Fresh Thinking Magazine: Issue 1 (2018)

2018

FreshThinking T H E 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

THINKING TOGETHER ON GLOBAL CONCERNS

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

PHOTOGRAPH: BALTSKARS/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

We convene leading thinkers in an interdisciplinary research environment

2018

FreshThinking T H E 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

4 THINKING TOGETHER ON GLOBAL CONCERNS

CTI’s Director on the Meaning of Membership

8 GLOBAL CONCERNS

10 Observing the Art of Thinking Aloud

20 The Gentle Ambassador: CTI’s New Global Fellow

24 The Accidental Theologian in the Age of Migration

27 Illuminating the Religion and Violence Relationship

30 Consultation on Religion and Inequality

31 Consultation on the Built and Natural Environment

32 COSMIC CONCERNS

34 Douglas Ottati: Reflecting on the Societal Implications of Astrobiology

36 Princeton Professors on CTI

37 Zoë Lehmann Imfeld: Science Fiction & Astrobiology at CTI

38 Erik Persson: Philosophy in Space

40 Andrew Davison: A Chorus of Planets

42 Emerging Scholars at CTI

46 NEWS & EVENTS

48 John Witte, Jr.: Legacy of the Protestant Reformation

50 Systematic Theology in the 21st Century

52 New Books from CTI

53 Member Monographs

54 CTI in the Community: Exhibition and Book Festival on Migration

56 Friends of CTI: Donors Who Make a Difference

ON THE COVER:

Photograph: ©freshidea/fotolia.com

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EDITOR’S LETTER

W

elcome to the inaugural issue of Fresh Thinking, a new magazine from the Center of Theological Inquiry. This new publication provides a window into CTI’s current research on issues of global concern. Join this ongoing conversation by dipping into the articles found here. Explore the Center’s distinctive approach to interdisciplinary dialogue in the context of our Director’s opening essay on the meaning of membership, and in Linda Arntzenius’s article, “Observing the Art of Thinking Aloud.” Reflect on the impact of Martin Luther in an essay on John Witte’s lecture at CTI commemorating the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Engage with Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, who presented his work at CTI in relation to the resident seminar on religion and violence. Learn about CTI Global Fellow Philip McDonagh, and about Peter Phan, Senior Fellow in the Resident Seminar on Religion & Migration.

Fresh Thinking aims to showcase work undertaken by members while in residence here at Henry R. Luce Hall, the home of CTI in Princeton. This includes essays such as those found in this inaugural issue by Andrew Davison, who explores the history of theological reflection on life in the universe, and by Erik Persson, a Swedish philosopher interested in the ethical issues surrounding planetary protection and space exploration.

It includes reflections on astrobiology, religion, and society from Princeton University astrophysicist Edwin Turner and Princeton University chemist Michael Hecht. Essays by theologian Douglas Ottati and literary scholar Zoë Lehmann Imfeld provide a window into the interdisciplinary conversations that take place at the Center. And a series of articles by Frederick Simmons, Joanna Leidenhag, Eve Nabulya, and Sarah Reynolds show how CTI shares its research with emerging scholars in summer workshops.

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FreshThinking

THE MAGAZINE OF THE CENTER OF THEOLOGICAL INQUIRY

DIRECTOR

William Storrar EDITOR

Joshua Mauldin CONSULTING EDITOR

Linda Arntzenius DESIGNER

Debra Trisler PHOTOGRAPHER

Frank Wojciechowski

Henry R. Luce Hall 50 Stockton Street Princeton, NJ 08540 609.683.4797 ctinquiry.org

That’s not all! Read further to learn more about CTI’s compelling research, published in two recent volumes: Theology as Interdisciplinary Inquiry, edited by Robin Lovin and Joshua Mauldin, and Imagining a Way: Exploring Reformed Practical Theology and Ethics, edited by Clive Pearson. In addition, we are pleased to highlight recent books published by CTI members. Finally, look inside for ways to join our conversation, whether by attending one of our public lectures (see p. 57) or the annual Salon on Stockton Street, a literary festival held at CTI in April in association with Morven Museum and Garden (p. 55). Whether in person or through our books, website, podcast, social media, and this magazine, thank you for engaging with the work of the Center of Theological Inquiry.

—Joshua Mauldin

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CTI Board of Trustees DIRECTOR

William Storrar ACADEMIC ADVISORY PANEL

John Bowlin Francis Clooney Angela Creager David Fergusson Agustín Fuentes David Ford Michael H. Hecht Robin Lovin Friederike Nüssel Peter J. Paris Jean Porter Jeremy Waldron

BOARD OF TRUSTEES

Fred Anderson, Chair Charles Wall, Vice Chair Nancy Hearne, Secretary Roy Lennox, Treasurer Robert Gunn Robert Hendrickson Dale Irvin Douglas Leonard Jon Pott 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

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thinking together

ON GLOBAL CONCERNS

The Meaning o

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ach Spring and Fall, I look forward to welcoming scholars and scientists into residence for a semester as members of the Center of Theological Inquiry. Our mission shapes our understanding of membership:

We convene leading thinkers in an interdisciplinary research environment where theology makes an impact on global concerns, and we share our discoveries to change the way people think and act.

A COMMUNITY OF FRESH THINKERS Membership of CTI means belonging to a research community with a distinctive approach to inquiry, and shared values. In the words of our founder James McCord, we value dedication to scholarship, openness to new ideas from any source, and generosity of spirit in the free exchange of ideas across disciplines. We seek to practice the interdisciplinary virtues of humility, civility, and charity. Time and again, we see our members flourish in this research culture, enriched by our ethos of listening intently to one another on complex questions of mutual concern.

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ILLUSTRATION: ŠTAI111/FOTOLIA.COM

We invite researchers into membership to advance our mission by thinking together on our CTI research agenda—that is, on questions of global concern across disciplines, religions, and regions of the world. But why a center of theological inquiry to study global concerns? If theology is the study of the question of God and all else in relation to God, then theological inquiry must be done in humble dialogue with others, if it is to be true to its own question and scope. At CTI, theologians have much to offer and much to learn from fellow members in other fields.

g of Membership The Center’s academic goal as a research institution is to generate fresh thinking on its global concerns through the power of interdisciplinary theological inquiry. We pursue this aim through resident seminars on our research agenda. Here, we think together on the Center’s research questions, informed and transformed by our members’ work in residence. We are committed to the acquired art of listening and giving one another our full attention.

For this reason, our seminars foster face-to-face conversation, free from the distraction of all electronic devices!

And how do we know when that moment of fresh thinking hap-

pens? A new idea is invisible, intangible. But when it happens, you can see it flying across the faces of those around our table, like a bird on the wing. This is the moment we aim for at CTI. It is not automatic. We cannot press a button to make it happen. But we can cultivate the environment that makes it more likely to happen.

In the wise words of our founder James McCord: 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.

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AN ENVIRONMENT FOR FRESH THINKING The Center of Theological Inquiry is therefore designed as a retreat for research. It is a place apart from the routine duties of academic life. It enables our members to pursue advanced study in an optimal environment for collaborative inquiry. Their conversation partners are next door. They have access to world class research libraries, thanks to our neighboring academic institutions in Princeton. Members find time goes quickly and so they make the most of this rare opportunity.

With McCord’s design come three axioms of resident membership. First, proximity. Our Members work daily alongside one another in adjacent offices at Luce Hall to foster the free and frequent exchange of ideas in our resident research community. Second, peace. Their offices are located on the Library Floor of Luce Hall, with its access for members only and library rule of quiet to allow them to work in peace. This floor is the home of the seminar, where we meet weekly in the Library to discuss our members’ work in residence. Third, plenty. Luce Hall is designed to offer plenty of opportunity for conversation in the fine rooms on the first floor.

The Oak Room is the Members’ Lounge. It is the designated place to talk at length with seminar colleagues, and to welcome visitors.

The elegant Commons room is for the Center’s larger academic and public events, and the meetings of our Board of Trustees, the stewards of our independent institution. By accepting these axioms of residence, our members ensure that Luce Hall is indeed an environment conducive to CTI’s fresh thinking on the host of problems facing religion and society.

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Our housing is also designed as an integral part of this hospitable research environment. Our Templeton Residences are fully furnished and equipped to allow members to arrive with a suitcase and settle in quickly. These short-term residences enable our members to focus on their research, without practical worries. We rely on our members to be good stewards of our housing during their stay, as the beneficiaries of our superb facilities to pass on to future generations.

THINKING TOGETHER ON GLOBAL CONCERNS This, then, is the meaning of membership of CTI. It means being a member of a research community that thinks together on questions of mutual concern. We practice the art of dialogue to generate fresh thinking on those concerns. Why dialogue? In the words of one advocate, “The intention of dialogue is to reach new understanding, and, in doing so, to form a totally new basis to think and act.” That is what we need in these troubled opening decades of the 21st century—a new basis to think and act on the global concerns of our time—migration, violence, inequality and the future of our cities and planet. Fresh thinking is found in dialogue, at CTI and beyond.

—William Storrar, Director

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GLOBAL CONCERNS

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BACKGROUND PHOTOGRAPH:VERVERIDIS VASILIS/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

Observing the Art of

THINKING ALOUD

BY LINDA ARNTZENIUS

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or the past four years, I have been lucky enough to be invited as a journalist to sit in on discussions by scholars-in-residence at the Center of Theological Inquiry.

To write for the Center is always a rewarding challenge. This year, however, my task was made more challenging because of the degree of complexity of the

subject matter and the range of expertise and sheer diversity of the participating scholars.

CTI is currently embarked on a five-year series of seminars focused on “Religion and Global Concerns.” For the first of these, “Religion and Migration,” a dozen men and women from across the globe—theologians and scholars in the social sciences and humanities (anthropology, ecology, economics, politics, sociology, theology and law)—are tackling issues of immediate import for today’s world. Not since the Copernican Revolution has there been a time when our conception of our place in the world has been so shaken. Long-held traditions, even our use of language, have fallen into question in an existential age of global uncertainty. With everything up for grabs in what is being dubbed “The Age of Migration,” no wonder there is worry on a global scale. What is happening?

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CLOCKWISE, FROM TOP LEFT:

Saskia Sassen and William Storrar, David Hollenbach and Ulrich Schmiedel, John Ahn, Kathrin Winkler and Hendrik Bosman, Seforosa Carroll

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RESIDENT SEMINAR ON RELIGION & MIGRATION 2017-2018 BACK ROW, LEFT TO RIGHT: Joshua Mauldin (CTI), William Barbieri (Catholic University of America, United States), Ulrich Schmiedel (University of Munich, Germany) Ciprian Burlacioiu (Ludwig-Maximilians University, Germany), Daniel Ramírez (Claremont Graduate University, United States), Hendrik Bosman (Stellenbosch University, South Africa).

MIDDLE ROW, LEFT TO RIGHT: Karla Britton (Yale University, United States), Valentina Napolitano (University of Toronto, Canada), Kanan Kitani (Doshisha University, Japan), William Storrar (CTI), Kristin Heyer (Boston College, United States), John Ahn (Howard University, United States).

FRONT ROW, LEFT TO RIGHT: Kathrin Winkler (Lutheran University Nuremburg, Germany), Philip McDonagh, Peter Phan (Georgetown

University), David Hollenbach (Georgetown University, United States), Seforosa Carroll (Charles Sturt University, Australia).

A culture of debate among diverse opinions is increasingly rare today, with entrenchment on all sides and a selective regard for truth. It seems increasingly difficult for people to talk to one another in any meaningful way. What if you could really say what’s on your mind? What if you could ask someone a question without fear of your words being misinterpreted or your motives impuned? In true dialogue, it is possible to say: oh I see you took my question in a way that I hadn’t realized it could be interpreted and that reveals to me something about my question of which I wasn’t aware: a hidden assumption, a cultural or traditional difference, a term with a special meaning in my field, or my own personal prejudice/worldview. Such a response would make you feel you were truly being listened to and would, I think, make you want to listen with equal sensitivity.

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THE ART OF DIALOGUE This is dialogue as the late scientist and philosopher David Bohm conceived it; a multi-faceted process that goes beyond typical conversation. It lies at the heart of the CTI methodology that Director William Storrar succinctly calls “Thinking Aloud Together.”

According to this way of working, dialogue is a process of discovery. Rather than the kind of point-scoring discussion all too prevalent in academia, genuine dialogue is not a game of ping-pong to be won, it is a game played with rather than against one another.

Furthermore, in the discovery of subtle differences in meaning lies new content. “In a dialogue, each person does not attempt to make common certain ideas or items of information that are already known to him,” says Bohm. “Rather, it may be said that the two people are making something in common, i.e. creating something

WILLIAM BARBIERI William Barbieri hails from “a typical Catholic melting pot family from the New York region with Irish and Italian grandparents on one side and English on the other.” His personal history has shaped his attitudes, interests and sensibilities. But it was in secondary school during the height of the anti-nuclear movement that his interest in social justice really took root. Subsequent study abroad in England, China, Taiwan and Europe ultimately led him to study comparative ethics and he now teaches in the Religion and Culture and Moral Theology/Ethics programs in the School of Theology and Religious Studies at the Catholic University of America. He also directs the Peace and Justice Studies Program there.

At CTI for the first time, Barbieri brings his training and sensibility in social ethics to bear on the residential seminar on Religion & Migration. Highly attuned to questions of moral agency and how issues of freedom, choice, psychology and group dynamics play into the political and social dynamics involved in migration, he has also had a long involvement with theoretical issues to do with boundaries. His Constitutive Justice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) is the result, he says, of many years of thinking on questions to do with boundaries and the way in which communities shape themselves. Widely published, Barbieri’s books include Ethics of Citizenship: Immigration and Group Rights in Germany (Duke University Press, 1998).

