Fresh Thinking Magazine: Issue 2 (2019)

ISSUE 2 2019

FreshThinking MAGAZINE OF THE CENTER OF THEOLOGICAL INQUIRY

CELEBRATING OUR

40

th

ANNIVERSARY

DISTILLING IDEAS fresh THINKING 2019

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Our mission distilled ‌ We convene leading thinkers in an interdisciplinary research environment where theology makes an impact on global concerns, and we share those discoveries to change the way people

PHOTOGRAPH: COZINE/ADOBESTOCK.COM

think and act.

ISSUE 2 2019

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

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IDEAS WITH IMPACT

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16 Agustín Fuentes’ Gifford Lectures

18 Richard Sosis and Eugene Rogers: Continuing the Conversation

The Complex Dance of Planetary Life

20 IDEAS ACROSS BORDERS

22 William Storrar: Between Urgency and Understanding

26 John Ahn on Migration as a Hermeneutical Lens

28 Karla Britton: Migration and Architectural Form

30 Seforosa Carroll: Migration, Justice, and Hope in a Changing Climate

32 Ciprian Burlacioiu: Religion, Migration, and Urban Space in South Africa

34 Albert Raboteau on the Great Migration

36 Scholarship and Contemporary Concerns: Luis Farjeat

38 Ulrich Schmiedel: Thinking Theology Together

39 Salon on Stockton

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4 W R ITE

RS ON

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42 40th ANNIVERSARY NEWS & EVENTS

44 The Founding Vision

46 Michael Welker’s Witherspoon Lecture

48 Bishop Bedford-Strohm’s William H. Scheide Lecture

50 Eric Gregory Delivers 40th Anniversary Lecture

52 Finding Solace in the Work of CTI

54 CTI Member Books

56 Friends of CTI: Donors Who Make a Difference page 44

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FROM THE EDITOR

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few years ago the theorist of religion Thomas Tweed published a book titled Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion. He argued that understanding religion requires taking stock of how it allows people to move across borders—physical, moral, spiritual—as well as to put down roots, to build places of dwelling. Religion allows for all kinds of movement, but it also allows for deep forms of dwelling in a given space and community. This dual power to facilitate movement, as well as to tighten local bonds, is at the heart of the religious imagination.

This image of “crossing and dwelling” came to my mind as I reflected on the work of CTI, the kind of work exhibited in the pages to follow. CTI facilitates a great deal of movement, as scholars travel from around the world to collaborate on basic questions of religion and society here at Luce Hall. In this year alone, we are convening scholars from Japan, Fiji, South Africa, New Zealand, Israel, Austria, the Netherlands, Germany, and the United Kingdom, to name but a few. But we don’t follow the typical model of the academic conference, where participants fly in for a whirlwind three days and are back on the plane before they know it. CTI fosters a space of dwelling. Our scholars live in adjacent townhouses for several months on a wooded street here in Princeton. They share meals, attend community events, and travel together to Luce Hall daily. These various spaces of dwelling allow for rich forms of collaboration, as scholars make a home and create a community at Luce Hall.

Before long, however, the workshop draws to a close and our scholars are once again on the move, returning to their home institutions. I like to think that this magazine provides an enduring space of dwelling once our workshop has adjourned and participants have dispersed across the globe. As CTI’s mission statement makes clear, we aim to share our discoveries, “to change the way people think and act.” We hope the magazine aids this mission, not least by creating a space for institutional memory, where conversations that took place across months and years come together in one place, where they can dwell for years to come.

For example, in Section 1 of this issue, Ideas with Impact, we include a feature article on a set of consultations CTI held with experts on world religions to examine how various traditions interact with the scientific discoveries of astrobiology. Section 2, Ideas Across Borders, brings together scholars from CTI’s workshop on religion and migration, in essays reflecting on their research at the Center. These programs illustrate the kind of work CTI has done since its founding forty years ago, in 1978. In celebration of these forty years, Section 3 highlights current news and events at the Center during this fortieth anniversary year, including a special feature on our founding trustees.

Looking back to our founding, and ahead to our future, the movement begins again, as this new issue of Fresh Thinking is distributed to all the places our supporters and members reside. Now that the magazine has reached you, wherever you are, I invite you to explore the conversations taking place at CTI, and I welcome your feedback and ongoing conversation at editor@ctinquiry.org.

—Joshua Mauldin

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fresh THINKING 2019

2019

FreshThinking THE MAGAZINE OF THE CENTER OF THEOLOGICAL INQUIRY

DIRECTOR William Storrar EDITOR Joshua Mauldin CONSULTING EDITOR Linda Arntzenius DESIGNER Debra Trisler CONTRIBUTORS Karla Britton Ciprian Burlacioiu Seforosa Carroll Eugene Rogers Ulrich Schmiedel Richard Sosis PHOTOGRAPHER Frank Wojciechowski EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS Jaime Basher Jade Talag

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

ctinquiry.org

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

BOARD OF TRUSTEES Fred Anderson, Chair Charles Wall, Vice Chair Jon Pott, Secretary Roy Lennox, Treasurer Brian Fix Robert Gunn Robert Hendrickson Dale Irvin Carter Karins Douglas Leonard 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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IDEAS WITH IMPACT

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TI has been distilling ideas with impact for forty years, ever since our foundation in 1978.

Our founder James I. McCord envisaged CTI as a place where scholars of world religions, East and West, would study alongside one another in order to deepen mutual understanding of these different traditions of belief and practice. As you can read in Linda Arntzenius’ article about our CTI consultation on astrobiology with scholars of Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, and Christianity, this founding commitment to fostering comparative theology at CTI is now a reality.

One of our founding Trustees David Lilienthal urged the Center as early as 1979 to study contemporary political and religious developments in Muslim majority countries and their implications for the wider world. Since then, CTI has collaborated with the International Bar Association to convene a pioneering dialogue on human rights between legal scholars in Islamic law and International law, published as Seeking Common Ground. This partnership built on CTI’s earlier inquiry on Christian theology and international law, led by social ethicist Robin Lovin and philosopher Jeremy Waldron with international law scholar Mary Ellen O’Connell. Most remarkably of all, a collaboration between Jewish scholar Peter Ochs and Christian theologian David Ford that began in residence at CTI has blossomed into the worldwide “Scriptural Reasoning” movement which brings Jewish, Muslim, and Christian scholars together to study common texts and seek a shared wisdom for contemporary problems—an idea with global impact.

Our very first CTI publication was by Professor Roland Frye of the University of Pennsylvania. It asked the question, “Is God a Creationist?”—the theological answer then as now is No! Since then, CTI has had a rich history of engagement with questions of religion and science. This includes the collaboration of distinguished physicist Sir John Polkinghorne with theologian Michael Welker; a symposium held at the American Philosophical Society on the idea of scientific and spiritual progress with Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, sociologist Robert Bellah, writer Marilynne Robinson, and theologian David Fergusson; and more recently, research grants from the NASA Astrobiology Program and John Templeton Foundation to consider the societal and religious implications of finding life beyond Earth. This enabled CTI to convene a hundred scientists and scholars in theology, philosophy, and literature to advance the new field of the astrobiological humanities.

And now we have launched our fifth decade with a fiveyear inquiry on religion and the major global challenges of our time—migration, violence, inequality and the future of our built and natural environments. This inquiry builds on the earlier work of CTI member Max Stackhouse on “God and Globalization,” published in four volumes and well-reviewed in The Wall Street Journal.

With this forty-year history of engaged scholarship, I am confident the ideas we distill in our current program will have an even wider impact in the years ahead—with your valued support.

—William Storrar, Director

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The Complex Dance of

PLANETARY LIFE

BY LINDA ARNTZENIUS

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ialogue between disciplines with different methodologies and linguistic practices is no trivial matter. This is especially so between theology and science. As Michael Welker’s 2018 William Witherspoon lecture (see p. 46) attests, understanding across disciplines takes time. Welker’s talk was a testament to the fruitfulness of collaborations undertaken over four decades at CTI. It also demonstrated the value of an approach that is sustained, persistent, openly receptive to new ideas—and yes, fearless.

The intellectual output of CTI is fostered in an environment of intense engagement towards understanding. But understanding is more than an end in itself. And while the ideas discussed and the problems examined have scholarly underpinnings, they also have real world import.

The three-year NASA and Templeton-funded Inquiry on the Societal Implications of Astrobiology (2015-2018) is a case in point. While the program raised many issues during its first two years, the idea that really caught fire among CTI’s resident scholars was the concept of life as a planetary phenomenon.

The third “outreach year” was a chance to distil the findings of the first two years and to take the impact of the Inquiry beyond Luce Hall. This was no simple wrap-up of what had been learned, however. Instead, CTI Director William Storrar convened a forward-looking Consultation on Astrobiology and World Religions that examined the implications for five world religions of this new scientific perspective as described in David Grinspoon’s 522-page book Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet’s Future.

“From the cosmic vantage point of our own evolutionary history and our current global situation,” Grinspoon suggests, “we have the option to choose the future we want and, with self-awareness, bravery, and humility, to reach for the wheel of history and steer a path toward infinite potential.” In this age of humanity (or Anthropocene) humans must recognize their role in shaping the global environment and become caretakers of Earth’s biosphere, consciously shaping our environment.

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SO JUST WHAT IS THE ANTHROPOCENE? While there is still contention over whether it’s an epoch, an eon, or simply a period of transition, there’s little doubt that the phenomenon it describes—human responsibility for major transitions in the character of the planet—is a real phenomenon; one that goes beyond discussions of fossil fuels and climate change to provoke questions such as: What is life? Can a planet be said to be alive? Is life on this planet a single organism (Gaia hypothesis)? Is human intelligence essentially self-limiting or adaptive?

The Anthropocene and the problem of how we deal with it, says Grinspoon, “is not a scientific problem—it’s a spiritual problem.” While science and technology can be part of the solution, humans must re-imagine themselves as a species within the global biosphere. Furthermore, he contends, current science and religion are not up to this challenge. A narrative often expressed in the scientific community is that religion, Christianity in particular, is responsible for the current environmental crisis by way of global capitalist exploitation. Grinspoon sees this as a problematic narrative. His hope is that science and religion working together will lead the way from a reckless to a “Mature Anthropocene.”

To those who might read his book’s title as anthropocentric, Grinspoon explains that the Earth in Human Hands image is not meant to imply that technology is the answer but rather “Whether we like it or not, Earth is in our hands and we have the potential to lead it to safety.”

CANER DAGLI ISLAM, DOGMA, AND DISCOVERY Caner K. Dagli, associate professor of religious studies at the College of the Holy Cross, holds a MA from George Washington University and a PhD from Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies. Born in the U.S. of Circassian descent, he has long been actively involved in interfaith dialogue between Muslims and Christians and was signatory to the 2007 letter, A Common Word

CONSULTATION WORKSHOPS The Consultation took place over two highly structured weekends in April and June, timed to allow an interim period for reflection and refocus between presentations, background readings, textual study, formal discussions, and informal chats.

Grinspoon’s paper Life as a Planetary Phenomenon: An Astrobiological Perspective kicked off a roundtable discussion. Inquiry Member Fred Simmons homed in on the “tacit theological dimensions” of Grinspoon’s otherwise secular account of the origin, development, present state, and possible future of life as a planetary phenomenon. And, while acknowledging the challenge to world religions, Simmons noted their value as “global communities capable of sustaining moral resolve for millennia in the face of persistent moral failure.” They had, in other words, much to contribute.

Between Us and You, addressed to Christian leaders in an appeal for peace and cooperation between the two world religions.

According to Dagli, navigating the encounter between Islam and astrobiology requires a sophisticated awareness of normative choices and epistemic judgments. Thus, the Islamic studies expert turned his attention to dogma and discovery as treated by the Persian theologian Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī in The Incoherence of the Philosophers.

In this 11th-century work, Ghazālī criticizes contemporary Greco-Arabic thinkers for presenting dogmatic assumptions in the works of Aristotle, Galen, and Ptolemy as the results of rational inquiry.

In doing so, they treated such figures as quasiprophets whose teachings were infallible. For

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Ghazālī, certain truths can only be known through

Quran is regarded as the uncreated word of God.

authority, and for him this means either a revelation

The invocation of divine names is a verbal ritual.

originating from God (in Islam, through a prophet) or

Speech is a sacred power, an eternal attribute of God.

through direct inspiration from God (which one can

God speaks the world. We speak his name

experience personally).

and complete the circle.

Following Ghazālī’s example, Dagli looked for

“What the Quran says about the relationship of human

astrobiology’s metaphysical assumptions. It’s an

beings with their environment may mean that Muslims

important exercise, he said. “Insofar as astrobiology

can embrace some version of the ‘good’ Anthropocene

presents discoveries then there should be no reason

and avoid the bad,” said Dagli, who pointed out that

why Muslims cannot embrace it. But insofar as it is

when the Quran was first revealed, and indeed for

framed by dogmas (not intrinsically bad or good),

most of the history of Islamic civilization, it would have

one can respond with dogma.”

been inconceivable that human beings could actually

At CTI, Dagli offered a “birds-eye view” of Nature as woven throughout the Quran, where humans are described as “stewards” and stories such as “The Blessed Tree” tell of the prophet Mohammed as a young boy traveling with his father. The tree, which is

destroy the world. But today, the Quran’s frequent warnings against “corrupting the earth,” typically interpreted though a social, political, and economic lens, have been given a new significance in the context of the global environmental crisis.

in Jordan and revered as the oldest living companion

“Insofar as the future of the earth is going to

of the prophet, moved to keep the boy in its shade.

be determined by human decisions and the

Another story describes a tree that Mohammed

environmental crisis is an ethical crisis, the question

leaned on while giving a sermon. When Mohammed

must be asked: in light of what principles, and

finished, the tree wailed in sadness and had to be

against the horizon of what ultimate reality, will those

comforted. The life of the prophet Mohammed is a

decisions be made?” asks Dagli. “Whose dogmas,

normative example in Islam, Dagli explained. The

and which discoveries, will guide us?”

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Five scholars of religion addressed the topic at hand with respect to their particular subjects, supplemented by background readings and traditional texts––Caner Dagli on Islam; Douglas Duckworth on Buddhism; David Haberman on Hinduism; James Miller on Daoism; and Peter Scott on Christianity. Joining them, in what Storrar aptly described as a “boot camp” on the conceptual and ethical challenges for religions in the context of life on a planetary scale, were four senior scholars, two theologians and two scientists––Harvard Divinity School’s Francis Clooney; Heidelberg University’s Michael Welker; and astrophysicist Edwin Turner and chemistry professor Michael Hecht, both from Princeton University.

The April session seemed like a warm-up compared to the speed with which ideas were suggested, elaborated, questioned, dismissed, and developed in June. Nothing received short shrift. Everyone was heard from and listened to. Having shared background readings since the first meeting, however, the level of discourse was clearly at a much deeper level.

DIFFICULT CONVERSATION TOPICS Given the diversity of cultures, religions, and fields of expertise, discussions were at times theological, philosophical, historical, scientific, and practical. Surprising overlaps and parallels between religious traditions and ethical values were explored. Not surprisingly, there were also some difficult-to-talk-about subjects.

