulme AI Center, we met to discuss taxonomizing the space of intelligent systems, with an emphasis on comparing the capacities of kinds of AIs to humans and nonhuman animals, like the octopus. And at Arizona State

University’s Beyond Center, teaming up with Paul Davies, David Grinspoon and Sara Walker, I began to hypothesize that resources in physics could help explore the idea of a planet as an intelligent system. A section of the book traces my journey of discovering a range of intelligent systems, and it asks whether other intelligences might exhibit a greater potential for advanced intelligence than the human mind.

Biologists have long explored the question of whether there is a universal biology; in a similar vein, it is time to examine a range of cases of intelligent systems (AIs, savants, planets, plants) and explore what is common in all the cases, if anything, and asking whether there are universal features of cognitive systems. Here, I draw from fascinating work on convergent evolution, my earlier academic book on whether there is a lingua franca of thought, and recent discussions of whether intelligence is dependent on hierarchical reasoning in multi-layered neural networks of the sort exhibited by deep learning systems and the brain. I then explore my project with NASA, in which I identified features that superintelligent systems are likely to have.

After exploring the range of intelligent systems, and discussing whether it is even possible, from our vantage point, to explore the scope and limits of our own minds, I turn to the question: would there be limits, or design ceilings, on enhancing our own intelligence? Some neuroscientists and evolutionary psychologists observe that there are intrinsic limits to the expansion of intelligence of the brain, but influential tech leaders like Elon Musk and Ray Kurzweil propose that AI and neurotechnologies will eventually get around these evolutionary limits. But I believe we may encounter other sorts of ceilings—ceilings that aren’t imposed by evolution but which are philosophical in nature. I call these “design ceilings.”

How can people follow the work you are undertaking in the Blumberg Chair of Astrobiology at the Library of Congress?

Big Think is doing a video series on my book, Artificial You, and the BBC world news and PBS are doing segments on it. Also, I’ve done a series of related op-eds, including two that recently appeared in The New York Times. I post news items to my website: Schneiderwebsite.com.

Susan Schneider is a CTI Member, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, and the 2019-2020 holder of the Baruch Blumberg Chair of Astrobiology at the Library of Congress. Schneider writes about the fundamental nature of the self and mind, especially from the vantage point of issues in philosophy, artificial intelligence, and astrobiology. She has been featured by The New York Times, Science, Nautilus, Smithsonian, Discover, PBS, The History Channel and more.

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INTERVIEW: MARY ELLEN O’CONNELL

Viewing Law Through the Lens of Beauty CTI Member Mary Ellen O’Connell has recently published a book that is the fruit of her research at CTI during the 2014-2015 Inquiry on Law and Religious Freedom. Published by Cambridge University Press, The Art of Law in the International Community argues that the secret to the renewal of international law lies in revitalizing the moral foundation of natural law through drawing on aesthetic philosophy and the arts. O’Connell discusses the book and its beginnings at CTI in the following interview.

How did the idea for this book come about, and what led you to examine the intersection of aesthetics and law?

The Art of Law investigates why we should care about the rule of law in the world. It builds on an earlier book, The Power and Purpose of International Law, which looked at what law is and how the enforcement mechanisms of international law work. The Art of Law goes further, answering why we should comply with the law regardless of coercive enforcement. It aims fundamentally at building new respect for the law of peace.

What are the main arguments of the book?

In researching The Art of Law, I found that people say they obey the law to avoid punishment or to realize some advantage—the pain and gain arguments. They are mostly unaware of the critical third reason: to do the right thing.

We have largely lost this third insight into law compliance. Without it, we can have little hope for ending armed conflict, protecting

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the environment, or upholding human dignity through law. In the West, we once understood that compliance with law was a divine command. Law compliance was not reduced to two dimensions.

With the suppression of theology from public life, however, we no longer recognize the divine component of law compliance. It lives on in tradition. Our world reveals, however, that the tradition is fading as even national leaders openly flout the law. The talk today is of the end of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism—other ways of saying the rule of law is in crisis.

This book offers a way back to understanding the normative dimension of law compliance. It is a way compatible with religious belief but open to all perspectives. Aesthetic philosophy offers an attractive insight into complying with law solely for the good of another. It supports humanity’s capacity for altruism, which is essential for functioning law that can create the conditions for a flourishing international community. In other words, the book revives natural law theory for our times. It responds to the main

“Without the academic year at CTI the book would not have been written.”

theory that has taken up the space left vacant by the retreat of theology, which is the political theory of realism. This theory largely accounts for the narrow understanding of human nature as responding only to material reality—pain and gain.

With the third reason in place, the book goes on to provide a new understanding of the central purpose of all law: the prohibition on the use of force and the provision of alternatives for the peaceful settlement of disputes. The final chapter draws once again on aesthetic theory to re-cast the vocabulary of dispute resolution, from one of competition—war and games—to one of performance. The courthouse as theater.

How did your time at CTI influence your research for this book?

Without the academic year at CTI the book would not have been written. Our year’s group of legal scholars and theologians focused extensively on the deep inter-connections of law and theology and how much we have lost in the narrowing of the human mind to focus on material things alone. Our many guests, events, and resources in the Princeton academic community created an atmosphere of intellectual excitement that I felt privileged to experience. It was also a year of personal spiritual growth for me.

I continue to marvel at the creativity and generosity of William Storrar and Kim Lane Scheppele, former director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton, in organizing us. I hope the book is a fitting tribute to them, as well as an expression of my gratitude.

Mary Ellen O’Connell is the Robert and Marion Short Professor of Law and Research Professor of International Dispute Resolution at the University of Notre Dame. In 2014-2015 she was a Senior Research Fellow in CTI’s Inquiry on Law and Religious Freedom. The book project she began at CTI was published in May 2019

by Cambridge University Press, as The Art of Law in the International Community.

This book developed through the efforts and support of so many people, too many to thank here. It has been a pleasure and a privilege to discuss the importance of art to law with audiences, classes, at dinners and during chance meetings. The footnotes reflect the contribution of numerous colleagues. Various institutions provided opportunities and environments for creative thinking, especially the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, the Center of Theological Inquiry and the Program in Law and Public Affairs of Princeton University, and the Norwegian Nobel Institute. Research assistants were collaborators in the ideas, the research, and the drafting, especially Felicia Caponigri, Marie-Claire Klassen, Zachary Stackhouse, and Sawyer White.

