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Author Archives: Melanie Barbato

Why is there still ‘interreligious dialogue’?

01 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by Melanie Barbato in Critical Religion, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster

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Catholicism, Critical Religion, Hinduism, interfaith dialogue, interhuman dialogue, interreligious dialogue

In a blog post written for this website, Michael Marten had pointed out the problems of speaking about ‘interreligious’ dialogue or the almost interchangeable ‘interfaith’ dialogue and has suggested an ‘interhuman’ dialogue instead. The increasing involvement of Humanist groups in ‘interreligious dialogue’ and the success of the book The Faitheist may indicate that the practice of dialogue is developing into the opposite direction: that the number of those feeling themselves represented by the category ‘interreligious dialogue’ or wanting to participate in such events has extended to increasingly include also people who self-identify as ‘non-religious’ (thereby accepting but simultaneously subverting the disputable binary category of ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious’). At the same time, the important criticisms Marten voiced are also increasingly gaining attention:in a very recent book, Muthuraj Swamy, both a scholar and practitioner of ‘interreligious dialogue’ in India, discusses ‘interreligious dialogue’ as an elite project that reinforces and in some cases constructs the very boundaries it seeks to bridge.

Like Swamy, many people who talk about being involved in ‘interreligious dialogue’ do also problematize the category they use, and for matters of transparency, I have to say that this includes myself. When I recently attended an event on the intersection of ‘interfaith’ theory and practise in Rome, the participants of the plenary discussion were introduced as all being both academics and practitioners in ‘interreligious dialogue’, yet almost all of them took, in some form, issue with the term ‘interreligious dialogue’. This was either because dialogue was seen to mean talking instead of acting, or as a general and abstract discussion that fails to get down to the much more specific root of the problems. One participant said that his organisation for a long time did not consider itself as doing ‘interreligious dialogue’ but was simply trying to do the work of the gospel. At another occasion, a leader of an international ‘interfaith’ organization told me that he did not really like the term ‘interreligious dialogue’ because he was critical about trying to influence others on theological grounds and that he preferred the term ‘religious diplomacy’ for his work that tries to bring leaders of different traditions together to make a difference in the world. Another position is that the practice of ‘interreligious dialogue’ is just mission in disguise, and for this it has attracted criticism both from those who ask for an encounter without ulterior motives and those who would like to see a more self-confident and direct missionary approach.

As the category ‘interreligious dialogue’ is taken to be problematic also by practitioners, I am interested in the reasons why they nevertheless use or accept the category. I think one of the reasons is that ‘interreligious dialogue’ can refer to a diversity of social practices without distinguishing among them. It serves as an umbrella term with positive connotations of goodwill, leadership, harmony or peace that is unspecific enough to allow for different actors to come together without having to disclose their precise attitude toward the other and also without the precondition that all actors share the same attitude toward the other. Within this diversity of social practises we can ask what people do in specific cases when they talk about doing ‘interreligious dialogue’.

The power of institutions in dialogue is a very strong factor in the persistence of ‘interreligious’ instead of ‘interhuman’ dialogue. The practice of ‘interreligious dialogue’ is very often done by individuals that represent or refer to an institution in order to present their position as coherent and authoritative. Those who are interested in an exchange of individual interpretations that do not claim to be representative or authoritative for a tradition and its institutions have an important role as innovators but they are usually not in a position to define the terms and conditions of the practice.

During the last months, I have been studying the high-level dialogue of the Catholic Church, particularly the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue (PCID). For the Catholic Church, Catholic-Hindu dialogue does, strictly speaking, not mean the Church’s dialogue with ‘Hinduism’ but the Church’s dialogue with people who say that they are adherents of ‘Hinduism’. Although the Catholic Church has pointed out repeatedly the wisdom of the Indian traditions, the question of the truth of the ‘Hindu’ teachings is not considered as particularly relevant for the practise of dialogue. Most of the official communication of the Vatican directed at Hindus is kept general or focuses on issues of social or environmental concern. Jenn Lindsay, a doctoral candidate at Boston University, observed during her grassroots research in Rome that initiatives that describe themselves as ‘religious’ often do not differ radically in methodology or objective from, say, intercultural dialogue, and there are some dialogue events where there is no talk about ‘religion’ at all beyond the tacit assumption of ‘religious’ belonging. Much of the Church’s dialogue is of a rather diplomatic nature, which may not be surprising considering that the Church is not only a group of Catholic individuals but one of the world’s biggest organizations whose officials have to find strategies for positioning the Church on various issues and in relation to other actors.