Astrobiology, said Clooney, gives us a new model of evolution––“planet and life in a complex co-evolutionary dance.” What do the religious traditions make of this and are we called to ethical innovation? Given the current state of the planet, there is an activist component here, said Clooney, who went on to address the need to be mindful of philosophical presuppositions that may be so entrenched within the traditions that they aren’t talked about.

“We need to keep learning and changing the ways we think about issues of science and astrobiology; examine metaphysics and epistemologies and undo oversimplifications.”

Although working with traditional texts requires time and can slow down the learning process (because of questions of interpretation and translation), Clooney endorsed the practice: “While it’s good to listen to living colleagues, we must not neglect the voices of the great scholars of the past. Attention to today can change the way we read these texts and vice versa.” He also praised the value of learning from multiple traditions and across disciplinary boundaries to find deep models devoid of platitudes and stereotyped

DOUGLAS DUCKWORTH AND BUDDHISM When Douglas Duckworth explained the intricacies of Buddhist tradition and doctrine with respect to the natural world, he not only addressed concepts of emptiness; a cosmos in which human and non-human animals are part of the same genus (with no special status afforded to the former); the etymology of terms such as jiva (the living), ajiva (nonliving), saṃsāra (life as we know it), and karma (actions of beings); he drew on story and parable.

The parable of the arrow, for example, shows the typical Buddhist rejection of origin narratives.

As the story goes, Buddha likens someone who insists on such metaphysical speculation to one who has been shot by an arrow and refuses to take the arrow out until given a complete causal account for the origin of each of its flight feathers, the wood of its bow, the background of its shooter, and so on.

Duckworth is so thoroughly immersed in IndoTibetan Buddhism and Buddhist Philosophy that it’s a surprise to learn that he was raised in the Protestant tradition, at least into his late teens, when he says it failed to satisfy his intellectual curiosity. As an undergraduate, his first interest

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was psychology—until an undergraduate class on

perspective, especially interacting with the people

world religion and existentialism “opened his mind

of various regions of Tibet. In 1999, he found a

to a broader world.” He graduated with a bachelor’s

rare manuscript which he then commissioned to

in philosophy and religion from James Madison

be digitized. It is now available as A Compilation

University in 1993 and went on to earn a PhD in Indo-

of Ngawang Tsoknyi Gyatso’s Writing’s on Other-

Tibetan Buddhism from the University of Virginia in

Emptiness. [Sichuan, China: Nationalities Press, 2009].

2005. He also spent several years at the Center for Buddhist Studies at Kathmandu University in Nepal.

Among the treasures of the consultation were two texts he selected for study: “The Jeweled Net

He has written extensively on the life and teachings of the influential scholar Mipam Jamyang Namgyal Gyatso (1846–1912), who wrote over 32 volumes on painting, poetics, sculpture, alchemy, medicine, logic, philosophy, and tantra, and is currently finishing a book for Oxford University Press on Tibetan Buddhist Philosophy of Mind and Nature.

of Indra,” a subtle metaphor for the structure of reality as understood in Buddhist tradition, and the “Mountains and Waters Sutra” by the Japanese Zen Buddhist master Eihei Dogen (1200–1253). Curious readers are referred to these in the immensely readable collection of classic texts: Dharma Rain: Sources of Buddhist Environmentalism [Shambhala, 2000], which has contributions from Basho, the

of religion at Temple University in Philadelphia,

Dalai Lama, Gary Snyder, Chögyam Trungpa, Peter

Duckworth says that travel further broadened his

Mathiessen, Helen Tworkov, and Philip Glass.

PHOTOGRAPH: JARED STINE/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

Now an associate professor in the department

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caricatures. “Sustained conversation of this kind benefits the world, particularly in an age when we need to engage across ecumenical lines. There is no single perspective. Even in Christianity, there are multiple perspectives, so we need inter-faith, intra-faith, and bilateral conversations as well.”

Turner spoke of the limitations of science (weak on values and normative ideas) and the “strange new territory” presented by climate change. “How can we say on the one hand that mass extinctions of the past were good (giving us the world as it is now) and that future mass extinctions are bad?” This led to issues relating to hierarchies of living things and the ideas of “radical equality,” the ideal and the gap between the ideal and the practice of it. Take, for example, the killing of chickens with a disease that threatens humans rather than caring for sick birds because of the expense involved.

One participant noted that most animals on Earth are domestic and asked whether wild species should be allocated wild spaces even if that meant shrinking the human population to make room for these other life forms?

While acknowledging that all life merits due regard, Clooney pointed out that hierarchies are in fact practiced all the time. “How do we acknowledge that there are forms of life that we care about more than others and what language do we use to talk about this privileging of one’s own family, community––how do we talk about this so as not to minimalize the faraway other?”

Such difficult ethical topics are just the tip of the iceberg. Should it be conceded that all life has value but not all the same value?

Turner suggested a thought experiment––suppose that our understanding of the biosphere suggests that the planet is sick and humans are the disease and that if humans were eliminated the planet would be healthier. What would the various religions make of this?

It was suggested that the knowledge that we can’t have human life without planetary life is something “that ethical world traditions do not take into account and are not serving us in the crisis that we find ourselves in today.” This was a statement that elicited a strong response urging that a sense of history be kept and pointing out that “humans haven’t done well in the post-religious world, where religion has given way to science.”

The June workshop benefitted from a presentation by Lisa Sideris, a professor of religious studies at Indiana University. As its title suggests, her 2017 book, Consecrating Science: Wonder,

DAVID HABERMAN AND HINDUISM’S AFFINITY WITH ASTROBIOLOGY David Haberman was the first to acknowledge the enormity of the task at hand. Five scholars of religion asked to look at their respective fields through the lens of astrobiology and the Anthropocene. For Haberman, this meant a new perspective on three decades of research. As it turned out, however, Haberman would discover multiple affinities between planetary thinking and Hinduism. His consultation paper was liberally (and helpfully) sprinkled with what he called “Grinspoon Affinity Alerts.”

As a professor of religious studies at Indiana University, Haberman specializes in Hinduism and the environment. This was his first visit to CTI. He noted with sadness that Hinduism is often reduced to caricature in the West. “As in the case of every world religion, it is more accurate to speak not of a single Hinduism, but rather of a rich multiplicity of Hinduisms.”

Unlike Daoism but like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Hinduism has an origin story. Haberman recommended two texts from the Upanishads as Consultation readings. Both invited comparison with Genesis and, as Haberman explained, are not

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PHOTOGRAPHS: COURTESY OF DAVID HABERMAN

scientific treatises but metaphorical accounts that,

a tradition in which one finds an understanding of

in essence, recognize no impenetrable boundary

life on Earth articulated as a simultaneously diverse

between God and the visible world—an animated

yet radically interconnected pervasive presence. In

presence pervades everything and anything can be

foundational scriptures and expressed in everyday

infused with Divinity.

thoughts and actions is the conception that ‘every-

In the Vishnu Purana, for example, the universe is the body of Krishna (or Vishnu)—mountains are his bones, rivers are his arteries, and trees his hair. Since all life and natural forms are divine, Hindu sages typically live in a close relationship with nature.

In many ways, said Haberman, Hindus would find it easy to relate to some of the ideas of astrobiology.

“I recently had a conversation with a Hindu Indian friend of mine; I was telling him about this consultation—that I was here to think about how Hindus would regard the notion of life as a planetary phenomenon. His immediate response was ‘Well that’s no big deal. That’s how we see it anyway.’”

thing is part of a singular divine reality’ and as such is worthy of reverence.” Thus, said Haberman, “the notion that the wildly diverse and bountifully abundant forms of life on this planet—privileging or excluding none—are a holistic ‘planetary phenomenon’ folds rather easily into this vast shape-shifting non-dual panentheistic vision.”

Pondering the different methodologies of religions and science, Haberman said: “It’s interesting to think about how the questions that are being asked today have been asked by other peoples at other times. The more we do that, the more access we have to wider ways of thinking and expanding our different angles on any particular that we might be facing. I suppose

Haberman’s approach combines both textual re-

that it means offering the wisdom of the ages to any

search and anthropological fieldwork: “Hinduism is

issue that we are thinking about.”

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Knowledge, and the Natural World (University of California Press) focuses on the role of wonder in contemporary scientific discourse and its impact on how we conceive of and relate to nature. It has been described as “a searing critique” of the new cosmology that according to Sideris, instead of cultivating respect for nature, encourages human arrogance, uncritical reverence for science, and indifference to nonhuman life.

Consider the leap in human consciousness that resulted from the first photographs of Earth taken from space. Paradoxically, the technology that took us into space inspired both back to Nature movements and plans to escape the planet––do we take care of Earth or do we leave it for new worlds beyond?

In a moment that delighted everyone, the door of Luce Hall was opened to the fine June weather and a mockingbird was heard going through his impressive repertoire, as if adding his endorsement of the conversation.

“If we can protect birds, then I think we can protect the planet,” said Sideris. “For all of the knowledge that we have about the environment and how it works and everything we know about climate change and why it is an alarming scenario, it doesn’t seem that it is knowledge ultimately that motivates people. Knowledge is important, of course, but I think that religious perspectives are one of the places that we find arguments about humans limiting themselves and thinking about humility and where we fit into things. . . .

Religions address that question of ‘how do we change’ and ‘what constitutes real change.’ And it is not knowledge.”

JAMES MILLER AND THE DAOIST UNDERSTANDING OF NATURE James Miller’s darting mind flits deftly from theology to philosophy to history to contemporary environmental problems. His manner has something of the questing student. But don’t be fooled. Miller is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading scholars of Daoism and the environment. His most recent book, China’s Green Religion: Daoism and the Quest for a Sustainable Future [Columbia University Press 2017] is one

TAKING CTI BEYOND LUCE HALL “This is one of the finest consultations CTI has ever convened–– inter-religious, inter-disciplinary work at the highest level,” commented Storrar. “This Inquiry meets a goal that was defined forty years ago for CTI that it would engage in comparative religious scholarship––that CTI would be a secular institution that would focus on the dialogue between religion and science.”

In the first two years of the Inquiry on the Societal Implications of Astrobiology, 26 established scholars in theology, humanities, and social sciences and a further 14 emerging scholars participated. This Consultation expanded that impact many times over, not only through the students with whom each of its participants comes into contact (in Canada, China, India, the Islamic world, United States, and Western Europe) but also through a forthcoming publication.

of six he’s published on the subject.

Miller was the first to speak on topic at CTI’s Astrobiology and World Religions Consultation and his opening remarks elicited easy laughter: “The great characteristic of heaven and earth is to produce fecundity. Heaven and earth are always bound together in a seamless operation of fecundity. That’s the basic orientation of Daoism.

The natural world is seen as an economy of cosmic power, an ordering process with the natural and the cosmic—rocks, plants, trees, gods—all part of the same continuous pouring forth of creativity.

From where? No idea. Let’s call it Dao for now.”

With this, Miller exemplified the traditional carefree nature of the Daoist sage as described in the

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Zhuangzi. This classic text of early Daoism is an ancient collection of stories, anecdotes, and parables—many of them humorous. It promotes carefree wandering and becoming one with Dao, or “the Way,” by following nature. Its main themes are spontaneity, freedom from convention, and the falseness of dualist distinctions such as good/bad, large/small, life/death, and human/ nature. In Daoism, Miller told us, there is no origin story, no creation of things out of building blocks as in the Western scientific tradition. And, if we think of religion as some sort of spiritual transcendence, then in Daoism we get there through the world, not by disconnecting ourselves from it.

Can this Chinese religion offer the aesthetic, ethical, political, and spiritual tools needed to construct a sustainable future? Miller certainly hopes so. His China’s Green Religion shows how Daoism orients individuals toward a holistic understanding of religion and nature, Daoist temple on Mt. Qingcheng, Sichuan province

connecting human flourishing to the thriving of nature.

What prompted his interest in Daoism? As an undergraduate learning classical Chinese, he read the “Autumn Floods” chapter of the Zhuangzi. Here’s the text that captured his attention: Zhuangzi and Huizi are strolling along the bridge over the Hao River.

Zhuangzi: The minnows swim about so freely, following the openings wherever they take them. Such is the happiness of fish.

Huizi: You are not a fish, so whence do you know the happiness of fish?

Zhuangzi: You are not I, so whence do you know I don’t know the happiness of fish? is to be you. But by the same token, since you are certainly not a fish, my point about your inability to know the happiness of fish stands intact.

Zhuangzi: Let’s go back to the starting point. You said, ‘Whence do you know the happiness of fish?’ Since your question was premised on your knowing that I know it, I must have known it from here, up above the Hao River.

And, said Miller: My life hasn’t been the same since . . .

PHOTOGRAPHS: COURTESY OF JAMES MILLER

Huizi: I am not you, to be sure, so I don’t know what it

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AGUSTÍN FUENTES

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The Gifford Lectures

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amed for Scottish jurist Adam Lord Gifford (1820–1887), the Gifford Lecture series is one of the world’s most prestigious. Each year, eminent scholars deliver lectures on topics in religion, science, and philosophy that are both scholarly and accessible to a large general audience. Aside from three years during World War II, they have been delivered annually since 1888 by such luminaries as Niels Bohr, Hannah Arendt, William James, and Karl Barth, to name but a handful.

Joining this impressive list is CTI member Agustín Fuentes, who delivered the 2018 Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh over several rainy and snowy evenings in February and March of last year. Among the guests invited by the

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Interviewed by Christopher Cotter in Edinburgh for his Reliuniversity to attend the lectures was CTI’s Director Dr. William gious Studies Project podcast, Fuentes described the title of his Storrar and fellow CTI member Wenstel Van Huysteen. Storrar last lecture “Does belief matter?” as somewhat facetious. “Everyand Van Huysteen joined Fuentes as the panelists for the Gifford one knows the answer is, yes! But what I really mean is: can we Seminar on his lectures. They were also guests at a dinner in Fuenmake belief truly matter in the 21st century, when we are on the tes’s honor, hosted by the university’s Principal and Vice Chancelprecipice of so many catastrophic issues for not just humans, but lor, Professor Peter Mathieson. In the after-dinner conversation on the whole planet? How do we engage the scientific, the religious, his lecture theme, Fuentes spoke of the “creative friction” that is the political, the economic, in dialogue so that we can do what so necessary for fruitful interdisciplinary conversation, something he many of us want––and that is to move forward on the planet in said he experienced as a resident scholar at CTI. ways that are sustainable, as equitable as possible, compassionate, As an anthropologist––Edmund P. Joyce C.S.C, Professor of Anand caring in spite of all the problems?” thropology at the University of Notre Dame––Fuentes is used to Fuentes thinks in an evolutionary way, an ecological way, and taking a long perspective. His six lectures on “Why We Believe: Evoa deeply philosophical way. In addition to belution, Making Meaning, and the Development ing thought-provoking, Fuentes’s lectures are of Human Natures” were a breakneck multi“Meaning, imagination, peppered with countless surprises. Did you million-year journey through human evolution.

For each lecture, Fuentes posed a question: and hope are as central know, for example, that man’s history with his best friend the dog goes back more than 20,000 Who are we? What makes us human? How do to the human story years? Or that human artists were mixing glues humans change the world? How do we believe? and pigments from plant, animal, and minerWhy do we believe? and Does belief matter? as are bones, genes, al materials as far back as 120,000 years ago?

“Humans believe. Meaning, imagination, and ecologies.”