My editor at Cambridge University Press, Finola O’Sullivan, gave me confidence. My husband, Peter Bauer, a former United States Army interrogator, a photographer, and a Photoshop expert, provided the original inspiration, as well as constant love, encour­agement, and support.

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WOLFGANG PALAVER

The Sacred and the Holy THEOLOGICAL INQUIRY ACROSS TRADITIONS

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esearch depends on a clear focus as well as on serendipity leading to new and unexpected insights. Both these preconditions helped me to work on René Girard’s distinction between the sacred and the holy with its special take on violence and religion. The Research Workshop on Religion & Violence at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton during the fall of 2018 provided me with a clear focus for my work. We started with working definitions of religion and violence. I insisted from the start that we should reflect on human violence first, turning to religion in a second step. I still think that this the right way to proceed because it forces us to reflect on human potentials for violence without shifting too quickly all the blame on religion.

Scapegoating religion diminishes our understanding of human violence. We should not forget what the Austrian writer Robert Musil stated after World War I: “Human nature is as capable of cannibalism as it is of the Critique of Pure Reason.” Similarly, the primatologist Richard Wrangham concluded recently that human beings “can be the nastiest of species and also the nicest.” Girard’s claim that mimetic rivalries are a main cause of human violence remains valid. Jonathan Sacks endorsed it recently in his book Not in God's Name highlighting the murderous force of “sibling rivalry.”

Putting violence first, however, does not mean to whitewash religion. A profound understanding of religion needs to find out in what way religions can enhance the outburst of violence and in what way religions are able to tame it. Serendipity provided me with new insights about religion. Discussing my work at CTI at a conference

that with play also “aggression and violence” evolved, “with the on religious violence at Georgetown University, a fellow participant particularly nasty result that humans and our nearest primate relareferred me to Benjamin Schewel’s overview of important theories tive, the chimpanzees, deliberately kill other members of their own of religion in his book Seven Ways of Looking at Religion. This book species.” Bellah did not shy away from mentioning “cannibalism” offered me two helpful insights for my own work. First, Schewel showing up in the fossil record and “in-group aggression” as part insists that in recent decades scholars of religion avoided substantial of human evolution. Most strikingly, Bellah refers by following the judgements to overcome past claims of Christian superiority. Purework of primatologist Christopher Boehm to the fact that egalitarly descriptive theories of religion, however, no longer allow us to ian hunter-gatherers relied heavily on violence: distinguish “Mother Teresa’s religion from Osama bin Laden’s.” By “Boehm insists that human egalitarianism does not come easily, following Girard’s distinction between the sacred and the holy, I try that it is not the absence of the disposition to dominate; rather, it to strengthen a substantial understanding of religion. In order not requires hard, sometimes aggressive, work to keep potential upto fall back towards unjustified claims of Christian superiority, howstarts from dominating the rest. ... Potential upstarts are first ridiever, I also follow Schewel’s connection with John Hick’s pluralistic culed, then shunned, and, if they persist, killed.” theology of religions according to which we can What Bellah remarked more in passing plays a discover a common core in all axial religions concentral role in Richard Wrangham’s most recent sisting in the transformation of “self-centeredness “Research depends on book, The Goodness Paradox, which also relies into Reality- or Other-centeredness.” The mystic dimension that characterizes Girard’s understanda clear focus as well partly on Boehm. Wrangham distinguishes between reactive aggression responding immediateing of the holy allows me to claim that it belongs as on serendipity ly to a threat that is much more common among to this axial transformation.

Conversations with associate director Joshua leading to new and wild animals and proactive aggression that is an instrumental and “cold” use of violence requirMauldin, with my colleague Ed Noort, and with unexpected insights.” ing planning and collaboration. The second type Marcia Pally, who visited me twice at CTI, led of violence is much more common among hume to investigate more closely the relationship man beings. According to Wrangham, human between Girard’s mimetic theory and recent reevolution has resulted in humanity’s self-domestication moving search on religion and human evolution (especially Robert Bellah’s more and more away from reactive violence. Proactive violence has book Religion in Human Evolution). Bellah’s distinction between played a key role in this domestication. Wrangham mentions an tribal, archaic, and axial religions forced me first to rethink the “execution hypothesis” explaining a selection against violent men: terminology that Girard and his followers have used. Girard pre“It proposes that selection against aggressiveness and in favor ferred the term “archaic” for early stages of human evolution that of greater docility came from execution of the most antisocial inare characterized by the “sacred” rooted in the scapegoat mechdividuals. … Coalitions of males became effective at deliberately anism that helped to overcome violent crises inside early human killing any member of their social group who was prepared to use groups. Following Bellah, I decided to use the term “pre-Axial” violence on his own behalf and simply did not care what others for the period that Girard called archaic. Bellah’s work challenges thought about him. In the end, execution was the only way to stop Girard’s hypothesis about the emergence of the pre-Axial sacred such a male from being a tyrant.” from a scapegoat mechanism. Bellah did not engage with Girard’s Wrangham links the execution hypothesis with the human unitheory in depth but remarks on one occasion that “a possible reversal of capital punishment. His evidence strengthens Girard’s lation between religion and terror goes way back, though perhaps scapegoat theory. Whereas Wrangham does not recognize a signot, contrary to Rene Girard …all the way back.” This criticism nificant role for religion, Girard’s understanding of the violent sabecomes clearer where Bellah remarks that the collective violence cred helps to explain how the execution hypothesis may relate to that Girard understood as scapegoating and as a foundational murpre-Axial forms of religion. The title of Wrangham’s chapter introder belongs to the later stage of “archaic religion,” which is accordducing the execution hypothesis is “The Tyrant Problem.” Girard’s ing to Bellah monarchical and centered around one person. For interpretation of the Book of Job in The Victim of His People offers this reason, Bellah claims in opposition to Girard “that the first a biblical counterexample to the execution hypothesis. Girard dekilling among culturally organized humans was not the killing of scribed the collective persecution of Job as following the sacred a scapegoat, but the killing of an upstart who genuinely threatpattern of collective violence against “tyrants.” Job’s trust in a God ened to revive the despotism of the old primate alpha male.” Bellah that sides with victims is an experience of the holy clearly distindownplays violence significantly if we compare most parts of his guished from the violent sacred. book with Girard’s mimetic theory. A more careful look, however, recognizes that Bellah may came closer to Girard than he himself had thought. With Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens he emphasized Wolfgang Palaver is Professor of Catholic Social Thought at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. play as the main root of rituals. He, however, did not overlook

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INTERVIEW: ETIN ANWAR

Discussing Islam and Violence Where did your scholarship in Islamic studies begin?

