Amy Uelmen, a lecturer at Georgetown University, was one of those in attendance. Uelmen, who would join Fordham Law School in 2001 as director of the Institute on Religion, Law and Lawyer’s Work, said she knew something big was afoot at the time.

“There was this sense of, how do we carry forward this thirst for integrity in our personal lives and our professional lives? I had the impression that there was a seed of something new,” she said.

“If you work for the poor or the homeless, it’s obvious in some ways how Catholic values dovetail with that, but if you’re working for large companies or in a large firm setting, it’s not so obvious. So, I think there was an opening to go to these areas that are less clear, and in some ways, a little bit more difficult to thread out the connections.”

A Reunion for Scholars

Uelmen will rejoin many of the attendees of that 1998 conference on Thursday, as the Institute marks the anniversary of it and a similar conference in 1997, at Religious Lawyering at Twenty, a two-day event sponsored by Fordham Law at the Lincoln Center campus. She will join the Honorable David Shaheed, retired Superior Court judge and associate professor at Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs, for a panel, “Humanizing Legal Education.”

On Friday, Fordham Law professor Russell G. Pearce, will lead a panel discussion, “Religious Lawyering at Twenty: In conversation with the next generation.” Pearce, who is also the Edward and Marilyn Bellet Chair in Legal Ethics, Morality, and Religion, was instrumental in organizing the original conferences.

Uelmen said that while Pearce had taken Tom Shaffer’s 1981 treatise “On Being a Christian and a Lawyer” and applied it to the tenets of Jewish Law, one of the noteworthy developments to come out of the 1998 conference was the involvement of the National Association of Muslim Lawyers, which had formed just two years earlier. One of the founders, University of Wisconsin Law School professor Asifa Quraishi-Landes, will be on the panel with Pearce.

When it comes to the past, she said she was excited to honor Howard Lesnick, the Jefferson B. Fordham Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Lesnick, who retired last year, wrote core texts such as Religion in Legal Thought and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and The Moral Stake in Education, (BookSurge, 2009).

“We’re going to celebrate how Howard brought his insight into the implications for teaching pedagogical practice and helped students become more human, basically,” she said.

Looking Ahead to the Future

The conference will not only be a retrospective; Uelmen said she’s hopeful that the conferences’ panels, celebrations, and workshops will also highlight the work of scholars who are just getting started. Their input is particularly important, she said, because they’re working in an environment that is very different from 1998. In fact, Uelmen returned to Fordham in 2016 to co-teach a workshop on having difficult conversations.

“We’ve spent, in many ways, the last 20 years becoming increasingly politically polarized, which makes it difficult to meet each other, hear each other, and figure out how to exchange stories and ideas,” she said.

“It’s a wonderful thing to get together in person, and make some personal connections and figure out how we can bring ahead a really humanized approach to having difficult conversations where we might substantially disagree on important questions.”

Imitation can take on many forms—behavior, manner of prayer, and even dress, said Father Ryan, the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society at Fordham. He cited several traditional and conservative aspects of imitation that eschew modernity.

‘A Clear Path of God’s Command’

He noted that the dress and appearance of Hasidic Jews mirrors that of past rabbis, “mystical masters” known as zaddikim. And while their dress may look different from modern street clothes to an outsider, he said, it is through “their very difference that they demonstrate their imitation of past rabbis and their fidelity to God.”

“To imitate one’s zaddik, to walk in the paths of ancestors in the faith, lies close to the heart of what the faith of Israel has meant for nearly four millennia,” he said.

Likewise, in Islam, accounts of what Muhammad said and did were written down to guide “requirements of ritual purity” that validate worship and all other aspects of life.

“We have put you on a clear path of God’s command. Follow it and do not follow the vagaries of those who know nothing,” Father Ryan said, quoting the Qur’an (45:18).

“Muslims have taken [this]divinely guided way of proceeding in every aspect of life more seriously and more literally than have Christians; in this they more closely resemble Orthodox Jews,” he said.

Each religion varies on the degree to which the followers adhere to such imitations, he said. In the case of Christianity, he cited St. Paul: “Be imitators of me as I am of Christ” (1 Cor 11:1).