And, according to Fuentes, the perseverance reand hope are as central to the human story as quired of anthropological fieldwork is the perare bones, genes, and ecologies,” says Fuentes. fect training for an academic career. Watching “We are a species distinguished by our extraorprimates, for example, usually means spending hours, after hours, dinary capacity for creative cooperation, our ability to imagine after hours, sitting watching them not do very much. At least so possibilities and to make them material, and our powerful aptisays Fuentes, perhaps being somewhat playful again. tudes for belief, hope, and cruelty.”

Transdisciplinary research over the last decade prompted FuenIn the first three lectures Fuentes focused on human development tes to start seeing larger-picture questions. It’s a perspective that from a particular kind of primate to a hominin which manipulates CTI is known to nurture and Fuentes acknowledges his time here animals, plants, ecosystems, and one another. From there, he moved as invaluably productive. “What’s happening at CTI and the postto the development of human cultures, natures, and belief systems.

CTI experience, expands out and infuses other practitioners beHis fourth lecture examined human culture, how it emerged, and yond CTI with a little bit of the kind of scholarly engagement that why it is central to our capacities for, and processes of, belief. “Being went on there. This is how I see my own opportunity to give the with, and believing in, others instigated the Anthropocene,” he said.

Gifford Lectures in 2018.”

Furthermore, in the last 15,000 years, “the magnitude, rapidity, and impact of humans’ relationships with an increasing array of other species transformed bodies, societies, and the global ecosystem at The 2018 Gifford Lectures can be viewed online at paces outstripping everything before.” giffordsedinburgh.com and will be adapted into book form.

For the question: Why do we believe? Fuentes reviewed current evolutionary ideas about how and why humans came to have reFURTHER READING ligious belief, noting that some 5.8 billion people (or about 83 Agustín Fuentes, The Creative Spark: How Imagination percent of the world’s population) identify as religiously affiliated.

Made Humans Exceptional (Dutton) “Religion is woven into the hearts of the societies and nations in Agustín Fuentes, Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You: Busting Myths about Human Nature (UC Press). which we all reside,” he said.

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EUGENE ROGERS & RICHARD SOSIS

Continuing the Conversation: Life after CTI

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n evolutionary anthropologist and a theologian are unlikely intellectual bedfellows. CTI, where one such relationship was born, is not your typical intellectual environment. In the 2012-13 academic year, CTI convened a year-long “Inquiry on Evolution and Human Nature,” co-funded by the John Templeton Foundation. This interdisciplinary inquiry brought together roughly a dozen scholars. Half of us were evolutionarily trained scientists (biologists, anthropologists, and psychologists) and the other half were theologians and religious studies scholars.

During the year, we all pursued individual research projects on this common theme. It was also a year of conversation. Well, attempted conversation, at least at first, might be more accurate. As we quickly realized, we were all academics but we spoke different academic languages. Our conversations would unfold with the discreet passing of philosophical, theological, and biological dictionaries across the room as we tried to understand each other.

In the fall we introduced the group to our individual research projects. Sosis, an evolutionary anthropologist, presented a model of religion as a complex adaptive system. His model emphasized how the elements of religious systems interact to generate physiological, cognitive, neurological, and affective responses. During the colloquium discussion, Rogers, a theologian, noted that there were parallels to the approach Sosis was advocating within theology, and he recommended that Sosis read George Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrine. Lindbeck had served as Rogers’ advisor in graduate school at Yale University. Sosis was captivated by the book and he initiated a number of animated discussions with Rogers about the implications of Lindbeck’s thesis. Sosis found much of The Nature of Doctrine compelling because Lindbeck’s argument, as Rogers

had recognized, was consistent with positions that Sosis had articulated in his own work, even though they were deriving their conclusions from very different sources, evolutionary biology and theology respectively. Moreover, Lindbeck’s insights on the difficulty of interfaith dialogue resonated with some of the challenges we were facing in our CTI dialogue.

Since our time at CTI, we have had the opportunity to exchange ideas on Lindbeck, as well as our mutual interests in ritual and signaling theory, via email, phone calls, and at several conferences we were both fortunate to attend. In the spring of 2018, we had the opportunity to extend the conversation beyond ourselves. During the spring semester, Sosis taught a graduate seminar entitled Religious Pluralism, in which he assigned The Nature of Doctrine. Sosis invited Rogers to the University of Connecticut, where he teaches, to discuss the book as part of the annual James Barnett Lecture Series on Humanistic Anthropology. Rogers welcomed the opportunity to discuss his former advisor’s work.

The lecture and discussion were not only “insightful,” according to Sosis, for Rogers they were also cathartic. Lindbeck had passed away earlier in the year and Rogers had visited him before his death. Lindbeck, who was in his mid-90s, however, was not the vibrant scholar at this point in his life that Rogers had known.

And without real intellectual engagement, the visit felt incomplete.

Discussing Lindbeck’s work with Sosis allowed Rogers to reengage with Lindbeck’s ideas, and in some small way, served as a fitting tribute to this productive scholar’s extraordinary life. Although Lindbeck wrote about the challenges of dialogue across boundaries, his work ultimately enabled two unlikely scholars to cross their disciplinary boundaries and benefit from what has now been a seven-year dialogue that began at CTI.

Eugene Rogers is Professor of Theology at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

Richard Sosis is the James Barnett Professor of Humanistic Anthropology at the University of Connecticut.

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Richard Sosis (left) and Eugene Rogers

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IDEAS ACROSS BORDERS The spiritual quest of humanity is no longer national and denominational but global and ecumenical

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PHOTOGRAPHS: OPPOSITE, EIGH PRATHER/ADOBESTOCK.COM; ABOVE, RIGHT: PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY ARCHIVES

James McCord (third from left), founder of the Center of Theological Inquiry

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he founder of CTI, James I. McCord, was a prescient visionary.

Long before the idea of globalization became current in academic and public life, Dr. McCord discerned a change in the spiritual quest of humanity. It was no longer national and denominational but global and ecumenical, he wrote in the late Seventies.

For this reason, he established CTI as an international research center for theology. It was to be interdisciplinary in character. It was designed to be conducive to fresh thinking on the problems of religion and society. Thanks to his vision forty years ago, CTI is distilling ideas without borders today—fresh thinking on global problems across the borders of disciplines, religions, and regions.

In this section of our magazine, you can read about the scholars and writers we have convened in the past year to think together on the global issue of migration from fresh perspectives in theology and literature. The section opens with a shorter version of a paper I was invited to write for a symposium on Confronting Religious Violence, chaired by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. In it I reflect on what CTI has learned over forty years about cultivating a scholarly counterculture of dialogue. It is one that respects our differences while addressing our divisions in the quest for common ground.

Turning 40 is a good time to take stock. What is CTI for? In the fitting words of Murray Rae, a systematic theologian who will co-lead our workshop on religion and the built environment in 2020, we facilitate interdisciplinary engagement in the service of the theological task. In celebrating the fortieth anniversary of CTI’s assigned task, we honor our founder by distilling ideas without borders for a divided world.

This is an enduring vision worthy of the industry of our scholars and the generosity of our friends. Happily, you will find evidence of both in this second edition of Fresh Thinking—with our thanks.

—William Storrar, Director

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WILLIAM STORRAR, DIRECTOR

Between Urgency & Understanding The work of CTI

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ut what can we do? This is a question I am often asked as Director of a research center that studies problems of global concern. It is an impassioned plea that returns me to CTI’s mission of sharing our discoveries to change the way people think and act. In what practical ways can we help solve today’s most pressing global problems? The Center of Theological Inquiry is a research institution dedicated to making a theological impact on global concerns through interdisciplinary and interreligious inquiry. By pursuing the theological task in this way, we face the tension between a sense of moral urgency to resolve the questions we study and the need for slow, patient scholarly work to understand them. We work in the tension between urgency and understanding.

For example, what can CTI do to help counter the problem of religion and violence? One way is to create a counterculture of mutual understanding across religious and cultural divides.

We do that at CTI through our distinctive research method of convening conversations across the borders of academic disciplines, religions, and regions of the world. In practicing this approach for forty years, CTI has convened three inquiries in recent years that have considered the problem of religion and violence from the perspectives of scriptural interpretation in the Abrahamic traditions, the relationship of Christian theology and Islamic law to international law, and the scientific and theological study of cooperation in human nature.

This research experience has led us to identify five practical imperatives in theological education to combat religiously motivated violence. We have seen the importance of hospitality, honesty, humility, and hope in research across religious and disciplinary boundaries. Even more importantly, we have learned

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of the need to integrate these four practical imperatives in a core commitment to dialogue.

These five practical imperatives shape CTI’s way of handling the inherent tension between urgency and understanding in our work.

Let me illustrate with case studies from our research program in recent years.

HOSPITALITY: A MODEL FOR PEACE When CTI convened a group of Jewish, Muslim and Christian scholars to address the question, “Do our three scriptures unite or divide us?” it was acknowledged at the outset that tensions among the three communities in the contemporary world made it difficult to find space for productive dialogue. Our group took to heart Jonathan Sacks’ insight that religion “is a fire––and like fire, it warms but it also burns.”

How, then, could these scholars––as they read, struggled over, challenged, and interpreted texts from their own and others’ traditions––confront religious violence with a counternarrative?

There was argument, to be sure––debate, discussion, questioning–– but there was also a sense of openness and mutual respect, and a shared love for God’s word as embodied in their respective scriptures.

Hospitality in theological education is a rich and nuanced one of “interpretative hospitality,” to adopt a term used by the scriptural reasoning movement. Such interpretative hospitality is not a comfortable and comforting practice; it is a demanding one. And yet its practice can lead to a deeper understanding of one’s own tradition.

As well as an invitation to dialogue, hospitality in theological education is an invitation to friendship. Despite the sense of crisis that had brought these study partners together, their study

was often punctuated with laughter––friendship lightened by the joy they found in the texts they read together, and in each other’s company. From this inquiry CTI learned that hospitality in theological education means the accentuation and not the diminution of the distinctive content of each Abrahamic tradition.

Mindful of the moral urgency of responding to the latest abhorrent act of evil in God’s name, theological scholarship must remain steadfastly committed to the longer-term work of conducting basic research and cultivating interreligious scholarship, without losing its sensitivity to the human suffering caused by religious extremism. The shared space that CTI offers presents a model for inter-Abrahamic peace, beyond mere agreement or shared declarations of belief. It is a hospitable model of shared space in which Jews, Muslims, and Christians inspired by the word of God may share, discuss, and debate their inspirations in the spirit of fellowship and love that each sacred text demands.

Shared space is also a practical imperative in theological education for peacemaking among the Abrahamic traditions––one which should have priority in theological education. CTI is one such space.

HONESTY: PREREQUISITE TO COMMON GROUND A few months before the Arab Spring, the International Bar Association and the Salzburg Global Seminar convened a weeklong seminar in Salzburg to explore the potential for common ground between Islamic law and international law on human rights. The papers presented at that timely seminar for lawyers, judges, and human rights activists from the Muslim majority world had been prepared in a workshop convened by CTI in partnership with the International Bar Association.

Once again, the importance of providing hospitable space for face-to-face study was affirmed; as was the transforming effect of fellowship after an intensive day of sometimes tense face-to-face discussions. At a critical juncture on the third day of their conversations the group reached an impasse. Just at that moment, CTI’s Robin Lovin offered the group a transformative insight. Neither Islamic law nor international law offer uncontested perspectives on human rights within their own fields of legal inquiry. Before any fruitful exchange could happen, each legal system had to be honest about the disagreements in its own backyard. Ground must be cleared before common ground can be found and shared.

Common ground is not a space where all questions have been settled, it is where both systems of law continue to pose questions to one another, but each understands the other better and understands itself differently because of the ground clearing

that has taken place. The importance of this preliminary ground clearing is the second practical imperative that CTI has learned as an educational institution in countering the narrative of religious violence. Such ground clearing is an exercise in intellectual honesty.

In an environment of mutual trust, scholars in different disciplines and religions acknowledge and explain the internal debates and disagreements in their own tradition as the essential prelude to better mutual understanding across disciplinary and religious traditions. In theological education, as in life, honesty pays.

HUMILITY & HOPE: THE INTERDISCIPLINARY VIRTUES In three interdisciplinary inquiries funded by the John Templeton Foundation, CTI considered what theology and theologians had to learn from dialogue with scientists and legal scholars on questions of human nature, moral identity, and religious freedom. In the subsequent co-authored volume by scholars in these inquiries, the habits of mind which make for fruitful inquiry across disciplinary boundaries were stressed. Two interdisciplinary virtues were seen as important in any theological inquiry that acknowledges the tension between moral urgency and theoretical understanding: humility and hope.

The habit of humility disposes scholars to acknowledge the limits of their own understanding and the value of collaboration with other disciplines to expand their knowledge and identify some of their errors. In particular, it requires respect for the assumptions of our colleagues in another discipline or religious tradition as our starting point.

In CTI’s inquiry on evolution and human nature, for example, the theologians of human nature in the group were challenged by their colleagues in evolutionary anthropology, biology, and psychology to take seriously the growing body of evidence for the centrality of cooperation and prosociality in human evolution (challenging the dominant assumption about the evolutionary survival of the fittest). The scientists in the inquiry set out on an even more demanding intellectual journey to enter the unknown territory of theology and take its assumptions about human nature into account, often for the first time (but as the essay by anthropologist Richard Sosis and theologian Eugene Rogers on page 18 shows, the participating scientists found the exchange with theologians illuminating).

Along with seeing the value of humility to learn from one another across disciplinary divides, we have also discovered in our interdisciplinary inquiries at CTI that a shared sense of hope is important. As the contributors to our volume on Theology as Interdisciplinary Inquiry noted: “Part of the way that we engage

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“Theological scholarship must remain steadfastly committed to the longer-term work of conducting basic research and cultivating interreligious scholarship, without losing its sensitivity to the human suffering caused by religious extremism.” people from other disciplines is by emphasizing the moral significance of the questions we can discuss with them. People will be willing to risk the loss of methodological rigor and even have their basic assumptions challenged if they think it will make a difference to important issues of justice and human dignity.

Regardless of their own faith or skepticism, people measure such choices by what they hope for.... As a practical matter ... the engagement of theology with other disciplines favors those who hope.” Hospitable places for honest exchange in any field cultivate these virtues of humility and hope.

THE DIGNITY OF DIALOGUE: CULTIVATING A COUNTERCULTURE One of the most profound moments of intellectual generosity and aesthetic judgement that I have witnessed was during our authors’ workshop on Islamic law and international human rights law.

Among the invited participants was a lecturer in human rights at an official government university in a Muslim-majority country in the Near East who was not able to attend the workshop in person.

We arranged for him to present his paper by telephone conference call. Just before the call was due to start, another workshop participant very intentionally drew her colleagues around our table to attention. She reminded them of how intrepid and even dangerous it was for the lecturer to make his contribution to our dialogue on human rights in these circumstances, with a high likelihood that his every word was being monitored. They should therefore be sensitive to his situation and respectful of his views in responding to the paper.

Who was showing this exceptional level of empathy for an absent and unknown dialogue partner? None other than a legal scholar who was herself a forced political exile from the same country and regime, with every reason to resent the views of one of its academic spokespersons. She was practicing the dignity of dialogue: not abandoning her own secular convictions about human rights but reaching out to understand the assumptions of someone who was

seeking to reconcile those same rights with a particular reading of his religious tradition.