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

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

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

“The most important part of the CTI workshop for me is the space to give voice to one’s own views while being open to ideas from different fields and perspectives.”

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My project questions the Western perception of Muslims as violent people. How did such a perception emerge, and what allows it to proliferate in the United States and elsewhere? While at CTI I have been studying these fundamental concepts and terms.

As of now the title of my work is going to be “Let’s pray they are not Muslims: Debunking Myth and Fostering Hope.”

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

And my friend said to me “Let us pray that they are not Muslims.” Of course, later in the day we learned that they were. So this project is a reminder of what radical Muslims did. And we see these again and again. And in my opinion, Muslims need to own it. That yes, there are problems with some Muslim followers.

Not all. It is small, but still. How can Muslim communities and Muslim scholars address violence done by Muslims?

PAUL MIDDLETON

Violence in Early Christianity The word “religion” itself is distinctively Western and we are basically asking the rest of the world to define religion in Western terms. I don’t know if we can think differently about the word, whether it needs to be religion or maybe something else.

If we agree on the word religion, then we can start addressing which part or aspect of religion we should focus on. We know that there are many factors that contribute to violence. Political instability, economic competition, lack of social cohesion. But if you were to address the question of violence from a religious perspective, then the question is how would Islam address violence? Which parts of Islamic teaching should be emphasized?

How has the CTI workshop impacted your research project?

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

It is important for all of us to understand what religion is and why it is important to people.

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

PHOTOGRAPH OF PAINTING: SALAJEAN/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

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

I

f the relationship between religion and violence is complex, the specific connection between Christianity and acts of violence merits particular attention. How can it be that people following a religion founded on the teaching of one who declared the peacemakers to be blessed should be complicit in, or indeed the perpetrators of horrific acts of violence over the last two millennia? Christians have engaged in slaughter in the mission fields, inquisitions and executions, Crusades against Muslims, and, of course, engaged in anti-Jewish oppression that ultimately led to the horrors of Auschwitz.

Many theologians claim that peace-making and non-violence are normative qualities of Christianity. A commonly expressed view is that while Christianity was indebted to Judaism for much of its theology and practice, one area of marked contrast was in attitudes to violence. While Jews had a tradition of Holy War in conquering, maintaining, and regaining the Promised Land, Christians followed a crucified Messiah. Therefore, in the first century, Jews could draw on the recent example of the Maccabees that would lead to the unsuccessful revolts against Rome. With no commitment to temporal space, Christian identity was forged through modelling Jesus’ embrace of suffering and death. In general terms, these contrasting

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imagine those they consider their enemies being subjected to vioways of creating social identity led to different interpretations of lent death, or in Revelation’s case, violent torture prior to death, persecution, suffering, and martyrdom. with the saints either watching on or participating.

Yet by the end of the fourth century, which had begun with The most gruesome violence can be legitimized if it is divine viothe so-called “Great Persecution” of Diocletian, Christian mobs lence, or human violence on God’s command or behalf. Even early were attacking synagogues with impunity. As the empire became Christian martyrdom is usually portrayed in agonistic terms, often increasingly Christianized in the fifth century, all non-Christians with a threat of violent retribution for the persecutors. In the New began to see their freedoms impinged as, to quote Hans Küng’s bitTestament, such retributive violence is not restricted to the Apocaing critique, “the Church no longer remembered that it had once lypse; it is found in the parables of Jesus, such as the wedding feast been persecuted.”

(Matt. 22.1–14) and the tenants (Matt. 21.33–46). Elsewhere in My project, Divine Violence in the New Testament and Early the New Testament, characters are subject to divine “execution,” Christianity, which I began at CTI, aims to offer some explanasuch as Judas (Acts 1.18), Ananias and Saption why the Church transitioned so easily phira (Acts 5.1–11), and Herod Agrippa from persecuted to persecutor. Accounts of (Acts 12.20–24), and possibly those who ate violence/non-violence in early Christianity “By understanding the the Lord’s Supper in an unworthy manner tend to make two erroneous claims. First, important role violence who Paul notes have died (1 Cor. 11.30). there is a sharp contrast between violence in Later, Tertullian, who is often invoked in arthe Hebrew Bible and New Testament. This has played in early and guments about Christian non-violence, urgis a move that was made as early as Marcion’s es believers not to attend the games because notion that the God of Jesus Christ was not subsequent Christian of their violence and cruelty, yet imagines the same deity as in the Hebrew Bible. This worldviews, we are better Christians to be spectators in the eschatoview was partly motivated by what Marcion saw as Yahweh’s problematic violence placed to learn the lessons logical arena when God executes judgement on non-believers (On the Games). throughout the Old Testament. Second, of history and overcome the While early Christians certainly did not some argue that post-Constantinian Christake up arms against the Romans, in their tianity, when the Empire began to be Chrislatent dark side of faith.” theological worldview they fantasized about tianized, caused a radical break from the earthe violence that would be inflicted on ly Church’s commitment to non-violence. those outside the church. In early ChristiChristians could now wield the power of the anity, violence was by no means eschewed; violence was eschatoState in order to promote the gospel and punish heresy. For some logically transferred, and only temporarily and temporally disradical Christian groups in the Anabaptist tradition, the failure of placed. When the opportunity eventually presented itself in the the church to disentangle itself from the State has been the cause of fourth century onwards, it is hardly surprising that Christians violence in the name of Christ up to the present day. used their newfound power to act, wielding divine violence and I challenge the assumption that there are sharp differences in the judgement against those they considered to be enemies of God. level of violence between the Hebrew Bible and the New TestaThe mistaken presupposition that the New Testament and earment, and from the pre- to post-Constantine churches. My thesis ly Christianity were by conviction “pacifist” acts as a theological is admittedly controversial: early Christianity never was characterinhibitor which makes it easy to dismiss the all too frequent ocized by a principled commitment to non-violence, and so the two currences of Christian violence as aberrations from a non-violent radical shifts identified never really took place. Some scholars have norm. However, by understanding and confronting the important attempted to “level out” the violence between the Old and New role violence has played in early and subsequent Christian worlTestaments by playing down the violence of the Hebrew Bible, dviews, we are better placed to learn the lessons of history and noting that mainstream scholarship now regards the conquest narovercome the latent dark side of faith. ratives of Canaan to be unhistorical, representing the fantasies of an exiled people. While this is almost certainly the case, it is this kind of “fantasy violence” that is found in the New Testament.