He noted that the monastic movements in first-millennium Christianity withdrew from the “corrupting secular world” while “Carmelites Franciscans, Dominicans and Augustinians, most prominently, sometimes engaged with the secular world but also withdrew from it into their convents from time to time.” In the late 14th century, however, starting in the eastern Netherlands, the Devotio Moderna movement appealed to laity and the lower ranks of the clergy, urging them to engage with the world but to eschew its corrupting standards, imitating the poverty and simplicity of Christ. The movement began with popular Catholic preacher Geert Grote, who died in 1384, but was most famously memorialized by Thomas à Kempis and his devotional book Imitation of Christ.

Father Ryan noted that in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, the one making the exercise asks to “to imitate [Jesus] in enduring every outrage and all contempt, and utter poverty, both actual and spiritual.”

Imitation in the Age of Smartphones

Following the lecture, the conversation took a contemporary turn when the evening’s moderator, William F. Kuntz Jr., a judge of the Second Federal Court in the Eastern District Court of New York, reflected on whether it was possible—in this age of smartphones—to turn away from modernity and imitate God and the prophets in a traditional manner.

“What would each of the faith traditions say about the innovations of Facebook and the internet?” he asked.

“There’s a strand with every religion that has a problem with any innovation,” said Rabbi Daniel Polish, Ph.D., of Congregation Shir Chadash in Poughkeepsie, one of the lecture’s respondents. “There’s a tension between those that refuse to adapt and early adapters.”

Father Ryan agreed. “There were condemnations of the railroad in the 19th century by the papacy,” he said.

Yet times change and technology moves forward. So how is one to adapt to modern times and yet remain faithful?

Zaki Saritoprak, who holds the Nursi Chair in Islamic Studies of John Carroll University and was also a respondent, said that like any technology, its value depends on how it’s used.

“You have a car; you can drive to a good place or bad place,” he said. “If [technology]prevents you from your major duties, like your responsibility to pray, then it becomes problematic.”

And yet, the same innovations can help with prayer, said Rabbi Polish, noting how many religious texts are now available online.

“The extreme Orthodox have made use of cell phones to access vast storehouses of information,” he said.

He recalled a recent service within the Hasidic community. “When it comes time to pray, they all pull out the cell phone and open to the appropriate app,” he said. “We were praying literally off our phones.”

Related Coverage: Anthropologist Researches Internet Use in Ultra-Orthodox Communities

And in a bonus track, Sister Johnson reflects on the recent death of renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, an avowed atheist.

Full transcript below:

Patrick Verel: For Christians, Jesus’ death on the cross atoned for the sins of humans, and his suffering is directly connected to our salvation. But what if there were a way to extend that belief in salvation beyond humans to all created beings? I’m Patrick Verel, and today my guest is Elizabeth Johnson, CSJ, a Distinguished Professor of Theology and author of Creation and the Cross, which was published last month by Orbis Press. Now, cosmic redemption is a big part of this book. What is it, and why has it fallen out of favor in recent centuries?

Elizabeth Johnson: Cosmic redemption is the idea that all of creation will be saved, every last galaxy, every last earthworm, every portion of the great world that God has created has a future with us in glory with God. It dropped out of awareness in churches’ consciousness pretty much around the 16th century, with the Reformation, Martin Luther and John Calvin and others focused their question on salvation of humans. The question was, how can I find a gracious God? The answer was through the death of Jesus on the cross.

The issue was, therefore, very focused on human beings and our sinfulness and our need to be redeemed. That tremendous focus on human beings blocked out the whole rest of creation. Once the Protestant reformists began asking that question, the Catholic church began responding. The debate really, the Protestants said, “We are saved by faith alone in Jesus Christ on the cross, and the grace alone.” Catholics answered back, “Yes, but we also need to do good works.” That became an internal squabble among Christians, and that diffuseness of that blocked out the rest of creation.

Patrick Verel: Why is Saint Anselm such an important figure when it comes to this story?