The fifth imperative in our work of theological education is therefore a practice that requires what one CTI scholar wisely calls “a patience and intellectual generosity that presupposes those entering it will have a sense of ignorance of the field of the other in the dialogue, but at the same time, a willingness and openness to learn.”

Inviting scholars who display patience and intellectual generosity in conversation with colleagues in other fields or faiths is the sine qua non of CTI’s work. Scholars acknowledge that they have much to learn about the other discipline or religion and are willing to make the effort to do so. In this context, it is a sign of effort rather than a failure of communication when dialogue partners acknowledge that a shared term does not mean the same thing for everyone in the conversation. It is a healthy sign that participants are wrestling with the tension between allowing one’s own thinking (and very self ) to be challenged and maintaining the integrity of one’s own deepest convictions.

As CTI convenes its research workshops on religion and violence during this current academic year, 2018-2019, we are consciously aiming to implement these five practical imperatives of hospitality and honesty, humility and hope, and the dignity of dialogue in our advanced program of theological education. We seek to create an educational counterculture, one which scholars in the Abrahamic traditions, other religions, and wider academy will find hospitable and safe space for face-to-face study and fellowship. That is our hope, and we hold it with an acute sense of institutional humility at our limitations for the task and need to learn from those who have given much more thought to the challenge.

But what can we do? That is the question. We can live and work responsibly in the tension between a sense of moral urgency at the world’s problems and a commitment to what our distinguished CTI member and academic advisor Francis Clooney at Harvard University calls slow learning for fast times.

This essay is a shorter version of William Storrar’s chapter in the volume edited by Richard A. Burridge and Jonathan Sacks, Confronting Religious Violence: A Counternarrative (Baylor University Press, 2018). See also the CTI volume, Theology as Interdisciplinary Inquiry: Learning from the Natural and Human Sciences, edited by Robin Lovin and Joshua Mauldin (Eerdmans, 2017).

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Research Workshop on Religion and Violence Fall 2018

BACK ROW, LEFT TO RIGHT: Antti Pentikäinen (Network for Religious & Traditional Peacemakers),

Ephraim Meir (Bar-Ilan University), Wolfgang Palaver (University of Innsbruck), Louise Du Toit (Stellenbosch University), David Tombs (University of Otago), Ed Noort (University of Groningen) FRONT ROW, LEFT TO RIGHT: Joshua Mauldin (Assistant Director, CTI), William Storrar (Director, CTI),

Hannah Strømmen (University of Chichester), Elisabet Le Roux (Stellenbosch University)

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Religion & Migration

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emographers generally classify two basic types of migration: internal within national boundaries and international over those boundaries; immigrants are described as legal, illegal, and refugees escaping persecution (often political). The causes of migration are economic, cultural, and environmental. But whatever the reason, migration is a major step not taken lightly. And it has a long global history.

In the 19th century, European immigrants to North America expected to find streets paved with gold (a perception that continues to draw people from Latin America and Asia to the United States and Canada). In the late 1940s, Eastern Europeans fled Communism for democracies of Western Europe and North America. During the 1930s Dust Bowl, thousands of Oklahomans abandoned their farms and migrated 1,000 miles west to California. Hurricane Katrina forced several hundred thousand from their homes and hundreds of thousands have been forced to move from the Sahel region of northern Africa because of drought.

According to the 2017 United Nations International Migration Report, there has been an increase in recent years–– approximately 258 million in 2017, up from 220 million in 2010 and 173 million in 2000.

CTI’s first of a five-year series of workshops focused on “Religion and Global Concerns,” looked at “Religion and Migration” with scholars from across the globe researching historical and contemporary migrations in terms of origin and systemic causes. Demonstrating the tangled web that is migration, many of their projects fell under multiple categories. Some had a religious aspect such as narratives of origin and migration in the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible; the forced migration of Russian Orthodox Christians at the time of the First World War; the 6th century BCE period of Exile; Christian migrants in Japan since the middle of the twentieth century. Some were historical––post-war and post-colonial movements of peoples in Asia, Africa, and Latin America; church independence in South Africa circa 1900. Others bore contemporary significance––sanctuary movements; unaccompanied minors; exclusion politics; urban transformation; climate change and disappearing islands of the Pacific. The essays which follow provide a window into this workshop on religion and migration.

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John Ahn on Migration as a Hermeneutical Lens Hermeneutics is the theory and methodology of interpretation, usually with reference to biblical and philosophical texts. CTI Member John Ahn from Howard University in Washington, D.C., has written a scholarly paper offering interpretations of migration narratives in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. Ahn’s article can be read in full at ctinquiry.org. Here, we offer a brief overview of its content.

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hn begins his hermeneutic of migration with a startlingly novel interpretation of a line from Ecclesiastes, “A time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together.” He suggests that the casting away of stones “is best understood as forced migration, exile to Babylonia, and gathering them is understood as return migration of peoples after three or four generations in displacement and resettlement.”

Noting that migration stories and memories are based on real social phenomena, he goes on to examine forced and return migrations to and from Babylon, Egypt, coastlands, and elsewhere.

In an overview of the social and scientific phenomena of migration, he uses finely-tuned concepts from contemporary migration studies. Types of forced migration (derivative/ purposive/ responsive) and categories of displacement (development induced/ internally displaced/ refugees) shed new light on the biblical period called the Exile (from around 598/7 to 538 BCE).

Among the “pull” factors he describes are environmental stressors such as famine. His details of studies of paleoclimatology are especially interesting. Citing the work of archaeologist Harvey Weiss and others, Ahn points out that prolonged periods of aridification affected both agriculture and peoples. Scientific data from the multinational Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 suggest a prolonged period of drought around 1200 BCE. Isotopic geochemical studies of stalactites and stalagmites and Dead Sea levels also attest to dry spells. And a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Karl W. Butzer: “Collapse, Environment, and Society”) suggests aridification in the 6th century BCE. With references from Jeremiah and the “diaspora novellas” of Daniel, Susanna, and Tobit, Ahn looks at a series of forced and re-

turn migrations. His many examples of return migrations address different responses to being “in exile” from successive generations.

Those most likely to maintain the desire for a return are the laborers, who even after four generations continued to struggle by the irrigation canals of Babylon, and the priestly class marginalized in exile and longing to be restored to their former status.

In Ahn’s interpretation, each generation has its own response to exile. The Book of Proverbs, for example, “is clearly an older first generation exilic or forced migration theology.” The Book of Job is a second-generation perspective in its rejection of the previous generation’s view that “sin” led to their forced migration.

He identifies changing goals from collective/permanent return to the aspiration to succeed. “Success in the diaspora is the central message of those that did not seek to return,” he says. “Return was for the underclass and priests.”

Looked at in terms of generations, he says, “Abraham likely represents the initial first return migration under Sheshbazzar in 538 BCE. Isaac may represent the second return migration under Zerubbabel and Joshua in 520 BCE. Jacob the third under Ezra in 458 BCE, and finally, Joseph may symbolically represent the fourth return migration under Nehemiah in 445-430 BCE.” Ahn puts selected texts under the lens of migration and finds forced migration in the first half of the book of Genesis and return migration in the second half––from the expulsion story through the narrative of Noah to the long and complex story of Abraham. Adam and Eve’s downfall narrative, Ahn contends, derives from a cultural memory of expulsion from the South King-

dom of Judah. “Adam and Eve are displaced and forced to resettle in the east (Babylon). A flaming sword is placed to prevent the thought of a return migration—clearly the viewpoint of the elites or in-group in Persia,” he says.

Ahn’s thoroughness extends through Exodus, beginning in Egypt and thence into the wilderness, which becomes a new home for the community to re-establish and reset its religious identity: a space where neither the Persians or Egyptians have power or control, where the Israelites receive revelation and law.

According to Ahn, “the social construction of reality in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament began with the collective consciousness of a nation that reflected on its forced migration. With the return migration, reconstruction and reinvention through scribal and canonical consciousness developed.”

Ahn, however, does not confine his readers entirely within the bounds of the HB/OT. He finds a parallel with events of 587 BCE in the destruction of the (second) temple in 70 CE, when the outward practice of sacrifice turned inwardly to prayer, prompting another set of writings and texts, the New Testament.

Moving further forward in time, he concludes with thoughts of contemporary migrants and refugees who have left their marks in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere. “Scripture is clear on where it stands,” he says, offering his own translation of Leviticus Chapter 19, verse 34: “Like the native of the soil among you, shall be to you the forced migrant, the forced migrant with you, you shall love him/her like yourself, for you were forced migrants in Egypt.”

John Ahn is Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible at Howard University School of Divinity

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KARLA BRITTON

Migration and Architectural Form

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hroughout history, architectural forms have been closely tied to the lives of migrating peoples. Whether the forms are churches, mosques, synagogues, kivas, or temples, they have served as the centerpieces around which immigrant communities have assembled, cultural traditions have been reinforced, and rituals celebrated. Architecture in this sense has always been closely tied to the search for meaning and belonging. Human beings are spatial creatures who seek places of dwelling and ways of understanding their place in the world through the marking of the ground.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the study of architecture and the study of theology have often been closely aligned. The study of God and the study of our spatial understanding of the world come together in the expansion of human experience beyond the knowable and material; the patterning of cosmological understandings in spatial terms; the creation of mystery through human-made cavernous spaces; built constructions as expressions of the ineffable; and even the biblical emphasis on altars, temples, the heavenly city, the Tower of Babel, and the continuing presence of these types in our lives today.

While theological attention has been given to the increasing number of migrants today, there has been little subsequent focus given to the building and spatial implications of migration. Addressing this lacuna, my work at CTI focused on the relationship between migration and architectural form. My interest lies in the reciprocal understanding of migration—the ways in which the culturally grounded insights of migrants often shape the cultural spaces of their host communities and likewise the ways in which the host communities impact the landscapes occupied by migrant communities.

For a theoretical foundation, my work appeals to 20th century theologians who were deeply interested in the relationship between theology and architecture. Theologians such as Romano Guarini, Marie-Alain Couturier, and Paul Tillich addressed a theology of culture and the ways in which art and architecture could provide an entrĂŠe into spiritual dimensions of human expression that are otherwise inaccessible to us even through prayer or scripture.

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PHOTOGRAPH: © TOMAS CASTELAZO, TOMASCASTELAZO.COM / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

“Human beings are spatial creatures who seek places of dwelling and ways of understanding their place in the world through the marking of the ground.”

Today every major city in North America shows evidence of immigrant communities and their places of worship: frequently migrant communities no longer meet together in rented storefronts or private homes, as is often assumed, but instead take on the task of constructing large, permanent, and highly-visible structures that are often of considerable architectural merit. One of the most culturally diverse cities in the world, Toronto provides an example of this exuberant built expression of migrant communities—including buildings by the Ismaili community, the recent Fung Loy Kok Place of Worship (Daoist), and the prominent Shri Swaminarayan Mandir Temple. Buildings such as these are not only places intended for the faithful, they are also prominent symbols in the public sphere.

In addition to the artistic and architectural implications of migrating peoples, my work at CTI also examined how landscapes and human settlements are impacted by highly unstable conditions caused by shifting global populations. From worship spaces in refugee camps, to “sanctuary churches” across the United States, immigration now shapes the spaces we occupy in our neighbor-

hoods, in our suburbs, and in our cities. Immigration, too, transforms vast territories, such as the line marking the U.S.-Mexico border, stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.

The philosopher Karsten Harries reminds us that the relationship between architecture and displacement underscores humanity’s sense of having been torn from an original embeddedness—not only in place but also in community. Questions that I addressed at CTI concerned the following: how does this broader existential context of displacement shape our concrete response to the humanitarian refugee crisis in which we are currently immersed? And related to that, if displacement is at the core of the human condition, what points of commonality and solidarity—rather than indifference and resistance—might we all find with those who are most obviously displaced in our day from country and home?

Karla Cavarra Britton is an architectural historian. She currently teaches Art History at the tribally-run Diné College of the Navajo Nation in Tsaile, Arizona.

She writes about architecture, religion, and cultural landscapes and is working on a book about migration and sacred architecture.

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SEFOROSA CARROLL

Migration, Justice, and Hope in a Changing Climate

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PHOTOGRAPH: GRAPHITHÈQUE/ADOBESTOCK.COM

I

n the absence of a physical home and the concomitant loss of culture, land, and identity, how might a community of people continue to have presence, visibility, dignity, and hope? This question undergirds the research project I began at the Center of Theological Inquiry in 2018 as one of twelve members of CTI’s workshop on religion and migration.

The Pacific region, known as “the liquid continent,” is among a number of places in the world facing the effects of climate change. My research project seeks to make sense of and bear witness to the plight of climate-induced migrants from the Pacific and to place the Pacific experience of climate change impact within the wider inquiry of religion and migration.

This research project is compelled to begin at the boundary.

The boundary, in this instance, is the limit of human possibility brought about by the impending loss of home and culture due to climate change. This is a growing reality for communities affected by the impact of climate change, especially in the Pacific Islands.

Philosopher Jonathan Lear in his 2006 book Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation contends that the limit of human possibility is not particular to a culture or group. It is “a peculiar human condition we all face… a possibility we all must live with—even when our culture is robust, even if we never have to face it becoming actual. It is a possibility that makes us human.”

For Lear the question becomes “How ought we to live with the limit of human possibility?” Lear insightfully highlights that consideration of the limit of human possibility is the precursor to radical hope. Using the example of the Native American Crow tribe and the account of their tribal Chief, Plenty Coups, Lear defines radical hope as “the hope for revival: for coming back to life in a form that is not yet intelligible.” Furthermore, “Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it. What makes this hope radical is that it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is.” Building on this notion, it is my contention that it is within a framework of considering the limit of human possibility that the “presenc-

ing” of radical hope and reimagining home begins. From a theological perspective, Jürgen Moltmann in his Theology of Hope speaks of radical hope as resurrection hope: the hope that “awakens our sense for potentiality and for possibilities of what could be.”

My research explores the need for human-affirming and identity-affirming narratives of migration, foreshadowed by disappearing islands and the loss of home, culture, land, and identity. In this work the theme of Presencing in Absence is utilized to think through the meaning of climate justice in this context and the imperative need for hope. Employing the theological notion of Oikos (home), the etymological root for the words economy, ecumenicity, and ecology, the project seeks to think through and “reimagine home” in a context where “home” is no longer physically present. I propose “presencing” as a means of manifesting radical hope, bringing to presence what is not yet intelligible.

I began my research at CTI with a focus on international law and climate migration, cognizant of the lack of a legal framework for climate refugees. The focus of the research evolved over the course of my time at CTI through conversations with colleagues and research. It became increasingly clear as I engaged in further research that climate justice and the virtue of hope need to be considered as important themes in this work. Pacific Islanders feel a deep sense of injustice and powerlessness. They did not cause the predicament they find themselves in, but they have to struggle with it.

Finally, my research seeks to reframe our understanding of sin, salvation, and eschatology within the Pacific context as it pertains to climate change and insofar as it stands as a barrier to a community of people struggling to make sense of where the suffering God may be in their midst.

I have been nourished and enriched by the insights and shared wisdom of my colleagues during the course of my time at CTI. The time spent learning and sharing together at the Center was indeed a gift. My continuing research in this area has been further shaped and refined by the wisdom of my colleagues, to whom I am deeply grateful.