While the Hebrew Bible’s violence usually manifests itself in war narratives, in which Israel is led by God against its enemies, early Paul Middleton is Professor of Christian texts transfer this warfare to an eschatological or apocNew Testament and alyptic level, most notably in the Book of Revelation. Readers Early Christian History at the University of Chester, UK. of both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament are invited to

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Your annual support for our mission and program makes CTI’s cutting-edge research possible. CTI could not do what it does without your generous contributions.

I thank you for your continuing commitment and investment.

—William Storrar, Director

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THE FRIENDS OF

$50,000 and above Judith McCartin Scheide Charles & Nancy Wall

$25,000 - $49,999 Robert Hendrickson Roy Lennox

$10,000 - $24,999 Fred Anderson Robert Gunn William & Joanna Storrar

$5,000 - $9,999

Honoring our Donors Thank you to the Friends of CTI who made gifts to the 2018-2019 Annual Fund, which directly supports CTI’s mission.

Mary Lee Fitzgerald Jay & Harriet Vawter

$2,500 - $4,999 Brian Fix

$1,000 - $2,499 James Armstrong Bruce Freeman Roland M. Frye Jr., on behalf of Helen Frye Parr and in Honor of Roland M. Frye* Dale Irvin George Johnstone Jon & Gwen Pott The Reading Group, Princeton John Witte Alison & James Zimmerman

$500 - $999 William & Gail Brown David Fergusson Joshua Mauldin Patrick Miller Eileen Moffett Peter Paris Eric Springsted John Thurber & Connie Cloonan Mark Modak-Truran Philip Webb

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Every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy in our listing. If any error is noted, please accept our sincere apologies and kindly notify Karin Morse, Director of Philanthropy at karin.morse@ctinquiry.org.

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Robert Adams Richard Armstrong* Linda Arntzenius Hank & Susan Bristol Nathaniel & Shirah Brown James Buckley Samuel Calian

Shin Chiba Richard Crocker Willem Drees Keith Egan Jane Egbert Silvio Ferrari Stephen Fitzpatrick Joan Fleming Amazon Smile Foundation Edmund Freeborn Paul Hanson James Haire Perrin Hardy Jan-Olav Henriksen Jennifer Holloway George Hunsberger Carter & Joan Karins Brian Kelly Scott Kenefake S.T. Kimbrough Wilson Kimnach Allan King Torrance Kirby Wesley & Phyllis Kort Douglas Leonard Michael Lukens John McCarthy Gerald McKenny Daniel Migliore Jan Muis Douglas Ottati Elizabeth Parr-Johnston Stephen Pope Catherine Randall Calvin Ratcliff Mary Reath Paul Rorem Warren Savage Daniel & Margaret Schipani Susan Schneider Robert Seaman Jayakiran & Mrinalini Sebastian John & Barbara Shimchick Louis Slee Jeanne Stevenson-Moessner Jade Talag Hans-Martien ten Napel Miklos Veto Ralph Wyman * In memoriam

McCord Fellows A giving circle recognizing our Members, CTI’s honored scholars, for their individual support.

Robert Adams William Brown James Buckley Samuel Calian Shin Chiba Willem Drees Keith Egan David Fergusson Silvio Ferrari Roland M. Frye Jr. James Haire Paul Hanson Jan-Olav Henriksen George Hunsberger George Johnstone S.T. Kimbrough Wilson Kimnach Torrance Kirby Wesley Kort Michael Lukens Joshua Mauldin John McCarthy Gerald McKenny Daniel Migliore Patrick Miller Mark Modak-Truran Jan Muis Douglas Ottati Peter Paris Stephen Pope Catherine Randall Paul Rorem Susan Schneider Daniel Schipani Jayakiran Sebastian Eric Springsted Jeanne Stevenson-Moessner William Storrar Hans-Martien ten Napel Miklos Veto

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Lisa Le Roux, Stellenbosch University

Religion & Violence: A Complex Relationship CTI Holds Symposium on Religion & Violence with Princeton University

D

o religions incite violence or can they help to end it?

How are religious factors identified in conflict situations? How is violence in religious texts to be interpreted? The complex relationship between religion and violence warrants a range of theological and interdisciplinary responses.

In December 2018, CTI collaborated with the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University (CSR) to bring together a characteristically diverse group of scholars to discuss these important and timely issues. The event, which took place at Princeton University, was an opportunity for CTI members to present their research in a public forum and in conversation with respondents from CSR. CTI Member Wolfgang Palaver of the University of Innsbruck opened the symposium with his lecture, “Transforming the Sacred into the Holy: René Girard’s Approach to Violence and Religion.”

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While focused on René Girard’s seminal book, La violence et le sacré, Palaver’s wide-ranging discourse took in recent research on violence among primates and humans; types of violence associated with different forms of religion; and religiously motivated violence and contemporary terrorism. Palaver set the scene for subsequent sessions on specific aspects of sexual violence and on the uses and misuses of violence in sacred texts; the first chaired

by CSR Associate Director Jenny Wiley Legath with Jessica Delgado of Princeton University as Respondent; the second, chaired

by CTI Associate Director Joshua Mauldin with Seth Perry of Princeton University as Respondent.

