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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Interreligious Mysticism4/19/2006 09:36:55An interesting talk came through the other day at Brown, Peter Ochs, professor of Jewish scripture and philosophy at the University of Virgina. He is also the teacher of our wonderful new Muslim chaplain here, Rumee Ahmed. The presentation, in its form, was incredibly refreshing, drawing in lots of audience participation including an informal interview of Ahmed by Ochs. It was a lot of fun. He presented a bit of his experience in the practice of Scriptural Reasoning, a method of interreligious (primarily Abrahamic) text study. He described a scene in which a bunch of scholars from Islam, Judaism, and Christianity get together for a number of days and do shared scripture study together, with all their texts together on the table. This goes on intensely, for 10 hours a day. After maybe 4 or 5 days they enter this state of "scriptural reasoning": an analytic state in which the abstract norms of the academic, Greek discourse of oppositions gives way to a scriptural knowledge, which Ochs takes to be more productive in respolving actual disputes. For him, the disputes of our religions are a consequence of the wrong pattern of discourse. Scriptural Reasoning is framed, incredibly, as a tool for world peace. Certainly the religion department here at Brown tends to abhor the "you have to experience it to understand it" states of consciousness that Ochs tends toward. Harold Roth, a scholar of Taoism and Buddhism mainly, has largely split from the department to develop just such a project, the Contemplative Studies Initiative. These sorts of approaches are an affront to the anthropological-critical method of Wayne Proudfoot that we are all taught. There is beauty to this proposition and without a doubt it arouses my curiosity, my wanting to try. But also it reminds me a bit of the naivete of my family's one relative who is now in Israel: my father always tells this story of when they were young in the 60s and this guy came to him excitedly announcing that Judaism could solve all the problems of the world like war and drugs and so on. My father then laughs a little too diabolically about this. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
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