Seforosa Carroll is a research fellow with the Public and Contextual Research Center, Charles Sturt University, Australia.

She currently works in Theological Research and Church Partnerships, Pacific and Australia with UnitingWorld.

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CIPRIAN BURLACIOIU

Religion, Migration, and Urban Space: South Africa circa 1900

J

ournalistic coverage of global migration crises may suggest that humanity is facing such challenges for the first time.

Global communication has brought increased awareness of such issues. Nevertheless, examples from the past are helpful in understanding repetitive aspects and new developments in the nexus between religion and migration. A case in point is South Africa, circa 1900.

Since the late 15th Century, South Africa was a strategic region for different European powers looking toward Asia. In the late 19th Century, the discovery of diamonds (1866 in the Kimberley region) and gold (1886 on the Rand) increased the region’s economic importance. Different “rushes” emerged and, in addition to fortune seekers and wage workers from different parts of the world, a significant number of Africans from the southern part of the continent were employed in the mines.

Before 1900, a cheap African labor force was recruited largely on a voluntary basis. After 1900, labor was extracted increasingly using colonial coercion. As a consequence, an army of African migrant workers arose; many of them moving between their place of work and their remote homelands for many years. One result of this industrial revolution was the emergence of urban industrial centers surrounding the mining regions.

Parallel with this dynamic of industrialization and urbanization, the first African independent churches emerged, departing from the paternalistic control of white mission churches. Starting from this chronology, in an ongoing research project, I raise the question whether and to what extent the process of religious independency in South Africa is influenced by urbanization and migration.

However obvious this chronology may seem, it has been largely overlooked by scholars.

In trying to understand the possible connections, the remarks of the sociologist Saskia Sassen prove helpful. Speaking more generally about unprivileged social classes in urban settings, she notes: “In the city, those without power get to make a history, an economy, a culture.” To these, I would add “a religion” as well. The critical mass of small and individually powerless people in urban areas, collectively representing a counter-weight to the centers of different powers, sets in motion a potential of creativity and emancipation. Sometimes, such urban areas emerge in short periods of

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time particularly due to migration. The most conclusive examples from South Africa are Cape Town, Durban, Kimberley, and Johannesburg. The latter two emerged from plain rural fields since the 1860s (Kimberley) and 1880s (Johannesburg) as a consequence of diamond and gold mining. Cape Town and Durban date back further to the development of these regions as significant ports and places of exchange.

Focusing on African migrant workers in these areas, the picture of a heterogeneous and crowded urban landscape emerges. These migrant workers came from different regions, hundreds and even thousands of miles away, crossing various colonial borders. African workers were housed mostly by the employing companies in compounds or, in some instances, they could rent a small plot of land in a so called “native area,� where they could improvise semi-permanent dwellings. The large majority of African workers were engaged by mining companies or public works in contracts for up to one year. At the end of their contract, they were eager to return to their homelands. At a later date, they would again engage in wage work, very probably in a place they already knew, if conditions were not too bad.

Their quarters were comparatively small and crowded spaces where individuals or sometimes families lived in poor conditions very close to each other, without any kind of private space. For employers, such places were a low-cost solution for accommodating the highly needed cheap labor force, which could be effectively controlled and disciplined. Long before the official apartheid policy was framed, regulations and laws enforced strict forms of segregation regarding the settling and movement of natives in urban areas. These cities were, consequently, not primarily the habitat of the colonial elite and the bourgeoisie. These were places where the labor force of migrant workers was extracted and managed in the most efficient way possible.

For missionaries, the city was a place of vice and spiritual corruption. Their favored setting and area of activity was the rural mission station where they could (re)create an environment according to their own vision. As a consequence of this absence and because of the fast-growing number of African migrant workers, urban industrial areas quickly became the new missionary frontier. The urban migrant population, in the absence of consistent missionary activities, and yet at the same time influenced by

Christianity, changed the religious landscape of South Africa.

In this urban context, a specific form of non-missionary, ethnic-overarching African Christianity emerged as a mass phenomenon. This was not an intellectual exercise but rather a practical way of coping with daily ordeals. The African workers were eager to overcome their status as uneducated, exploited, half pagans and sinners—as they were treated both by employers and missionaries.

Missionary independent churches offered spiritual empowerment and vindication.

Beyond this dynamic of spiritual emancipation, urban areas and African independent Churches became a melting pot for religious ideas and identities. No stone of the traditional western Christian edifice remained unturned. Theological ideas and denominational frames were combined and reshaped to respond to the needs of this marginalized and oppressed migrant population. To a large extent, African independent Churches emerged in South Africa as an urban phenomenon among migrant workers.

Although limited in scope, this example from South Africa demonstrates the importance of non-theological and non-ecclesiastical elements in shaping world Christianity. It is possible that other world religions have experienced similar influences. The paradigm of South African independent churches offers a clue in understanding the dynamic of global religions.

Ciprian Burlacioiu is Lecturer in Patristic Studies and History of World Christianity at Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich.

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Albert Raboteau on the Great Migration

BY LINDA ARNTZENIUS

A

l Raboteau is soft-spoken, as thin as a rail, and has a shock of graying hair. His warm and gentle manner invites trust and makes one feel instantly at ease. As Princeton University’s Henry W. Putnam Prof. Emeritus and the author of seminal texts on the Antebellum South, Raboteau visited the Center of Theological Inquiry in January 2018 to share his research on immigration and religion with members of CTI’s research workshop.

Theologian John Ahn was among the first to welcome the respected scholar. As an undergraduate, Ahn had found similarities between the Korean American Church and the Black American Church and, inspired by Raboteau’s writings, he had reached out to him. In return, Ahn received a generous response that included an invaluable reading list.

Like many gifted teachers, Raboteau is a born storyteller. He began his discourse with typical aplomb, telling us that he was born in 1943 into a country and time burdened by racism and racial oppression. “I was born into a family of Indian, French, German, and African ancestry in a small town on the Gulf of Mexico named after a king of France, Bay St. Louis.” He was born three months after his father was shot and killed by a white man who was not prosecuted.

Born into a Roman Catholic family, Raboteau was named Albert Jordy after his father. At the age of two, his mother took him and his two older sisters to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and then to Los Angeles. Every summer, they returned south to visit relatives.

Raboteau remembers those journeys as fraught with danger. The Green Book, which told blacks where to get food and where to stay, was their guide. Several occasions during the summer he turned seven were particularly memorable. His family had stopped in Alabama and his mother had gone into a store to shop. Al was drawn to a drinking fountain. Hot and thirsty, he didn’t notice the “Whites Only” sign. His ever-watchful mother, though, had seen it. She caught him just in time and whisked him round to the back of the store to the “Coloreds” fountain. A lifetime later, Raboteau still feels the depth of her anger, not at him, but at Jim Crow.

But it was another instance that was most hurtful. His mother had taken him to visit relatives and, as the day wore on, they missed mass at the local black church. When they went to the

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PHOTOGRAPH: STATE ARCHIVES OF NORTH CAROLINA [PUBLIC DOMAIN OR NO RESTRICTIONS], VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

white church instead, Raboteau remembers being shown to the pews at the back. When he got up to take communion, the priest passed him by three times, giving communion to the white people before giving it to him. As young as he was, Raboteau knew instinctively that this was wrong. “I cried about that,” he said, “these scars run deep. Our society still suffers the pain of the lynching tree. We haven’t come to grips with it yet.”

Such experiences fed Raboteau’s interest in migration. Having long felt that scholars of religion and scholars of migration needed to talk to one another, he formed a research project with sociologists Richard Alba and Josh DeWind. Their book, Immigration and Religion in America: Comparative and Historical Perspectives, examines the religious identities of Italian, Mexican, Japanese, Korean, Jewish, Arab, and Haitian immigrants in America.

Raboteau’s wide-ranging conversation with CTI’s scholars encompassed Jacob Lawrence’s artwork of the Great Migration of black Americans from the rural south to northern cities in the twentieth century; churches split along racial lines; black Pentecostalism’s emergence as a major denomination in 1916 and spread to South America and Haiti; the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education and a period of tumultuous struggle over the meaning of race and the legality of racial discrimination; encounters between black churches and Islam; Elijah Mohammed and Malcolm X; and the growth of black Catholicism.

According to Raboteau, Roman Catholicism in America is a series of Catholicisms: English speaking from Great Britain, French, German, Irish, Polish and Czech––each seen as foreign by other groups maintaining their own Catholic identities. “Still today, in Trenton, you’ll find a Polish church on one corner and an Italian on the other and three different virgins have been crowned in America and officially approved by the Vatican (Cuban/Haitian, Italian, Mexican), thereby domesticating the presence of their people in this country.” These remarks resonated with many of the international scholars around the room and CTI Director William Storrar recalled Robert Putnam at CTI describing the Catholic Church as “the great revolving door for immigrants into American life.”

The Great Migration, said Raboteau, “challenged religious life, and other aspects of civic culture, among African Americans by bringing them into an environment of much greater pluralism than most had experienced in the rural South and even many southern cities.” To Ahn’s suggestion that blacks migrating from the south to the north were essentially refugees, Raboteau nodded.

“The Mason/Dixon line may be a fiction but it can be felt,” as

“Our society still suffers the pain of the lynching tree.

We haven’t come to grips with it yet.”

he could attest from his own experience of crossing it in 1968, going south to teach. Another participant suggested “diaspora” as a powerful metaphor, noting Nell Painter’s Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction. “The symbol of Exodus, like a mirror,” said Raboteau, “reflected both their disenchantment and their hope that this nation might someday be that ‘promised land.’

In this sense, the African American Exodus tradition was grounded in American civic values as a ‘prophetic’ call to the nation to live those values by making them inclusive of all.”

“The long encounter of black and white Americans, which began tragically under slavery and still proceeds under the long shadow of the plantation, remains the paradigmatic test of the national experiment,” said Raboteau.

For more on this subject, see Raboteau’s collection of essays, Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History.

FURTHER READING Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin; Black Boy

by Richard Wright; American Prophets by Albert Raboteau; The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

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LUIS FARJEAT

Scholarship and Contemporary Concerns

T

he first time Luis Xavier López-Farjeat visited the Center of Theological Inquiry was as a member in residence for the academic year 2008-2009. His most recent visit was much shorter and much more intense.

He flew in last February for a one-day consultation on Islam and Migration, joining two other international experts––Anver Emon from Canada, and Urfan Khaliq from the United Kingdom––to present what amounted to a “master class” for CTI’s resident scholars on the ways in which Islamic laws apply outside of Islamic countries.

Described by CTI Director William Storrar as “a rich learning opportunity” and by one CTI member as “an intellectual treat,” this was a chance for participants in CTI’s Inquiry on Religion and Migration to hear from and put questions to seasoned scholars on issues that have direct impact on their own research projects as well as the global concerns conversation at CTI. Farjeat was born and grew up in Mexico City as part of Mexico’s large Lebanese Maronite Catholic community––his father is Mexican; his mother is Lebanese. He teaches in the department of philosophy at the Universidad Panamericana in Mexico City where his research interests include Arabic/Islamic philosophy and thought, ancient philosophy, medieval philosophy, Hegel, and Idealism. His expertise extends further to ethical theories, theory of argumentation, epistemology and philosophy of mind, and philosophy of religion.

Although his early love was literature, Farjeat came to philosophy via the history of ideas. Fascinated by concepts and translations, he studied Chomsky and Wittgenstein. Ancient philosophy led to Hegel. Aristotle’s Logic, the subject of his dissertation, led to Arabic commentaries on rhetoric and logic. While working toward his PhD, which he gained in 2001 from Spain’s Universidad de Navarra, Farjeat found that Arabic commentators on Aristotle had also developed their own philosophies. Often considered mere interpreters, during the last 20 years or so they have come to be regarded as relevant in their own right.

More scholars are now recognizing this. The 2014 encyclopedia, the Routledge Companion to Islamic Philosophy, edited by Farjeat and Richard C. Taylor, positions Islamic philosophy as an integral part of the Western philosophical tradition. Although a burgeoning field, it’s fair to say that students aren’t exactly lining up to get

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into it. That may be because it demands a high degree of linguistic skill. While there are manuscripts to work with (original texts and revisions of Latin translations), knowledge of Greek, Arabic, Latin, and Hebrew is required.

Farjeat recalls his first visit to CTI as “wonderfully productive.”

“Out of my time here came four papers discussing ways in which thinkers such as Maimonides, then Averroes, then Al-Farabi, then Al-Ghazālī, understood faith, reason, and religious diversity and how they treated other creeds.”

Since then, Farjeat has delved into the influence of Arab scholars on Christian thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas. He has a special interest in the philosophical notion of territory in Islam and its relationship with other nations. Among his contributions to February’s master class was his tracing of the origin of the dichotomy of the terms dar al-islam (Dominion of Islam) and dar al-harb (Dominion of non-Islam). The use, history, and meaning of these terms and others, such as jihad, hijira, and aman, as well as the role of jurisdiction in mapping the boundary between dar al-islam and dar al-harb, were gently and persistently teased out by Emon, Khaliq, and Farjeat. Farjeat looked to Al-Farabi’s Political Regime and other texts for insight on distinctions that show a cooperative association among nations––a multiplicity of states not in conflict with other territories under non-Islamic regimes.

Lest it seem that such scholarship is of purely esoteric interest, it is sobering to recall the contemporary and controversial problems that such study bears upon. Are Muslims living, say, in the U.K. or the U.S. obliged to follow two sets of laws and, if so, which one is primary? What legalities and jurisdictions govern issues such as cross-border parental child abductions and divorce? What of religious non-Islamic minorities living in Islamic countries––is it possible for them to maintain their own laws? What protections might they have under Islamic laws?

Understanding the subtleties of Islamic history, religion, and legal tradition has enormous practical import and Farjeat’s work with primary sources in their original languages is an example of how rigorous scholarship can engage with contemporary issues of real global concern. As such, Farjeat is the epitome of the CTI Member––deeply serious about scholarship with a concern for real-world implications.

Peter Phan (left) in conversation with Luis Farjeat

Farjeat’s work with primary sources in their original languages is an example of how rigorous scholarship can engage with contemporary issues of real global concern.

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ULRICH SCHMIEDEL

Thinking Theology Together

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ax Weber has had a lot of bad press among scholars of religion in recent years. But during my time at the Center of Theological Inquiry, his lecture on “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” delivered a century ago at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in Germany came to my mind again and again. Comparing the German and the American academic systems was interesting for me as a German scholar living in Princeton. Weber’s lecture explores what he calls the “external conditions” and the “internal callings” of the scholar who engages in “science as a vocation.” The German concept of Wissenschaft, which the translator of the lecture rendered as “science,” covers all academic approaches, including the humanities. Such science, Weber suggests, is about ideas. But where do ideas come from? Weber cautions that “the soil of very hard work” can foster ideas but cannot force ideas. We cannot have ideas without “brooding and searching at our desks” but we can have “brooding and searching at our desk” without ideas. Looking back at CTI’s workshop on religion and migration, I can confirm that there was a lot of brooding and searching at my desk. But that wasn’t all there was. CTI fostered ideas because the international and interdisciplinary set-up of the workshop allowed for what I would call estrangement, engagement, and encouragement between scholars from different and diverse disciplines.

