Spring 2019 Vol. 54.2

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Living Unity: North American Academy of Ecumenists Annual Conference September 27–30, 2018, Arlington, Virginia
William P. McDonald

“Living Unity: Ecumenical Shared Ministries” was the theme of the North American Academy of Ecumenists’ 2018 annual conference, exploring forms of ecumenical relationships at the local level in Canada and the United States. Five speakers and a panel of representatives from Ecumenical Shared Ministries (ESM’s) informed the conversation among some three dozen participants gathered for the weekend.

Space for the Other: Ecumenical Shared Ministries
Sandra Beardsall, Mitzi J. Budde, William P. McDonald

Ecumenical Shared Ministries (ESM’s) combine two or more traditions in a variety of contexts and for as many reasons. The space such congregations share suggests resources for an ESM ecclesiology. Ecumenical parishes live with their multiple traditions in a mutual “otherness” that invites reciprocity, mutual indwelling, and communion. Their shared space—“disruptive” of the norms of single-traditioned churches—marks a shared practice of both acknowledging and dying to boundaries across a history that becomes necessarily experimental. Finally, ESM’s witness to the church’s cruciform body of self-giving—in this case, of one tradition to the other—in a sharing of gifts and graces.

Living Unity—What Can Come from Living and Studying Together
Thomas Ryan

Sharing of life and faith is not a question of just occasionally joining hands in a joint project, entered into perhaps once a year. Rather, it is a question of renewed relationships and awareness of one another precisely as Christians. Congregational ecumenism means sharing our faith, our tradition, our prayer, our play, and our mission in the place where we live together. It involves listening, learning, acting, and communicating. The importance of local ecumenism is seen immediately when one reflects that it is groups of people more than sets of doctrinal propositions; it is communities of belief more than systems of belief, which ultimately need to be reconciled.

ARTICLES

The Theology of Vocation in Teresa of Ávila’s Reformed Convent through the Lens of “Two Very Wicked Heretics”*
Alisa J. Tigchelaar

This essay considers the life work of Catholic Reformer Teresa of Ávila through the unusual lens of the vocational theology of two key Protestant Reformers. It aims to show that although Martin Luther’s and John Calvin’s shared opposition to Catholic monasticism was closely connected to their notion of calling, even certain post-Tridentine monastic traditions, such as that of the founder of the Spanish Discalced Carmelites, might be particularly well understood through Protestant-Reformer articulations. The project begins with an exploration of Luther’s and Calvin’s theology of vocation and general implications for sixteenth-century monasticism, continuing with monastic traditions that lent themselves well to the Christian practice of vocation, both in general and among Spanish female religious. From there, Teresa of Ávila’s specific vocational context is studied from within a Lutheran or Calvinist perspective. This seemingly antithetical vocabulary contributes a concluding suggestion that reevaluating seemingly paradoxical elements of early-modern-schism Christianity as potentially meaningful points of connection can contribute both to our historical understanding and to current ecumenical efforts between Catholics and Protestants.

Why Is Sunday Morning the Most Segregated Hour? A Sociopsychological Inquiry into the Barriers and Opportunities for Ecumenical Unity
Theo van Willigenburg

The segregation between faith communities is better explained by exploring the socio-cultural frameworks with which people identify because of their value orientations than by reference to doctrinal disagreements. In most faith communities, not only do such values as charity or justice count, but also important are the sacredness and authority of traditions, people, and places, as well as ethnic recognizability and loyalty to the ingroup. These latter normative orientations explain why it is so difficult for faith communities to engage in ecumenical processes of unification. Given this, the essay explores two sociopsychologically viable ways in which ecumenical unity may be fostered.

Toward a Christian Peacemaking Approach to Jerusalem
Julie Schumacher Cohen

The future of Jerusalem for two peoples and three faiths remains a basis of conflict in the Holy Land. In the context of the Trump Administration’s 2018 move of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, this essay lays out and critiques a key motivator—Christian Zionist theologies, including dispensationalism as a subset—while also critiquing non-Zionist replacement theologies. Rejecting these different projections of Christian-centric solutions as insufficiently universalistic or pluralistic, the essay also examines contrasting positions of a variety of other Christian bodies and leaders, including heads of Jerusalem churches. It concludes by offering a Christian peacemaking approach grounded in humility that neither sidelines Palestinian claims nor subsumes or severs Jewish ones but respects the core narratives of Jerusalem as a matter of justice.

Bahá’í Contributions to Interfaith Relations
Christopher Buck

The Bahá’í Faith “claims not to destroy or belittle previous Revelations, but to connect, unify, and fulfill them,” according to Shoghi Effendi (Bahá’í “Guardian,” 1921–57). Seena Fazel proposed “three bridges that can link the Bahá’í community to other religions in dialogue”: “ethical,” “intellectual,” and “mystical-spiritual.” The Universal House of Justice (elected international Bahá’í council) addressed its public “Letter to the World’s Religious Leaders” (April, 2002) to promote consensus “that God is one and that . . . religion is likewise one.” Shoghi Effendi’s declaration that the Bahá’í Faith “proclaims all established religions to be divine in origin, identical in their aims, complementary in their functions, continuous in their purpose, indispensable in their value to mankind” potentially can promote ideal interfaith relations through reciprocal recognition and respect.