I found that within the PCID there was a clear awareness of the plurality within ‘Hinduism’. There was no assumption that they could meet the Hindu tradition in a single person. When I asked an official how he selected potential Hindu partners for dialogue, he replied that he did not because that would amount to deciding which of the thousands of groups would be the proper representative of ‘Hinduism’. Instead, he pointed out, the Vatican relies on its cooperation with the Church structures in India who recommend participants for meetings, for example on social issues, or Indian persons of authority who would like to meet with the Pope. Personal contacts are thus channelled and filtered through the church structures. One of the central aspects of the council’s work is to advise the local churches on the framework within which dialogue is considered possible and fruitful for Catholics and what would run contrary to Church guidelines. But why should Hindus be interested in ‘interreligious dialogue’? ‘Hinduism’ as a very diverse tradition (the criticism of speaking of ‘Hinduism’ a single tradition is well known), has no strict institutional selection criteria but depends on student-teacher lineage an intersubjective practice of reputation. Besides theological and social reasons, ‘interreligious dialogue’ with the institution Catholic Church as represented by individuals like the Pope or the members of the Curia can seem attractive for Hindu leaders as his or her approach is thereby externally acknowledged if not ‘officialized’ as an authoritative voice of ‘Hinduism’.

One of the reactions I received when talking about the work of the PCID was that this was not ‘interreligious dialogue’ but rather church politics. Yet in my view this distinction would itself be problematic because it reinforces the dichotomy between the religious and the political that has been criticized by Timothy Fitzgerald and others, and which appears as particularly artificial when the focus is not on individuals but on a giant global institution. While the general approach of the PCID may for some be neither ‘interreligious’ nor ‘dialogical’ enough, it has the conceptual advantage that it does not essentialize ‘Hinduism’ but is prepared to engage also with a tradition in which few people may hold exactly identical beliefs. The Vatican communication does, on the other hand, often essentialize Catholicism by presenting a unified ‘Catholic’ perspective. This is however not because the Vatican officials are under the illusion that all Catholics believe the same but because they hold that all Catholics under the guidance of the Church should do so. The Catholic Church also speaks of a dialogue of life to which every member is called, but on the organizational level interreligious dialogue signifies the benevolent and constructive interaction between the institution Catholic Church as the bearer of truth and the individuals and organizations of the wider world.

The Vatican’s take on ‘interreligious dialogue’ may be closer to diplomacy or even the public relations of a big organization than to either the ideal of ‘interhuman dialogue’ or the sentiments behind the harmony beads referred to in Marten’s post. Yet even within the Vatican the case is not clear-cut. Looking through Church documents that contain words like ‘Hindu’ one finds two very different approaches: while one is rooted in seeking to understand the mission field or a diplomatic partner, the other takes non-Catholics as fellow pilgrims who can engage in mutual support and cooperation and even a joint search for the truth. The recent video on ‘interreligious dialogue’ by Pope Francis is particularly interesting in this respect as the dramaturgy of the video implies no hierarchy among those addressed by the Pope but places the individual’s belief in ‘love’ into the centre of the dialogue. These approaches ranging between mission, diplomacy, public relations and ‘interhuman dialogue’, all with their own conceptual challenges, co-exist side by side. For understanding what people do when they speak of doing ‘interreligious dialogue’ one therefore has to look at concrete and limited cases and take plurality of actors, aims and motivations into account that seek to shape the concept and practise of ‘interreligious dialogue’ even within a single organisation, a single edited book or at a specific dialogue event. One of the reasons why the term ‘interreligious dialogue’ is still around is that in an increasingly plural and interdependent world it sets a stage that very different organizations use for negotiations of institutional and individual interests.