He has written numerous articles in the areas of human

rights, comparative ethics, peace studies, Catholic social teaching, and German studies and has edited From Just War to Modern Peace Ethics (with Heinz-Gerhard Justenhoven; De Gruyter, 2012) and At the Limits of the Secular: Reflections on Faith and Public Life (Eerdmans, 2014).

Barbieri approaches migration as a case study in the ethics and politics of human dignity. His interests range over labor migration, detention, sanctuary movements, DACA, unaccompanied minors and families, and humanitarian and political refugees. With the cultural anthropologist and social scientist Valentina Napolitano, he shares an interest in Michel de Certeau, as well as in the function of language and decolonization. “The intersection of language and power is a part of the dialogue that we will have to hold in view, as is the fact that there are real people behind the statistics and concepts,” he says. “Migration is a fascinating theoretical topic but at root it is a very urgent problem with real victims of sex trafficking, war and environmental catastrophe.”

As a fellow of several institutes and academies—Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies and Center for the Study of Culture and Values—and as a member of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Christian Ethics—Barbieri has “a special appreciation” for CTI. “It’s rare to find the right conditions and the right chemistry and the right environment, and I’m familiar with those challenges from my own work, sometimes more successful than others. This is a truly residential project that uses space to foster ongoing exchange. CTI builds on the insight that the arrangement of space and the arrangement of routines is a crucial substrate for effective intellectual collaboration.”

And as a scholar, Barbieri knows that “conversation is always going to be a source of insights that we cannot generate ourselves. At CTI I can count on finding new impulses for prompting my own thinking on these questions and to advance my project on human dignity and migration.”

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PHOTOGRAPH: SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

new together.” Such dialogue, says Bohm, “goes into the process of thought behind the assumptions, not just the assumptions themselves.” And, as Bohm points out, its creative potential depends upon sustained, serious application by participants able “freely to listen to each other, without prejudice, and without trying to influence each other.” In other words it requires a willingness to be open and vulnerable.

Over a long weekend in October when the participants met face to face for the first time, I saw this agenda-free dialogue develop.

Incidentally, when you find yourself sitting next to a German theologian who offers his take on “Fortress Europe” and the ways in which theology features in contemporary discussions on migration; a South African expert on the book of Exodus and the Bible in 19th century colonial contexts; a Korean-American New Yorker reframing the Wilderness Wandering Tradition; and a Fiji-born Rotuman who tells you of rising sea-levels that are an imminent threat to island peoples of the Pacific; you know you must be at CTI. Nowhere else brings together people, as broadcaster Krista Tippett has said, in such “seemingly unlikely combinations.” The word “seemingly” there is crucial, for as I discover there is much that unites these scholars.

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Among others, I meet leading theologian Peter Phan, himself a refugee from Vietnam (see “The Accidental Theologian,” page 24); Daniel Ramírez, a fourth generation Latino Pentecostal; Kanan Kitani, a Japanese scholar of theology and popular culture; ethicist William Barbieri; and the Italian cultural anthropologist Valentina Napolitano. (For more on each of these scholars, see sidebars).

As one would expect in such an advanced level resident research seminar, most are established scholars; two are in the early stages of their careers. Napolitano expresses the general feeling of excitement at the “wonderful combination of different life histories, disciplinary backgrounds and stages in careers.”

For Phan, such diversity is necessary to grasp what is going on in the world. It isn’t long before these multiple strands intersect in a web of connections. Individual scholars become the go-to experts for Old Testament scholarship; several are called upon to clarify points of ethics or share insights drawn from experience; others introduce aspects of space, analyses of empirical data, interreligious encounters; several draw upon their knowledge of human rights, human dignity, ecology, evangelical and practical theologies. A dizzying range of concepts and questions arise and several different perspectives emerge in

KANAN KITANI Kanan Kitani is an early career scholar from Japan’s Christian minority who followed her heart into theology over parental objections and worked several jobs to support her theological studies. In Japan only 0.8 percent of the population is Christian and although she grew up in the Congregationalist tradition, Kitani’s career path took some thought. Her family has come around since her appointment as an assistant professor of theology at Doshisha University in Kyoto but her decision to become a pastor remains unconventional.

In today’s highly competitive Japan there is pressure to get into a good university and become a doctor, a lawyer or a professor. Kitani felt that pressure, especially as her father is a medical doctor whom she was expected to succeed. During her high school years, as a devout Christian, she felt something was missing from her life; she decided to study theology. She finds inspiration in the life of Joseph Nishima, the Samurai who became a Christian in 1862 at a time when Japan was isolated from the rest of the world and Christianity was banned. Nishima, who went on to found Doshisha University, risked his life when he put down his sword and picked up the Bible. After traveling as far as Boston where he was taken in by a ship’s captain in 1865, he ultimately returned to Japan as a Christian missionary.

On her first visit to CTI, Kitani says she feels like she’s in “academic Disneyland,” especially after visiting the Princeton Seminary Library. With few resources for studying theology in Japan, being at CTI is “a dream come true.”

In addition, she finds that she is learning a lot from the high level of discourse and the interdisciplinary nature of the program and its participants. She expects to expand her ideas and advance her greatest challenge of doing theology interreligiously. “As a Japanese woman, this kind of collaboration is very unusual,” she says. “In the Japanese educational system we do not usually have conversations; professors give lectures and students listen and do not question. So we do not have this kind of rich conversation, even in graduate school; it is very stimulating and a little intimidating.”

At CTI, Kitani is challenged to overcome some of her own cultural training. As a Japanese woman she was taught

not to speak until men had finished talking. She also has to overcome a traditional reverence for seniority—she was once told by a senior (male) colleague in Japan that if she wanted respect from her colleagues she should not speak at all! At CTI, she is learning to find the right moment as well as the nerve to jump into the conversation.

As for the issue of religion and migration, she notes that in contemporary Japan, the migrant population has doubled in the last decade. The 20,000 migrants currently coming into Japan each year are mostly women from the Philippines, Korea, Brazil, Vietnam, South America and Peru. They find work in the sex-trade or as domestics. Since most immigrants are Christian or Muslim, their presence is bringing change to Japanese society. Migration is a “sign of the time,” says Kitani, whose current research is a theological interpretation of Jesus as the Paradigmatic Migrant.

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their treatment with theological, global, intergees and human rights that is pertinent now.

“There is nowhere that disciplinary, and ethical viewpoints melding in While acknowledging religion as a cause of makes me think some surprising ways. conflict (citing instances of Catholic/ProtesSeforosa Carroll shares details of the tant Christianity; ISIS and Islam, Myanmar more deeply “Rainbow Theology and Noah’s Covenant” and Buddhism) he notes the normative trathan CTI.” that stands in the way of people handling an dition of concern for the displaced in these imminent problem. In this instance, faith religions. His talk elicits questions about hu—Linda Arntzenius has led to false hope, an anchor that inhibman rights and the definition of “refugee;” its engagement with reality. With identity issues concerning borders; responsibilities of connected to land, how do we help such citizens, non-citizens; and, perhaps not surdisplaced people re-imagine home? It’s just prisingly, since Hollenbach is a Jesuit priest, one of many questions Carroll asks. Cipriabout the meaning of his order’s motto “For an Burlacioiu engages with the Greater Glory of God” Hendrik Bosman on the imin the context of migration. pact of industrial and urban Phan comments that relife on indigenous Christiligious faith can sustain refanity in Southern Africa at ugees in the midst of their the turn of the 20th century suffering (citing examples) and with Daniel Ramírez and is significant in eneron labor migration in the gizing the response to huAmericas. manitarian crises. Several As the seminar participarticipants point to the pants discover overlapping danger of statistics, noting research interests, I can’t that behind every statishelp wondering about the tic is an individual human personal qualities that unite story. “Religion should be them. What they have in part of the solution,” says common, I realize, is attenCTI’s Distinguished Global tiveness, an ability to listen Fellow Philip McDonagh. and to question; to bring “How do we share the their own life experiences as well as their knowledge to a creative goods of this world? We must transfer our thinking from the process that involves a significant degree of reflection and I might nation-state to the world.” (For more on McDonagh, see “The add, intellectual risk. They share that openness to creative collabGentle Ambassador,” page 20.) oration that is necessary for the “Thinking Aloud Together” of World statistics provided by Sassen bring the crisis into context. which Storrar speaks.

Sassen looks at how migrations begin and, given all the poverty Still it’s the early stages of the seminar. Let’s see what happens. and inequality in the world, she asks Why aren’t there more? War has This is where leading ethicist David Hollenbach of Georgetown changed, she says and whatever is done to promote irregular comUniversity and eminent sociologist Saskia Sassen of Columbia batants will keep war going. Sassen works at what she calls, “the University step in. fuzzy edges of paradigmatic knowledge”—“in the shadows of powerful explanations when territory exits conventional framings.” In DEEPENING THE CONVERSATION the social sciences, “existing paradigms served us well until gloHollenbach and Sassen get it all rolling, the former with an ethibalization,” she says and goes on to describe her interest in new cal perspective on human rights and the latter with a sociological migration flows that “signal the making of new histories.” perspective on migration and globalization. Their papers have been Her presentation is profoundly informative and challenging. distributed in advance and read by all for the discussions that follow.

Where is the church in all this, asks Phan, launching a conversation Hollenbach is a longstanding friend of CTI—he took part in that takes in current migrant churches in California; unaccompanied the Religion & International Law Inquiry in 2010 and the Law minors crossing borders; the concept of dead land; and the systemic & Religious Freedom Inquiry in 2015. But it’s his work on refucauses of instability in the world and the role of large corporations.

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VALENTINA NAPOLITANO Valentina Napolitano became a cultural anthropologist because of an interest in Latin America and indigenous people in Central Mexico. “Divergent ontologies have been key to my anthropological research and I am particularly taken by the long history of the colonial Americas, and so to histories rather than history,” she says. “Affective histories have often been forgotten or repressed but they re-emerge with much potency and my work has been trying to understand some of these returns.”

A professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto, Napolitano is the author, among other works, of Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return: Transnationalism and the Roman Catholic Church (2016). The book’s focus is people—mostly women—from Latin America and their experiences in Italy. Many work as domestics; some are sisters in Roman convents.While giving voice to individual histories, Migrant Hearts speaks to the complicated interaction of migrant experience, national politics, humanitarian discourse, and contemporary theology.

Napolitano has an idiosyncratic approach to conversation.

“Sometimes I’m not very linear in my thinking; I am moved by ideas as fields of forces and I hope to bring to the conversation elements to do with migration, home, politics of dwellings, ideas of liturgical and affective labors, anthropology of Catholicism toward a broader discussion of the relation between migration, religion and society.” Keen on new research methods that involve advocacy, she sees her work not only in the library but “very much out in the world with a particular awareness to social justice.”

Her current research is on the Catholic Church as a living religious infrastructure. She studies waves of migration along the Windsor/Detroit corridor where different dioceses across the Canadian/U.S. border are dealing with changing migrant landscapes. She is particularly interested in the ways in which current migrants inhabit spaces previously animated by Polish and Italian migrants, and the emergence of new practices and rituals in churches that host Latino migrants.

“My research focuses on migrant religious orientations in space, the ecological life of religious buildings and the gendered liturgical labor that is (re)produced differently across this corridor space.”

To CTI, Napolitano brings an awareness of the process of decolonization as a complex and important matter with which to engage. “We know that the history of Christianity, in different forms, has been the unacknowledged underpinning of colonial histories. This is not to say that Christianity has only been that, but that there is a systemic relation to Christianity and histories of oppression that cannot be only confronted by personal and intersubjective spaces of communitas/ecclesiastic and ecumenical encounters.” In other words: “There is work to be done on the entanglements of different worlds that have created systemic inequality; Christianity, in some of its forms, is entangled in these worlds.This is difficult work as it involves all of us and is at the core not only of our work but of our being.”

The notion of vulnerability, says Napolitano, “is a good point of departure to work with the unacknowledged realm of privilege that we take for granted and that forms the platform from which we do our analysis.”

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“Knowledge is like a big Baobab tree, you need a community to embrace it.”

PHOTOGRAPH: ©DANMIR12/FOTOLIA.COM

—Hendrik Bosman

For one participant, Sassen is providing tools to think with; another notes that our ethics rarely descends to the level of what to do for the very poor. Seforosa Carroll describes rising sea levels in the Pacific and Bangladesh, shrinking habitat and new helpful and hopeful technologies and architectures: projects that use brown water to make biodegradable plastic, paint that cleans the air. McDonagh offers insights on geopolitics and migration as a business with criminal elements. Bosman offers the delightfully visual: “Knowledge is like a big Baobab tree, you need a community to embrace it.”

DEEPENING INSIGHT The idea of examining a particular subject through different lenses inevitably leads one to take a close look at the lenses one has acquired or adopted or has used for so long one has become unaware of them, for whatever reasons. What happens when you adopt a different set of lenses? Clearly this is a fruitful process for promoting thought, discussion, and discovery; at CTI it opens new lines of investigation.

In previous years, it seems, CTI’s scholars-in-residence had more ground to travel in the opening stages of their inquiry when, for example, theologians sat down with scholars in the hard sciences to

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introduce themselves to one another, share and explain their concepts and their projects. In this instance, although the subject matter is so very intractable (what in social planning jargon are referred to as “wicked” problems of complex interdependencies), the participants start with more of a shared understanding. As soon as introductions were made, they were in the thick of intellectual dialogue. They jumped right in. For me, it was a dizzying experience.