EXPLORATIONS AND RESPONSES

The “Golden Rule”: The “Best Rule”
Leonard Swidler

The “Golden Rule”—“Love your neighbor as yourself”—is doubtless the most widely known and affirmed ethical principle worldwide. At the same time, it has its serious, quasi-serious, and jocund critics. There are also variations of the Golden Rule, such as the so-called “Silver Rule” (the negative articulation: “You should not do to your neighbor what you do not want done to yourself”) and the extrapolated “Platinum Rule” version1 (“You should treat your neighbor as she or he wishes to be treated”). It is worthwhile to spend some energy on each of these “variations” and critics, but most of all I would like to reflect on the meaning, implications, and applications of the Golden Rule for the twenty-first century.

BOOK REVIEWS

A Palestinian Theology of Liberation: The Bible, Justice, and the Palestine-Israel Conflict by Naim Stifan Ateek (review)
Lilian Calles Barger

The Life, Legacy, and Theology of M. M. Thomas: “Only Paraticipants Earn the Right to Be Prophets.” ed. by Jessica M. Athyal, George Zachariah, Monica Melancthon (review)
Bob Robinson

Gandhi in a Canadian Context: Relationships between Mahatma Gandhi and Canada ed. by Alex Damm (review)
Reid B. Locklin

Praise the Name of the Lord: Meditations on the Names of God in the Qur’an and the Bible by Michael Louis Fitzgerald, and: Dialogue of the Heart: Christian-Muslim Stories of Encounter by Martin McGee (review)
Sara Haq

The Wittenberg Concord: Creating Space for Dialogue by Gordon A. Jensen (review)
Adam Koontz

Religion and Faith in Africa: Confessions of an Animist by Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orabotor (review)
Eric J. Montgomery

Summer 2019 Vol. 54.3

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Editorial
Religious Literacy and Medical Interpretation: Giving Meaning to Meaning in the Twenty-First-Century American Hospital
Maria Rey, Terry Rey

Not many scholars of religion can claim to have ever had their work appear on the New York Times’ “Best Seller List,” but Stephen Prothero, a professor of American religion at Boston University, can, for that is where his 2007 book wound up: Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn’t.1 One of the book’s greatest merits is its demonstration of just how dangerous for humanity religious illiteracy is. The dangers are compounded in the United States, furthermore, by the fact that it is an ethnically and religiously diverse country, as well as being the world’s third largest country and its oldest democracy, which amplifies the possibility for religious misunderstanding and its legal and political ramifications. If we wed to these factors the reality that the U.S. is home to some of the world’s best hospitals, which attract patients and their families from all corners of the globe, the issue at hand becomes even clearer: The consequences of the combination of religious diversity and religious illiteracy for the contemporary health care profession are serious and many.

ARTICLES

Teilhard de Chardin and World Religions*
Ilia Delio

Teilhard de Chardin had a broad vision of religion and evolution. Religion was less a human phenomenon for Teilhard than a cosmological one, serving a vital role in evolution by orienting cosmic life toward ultimate fulfillment. In this respect, he felt that world religions are still too tribal and separate to satisfy adequately the spiritual needs of the earth. Hence, a new convergence of world religions is needed for a renewed spirit of the earth. This essay examines Teilhard’s insights on the convergence of world religions and his notion that Christianity is a religion of evolution, normative of evolution, and thus the form of a new religion of the earth.

The Thinker and the Guide: A Conversation concerning Religious Disaffiliation from the Catholic Church
James Michael Nagle

The rise of religious disaffiliation represents one of the most significant events of the last 100 years in religious history. Catholicism in the United States has experienced the greatest “losses” associated with this movement, but Catholic theology has not been curious enough about what sorts of people disaffiliating Catholics are becoming. Scholars such as Tom Beaudoin and Patrick Hornbeck have proposed new directions for theological research by tracking not just what “brokers of official Catholicism” count as normative but also what ordinary and disaffiliating Catholics take to be normative out of their own formation and everyday life. This essay explores the experience of disaffiliation through a research portrait of a conversation between one affiliated religious educator and his disaffiliated former student. The study provides a compelling way into the larger contested conversation concerning disaffiliation. These two perspectives—of the affiliated religious educator and of the disaffiliated former student—offer insight on a growing but underrepresented experience in contemporary theological research. The essay suggests that positive religious life and learning can lead beyond affiliation with the Catholic Church and that, when disaffiliated persons are engaged in conversation, we can learn from them. The purpose of this study, however, is not to find a solution to the “problem” of disaffiliation but to propose a more affirming way to speak of and with persons and groups disaffiliating from conventional religious communities.

