Art and Belief

Artists Engaged in Interreligious Dialogue

Ruth Illman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317543770
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

'Art and Belief' explores communication between faiths through an examination of contemporary artistic practice. The book discusses how a range of artists formulate their worldview and what motivates them to engage in dialogue. These artists are engaged in a wide range of artistic forms and practice and come to dialogue from diverse religious positions. The aim of the book is to question the assumptions of interreligious dialogue as a largely intellectual exercise in defining the religious "other" and to explore dialogue as a manifestation of interpersonal ethics.

1 Interreligious Dialogue in a Changing World

Jewish, Christian and Muslim musicians meet in Barcelona in the spring of 2008. Under the guidance of the viol player and conductor Jordi Savall they perform the concert Jerusalem: The City of the Two Peaces – a musical journey through the history of this extraordinary city, coloured by holy union and bitter conflict between the Abrahamic religions. In Savall’s musical vision, the shared cultural and religious heritage uniting these three religions is formed into a creative dialogue forum wide enough to contain the tangible differences in style, tradition and interpretation characterizing this diverse group of musicians. According to him, music is an apt metaphor for dialogue: we are all different, he claims, but through music we can communicate and build community without violating this integrity.¹

In the autumn of 2007, the author Susanne Levin writes in the Muslim cultural journal Minaret about her experiences of estrangement and interreligious encounters. As a young girl, the daughter of an Auschwitz survivor, in 1950s post-war Sweden she never seemed to fit into the patterns of Swedish normality. This, she writes, created a “stranger’s soul” in her: a deeply rooted feeling of being vulnerable and an outsider. To Levin, writing has therefore become a way of reconciling herself with her Jewish identity and a weapon against the growing racism and anti-Semitism she observes around her.²

In February 2009, visitors to the Museum for Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki entered straight into the world of religions. In the art exhibition Choosing My Religion multimedia artist Marita Liulia presented her view of interreligious encounters today. The spectators were invited on a journey through the world religions, presented side by side in paintings, photographs, film installations, artefacts, facts and an interactive website. In Liulia’s opinion, religion is a thoroughly human phenomenon that enables people to deal with themselves and others and to control their inner demons and fears. In her art, focus is placed on contemporary spiritual seekers in the post-secular religious landscape; people who use several different sources to form a personal existential worldview.³

The Muslim prayer call adhan fills the Dome of Uppsala in November, 2008. In the pulpit, we find Chokri Mensi, one of the vocalists taking part in the Interfaith Climate Summit. As a musician, Mensi defies conventional categorizations of Muslims and combines different roles, often regarded as mutually exclusive, in an unbiased way: he is an active believer and a practising Muslim, but simultaneously a creative and socially engaged artist. In his opinion, all human beings – regardless of religious belonging or personal merits – share an unalterable dignity and grace as the creations of God. The duty of believers is hence to care for others, to show solidarity with the subjugated and to carry social responsibility. In his personal life, Mensi puts these ideals into practice by taking part in creative dialogues where music is used as a tool for communicating with the religious other.⁴

An all too ordinary tragedy takes places in Jenin on the West Bank in November 2005. Twelve year old Ahmed is shot to death by Israeli snipers while playing with his friends. Three years later, the visual artist Cecilia Parsberg has completed the film A Heart from Jenin where she combines documentary material with fiction, animation, poetry and music to recount the sad but hopeful story. Ahmed’s parents donate the heart of their dead son to Israel: as a testimony of peace, to show that Palestinians are no barbarians but human beings who want to live in peace and mourn their children infinitely. The film follows Ahmed’s heart as it travels over the wall and finally reaches Samah, the Druze girl who receives Ahmed’s heart and with it the possibility to continue her curious exploration of life. The heart, Parsberg concludes, is a gift that drills a hole in the wall.⁵

A rainy day in Brussels in June 2008, I meet Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: the man who abandoned a successful career as academic philosopher to become a writer of plays and novels telling the stories of encounters between people of different faiths, ages and social positions. The intellectual journey always begins in the world of emotions, he claims. To be able to include this vital element in his writings, Schmitt has chosen to express himself in fictive texts rather than in rational science. The purpose of literature is to explore the world as well as the mind and heart of people, he says.⁶ As an artist, hence, Schmitt regards it as his mission to create respect and sensibility towards the complexity of the world; to write about love and interpersonal encounters in a way that promotes peace and understanding.