There is nowhere that makes me think more deeply than CTI. Even with all of the resources available to the lay person in Princeton (talks at the Institute, the University, the Seminary, Princeton Public Library and so on), it is at this small institution where I am provoked into my deepest thinking.

Referencing the founding vision of CTI as a global and ecumenical center, Storrar says: “This is perhaps the most global and ecumenical group of scholars we have had here in my 13 years as Director; and since these topics are deeply connected, this group is laying the groundwork for what is to come.”

With this seminar, CTI has its finger firmly on the pulse of what is happening in the world today.

And an eye on its mission to contribute to positive change in the world.

DANIEL RAMÍREZ Daniel Ramírez is a religious historian with training in Latin American Cultural Studies and ethnomusicology. He describes himself as a fourth generation Mexican American-Chicano from Los Angeles. His career path was not straightforward: “This is my third career after Yale; I was in international banking and then spent a good number of years in Student Services at Stanford University, where higher education was demystified for me,” he says. The premature deaths of two of his uncles who were preachers in the Pentecostal Church compelled him to set about recovering and preserving their stories and, with the support of senior lead-

ers in the Pentecostal Movement, he interviewed their peers.

“Also called the Apostolic Movement, the Latino Pentecostal Movement is a heterodox variant that is non-trinitarian; it is very special,” says Ramírez.

Now Associate Professor of American Religions at Claremont Graduate University, Ramírez is developing a theology of migration. He explores the theological and political implications of transnational and migratory experience among Mexican, Central American and indigenous Pentecostals.

“Latin American Pentecostalism is still in its adolescence,” he says, noting that early church members were without the where-with-all to write theology so that the history of the church comes from “testimonies, stories, and a beautiful musical archive which was framed in all of the popular cultural idioms of their time—folk music hymns with doctrinal content, testimonial content, existential sorrow, framed in such a way that they would speak to popular culture.” It’s a remark-

able story that Ramírez wrote about in his 2015 monograph, Migrating Faith: Pentecostalism in the United States and Mexico in the Twentieth Century.

Many such songs have a sojourning motif. “When sung in moments of surrounding xenophobia, these acquire a multi-layered significance much akin to the slave spirituals that took on a whole different meaning on the eve of emancipation. Black Pentecostalism is the mother of Latino Pentecostalism and it was the great migration of blacks from south to north that carried rural Pentecostalism to the urban north.”

One particular hymn that Ramírez is fond of (and will sing if asked) emerged from Puerto Rico in the 1950s and took deep root in Central America and the Mexican Southwest. “The Bible is the Flag” uses the stars and stripes as a metaphor. “When sung by a congregation of undocumented people avoiding raids such as took place during Operation Wetback of 1954, and after the anti-immigrant Proposition 187 in California in 1994, it acquired a different significance,” he says.

At CTI for the first time, Ramírez is addressing questions such as: How do ostensibly subordinated migrants view themselves as citizens of the world, the nation, and heaven, as they transit back-andforth? What do their stories and songs reveal? And what historical and other resources and insights can be used to translate and systematize incipient theological self-understanding into a Pentecostal Social Doctrine? As a model of how he might undertake the latter, Ramírez looks to David Hollenbach, whose “clarity of method and cogency of argument” in translating Catholic Social Doctrine he admires.

With the “many systematic minds” he encounters at CTI, Ramírez finds multiple resonances: with Napolitano’s social science method, for example, and her postcolonial critiques of communication that Ramírez believes must be borne in mind, especially when speaking on behalf of people who would never be able to hold forth in an academic environment. He was moved to hear of the almost fatalistic and melancholy response to existential destruction of island inhabitants in the Pacific. “I have seen some of that in places where people have been uprooted by violence or ecological damage, the poorest of the poor—how do they articulate a theology that is Job-like in its approach, when it’s bleak and dark and you have to have faith that ‘things will get better by and by.’ That reminder from the peripheries of our modern world was striking.”

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PHILIP McDONAGH

The Gentle Ambassador

BY LINDA ARNTZENIUS

Philip McDonagh

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and the European Union—where he was recently part of a select ver the next five years, The Center of Theological group invited to discuss religion and human rights at the European Inquiry is convening a series of interdisciplinary and Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. Later this year, the Agency interreligious seminars on Religion and Global Conis set to hold a conference on “Belonging” aimed at bringing the cerns with Philip McDonagh as its Distinguished human rights agenda into the broader context of how to build a Global Fellow. Interviewed recently at the Center, this former Irish stronger and fairer society.

Ambassador spoke candidly about his interests in a common world, That excites McDonagh. He believes that societies have reached peacemaking, religion, conflict and diplomacy. He touched on some a point where creating a common world should be recognized as of the values he believes are lacking in contemporary society, and, as a goal. “And if it comes to creating a common world, we have to befits an Oxford-trained Classicist, the role of the Muses. In so doremember that 80 percent of people in the world say that they ing, McDonagh revealed much of the experience and philosophical are religious; opinion polls show that this is what matters to them thoughtfulness he brings to the CTI table. probably more than anything else,” he says. So, when he sees the With his lilting Irish voice and a colorful manner of speech, relegation of religious convictions to the private sphere, he feels McDonagh has the air of a romantic. So how does this fit with a uneasy. Possibly a consequence of the European Enlightenment, long career of thrashing out issues related to peace, trade, economic this idea misjudges, he believes, the origins of our [Western] development and security? McDonagh’s most recent posting was civilization. As McDonagh sees it: “The big question is: what is as part of the Permanent Mission of Ireland to the Organization the citizenship obligation of the Church for Security and Cooperation in Europe and can you formulate a vision of that (OSCE). Before that he served as “It’s very easy for a society without making it an ecumenical task, Ambassador to Russia, Finland, the Holy to polarize and for religion and by including dialogue with other See, and India. During the latter half of religions?” the 1990s, he helped develop the Peace to seem to be a marker of While visiting CTI for an intensive Process for Northern Ireland. His career difference but the real source introductory seminar on Religion & attests to a deep commitment to peace Migration with current scholars (meetand reconciliation in the world. “I know of division is much deeper.” ing for the first time as it happens), Mcit’s overused as an accolade but Philip Donagh discussed some of the seemingly McDonagh truly is a Renaissance Man,” —Philip McDonagh impregnable injustices in the world that says CTI Director William Storrar. “Not are among the root causes of migration. only is he a distinguished diplomat, he is “People sometimes find it very hard to see where change can come. a Classics scholar and a celebrated poet. CTI is proud to bring such How do you enter the debate when there is a complex system in an international figure together with our scholars-in-residence to the world with a whole series of defects that seem to be interlocktake on global concerns of real import.” ing in some way and reinforcing one another? Maybe one of the Fresh into his retirement from the OSCE, McDonagh is ready ways we can bring more light into those discussions is by asking to engage. He has an edge when it comes to the role of religion what our religious beliefs tell us we should do. That’s not new; in real world situations. In various diplomatic postings he has that’s Augustine’s City of God and the Earthly City.” worked with multiple religious faiths—not only in the peace Given his work as a peacemaker, McDonagh has much to conprocess in Northern Ireland and through his involvement with tribute to any dialogue on the dynamics of religion and violence. peace-making efforts in India and in Sri Lanka, but also with the “It’s very easy for a society to polarize and for religion to seem to be a Orthodox Church in Russia and with Hinduism, Sikhism, and to marker of difference but the real source of division is much deeper,” some extent Islam, in India. He also has an insider’s knowledge he insists. “Those who claim that religion is the root of violence of how and where religious issues emerge in current debates of may not have thought as deeply about religion as they should and international organizations such as the OSCE, the United Nations

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Of all his diplomatic postings, it is perhaps have not thought about what it means that India that made the most dramatic impact the world is the creation of a merciful God. “In dialogue you are on McDonagh’s personal life. It was there Now I know that’s not the view of every relistening as much as that he met his wife Ana, who is from the ligion, but if you think about religion deeply Jewish minority in Bombay. And it was you come back to mercy and benevolence as speaking and leaving there that the couple adopted their two the values we should try to realize.” a space for something daughters from an orphanage near Delhi.

CTI’s great project, he says, “is to enable From a personal point of view, India was a dialogue at a much deeper level than is new to emerge.” wonderful posting. customary in our society. Perhaps in due course, the experience here will bear fruit —Philip McDonagh IRISH FAMILY LIFE but this is a privileged moment. Dialogue McDonagh grew up in a close-knit Catholic is not a transaction in which you promote family of three brothers and a sister in a part your own interests and values and measure of Dublin called Terenure. It was a time of coal fires and radio and success by how much you have impressed your reality on other newspapers rather than television; a family that entertained itself people. In dialogue you are listening as much as speaking and with song, recitation and “party-pieces.” His father’s was singing leaving a space for something new to emerge.” In other words, “The Ballad of Joe Hill.” McDonagh’s was offering spontaneous dialogue is a creative process. “CTI is creating a space in which commentary on fictitious horse races; a talent he’s developed we can once again get closer to the roots of our culture in a way over the years and put to good effect in charity fundraisers (see that will be fruitful. If you can do this even on a small scale, on his Cheltenham Races on YouTube). To put their son through one issue among one group of people, there is no telling where the Oxford, McDonagh’s parents sold their car and borrowed money. benefits will flow.”

Yet though they had a modest lifestyle, McDonagh remembers his father telling him that if Dublin’s poverty could be addressed OXFORD AND THE PEACE PROCESS through government action he’d be happy to pay higher taxes. A McDonagh is a patient man, firm in the knowledge that deep sense of service was something McDonagh inherited from both and substantial dialogue may take time to bear fruit. He became parents and he followed his father into the Department of Foreign a student of Oxford’s Balliol College, where he gained first class Affairs. The late Bob McDonagh was Ambassador to Germany, honors in Classics, during the turbulent period of the Troubles Italy, and the United Nations, and before the age of 13 the young in Northern Ireland. After the events of Bloody Sunday in 1972, McDonagh attended schools in Washington, Stockholm and when 13 unarmed civilians were killed by British soldiers in Copenhagen.

Derry, Northern Ireland, McDonagh was elected President of the Oxford Union. He was amazed. “It showed great goodwill towards CLASSICS SCHOLAR Ireland and where the instincts of the student body were.” That Spend five minutes with McDonagh and you will realize that he is a year, McDonagh was called upon to take part in a number of Classicist to the marrow. He has Latin and Greek at his fingertips and dialogues on Irish unity. He witnessed the emergence of concepts given the chance will offer a discourse on the true significance of the that would later bear fruit from 1994 to 1999 when he worked on Muses that has been lost to modern culture. Citing Hesiod’s poem the Northern Ireland peace process as Deputy Head of Mission at “The Theogony,” he explains that besides providing consolation and the Irish Embassy in London. “At that moment we actually had inspiring poets, the Muses also prompt leaders in front of restless what could be called a contextually-grounded theology,” he recalls, crowds to say the words that will bring quiet; they also suggest to “and the main thinkers who developed these ideas were mostly judges verdicts that will be acceptable to both sides. Not only that, Christians on different sides of the tradition, including some in the Muses are responsible for the independence of poets, allowing England, especially some civil servants in White Hall.” them a platform from which to critique society.

McDonagh is proud of the work he did with respect to peace in “Poetry is capable of having political weight and significance,” Northern Ireland, and rightly so, but don’t expect him to boast. he believes. “It can be an echo of historical change and if you are That’s a mode of expression alien to the man. Ask him, instead, thinking very deeply about politics, poetry is very relevant. In what were the most interesting things in which he was involved his ‘Defense of Poetry’ Shelley says that poetry accompanies any and he might acknowledge his bridge-building efforts to successive great awakening of human kind; when you have some important leaders of the Ulster Unionist Party, David Trimble in particular.

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creative political development underway it very often finds a literary counterpart. Diplomacy at its best does the same and there is an overlap between the spheres of poetry and diplomacy.”

More than once McDonagh has found that he has been able to say something in a poem that, as a diplomat, he would not be able to express in a meeting or in a published article. According to Foreign Service rules everything published by a diplomat has to be looked at beforehand. While McDonagh has frequently been asked to hold back something in an article, he has never once had a single line of poetry questioned. And there are times when he has brought poetry and diplomacy together to good effect. The most successful diplomatic event he was ever involved in, he says, was an evening in Moscow when he gathered fellow diplomats for an evening of Leonard Cohen songs. “The Canadian ambassador was

the master of ceremonies, and the head of the American Protestant Chaplaincy in Moscow and I jointly sang ‘If it be Your Will.’”

These days, when poetry is often regarded as a solitary activity, McDonagh reminds us that there were times in history—in the days of Homer, for example—when the Bard was always part of any great public event, giving expression to the values of society.

CTI’s mission is to convene leading thinkers in an interdisciplinary research environment where theology makes an impact on global concerns, and to share its discoveries to change the way people think and act. With the likes of Philip McDonagh bringing his talents as peacemaker, poet, scholar, and diplomat, the Center is doing just that. Chances are the dialogues of the next five years will bear fruit in ways that are impossible to anticipate except to expect good things to follow.