Estrangement. Weber suggests that the scholar has to be a “strict specialist.” Because of this specialization, she or he (admittedly, for Weber the scholar is a “he” rather than a “she”) has “to put on blinders” that screen out what is not the subject of her or his study. Specialization elicits estrangement. But during my time at CTI, I experienced this estrangement as creative. Surprisingly, the questions from non-theologians prompted me to delve more deeply into theological disciplines and the questions from theologians prompted me to delve more deeply into non-theological disciplines. The challenge to translate my own concepts into the languages of my colleagues and my colleagues’ concepts into my own language was precisely what provoked new ideas.

Engagement. Engagement ran through all of our conversations.

When Weber speaks of “science for the sake of science,” he envisions distance as part and parcel of the scholar’s vocation. Of course, one would want to counter this vision. The controversies stirred up by migration call for interventions by scholars: their engagement instead of their disengagement. What I learned, however, is that such counters can come too quickly. In order to think through migration in a way that considers its complex ethical and its complicated political implications, thinking needs to take detours. It is a responsibility of theologians to engage in politics and ethics, as a colleague emphasized over a cup of coffee. But in order to meet this responsibility, we need open-ended thinking that takes the time to explore the complex configurations of migrations past and present.

Encouragement. Weber is correct that “no amount of … enthusiasm, however sincere … it may be, can compel a problem to yield scientific results.” But to work with others who are enthusiastic about the problem surely offers the scholar the encouragement both to try and to keep trying for results. At CTI, scholars from around the world who would not normally sit around one table learned that their ideas about religion and migration might be useful to each other. It was the most effective encouragement I can think of.

Weber was mindful of both the “internal callings” and the “external conditions.” At CTI, these conditions left nothing to be desired, which meant that all of us could concentrate on the “soil of very hard work” that might foster ideas. CTI set up an excellent and exciting environment—both in the internal terms and in the external terms of Weber. Re-reading Weber in light of the experience I gained, however, I am puzzled that one concept never comes up in his lecture: “collaboration.” Although it seems both impudent and imprudent to take issue with the wisdom of Max Weber, who could look back on a stellar career when he delivered his lecture, I would suggest that the vocation of science must be collaborative. CTI facilitates the creation of ideas through estrangement, engagement, and encouragement, because it brings scholars together.

Ulrich Schmiedel is Lecturer in the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh. His research combines theology with sociology of religion and philosophy of religion. In 2018, he was a member of the Center’s Inquiry on Religion and Migration.

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Christopher Dickey with Sally Magnusson

Salon on Stockton

BY LINDA ARNTZENIUS

T

he Center of Theological Inquiry in partnership with its neighbor, Morven Museum & Garden, holds an annual literary salon. As part of a Princeton-wide investigation on the theme of migrations, led by the Princeton University Art Museum, four celebrated authors and journalists—Neal Ascherson, Christopher Dickey, Sally Magnusson, and Lynne Olson—were invited to discuss “War and Displaced Lives” for the 2018 Salon on Stockton Street. If you were not among the audience, here’s a taste of what you missed.

During an evening with the authors at Morven, the historic home of Princeton’s Stockton family, audience members interacted with the authors following a panel discussion in which Dickey and Ascherson shared their war-reporting experiences––the ethical dilemmas of reportage; how conflicts produce refugees and vice versa; and changes in the way wars are covered and journalists are perceived today.

Award-winning author and foreign affairs editor for The Daily Beast, Dickey began his career in the 1970s, writing about immi-

grant communities––from Vietnamese “boat people” to Salvadoran refugees––for The Washington Post. During the Central American Wars of the 1980s, he wrote his first book on the CIA-funded Contras. When living in the Middle East in 1985, he saw the displacement of people lead to civil war in Lebanon.

Ascherson too has witnessed much of war, not only as a journalist but in combat as an officer in the Royal Marines in Malaya.

He’s written for The Manchester Guardian, The Scotsman, The Observer, The Independent on Sunday, London Review of Books, and contributed scripts for the documentaries The World at War and The Cold War. In the 1990s, he was with Serbian troops besieging Sarajevo, where he went through “agonies of decision.” Should he, for example, write about seeing weapons being brought into Bosnia covertly and in support of the fight against the Serbs?

Who would be endangered if he did so? “Covering war is not as hard as being a soldier,” he commented, “journalists had the possibility of bailing out but the soldiers didn’t.”

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Lynne Olson

JOURNALISM TODAY Ascherson believes that it’s “malarkey to say that you can’t communicate what war is like. As journalists, we can help people understand.” “People see frontline images on television and think they know what it’s like,” offered Magnusson. “But those images are selective,” responded Dickey. “As seen by Americans, the Iraq War was all about victory; Arabs saw scenes of misery. During the Vietnam War, the TV and print press coverage did a great job in conveying a real sense of what was happening. By contrast, today’s Pentagon Pool is a disaster.”

Embedding of journalists, everyone agreed, was not a good thing. And the freedom to pursue the truth that was once afforded to journalists by opposing sides is now a thing of the past. “The bad guys don’t need us anymore,” explained Dickey, recalling a time when journalists were sought out by both sides––when it was possible to meet with Contras in the morning and with their opponents in the afternoon. But perhaps the greatest tragedy of being a war correspondent, said Dickey, is “seeing disaster coming and having zero input on preventing it; and then it happens!”

THE WORLD TODAY Of recent migration, Dickey commented, “I’ve seen a lot of suffering, but I’ve never seen a crisis on the scale of what we are seeing now in Europe with more people who are more and more desperate. It’s not that they don’t want to work. The people who become migrants, refugees, are very often the smartest, most capable people in their society. It’s all about one central issue, it’s about hope, and they lose hope in the locations where they were born.”

Hope seemed in short supply when photographs of the body of little Aylan Kurdi washed up on a beach in September 2015. “The danger of photographs is that they create very intense emotion that is short-lived. The ability of the public to forget a crisis like this is perhaps one of the more terrifying aspects of it,” said Dickey. “I’ve seen this for almost 40 years as a foreign correspondent.”

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WHAT CAN BE DONE? According to Dickey, among the things that can be done is to help develop the countries that people are coming from and to end the war in Syria in a coherent and coordinated way. “The fundamental problem is to give people hope in their own countries. Until that begins to happen, not much will change.”

And, added Ascherson, journalists must write with sensitivity about refugee migrants and the communities who host them. “Can a host community assimilate a new group––this has to be written about sensitively.”

As the discussion of migrations continued, an exhibition of contemporary portraits of Princeton residents by photographer Carolyn Scott, also a part of the town-wide migrations project, lined the walls of Luce Hall. Scott was not prepared to be exploitative, so instead of a politically-charged photojournalistic essay with shots of day laborers waiting for work on Witherspoon Street or packed into cramped rentals nearby––the exhibit explored Princeton’s diversity, showing that we are all pretty much from somewhere else.

FACT AND FICTION On the Salon’s second day, the audience settled in to enjoy what many had come to hear––authors talking about recent writings––two books set during World War II and two set further back in time, one during the American Civil War and one in 17th Century Iceland.

For her fourth book on Britain and World War II, Lynne Olson looks through the eyes of exiles from occupied Europe––the Poles, Czechs, Free French, and other exiles who kept “popping up” when she was researching her earlier books. Polish pilots gave her book its title, Last Hope Island––their name for Britain as the base for exiled leaders whose efforts to regain their war-torn countries played an important role in winning the war. The Polish pilots, she said, were enormous risktakers and great to write about.

Last Hope Island is a treasury of facts, characters, and stories with unforgettable portraits of King Hakon VII of Norway and Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, whose BBC broadcasts to her homeland, replete with choice language for the Nazis, inspired the enduring affection of her people. Here’s the BBC fostering the spirit of hope and sending coded messages to resistance networks; the “V campaign,” the first pan-European symbol of resistance; Churchill and Roosevelt’s relationships with the difficult Charles De Gaulle— even his own family said “he fell into an ice-box as a child.” Here too are instances of profound bravery with the three spinster sisters who risked their lives daily to hide a young British soldier for four months while surrounded by occupying German troops.

Olson is historian, journalist, novelist, and gifted storyteller combined. This book took her ten years to write. And while is it very funny at times, it lends a poignancy to contemporary discussions of Brexit.

Polish exiles also inspired Neal Ascherson’s first novel, The Death of the Fronsac, set in Greenock, Scotland, where Ascherson grew up and the Polish navy was based after Hitler invaded Poland. The streets and bars were “bright with the uniforms and loud with the voices of Americans, Canadians, Norwegians, Frenchmen, Czechs, and Poles.” The latter grabbed Ascherson’s childhood fascination with “their swinging musketeer capes, their rattling language, and their merry gallantry.”

In 2004, during a new wave of Polish immigration to Scotland, Ascherson heard an elderly local woman recall those days—“any woman my age knows that all Poles can dance like Fred Astaire.”

After the war, many Poles wanted to go back home but since Eastern Poland had been annexed by Stalin, they had no homes to go back to.

While the novel centers on a ship that blew up in Greenock harbor, it’s also a contemplation of “home.” This is an elusive concept in Polish culture, said Ascherson, who was moved emotionally when relating an encounter between the Polish Pope, John Paul II, and a two-year old child whose mother held her up for him to bless. He asked the child, “where is Poland?” then took her tiny hand and placed it over her heart.

Chris Dickey’s Our Man in Charleston explores the life of the British consul in South Carolina from 1853 to 1863. Robert Bunch witnessed “the kind of madness taking shape around secession and slavery that would eventually tear the country apart,” said Dickey. Bunch wrote confidential dispatches urging Britain to cut ties with the South while ingratiating himself with the Southern slave-owning elite (who believed he was on their side).

Bunch’s first such secession-predicting dispatch was sent four years before the beginning of the Civil War. The South was convinced that Britain, which imported eighty percent of its raw cotton from the slave-holding South, would support their cause. They underestimated the depth of British feeling against slavery, however.

Our Man in Charleston is a complex and fascinating story told by a writer who is able to make connections across centuries, countries, and political divides.

Finding resonance between the issues of today and an event even further back in time, Sally Magnusson has written a novel that melds history and folklore. The Sealwoman’s Gift is based on a violent 17th century slave raid on Iceland. The Turkish Raid of 1627 saw 400 Icelanders abducted from their homes and taken to Algiers and Morocco. The event is well-remembered in a country rich in language and tradition. “Iceland is a nation built on words,” said Magnusson, “the raid was much written about so that no-one would forget the day the pirates came.”

You might say that Magnusson was born to write this book. The respected BBC presenter and author is the daughter of two journalists who met in the newsroom of The Scottish Daily Express. Her father was born in Iceland in 1929 and immigrated with his family to Scotland as a babe-in-arms. Magnus Magnusson was raised in

an Icelandic household and didn’t speak English until he was five.

Like both of her parents, Magnusson grew up immersed in story.

She chose fiction for her subject so as to explore the experiences of an enslaved woman and mother. While a memoir of the event exists in The Travels of Reverend Olafur Egilsson: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Iceland in 1627, there is little from a woman’s perspective. Egilsson was abducted with his wife and two children. What gripped Magnusson were the horrors of a woman giving birth on a slave ship and watching her 11-year-old son being sold. How did she deal with the trauma? How did she survive?

“Stories kept this woman sane,” offered Magnusson.

“Novels can be the gateway to empathy. If literature can do anything, it is to take us inside otherness. This is the closest we can get to another mind, another heart.” What saddens Magnusson, however, is the thought that such abductions and slavery still happen. “What hope is there for humanity when this is still going on,” she asked, bringing us back from the past to yet another aspect of migration today.

With a history that dates back centuries, a salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host for the exchange of ideas through conversation. It’s a form that is currently in renaissance, not least here in Princeton where the 2019 Salon on Stockton Street will take place at Morven Museum & Garden on Friday, Sept. 20, and at the Center of Theological Inquiry on Saturday, Sept. 21. For more information, visit the CTI website: ctinquiry.org.

Neal Ascherson

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The Founding Vision James I. McCord’s vision for an independent research institute that would give intensive thought to theology at the deepest level and in relationship with other disciplines in the humanities and natural sciences developed over two decades.

Since its founding in 1978, the Center of Theological Inquiry has influenced the growth of interdisciplinary research around the world.

An influential figure in national and international church affairs, James I. McCord (1919-1990) is remembered as a man of unbounded energy and insight. Educated at the universities of Texas, Harvard, and Edinburgh, he was pastor of churches in New Hampshire and Texas, taught philosophy at the University of Texas, and served as Dean of the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary before assuming the presidency of Princeton Theological Seminary at age 39. He led the Seminary from 1959 until his retirement in 1983. During that time, he conceived of the Center of Theological Inquiry and, together with a board of eminent trustees, incorporated it with the State of New Jersey in 1978 as a nonprofit for interdisciplinary research on religion.

David E. Lilienthal (1899-1981) was the oldest son of Jewish immigrants. In 1920, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Indiana’s DePauw University, where he was an accomplished light heavyweight boxer. His friends described him as “a unique combination of tenderness and toughness.”

After Harvard Law School, he pursued a career in law, particularly labor and public utility law. He came to national prominence for his leadership of the Tennessee Valley Authority (the federal corporation created by Congress in 1933 to provide economic development to a region hard hit by the Great Depression) and the Atomic Energy Commission (1946-1950). Among his hopes for CTI was that it would “throw some light on the practical problems facing the world.”

Eminent scholar, Roland M. Frye (1921-2005), was research professor in residence at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. and Schelling Professor of English Literature at the University of Pennsylvania (1965-1983). An outspoken opponent of creationism, he succeeded McCord as Chair of CTI’s Board of Trustees and received the Thomas Jefferson Medal for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities from the American Philosophical Society in 1997.

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Harold Holmes Helm (19001985) graduated from Princeton University in 1920 and immediately went to work for the Chemical Bank of New York. His talents were rewarded by rapid preferment. As chairman of the board and chief executive officer, he guided the bank through a series of mergers to become one of the largest in the United States.

Not only that, he led the committee that recommended admitting women to his alma mater.

The life of Polish-born refugee Henryk R. De Kwiatkowski (1924-2003) is a ragsto-riches tale of World War II survival and self-made success––escape from a Siberian labor camp, service in the Royal Air Force, working his way through university, emigration to the U.S., making a fortune selling used airplanes–– culminating in a lifestyle that included a collection of Impressionist paintings, polo at the most exclusive clubs, and raising thoroughbred race horses at Kentucky’s famed Calumet Farm.

A gifted orator who is said to have given 18 speeches in 12 hours, Robert B. Meyner (1908-1990) was born in modest circumstances and worked his way through Lafayette College. After graduating from Columbia University Law School (1933), he was a successful trial lawyer in Phillipsburg, New Jersey. He served as a naval officer during World War II, reaching the rank of lieutenant commander. Involvement in civic and social affairs led to running for office and he was elected Governor of New Jersey in 1953 and again in 1957––the year he married Helen Day Stevenson, a member of the House of Representatives (1975-1979). The Saturday Evening Post described him as “The Glamorous Governor.”

William H. Scheide (1914-2014) was one of Princeton’s most beloved figures. Having inherited wealth and a deep love of books from his father and grandfather, he used both to benefit others, devoting his life to philanthropic and artistic pursuits. Princeton University’s Scheide Library is one of the world’s finest collections of rare books. In 1936, he graduated from Princeton with a bachelor’s degree in history. Having earned a master’s in music at Columbia, he taught in Cornell’s music department, and he brought numerous little-known and rarely-played Bach works to public attention. Without fanfare, he provided financial support for some of the most important legal battles of the civil rights movement, helping to finance the landmark school desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education. He remains CTI’s longest-serving board member.

