Dialogue for Interreligious Understanding

Strategies for the Transformation of Culture-Shaping Institutions

Leonard Swidler

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137470690
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion comparée

This invaluable volume gathers together the cumulative insight of more than fifty years of Leonard Swidler's work on dialogue. The founder and president of the Dialogue Institute, Swidler offers through experience and research his theory and tools of interreligious, intercultural, and international dialogue.

1

Dialogue on Dialogue: Introduction to the Virtue and Way of Deep-Dialogue/Critical-Thinking/Emotional-Intelligence/Competitive-Cooperation—Dia-Logos

Dialogue is not just talking together, but is a whole new way of seeing oneself and the world, and then living accordingly. Dialogue must become a Virtue, a Way of Life, penetrating all of life and being expressed in Deep-Dialogue, Critical-Thinking, Emotional-Intelligence, Competitive-Cooperation—in short, Dia-Logos.

Why a Dialogue on Dialogue? Answer: Because most people do not understand dialogue as it is often used today. They hear a lot about it, sense that it is growing in importance in today’s world, but often are hesitant about it, precisely because they do not really know what it is, or—even more fearsome—what it might lead to. Many reject it out of hand simply because of fear of the unknown. When individuals and groups do begin to test dialogue, they most often begin with a Dialogue on Dialogue, seeking to learn what it is and what it might lead to. I remember that when I was heavily involved in the Christian-Marxist dialogues of the 1960s, until the disappearance of the Soviet Union in 1991, I was struck by the fact that every time a new partner group joined the dialogue, they spent the first two or more years on a Dialogue on Dialogue.¹

Virtue, Way, and Dia-Logos

This book, then, aims to help those who are convinced, or who at least suspect, that the tried and true but disastrously unsuccessful methods of Diatribe, Debate, or any of the other aggressive stances against those who think differently from us, need to yield to the new method—the Virtue and Way—not of casual, everyday dialogue, but, as I shall lay out in this book, Deep-Dialogue/Critical-Thinking/Emotional-Intelligence/Competitive-Cooperation—that is, Dia-Logos in the original Greek. Here are laid out what (1) Religion, (2) Dialogue, and beyond it, Deep-Dialogue, its obverse, Critical-Thinking and Emotional-Intelligence, their action expression, Competitive-Cooperation are, as well as some commonsense guidelines and resources to make them happen. Beyond that, (3) a deeper, a more theoretical explanation of Deep-Dialogue/Critical-Thinking/Emotional-Intelligence/Competitive-Cooperation is also disussed. In brief, the Virtue, that is, the Way of living every day in Deep-Dialogue/Critical-Thinking/Emotional-Intelligence/Competitive-Cooperation—in Dia-Logos—is presented.

Those who are not very used to more theoretical reflection might experience a slight bit of My Eyes Glaze Over (MEGO) in this theory section, but you are urged to persist—perhaps give it a slow, second or even third reading spread over an extended period time. Deep-Dialogue, its counterparts Critical-Thinking/Emotional-Intelligence, and action expression Competitive-Cooperation are virtues, which means that they are not acquired in a flash. Virtues (more on Virtue below) are habitual ways of acting. For example, the person who has developed the virtue of courage reacts habitually, that is, automatically, in a courageous manner when a challenge arises. So, too, a Deep-Dialogue/Critical-Thinking/Emotional-Intelligence/Competitive-Cooperation mentality needs to be inculcated to operate habitually; it needs to become a Virtue—a Way of life. Virtues, however, cannot be developed overnight. So, yes, try to put these Deep-Dialogue/Critical-Thinking/Emotional-Intelligence/Competitive-Cooperation ways of thinking, and consequent acting, into practice time and time again, and come back and reread these pages time and time again. It will be rewarding. Then live accordingly the Virtue, the Way of Deep-Dialogue/Critical-Thinking/Emotional-Intelligence/Competitive-Cooperation: Dia-Logos.

Then (4) reflections are offered on some of the most important applications of the Virtue, the Way of Deep-Dialogue/Emotional-Intelligence/Critical-Thinking/Competitive-Cooperation, for example, education, global ethics, law, and business. These, of course, are not the only important areas of the outworking of a mentality—Virtue, Way—of Deep-Dia-logue/Critical-Thinking/Emotional-Intelligence/Competitive-Cooperation among the culture-shapers of the world, but they will serve as pump primers for you, the reader, to do something similar in your part of the world—and then share it with the rest of us, including me!