LEFT TO RIGHT:

William Storrar, Melissa Lane (Princeton University), and Philip McDonagh

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PETER PHAN

The Accidental Theologian in the Age of Migration

BY LINDA ARNTZENIUS

O

n the fall of Vietnam in study the impact of migration on the 1975, Peter C. Phan fled understanding and practice of religions. his native country with “Migration is the seismic phenomenon his parents, brothers and of our time brought home to us all by sisters. The family spent months in a harrowing images of infants cradled refugee camp before settling in Dallas, in the arms of their rescuers,” he says.

Texas. To help support them Phan turned “There is virtually no nation on earth to what he knew best: teaching theology. that hasn’t been seriously affected, For the next 13 years he taught at the either as a place of origin, transit, or Catholic University of Dallas before destination. It is an issue at the forefront moving on to the Catholic University of concerns facing religious communities of America in Washington. In 2003, and societies today.” he joined the faculty of Georgetown While Phan can point to numerous University, where he now holds the social science studies on migration, he Ignacio Ellacuría Chair of Catholic notes that relatively little attention has Social Thought. been paid to migration in theological Besides stellar academic credentials— and religious studies. CTI is filling this during his years teaching he has found lacuna. And Phan is bringing national time to write or edit more than 40 books and international data to the table. Citing “Without migration and 300 essays—Phan has a talent for recent UN statistics, he points out that the three Abrahamic winnowing complex presentations to of a world population of 7 billion, an a handful of essentials. He leads with estimated 65.3 million are displaced, religions would not be clarity and focus. either in their own countries, as asylum“Peter is the perfect choice for CTI’s seekers, or as refugees. That’s one in 113 what they are today.” first global concerns seminar on Religion people. And the rate is increasing. In —Peter Phan and Migration,” says CTI Director 2005, people were displaced at the rate William Storrar. “He brings his own of six per minute; by 2015, that rate had refugee experience to the study of the become 24 per minute. This is a crisis impact of migration on theology and church ministry and he that cannot be ignored. To help us understand this crisis, Phan offers is skilled in interreligious dialogue. While firmly rooted in the insight into the role that migration has played in the expansion of Catholic tradition, he brings an ecumenical spirit and he has been religions, particularly Judaism, Christianity and Islam. “Religions a leading participant in Buddhist and Muslim dialogue. ” have been shaped by migration,” he says. “Without migration As Phan sees it, such dialogue is a theological imperative, the result the three Abrahamic religions would not be what they are today. of globalization, mass migration, and modern communication.

Furthermore, the Catholic Church in America would not exist He is thrilled to be guiding CTI’s members-in-residence as they without migration.”

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Phan goes further still to claim that “migration” is the very essence of the Church and of Christianity; a perspective that requires the rethinking of all beliefs. To defend his claim, Phan cites the mass movements of people out of Palestine to Syria and beyond, after the fall of Jerusalem, and a gospel spread by ordinary people going about their daily lives—lay people such as merchants moving along the Silk Road. “The gossiping of the gospel,” he calls it.

Phan is apt to delight his audience with insight-yielding gems of information such as the idea that the first church was erected in India. “That Thomas went to India is not studied in the West but there are churches founded by Thomas in Kerala in 57 AD, years before there was a church in Rome,” he says, adding: “There are more historical references to St. Thomas in Kerala than to St. Peter in Rome!”

One way to examine migration, says Phan, is to ask what religious tradition has to say about the subject in the Old Testament and throughout Christian history. “Most theologians work this way, but if you consider the Bible as not only the word of God but also a human document, the perspective of migration can throw new light on our understanding of Christianity. Taking migration as a lens, what do you think about God? If I am a migrant, God appears very different. The migrant has no power, only vulnerability and a dangerous departure from home. So let’s think of creation as an act of vulnerability, of leaving the Divine eternal home and going to a world in which God runs all the risk of being rejected,” he says.

“This is a kind of structure that a migrant can relate to. Think of Jesus as migrant. Even before he was born, Herod was out to kill him. All of his life, he has no home, nowhere to lay his head. You read his life differently if you read with the eyes of a migrant.”

According to Phan, replacing Catholic eyeglasses with ecumenical eyeglasses or by those of a different religion can be a revealing exercise: “It’s not that one should abandon one’s own tradition but when you do theology in conversation with some other religious and non-Christian communities, you are forced to change your perspective, enlarge it mostly. This kind of dialogue forces you to examine your own assumptions—not necessarily to reject them but to bring them to light.”

As Phan points out, the United States is now one of the most pluralistic countries in the world with Jains, Sikhs, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, and Christian communities in every major city. “But to talk with other faiths is not to try to create a supertheology that incorporates all sorts of religious beliefs. It’s an attempt to find common language; to understand the other in their own terms; take those terms seriously, while recognizing differences.”

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Like many great teachers, Phan is a seasoned storyteller. His discourse is spicy with references to contemporary literature, Bible stories, anecdote, and yes, the occasional tall tale. An avid reader of novels, he credits essays in The New Yorker and The Atlantic for teaching him how to write and how to tell a story. His humor and erudition enthrall. When participants in the current CTI seminar got together for the first time last October, there was much of Phan’s learning to be shared. There was also a great deal of laughter.

“Humor is not just a prop to get people’s attention,” he says.

“Humor breaks down dogmatism.” Phan channels an inner Seinfeld to disarming effect when he describes the cognitive dissonance of seeing a mobile home travel along the highway shortly after he arrived in America from Vietnam. What is this? A mobile home?

Really, a home that runs 65 miles per hour on the highway?

“But at CTI,” says Phan, “there is no dogmatism and no-one is on the defensive. What I have seen here is mutual learning and teaching and that’s true dialogue, listening and sharing. It’s wonderful to bring together people from Australia, South Africa, Germany, Japan, Fiji, everywhere . . . We have our research interests and we think together about a particular topic. This is thinking aloud together.”

And, as we know, “Thinking Aloud Together” is a hallmark of the Center of Theological Inquiry.

Peter C. Phan came to the United States as a refugee in 1975.

After teaching at various universities, he came to Georgetown University in 2003 and currently he holds the Ignacio Ellacuría Chair of Catholic Social Thought and is the founding Director of the Graduate Studies Program in Theology and Religious Studies. He has earned three doctorates: Th.D. from the Universitas Pontificia Salesiana, Rome, and Ph.D. and D.D. from the University of London. He has also received three honorary degrees: Doctor of Theology from Catholic Theological Union and Doctor of Humane Letters from Elms College and Virginia Theological Seminary. His research deals with the theology of icons in Orthodox theology, patristic theology, eschatology, the history of Christian missions in Asia, liberation, inculturation, and interreligious dialogue. He is the author and editor of over 40 books and has published over 300 essays on various aspects of theology. His current research focuses on the impact of migration on theology and church ministry, on which he has co-edited three volumes.

RABBI JONATHAN SACKS

Illuminating the Religion and Violence Relationship

BY LINDA ARNTZENIUS

W

hen Rabbi Jonathan Sacks launched CTI’s Seminar on Religion and Violence as part of its five-year Inquiry on Religion and Global Concerns, it was easy to imagine the pleasure his visit would have given the Center’s founding trustee David Eli Lilienthal (1899-1981). Sacks is Britain’s Emeritus Chief Rabbi.

His appearance marked the start of the Center’s fifth decade and it seemed fitting to recall the Center’s founding and the hopes of Lilienthal in particular.

The son of Jewish immigrants, Lilienthal, who would lead the Tennessee Valley Authority and later the Atomic Energy Commission, was deeply concerned with the near east and with the politicization of Islam. He believed passionately that CTI should take seriously the state of the world and the role of religion in that world. So it spoke to the roots of CTI when this great Jewish leader and thinker joined William Storrar and others for a conversation about his latest book Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence.

Sacks is a philosopher, theologian and public figure. Among

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“Can religions meet together or are they doomed to conflict?”

—Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

many other prestigious appointments, he is Professor of Law, Ethics and the Bible at King’s College, London; Ingeborg and Ira Rennert Global Distinguished Professor of Judaic Thought at New York University; and Kressel and Ephrat Family University Professor of Jewish Thought at Yeshiva University. In 2005 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his “services to the community and to Inter-faith Relations.” In 2009, he became a peer of the British realm. As such, he sits in the House of Lords as Baron Sacks of Aldgate. He was awarded the Templeton Prize in 2016.

Sacks believes that diversity enriches the common good. Deeply rooted in the traditions of his Jewish faith, he draws insightfully upon its resources to transcend differences between religions and bring illumination to universal human issues. He is an advocate and practitioner par excellence of interfaith dialogue and a highly accomplished speaker, beloved by both religious and non-religious audiences for his wisdom, insight, compassion, and boldness. His frequent appearances on television and radio in the United Kingdom (not to mention YouTube) have made him a public figure on both sides of the Atlantic and internationally. A prolific writer—author of 25 highly influential books—and international speaker, Sacks enlarges the audience for a religious perspective through articles in the national press of the United States and of the United Kingdom.

The subject of his recent book, Not in God’s Name is a perfect fit for CTI’s resident seminar on Religion and Violence, the second part of CTI’s five-year focus on Global Concerns. No stranger to the Center, where his 2011 book The Great Partnership: God Science and the Search for Meaning informed the 2012-2013 Inquiry on Evolution and Human Nature, Sacks was prompted to write Not in God’s Name while attending the World Economic Forum in New York City not long after 9/11. As he stood at Ground Zero, he

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pondered the existential question: Can religions meet together or are they doomed to conflict?

Much as The Great Partnership helped shape contemporary discussion of the relationship between science and religion, Not in God’s Name is expected to inform the discussion of religion and violence. The book, Sacks told fellow CTI seminar participants, is the result of 13 years of study into the roots of religious violence.

It was written to be read by Jews, Christians and Muslims and rewritten many times before its author “got it as right as he could.” It opens with the sentence: “When religion turns men into murderers, God weeps.” It ends with a call for Jews, Christians and Muslims to let go of hate. To recognize that we are all precious in God’s sight and that to be blessed, no one has to be cursed.

In recent years many secular intellectuals have vilified religion as the cause of violence in the world. This is a position that can only be held by someone on the outside of religion, says Sacks. His book is written from inside religion and it had to be that way, he says, because what is needed now is a fundamental examination of the connection between religion and violence, monotheism and violence, and the three Abrahamic religions and violence. To this end, Sacks explores religious texts to reveal insight on the roots of violence between Judaism, Christianity and Islam. He finds that violence is not born of religion, it is born of identity. What has happened to identity in the modern world, he asks. “The 18th century was a flight from particularity, with attempts to establish universal systems of philosophy, science, and ethics; the 19th century saw identity expressed through the nation-state, race, and class. The first of these led to two world wars, the second to the Holocaust and the third to Stalin’s Gulags and the KGB. Since the 1960s we’ve been trying to escape from the problem of identity to

the individual rather than to the universal.”

Religion, however, is the strongest form of identity, and it has made a dramatic return to the world-stage. “I don’t think anyone expected religion to return to the international arena as a shaping force the way it has done in the 21st Century,” Sacks says.

“Certainly in Europe people thought religion was in intensive care; it was dying and suddenly it has returned. But it has returned not as a still small voice but as the whirlwind, the fire and the earthquake.

And it is shattering and devastating communities in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, a number of African countries, Pakistan and Myanmar. There is religiously motivated violence today among Muslims, Hindu nationalists, Christians and Buddhists. This is a serious issue that needs the most serious reflection.”

In Not in God’s Name, Sacks takes a bold look at texts that are full of potential minefields. He believes that it is imperative to acknowledge and confront “hard texts embedded in the Torah, the Bible and the Koran that lead to conflict. We must re-read these texts. We must retell our foundational narratives that have for centuries set Jews, Christians and Muslims against one another.”

The Rabbi acknowledges French anthropologist René Girard’s

1972 book Violence and the Sacred. Contrary to those who believe that religion gives rise to violence, Girard argues that violence gives rise to religion. According to Girard, tensions within society lead people in conflict to look for a third party to blame. In Sacks’s parlance, the primal religious experience—the first religious act— is human sacrifice and the first sacrifice is the scapegoat. For Girard sibling rivalry is the main driver of violence in human life. Think: Set and Osiris, Romulus and Remus, Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Leah and Rachel, Joseph and his brothers. And Sacks finds sibling rivalry between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

“Rivalry between these faiths is written in our history, our stories set us in a relationship of sibling rivalry, a tense and potentially violent relationship.”

A decade and a half after Sacks stood at Ground Zero pondering the inevitability of religious conflict, is he optimistic that religions can come together to resolve differences? His answer is a resounding yes. And one of the ways forward is to train a generation of religious leaders and educators who embrace the world in its diversity, and embrace sacred texts with maximal generosity. For, according to Jewish tradition, A hero is one who turns an enemy into a friend.

CTI Director William Storrar welcomes Lord and Lady Sacks to Luce Hall, with CTI Trustees Judith McCartin Scheide and Jon Pott.

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CONSULTATION ON

Religion and Inequality

C

TI held a consultation last Spring on the theme of religion and inequality with Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton and fellow Princeton economist Anne Case. This event was in preparation for CTI's own inquiry on this global concern in 2019-20. Case and Deaton shared their groundbreaking analysis of the health and mortality data which has exposed the scale of the opiod crisis in the United States. They were joined by theologians and philosophers who work on economic questions, including Russell Keat from the University of Edinburgh, Marcia Pally from New York University, Daniel Finn of St. John's University in Minnesota, and Douglas Meeks from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, seen here in conversation with Angus Deaton.