As is often the case with events that mark the culmination of a period of intensive research and collaborative dialogue, little time was wasted by participants already familiar with each other’s work.

Sociologist Lisa Le Roux of South Africa’s Stellenbosch University, philosopher Louise Du Toit, also of Stellenbosch, and theologian David Tombs, of the University of Otago in New Zealand, offered very different perspectives. All, however, acknowledged the pressing concerns of today.

“What we are doing here is driven by a sense of urgency,” said Le Roux, plunging straightway into a feminist perspective on women’s agency and complicity in violence and in patriarchal systems and beliefs that subjugate them. Addressing the portrayal of women as intrinsically non-violent and the paradox of religious women’s compliance with restrictive doctrines, she described ways in which gender constraints created to counter inequality can contribute to gender inequality, especially in religious contexts. A better understanding of women’s agency, she argued, would help those seeking to understand and transform women’s lives for the better—feminists, development workers, activists, researchers—to engage in ways that respect very different worldviews.

An element of time travel was evident here: entering the past to make sense of the present; interrogating existing scholarship and traditional readings for insights and new interpretations for contemporary solutions.

Du Toit went back to the 19th Century to a troubled border in Southern Africa to investigate the sexual dimension of colonialism.

Church hearings into adultery and physical abuse in the case of John Balfour, the son of a first-generation Christian convert, expose clashing socio-sexual codes and ways in which European patriarchal heterosexuality was used as a Christianizing or “civilizing” tool that did much to displace pre-colonial social, political, and religious systems. The time journey was of more than historical interest. As Du Toit explained, it bears on contemporary South Africa, where extremely high levels of sexual violence draw state, government, and other official responses and where “the complicity of Christian tradition with sexual violence is increasingly obvious.”

Tombs plunged further back in time to Rome in the early days of Christianity for a disturbing examination of torture. His “Crucifixion, Impalement, and the Palatine Graffito,” referenced a crude sketch, discovered in 1857, on a wall that was once part of Rome’s Imperial Palace. Dating to around 200 CE, it shows a person, assumed to be a slave, looking up at a crucified figure with the head of a donkey. The inscription reads: “Alexamenos worships his God.” In this era, it was a common slur against Christians that they worshiped a donkey-headed god and the drawing is understood as a mocking reference to Christ. Tombs looked squarely at the evidence for sexual violence being part of crucifixion in those days and explored, with sensitivity, the possibility of Christ having endured such abuse. Although the evidence is suggestive rather than conclusive, further investigation and understanding of the graffito, Tombs suggests, “could deepen the contemporary conversation on sexual violence within the churches.”

In the day’s second session, the University of Groningen’s Professor Emeritus of Ancient Hebrew Literature Ed Noort and Hannah Strømmen of the University of Chichester addressed the

Ephraim Meir, left, and Suldaan Abdisalam Mahmood, Advisor for the President of Somalia on Peace and Reconciliation

“The complex relationship between religion and violence warrants a range of theological and interdisciplinary responses.”

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left to right: Louise du Toit, David Tombs, Lisa Le Roux, Jessica Delgado

challenges of violence in religious texts. As earlier, the problems of today were ever present.

“Every text needs interpretation. Every interpretation needs wisdom. Every wisdom needs careful negotiation between the timeless and time,” offered Noort, quoting Jonathan Sachs. Arguing that new translations are needed for the future, Noort warned that while texts in their contexts offer possibilities for understanding, texts stripped of their contexts can be misused to terrible effect.

The action of Anders Behring Breivik in Oslo on 22 July 2011 proved illustrative. Strømmen described the killing of 77 people with many more hospitalized, most under the age of 20. Seeing himself as a modern-day crusader, Breivik legitimized his acts in terms of violent and militaristic imagery in the Bible. Far-right rhetoric, particularly the idea of a Christian West against Islam, pervades his online manifesto.

Strømmen described a method for identifying and perhaps pre-empting such violence. Noting how particular notions of the Bible have gained traction in the West, she described how “biblical assemblages”—assortments of images, texts, stories, characters, and material realities that make up particular bibles rather than fixed bodies of texts—can be used to identify trends in discourse. By mapping these developments in mainstream and fringe cultures, it may be possible to “spot other biblical assemblages gaining speed.”

Solutions were discussed in the closing panel on Dialogue and Reconciliation, chaired by CSR Director Robert Wuthnow with

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CSR Visiting Fellow Tanya Zion-Waldoks of Bar-Ilan University as Respondent. Founding Director of the Network for Religious and Traditional Peacemakers, Antti Pentikäinen spoke of a new generation of Sámi activists in Finland who are tackling the impacts of colonialism and intergenerational pain. Sámi, the last indigenous people in Europe, experienced forced conversion to Christianity and assimilation. With the Finnish government, Pentikäinen helped launch a transformative truth and reconciliation process with the Sámi that could serve as a model for the wider community.

Ephraim Meir, Levinas Guest Professor for Jewish Dialogue Studies and Interreligious Theology at the University of Hamburg and a specialist in modern and contemporary Jewish philosophy, described his work constructing an interreligious theology with dialogue as its object and method.

The day’s event perfectly illustrated what CTI Director William Storrar describes as a constant challenge for CTI scholars: working “in the tension between the moral urgency to resolve pressing contemporary problems and the necessity for slow, patient work that sheds light on their origins and evolutions.”

At the end of the day, all agreed that new understandings must be more widely disseminated into the mainstream and mobilized toward solutions for contemporary problems. Zion-Waldoks summed up the general feeling: “Fascinating and generative, these thoughts will stay with me long after I’ve left this room.

Religion and the Built Environment CTI’s 2020-2021 Research Workshop Murray Rae University of Otago, New Zealand

Thomas Barrie North Carolina State University

Julio Bermudez Catholic University of America

Joshua Mauldin CTI

Listen to CTI’s latest podcast on how the built environment affects our lives.

The Inequality Lectures

Fall 2019:

As part of the Research Workshop on Economic Inequality, CTI is sharing its research through a lecture series on the global concern of rising inequality.