Is the Codex Canonum Ecclesiarum Orientalium Empowering the Vocation of the Eastern Churches in Communion with Rome?
Rosanna Rodriguez

The juridical aspect of ecumenism is very important. A sign of reception of ecumenical ecclesiology is its integration with canon law. This essay evaluates the value of the Codex Canonum Ecclesiarum Orientalium as an instrument in their hands of the Eastern Churches in communion with Rome for promoting unity between Orthodox and Catholics. It contrasts it with the ecclesiology of the Orthodox-Catholic dialogue on unity. It also shows that in many important points the ecumenical value of this code of law is limiting more than facilitating and reflects the need to integrate the results of the ecumenical dialogue with canonical legislation.

Race and the Orders of Violence: Applying the Just War Tradition to Racialized Violence*
Matthew D. Lundberg

The topic of race and violence in the United States brings to mind an array of images: lynchings, race riots of various kinds, police brutality, violent crime within some minority communities, and so on. In most of these cases, the word “violence” refers to actions of serious physical harm—a mob committing murder, the burning of a car, the beating of a suspect in custody, a shooting in a drug deal gone bad. While these examples certainly warrant the word “violence,” they only scratch the surface of violence related to race. Describing them with that one word without further comment can obscure important distinctions about the nature of violence related to race and racism. What follows hopes to contribute to greater clarity by drawing upon a key resource pertaining to violence in the ecumenical theological and ethical traditions of Christianity—the just war tradition. We will find, however, that true clarity about violence and racism requires a recognition of the issue’s profound ambiguity.

Medellín through Methodist Eyes
Edgardo Colón-Emeric

This essay examines the ecumenical aspects of the 1968 conference of Latin American Bishops in Medellín. It begins with the historical context of the conference, showing how Medellín, by focusing on specifically Latin American issues, was a major break from tradition set by previous conferences. It then examines José Míguez Bonino’s reading of the conference, highlighting its ecumenical currents and its focus on liberation of the poor. It discusses the impact of Medellín on the Latin American Protestant ecumenical and evangelical movements, followed by an analysis of how Methodists are to understand themselves in light of Medellín, with a focus on Medellín as an affirmation of the Latin American, catholic, and Wesleyan aspects of Methodist theology.

Explorations and Responses

Gustavo Gutiérrez: Liberation Theology for a World of Social Justice and Just Peace
Vasilios Dimitriadis

When studying the great ideas that have changed or could transform the human and the world, thoughts emerge from verba et scripta, thoughts that try to pinpoint fragments of truth, in order to give birth to an exit from roaming into the labyrinth of our microcosm. There is a struggle against egocentric individualism, in order to distance ourselves from the pursuit, the disturbance, the root of the problem and its solution—from the constant “why?” Each era has its own historical background and its own interpretation.

The Ecumenism of the Polyhedron: A New Ecclesiology?
Raniero Cantalamessa, ofmcapp, Translated from Italian by Marsha Daigle Williamson

The image of a polyhedron, a three-dimensional body with many angles and surfaces such as a prism, was used by Pope Francis for the first time in Evangelii gaudium in a general ecclesiological sense to describe the Church as a whole.1 He used it in the address he gave at the Pentecostal Church of Reconciliation in Caserta—but this time in terms of the ecumenical dialogue among the various Christian churches. It is worth listening to its central part again:

Engaging with the Narrative of Radical Extremism: A Spiritually Based Diagnostic and Intervention Model
Tariq Mahmood Awan

This essay shares some of the aspects of my research journey and the pedagogical approaches implemented during the Islamic Guidance Programme (IGP). The IGP is a faith-based, spiritually embedded intervention that has been designed to cater to the rehabilitative needs of Muslims charged under extremism legislation, as well as those who appear vulnerable to faith-based radical extreme ideology. A spiritually based critical theological approach is adopted throughout the whole process of teaching. As a spiritually based intervention, IGP has its own theological foundations, epistemological principles, and unique teaching techniques that need to be used during the process of rehabilitation of a selected group of participants. This essay presents a summary of these theological, empirical, and educational aspects.

BOOK REVIEWS 

Elie Wiesel: Teacher, Mentor, and Friend ed. by Alan L. Berger (review)
Eugene J. Fisher

Confronting Hate: The Untold Story of the Rabbi Who Stood Up for Human Rights, Racial Justice, and Religious Reconciliation by Deborah Hart Strober, Gerald S. Strober (review)
Eugene J. Fisher

The Sufi and the Friar: A Mystical Account of Two Men in the Abode of Islam by Minlib Dallh (review)
Christian Krokus

The Divine Christ: Paul, the Lord Jesus, and the Scriptures of Israel by David B. Capes (review)
Glenn B. Siniscalchi