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CONSULTATION ON

The Built and Natural Environment

I

n preparation for an inquiry on religion and the built environment in 2020-21, CTI's director William Storrar convened a consultation last Spring with professors of architecture Julio Bermudez from the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, Tom Barrie of North Carolina State University, and Rebecca Krinke of the University of Minnesota. They are founding members of the Architecture, Culture and Spirituality Forum, an interdisciplinary research network. They are seen here at the late architect and designer Michael Graves' house in Princeton with theologian of architecture Murray Rae from Otago University in New Zealand, Buddhist studies scholar Douglas Duckworth from Temple University in Philadelphia, and Dominique Steiler, a professor of wellbeing at work at the Grenoble Business School.

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COSMIC CONCERNS The Societal Implications of the Universe’s Potential to Harbor Life Beyond Earth

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BACKGROUND IMAGE: VADIM SADOVSKI/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

LEFT TO RIGHT: William Barry (NASA), William Storrar, Catharine Conley (NASA), David Fergusson

(University of Edinburgh), Mary Voytek (NASA), Douglas Ottati (Davidson College) at CTI

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DOUGLAS OTTATI

Reflecting on the Societal Implications of Astrobiology

C

Cells and organisms are themselves communities, the ecosystem TI’s 2016-17 Inquiry on the Societal Implications of Astrois a community which enables differentiation and is assembled biology was made up of 14 scholars from colleges and unifrom species. Indeed, in The Origin and Nature of Life, Smith and versities in the United States and Europe. Nine represented Harold J. Morowitz say, “the fundamental unit of life is not the various areas in theology and theological ethics, two were philosoindividual, but the biosphere as a whole.” A related idea is that phers, one was a cultural anthropologist, one a scholar of literature, life populations shape planetary conditions, e.g., microbes made and one a biologist. We were fortunate also that Ed Turner, an astrocritical contributions to the formation of Earth’s atmosphere and physicist at Princeton University, attended many sessions. I was privthus to the planet’s subsequent ability to support other life forms. ileged to be a senior fellow in the inquiry, along with senior fellow This is one reason why certain gasses Frank Rosenzweig, a biologist at Georgia may be “signatures” of life on other planTech. Much might be said about the intel“The prominence of ets, moons, etc. Life inevitably alters and lectual progress the colloquium made. Here, microbial life significantly shapes habitat, which, in turn, impacts life.

I select four points.

A fourth item—one contributed largely Ed Turner and others emphasized the imexpands and enriches by humanists and social scientists—conportance for the story of life of connections the broader context for cerns complexities of “societal implicabetween the material (or inorganic) and tions.” Cultures such as our own contain the organic. For some time there have been considering the place of multiple communities and traditions of reasons to question overly sharp philosophhumans as well as for what discourse, practice, and commitment that ical and theological distinctions between do not merely receive information but humans and other animals, and between it may mean to talk about also interpret and construe it in their own animals, plants, and their environments. terms. As they do so, they may identify and Relationships between the material and the the God of life.” address new moral questions, e.g., human organic promise a profound expansion of responsibilities toward planetary environour sense of the value for life of the material —Douglas Ottati ments that now support life or may in the realm and of the specific material environfuture. They may reject findings and ideas, ments of particular planets. though any specific community or tradition does so in conjuncFrank Rosenzweig focused attention on the importance of the tion with its own interpretation of the findings and ideas in quesprevalence and dynamism of microbes for the larger story of life. tion, and may also reconfigure elements of its own interpretative Present in diverse environmental conditions on Earth, including framework in the process. There is also a variety of ways in which a quite extreme ones, microbes are, perhaps, a primary form of life given community and its tradition may assimilate new thinking and we may expect to encounter elsewhere. Theologically speaking, the knowledge into its interpretative framework. It may select for reprominence of microbial life significantly expands and enriches the trieval ideas and symbols from its longer tradition other than those broader context for considering the place of humans as well as for that recently have received sustained attention. It may reformulate what it may mean to talk about the God of life. and/or reject particular lines of reflection within its own interpreA third point is that life may be understood as a planetary phetative framework. Again, some may abandon a historic tradition nomenon or process. A number of scientists underscored this. For and its discourse when, in their judgment, its framework cannot example, Carl Pilcher noted that specific planets furnish life “safe helpfully interpret valid and important new knowledge. In addiharbors” for a time. Eric Smith challenged Darwinian perspectives tion, the vocabularies and ideas of scientists and their communities on organisms and environment by observing that individual orcan be influenced by those of other communities, e.g., reflections ganisms are packages of components that affect each other’s states.

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about universal rational languages among philosophers, linguists, and science fiction writers.

My own current project is a systematic theology that interprets the piety of some present-day Protestant churches and addresses their current cultural circumstances, including recent scientific knowledge and views. Though the connection between my systematic theology and astrobiology is therefore indirect, my grasp of the Christian vision I am formulating has been enriched by theologically resonant points like those mentioned above.

The Inquiry also influenced my thinking about liberal arts education and the humanities in relation to theology—a project to which I hope to turn my attention in the future. Questions concerning theology, humanities, and the sciences are relevant here, especially as they bear upon human self-understandings and visions of a good life and good society. My reflections about these matters also were enhanced by Robin Lovin’s CTI lectures on contemporary politics and the many ideas and traditions about human goods in our pluralistic society.

In our pluralist society there is no single form of discourse about the appropriate policies, values, and goods to be pursued and preserved. Instead, there are particular communities, frameworks, and discourses that shape multiple values and perspectives. These make for complexities and political ambiguities when it comes to cultural implications of astrobiology. Practically speaking, however, the plurality of relevant discourses may be circumscribed, and it seems possible to identify a handful that need to be kept in mind as we ponder how astrobiology may be received and interpreted in American culture today.

In closing, I should say my year at CTI was a genuine pleasure. I cannot imagine a more accomplished and collegial group of scholars with which to work.

Douglas F. Ottati is The Craig Family Distinguished Professor of Reformed Theology and Justice at Davidson College, North Carolina. In 2016-17 he was a senior fellow in the Center’s Inquiry on the Societal Implications of Astrobiology.

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MICHAEL HECHT

From Princeton University to CTI

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EDWIN TURNER

Astrophysics at CTI

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y involvement as a frequent visitor to CTI’s program on the Societal Implications of Astrobiology has greatly enriched the context in which I view my own astrobiological research and that of my colleagues in the field.

Indeed, despite decades of professional interest in the search for life outside the Earth and it being a major focus of my personal research agenda for now approaching 20 years, I had scarcely even stopped to consider that the topic has significant impacts on society. That now seems staggeringly naive to me, but it is true nonetheless. But this “blindness” on my part quickly dropped away when I began to hear the ideas and insights of the magnificent and diverse group of scholars CTI assembled in Princeton to consider the issue. The swirl of religious, philosophical, historical and sociological expertise and knowledge around the table was occasionally dizzying and humbling but always stimulating and inspiring. There is no doubt in my mind that my own work on finding and characterizing exoplanets and on the origin of life in a probably infinite universe will now proceed along a different and more thoughtful arc. I could not be more grateful.

Edwin Turner is Professor of Astrophysical Sciences and Director of the Council for International Teaching & Research at Princeton University. He presented his research on astrobiology to members in CTI’s Inquiry on the Societal Implications of Astrobiology in a special seminar in the spring of 2016.

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he Center for Theological Inquiry is my neighbor in Princeton. For years I walked past CTI, but I had no idea who was in the building or what kind of inquiries were pursued there. As a professor of chemistry, directing a research lab at Princeton University, I didn’t expect to have much in common with those inquiries.

Then I discovered that scholars at CTI were inquiring about astrobiology. “But, that’s what I do!” After a few emails and phone calls, I was invited to present my research (our laboratory inquiries) at the CTI Winter Symposium in 2016.

Before meeting the members at CTI, I wasn’t sure if the philosophers and theologians there would understand or appreciate our experiments in chemistry, molecular evolution and synthetic biology. After meeting them, I realized that they had changed my own understanding and appreciation of these experiments.

A moment that will always stick with me came as I described the results from a set of laboratory experiments. I said that “Evolution selects for… (and) evolution favors an outcome in which…”

One of the CTI scholars asked me whether I intended to assign agency to evolution, as suggested by my language. That exchange led me to re-think issues at the core of my own research.

Since that first symposium, I have continued to enjoy discussions at CTI in Princeton and with its extended community.

Last spring, I joined several CTI scholars at a conference in Stellenbosch, South Africa, where we examined the core assumptions in each of our disciplines. From Princeton to Stellenbosch, the CTI community has stimulated me to think in new ways. Nowadays when I walk past the building, I may not know about all the inquiries being pursued at CTI, but I do know that those inquiries have shaped my own.

Michael Hecht is Professor of Chemistry at Princeton University.

He participated in the Inquiry on the Societal Implications of Astrobiology, 2015-2018.

ZOË LEHMANN IMFELD

Science Fiction & Astrobiology at CTI

CTI members in the 2016-2017 Inquiry were tasked with examining the societal implications of astrobiological research and its possible results. As a literature scholar, I came to the inquiry knowing that these are questions that science fiction has been asking ever since Lucian’s A True History in the first century A.D. Most importantly, science fiction demonstrates what hard questions these are to ask. Astrobiology, at its core, deals with questions that challenge our definitions of life. And yet to consider the societal implications of astrobiological research, we must translate these questions into themes which go to the heart of being human.

Through my own research into the function of scientific discourse in fiction, I have found myself working in English literature departments, but also departments of theology, and most recently, astrophysics. In this way, I have seen first-hand that while “interdisciplinarity” may continue to be the golden child of academia, the work of empirical scientists and theologians can often seem untranslatable to each other. The truth claims and premises of one scholarly field are often treated as a confrontation to the other— challenges to be overcome.

The risks of exposing one’s own work to possibly conflicting perspectives are real. What if exposing one’s work to other perspectives simply undermines it? What if it is untranslatable outside one’s own specific field? Our instinct, I think, is to try to collapse the distinctions between disciplines in order to do interdisciplinary work. The temptation is to keep discussions within a safe space, sticking only to common ground. However, my experience is that we need to be more alert to the disciplinary traditions with-

in which we communicate. This was the task given to the members of the inquiry. For the inquiry to function, each member needed to communicate not only with differing philosophical traditions, but with radically different scientific methodologies. For instance, Catharine Conley, NASA’s planetary protection officer, attended one of our symposia prepared to have the ethical purpose of NASA’s program placed under interrogation by philosophers who have dedicated their work to such questions. In return, the scholars at CTI were challenged to frame their own perspectives in discourse founded in heuristics and falsifiability.

It is scholarly exposure to potentially conflicting discourses which goes to the heart of endeavors such as the recent inquiry at CTI. If we are to genuinely posit answers to the philosophical, ethical and theological challenges that the field of astrobiology creates, then it is not enough to simply be “tourists” into the natural and exact sciences. We must be prepared to challenge each other, and be able to interrogate the truth claims and methodologies of differing scientific backgrounds. In return, we must be hospitable to receiving those challenges ourselves. Only then can work such as that which has been happening at CTI take place.

Challenges such as these create a tension in my own research into literature. I like to think that by inviting the concepts of the natural sciences into my scholarship, I’m challenging the tools that we use to read scientific fiction. What happens if we read works of science fiction as scientific models? What kind of philosophical and scientific standards does science fiction have to meet to earn its place in the discussion? My time at CTI has gone a long way to helping me answer these questions. In return, I was challenged to find a role for science fiction and to champion it.

After all, science fiction can boldly go to places of which philosophy and astrobiology can only speak theoretically. My time at CTI has certainly helped me ponder the ways in which fiction can contribute to the conversation, and I know from my discussions at CTI that I’m not the only one. With a bit of luck, the inquiry will also go some way to banishing the phrase once and for all, “that’s just science fiction.”

Zoë Lehmann Imfeld is a lecturer in modern English literature at the University of Bern in Switzerland and the author of The Victorian Ghost Story and Theology: From Le Fanu to James (London, Palgrave MacMillan, 2016). In 2016-17 she was a member of the Center’s Inquiry on the Societal Implications of Astrobiology.

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ERIK PERSSON

Philosophy in Space

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“How do we find a good balance between conservation in the name of science and exploitation in the name of economic development and human prosperity?”

—Erik Persson

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uring the academic year 2016-17 I had the great pleasure of being a research fellow in residence at the Center of Theological Inquiry, as a part of the Inquiry on the Societal Implications of Astrobiology. My project was to investigate potential conflicts between astrobiological research and commercial space initiatives, in particular regarding planetary protection.

Doing research having to do with astrobiology, commercial space initiatives, and planetary protection is not typically what philosophers do, but in this case, and in this combination, it actually does make quite a lot of sense. My normal line of work is in environmental ethics, a booming area of philosophy where one recurring set of questions has to do with how to deal with value conflicts between preservation and development in an ethically responsible way.

So why was I involved in a project having to do with space?

Astrobiology is usually defined as the study of life, its origin, evolution, distribution, and future on Earth and in the universe. It is thus a very wide field of research that is not only occupied with searching for extraterrestrial life. The search for extraterrestrial life is of course an important part of it, and also the most salient part.

