On the Role of Ritual in Interfaith Education

Abstract

In religious pedagogy focused on teaching religious diversity, two approaches are usually discussed: multireligious learning and interreligious learning. Here, I will explore both approaches and argue why I think interreligious learning is to be preferred. Interreligious learning, however, can take many forms. In academia learning tends to be focused on an exchange of experiences and insights mediated by a joint reading of both scholarly and sacred texts. For various reasons, however, I have come to consider this approach to be too limited, and I wish to explore the possibility of moving beyond texts to include symbolic practices in interreligious education.

Most policymakers agree that education plays an enormous role in combating religious prejudice, promoting mutual understanding, and fostering social cohesion (Roebben 2016). As educators, we are being challenged to think about what forms of religious pedagogy and what methodologies are most apt to meet these needs. In religious pedagogy focused on teaching religious diversity, two approaches are usually discussed: multireligious learning and interreligious learning. In what follows, I will explore both approaches and first argue why I think interreligious learning is to be preferred. Interreligious learning, however, can take many forms. In academia, and also at secondary schools, learning tends to be focused on an exchange of experiences and insights mediated by a joint reading of both scholarly and sacred texts. For various reasons, however, I have come to consider the textual focus of interreligious learning to be too limited. In this article I wish to explore the possibility of moving beyond texts to include ritual practices in interreligious education.

To develop my argument I will not only draw on pedagogical theories, but also on my own experiences as an interreligious educator in the department of theology of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where I teach master's students from different countries (due to the internationalization of the academy) with diverging religious and cultural backgrounds. It is a daily challenge to do justice to the particular confessional commitments of our students, while simultaneously creating an educational environment of dialogical openness. The aim is not only for them to become religiously literate (i.e., knowledgeable in different traditions) but that they become interreligiously literate (i.e., capable of sensitively and effectively relating across religious differences). The importance of this work has been attested to by several researchers, who point out that those who study in such an international and diversified environment often become ambassadors dedicated to the cause of learning across communities (Gill 2010).

Multireligious learning and religious literacy

Many people simply lack the knowledge to understand what religious adherents believe, what they regard as sacred, why certain utterances or actions may be experienced as offensive. As a consequence, people make all sorts of bland, simplistic statements in which they generalize about all Muslims or all Catholics. In this regard Diane Eck's remark is on point: “I think it is dangerous to live at such close quarters in a society such as ours, with a series of half-baked truths and stereotypes functioning as our guides to the understanding of our religious nature” (quoted in Kujawa-Holbrook 2014, 12). Minimal religious literacy is a basic condition of effective citizenship. Thus, one of the primary goals of religious education is to tackle the problem of religious literacy by ameliorating the knowledge people have about other religious traditions.

The name connected to this plea for religious literacy is Prothero, who with the context of the United States in mind wrote a book entitled Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn't (2007). He even developed a religious literacy quiz, asking such questions as: Can you name the 4 gospels? What is Ramadan? What are the four noble truths in Buddhism? In Europe, teaching religious literacy is more often connected with the pedagogical approach of multireligious learning or learning about religion.

[Students] acquire knowledge about, and insight into, diverse religious and world-views. The religious traditions are presented on an equal footing with a view to comparison. The attitudinal aim is greater tolerance of other religions and immanent world-views (Sterkens 2001, 55)

In this approach, the central focus is on the introduction to and the comparison of various religious perspectives, all of which formulate their own answers to the questions about God, the human being, and the world. The aim is to achieve “a possibly objective survey of the contents and forms of expression of the religions” (Ziebertz 1993, 86). Perhaps this model can best be compared to so-called comparative religious studies, which explores both differences and similarities between religious traditions. Without question, this approach to religion does have merit within the academic world. That is not open to discussion here. The question is whether this is a good model for religious pedagogy. Three objections in particular merit our attention.

First, without doubting for a moment that it is important to provide proper information about the various religions, worldview learning is nevertheless more than simply a cognitive process that is directed at gathering as much information as possible about the religions. Religious education should also teach students to position themselves and ask themselves Where do I stand? How do I position myself? How does the context from which I speak affect the way I see and relate to others? That means asking questions like Where do I encounter others? How do I experience religious difference? How might my experiences be influenced by discourses in my own family, (religious) community, media, and so on? These questions are not addressed in the multireligious model: personal involvement would hinder the objective presentation of the religious traditions. This model creates the impression that religions and worldviews are interesting as historical and cultural phenomena, but not as living traditions that give meaning and direction to many people. One could even say that this approach is a way of controlling religious diversity by treating the religions as “objects” that can be studied from a certain distance. This does not prepare students from the real world, where, whether they like it or not, they are already living amidst of difference.

[T]he global world which we inhabit … is one in which we can no longer control or define the limit on what is dangerous, or perceived by us as dangerous. We must continually engage an other – one with different sights, smells, commandments and obligations, ideas of home and belonging, different moral visions and virtues, and different ideas of self and community. (Seligman et al. 2015, 3)

In my view, it is also not the case that the multireligious approach will improve the religious sensibility of the students (Pollefeyt 2003). This pedagogical model, which aims at a value-free, ideologically neutral and objective presentation of the different religions could even result in indifference, precisely because it is disconnected from real life experiences. The questions What does it matter or what difference does it really make? to belong to this or that tradition is never really asked. From this perspective, the approach of multireligious learning even shows some resemblance with passive tolerance: religious difference is placed at arm's length (and hence contained)—the conversation is ended before it has even begun.

An additional problem is that this model departs from the understanding that students come to the classroom with little to no knowledge about religion. Many students, however, do not only have little knowledge, the little knowledge they do have is often drenched in stereotypes and generalizations, which they take from family, their peers, their own religious community, media, and so on. In my experience as an educator teaching in a multireligious and multicultural context, this is a real issue. Some students come to my classroom with great prejudices with regard to religion in general: religions promote conflict and religious beliefs are backward and unacceptable, or religion is irreconcilable with a critical, enlightened, and scientific outlook and religious believers are superstitious, and so on. Other students come to my class thinking that all religions are more or less the same; their practices and symbols might differ, but in the end they all aim at love, peace, and justice. They do not really understand why it would be relevant to learn about the particularities of religious traditions, which are only of secondary importance. I also have students who are very literate and well versed with regard to their own tradition (e.g., Islam or Christianity), but are quite prejudiced vis-à-vis other traditions. Their theology of other religions is dismissive of other traditions, which are seen as untrue, or corrupt. These are problems that will not be tackled by teaching about religion. To change biases, the cognitive process of learning needs to be matched with (or better still, focus on) affective, experiential, reflexive, and self-critical learning (Morgen and Steven Sndage 2016).

Interreligious learning

Beyond overcoming religious prejudices, interreligious learning or learning from religious others fosters and enhances interreligious literacy, the ability to sensitively and effectively relate across religious differences. This is an expertise that focuses on the cultivation of the “inter,” which as Buber (1952) rightly pointed out is always inter-personal; it is learning from different religions by engaging in a reciprocal encounter with people who belong to and identify with these different traditions. Religions never exist in the abstract; they are always lived in concrete contexts and intertwined with the lives of their adherents. In interreligious learning religion receives a human face. Involvement rather than distanciation is part of this learning process, and it is this personal involvement that is most needed for building meaningful relations across communities.

Interreligious learning is competency-oriented education: it aims at developing the competencies needed to engage religious diversity and the “skills in relating effectively to persons of other religious worldviews” (Morgen and Ssndage 2016, 148). The competencies specific to interreligious learning all relate to the so-called dialogical tension between openness and commitment and how to find a balance between both. Students learn how to remain faithful to who they are and what they believe, hold sacred and are committed to, while at the same time being open to learning from others. Identity and openness are not opposed to one another; to the contrary, the formation of personal identity is seen as an ongoing process in which sameness and difference and continuity and change are gradually interwoven. To achieve this end, what competencies do we need to develop?

Knowledge

Even though it is clear from my criticisms of the model of multireligious learning that factual knowledge will not suffice, it is nevertheless a prerequisite to interreligious learning to have at least some knowledge about one's own tradition as well as about the traditions of others (beliefs, texts, practices, etc.). One could call this the objective dimension of the learning process. However, for a deep learning across traditions to become possible, this knowledge will need to be re-connected to lived experience. To really learn to appreciate the dynamic complexity of interreligious relations, students must not only learn about the beliefs, scriptures, and practices of different traditions or about the models of religious diversity (exclusivism, inclusivism, pluralism), or even about the different conditions for interreligious dialogue (openness, commitments, etc.)—they also must learn to understand and reflect on how their textbook knowledge finds affirmation in or is challenged by real life experiences (Ghiloni 2011). Knowledge that matters in life and that helps us to navigate the complexities of living with difference, cannot be disconnected from experience and from religion as it is lived. As Adam Seligman and colleagues explain, in the process of learning about religions, “we cannot separate the intellect from experience, and the attempt to do so leaves us with disembodied, abstract knowledge that all too often emphasizes ‘things’ rather than ‘relations and connections between them’” (2015, 53).

Hermeneutical openness and interreligious sensitivity

When encountering the religious other, we have an ethical responsibility vis-à-vis the (religious) other to do justice to her self-understanding. I have called this elsewhere hermeneutical openness (i.e., the willingness to understand the other in his or her otherness). One need not agree with nor appreciate nor even embrace the other's beliefs, but one should avoid misrepresentation (which is a form of bearing false witness against your neighbor) (World Council of Churches 1979, § 17). Clearly there are gradations to understanding; there is less and more understanding, and complete understanding is not possible. Misunderstanding is not a dramatic error, as long as one is open to correction. Step by step, by trial and error, one learns to understand what the world looks like from the perspective of the other (although full crossing over is not possible). To understand the other in her otherness requires the cultivation of a listening heart. For me this is first and foremost a matter of justice: the other is entitled to being heard.

Hermeneutical openness is not simply accumulating knowledge about another tradition; what I have in mind is rather an attitude of attending to the other so as to overcome general claims, platitudes, and stereotypes. One should learn to refrain from too-hasty judgments. The challenge is to speak about and with the other with nuance, finesse, and sensitivity, and that requires paying attention to the religious language used by the other (e.g., a headscarf is not a piece of cloth, and circumcision is not baptism for Jews). At stake is acquiring the sensitivity to tread carefully when dealing with religious issues, as they are strongly interwoven with personal and communal experiences, narratives, and loyalties. People are vulnerable in their religious attachments, and dismissive reactions and offenses may be experienced as deeply painful; that is why we need practical wisdom that will allows us to navigate our religiously plural world and reach out to others. One cannot learn this by keeping “difference” at arm's length. Learning in the proximity of others enables a change of perspective necessary to relate to others in a sensible way. Or as Heinz Streib (2001, 130) puts it:

Such change of perspectives is hardly possible while standing on the top of the mountain: because there, the foreign is far away; it may look beautiful from a distance, but it is difficult to go there. We enjoy a grand vista while standing on the firm ground of our own religion. Perspective change occurs rather in the valley. The life-world, the “small social life-world” (Hitzler 1994), is the primary locus of perspective change. It means to see the individual, to initiate and nurture the reciprocal perspective change between them, but it means also to allow for and appreciate (!) the experience of the foreign, of estrangement in dialoguing with each other.

Self-critical commitment

As I mentioned above, no one comes to the dialogue table as a blank slate, and no one stands on neutral ground. Claims to neutrality often conceal both a privileged position and prejudices that go unnoticed. Students need to learn to gain insight into the location from which they speak and how their particular situation, which is complex and multilayered (religion, class, ethnicity, age, gender), influences the way they perceive and relate to religious others. It belongs to the human constitution to be prejudiced (cf. Gadamer 1993, Ricoeur 1992); the challenge is to prevent these prejudices from assuming the upper hand and to allow oneself and one's assumptions to be questioned and interrupted by others. In this regard, I fully agree with Francis Clooney (2010, 64), who suggests that “if we see our biases and watch them in operation, we can become freer, more vulnerable in [the way we relate to others].” Although self-reflection is needed to open up to others, at the same time self-reflection and self-criticism is also something one learns during the practice of dialogue. It is a competence one gradually acquires in conversation with other.

An encounter with the other calls forth our own prejudice, and then makes interlocutors feel disoriented because we realize that we are each doubted by the other and that their otherness questions our own prejudices/prejudgment. Here is the potential of the other—by unveiling our prejudices in this way, an encounter opens up the opportunity for us to revise and expand our ideas and understanding in a progressive circle of growth. (Gill 2016, 491)

Second, and related to the above, students need not only learn to respect interreligious differences, they must also learn to recognize the plurality of voices within different traditions. Sometimes intrareligious difference is even more difficult to handle than interreligious difference. On the one hand this means that they need to learn to voice the way they have come to appropriate the tradition to which they belong and to recognize that their appropriation might bear both similarities and differences to that of others who belong to the same tradition. This also frees them from the heavy burden of having to speak for and represent their entire religion. On the other hand, during the process of interreligious learning, students also learn not to reify religious others, as if their tradition is a monolithic whole that can somehow be reduced to core beliefs and unchanging patterns of behavior or unwavering attachments to fixed symbols. If a lack of (inter)religious literacy correlates with stereotyped understanding of religious difference, interreligious competency correlates with the capacity to handle ambiguity, nuance, and a variety of perspectives.

Third, although educators often state that interreligious learning requires students to encounter one another on an equal basis (as if the “inter” is neutral), I think this is a far from innocent claim. In my understanding the dialogue table is not a space that is characterized by equality; rather it is one where power imbalances prevail. Thus interreligious encounters do not take place in a neutral space, but one in which some are privileged and others marginalized. This is certainly the case when interreligious learning happens at Western European (and American) universities, where Christian privilege prevails and negatively affects the way Christians relate to religious others. Self-critical commitment, however, requires that Christians become aware of their privileges and address and take responsibility for them. Interreligious learning may be instrumental for students to confront their privileges and how they affect others negatively (Larson and Shady 2013).

Witness as narration

Sometimes my students confuse dialogue with debate or even polemics, as if its purpose is to “score as many points as possible” or to “corner the other” or push her onto the defensive. They would make bold statements about absolute truth as it is captured in their own tradition. That is not the purpose of interreligious learning. Polemics often remains at the level of speculation about doctrines—is God one or three-in-one? Although this might result in an interesting theological dialogue, as an educator training people to become interreligiously literate, I do not think this is the way to move forward. Interreligious learning is first and foremost a meeting between persons, real people with hopes and fears, dreams and disappointments, life-experiences and prejudices, which they all bring to the table in the form of small and grand narratives. They need to learn to testify to what occupies their mind, what they believe to be true, what they wish for life, how they strive to become the person they are called to be. This process is about truth, but not in some abstract way—as if the truth can be captured in mere propositions that can be discussed detached from the question of meaning. Rather than engaging in an acerbic debate, students must learn to narrate to others what it means when they say Jesus is their Savior (or other truth claims). This brings me to a fourth competence, namely that of being able to bear witness to one's own commitment in an interreligious setting. Students need to learn how to communicate their faith: what inspires them, what they desire and long for, what they hope and fear, in a language that also speaks to those who do not share their convictions. Sharing narratives is one of the best ways to do this.

By sharing narrative, the other becomes more than a label (cultural, ethnic, gender-related, religious, etc.) or merely someone different. Instead the other's otherness becomes more vivid and more pronounced. At the heart of the narrative exchange is an experience of reciprocity which can open doors so that the dialogue partners might move away from entrenched views and ideologies to embracing the other and her otherness and towards learning and growth. (Gill 2016, 492)

From text to rituals

The notion of “interreligious literacy” betrays a certain focus on language as it is spoken, written, and read. Indeed, interreligious education (as most education!) is often text-oriented. That is also true for the way I have been working in the Netherlands with my mixed group of students: reading, writing, and discussing. Texts form the core of the interreligious learning activities I have developed over the course of years.

Usually students will read assigned scholarly literature (e.g., on models of religious diversity, the spatial dimension of interreligious encounters) and discuss it in a reflexive practice. Coming from different countries, belonging to different cultural and religious traditions, they bring a variety of insights and experiences to the table. They share stories and learn to imagine the world differently. In this exchange they deconstruct seemingly self-evident assumptions (that inclusion equals openness), learn to uncover the power mechanisms involved in interreligious relations (who is allowed to represent which tradition?), and understand how what works in one context may have devastating consequences in another.

I also ask my students to keep a logbook in which they continue their reflective praxis, drawing on the literature and the classroom discussions, but also writing on the way interreligious interactions occur in their direct environment (friends, roommates, family), in television shows, in newspaper articles, radio programs, or society at large. They are challenged to connect the syllabus and academic conversations with insights, intuitions, and experiences from these other sources—connecting text and context, theory and praxis. Writing down their reflections, they increasingly gain insight in the complexities of interreligious relations and their own position in this dynamic field of interaction.

Next, my students also engage in scriptural reasoning (Moyaert 2013). This is a specific praxis of interreligious learning that aims at building interreligious communion through reading and studying the sacred texts (scripture) together with others in a classroom setting. They will for example read portions of the First Testament together with excerpts from the Qur'an and the Hadith and comment on them drawing on a variety of sources—traditional commentaries, scholarly approaches (post-colonial, feminist, etc.) as well as personal experiences. They exchange insights, bear witness to their faith, share stories, and bring different perspectives to the conversation. In my experience, when students over a longer period of time read texts from different traditions together, they learn to pay close attention to the text and bring the text to life (it is not a text from the past, but a text that challenges them today); they learn to listen and witness. They discover differences and commonalities, develop a sensitivity to each other's vulnerabilities as well as strengths—they build trust and come to respect and even appreciate each other as same and different. The result is a far more nuanced understanding of the other.

In both practices, texts provide a medium or better still some kind of platform that facilitates the conversation and exchange among them. The texts as platforms for interreligious encounters help to give a human face to the other beyond stereotypes (Heller 2012). Although most of my students have good experiences with this text-oriented interfaith education, for some time now, I have been pondering its limitations. I am concerned that it may even limit our capacity to learn across religious traditions. There are various reasons that feed this concern, but the primary one is that this learning remains too much a class room activity, and for that reason it first continues to speak mainly to the human person in her capacity to think, formulate insights, read, and write. Without doubt (and my students would testify to that) the dialogical exchange that develops around the texts enables better understanding and it can rightly be termed as a form of experiential learning (Maraldo 2010). However, such a text-oriented approach to interreligious learning tends to overlook the role of the body and bodily ritual practices as sites for interreligious learning (O'Donnell 2012). As a classroom activity that speaks to the religious person in her capacity to read, speak, and write, the way the body is also involved in knowledge production is not properly considered. From an anthropological point of perspective this is a problem. The human person is an embodied creature: body and mind are intertwined, just as action and thought are fused together and understanding is often generated through practice.

Second, the neglect of ritual practices also leads to an impoverished understanding of religion. Without doubt, an exchange revolving around texts is important, certainly when this is connected to experiences. But what about what religious people do: the rituals they perform, the relics they cherish, the statues they dress up and carry around in processions, the pilgrimage sites that are visited generation after generation, the way religious communities dispose of their sacred texts, and also the way religious communities make use of symbolic practices to educate their adherents and mold their bodies and minds so as to create the proper religious and moral dispositions? It makes sense to claim that they also deserve our attention. Indeed, these symbols and symbolic practices have consoled many and irritated others. They have sometimes strengthened communities; other times they were the source of intra- or interreligious conflicts. Symbols and symbolic practices are not added to religious life—often they belong to the heart of lived religion. If one of the aims of interreligious learning is to understand the other in her otherness, should we not attend to these practices too?

Third, I am moreover concerned that, willingly or not, by placing texts at the center of interreligious learning, we as educators are reinforcing a modern Enlightenment understanding of religion, according to which symbolic practices are only of secondary importance. The message we are (implicitly) communicating is that we can understand what matters to religious others without attending to their symbols and symbolic practices (which are thereby cast to the periphery of religious life). This shows affinity with the tradition of passive tolerance, according to which religion can be tolerated as long as it remains “invisible” in the public realm (i.e., as long as one does not draw too much attention to the palpable, bodily aspects of religious life, which are regarded as subordinate to the inner spiritual sensibility that marks the essence of real and authentic religiosity. Considering the fact that today in Europe many interreligious conflicts have to do with precisely these material, spatial, and ritual dimensions of religions life (e.g., food laws, the wearing of religious symbols, the erection of new religious buildings or the reallocation of old sacred spaces, religious holidays), and in view of the difficulty if not inability many people face when dealing with or respond to these particular differences in an appropriate way, I think interreligious educators, who are tasked with enhancing the interreligious literacy of their students, should also (in complementarity with our textual practices) develop reflexive practices in which symbols and symbolic practices occupy center stage. This means going out and exploring rituals as a site for interreligious learning. Maybe it would also make more sense to move from talk about interreligious literacy to discussions about interreligious sensibility, thereby making clear at once that the whole person, with all his senses, is involved in this process. Subsequently, I would argue that we should consider symbols and symbolic practices as an important site for interreligious learning. I agree with Robert Pennington (2015, 127) that because embodied ritual practices are at the heart of religious life, “coming to learn these contextualized practices not only increases the amount of content understood; it changes the very way that one understands.”

Case for interritual learning

The most obvious way to engage in a form of interritual learning is of course by organizing site visits. Entering the sacred space of another tradition and engaging some of the rituals performed creates this possibility of experiencing both the beauty and wisdom of another tradition. It also opens up the possibility of a deeper understanding of the other tradition, by seeing the interconnection between what is believed and how that is symbolically and ritually enacted. In the realm of prayer, meditation, and ritual there is nothing more eye opening than seeing people from another religious tradition enact their faith in an embodied way. Here interreligious learning becomes learning through the body (Moyaert 2014). To enable interritual learning, I would advise organizing these visits during a worship moment, preferably at a site (temple, synagogue, church) that belongs to the home community of one of the students. Doing so would enable students of that community to partake in the worship, while their fellow students observe them. I agree with Adam Seligman and colleagues (2105), who point out that this can be a “strong learning experience.” Seeing your fellow student, with whom you take classes, share stories, and exchange ideas, ”stand up and take the Eucharist or become a prayer leader in a mosque or church. … You suddenly perceive him in a different light … ” (79).

It may also happen that an invitation is extended to fellow students who are outsiders to the visited community to participate in the rituals performed. More than when they would be observers, such an invitation would allow them to cross (ritual) boundaries and to experience what it means to celebrate Shabbat, to perform Salah, or to offer Prashad in a Hindu Temple. When they can

enact and experiment with religious practices, then genuflecting in a church, meditating in an ashram, dancing in a temple or engaging in the practice of wadu, the Islamic cleansing and purifying practice involving the ingestion of water through the nose, can function as an experiential, contextually-situated, practice-centric form of knowledge that is learned interpretatively by the student-practitioners. Experimenting with religious rituals and worship practices can ultimately help students become involved in a transformative “process of embodied learning from people's religious words, practices, traditions, and experiences.” (Pennington 2015, 126).

Of course, some rituals are more welcoming to outsiders than others, and some rituals may only be performed by insiders (with diverging roles). Ritual boundaries can be very difficult or even impossible to cross. On the other hand, sometimes outsiders might be welcomed to participate, but students may feel that such a crossing over would be difficult to reconcile with their own religious commitments. They may feel a ritual crossing over would be inauthentic or even come down to some kind of make-believe. As a consequence, some students will not be able to fully participate in strange rituals and will limit themselves to respectful presence. That should not be seen as a failure; it is not necessarily a bad thing to experience certain limits and to become aware of underlying symbolic sensibilities that often go unnoticed in discursive forms of interreligious encounters. Rituals are complex phenomena that may evoke a variety of reactions. Crossing over into the ritual realm of another tradition may give students a glimpse into the rich non-discursive world of a foreign religion, thereby enabling a deeper learning across traditions; however, it may also lead students to realize that they will never fully understand the other. Cultivating interreligious sensibility also entails realizing that some ritual boundaries are difficult to cross or realizing that the gap between insiders and outsiders is larger than often assumed. It also means accepting and respecting that not everything can be shared and understood. “The fruit of the encounters is often the realization of the inaccessibility to the religious other of the full liturgical experience and understanding. … It may be a sign pointing to the richness that lies just beyond the reach of comprehension” (O'Donnell 2012, 371-378). As is the case with interreligious learning revolving around texts, reflexive praxis, an exchange of experiences and insights in a narrative form, is the way to facilitate the learning process. In discussing the experiences on site, students learn about their own identity in connection with that of others.