Entering the Field

The examples presented above concern what I call creative interreligious dialogue; that is, the practice of using art as a platform where persons of different religious backgrounds can meet and discuss in open, respectful and inventive ways. The thoughts and opinions on religion, art and dialogue formulated by these six artists will run as a uniting thread throughout this study, lending the theoretical claims a thoroughly empirical anchorage.

Interreligious dialogue is a topical issue today for many reasons. At a global level, the question of how to facilitate respectful interreligious relations seems vital, especially with regard to the so-called children of Abraham: the intense but troubled and at times even murderous family of Jews, Christians and Muslims, all tracing their ancestry to the biblical figure of Abraham.⁷ Another reason why research on dialogue is so important today stems from the observation that the role of religion in Western societies seems to be under transformation. This vague pattern of change, often described as a shift from secular to post-secular, has by Inger Furseth been paralleled to a move from “finding truth” to “finding oneself.”⁸ In many areas of the world, religions are no longer bound to place or ethnicity as people and ideas constantly migrate around the world, drawn by the adventure or forced by oppression or famine. In this plural context, an increasing amount of people regard religious identity as a personal project of development rather than a genealogical given: a flexible identification with ideas, expressions and sentiments suiting the personal outlook on life. Critique towards modernism and its reliance on rationality is coupled with a growing interest in emotional and experiential dimensions of faith. In this context, being “spiritual” appears as a more attractive self-description than being “religious.”⁹

At the outset of a study on interreligious dialogue, the transformation described above gives rise to many questions: Is a shift from religion to spirituality really under way, where and how can it be observed and what does it imply? Do the two positions constitute opposing alternatives, or do they merge and mix in individual lives? Above all: what are the effects of such a transformed understanding of religion on the interreligious field? The current situation coined by complexity and change is not experienced in a univocal way as an urge to exchange outdated, rigid religion for contemporary, flexible and open-ended spirituality. On the contrary, many people prefer to respond to the changes by becoming even more conservative and uncompromising in their religious views, at times also responding in hostile ways to increasing diversity and globalization. An ever increasing number of conflicts in the world appear to draw their strength from negative perceptions of cultural, religious or other kind of difference. The effects of such attitudes range from docile discrimination to disastrous dehumanization, but the kernel of the problem is the same: you are not like me and that is not good; your difference involves a threat to me. As Michele Dillon notes: “Religious differences continue to be highly salient markers of Otherness… Independent of whether an individual is religious or not, tolerance of otherness does not come easily.”¹⁰

To bridge these gaps and replace prejudices with understanding and respect, a mere increase in information and knowledge about the other is not enough. The fear of difference is seldom a position based on facts and reasoning alone. Our opinions and interpretations are formed and fed by our emotions and experiences which have made an impact on us from early on in life and structure our responses to new situations in sometimes quite irrational ways. Hence, coming to terms with difference is not just a question of reason and knowledge – it touches us on a deeper level as complex, interpreting and insecure human beings. The research field of interreligious dialogue hence involves theological and historical investigations as well as questions related to the humanities, focusing on the meaning-making process of individuals who are formed by cultural and social contexts as well as unique, experiencing and interpreting human beings.