It is, however, also very difficult. One complicating factor is that when searching for life on other worlds (planets, moons, etc.), it is important not to bring along a lot of Earth life that might invade that world, threaten the possible indigenous life and cause false positives. The methods for dealing with this problem are summed up in the term “planetary protection.” There are guidelines stating the maximum “bioload” (i.e., how many microbes will be allowed on a spacecraft depending on its purpose and its target body). There are also guidelines about how to achieve this in the form of clean room protocols, decontamination procedures, trajectory bias, and other technical measures. These guidelines are more or less universally adhered to among space agencies and space researchers, but what about private space entrepreneurs? There are an increasing number of private initiatives that, for instance, want to put humans on Mars. How do we find a good balance between conservation in the name of science and exploitation in the name of economic development and human prosperity? This is not an easy question, especially since both endeavors seem to be valid and worthwhile goals. It does not get any easier when we consider that these are actually not the only values at stake, even though they are usually the only values that are openly discussed in the space

community as well as in the space business and space policy communities. There are also other values that need to be discussed. It is for instance possible that extraterrestrial life has moral standing in its own right, independently of its value as an object of study. It is also possible that pristine extraterrestrial environments have value as ends (sometimes called intrinsic value), independently of their value as resources.

By now, it should be clear that there are very strong similarities between these questions and the questions discussed in environmental ethics. It may even indicate that it could be beneficial for the discussions about these questions to involve people with experience from similar discussions in environmental ethics on our own planet. I have tried to contribute to this discussion for a while as a spin-off from my normal work in environmental ethics. Finding time to do research that is not strictly speaking a part of one’s field is not easy, however, so the chance to work on these questions full-time in an inspiring working environment was an incredible opportunity for which I am very thankful.

The Center of Theological Inquiry is a very special environment in many ways. It is in particular a very good working environment with a very nice and helpful staff. It is also an institution that is very good at identifying and taking on interesting and highly relevant research questions, and it is very good at identifying and connecting people with a suitable and complementary background for working on these questions. During my time at the Center, I was therefore blessed by

the opportunity to work together with a group of very bright and inspiring people, who all made contributions to my research in different ways, in the form of in-depth discussions about specific passages of a text during the colloquia, during weekly walks to and from the Center, and also in the form of a joint paper. As a part of the project, there were also symposia with invited guests—from science fiction authors to NASA representatives. Finding the right people for such events is not easy, especially considering that the members of the project came from very different backgrounds. The mix of people and specialties that were invited to the symposia made these events incredibly interesting and inspiring with great opportunities for discussions both in larger groups and one-on-one.

In addition to the direct impact that my stay at CTI had on my research during the time I was there, there has been even more long lasting impact. I am thinking both of the new ideas that will continue to inform my research for years to come, and of all the amazing people who have continued to benefit my research as cooperation partners, and indeed as friends of both me and my family.

Erik Persson is a Swedish philosopher whose primary research interests are applied ethics and value theory, in particular environmental ethics and space ethics. In 2016-17 he was a member of the Center’s Inquiry on the Societal Implications of Astrobiology.

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ANDREW DAVISON

A Chorus of Planets

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vidence of planets around other suns has been secured only relatively recently, and dates back only as far as 1992. While the scientific data might be new, however, Christian theologians have been thinking about the repercussions of life since at least the 15th century. Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64) wrote about it, albeit in passing, in his On Learned Ignorance—one of the towering achievements of that century—as did the Franciscan Guillaume de Vaurouillon (ca. 1392-1463). These writers both thought that extraterrestrial life was quite probable and, with that, they also illustrate the main irony of theological writing about astrobiology rather nicely: on the one hand, there is a good deal of it down the centuries; on the other, little runs to any great length or detail. That shallowness does not rest on squeamishness about the subject, however, or on a sense that life elsewhere was unlikely, as we have seen in Cusa and de Vaurouillon. No: treatments are brief simply because life elsewhere in the universe was not thought to pose a threat to Christian doctrine.

The century after Cusa, to be fair, was not one of equanimity.

Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was executed for a heretic for publications such as On the Infinite Universe and Worlds (1584), although speculation about far-flung life was certainly not the most provocative part of his project. Among the Protestant reformers, Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560) addressed the prospect of life beyond Earth head on, and deplored the thought.

Move on a century or two, however, and a calm open-mindedness is restored. The English priest John Ray (1627-1705), sometimes called the father of British natural history, stands as an example. In The Wisdom of God in the Works of Creation, extraterrestrial life features as an uncontroversial aside: “Every fix’d star [in number ‘next to infinite’] … is a Sun or Sun-like Body, and in like manner incircled with a Chorus of Planets moving about it … [and is] in all likelihood furnished with as great variety of corporeal Creatures, animate and inanimate, as the Earth.”

In the 19th century, when Anthony Trollope (1815-82) wanted to portray characters in Barchester Towers as up-to-date and sophisticated, he had them talk about theology and astrobiology. It was a modish subject of the time (in chapter 19): “Are you a Whewellite or a Brewsterite, or a t’othermanite, Mrs. Bold?” said Charlotte [listing popular contemporary opinion-makers on the topic], who knew a little about everything, and had read about a third of each of the books to which she alluded.

“Oh!” said Eleanor; “I have not read any of the books, but I feel sure that there is one man in the moon at least, if not more.”

“You don’t believe in the pulpy gelatinous matter?” said Bertie.

“I heard about that,” said Eleanor; “and I really think it’s al-

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most wicked to talk in such a manner. How can we argue about God’s power in the other stars from the laws which he has given for our rule in this one?”

“How, indeed!” said Bertie. “Why shouldn’t there be a race of salamanders in Venus? and even if there be nothing but fish in Jupiter, why shouldn’t the fish there be as wide awake as the men and women here?”

“That would be saying very little for them,” said Charlotte.

“I am for Dr. Whewell myself; for I do not think that men and women are worth being repeated in such countless worlds.”

In the 20th century, C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) tackled the question not only in his fiction (the “Cosmic Trilogy”), but also in an essay, “Religion and Rocketry,” which makes for ideal introductory reading on the topic. Later, several other Anglicans weighed in, not least in thinking about whether God would meet many inhabited planets with many incarnations. We could mention Eric Mascall (1905-1993), Arthur Peacocke (1924-2006), John Polkinghorne (1930-) and Brian Hebblethwaite (1939-). However, repeating the story we keep encountering, aside for a short paper by Hebblethwaite, their comments rarely run beyond the length of a couple of pages, and are frequently shorter still.

The longest treatment among Anglican theologians, in fact, comes not from the 20th century but from the 17th, from John Wilkins (1614-72)—Bishop of Chester and founder of the Royal Society—in a pair of books, published together in 1684. Their typically convoluted 17th century title begins A discovery of a new world: or a discourse tending to prove, that ’tis probable there may be another Habitable World in the Moon. Given that Wilkins was something of a Puritan sympathizer, it is perhaps unexpected that discussions of Thomas Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, contemporary Jesuits, and the pagan writers of antiquity fill almost every page, alongside an impressive knowledge of the Fathers. This is a booklength treatment, and yet Wilkins’ pair of treatises actually prove the rule set out at the beginning, that if detailed theological engagement with the prospect of exobiology has been common, it has also typically been fleeting. A methodological question certainly occupies Wilkins at considerable length, namely why the Bible is silent about life elsewhere if, as Wilkins thinks, such life is common. Here, Wilkins’ text stands as a model for the “science and religion” dialogue today. It is a mistake, Wilkins wrote, to look to the Bible for “philosophy” (natural philosophy, for which, read science): the purpose of the Scriptures is not “to discover anything unto us concerning the secrets in philosophy.” Revelation addresses matters of theology and salvation; the investigation of science is left to human ingenuity. Setting that lengthy discussion aside, however, when it comes to the questions that this life

. . . the prospect of life elsewhere in the universe does not pose any great threat to Christian theology.”

—Andrew Davison

might pose for a whole range of core Christian doctrines, we find that they receive only cursory attention: whether other creatures might be fallen, for instance, and if they are, whether Christ’s death atones for them too. Wilkins simply did not think that there was enough friction when it came to life elsewhere in the universe to ignite a theological fire.

To this day, lengthy and detailed discussions of systematic theology from the perspective of astrobiology have been notable by their absence. The Dominican Thomas O’Meara wrote up a long paper from Theological Studies as a not-much-longer book, Vast Universe (2012). David Wilkinson’s Science, Religion, and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (2013) contains two chapters on directly doctrinal themes. An edited volume on the topic is soon to be published by Robert Russell and Ted Peters.

The dominant position, to state the point again, running from Cusa through Wilkins and Ray, and on to many of the founders of “science and religion” as a theological sub-discipline in the 20th century, is that the prospect of life elsewhere in the universe does not pose any great threat to Christian theology. On that, I stand with them. When it comes to the allied suggestion, however, that such a lack of threat means that there is rather little to say from a theological perspective in response, I depart from their company.

That makes me all the more grateful to the Center of Theological Inquiry, and to its funders, for providing nine months across

2016 and 2017 in which to research a rather more extensive, booklength treatment of astrobiology and systematic theology than has been offered up to now. Christian theology is an intricately interwoven affair, so very little of it fails to bear on questions of exobiology, one way or another.

The project seems timely. As I write, the tally of planetary systems discovered around other stars stands at around 3,600, although the number increases more or less each week. Technological developments put us at the cusp of being able to detect the atmosphere around some of these planets, which will allow us to look for the tell-tale signs of life that would likely show up there.

Who knows when, or if, that momentous news will break. If it does, however, we can be sure that it need not catch the Christian intellectual tradition on the back foot. There is already a legacy of thinking about these questions that stretches back over centuries. It has largely been fragmentary, however, up to now, and often cursory. A good deal of detail remains to be thought through, but I can reiterate the centuries-old conviction, all the same, that Christians can go about that business cheerfully, rather than in trepidation.

The Rev. Andrew Davison is the Starbridge Lecturer in Theology and Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge, fellow in theology at Corpus Christi College, and canon philosopher of St. Albans Cathedral. In 2016-17 he was a member of the Center’s Inquiry on the Societal Implications of Astrobiology.

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EMERGING SCHOLARS WORKSHOP on the Societal Implications ofAstrobiology Frederick Simmons, with Lucas Mix (right)

FREDERICK SIMMONS

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fter six symposia, nearly fifty colloquia, and two years of inquiry with leading scholars from several disciplines, CTI’s residential program on the societal implications of astrobiology concluded with a weeklong workshop on the topic. Convening eleven graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and other emerging scholars with interests in astrobiology and society from across North America, Europe, and Africa, the five day event in mid-June promised an unusual opportunity for those entering the field to discuss their work in progress with an international cohort of peers undertaking kindred study. The workshop was an admirable culmination of the sustained, sophisticated, and multifaceted collaborative work and individual research projects in astrobiology that the Center had sponsored over the preceding two years.

While research in astrobiology has been happening for decades and humanistic reflection on the topic far longer—albeit often by other names—primary scholarly self-identification with astrobiology is a relatively recent phenomenon. The youth movement is thus especially influential in astrobiology and the workshop harnessed its vigor. Coupling these structural factors with CTI’s carefully crafted environment for fresh thinking and customarily gracious hospitality, the workshop was accordingly poised to prove more than a mere coda to the prior residential inquiry. And with their level of preparation, engagement, open-mindedness, disciplinary

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diversity, affability, and sheer intellectual acumen, the workshop’s participants wholly realized this potential and rendered the workshop another highlight of the overall inquiry.

Five formal elements structured our endeavor to foster critical and collaborative thinking on the societal significance of the scientific study of life’s origin, nature, distribution, and future in the universe. First, the workshop’s co-conveners each offered a pair of orienting presentations on scientific, philosophical, theological, and ethical aspects of the societal implications of astrobiology drawn from their work in the two-year residential inquiry. Second, each participant led a session dedicated to discussing their astrobiological work in progress. Third, small groups composed of all the presenters for a given day considered topical questions designed to elicit interdisciplinary collaboration. Fourth, plenary conversations addressed salient methodological matters in field-spanning exchanges. Finally, the co-conveners led a cumulative session that sought to distill key insights, questions, research trajectories, and potential projects that became manifest over the week. The group even found a few moments for informal conversation and sheer conviviality.

Although the week’s rich, expansive discussions defy even general summary, several of their principal themes remain vivid to me nearly half a year later. A short sampling includes the relationships between astrobiology and a definition of life; the links between scientific methodology and astrobiological ontology; the status of emergence and teleology; and the impact of astrobiology on doctrines of sin and salvation.

Ed Turner is an astrophysicist and frequent contributor to our inquiry on the societal implications of astrobiology. By most measures, he studies a lot of interesting stuff. Nevertheless, during one of his presentations to our group he remarked that astrobiology is the only facet of his research ever to pique his son’s curiosity. Similarly, biologist Frank Rosenzweig began his co-leadership of our second residential year with a couple of amusing stories suggesting that NASA may be the most popular part of the American government. While Turner’s anecdotal evidence undoubtedly involves a far higher bar than Rosenzweig’s, they both attest to societal interest in astrobiology. No doubt our workshop largely lingered over the abstract and technical ends of that interest. Nonetheless, the precocious, promising work of this summer’s emerging scholars strikingly and repeatedly showed how compelling even the relatively recondite and scientific dimensions of inquiry into the societal implications of astrobiology can be.

Frederick Simmons is the J. Houston Witherspoon Fellow in Theology and the Natural Sciences at the Center of Theological Inquiry.

JOANNA LEIDENHAG

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n June 2017 eleven young scholars were warmly welcomed to an Emerging Scholars Workshop on the Societal Implications of Astrobiology at CTI. In the opening session astrobiologist Lucas Mix brought into focus perhaps the central questions for his field, what exactly is life? How do we define it, look for it, and place value upon it? He drew up a layered typology for this concept including chemical-biological theories, philosophical questions of consciousness and mind, the impact of the social, relational and historical spheres, and, finally the transcendent realm. During this session I realized that astrobiology is (like the universe itself ) an expansive discipline without clear boundaries. Astrobiology is perhaps better described as a melting-pot of other disciplines, in a way not dissimilar from theology.