PHOTOGRAPHS OF MCCORD AND TEMPLETON: COURTESY OF PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY LIBRARY ARCHIVES

John M. Templeton (1912-2008) was a lifelong member of the Presbyterian Church and one of the most generous philanthropists in history, giving away over $1 billion to charitable causes. The successful investor and banker who created the Templeton Growth Fund in 1954 was described in 1999 by Money magazine as “the greatest global stock picker of the century.” Templeton attributed much of his success to his ability to maintain an elevated mood, avoid anxiety, and stay disciplined. In spite of enormous wealth, he lived modestly, driving his own car, and never flying first class. He established the John Templeton Foundation and the Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities. For his philanthropic efforts, he was made a Knight Bachelor in the U.K. in 1987, becoming Sir John Templeton.

For over four decades Henry Luce III (1925-2005) guided the Henry Luce Foundation’s support of programs in higher education. The foundation was founded in 1936 in memory of Luce’s grandparents who were both missionary educators in China.

His friendship and support for CTI is commemorated in the Center’s Luce Hall, named in honor of his father, Henry R. Luce, the influential co-founder and editor-in-chief of Time, Inc.

W. Beverly Murphy (1907-1994) was the innovative president and CEO of the Campbell Soup Company (1953-1972) who added V-8 vegetable juice and Godiva chocolates to the New Jersey company’s offerings.

During World War II, he worked with the War Production Board and, in 1946, was awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal for Merit

by President Harry S. Truman. He was an active member of Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia.

William H. Sword, Sr. (1924-2005) was interrupted in his studies at Princeton University by World War II in which he served in the U.S. Army, the U.S. Army Air Corps, and the U.S. Navy. After returning to Princeton to graduate in 1948, he worked for Morgan Stanley before forming his own Princeton-based firm in 1976.

Besides CTI, he was an enthusiastic volunteer for dozens of nonprofit organizations and an elder of Nassau Presbyterian Church.

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The William Witherspoon Lecture on Theology and Science Michael Welker on Resurrection and the Spiritual Body

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he 2018 William Witherspoon Lecture on Theology and Science, an annual public event sponsored by the Friends of the Center of Theological Inquiry, took place in April. Named for a Missouri businessman, the lecture was given by the renowned German theologian Michael Welker, Senior Professor of Systematic Theology at Heidelberg University. Welker chose as his topic: “Resurrection and the Spiritual Body.”

If you’re thinking that this is a somewhat surprising topic for discourse between theology and science, you are not alone. Welker

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agrees, acknowledging that science typically seeks empirical evidence and resurrection and the spiritual body is a matter of theology and belief. Having set up his audience for an intriguing narrative, Welker did not disappoint.

His lecture would demonstrate that the science/theology dialogue enabled, and even provoked, new insights into these two complicated issues. It would also show the necessity of time for ideas to gestate, develop, and come to fruition. And, 2018 being the 40th anniversary of CTI’s founding, it would also reveal how Welker’s thinking developed at CTI. “My presentation is therefore

not only an expression of gratitude to the late William Witherspoon, but also to the CTI and its directors, Daniel Hardy, Wallace Alston, and William Storrar.”

Welker’s lecture was part memoir, part celebration, part tribute to colleagues, and part roundup of ideas for future pursuit.

Following an encounter with the work of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), the philosophically-inclined Cambridge mathematician who, with Bertrand Russell, authored one of the twentieth century’s most important works, Principia Mathematica, Welker participated in several science/theology dialogues in Germany during the 1970s and 1980s but found it “almost impossible” to introduce the rich complexity of theological topics and forms of thought into the discourse.

Then, in 1993, CTI Director Daniel Hardy organized a consultation on science and religion. Welker described it as a turning point. “Given my previous experiences, I was astonished to find scientists interested in serious systematic theological and even biblical thought,” he said. And yet, while curiosity and excitement built up on both sides, “our areas of knowledge and modes of thought were too far apart to generate any creative immediate cooperation.” It was several more years before this was achieved. Hardy’s successor at CTI, Wallace Alston, arranged another multi-year international science and theology discourse led by Welker and English physicist John Polkinghorne. Further CTI projects followed. It is no surprise then that Welker describes his time at CTI and the fruitfulness of interdisciplinarity as central to his research.

A moment of levity was Welker’s recall of a remark by the analytic philosopher Andreas Kemmerling. During a series of consultations on human complexity, Welker had questioned the value of such dualisms as mind/body, spirit/body, mentalist/physicalist.

“On your knees you will pray for a dualistic anthropology,” Kemmerling told him. “With your intended focus on the complexity of the human person, you will fall into a bottomless pit. We have more than twenty concepts of the human person in philosophy–– and we do not even know how to rank them!”

Undaunted, Welker came to understand that the sharp dualism of flesh and Spirit is grounded in the difference between finitude and eternity. He began to explore the reality of the resurrected body with its spiritual power and radiation. “As we gradually learn to appreciate the fact that all our perceptions, memories, imaginations, and thoughts are embodied, as Whitehead says, ‘we think with our bodies,’ we might also learn to appreciate the existence of embodied spirituality and an embodied spirit.” The topic, he suggested, stands for many “adventures of ideas” ahead.

FURTHER READING Welker’s publications include, among many, God the Spirit, 1994; Creation and Reality, 1999; and Resurrection— Theological and Scientific Assessments (ed.), 2002.

Welker follows Whitehead in delivering the Gifford Lectures in Scotland in October and November of 2019. (For more on the Gifford Lectures, see page 16)

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William H. Scheide Lecture on Global Concerns Heinrich Bedford-Strohm on the Ethical Challenge of the Digital Age

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ith its finger on the pulse of the most pressing of contemporary issues, CTI invited Germany’s leading Protestant theologian Heinrich Bedford-Strohm to mark the 40th Anniversary of CTI’s founding in 1978 by delivering the 2018 William H. Scheide Lecture on Global Concerns.

Bishop for the state of Bavaria and Chairman of the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland––which brings together twenty Protestant churches and more than 23 million believers––Bedford-Strohm is known for speaking out on public issues. He served as the Founding Director of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Center for Public Theology at Bamberg University and, at CTI in 2007, he helped create the Global Network for Public Theology.

For his Scheide Lecture, “The Ethical Challenge of the Digital Age,” Bedford-Strohm shared his personal experience of technological changes familiar to many––from handwritten posters as a high schooler to the proud use of a typewriter as a university student and then composing his dissertation on a computer.

The impact of digital technology was brought home to him when, as a student protestor, he was arrested for blocking a truck carrying nuclear weapons. Offered a fine as a substitute for several weeks in prison, he refused to pay. But when the court threatened to seize his computer, he paid.

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Since then, digital technology has changed the ways in which we communicate as well as our patterns of discourse, the ways in which we work and the forms of industry. It seems to be on a course that may even change our conception of what it is to be human.

Treading a path between progressive optimism and prophecies of doom, Bedford-Strohm delineated the explosion of social media and its effects on our lives, our brains, and our political culture.

He traced the developments of what is perhaps the most fundamental cultural revolution experienced in our lifetimes with eye-opening details: the concentration of corporate power; the exposure of private life and loss of intimacy; algorithms that are designed to maximize profits; opportunities for political opinion-building and the spread of propaganda; the replacement of the human work force and the potential polarization of job-holders and the out-of-work; and military research into autonomous weapons that recognize a target and attack without the participation of a human operator.

He expressed concerns that many of us are just beginning to grapple with, including the so-called “Big Five” of the digital age (Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon) themselves. From desktops and web searches to mobile phone operating systems (and the apps that run on them), Internet advertising and the cloud infrastructure, these giants have, within a very short time span, acquired extreme wealth and power. Google is used for 90 percent of all internet searches. Facebook boasts 2.23 billion users. Large data collections with massive databases yield enormous advantage over smaller competitors. Their platforms generate what economists call “network effects”—as more people use them, they become indispensable.

More than once during his extensive survey, Bedford-Strohm paused to say, “Think about this!” Such moments provided breathing room in which to take in the enormity of his survey as well as the seriousness of the issues. “We are analyzed and categorized, and then exposed to specific advertising or microtargeted political agitation, without ever suspecting it. Our private life is exposed to individual or corporate agents which are for the most part anonymous to us,” he said.

Going further, he identified the field most relevant for theology to consider––the possible merger of humans and machines through artificial intelligence (A.I.). After reflecting on what biblical testimonies say about human beings, he asked, “How much

human productive activity in the design of human beings is still reconcilable with the deep Christian conviction that human beings are not created in the image of another human being but in the image of God?” His shared thought experiment of being asked, at some future date, to baptize some form of A.I. brought the whole set of implications into focus. “How will we as ministers react when a robot who seems to match all characteristics of a human being will ask us in a sincere voice and with a sincere look in their eyes to baptize him or her or it?”

Had Bedford-Strohm stopped there, his tour of the implications, consequences and potential future scenarios of the digital age would have been dishearteningly bleak. But, like any good pastor, he brought his listeners back to theology and also, not coincidentally, back to Bill Scheide and his love of the Bible and Bach.

What is at stake, he said, before going on to outline constructive ideas for bringing ethics to bear, is no less than responsibly filling a social space in which human beings spend a lot of time every day, under conditions of massive lack of transparency and on the basis of rules not subject to democratic control. “At present there are no effective internationally coordinated rules for transparency and regulation in order to limit this powerful global market power.”

Speaking as both an academic and as a religious leader, Bedford-Strohm identified ways in which to rescue public discourse, question algorithms, and create public accountability; first an awareness campaign, then challenges to governments and companies so that they do not severely dominate our lives. “Let’s make the world a better place––together––on the basis of clear democratically agreed-upon rules. We must and we can shape the digital revolution in a responsible way.”

How? By formulating public values and developing professional ethics––an ethics of algorithms, and an ethics for professional programmers. Noting that European regulators are already pursuing several of the “Big Five” on antitrust and privacy grounds, he urged increased international cooperation and, in particular, intensified transatlantic exchange.

“We think we are users [of social media] but we are the product; we are not the customers of Facebook, our data is what they sell,” commented Hannah Reichel, Associate Professor of Reformed Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, as respondent to Bedford-Strohm’s lecture.

Faced with algorithms that “make predictions, shape the world we encounter and ultimately, through that, our possibilities, our identities,” Reichel suggests that to counter the “fatal alliance of economics and extreme beliefs,” a change in the business model is called for.

“How can we make it economically advantageous for Facebook and the like to change their algorithms to be socially responsible?”

It is clearly a mission to which Bedford-Strohm is committed. His presentation at CTI was the start of a speaking tour that followed

on his recent debates with executives at both Google and Facebook in Dublin. He found them receptive to discussion and believes that with “mutual openness for discourse on ethical foundations of the digital world, combined with the necessary public pressure on private agents, there is a good chance to make progress in making the digital world more accountable.”

According to CTI Member Elisabet Le Roux, Bedford-Strohm’s presentation enriched her understanding of how rapidly evolving technology is influencing her opinions and thinking, and how it is impacting her experience of relationships with other people. “At the same time, I don’t simply have to be a passive victim of manipulation in this digital age,” she said.

Like Le Roux, many in the audience were left with the thought that while social media may have gathered a great deal of information, collections of data are not knowledge even if the predictive power of algorithms may seem to suggest otherwise. Theology has a serious role to play in order to prevent human beings from becoming a commodity. As CTI’s Director William Storrar puts it: “We live in a world of theological injury, and it is the task of theological inquiry to expose such injuries.”

Bedford-Strohm’s talk was a fitting tribute to the late William H. Scheide, a man who quietly used his wealth and wisdom for the public good. This timely talk by a lively engaging speaker was filmed and is available on the CTI website: ctinquiry.org.

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Eric Gregory Delivers CTI’s 40th Anniversary Lecture

BY LINDA ARNTZENIUS

“L

et me get right to it,” said Eric Gregory, launching into an ambitious lecture that moved effortlessly between the theological, the philosophical, and the political. “We Americans are unhappy. We are not happy about America. We are not happy about ourselves in relation to America. . . As we look out at the rest of the world we are confused; we don’t know what to do.”

These words resonated so well with his audience that Gregory had no need to cite examples of mass murder, migrant caravans, environmental crises, or “stubborn economic inequalities that serve as proxies for political ones.”

But while spoken on this occasion by Gregory, the words were not his. They were those of Henry Robinson Luce, founder of Time, Inc., from the first paragraph of his influential 1941 Life magazine editorial, “The American Century.”

Besides calling for the U.S. to enter World War II in order to defend democratic values, Luce advocated a role for the United States that would eschew isolationism and embrace the role of the world’s Good Samaritan, spreading democracy across the globe.

Gregory quoted Luce while standing in front of his portrait in CTI’s Luce Hall, named by founding trustee Hank Luce in tribute to his father. Luce, noted Gregory, had once been dubbed “the most influential private citizen in America” and had “transformed mass-market journalism that would dramatize foreign news especially through photojournalism that visualized distant suffering around the world even as he also brought theological reflection to a wide public audience.”

On the occasion of the Center of Theological Inquiry’s 40th Anniversary Lecture, Gregory was at CTI to speak on “Good Samar-

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itans of the Entire World––Humanitarian Ethics and What We Owe to Whom.” Luce Hall was filled to capacity and its doors had to be opened to allow those outside the hall to hear him.

Gregory is Professor of Religion and Chair of the Council of Humanities at Princeton University. He is the author of Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (University of Chicago Press, 2008), and he is at work on a book about what is owed to strangers in this global age––the tensions between moral obligations that are universal in scope and those more particular roles that constitute our temporal (and national) identity.

“Eric Gregory is a most distinguished and appropriate person to deliver our 40th anniversary lecture in celebration of this interdisciplinary institute of theological inquiry,” said CTI Director William Storrar.

GLOBAL JUSTICE “Global justice is among the most pressing concerns of our time,” said Gregory, “and yet, political theologians have said surprisingly little about either global justice or nations.”

To remedy this neglect, Gregory launched an ambitious tour de force of contemporary humanitarian ethics, the debate as to its origins, consequences, and efficacy, and ideals of Christian charity framed around the parable of the Good Samaritan.

With numerous quotes and summaries of the positions of contemporary and past political theorists, philosophers, and theologians he set out to raise bedrock theological principles that, he suggests, need some fresh thinking. Besides addressing the ideas of his Princeton University colleague Peter Singer, Gregory drew upon past and contemporary thinkers, politicians, and theologi-

ans including John Rawls, Reinhold Niebuhr, Margaret Thatcher, Charles Taylor, St. Augustine, Avishai Margalit, Didier Fassin, and Oliver O’Donovan, among others.

“From the moral point of view, the development of the world into a ‘global village’ has made an important, though still unrecognized, difference to our moral situation,” Singer wrote in 1972.

Since then, said Gregory, globalization has only intensified what Karl Barth called the “problem of near and distant neighbors.”

According to Gregory, simple acts such as turning on the computer or contributing to one’s pension fund “implicates us all in a vast web of global relations.”