Last (5), a few more practical sample programs are presented on how to apply the Virtue, the Way of Deep-Dialogue/Critical-Thinking/Emotional-Intelligence/Competitive-Cooperation in various settings. These sample programs are projects that organizations like the Dialogue Institute (founded in 1978, www.jesdialogue.org) could undertake or that you the reader can launch on your own, in perhaps adapted form.

Because several of these chapters are also designed as stand-alone documents that readers may want to duplicate, there will be a very minimal amount of repetition of some key material at the beginning of these chapters. Before you complain, I would like to recall a Latin saying I learned in my youth (does anyone study Latin anymore? No? What a loss!): Repetitio est mater studiorum, “Repetition is the mother of studies.”

So, this book aims at being what I hope will be a helpful combination of theoretical ideas and practical projects that will serve as a sort of vade mecum (a “Come with me!”—see, there’s that missing Latin study again!) for the twenty-first-century person who wants not just to live out her/his life in reasonable comfort but also to help transform her-/himself and the world for the better—to follow the Virtue, the Way of Deep-Dialogue/Critical-Thinking/Emotional-Intelligence/Competitive-Cooperation—Dia-Logos.

Deep-Dialogue and Critical-Thinking/Emotional-Intelligence/ Competitive-Cooperation

In recent decades, the term “dialogue” has become increasingly popular. Already over a half-century ago (1957), I started researching the ecumenical dialogue (called the Una Sancta Movement) between Catholics and Protestants that started after World War I in Germany, the Land of the Reformation.² Then came Vatican Council II—1962–1965—of the Catholic Church (with its 1.3 billion members!), which totally reversed the Catholic Church’s resistance to dialogue and committed it to its full embrace. In the midst of this, my wife, Arlene Anderson Swidler, and I launched the Journal of Ecumenical Studies (JES, 1964). The subtitle of JES was “Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox,” but already in 1965, we dropped the subtitle and took on our first non-Christian associate editor, Rabbi Arthur Gilbert. In the next three years, JES continued to expand the dialogue (adding Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist . . . associate editors) so that the initial dialogue among Christians quickly spread to dialogue among all religions and beyond to all ideologies, cultures, and societal institutions.

Already in the late 1960s, JES was found in a worldwide survey by the Centro Pro Unione in Rome to be the most important publication in the world devoted to ecumenical/interreligious dialogue. In 1978, I established an outreach arm of JES, the Dialogue Institute: Interreligious, Intercultural, International (DI), although the name was modified several times over the decades. In the mid-1990s, I joined with Ashok Gangadean, professor of philosophy at Haverford College, an elite Quaker undergraduate college near Philadelphia, to form the Global Dialogue Institute. We worked jointly with Harry Halloran and Uli Kortsch, local business leaders, as well as Ingrid Shafer, professor of integrated studies at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma, a liberal arts college. Together Ashok and I collaborated to produce—in dialogue (!)—several documents, of which a few are the basis of some of the material here.

Thus, I had started out as a graduate student in the 1950s taking up the dialogue between Catholics and Protestants, moved on to Jewish-Christian dialogue, then Jewish-Christian-Muslim dialogue, and further to dialogue with Hinduism, Buddhism, and . . . , and . . . by 1968, even atheistic Marxism! I then began to reflect, along with others, about dialogue itself. In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, and the Soviet Union (which I and everybody else, including the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] and the KGB [!], thought would last well into the third millennium) teetered into oblivion. Shortly afterward, in 1993, Samuel Huntington argued that the world had settled back into “The Clash of Civilizations.”³

He was right. There was/is a Clash of Civilizations. But that did not and does not describe all of the contemporary global scene. The world also dramatically began to move into the Age of Global Dialogue,⁴ as I personally can attest. In the same period, that is, between 1990 and 1992, I published 12 books dealing with Dialogue!⁵ Soon the very term dialogue became extremely popular (but not necessarily the reality!), so much so that it was at times applied indiscriminately or even deceptively. Hence, I began to look for a term that would avoid such lightheaded misunderstandings. Thus, my friend and colleague Ashok Gangadean and I, also in cooperation with Howard Perlmutter, a professor at the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania, in the 1990s came up with the term Deep-Dialogue to indicate that we were talking about something much deeper than mere conversation, something life transforming.