Elizabeth Johnson: Okay, Anselm was a 10th and 11th century theologian, a monk, and ultimately the Archbishop of Canterbury. He wrote a wonderful book in Latin called Cur Deus Homo, or in English, Why the God Man. He asked the question, why did God become human and died to save us when He could have done it some other way? He could have shed a tear or done one act of kindness, and that would have solved it.

His answer became enormously influential. His answer was, God became human and died to save us because sin offended the honor of God, and humans had to make satisfaction. Since we are just human creatures and finite, we cannot make satisfaction equal to the glory and honor of God we’ve offended, so an infinite person had to come and do it.

The only way to make satisfaction was to die, because Jesus was sinless and death was understood as a punishment for sin, a result of sin. As the sinless one, he did not have to die, so when he died, he paid back more than was owed to the honor of God. Since he didn’t need any blessing, he shares it all with his brothers and sisters.

Patrick Verel: Okay.

Elizabeth Johnson: The last line of that book Anselm writes, “And so you see, God’s mercy is greater than we could have imagined.” Now, the problem with that is for Anselm’s time, that was an argument that made sense to people because he was living in feudalism, and the lord of the manor, his word was law. There were no police forces, no armies, et cetera.

If you offended the lord, you were breaking up civil orders as well as his own honor. You had to pay it back in a visible way. What Anselm did was take that political arrangement and made it the image of God. That made it cosmic. What has developed is out of that theory is a notion of God as a supreme Lord whose honor is more important to God than God’s mercy. Jesus told parable after parable where God’s mercy violates the norms or the expectations. You think of the Prodigal Son, and so on, that you don’t have to pay back, you see.

God’s mercy comes and saves you regardless. You don’t need to pay, but it became tit for tat, like we had to earn our salvation. We have to pay back and Jesus was the one who paid it back. The cross became a prerequisite for God to be merciful, and that has done terrible damage to the image of God.

Patrick Verel: Creation and the Cross has been constructed in a dialogue form, which is similar to the way that Saint Anselm wrote many of his works. Why did you do that?

Elizabeth Johnson: I did that because Anselm has been so influential, whether you realize it or not, right? I wanted to have like an alternative to Anselm, in the same vein. So, he chose a monk named Boso, seriously B-O-S-O it’s spelled, who used to ask him a lot of questions about things, and set him up as a dialogue partner in this book.

I invented an interlocutor to myself whom I named Clara from the Latin word for light, and I said that she’s an amalgamation of all the very smart, insightful young men and women whom I have taught over the course of my teaching life. It becomes a conversation between a teacher and students in a way, that is easier to follow rather than whole paragraphs of argument.

Patrick Verel: Then the main argument of the book is that cross represents more than just salvation from sin. It’s, and I quote, “An icon of how God is present with all creatures in their suffering and death.” Now, is this a new argument?

Elizabeth Johnson: It’s a very ancient argument, but it’s one that we haven’t paid attention to, right? You can find this, again, in the Bible, in the New Testament, understandings of the death and resurrection of Christ, is that, in Jesus Christ, God became one with us in the flesh, to quote John’s gospel, right?

The flesh was human flesh, but our human flesh, we realize today, is part of the whole flesh of the community of life on earth. I mean, we take in food and air, it keeps us alive. We have evolved out of the whole community of life on earth. I’m using the expression, “Community of life,” which is a key expression in Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato si’.

To try to make ourselves realize we’re not the only ones prancing around on this planet, but as humans, we are part of a wonderful community of life and that what we say about God, we need to bring that community of life mainstream into our dogmatic teaching and our preaching and our liturgies. The idea in scripture that when the word became flesh and dwelled among us, it was God becoming bonded personally with human beings, but also with all flesh on the earth, with matter.

His genes, Jesus’ genes were of the Hebrew line of the human race, the cells in his body were made of gases and materials that had exploded in the stars billions of years ago, just like our own. Part of God became bonded to the universe humanly, physically as a cosmic event. So, in his death, God is with all creatures who die, not just with humans, but with the pelican chick, and the deer being chased by the lion and so on.