The series begins on October 17 with a lecture by Australian theologian Robert Gascoigne on “Inequality and Catholic Social Teaching,” and continues with a November 14 lecture by literature scholar Leslie Wingard on “Sin, Servanthood, and Social Inequality in African American Literature and Culture.” The series concludes with the William H. Scheide Lecture on Global Concerns on December 5, given

by South African theologian Nico Koopman, on “Mandela’s Dream: Democracy in South Africa 25 Years On.” These lectures are free and open to the public.

October 17 Robert Gascoigne November 14 Leslie Wingard

December 5 Nico Koopman

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SPOTLIGHT ON

Dr. Johnstone is most grateful for the support he received from the Templeton Foundation and the many opportunities this provided for him to explore the relationship between the sciences and humanities. This included a delightful year with an incredibly bright (and fun) group of colleagues at the Center of Theological Inquiry studying Religious Experience and Moral Identity (with special thanks to Will Storrar and the CTI staff) and several summers with equally bright (and fun) colleagues in the Science and Religion program held at Oxford University (with special thanks to Stan Rosenberg and the SCIO staff ).

Endorsements:

Brick Johnstone and Daniel Cohen Neuroscience, Selflessness, and Spiritual Experience Neuroscience, Selflessness, and Spiritual Experience conveys the manner by which selflessness serves as a neuropsychological and religious foundation for spiritually transcendent experiences.

The book combines neurological case studies and neuroscience research with religious accounts of transcendence experiences from the perspective of both the neurosciences and the history of religions. Chapters cover the subjective experience of transcendence, an historical summary of different philosophical and religious perspectives, a review of the neuroscience research that describes the manner by which the brain processes and creates a self, and more. Co-authored by Brick Johnston, a CTI Member, and his colleague Daniel Cohen, the book is a testament to the kind of interdisciplinary scholarship CTI fosters.

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“Neuroscience, Selflessness, and Spiritual Experience is a rare and remarkable book that transcends disciplinary boundaries. It is a stunning accomplishment and I recommend it for anyone interested in religious experience. Johnstone and Cohen’s clear style and exceptional scholarship shine through on every page.

It is one thing to advocate for collaboration between the sciences and humanities; it is quite another to produce a volume that not only builds the sciencehumanities bridge, but regularly traverses it. This type of work is precisely how the study of religion needs to move forward and it is clear that Johnstone and Cohen are well-positioned to lead the way.”

—Richard Sosis, James Barnett Professor of Humanistic Anthropology, University of Connecticut

“It is a rare treat to see a neuroscientist collaborate with a humanities religious studies scholar at the depth evident in this marvelous book. No matter what happens to religion in a secularizing world, spiritual experiences of selflessness and transcendence are a basic part of the human condition. Fortunately for all of us, experts such as Johnstone and Cohen can help us make sense of them.”

—Wesley J. Wildman, Professor of Philosophy, Theology, and Ethics, Boston University.

Phillip Cary The Meaning of Protestant Theology

Agustín Fuentes Why We Believe

Christine Schliesser Theologie im öffentlichen Ethikdiskurs

Andrew Davison Participation in God

Mary Ellen O’Connell The Art of Law in the International Community

Susan Schneider Artificial You

Silvio Ferrari Routledge Handbook of Religious Laws

Esther D. Reed The Limit of Responsibility

Peter Manley Scott The Theology of Postnatural Right

For a wider selection of member publications see Spring and Fall Books on our website, ctinquiry.org.

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INTERVIEW: LESLIE WINGARD

African American Christianity in the 21st Century ism, homophobia, and “church hurt”—alienating experiences justified by the (mis)use of Scripture in Christian settings. The arts and humanities enhance our everyday understanding of Christianity as a practice open to all. As an interdisciplinary humanities scholar rather than a scholar based solely in theology, I am excited to work with others at CTI on a book which represents the full range of Christian ideas.

How do you as a scholar approach the problem of economic inequality?

Let’s discuss the project you are working on at CTI. My project is titled “Being, Belonging, and Beyond: Redefining African American Christianity in the 21st Century.” I analyze print and visual texts to unpack three sets of Christian concepts from a politically progressive perspective: grace and peace (Being), communion and virtue (Belonging), and sin and hell (Beyond).

As a literature scholar, where do you find value in studying religion and collaborating with scholars of religion and theologians?

I am using a range of methods and theories in my project: womanist theology; close readings of literature and visual art; and black cultural studies approaches. Analyzing religion through artistic production invites us to understand Christianity as fluid and challenges the traditional bifurcation of sacred and secular culture.

Too often, this bifurcation has contributed to the spread of sex-

The “Belonging” section of my project is about economic inequality, especially the ways in which the words “Virtue” and “Communion” have been understood in black communities. I see virtue and communion as two sides of the same coin, though the latter is group-oriented, while the former is often attached to the individual. I analyze these terms by utilizing African American memoirs that touch on economic inequality as case studies, including Dorothy Height’s Open Wide the Freedom Gates (2009) and Michelle Obama’s Becoming (2018).

As I explore the two terms, I also consider print and visual representations of Kwanzaa, the holiday which celebrates the principle of cooperative economics and that some African Americans have seen as competing with Christmas.

What are your hopes for the Research Workshop on Religion and Economic Inequality, as it relates to your own project and perhaps also more broadly for the set of issues being addressed?

Despite the long US history of racial and economic discrimination, African Americans have expressed their agency and self-definition through black culture—literature, visual art, music, and film. With the help of others in the CTI workshop, I am exploring how black culture has always “intersected with Christianity.”

Leslie E. Wingard is Associate Professor of English at the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio. She has published articles in Religion and Literature, Religion and the Arts, South: A Scholarly Journal, and American Quarterly, and written a book manuscript under contract with University of Georgia Press. Last summer, Wingard was Alfred Appel, Jr. Curatorial Fellow in African American Art at the Delaware Art Museum.

She has also been Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Visual Culture at Williams College, a Research Fellow in the Departments of English and African American Studies at Princeton University, a Research Fellow at the Princeton Theological Seminary and Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion, and a Research Fellow in the Religion Department and Program in Africana Studies at Haverford College. Now a CTI Member, Wingard is participating in CTI’s Research Workshop on Religion & Economic Inequality.

Leslie Wingard will give a public lecture at CTI on November 14, 2019, on “Sin, Servanthood, and Social Inequality in African American Literature and Culture.”