Very briefly, Deep-Dialogue can initially, and still relatively superficially, be described as a “conversation between individual persons—and at times through them, two or more communities or groups—with differing views, the primary purpose of which is for each participant to learn from the other so that s/he can grow, which of course means change—and thereby the respective groups or communities as well.” Hence, whereas in the early decades the term I used was dialogue, in the materials Ashok and I developed, and those I created in more recent years, I use, or at least mean, Deep-Dialogue, in its profound, life-transforming sense. In addition, I am convinced that the concomitant virtue to Deep-Dialogue must be Critical-Thinking/Emotional-Intelligence and their consequent action expression Competitive-Cooperation—but much more of them below.

Beyond that, however, Deep-Dialogue/Critical-Thinking/Emotional-Intelligence/Competitive-Cooperation needs to pervade all of reality in ways that we humans have not realized—until this new millennium, when we began to reflect even more deeply not just about dialogue. Rather, only recently have we begun to reflect on,⁶ and attempt to live out, a whole way of life, the Way of Deep-Dialogue/Critical-Thinking/Emotional-Intelligence/Competitive-Cooperation—Dia-Logos (more on the latter below).

General Background and Guides

This section provides an understanding of the basic subjects involved, for example, religion, ideology, dialogue . . . and the basic tools to deal with them.

Part I

General Background and Guides

2

What Is Religion?¹

Religion is an “Explanation of the ultimate meaning of life, and how to live accordingly, based on some notion and experience of the transcendent.” Each religion has four “C’s”: Creed (the “explanation of life”); Code (of behavior, ethics); Cult (actions relating the believer to the transcendent); Community structure (monarchical, republican, individualistic, etc.)

General Western Definition of Religion

What is religion? Let’s start with the etymological roots of the Western term “religion,” even though it turns out not to be particularly helpful. We say in English that we ought to choose good and avoid evil; we speak of being “obliged” to choose the good. Our English word obliged comes from a Latin root, obligare, “to be bound to.” Hence, we are bound to, obliged to, do the good. The Latin root of the term religion is fundamentally the same as that of oblige, that is, religare, “to be bound back.” This word root is really more helpful in another way in which we use the term religious, as when we say, “He follows his routine religiously,” meaning that he is bound to it. That regular commitment may at times, or even often, be a part of what we normally name religion, but it surely is not its core.

Scholars writing about the meaning of religion often start by stating that it is not possible to give a definition of religion, and then often follow that up with quotations of a number of descriptions by other scholars, and end up nevertheless offering their own description, or perhaps tentatively a working definition. I am more optimistic about the possibility of giving a definition and offer one here at the start:

Religion is an explanation of the ultimate meaning of life, based on a notion and experience of the transcendent, and how to live accordingly, and it normally contains the four “C’s”: creed, code, cult, community structure.

Creed refers to the cognitive aspect of a religion; it is everything that goes into the explanation of the ultimate meaning of life.

Code of behavior or ethics includes all the rules and customs of action that somehow follow from one aspect or another of the Creed.

Cult means all the ritual activities that relate the believer to one aspect or other of the Transcendent, either directly or indirectly, prayer being an example of the former and certain formal behavior toward representatives of the Transcendent, like priests, of the latter.

Community structure refers to the relationships among the believers; this can vary widely, from a very egalitarian relationship, as among Quakers, through a “republican” structure like Presbyterians have, to a monarchical one, as with some Hasidic Jews vis-à-vis their Rebbe.

Transcendent, as the roots of the word indicate, means “that which goes beyond” the everyday, the ordinary, the surface experience of reality. It can mean spirits, gods, a personal god, an impersonal god, Emptiness, and so forth.

Especially in modern times there...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1   Dialogue on Dialogue: Introduction to the Virtue and Way of Deep-Dialogue/Critical-Thinking/Emotional-Intelligence/ Competitive-Cooperation—Dia-Logos
• Part I   General Background and Guides
• Part II   Theoretical Background
• Part III   Implications
• Part IV   Potential Applications
• Notes
• Index