With a keen ear for the apt quote, Gregory summoned up the likes of Adam Smith, David Hume, and Emerson (a particular favorite) to describe a shrinking social world and its moral quandaries. It was Emerson who said the sugar raised by slaves “was excellent: nobody tasted blood in it.”

“Our relationships to physically distant strangers are now much more heavily freighted with wrongs,” said Gregory. Those distant strangers “are not merely the anonymous others imagined from an utterly abstract point of view––they are the very people who do work for us in the morning and the people who will be caught by our drones in the evening.”

“What Singer claims holds for our moral situation also holds for our theological situation” said Gregory, who defended a politics of internationalism rather than nationalism or cosmopolitanism, one with roots in 20th century political thought as well as more distant ones that he reconstructed by way of the Augustinian tradition.

But the Luce era ideal of America as “the good guys” in a liberal international project has become something of a “tattered coat upon a stick” of late. “Today we know the story of earnest do-goodism gone wrong,” said Gregory. At the same time, today’s religious Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) are also subject to intense criticism. Charity has been deconstructed as legal imperialism.

QUESTIONS RAISED So, is humanitarianism a form of political theology that serves to make intolerable injustice in the global world more bearable? Is it, as characterized by some scholars, a material project of salvation? Or does it perpetuate a “bureaucratic, colonial, collectivizing, commodifying, program of rule with top-down technocratic schemes,” as Luke Bretherton suggests?

Critics say that humanitarianism on the scale that it has now reached obscures structural inequality; that it commodifies suffering.

Gregory cited a few recent book titles here: The Dark Side of Virtue, Imposing Aid, Famine Crime, Toxic Charity by way of illustration.

Still, he said, many of today’s students are excited by the idea that humanitarianism will save Christianity. That in some way, today’s reconfigured form of charity via NGOs (Habitat for Humanity, Doctors without Borders, Catholic Relief Services, Lutheran

World Relief ) will compensate for lack of justice––for state and market dysfunction and the vacated traditional presence of denominations around the world. And that, despite its many critics, Christian communities are deeply invested in humanitarian work as embodied expressions of the universal love of neighbor.

The dilemma of modern humanitarian ethics, said Gregory, is that “to the extent that Christian humanitarian work is rationalized it meets theological suspicion in the name of relationships but to the extent Christian humanitarian work resists professionalization it meets empirical suspicion in the name of efficiency.”

AND WHAT OF THAT GOOD SAMARITAN? Who is my neighbor in today’s global world? “Our membership in humanity gives rise to the question, why should my fellow citizen, say in Texas, whom I will never meet, mean more to me than the Indonesian who grows my coffee that I drink every morning, let alone the billions of people who now live in extreme need?”

Noting that while it has not always been a stock resource of Christian ethics, Gregory pointed out that the parable of the Good Samaritan has become paradigmatic in recent decades for philosophers and politicians, including Gordon Brown who, in 2008, said “our neighbor is every person from every country” and Mark Zuckerberg, in 2017, who said: “We have to build a world where we care about a person in India or China or Nigeria or Mexico as much as a person here.”

“How can we do this when caring in this way is a Promethean and potentially suffocating task?” asks Gregory. “Moderation seems necessary lest we become exhausted or obnoxious paternalists.”

The Good Samaritan was frequently invoked by St. Augustine.

But, said Gregory, Augustine affirmed the moral significance of proximity when he added “You should take particular thought for those who, as if by lot, happen to be particularly close to you in terms of place, time, or any other circumstance.”

And as Gregory sees it, proximity matters more than philosophers today might think, since “what we see as accidental physical proximity leaves all sorts of other accidental proximities obscured.”

According to Gregory, “there is a strong repudiation of nationalism in theology.” Nonetheless, he is “inclined to reject the view that nation states are wholly discontinuous with nationalist sentiments of the past. A pre-occupation with the evils of nationalism has let the identity of nations slip away from theological consciousness—understandably so given the grotesque record of Christian nationalism and settler colonialism.”

According to Jeremy Waldron, who served as respondent for the lecture, Gregory presented a “treasure trove of thought, insight and learning.” Waldron went directly to the parable to ask whether it really prescribes a sense of duty that is potentially suffocating.

Is there anything in the parable to suggest limits, he asked? “No. The parable is unequivocal. The only comfort is that when we fall

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among thieves, there will be someone there to comfort us.”

Gregory would like to see more theologians taking on critics who decry humanitarian efforts as cultural imperialism. He suggests that such critics may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater––and that in today’s flawed world, this might be the best we can do. “Given the complexity (and conditions of sin and finitude), ad hoc judgments and partial, experimental works of charity and justice might be best we can muster in the face of the contradictions of humanitarian ethics.”

In addition, Gregory provides a somewhat more charitable interpretation of humanitarianism that recognizes that many of such institutions and their practices are the legacy of generations of Christians and others trying to come to terms with their own globalizing experiences. As such, their traditions are deserving of “our humble respect even in our commitment to reform rather than demonize them.”

Christianity is no easy religion. To love thy neighbor as thyself, can be a hard road to travel as Eric Gregory’s lecture suggests.

There is no formula that can tell you what justice or charity require. Harm in a global society is highly indirect.

After the discussion, Robin Lovin, formerly CTI’s Director of Research and now an Honorary Trustee, thanked Gregory on behalf of the Board of Trustees. Lovin then presented him with a signed first edition copy of Peter Brown’s biography of Augustine of Hippo on behalf of the Director, William Storrar, with a personal dedication from the author. “As Brown has made Augustine accessible to us, Gregory has made Augustine’s work relevant to us,” said Lovin. Gregory congratulated CTI on its fortieth anniversary on behalf of Princeton University and thanked the Center for the distinctive space that it creates in the life of the academy.

To watch Gregory’s complete lecture, visit the CTI website at ctinquiry.org.

Eric Gregory’s current book project, tentatively titled The In-Gathering of Strangers: Global Justice and Political Theology, is an examination of secular and religious perspectives on global justice.

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Finding Solace in the Work of CTI

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s a writer, I am an avid reader. One of the newspapers I read regularly has a column of quirky little human-interest items that serve as a brief respite from the news of the day. Recently, I was charmed by a snippet about the annual U.K. Tree of the Year competition. “Nellie’s tree” in the village of Aberford near Leeds was the clear winner for 2018.

A century ago, Vic Stead grafted three beech saplings together to form the shape of the capital letter “N” as a gesture to his girlfriend. He hoped it would convince Nellie to marry him. It did.

PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF LINDA ARNTZENIUS

Since then, the tree has been known as “the love tree” and it’s a popular place for marriage proposals. Vic and Nellie’s grandson shared its story for the competition.

The “love tree” is a blessed reminder that even in today’s crisis-ridden culture daily life goes on almost out of view in the corners where, as Auden puts it, “the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse scratches its innocent behind on a tree.”

This small glimpse of everyday rural life has stayed with me and cheered me. As I sat down to write this, the first of eleven members of Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue (murdered by a gunman whose hatred had been enflamed by anti-immigrant rhetoric) was being buried.

While contemporary culture seems to crack under the onslaught of political division, it is somehow heartening to think of people going about their daily business or voting for their favorite trees.

It often seems that civil dialogue is a quaint nicety of the past.

Instead, we live in an atmosphere of developing fear, increasingly divided by propaganda and disinformation, what John Dewey called “the conscription of thought.” Writing in 1917, Dewey was talking about propaganda that stirred up hatred and hysteria such as anti-German rhetoric that fueled the United States’ entry into World War I. It led not only to the innocuous renaming of dachshunds as “liberty dogs” but to the lynching of one German immigrant and the tarring-and-feathering of numerous others.

The symbolism of the Tree of Life and England’s “love tree” stands in marked contrast to mail bombs and escalating anti-Semitism in a society increasingly polarized by political entrenchment.

It is a balm then to realize that there are places, such as CTI, that mitigate against inflammatory rhetoric.

For me, CTI is a place of solace. Not because it distracts from the problems of the world. It does not. On the contrary, it explores them. It is the way in which CTI approaches today’s most pressing issues that I find so uplifting.

Dogmatic polarization of dialogue has no place at CTI. Instead, courtesy and empathy allow discussions between individuals who have different opinions, different understandings––even deeply-held opposing belief systems—to take place and, moreover, to culminate in mutual understanding and insight.

This is no accident. Part of CTI’s mission is to address issues where theology can make a difference and to share its findings so as to change the way people think and act. It is a mission that CTI bears in mind constantly.

For the past five years, I have been invited as a journalist to sit in on discussions by scholars-in-residence at the Center and to write for the CTI publication, The Commons, and now for Fresh Thinking. Encounters with a broad spectrum of scientists, theologians, philosophers, and other humanities scholars in seminars, workshops, and consultations, as well as leading authors at CTI’s annual Salon on Stockton Street, have stretched my own thinking.

To write for the Center is always a challenge. Not only because of the range of topics but also because of the complexity of subject matter and the range of expertise and sheer diversity of its participating scholars. My task as a reporter is to provide a bridge between specialized spheres of communication and Fresh Thinking’s readers––without losing anything of importance in the process. I try to take material that is written for insiders who speak a shared language and make it accessible to the non-specialist; to convey what happens at CTI in the least complicated of terms. Given my own limited understanding, this can be a tall order, but it is never boring, never repetitive, and always rewarding.

The first issue of Fresh Thinking featured a striking image of trees on its cover. Trees also appeared inside that inaugural issue. An image of Africa’s majestic Baobab trees (often referred to as “Africa’s Tree of Life”) symbolized the vastness of knowledge.

They have also found their way into this issue as well. The sidebar on Hinduism scholar David Haberman includes an image of a tree he talks about in his book People Trees: Worship of Trees in Northern India.

I doubt I am alone in finding solace in trees and also in nature, in books, in libraries, in the company of librarians (special people everyone) and in CTI as a place for reasoned discourse. Just knowing what it is and what it does is heartening. In this age of pessimism, CTI is a place of radical optimism.

Yours, Linda Arntzenius

Linda Arntzenius is Consulting Editor of Fresh Thinking. A native of Scotland, she came to the United States in 1987—first to Pittsburgh where she was a visiting scholar at Carnegie Mellon University and then to Boston and Los Angeles before settling in Princeton in 1998. After a couple of years teaching at Mercer County Community College and The College of New Jersey, she became the Institute for Advanced Study’s first publications officer. She edited The Institute Letter for several years and, for the last decade, has conducted an oral history project for the Institute’s Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives Center. Her writing credits include a pictorial history Images of America: Institute for Advanced Study for Arcadia Publishing; articles for The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, American Bungalow, Princeton Magazine and Urban Agenda: New York; and reporting on local issues for Town Topics and other media.

She has an undergraduate degree in philosophy, a Master in Logic and Scientific Method from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a Master of Professional Writing from the University of Southern California. She is also a published poet.

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NEWS & EVENTS

CTI MEMBER BOOKS

Gerald McKenny Biotechnology, Human Nature, and Christian Ethics (Cambridge University Press) A growing number of biotechnologies aim not at treating or preventing diseases and injuries but at controlling, selecting, altering, and even replacing aspects of our biological nature. Does our biological nature have any sort of value or status that we should consider when we evaluate technologies that impact it in these ways? This book considers four positive answers to this question and concludes by arguing that all four answers help us to understand what is morally and theologically significant about our nature and how biotechnology can both contribute to and detract from that moral and theological significance. The final version of the book was written during a year at CTI and reflects the contributions of many conversations with fellow members and guests during that year. —Gerald McKenny, Walter Professor of Theology, University of Notre Dame, and CTI Member

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Clifton Black

Ernst Conradie

The Lord’s Prayer

Redeeming Sin? Social Diagnostics Amid Ecological Destruction

Agustín Fuentes

Botond Gaál

The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional

D. Densil Morgan

Theologia Cambrensis: Protestant Religion and Theology in Wales, Volume 1: From Reformation to Revival 1588-1760

Awakenings as Inspired by John Calvin

Daniel S. Schipani

Manual de Psicología Pastoral: Fundamentos y Principios de Acompañamiento

David Fergusson

The Providence of God: A Polyphonic Approach

Travis Kroeker

Messianic Political Theology and Diaspora Ethics: Essays in Exile

Matthew Skinner

A Companion to the New Testament: The Gospels and Acts

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

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THE FRIENDS OF

The Trustees and Director of the Center of Theological Inquiry gratefully acknowledge the support of the Friends of CTI in 2017 - 2018. Their generous gifts fund almost 20% of our operating budget and make our mission possible.

$50,000

Up to $499

Judith McCartin Scheide Charles & Nancy Wall

$35,000 Roy Lennox $25,000 Robert Hendrickson $10,000 and above Robert Gunn William* & Joanna Storrar $8,000 and above Fred Anderson $5,000 and above Jay & Harriet Vawter $1,000 and above Bruce Freeman Dale Irvin Douglas Leonard Jon Pott Alison & James Zimmerman

$500 and Above Jesse Couenhoven* William* & Gail Brown David Fergusson* Timothy Jenkins* George Johnstone* Joshua Mauldin* Eileen Moffett John Thurber & Connie Cloonan

Richard Armstrong Wayne Becker Donald Boulton Jenný Bjórgvinsdóttir Janet Brittain Shirah & Nathanial Brown James Buckley* John Burgess* Samuel Calian* Thomas Hal Clarke Shin Chiba* Richard Crocker Willem Drees* Duncan Van Dusen & Elizabeth E.R. Van Dusen Jane Egbert Silvio Ferrari* Stephen Fitzpatrick Joan Fleming Edmund Freeborn Roland M. Frye Jr. on behalf of Helen Frye Parr in Honor of Roland M. Frye* Perrin Hardy George Hunsberger* Peter Jeffery* S.T. Kimbrough* Wilson Kimnach* Allan King Torrance Kirby* Wesley Kort* John Kuykendall* Benjamin Landrum Jessica Lowe* Michael Lukens*

Hans-Martien ten Napel* Gerald McKenny* Daniel Migliore* Patrick Miller* Jan Muis* Douglas* & Pam Ottati Peter Paris* H.J. Paul* Stephen Pope* A. Prindl Calvin Ratcliff Mary Reath Holmes & Jane Rolston Warren Savage Daniel* & Margaret Schipani Kenneth Schmidt Susan Schneider* Jayakiran* & Mrinalini Sebastian Louis Slee Marcella Stapor Jade Talag Derek Tovey* Margaret Towne Gooitzen Vanderwal Robert Weber Ralph Wyman

The Center gratefully acknowledges support from the following institutions: * McCord Fellows—the giving circle of CTI Members who give back to CTI 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.

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fresh freshTHINKING THINKING 2019 2019

We invite you to join us as we launch our fifth decade and

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embark on a major research program on the most urgent concerns of our time—migration, violence, inequality and the future of our environment.

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

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.

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

TEA & TALK with our Scholars on their work at CTI Sunday afternoons at 4pm in the informal setting of our Oak Room Lounge

• THE FRIENDS OF CTI Public Lectures Spring 2019 William Witherspoon Lecture on Theology & the Natural Sciences Professor Dirk Evers, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany and President of the European Society for the Study of Science and Theology

• SALON ON STOCKTON September 21, 2019 at Luce Hall Join us for our annual literary festival with our neighbor, Morven Museum & Garden

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.

theology matters A new podcast from CTI

Season 1:

Religion and Violence To be released February 2019 ctinquiry.org