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Spring 2019 Research Workshop Continuing the Five-Year Inquiry on Religion & Global Concerns, CTI successfully completed its second Research Workshop on Religion & Violence in spring 2019.

Back Row, Left to Right: Richard Davis (Pacific Theological College, Fiji) Joshua Mauldin (Associate Director, CTI) Peter Ochs (University of Virginia, USA) Christine Schliesser (Zurich University, Switzerland) Mark Eaton (Azusa Pacific University, USA) Willem Drees (Tilburg University, the Netherlands)

Front Row, Left to Right: William Storrar (Director, CTI) Pauline Kollontai (York St. John University, UK) Etin Anwar (Hobart and William Smith Colleges, USA) Joel Hodge (Australian Catholic University, Australia) Paul Middleton (University of Chester, UK)

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NEWS

&

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PHOTOGRAPH: ©MICHAIL PETROV/FOTOLIA.COM

EVENTS

Leading Scholars Explore Cutting-Edge Questions in Theology & Science

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his year’s William Witherspoon Public Lecture on Theology and Science was delivered on the evening of March 21, 2019 by CTI Member Dirk Evers and discussed in detail the following morning at a symposium led by the Dutch philosopher Willem Drees.

Evers and Drees are leaders in the field of science and religion and the event was a highlight of the Center’s 2018-2019 year.

Evers is Professor of Systematic Theology at Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg and President of the European Society for the Study of Science and Theology (ESSSAT). Early interests in science found expression in his 2002 ESSSAT Research Prize-winning doctoral thesis, “Space, Matter, Time: Christian Theology of Creation in Dialogue with Scientific Cosmology.”

A past president of ESSSAT, Drees is a humanities professor of philosophy at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Trained in physics and theology, he teaches and writes on human self-understanding and religion in today’s multicultural and technological world. Recommending that Drees should be read by all who take a scholarly interest in science and religion, British historian John H. Brooke described his arguments as impossible to compress into sound-bites, “and that is their strength.” The remark applies equally to Evers, never more so than on this occasion when he addressed the weighty question: “Artificial Intelligence: Friend or Foe of Human Flourishing?”

Right off the bat, Evers assured his audience that despite the clear-cut alternatives of his title, he would not be offering a definite answer. Instead, he set out a thoroughly researched history of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the context of the Digital Revolution.

This, said Evers, is a revolution in the sense of Friedrich Engels: “the revolutionizing of all traditional relationships by an industry as it develops, which also revolutionizes people’s minds.” As history demonstrates, technological change and human self-understanding go hand in hand, said Evers, citing Marshall McLuhan in 1971: “Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain.”

From there Evers went on to discuss AI from the first use of the term in 1956, by John McCarthy in the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, to the explosion of advances—artificial neural networks that can: identify human faces at a better rate than humans; diagnose certain cancers with higher precision than the best clinicians; and analyze complex situations and make decisions better and faster than humans.

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But with new developments come new challenges. Evers echoed Heinrich Bedford-Strohm’s 2018 William H. Scheide Lecture on Global Concerns, “The Ethical Challenge of the Digital Age,” in listing the good, the bad, and the downright scary. “As Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari has argued, governments are more and more reduced to administration, to managing a country, not leading it.”

When it comes to information and communication, AI offers increased ease in political and individual decision-making, but at the cost of fake news, filter bubbles, and echo chambers that within certain ideological frames “reveal a remarkable resilience to rational argument or scientific reasoning.”

What of jobs when more tasks are taken over by machines and perhaps by robots made efficient and competent by AI? What of automated warfare with final decisions given over to AI? What of personal decision making and the organization of daily life?

“Already in 2007 Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Google, defined the company’s goal as to enable its users to be able to ask questions such as “‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’”

In 2010, Schmidt went further by claiming that Google and its digital tools should aim at giving advice: “most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

By now, many members of the audience were thinking about their own personal reliance on devices that monitor physical activity, for example, and their increasing reliance on Siri, Alexa

and Google Assistant. “How many and which of our life-choices are we willing to delegate?” asked Evers. And “What will become of our moral sense of community and solidarity in a world of individual monads and blurred general categories? How can we value diversity and equality at the same time?”

As if these challenges were not enough, Evers went on to what some see as endangered humanity at the dawn of superintelligence. As early as 1965, British mathematician Irving J. Good imagined the self-perfection of machine intelligence: “an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.”

More recently, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Stephen Hawking have warned of the dangers of AI. But Evers is not to be carried away. “On the whole, I find the concept of the awakening of a superintelligence hardly warranted. My main objection is that AI is addressed as a quasi-agent and a kind of ghost in the machine right from the beginning. In this respect I am a Quinean: no entity without identity.”

As a theologian, however, he asks: “To what extent are we delivering ourselves to forces and dynamics beyond our control? What boundaries should we accept as given, and what boundaries can or even must be pushed? Do we have to learn to say ‘enough,’ or do we have to develop more courage to go beyond? When are we too optimistic, when are we too alarmist?”

“From a Christian perspective we might argue that those things in life that really count we receive rather than produce. And that, even from those aspects of life that seem to be in opposition to worldly flourishing, including processes of aging and finally death, we often profit, and that by giving away we might receive more than by trying to accumulate.”

The wealth of detail in Evers’s lecture is beyond the scope of this article and so it is a happy consequence of digitization that his lecture and that of BedfordStrohm are available on the CTI website: ctinquiry.org.

Sarah Lane Ritchie

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Witherspoon Symposium Divine Action and the Naturalization of Consciousness

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rom one ESSSAT Prize-winner to another, it was time for Sarah Lane Ritchie to present her essay, “With God in Mind: Divine Action and the Naturalization of Consciousness.” Ritchie is the first person ever to win both the ESSSAT Student Prize (2016) and ESSSAT Research Prize (2018)—awarded for her PhD thesis submitted at the University of Edinburgh. It was not hard to see why the judges commended her “fine analysis” and “fresh theological insights.”

Long fascinated by “the complex ways in which scientific research can play a role in constructive theological scholarship,” Ritchie focused on how divine realities relate to physical matter —the so-called “causal joint problem.”