Also, then in the resurrection of the body of Jesus Christ, it’s the beginning of the future of all flesh. If the resurrection means anything is that there’s a future for creation, that everything doesn’t end up in annihilation, but the love of God that created it all is powerful enough to redeem it all. At the end of Laudato si’, Pope Francis writes that, “At the end of history, we will all be together enjoying the beauty of God,” that’s his view of heaven, “and all creatures be splendidly transfigured,” and I’m quoting here, “Will share with us in that joy.”

Patrick Verel: So, if people took this notion to heart, how do you think that will change their outlook on life?

Elizabeth Johnson: I think it would do two things. It would expand our consciousness as human beings on this planet that we are not the king of the hill, so to speak, that we have neighbors and relatives of different species than ourselves. To put us in a context, when God spoke to Job in the book of Job, the first question God says to him is, “And where were you when I created the world?” As if you think you can rule everything. Put us back in a humble position.

The second thing that flows from that is a tremendously powerful impetus for ethics, for ecological care of the earth, for responsibility for the lives of all these others in the air, in the sea, on the land, that we are basically wiping out, making species go extinct as Pope Francis says in Laudato si’, that should be for us a cause of personal suffering to see all this death. Many people in the church are still merrily going on their way as if this is not a religious matter.

Patrick Verel: This notion that Christians have a duty to protect the environment, it’s gotten a lot of attention and obviously you delved into it in great detail in your 2014 book called Ask the Beasts, that one, and the God of Love, and as you mentioned Pope Francis had his encyclical Laudato si’. What’s the common thread between all of these?

Elizabeth Johnson: We live on a marvelous Blue Planet, and we’re destroying it, so wake up.

Bonus track

Patrick Verel: It’s so funny that we’re talking about this now, and Stephen Hawking, of all people, just died.

Elizabeth Johnson: Yes.

Patrick Verel: What was your take on him?

Elizabeth Johnson: He was fabulous. Now, he was an atheist, avowed atheist.

Patrick Verel: Yeah.

Elizabeth Johnson: And so, A Brief History of Time, you know his famous book, at the end of it he’s talking about all the ways equations can explain galaxies and this and that, black holes, everything, and he says, “What is the power that created these equations that makes the universe run this way”, and when I talk about this I always say, “In the integrity of his own atheism, he leaves that question hanging, he leaves it unanswered”, which I honor that. I mean that’s what he … He didn’t know where it all … But, as Christians, we can say, well we think we have an answer. We think this came from the love of God.

Patrick Verel: That’s interesting. It makes him seem more like an agnostic.

Elizabeth Johnson: He’s not like Richard Dawkins or those other idiots. They know nothing about religion and they dis … I mean they’re as bad as the fundamentalists, who just dismiss science.

Patrick Verel: Yeah.

Elizabeth Johnson: I mean the two of them, I wanna say a plague on both your houses, no don’t. Really, but-

Patrick Verel: We’ll edit that out.

Elizabeth Johnson: No, leave it in. No, but Dawkins, yeah, no, I mean I would say he was a rigorous atheist. He really didn’t believe there was anything remotely that he could name God anyway, but he wasn’t damning those who thought, not saying we’re all idiots if we thought otherwise, but I think having that question lined up that way, after all his study, is a beautiful in road to say, someone who lives with faith doesn’t have anymore data than the scientists do in terms of the material world, the physical world evolution and all of that. It has a different interpretation of it. It has a different take on it, sees it with different lens, and the lens says we push it to the ultimate. It comes from the infinite generosity of a loving God. And that makes my life meaningful.

So, I can’t force you to believe this and I can’t prove it either, and that’s why faith is faith. We walk by faith not by sight. It’s not proved, but you have a lot of reasons that can back it up. You have the community that’s trying to live this out, and so on and so forth.

]]> 87367 https://now.fordham.edu/campus-locations/lincoln-center/mcginley-lecture-offers-insights-jewish-christian-muslim-reformations/ Mon, 20 Nov 2017 18:39:49 +0000 https://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=80463 The annual fall McGinley lecture wrestled with a multifaceted question: How can the clash of great empires and cultural worlds of the past bring new perspectives on reformation in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions of faith? 