Logic, Poetry, and the Myth of Disenchantment

09 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by Melanie Barbato in Critical Religion, Ludwig Maximilians University Munich

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Critical Religion, Disenchantment, Indian Logic, Poetry

In this posting I will discuss some issues surrounding the use of formalized repetitions and the “disenchantment” of language in modern times.

Robert Yelle has shown in his book The Language of Disenchantment (2013) that the attempts of the British civilizing mission to roll back mantras and other apparently non-rational forms of language in India had a precursor in the polemics against Catholic “vain repetitions” back home:

Protestant iconoclasm at a deep level informed many criticisms of Hindu culture, beginning with its worship of multiple gods or images (murti) of these in stone metal, or wood. […] These polemics were in many instances simply transferred from Catholics to Hindus as their target, with little if any modification. Such was the case not only with the worship of images, but also with attacks on the various forms of chants that Hindus used – matras, Vedic recitation (svadhyaya), and the like – which, to many British, resembled the chanting of the Ave Maria by Catholics. (Yelle, 2013: 9)

According Yelle, “disenchantment” was an ideology, not an historical process that did happen or could have happened. The interesting question is therefore not how language got disenchanted but how disenchantment is employed as a rhetorical tool in narratives of approaching the other.

An example from Indian logic can show how fluid the boundaries between aesthetics, religious belief and rational argumentation can be. When Western scholars learned about the traditional five step inference model of the Indian Nyaya school, they considered it as inferior to the three step Aristotelian model because of the apparently redundant repetitions of the form. Ganeri (1924: 75) in his “A Note on the Indian Syllogism” called the Indian model “an untidy organism […] with vestigial structures and rudimentary organs”, especially when compared to the “more perfect work of art, the Aristotelian syllogism”.

It is true that in the Nyaya inference model requires apparently superfluous examples and repetitive steps:

Proposition: This mountain is fire-possessing.

Reason: Because it is smoke-possessing.

Example: Like the kitchen, unlike the lake.

Application: This mountain, since it possesses smoke, possesses fire.

Conclusion: This mountain is fire-possessing.

Both the examples and the repetitions can be explained if the background of Indian logic is taken into account. Logic in India was fundamentally rooted in rhetoric, and the goal was to guide the audience or the other party of the debate along every step of the argument so that they could follow and, if in amicable mood, agree with every single point. Repetitions were not seen as a flaw. On the contrary, Jainas considered the elaborate ten-step syllogism as found in the writings of Bhadrabahu the highest form of making an argument, superior to the five step model. A three step argument was also known to Nyaya logic, but was considered only suitable for drawing conclusions for oneself, not for convincing others.

While oral culture relies on formalized repetitions for both effect and style, for the British, logic had to conform to their preference for plain style and classicist aesthetics. For Randle, the Aristotelean syllogism was after all not only “perfect” but also a “work of art”.

Poetry, maybe the most obvious “word-art”, is today also dominated by the preference for non-repetitive forms. The argument is that poetry has been freed from the straight jacket of rhyme, form and metre. Rhyme, the regular correspondence of sounds, seems to be for modern ears a particularly vain, if not ridiculous, repetition. The first rule of Frank L. Visco’s famous list of “How to Write Good” reads “Avoid Alliteration. Always”.

Like the difference between Protestant plain style and the repetitiveness of Indian mantras or the Catholic rosary, this is not just an aesthetic preference. By using rhyme, poetry can recreate, reaffirm and conform to a given order. The fact that form and rhyme are out of favour on the poetry market reflects therefore a more general individualization and the rejection of traditional pattern in many areas of life.

It is not a coincidence then that the revival of poetical formalism was called for in particular by Catholics. In 1987 the Catholic poet and critic Dana Gioia (1987: 408) criticized modern mainstream poetry for the “debasement of poetic language; […] the inability to establish a meaningful aesthetic for new poetic narrative and the denial of a musical texture in the contemporary poem.” He called for a renewed interest in the aural aspects of poetry that had been replaced by the more visual and text-centred focus of contemporary free verse. Metre, which Gioia (1987: 396) understood as dating back to times “when there was little, if any, distinction between poetry, religion, history, music and magic”, was taken by new formalism as part of the solution.