In its original Greek form, the word dialogue simply means conversation. Throughout history, this conversation has been understood in different ways: as spoken or written language, as formal or informal contacts, as mere words or as an action oriented undertaking. Various forms of encounters between persons of different faiths have doubtlessly taken place since the beginning of time, but it is only since the second half of the twentieth century that expressions such as dialogue of religions or interreligious dialogue have found a place in the scholarly study of religions.¹¹

By tradition, the study of interreligious dialogue has predominantly been concerned with applying a strictly text-centred, intellectual perspective on the question at hand: comparing scriptures and formative theologies to find common theoretical understandings and dogmatic positions upon which to build understanding and agreement. Religious truth has been the basic subject of such research, based on the core assumption that rational reasoning, careful weighing of proofs and evidences and logical arguments (not excluding traditional religious apologetics) can bring about agreement on such matters.¹²

Early on, however, the rational and theoretical approach to dialogue was accompanied by efforts of practical interreligious co-operation (as exemplified by the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, 1893). Furthermore, philosophical approaches to dialogue were formulated as tools for creating unity and universality, for example various forms of philosophia perennis. An additional influential perspective on dialogue, in sharp contrast to the ideal of rational reasoning, was introduced by Martin Buber in his 1923 book I and Thou. Being Jewish, Buber was well aware of how easily and effectively religious difference could be used as an instigator for cultural, politic and economic oppression. Therefore, he developed a view of dialogue focusing on personal discourse and the recognition of common humanity: individuals meeting at different levels of mind, language and action. Such efforts are often brought together under the description “dialogues of life.”¹³

The modern sense of dialogue applied within the academic study of religion bears traces of all of these approaches. Hence, it embraces both the theoretical fascination for comparisons of rational arguments, the meta-theoretical study of relations between religious traditions as historical and theological entities and the existential interest in the religious other as a personalized Thou. In his article on dialogue in Encyclopaedia of Religion, Eric J. Sharpe outlines four basic elements in the current “dialogue canopy”:

1. Discursive dialogue: Meeting, listening and discussing among intellectual equals; dialogue as a scholarly enterprise of theological expertise.

2. Human (“Buberian”) dialogue: Human beings meeting each other as unique individuals; dialogue as an interpersonal, existential need.

3. Secular dialogue: Joining forces to inflict change in practical issues of common concern; dialogue as doing.

4. Spiritual dialogue: Seeking personal development and spiritual fulfilment together through interreligious services, prayers, meditations; dialogue as shared devotion.¹⁴

Several epistemological approaches can thus be regarded as well-established within the research on interreligious dialogue. Nevertheless, most academic studies on dialogue – in past as well as present – have emphasized the discursive dimension at the expense of the other aspects included in the canopy. As less scholarly attention has been given to such approaches, theoretical and methodological development has been less vivid concerning the spiritual, practical and interpersonal aspects of interreligious dialogue.¹⁵

As a consequence of this development, in my opinion regrettably, much of current dialogue research rests heavily on a rather limited understanding of what religion is, how it can be defined and what central dimensions it includes. This research agenda, which implicitly builds on Christianity as the role model for religions in general, places great emphasis on the intellectual dimensions of religious traditions and the search for systematic developments of solid and coherent theologies. The ideal of theoretical systematization as the core of religious faith is not applicable interreligiously, however, and can be contested even within Christianity itself.¹⁶ Other obstructive presuppositions following in the wake of the narrow focus on dialogue as rational truth debates includes the idea that religion is a clearly delineated sector of human life, separated from other sectors such as economy, culture, politics and social relations. Furthermore, it includes an apprehension of religious diversity as a strictly marked-out area where each tradition constitutes a monolithic unity of creed, conduct and belief, clearly separated from other similar unities.¹⁷ Such essentialized conceptions of religions as fixed constants shaping and directing human behaviour in a pred...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Interreligious Dialogue in a Changing World
• 2 Reflexive Religiosities and Complex Otherness
• 3 A Creative Perspective on Interreligious Dialogue
• 4 A Dialogue of Souls: Jordi Savall
• 5 Exploring Estrangement: Susanne Levin
• 6 Only the Idea of Snow is White: Marita Liulia
• 7 When Language is Not Enough: Chokri Mensi
• 8 Beauty is a Hole in the Wall: Cecilia Parsberg
• 9 Inhabiting a Mystery: Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt
• 10 Conclusions: The Art of Dialogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects