Paradigm Responses

THE INVITATION

In the January 2005 issue the editors offered the Interreligious Insight Paradigm: an Invitation. The Paradigm combines a vision of the future with a statement of the interreligious and intercultural mission of the journal. It has three dimensions:

1.Confidence that ours is a time of global cultural evolution (which the editors termed “sea change”, manifested in part in increased intercultural encounter and understanding and emerging progressive approaches to the most critical issues facing the planetary community

2.Commitment to an experience of religious pluralism that generates profound interreligious dialogue as a pathway to religious truth 3.As a consequence of 1 and 2, a deep ethical challenge to many of our inherited patterns of behavior and attitudes toward the other.

The Editors have invited our readers as well as religious and spiritual leaders, scholars, and activists from around the world to offer their thoughts on the Paradigm. The first five responses appear in this issue. (Note: plans are underway to offer the Paradigm as a stand-alone reprint. An announcement will appear in Insight.)

URSULA KING

A challenging paradigm indeed, an imaginative effort to move interfaith dialogue forward to a new stage. I particularly liked the thought-provoking statements that we stand on a threshold of a different way of being religious (very true – also seen by Teilhard de Chardin), that dialogue is “demanding spiritual work”, and that we need to combine trust with “critical fellowship”. Those committed to dialogue can apply these ideas creatively in their work, and others, on discovering this larger, more dynamic vision, may be freshly drawn to join this new form of dialogue. I am attracted by the overall flow and energy of the argument, but have some additional concerns. First, I would have liked to have seen spiritual evolution mentioned, besides “an expanding vision of global cultural evolution”. Then, is the metaphor of “seachange” and “wave s” really the most appropriate was of expressing this new paradigm, especially after the recent disaster of the immense tsunami wave created so much destruction and suffering? Waves burst forth from the bowels of the earth without any human action or responsibility for this event. Surely, the point of a new dialogue and a new social/cultural/spiritual/moral/ethical paradigm is the involvement of human beings, their responsibility in creating it, in truly willing to make it happen. It will never arrive like a wave by itself, but will have to be our own creation. Part of the fundamental paradigm change is this huge responsibility that we have for our own future and that of the planet, but also for our global religious heritage and its creative transformation in the present and future. And that must involve all people, and especially women who have been marginalized so far and remained mostly excluded from the official dialogue exercise. As elsewhere, restrictive gender patterns remain still deeply embedded in interreligious dialogue, even when they remain hidden from most untrained eyes.

We need to draw on the great ethical and spiritual resources of our cumulative religious heritage if we truly care for the future of humanity and the earth. We need to preserve the plurality of the deepest faith intuitions and practices - what I call “the noospheric diversity” of ideas and beliefs - just as much as we aim to preserve the biospheric diversity of our planet. We need to recognize the necessity of diversity (beyond mere complementarity) as the very condition for closer interaction, deeper understanding, and convergent strivings towards mutual sharing of the experiences and resources which are at the heart of our faiths.

Ursula King is Professor Emerita of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Bristol, UK, and a Vice- President of the World Congress of Faiths. She is currently working on spirituality in a global context for a new book, One Planet, One Spirit. She is the author of this issue’s lead article on Teilhard de Chardin.

ROSAN YOSHIDA

We are in certainly in a time of sea change; but the risk is that we may suffer a global tsunami. We face what activists call the “global problematique”: global warming, pollution, species extinction, resource depletion, etc., because our old systems: civilizations (nations, corporations, religions, media, education, etc.) no longer function well in the context of new global realities. It is selfish and irresponsible to behave as ostriches in such a critical situation.

Religions were once in the vanguard of the spiritual revolution to overcome the five calamities of civilizations (delusion, bondage, discrimination, exploitation, and extermination) and to nurture instead the five blessings of culture (truth, freedom, equality, love, and peace). But in so many ways, our religious institutions are out of date. The new global age demands new knowledge and action grounded in the new understanding of truth, goodness, beauty and holiness. It is critical that we move beyond blind sectionalism.

The principles identified in the Interreligious Insight Paradigm provide a clear expression of the next cultural evolutionary step. They are very much in the spirit of Towards a Global Ethic: An Initial Declaration, drafted by Hans Küng and set forth at the first modern Parliament of the World’s Religions, Chicago 1993.

The Declaration of a Global Ethic was a great achievement by the world’s religious communities on behalf of all beings. It can be rephrased in terms of “5Ls”: law, life, love, liberation, and lielessness. As Gandhi said, “There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.” Wars create only more wars, never peace. Militarism is nothing but mistrust, fear, weakness and wickedness. Only love works, never hatred. Religion means re-union (re-ligare) with the holy (the whole/wholesome). If it is not grounded in the whole, it is not real religion.

Dr. Rosan Yoshida is Director of the Missouri Zen Center and author of many works on Buddhism, ethics, and interreligious understanding. He is the Japanese translator of Towards a Global Ethic: An Initial Declaration and many other works by Dr. Hans Küng.

BRIAN WALKER

This response to the editorial trinity’s invitation in January 2005 is both a critical reflection upon the Interreligious Insight Paradigm and an invitation to share in the creative action of another model, the Diagenetic Paradigm, evolved from interreligious dialogue in the world’s least developed country, Sierra Leone.

THE NEW MOMENT

Certainly, fresh models of living positively with religious difference are required as we emerge, from two millennia of exclusive religious monologues and a century of parallel interreligious pre-dialogue, into global awareness. Monologues still dominate mainstream religions, but pre-dialogue has shown there are alternative models for shared thinking and hopeful action.

SEA CHANGE

As the tsunami horror of global violence crashes onto Western television scenes, we are awakening to the reality of war, disease and poverty in which over 30,000 children, women and men die needlessly every day. But, it is not in the two-wave model crossing point that hope is to be found. The old wave of triumphal exclusivism still towers menacingly over the ripple of concerned pluralism. Nevertheless, there is hope. With the increasing complexity of values, understandings, moral-ethical insights, choices and actions, comes the hope of simple and yet profound acts that will power the new wave by “cracking the silence” of that vast majority of humanity who want to live in justice, peace and harmony.

INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE

The interpretation of dialogue as “speaking across” is more indicative of parallel religious monologues speaking across one another. The preferred rendering of the Greek is “through-word”. Through word, religious vision and possibilities for making a difference are enriched because they are shared. The dialogue process here also depends upon listening and sharing. To create a dynamic momentum, however, the process needs venture beyond the parallel dialogue of telling “the other” what we mean about truth, salvation, deliverance, enlightenment… The important crossing point then comes when dialogue turns diallel, “through one another”. This is not a new way of pursuing religious truth, it is a process for accepting that different understandings of truth can enrich and inspire engagement, leading to real transformation. Such a process is the Diagenetic Paradigm, which, through knowledge; through word; through mind, prayer, meditation and reflection; through separation; through discussion; and through creative, action transforms hope for all humanity.

The invitation is for you to share in the Diagenetic Paradigm and to make a difference to hope for you and for humanity. Email hopeis@btinternet.com to find out how you can start your own Diagenetic Paradigm of dialogue and engagement that actually transforms.

Dr. Brian Walker is Chair of Religions for Peace (UK). He is also an Executive Member of the World Congress of Faiths.

JOHN HICK

The analogy of the two waves of old and new ways of thinking, which are now meeting and in their meeting creating cross-currents and eddies and even whirlpools, seems to me excellent. (It corresponds roughly to the idea of paradigm shifts in the history of science, which involved periods of confusion). But staying with waves, I am not quite sure that “crossing” is the right development of it. Is not the picture one of the river of human thought now being entered by a new stream, with all the turbulence that this can cause? In a sense, I suppose, the two streams cross. But there will continue to be the one river of human thought, but with its composition gradually changing as the new stream transforms it – we hope. This point may or may not matter much.

I’ll also offer a philosopher’s niggle in regard to the chart on p. 10: the move from body/mind dualism to exploring their connection. Those who affirmed brain/consciousness dualism always tried to find how they interact. Many leading neuroscientists today regard the nature of consciousness as a sheer mystery, not identical with brain function. But the point may well not matter here.

The section on interreligious dialogue seems to me good. But should there be some mention within it of the powerful countervailing, and seemingly growing , flow of religious fundamentalism, there by acknowledging the difficulty of the dialogue movement?

The third section also seems good. One minor detail, where you say that not all spiritualities and moralities are good, why not say that not all religion is good? Religion, as an historical phenomenon, can be very good and also very bad.

John Hick is a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Research in Art and Social Sciences, University of Birmingham, UK. He is a Vice-President of the World Congress of Faiths.

KUSUMITA PEDERSEN

This paradigm is all-embracing and there are many ways we can enter into its global reality. One gateway is the statement of Isaiah Berlin quoted by Joseph Hough in the same issue of Interreligious Insight:

It is a terrible and dangerous arrogance to believe that you alone are right, that you have a magical eye which sees the truth and that others cannot be right if they disagree. This makes it certain that there is only one way, and one only, and that it is worth any amount of suffering (particularly on the part of other people) if only the way prevails.

But why? What is the step I take from simply having the “magical eye” myself to using violence against those who do not accept its “truth”? One obvious reason is that I suffer from cognitive dissonance. To get rid of this anxiety, I turn to an invigorating anger against those who do not believe the things I do. But there is another reason: the “magical eye” is the most potent instrument of power. Knowledge affords authority to its possessor. “Knowledge” of ultimate matters can give ultimate authority. It thus legitimates the use of any amount of power, which is then used to punish the disobedience of dissenters and maintain power for its own sake. The ethics of the paradigm calls us to consider above all the concrete results of our uses of “knowledge” – even when we are convinced it is both true and ultimate.

Dr. Kusumita P. Pedersen is Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, New York and was previously Executive Director of the Project on Religion and Human Rights. she has been a leader in the global interfaith movement for many years.