The questions we wrestled with as a group over the coming days—questions of ethics, value, consciousness, and historiography—should not be considered new questions. Elizabeth Loos’ research paper, for example, explored the way that pre-Socratic philosophers, Plutarch and Nicholas of Cusa have discussed the issues of many “worlds”, extra-terrestrial life, and the epistemological problem of discovering something totally unknown, such as alien or “weird” life forms. Similarly, Sarah Reynolds’ paper explored how religion and science were interwoven through the life and work of Johannes Kepler, particularly in Kepler’s theory that the craters of the moon may be a sign of intelligent life and design. Although formally astrobiology is a new field of research, we discovered that throughout the centuries the questions of astrobiology have provided a forum for interdisciplinary dialogue.

As we engaged in an international and interdisciplinary encounter around the table, the theme of encounter was at the forefront of many of our discussions. Joel Parkyn’s research paper used the case study of the European Conquest of Mesoamerica to examine the resiliency of Christianity in the face of historic and potential future extra-terrestrial encounter. The historical analogue of “New Worlds” in the Americas and Australasia provided useful analogies throughout the workshop. Whereas Parkyn’s paper discussed the role of the image of Our Lady of Gualalupe in mediating encounter, Anna Klara Capova’s presentation catalogued the growing iconography of astrobiology, which mediates astrobiology to the wider society through images.

The role of the imagination featured in many of our discussions.

For example, Dylan Belton examined the way that the imagination of the organic and the theological imagination align against Neo-Darwinian mechanistic metaphors, and how these interpretations of evolution continue to influence practical and scientific questions of the origin of life. Since June, all three of these presentations have helped me to reflect on the mediatory power that images and imagination may have in my own research, which I had previously underappreciated.

Of course, some of the most memorable and fruitful moments came through convivial disagreement. In particular, disagreement about humanity’s role and place in the universe; disagreement about whether the category of sin and fallenness extended out beyond Earth and how this affected potential contact or discovery of other life forms. Fred Simmons’ workshop in particular led me to re-examine my own presuppositions about the theological meaning of bodily death and how Christian theologians might articulate the scope of the effects of human sin.

During my stay in Princeton, I reflected upon CTI’s decision to spend several years dialoguing with astrobiology. It was a decision that had initially left me both curious and perplexed. It seems to me now that deliberate theological engagement with astrobiology is not only part of the wider turn in academic theology to actively engage in interdisciplinary dialogue, but also to reassert that the Christian faith is invested in (non-eternal) life now in this creation, as well as the hope for life beyond. And this is because, until (if ) we discover life beyond earth, astrobiology is highly engaged with the philosophical, scientific, theological, and ethical questions of life on Earth. This came through particularly strongly in the research paper from Eve Nabulya. She looked at eco-centrism and Aldo Leopold’s “The Land Ethic,” and she placed this in conversation with two literary novels which, like the poetry of the Psalmist, give the Earth a voice.

Astrobiology and theology have more in common than I had initially realized: both disciplines have at their core a hope for a yet unknown, unspecified, discovery of new life, and this hope drives practitioners of these two disciplines to look more deeply and sensitively at life in its current form(s) on this planet.

Joanna Leidenhag is a doctoral student in systematic theology at the University of Edinburgh. She was a participant in CTI’s Emerging Scholars Workshop on the Societal Implications of Astrobiology (June 2017).

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EMERGING SCHOLARS WORKSHOP on the Societal Implications ofAstrobiology

EVE NABULYA

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feel privileged to have participated in the Emerging Scholars Workshop at CTI. The singularity of the workshop, in my view, lay in its disciplinary openness. The workshop brought together emerging scholars from the fields of computer science, theology, anthropology and literature to reflect on the question of extra-terrestrial life under the umbrella of astrobiology. As such, the event provided a platform for upcoming researchers in the humanities to exchange ideas on a primarily scientific subject. Remarkably, the different panels all emphasized one major point: the significance of securing the longevity of the current civilization if the huge investments into space research are to yield results. In other words, it becomes clear that the search for life on other planets should be promoted alongside research on the preservation of planet Earth. This realization in turn led to reflections on how the different fields can contribute to the analysis, interpretation and communication of scientific findings, which to me is a step in the direction of harmonizing scientific and social research. This synergy, deeply invested in social ethics, may also promote more social sensitivity in scientific projects.

The workshop was an uncommon opportunity for scholars in different fields to talk to each other around a common research focus. It was my second time to participate in a workshop of this nature (the first one being a related workshop organized by CTI and held at Stellenbosch University in South Africa in February 2017).

I benefitted in several ways. First, I had to reconfigure my ideas differently to make them accessible to a mixed audience. Most of the papers I had presented hitherto had been to audiences in my field, and so I had no need to simplify the ideas or to tone down the technical language. This time, however, I had to stand up to the challenge of providing inroads into my theoretical framework, to indicate the way it relates to the other conversations in the room.

It was an enriching experience.

Since the workshop concluded I have become more aware of my disciplinary assumptions about what constitutes life, and how such assumptions directly impinge on my research. From my standpoint in literary environmentalism, for instance, I realize that the possibility of life on other planets calls for a revision of some of the positions based on an Earth-centred approach to environmental issues. Furthermore, my former ideas about the impenetrability of scientific research and its antipathy towards

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my own field have changed. It was exciting to see how my own research directly speaks to the inquiry on astrobiology. It is from such a broad perspective, I believe, that the humanities can maximize their contribution to human endeavors to improve life on Earth and in the universe.

Eve Nabulya, Makerere University, Uganda, was a participant in CTI’s Emerging Scholars Workshop on the Societal Implications of Astrobiology (June 2017).

SARAH JOZINA REYNOLDS

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e’re noisy as we tromp en masse down the stairs in the front stairwell at the Center of Theological Inquiry. It’s the first day of the 2017 Emerging Scholars Workshop on Astrobiology and Society, and its leaders, Lucas Mix and Frederick Simmons, have sent the eleven of us out in small groups with questions to discuss. I follow Dylan Belton, a Ph.D. student in systematic theology from Notre Dame, and Klara Anna Capova, a research fellow at Lund University in Sweden, as we make our way outside on our hunt for a good place to sit and converse. Ducking around the side of the building, we claim a space on the back patio.

The sky is a beautiful blue as we pull chairs together and settle in to re-read the question at hand: should we terraform Mars? “No,” says Klara, who is a sociocultural anthropologist, with a definitive shake of her head and a near shudder at the thought. “We don’t need to take over another world.” Dylan and I are less sure of our convictions if the stakes were raised. Would we terraform it for human survival? For human benefit if it were convenient to do so?

If it’s entirely uninhabited, if it’s genuinely “empty” space, is there any moral cost in filling it?

There’s an art, I’ve learned, to perception. I’ve had to teach this to students in astronomy in their first nights out observing, telescopes pointed up at the dark, but still star-illuminated, night sky.

Trained by the flicker of modern technology and the easy permanence of Hubble images, people tend to think seeing is easy. We have to be coached in letting our eyes adapt to the dark, or giving our brains time to recognize a signal pattern, in order to see the faint and subtle details of the actual sky. It’s largely patience but is also attentiveness and the willingness to stay with a field of vision until you’ve found all you can from it. “Wait,” I always find myself telling the students again as they try to spot a faint nebula, “and keep looking.”

As a child, I called it “waiting for the ants” and thought of it as a game, settling down under my favorite oak tree to observe. At first, I’d see only the broad strokes of nature—the field spread out to my left, the woods in the distance—or the parts that imposed themselves upon me—a bird loudly cawing as it flew overhead. But I discovered that if I waited attentively, quiet and still, my perception would slowly shift, deepening until I would suddenly become a witness to a whole new world of activity. Where I had been sitting alone under a tree, now I was surrounded by life: ants scouting for food, a beetle scurrying along in the dirt, the caterpillar inching along and devouring a blade of grass, the spider I hadn’t seen sitting right next to my hand. It’s one of the oddities of a place like Mars‑—that,

devoid of life, we might not find as much there to perceive. From a lifetime of living on a planet inundated with signs of life and its activity, I don’t know how to imagine, or necessarily qualify the value of, a place where the landscape is always barren and empty, where I can’t see the ants, no matter how long I wait to do so.

As we debated the weight of human life versus the stark Martian landscape on that hot summer day in Princeton, we “emerging scholars” were embarking on a similar task. In reading and discussing each other’s papers, we started with our surface perceptions, with broad strokes and familiar issues. But as each session of the week progressed, we found ourselves looking deeper, recognizing more, and seeing connections we hadn’t previously made. I had come to the workshop expecting to gain new theological insights regarding my historical research on the astronomer Johannes Kepler’s thought about life on other worlds. And I certainly benefitted from learning more about theological views of life and intelligence than are available in my home department of History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University. But I left with unexpected discoveries and new research directions to pursue, with new friends and scholarly colleagues, and the recognition that there’s still much more to understand about what the possibility of life on other worlds means for us. “Wait,” I tell myself as I sit down to my work, a list of new questions raised by the workshop in front of me, “and keep looking.”

Sarah Jozina Reynolds is a graduate student in History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University. She was a participant in CTI’s Emerging Scholars Workshop on the Societal Implications of Astrobiology (June 2017).

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PHOTOGRAPH: ©MICHAIL PETROV/FOTOLIA.COM

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NEWS & EVENTS

JOHN WITTE, JR.

The Legacy of the Protestant Reformation

PHOTOGRAPH: WIKIPEDIA

CTI recently marked the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation with a public lecture by John Witte, Jr., Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law and McDonald Distinguished Professor at Emory University.

BY LINDA ARNTZENIUS

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itte is an imposing presence—he stands well over six feet tall and has a deeply resonant voice. He commanded the room as much as he did his subject: “From Gospel to Law: Martin Luther’s Enduring Reformation of Church, State, and Society.” A specialist in legal history, marriage law, and religious liberty, Witte has published over 250 articles and 30 books. He has a way with book titles: Sex, Marriage and Family Life in John Calvin’s Geneva; God’s Joust, God’s Justice; and The Sins of the Fathers: The Law and Theology of Illegitimacy Reconsidered. As well as directing Emory’s Center for the Study of Law and Religion, he has led 14 major international projects on democracy, human rights, and religious liberty; on marriage, family, and children; and on law and Christianity.

CTI Director William Storrar introduced him as an exemplar of interdisciplinary scholarship and described the Emory Center as “the gold standard” for interreligious and international dialogue.

Witte is recognized among the world’s foremost experts in his fields. He is also, says Storrar, “a great friend of CTI, who has visited many times, and is a great personal friend and mentor.”

Those attending the public event included students of Princeton Theological Seminary and Princeton University. Their excitement was tangible. Witte did not disappoint. He captured his audience right off the bat when he acknowledged, with wry humor, his status as a “mere law professor” somewhat intimidated to be talking to theologians about Luther, who was known to have made numerous derogatory remarks about jurists. Witte shared a selection of Luther’s choicest: “Jurists are bad Christians,” “Every jurist is an

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enemy of Christ,” “Lawyers are agents of the Devil,” and “Of the gospels lawyers know nothing.” He then launched into a history of the Reformation at breakneck speed that cannot possibly be done justice in this brief space. Suffice it to say that audience members were screwed to their seats in anticipation. It’s no surprise that Witte has been named “Most Outstanding Professor” by Emory law students at least a dozen times and has repeatedly won prizes for his teaching and research.

In 1520, three years after posting his Ninety-Five Theses (or Disputation on the Power of Indulgences) on the church door in Wittenberg, Luther burned books on Catholic theology and canon law at the city gates. He also burned the Papal Bull calling on him to recant or face excommunication. Excommunication duly followed.

Witte catalogued what happened next: the break with Rome, the challenge to authority, the denunciations of the Pope and the Church. “Freedom of the Christian was the rallying cry that led Reformers to denounce canon law and clerical authority and to urge radical legal and political reforms. Church courts were forcibly closed. Clerical privileges and immunities were stripped. Mendicant begging was banned. Mandatory celibacy was suspended.

Indulgence trafficking was condemned. The church’s vast properties and institutions were seized, often with violence and bloodshed. Priceless church art, literature, statuary, and icons were looted, sometimes destroyed. And church sanctuaries, parsonages, and seminaries were confiscated and converted to Protestant control.”

The Protestant Reformation broke the international rule of the Catholic Church and splintered Western Christendom into com-

peting nations and regions, each with its own religious and political rulers. It triggered a massive shift of power and property from church to state. State rulers now assumed jurisdiction over numerous subjects and persons previously governed by the church.

What ultimately emerged from the Protestant Reformation were impressive new legal syntheses that skillfully blended classical and biblical, Catholic and Protestant, civil and canonical teachings.

But all this didn’t start with Luther, Witte said: “The Reformation had already been two centuries in the making when Luther ignited this new way of thinking.” Luther and other Protestant Reformers built on the late medieval reforms that strong secular rulers had begun in the 14th and 15th centuries as they rebelled against the power, prerogatives, and privileges of the medieval church.

Luther’s pugnacious rhetoric, however, drove too deep a wedge between the canon law of the church and the civil law of the state and swift radical change led to social upheaval, slackness, confusion, lawlessness and poverty. Charitable offerings declined. “It was like Woodstock,” said Witte. “It is one thing to deconstruct an institutional framework and quite another to try to reconstruct a new institutional framework.” Luther came to realize that law, rather than a necessary evil, was an “essential blessing for life in the earthly kingdom.”