Father Patrick J. Ryan, the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society, suggested that the collisions of various empires might have signaled, supported, and even inspired reformation in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

“Sometimes reformation has happened in reaction against colliding,” he said at the Nov. 14 lecture at the Lincoln Center campus. “At other times, the very collision of worlds has sparked reformation.”

Jerusha Tanner Lamptey, Ph.D., an assistant professor of Islam and interreligious engagement at the Union Theological Seminary, and Rabbi Daniel Polish, Ph.D., the spiritual leader of the Congregation Shir Chadash, acted as respondents to Father Ryan’s lecture.

A ‘tragic irony’

Father Ryan’s lecture, which coincided with the fifth centenary of the Lutheran reformation, took into account the reform movements that were incited by Kings Hezekiah and Josiah as well as the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah. He also explored 19^th century Reform Judaism.

“Reform Judaism enabled many hitherto purely nominal Jews or immigrant Jews to understand two basic elements of the faith, the oneness of God and the call of the chosen people to spread the light of monotheistic faith,” he said.

In the case of Christianity, Father Ryan stressed that the collisions of both empires and cultures have been significant in the Protestant reformations as well as the Anglican and Catholic reformations. He said that in the late 15^th century, Europeans first encountered new worlds in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. But the agents of the Catholic reformation were more likely to evangelize these populations than Protestants, he said.

Father Ryan emphasized that Martin Luther was, however, eager to convert Jews after becoming convinced by Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans that salvation would come to the Jews only after the evangelization of Gentiles was complete. The Lutheran reformation went down a dark path in 1543 when Luther published anti-Semitic writings that called for the violent destruction of the Jews.

“All of us who call ourselves Christian, heirs of one or another reformation—Protestant, Anglican or Catholic—need to examine our past in such a way as to liberate ourselves and our world from imprisonment in history,” he said.

Rabbi Polish likewise acknowledged Luther’s anti-Semitism, but said he was also struck by the commonalities of Reform Judaism and Lutheranism. Just as Luther rejected practices of the church that were not directly mandated in scripture, early reformers of German Judaism rejected the notion of an authoritative rabbinical interpretation of scriptures.

“Both Luther and early Jewish reformers shared commitment to the vernacular,” he said, adding that early Jewish reformers believed in a “perfect symbiosis of their German culture and their Jewish inheritance.”

Of course, this became a tragic irony in the context of the Hitler era, he said.

“The futile aspiration of early reformers to be accepted by their fellow Germans ended with the extermination of their community,” he said.

Authority in the past, present, and future

In his assessment of reform in Islam, Father Ryan affirmed that the first Muslims in seventh-century Arabia saw Islam as “a reform of what had come earlier in the Jewish and Christian tradition of faith.”

“Muhammad’s prophetic vocation made him, in the Islamic theology of history, the last of a series of great prophets and especially of those prophets who are characterized in Islamic tradition by the term rasul, messenger,” he said.

Father Ryan noted that between the 15^th and the 19^th centuries, Muslims like the Egyptian polymath Jalal al-din al-Suyuti and the northern Nigerian Usumanu dan Fodio considered themselves to be mujaddids or reformers of Islam.

Self-described Mahdis or messianic leaders also started uprisings in Sudan and Saudi Arabia in 1881 and 1979, which coincided with the start of the 14^th and 15^th Muslim centuries.

Like the leaders before them, these reformers believed that they were responding to perceived threats to the Islamic tradition by great empires or repressive regimes, Father Ryan said. There are some echoes of this as well in the ISIS insurgency that assailed Syria and Iraq after 2014.

“That the partisans of ISIS first chose to create their ideal state across the borders of Iraq and Syria demonstrates how much ISIS is a delayed response to and reaction against European colonial parceling out of the central Arab world in the aftermath of World War I,” he said.

Lamptey cited trends in recent Islamic feminist interpretations of Islam as concrete examples of contemporary Islamic reform. She said these distinct interpretations were focused on egalitarian or a recovery of “real Islamic tradition’.”

“They argue that the Quran is fundamentally egalitarian, that it depicts an undifferentiated, ungendered human creation, [and]a divine sovereignty….and that the Quran is silent on any accounts of women in a secondary status,” she said.

While the Islamic feminist pioneers recognized that there were limitations and discrepancies in these interpretations, she said they attributed them to context and human interpretation.

“They seek to address those concerns by returning to the supposedly pristine beginnings and uncorrupted sources of the Islamic tradition,” she said.

But deep down, subtle forms of racism have long been embedded in some of the most influential institutions in the United States.

In The Sin of White Supremacy: Christianity, Racism and Religious Diversity in America (Orbis, 2017), Jeannine Hill Fletcher, Ph.D., professor of theology, examines theology’s culpability in perpetuating ideas that elevate both Christianity and whiteness over all else.

The book was inspired by Hill Fletcher’s work as the faculty director of Fordham’s Service Learning program. As the program sent students to work in communities of color, workshops on racism have been a part of the student preparation, said Hill Fletcher. As a result, she became very familiar with practices, such as redlining, that have led to racialized disparities that continue today.  And she began to ask questions about theology’s role in securing rights for some people and denying them to others.

“In my studies of the theologies of the religious ‘other,’ I recognized that the ideology of Christian supremacy was actually a piece that informed legislation that dispossessed native people,” she said.

“Theology was being constructed in a way that made it seem reasonable to say that only Christians had rights to the land. It was producing ideas that made it reasonable to believe that enslaved Africans were better off because they’re with Christian masters.”

Exhibit A for this thinking, she said, is the Doctrine of Discovery, which scholars trace back to documents like those issued in 1493 by Pope Alexander VI. The protocol, which was embraced by European kings and queens, stipulated that if explorers from a Christian nation encountered settlers from another Christian nation in a new land, the new explorers had no rights to it. If, on the other hand, a non-Christian community was present, the Christian nation had the rights to the land—either by force or by purchase.

This principle was practiced over several hundred years, and was made government policy in 1823, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Native Americans could never lay claim to ownership of land. Chief Justice John Marshall, writing for a unanimous court, cited the doctrine as precedent for the decision, in the case Johnson v. M’Intosh.

“In most cases, you can’t trace a direct cause from something a theologian says to this kind of practical output,” Hill Fletcher said.

“But theologians have always had the ability to lend symbolic capital to ideas. These ideas can create conditions [that]have real-life effects.”

Although several Christian churches are wrestling with the legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery, the Catholic Church has not yet officially repudiated it, Hill Fletcher said. It still has effects today in the struggle for Indigenous Nations’ sovereignty and self-determination.

“I know a lot of white Christians who are upset by what’s happening at Standing Rock, and upset by our segregated communities. But they don’t necessarily see how our Christian patterns over the last several hundred years have created the conditions for those things, so they don’t feel responsible for them,” she said.

“We are responsible for the realities that we see in front of us, and we need to rethink our theologies in order to address that.”

Even today, Hill Fletcher said theologians inadvertently make white Christian supremacy appear reasonable. Teaching, for instance, that Jesus is the savior of all people can be problematic.

“When a theologian teaches that, he is normalizing that to be human is to be Christian, and to be non-Christian is to be somehow ‘other,’ and that people of other faith traditions might be lesser Americans—maybe even lesser human beings,” she said.  This has the practical effect, for example, in politicians’ calls to admit only Christian minority refugees into the country.

Hill Fletcher said she was inspired by the work of Fordham alumnus Craig Wilder, Ph.D., Barton L. Weller Professor of History at M.I.T. and author of Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).

The book’s August release coincided with a week in which large numbers of white supremacists felt comfortable enough to march publicly for the first time in years. Hill Fletcher noted that, although such overt racism is new to the 21st century, the underlying issues are not.

“It was a crisis under enslavement. It was a crisis in abolition. It was a crisis under Jim Crow. It was a crisis for the Chinese workers in the 19th century, and it was a crisis for Native American peoples,” she said.

“It has been a crisis since the founding our country.”