Now a Lecturer in Theology and Science at the University of Edinburgh, Ritchie hails originally from Michigan, where she began undergraduate studies in biology and psychology, before being “wooed by the philosophy and religion program at Spring Arbor University.” She went on to complete a Master of Divinity at Princeton Theological Seminary.

She has “always experienced both science and theology as reality-seeking enterprises, which (at their best) bring human beings into contact with a deeper understanding of the universe.” This was evident in her opening lines: “At any given moment, an untold number of individuals around the world find themselves experiencing something that has been attested throughout human history: the conscious experience of divine activity, both within their own minds and elsewhere in the world.”

Rejecting as “highly suspect metaphysics,” the practice of slipping God in whenever we can find a spot in the physical world that is underdetermined—constraining God to mystery under the banner of engagement with science, Ritchie believes that a non-physical understanding of mind, open to divine influence and compatible with naturalism and laws of physics, doesn’t go far enough. She insists that all that is physical/natural is in contact with God. It is perhaps no surprise then that she criticizes the Divine Action Project (DAP) at the Vatican Observatory, and its search for “traction” between science and theology, on the grounds that specific proposals within the project tend “to submit theological affirmations to scientific scrutiny—rather than the other way around.”

Ritchie, in contrast, suggests that “key features of the theological turn in divine action theology suggest new ways in which divine action in the mind can indeed be affirmed, precisely because all the natural world is always and already involved with God’s active presence.” Her view is that the theological turn in divine action theology eschews causal joint models altogether and returns divine action to a theological framework—rather than regard it as a question ultimately to be answered by the most current scientific knowledge.

The conflict is about understanding realities. Ritchie is committed to there being one reality and regards science as an evolving category that has its limitations. She argues for theistic naturalism: “I don’t think it’s possible to tease apart the natural from God.” To paraphrase Galen Strawson: The real mystery is matter, not mind.

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Tea & Talk at CTI Current Member Scholars-In-Residence share their discoveries with Friends of CTI during “Tea & Talk” sessions held periodically throughout the year. Featuring the work of scholars in theology and a range of other disciplines, these gatherings create space for thoughtful dialogue on vital questions of our time. Here, current scholars Etin Anwar of Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Mark Eaton of Azusa Pacific University, and Peter Ochs of the University of Virginia engage the group in a conversation about religion and violence as part of CTI’s fiveyear Inquiry on Religion and Global Issues.

Check CTI’s website for a list of upcoming Tea & Talks and other lectures.

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WILLIAM H. SCHEIDE LECTURE ON RELIGION & GLOBAL CONCERNS

Mandela’s Dream

Democracy in South Africa 25 Years On

Nico Koopman Koopman is a resident scholar in CTI’s Research Workshop on Religion & Economic Inequality.

On returning to CTI more than ten years after his last time at the Center, Koopman says: “It is such a privilege to return to CTI after having spent the period of September 2007 to June 2008 in Princeton. That year was one of the most formative experiences of my life. That time of doing theology in communion with scholars from different disciplines, backgrounds and continents impacted tremendously on my calling as public theologian in church, broader society and academy, in recent years as vice-president of one of Africa’s major universities, namely Stellenbosch University.” Discussing his upcoming lecture, Koopman explains that “twenty-five years ago Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as the first president of democratic South Africa. He was the main carrier of the South African Dream. This vision for PHOTOGRAPHS: KWPHOTOG, BONANDBON/ADOBESTOCK.COM

a new South Africa was articulated in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa. Many argue that democracy did not deliver on its promises. Besides global objections to democracy as a political system, peculiar vulnerabilities of democracy in the South African context are identified. This lecture pleads for a revival of democracy in South Africa and globally, and specifically explores insights from theology that might serve this second chance for democracy.”

Thursday, December 5, 2019 7pm at CTI

CTI Board of Trustees DIRECTOR William Storrar ACADEMIC ADVISORY PANEL John Bowlin Francis Clooney Angela Creager David Fergusson Agustín Fuentes Michael H. Hecht Jan-Olav Henrikson Cathleen Kaveny Robin Lovin Friederike Nüssel Peter J. Paris Jeremy Waldron

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 Gayle Robinson Judith McCartin Scheide William Storrar John Thurber Jay Vawter

HONORARY TRUSTEES Craig Barnes Bruce Freeman Robin Lovin Richard Mouw Krista Tippett EMERITUS/EMERITA TRUSTEES James Armstrong Judy Wornat Ralph Wyman

CTI’s Director, Dr. William Storrar, is pleased to announce his appointment of a new Director of Philanthropy. Karin Morse will join the CTI team bringing over fifteen years of experience in fundraising in the non-profit arena and in education. She will lead CTI’s efforts in developing strategic resources for strengthening the mission now and for the future.

“For over forty years, CTI has led a visionary program that advances the mission of convening leading scholars seeking a deeper understanding of the convergence of global concerns and theology, and then sharing the impact of those discoveries. From workshops to consultations to community connections and presentations, the activity is abundant not only in Luce Hall, but also regionally and globally. Ensuring CTI continues its cutting-edge research requires significant support and I am excited and honored to join the staff, board of trustees, and friends in this new role.”

—Karin Morse, Director of Philanthropy

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Humanity’s spiritual quest is no longer national and denominational but global and ecumenical.

—James I. McCord (1919-1990), Founder of the Center of Theological Inquiry

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Sunday, September 29 at 4pm:

Center of Theological Inquiry Henry R. Luce Hall 50 Stockton Street Princeton, NJ 08540

TEA & TALK

with Leslie Wingard

Thursday, November 14 at 4:30pm:

& Devin Singh on Challenging Inequality

Leslie Wingard

from the Perspectives of

Public Lecture on

Literature and Theology

“Sin, Servanthood, and Social Inequality

Thursday, October 17 at 4:30pm:

in African American Literature and Culture”

Thursday, December 5 at 7pm: Nico Koopman to give William H. Scheide Lecture on Global Concerns, on “Mandela’s Dream: Democracy in South Africa

Robert Gascoigne

25 Years On”

Public Lecture on “Inequality and Catholic Social Teaching”

Podcast Season 2: Religion and Economic Inequality Coming in Fall 2019 ctinquiry.org