Mention of the earthly kingdom led Witte into brief discourse on Luther’s theory of the two kingdoms, the earthly and the heavenly, with humanity in both. Luther’s theory rejected hierarchical ontologies and led to a political theory that separated church and state.

When crises followed, Witte continued, Protestant theologians were forced to recognize that law and indeed jurists were not an evil but a necessity. By 1575 a mass of theological and legal reforms had been set in place, many written by Luther himself. They covered much that had previously come under the purview of the Church: family life, marriage and divorce, protection for widows, wives and children; education, public schools for boys and girls, literacy, charity, social welfare, and criminal laws that replaced tor-

ture with rehabilitation. Witte shared a dizzying list. “For a complete picture,” he said playfully, “see my wife’s husband’s book Law and Protestantism. To be enjoyed with a fine Cabernet.”

Endlessly energetic people they must have been, these Lutherans. They produced a “leaner, cleaner, more participatory and vernacularized Church.”

Describing the Protestant Reformation as a “great legacy to the world,” Witte noted that a good deal of modern Western law and politics still bears its marks. “The Reformation still has an influence on both sides of the Atlantic and many of today’s laws were part of Luther’s original vision: the state still monitors public schools, cares for the needy and the poor. Indeed the rise of the welfare state conforms to Luther’s idea of the magistrate as the father of the community.” But it wasn’t all good, Witte acknowledged. There were negative effects on women and any legacy of the Reformation has to tackle links in the long chain of history between Luther and Hitler, 400 hundred years later. Before we indict Luther, however, says Witte, we should examine his late-life “rantings” against his earlier writings. To blame Luther for the Holocaust strains both fact and law. This was a statement that Witte did not make lightly.

Members of his own family had suffered during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

At the end of his informative lecture, as the audience expressed their appreciation with prolonged applause, Witte stood modestly with head bowed. In the Q&A session that followed, he was asked whether Luther’s legacy would be secure into the future. He responded with optimism: “In the last 30 years Luther’s legacy has become better known, especially in the Western legal tradition.

His 95 Theses were directed against a spiritual tyrant. In a time of civil society in flux, there is an opportunity to engage with deep questions and with other religions, and I think this is beginning to happen. It’s an important academic project that is being recognized and pursued.” The young seminary students in the audience at the Center of Theological Inquiry clearly agreed.

John Witte, Jr.

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NEWS & EVENTS

SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY IN THE 21ST CENTURY A Transatlantic Conversation

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evelopments in systematic theology in the 19th and 20th centuries were stimulated and nourished by continuous conversations and debates between theologians from North America and Northern Europe. Drawing on this tradition of mutual exchange, CTI and the Ecumenical Institute, Heidelberg University, held a joint symposium in December 2017 to foster dialogue on the future of systematic theology.

The symposium was envisioned and organized by CTI Director William Storrar and Professor Friederike NĂźssel, Director of the Ecumenical Institute at Heidelberg University. It brought

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together leading systematic theologians from Northern Europe and the United States to address timely questions regarding the scope, purpose, and method of systematic theology in the 21st century. Participants included Oliver Crisp (Fuller Theological Seminary, USA), Ian McFarland (University of Cambridge, UK), David Fergusson (University of Edinburgh, UK), Werner Jeanrond (University of Oxford, UK), Joshua Mauldin (Center of Theological Inquiry, USA) Paul Nimmo, (University of Aberdeen, UK), Friederike Nüssel (Heidelberg University, Germany), Douglas Ottati, (Davidson College, USA), Risto Saarinen

(University of Helsinki, Finland), Christoph Schwöbel (University of Tübingen, Germany), Katherine Sonderegger, (Virginia Theological Seminary, USA), Philipp Stoellger (Heidelberg University, Germany), William Storrar (Center of Theological Inquiry, USA), Kathryn Tanner, (Yale University, USA), William Schweiker (University of Chicago, USA), Michael Welker (Heidelberg University, Germany). The conversation on the future of systematic theology augured well for the discipline as an intercultural and interdisciplinary endeavor.

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BOOKS FROM CTI

Theology as Interdisciplinary Inquiry Learning with and from the Natural and Human Sciences ROBIN W. LOVIN & JOSHUA MAULDIN (Editors)

Can a neuroscientist help a theologian interpret a medieval mystical text? Can a historian of religion help an anthropologist understand the effects of social cooperation on human evolution? Can a legal scholar and a theologian help each other think about how fear of God relates to respect for the law? In this volume leading scholars in ethics, theology, and social science sum up three years of study and conversation at the Center of Theological Inquiry. This is an essential and challenging collection for all who set out to think, write, teach, and preach theologically in the contemporary world.

Imagining a Way Exploring Reformed Practical Theology and Ethics CLIVE PEARSON (Editor)

From the inception of the Reformed tradition, Reformed Christians have followed God’s call to engage and change the world. Yet little work has been done to bring the tools of practical theology and ethics to bear on the task of understanding the Reformed tradition.

This comprehensive volume addresses that problem. CTI gathered some of the most respected voices from within the study of Christian ethics and practical theology to ask how the Reformed tradition understands its calling into the world. Readers will come away with a firmer grasp of how the Reformed tradition informs and animates Christian engagement with the world.

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MEMBER MONOGRAPHS

A Handbook to Old Testament Exegesis

Une voie infiniment supérieure

Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels

WILLIAM P. BROWN

CHRISTOPHE CHALAMET

RICHARD B. HAYS

Religion as Orientation and Transformation

Constitutionalism, Democracy and Religious Freedom

RUSSELL STANNARD

JAN-OLAV HENRIKSEN

HANS-MARTIEN TEN NAPEL

Osons la Paix Economique

Cosmology in Theological Perspective

DOMINIQUE STEILER

OLLI-PEKKA VAINIO

The Divine Imprint

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

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NEWS & EVENTS The Center of Theological Inquiry is proud to be a partner in a community-wide collaboration on the theme of migration by nonprofits in Princeton during the Spring of 2018, led by Princeton University Art Museum and Princeton Public Library.

Learn more at princetonmigrations.org.

This Princeton community collaboration theme happily coincides with our Resident Seminar on Religion & Migration at CTI this Spring. Our resident scholars will contribute to this community program with lectures and talks at Luce Hall.

We are also contributing two special events.

First, we have commissioned a visiting artist in our Inquiry on Religion & Migration to take photographs of the diverse faces of our local community for a special exhibition, entitled:

Our Town – Princeton PHOTOGRAPHS BY CAROLYN SCOTT

Carolyn Scott

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Second, the theme of our literary festival this year is “War & Migration”, with four distinguished authors and journalists discussing their books on the impact of war and violence on displaced lives and forced migrants.

Full details opposite in our Salon on Stockton poster.

PHOTOGRAPH: CAROLYN SCOTT

This exhibition will be open to the public at CTI's Luce Hall, 50 Stockton Street, Princeton, from 9:30am to 4:30pm, on Saturday, April 14th, as part of the Salon on Stockton—our literary festival with Morven Museum & Garden. Carolyn Scott's exhibition of photographs of Princeton people and places will also be open at Luce Hall from Monday, April 16 to Friday, April 20, 1pm to 4pm.

APRIL 14 2018

SALON ON STOCKTON • A LITTLE LITERARY FESTIVAL IN PRINCETON •

FRIDAY, APRIL 13 5:30 pm

COVERING WAR: JOURNALISTS IN CONVERSATION MEET THE AUTHORS @ MORVEN MUSEUM & GARDEN 55 STOCKTON ST.

SATURDAY

APRIL 14 10:00-11:00 am

NEAL ASCHERSON

LYNNE OLSON

The Death of the Fronsac

Last Hope Island

An unforgettable novel of life in wartime, and of the tragic fate of Poland in the 20th Century: a story of sabotage, betrayal, and exile, told by one of Britain’s finest writers.

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SALLY MAGNUSSON

A groundbreaking account by the bestselling author of how Britain became the base for the exiled leaders of Europe in their struggle to reclaim their continent from Hitler.

N O S R E T I R W

11:30 am-12:30 pm CHRISTOPHER DICKEY

1:30-2:30 pm LYNNE OLSON

3:00-4:00 pm NEAL ASCHERSON

4:30-5:30 pm WAR & DISPLACED LIVES: AUTHORS’ PANEL @ CENTER OF THEOLOGICAL INQUIRY 50 STOCKTON ST.

For tickets & information visit morven.org or call 609.924.8144 x113

SALLY MAGNUSSON The Sealwoman’s Gift A Salon favorite’s novel that turns an historical event of violent abduction and slavery in 17th century Iceland and Algiers into an imaginative story of survival in a foreign land.

AT LUCE HALL

CHRISTOPHER DICKEY Our Man in Charleston The award-winning author and foreign affairs editor tells the true story of a UK diplomat and secret agent at secession’s epicenter. It forever changes our view of the Civil War.

THE FRIENDS OF The Trustees and Director of the Center of Theological Inquiry gratefully acknowledge the support of the Friends of CTI in 2016 - 2017. Their generous gifts fund almost 20% of our operating budget and make our mission possible.

$50,000 Judith McCartin Scheide Charles & Nancy Wall $25,000 Robert Hendrickson Roy Lennox $7,000 and above Fred Anderson William* & Joanna Storrar $5,000 and above Robert Gunn Jay & Harriet Vawter $1,000 and above Bruce Freeman Nancy Hearne Dale Irvin Robin Lovin* Jon & Gwen Pott Michael* & Teresa Sabol Spezio Alison & James Zimmerman $500 and above William* & Gail Brown David Fergusson* S.T. Kimbrough* Joshua Mauldin* Eileen Moffett Eric* & Brenda Springsted John Thurber John Witte 56 56

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Up to $499 Ann Astell* Richard S. Armstrong Wayne & Jeannie Becker Robert Boehm Donald Boulton John Burgess* Gordon Burghardt* Shirah & Nathaniel Brown Jerome Danner Andrew Dunning Stephen Fitzpatrick Joan Fleming Edmund & Deborah Freeborn Roland M Frye Jr. on behalf of Helen Frye Parr Paul D. Hanson* Jan-Olav Henriksen* I. John Hesselink George Hunsberger* Wesley Kort* John Kuykendall* Douglas Leonard Michael B. Lukens* Daniel Migliore* Patrick Miller* Jeanne Stevenson-Moessner* Douglas Ottati* Peter Paris* Calvin Ratcliff Warren Savage Daniel Schipani* Robert Seaman Jayakiaran Sebastian*

Louis F. Slee Marcella Stapor Hans-Martien ten Napel* Angela Townsend Elizabeth & Duncan Van Dusen Philip Webb Ralph M. Wyman The Center gratefully acknowledges support from the following institutions: *Members of CTI NASA Astrobiology Program John Templeton Foundation The Reading Group, Princeton Pennswood Village

We have made every effort to be accurate in our listing and apologize if any mistake or omission has been made.

You can support CTI and make a secure donation online at ctinquiry.org.

BECOME A FRIEND OF As a nonprofit, CTI is grateful for the support of its friends who value our fresh thinking on religion and society. As you can see from our donor list, we depend on their generosity to fund our program.

We invite you to join us as we launch our fifth decade and embark on a major research program on the most urgent concerns of our time—migration, violence, inequality and the future of our environment.

During the year Friends are invited to special events, including:

TEA & TALK

with our Friends & Fresh Thinkers Spring Sunday afternoons at 4pm in the informal setting of our Oak Room Lounge

If you would like to share in this endeavor, please consider becoming a Friend of CTI with your donation of $25 or more.

THE FRIENDS OF CTI Public Lectures

PHOTOGRAPHS, L TO R: ©KICHIGAN19/FOTOLIA.COM, KASTO/FOTOLIA.COM

We look forward to sharing news of our research in the pages of this magazine, quarterly e-bulletins with news of upcoming events, and on our website, where you can make a secure online donation at ctinquiry.org.

Or you can send a check payable to: The Center of Theological Inquiry Annual Fund Appeal Luce Hall, 50 Stockton Street Princeton, NJ 08540.

All donations will be gratefully acknowledged.

Thursday, April 5 – William Witherspoon Lecture on Theology & Science Professor Michael Welker, Heidelberg University Friday, May 4 – William Scheide Lecture on Global Concerns Professor Peter Phan, Georgetown University

Bring a friend to our

SALON ON STOCKTON

Saturday, April 14 at Luce Hall Join us for our annual literary festival with our neighbor, Morven Museum and Garden— details on pages 54 and 55.

O S R E T 4 WRI

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announces

RESIDENT SEMINARS, 2017-2022 THINKING TOGETHER ON GLOBAL CONCERNS 2017 -2018 n

RELIGION & MIGRATION

2018 -2019 n

RELIGION & VIOLENCE

2019 -2020 n In 2017, CTI launched resident seminars on religion & global concerns: Fall Seminar: Aug. - Dec. Spring Seminar: Jan. - May Members of the resident seminar must hold the PhD or equivalent.

RELIGION & INEQUALITY

2020 -2021 n

RELIGION & THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

2021 -2022 n

RELIGION & THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

About the Center's Resident Seminars in Princeton, NJ We convene resident seminars on global concerns. Members work in an ideal environment for thinking together on seminar questions. They enjoy adjacent offices, world-class libraries and rent-free furnished housing. They cover other costs, including living expenses and travel.

To learn more, go to www.ctinquiry.org • Email: apply@ctinquiry.org Center of Theological Inquiry • Luce Hall, 50 Stockton Street, Princeton, NJ 08540