Unsurprisingly, new formalism has been called “patriarchal” and a “dangerous nostalgia”. But while alliteration may not always be awesome, free verse is just as dangerous in the sense of promoting a particular blend of “political” or “religious” preferences. In either direction, shifts in how language is supposed to be used can tell a lot about power relations but they do not in themselves constitute a form of “progress”. Like other judgements that are called aesthetic, political, religious or rational they are mingled with the myths we have come to hold true.

Words don’t come easy: an example from Jaina Studies

07 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by Melanie Barbato in Critical Religion, Ludwig Maximilians University Munich

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categories, Critical Religion, India, Jaina, Jainism, philosophy, world religions

Jainism is increasingly included among the “world religions” with a growing number of books available for both academic and general readers. Typically, Jainism is introduced as an Indian religion with around 4 million members and with a strong focus on personal development through non-violence and asceticism. The BBC website, for example, states that “Jainism is an ancient religion from India that teaches that the way to liberation and bliss is to live lives of harmlessness and renunciation.”

However, when I spoke to Jainas as part of my doctoral research in Karnataka, I found that many Jainas object to the idea that Jainism is their religion. For example, a lecturer at a Jainology department told me that he considered there to be only one true religion, and that would not be Jainism but non-violence. A bhattaraka, a highly venerated Digambara functionary, said that every religion claims to have the ultimate solution, but when new problems arise, subgroups will just form new religions, and that to him race, caste or religion did not matter for defining a person. Another bhattaraka told me that Jaina dharma, Christ dharma and Muslim dharma were all limited but that the universe was unlimited. All these people shared an aversion against having their Jaina beliefs and practices categorised as religion not because they believed in the superiority of secular labels but because to them fencing off a part of reality as “religion” or “Jain-ism” carried connotations of a narrow-minded ideology and arbitrary boundaries.

This highlighted a problem I experienced again and again when trying to write about Jaina teachings: what concepts and phrases do I use for talking about what Jainas believe and do?

Jaina Studies at the University of Mysore

Jaina Studies at the University of Mysore

My doctoral research is about anekantavada, the Jaina teaching that every object in the world has infinitely many aspects even though only a limited amount of information can at any single point in time be grasped by human perception or expressed by human language. In that respect anekantavada is a philosophical teaching that involves questions of ontology and epistemology. But anekantavada is also one of the most important teachings of Indian rhetoric or, as the study of argumentation in India is commonly called, Indian logic. If objects have infinitely many aspects, this impacts on the way we should speak about reality, especially in arguments about ultimate meaning. The claim is that ideally the expression “from a certain perspective” should be added to every statement, to show that it reflects only one of many equally justified possibilities. This has strong ethical implications which have become predominant in contemporary discussions about anekantavada as “tolerance”. However, anekantavada also has to be seen in the light of the ultimate goal of the Jaina, becoming an omniscient, a liberated being who can grasp at will all aspects of past, present and future simultaneously. According to Jainism these omniscients, who have cleansed their souls through right conduct and knowledge of karmic particles, already exist in higher spheres. Anekantavada tries to show the limitations of human perception while bringing us as closely as possible to the reality of the omiscients. So is anekantavada a religious teaching?

I found that anekantavada cannot be properly understood if it is labelled either philosophy or religion, so throughout my dissertation I kept somewhat unhappily repeating the expression “Jaina philosophy and religion”. Trying to avoid controversial terminology I also spoke of the “Jaina worldview” though I was not happy at all with this term because it lacked the emphasis on praxis. Just using Indian terms did not seem a solution to me either because an important part of my dissertation was explaining an element of one culture for the readership of another. Of course concepts overlap and there are ways of explaining how they are connected but every concrete text passage calls for a concrete choice. It does, after all, make a big difference if I write that anekantavada is part of “Indian logic” or “Jaina rhetoric”.

I cannot say that I have found a solution to this problem of categories and terminology but I try to make the tensions visible in the text. A first point was to reflect the different conceptualisations in the structure of my text. Anekantavada is about the many perspectives one can have on the world, and I therefore discuss in one chapter anekantavada as part of ontology, in another as part of epistemology, in another as soteriology. Then I try to bring them together in an overarching, more organic section, hoping that every time I present anekantavada in one way the other presentations will have some presence in the reader’s mind. The other point was that I decided to provide a substantial amount of background information on terms that should not appear natural but contested. When I speak of anekantavada as being part of Indian logic I devote a whole section to discussing the field of Indian logic in comparison to Western logic, and that it is based on rhetoric and grammar, not mathematics. I thereby hope to draw mental landscapes that present a realistic impression even if the embedded terminology remains deficient.