Another way of engaging in interritual learning is by challenging students to develop a multi/interreligious celebration/prayer. As our societies become more and more pluralized, many feel our rituals need to change, and new rituals need to be created that are more inclusive. One could for example assign them to formulate a prayer for the occasion of the opening of the academic year. By engaging in an exercise of ritual creativity, students learn to ask questions like if we pray to express our gratitude, who are we praying to, who are we thanking? Is it important for the ritual to be successful that the meaning of the ritual performed be shared by all? Is that ever the case (even in mono-religious settings)? What would it take for an interreligious prayer to be successful? When does it fail and why? Such an assignment is a direct opportunity for exchange in which students, in the proximity of the other, become conscious of the importance of religious language, symbols, and gestures. How is it that symbols that are meant to express inclusion and hospitality may be perceived by others as doing violence to their self-understanding.¹

Changing some of our assumptions

I hope that this kind of ritual approach to interreligious learning will correct an understanding of religion to which most of us, just by living in Europe and working in academia, have been exposed, and which, to my mind, fails to do justice to religious particularities and thus fails to cultivate the interreligious competencies people need to navigate our pluralized societies. By drawing attention to the central place that religious practices play in the daily life of many religious people, I hope students will come to understand why it is too simplistic to regard religious practices as of secondary importance.

I also hope this will contribute to a more complex understanding of symbols and symbolic practices. As mentioned above, there is a tendency, certainly within the framework of a modern understanding of religion, to understand symbols and symbolic practices as expressions or representations of something else. That “something else” can be a religious experience of the ultimate reality, a doctrinal truth, a narrative (Pesach∼exodus), but also “a therapeutic need.” Elsewhere I have called this an expressivist or a representationalist theory of symbols and symbolic practices. It is clear that is the way symbols and symbolic practices are often understood, both within and without religious traditions; however, this is not the only way religious people engage in ritual practices and ritual objects (statues, relics, foods). Not all ritual practices and ritual objects fit this mold. Sometimes, the latter cannot be understood from a representationalist perspective, but rather need to be approached from a perspective of embodiment or “meaning incarnation” (Whitehead 2013, 28). Rather than pointing us in the direction of something else, in the case of embodiment, we say that the ritual practices revolve around ritual objects in which “the sacred” resides or is present. In the latter case, presence of the divine is found in the ritual objects. When one touches, kisses, and carries around the ritual object, one touches, kisses, and carries around the sacred. On the other hand, mocking or damaging such symbolic objects may evoke strong reactions, as such acts might be perceived as acts of profanation or blasphemy. By moving interreligious learning beyond texts so as to include ritual practices and drawing attention to what people do in the ritual realm, I hope students will not only learn to better understand why some religious people attach so much importance to this statue, or those precise words, or this relic, but also why offenses, disrespect, and profanation may evoke strong and emotional reactions (Moyaert 2017).

Third, as interreligious learning unfolds as inter-personal learning, there is a risk that students may not fully grasp that religious commitments are not necessarily seen as individual autonomous choices (cf. passive pluralism). Many religious believers would highlight that their identity is in part signified by heteronomous religious structures in which transcendent sources of significance and authority are recognized (Woodhead and Heelas 2006, 6). They would not however, regard this as a limitation of their personal freedom. This is difficult to understand sometimes, certainly for believers (and non-believers) who have a very liberal understanding of religious freedom as being rooted in autonomy. Bringing in ritual as a site of interreligious learning might correct and nuance the opposition between autonomy and heteronomy that is sometimes projected in discussion revolving around religious diversity.

Conclusion

Interreligious learning is experiential learning not focused on textbook knowledge about different religious traditions, but rather on promoting interreligious literacy. The goal is to equip students with the necessary competencies to address religious diversity. Interreligious learning is focused on giving religions a human face. It is less about ideas than it is about promoting an exchange between persons. The priority is given to lived experiences. Nevertheless, in academia, interreligious learning usually takes place in a classroom environment, and the exchange between the students, drawing upon their experiences, insights, and intuitions, is facilitated by reading texts (scholarly texts or sacred scriptures). This is highly valuable, but still too remote from lived religion, which often revolves around particular religious practices. That is why as interreligious educators, we should develop methods that encourage students to move beyond texts and to participate in various religious practices.

About the author

Prof. dr. Marianne Moyaert is Full Professor of Comparative Theology and Hermeneutics of Interreligious Dialogue, Faculty of Theology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands. E-mail: [email protected]

Notes

1 Take for example the suggestion furthered by some that welcoming religious others at the table of the Lord would be an expression of the utmost hospitality. Great is their surprise when their fellow students see it as an expression of Christian dominance, which leaves little to no room for their religious identity.