In the ancient world, however, it was a powerful idea that had to do with more than just physical health. Food and mother’s milk were seen as related to character, and would also become symbols of spiritual growth and nourishment among the earliest Christians, according to a new book by a Fordham-educated scholar of religion.

“That you are formed according to the one feeding you is something you would see often in both Roman and early Christian literature,” said John Penniman, Ph.D., GSAS ’15, assistant professor in the religious studies department at Bucknell University.

His book, Raised on Christian Milk: Food and the Formation of the Soul in Early Christianity (Yale University Press, 2017), was released last spring. Penniman spoke with FORDHAM magazine about how the idea emerged as he was earning his doctorate in Fordham’s theology department—and his surprise discovery about how much history you can find behind a common catchphrase.

How did you get the idea for this book?

It began during my doctoral work at Fordham, when I was thinking about how early Christians talked about being formed properly according to their ideals. In ancient and early Christian literature, I began to regularly notice references to food, nurturance, breastfeeding, and maternity, even when that wasn’t literally what was being described. It was being used to talk about how to properly form the soul, in a certain sense, so I began to explore the use of food to talk about formation, and focused on a New Testament passage where the apostle Paul says to the Corinthians, “You are not ready for solid food, so I gave you milk to drink instead”—because they are still infants and not fully formed, essentially.

In early Christian literature, this passage gets interpreted in wildly different ways. It seems like Paul is saying the Corinthians are infantile and not ready for advanced teachings. Others in later generations of early Christianity used that passage as a way to think, “Well, in these circumstances it would be good to be infantile because you are being properly fed, you’re being fed by the right source, you’re not getting ‘wrong’ food that’s going to deform you.”

Why was this such a potent metaphor for Paul to use?

The metaphor was widely used to think about growth and character formation in that period. It actually drew upon deep political and social values that were much broader in the Roman empire than just early Christians, and these values looked at mother’s milk as literally a carrier for moral character, for social belonging, for intellectual capacities, even for social legitimacy or ethnic belonging in certain respects. Milk was politicized in really significant ways in the Roman empire, and my argument is that Paul is actually drawing upon this symbolic value when he’s evoking it metaphorically.

Does this mean the Romans believed in nurture rather than nature?

What I discovered, and what was really surprising to me, was that you could be born into a really highly regarded aristocratic family, but it was thought that if you weren’t fed properly, you would become deformed in character and soul, and by that they often meant who nursed you as a child, who minded you as a child. Nurture was shaping nature in that way; your nature wasn’t complete at birth, according to ancient Roman medical and moral thought, and early Christians really picked up on this. It wasn’t that they emphasized nurture more than nature, it’s that the categories themselves were really slippery and didn’t uphold that dichotomy in quite the same way that we think about it today.

Was solid food invested with the same importance that milk was?

In one early Christian text, by Origen of Alexandria, solid food functions as a metaphor for social status. He basically says the rustic folks who work out in the fields don’t have the palate or the stomach for rich foods compared to folks who live in the city, who have more means, so they must be given lighter fare. From this he sort of spins out a way to say not everybody can be taught the same way. And he thinks this is quite natural—the higher-status person in the city is going to eat richer foods, more animal protein, whereas the farmer is going to have blander foods and less animal protein, and for him that becomes a way to ask, what are the “solid foods” to which one could aspire spiritually?

Did these early thinkers give us the cliché “you are what you eat”?

The 19th-century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach is the one that really popularized it. And he was mocked for it—people thought he was being reductive and overly materialistic. What’s fascinating is that in defending himself he turned to the ancient world and how ancient people thought about food. So I unexpectedly discovered that this cliché leads us directly into the ancient world, and that food has always been this deeper, more deeply significant symbol that you take into yourself.

But this concept of authority and impartiality, according to Patrick J. Ryan, S.J., evolved a great deal over the years. In “Judging Justly: Judgment in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Traditions,” Father Ryan, Fordham’s Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society, explored how Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faiths contributed to that idea through their own unique traditions.