I am not sure if the Jainas I spoke to in India would agree with how I present their tradition but I hope they would acknowledge that at least I have learned a lesson from anekantavada about the complexity of the world and the limitations of language.

Marian apparitions – a challenge to established categories

02 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by Melanie Barbato in Critical Religion, Ludwig Maximilians University Munich

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Christian, Critical Religion, market, modernity, pilgrimage, religion, strong religion

Emile Zola noted in 1892 about the newly built Lourdes basilica that its effect was “very shimmering but not especially religious”. The aesthetics of the Lourdes complex, with its mix of architectural styles and generous use of electric lights, was only one of many elements of the Marian apparitions that did not sit well with critics. Interestingly it was not only the reactionary politics behind the Marian cult but particularly the modern aspects like the consumerism or use of mass media at Marian apparition sites that were criticized by many liberal and progressive observers as unworthy of a true religious spirit.

But it would be misguided to simply continue the 19th century tradition and label these aspects as aberrations of an otherwise pure religiosity. As Suzanne K. Kaufman has shown, republicans used the controversy around Lourdes to construct a dichotomy between an acceptable private, nostalgic religiosity and its debased modern public forms in order to “relegate its practices to the margins of modern political and economic life”. (80)

The background for this was that the developments at Lourdes and other Marian apparition sites challenged the monopoly of the secular world view for presenting viable visions for modernity and progress. Marian apparitions showed that reactionary values could go very well with modern technology, mass media and the market. The apparitions themselves were also highly political, not only in the sense that they brought existing tensions to the fore as in the case of violent clashes between Catholics and state troops following claims of Marian apparitions during the German Kulturkampf, but innately through the messages conveyed by the seers to the people.

Academia is increasingly taking “strong religion” (Almond et al. 2003) into account, yet the preconceptions about what the term is supposed to designate are strongly influenced by militant Islamism and its scripture based forms of fundamentalism that dominate the news since 9/11. Marian apparitions, however, are not primarily rooted in scripture but distinctively modern. Mary, the mother of God, appears in the here and now with a message tailored to the circumstances of the time, often choosing places undergoing drastic transformation: Fatima called for a bulwark against communism, La Salette summoned to a disciplined Christian life on the brink of the 1848 revolution. The still on-going messages at Medjugorje that started a decade before the Balkan war spread the message of peace as did the apparition of Mary in Kibeho, where one of the major genocides of the Rwandan war took place.

At Lourdes, the Assumptionists realized the political potential of the Marian apparition site when they chose the National Pilgrimage as their key instrument for driving forth their mission of re-Christianizing French society from individual to government. Also, what is overlooked when speaking in derogatory terms about the devotional kitsch associated with Marian apparition shrines is that these mass produced items could powerfully forge and express identity as they served as “a rival set of emblems” (Blackbourn, 1993: 27) to the omnipresent national symbols of allegiance like the Tricolour.

Of course, the status of Marian apparitions is highly contested. Catholics are not obliged to believe in any of the accepted apparitions, and not only rationalists may find it difficult to believe that God sends Mary today to speak on day-to-day politics. Yet one should keep in mind that those who write off Marian apparitions as degenerated forms of religion and hence as imagined have an agenda, too. Religion, politics, modernity and the market do not come in neat boxes, and we should be wary of anyone trying to package these terms according to their needs. Marian apparitions are an underestimated phenomenon of modernity that can shed new light on the contested conceptualisation and construction of religion from the 19th century onwards.

—

Strong Religion: The Rise of Fundamentalisms Around the World, by Gabriel A. Almond, R. Scott Appleby and Emmanuel Sivan. University of Chicago Press, 2003

Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century Germany, by David Blackbourn. Alfred A. Knopf, 1994

Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine, by Suzanne K. Kaufman. Cornell University Press, 2005

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