He framed his discussion of judgment with the tragic story of how three High Court judges in Ghana were murdered in 1982 precisely because they had given judicial redress to people convicted by a kangaroo court under a military regime.

In remarks delivered on March 28 and March 29 as part of the annual Spring McGinley Lecture,

Father Ryan delved into examples from scripture that illustrated how the faithful have struggled with concepts such as mercy and justice. In the Book of Genesis, he noted that God, whom Jews regard as the supreme judge, had a “crowded docket”: Weighing in on the fratricide of Cain, and condemning the corrupt and violent contemporaries of Noah yet sparing the ark-builder and his family.

In Christian scripture, he recalled an account in the Gospel of John, where Jesus is confronted by “the scribes and the Pharisees” asking him to judge a woman caught in the act of adultery. Jesus play-acted the role of judge, writing on the ground, and finally declaring, Jesus’ declaration “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” illustrates the importance of impartiality and fairness.

“When Jesus finally rises from his play-acting, he finds that all the guilty accusers of the woman have departed, ‘one by one, beginning with the elders,’” Father Ryan said.

“One possible reason that the placement of this Gospel passage in the New Testament has proven so problematic may be that the discipline of the early church, in cases of adultery, was much less merciful than that of Jesus.”    *       

In Islam, as in Christianity and Judaism, God is also the ultimate judge, he said. His command and judgment are closely associated with the commands and judgments issued by the Messenger, the Prophet Muhammad. That practice continued after Muhammad’s death via judges who were concretized as the caliphs’ appointees in the Sunni tradition from the seventh to at least the 13th century, and the appointees of the imams in the Shi‘i tradition.

A qadi, or judge in the Sunni Muslim tradition, was appointed by the caliphs in the seventh century, and gradually began to exercise judicial functions in the eighth century, said Father Ryan. When the Turkish government suppressed the caliphate in 1924, however, a central religious-political institution was lost. Since then, Muslim judges are often appointed by national or regional governments. This has led to some controversial rulings in Nigeria, in particular, he noted, involving the amputation of hands for sheep-stealing, as well as overly zealous accusations of adultery against women based on circumstantial evidence only.

“Better trained Muslim judges, with expertise in comparative law and a broader vision of Islamic jurisprudence, can be found in many of the Gulf States,” he said. “But there have been highly problematic judgments handed down by judges, not only in northern Nigeria but also in Saudi Arabia and Egypt in recent decades.”

Respondents to Father Ryan’s lecture included Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology at Fordham, and Ebru Turan, Ph.D., assistant professor of history at Fordham. Gribetz highlighted two passages from Genesis Rabbah and the Babylonian Talmud and one from the Torah that illustrate the ongoing debate between mercy and justice in God’s mind. God is compared to a king who holds up two empty cups and notes that they will crack when filled with cold water and burst when filled with hot water. The temperatures are stand-ins for too much mercy and too much justice.

“[They] represent radical extremes-order and chaos, suffocating restriction and unbounded freedom. Each on their own is assumed to be too dangerous—so dangerous that it will shatter, crack or deform the world,” she said.

Turan further developed Father Ryan’s history of how the role of judge developed historically in the Muslim tradition. The Ottoman Empire, from the 13th to the early 20th century, developed a system of training legal scholars for such posts. With the break-up of the Ottoman Empire after 1918, modern Turkey appoints judges with a much more secular orientation.

Father Ryan said offered three conclusions from the faith traditions’ experiences with justice:

-Judges need protection from manipulative politicians, established ruling classes, and populist demagogues. He cited as examples the Roman-dominated Hebrew sanhedrins, Pope Urban II commanding Christian knights to go on Crusade, and modern “Muslim muftis” who “declare every military adventure of a Middle Eastern dictator a jihad.”

-Judges should have excellent legal credentials, a deep understanding of the law in their own tradition, and a sense of comparative law. There is no room in the courtroom for mediocre judges.

-Judges benefit from differences in legal opinion, or “ikhtilaf,” an Islamic concept being promoted by movements concerned with the status of Muslim women. This contrasts with the generally approved idea of Islamic  legal consensus, or “ijma,” relied on by Orthodox Jews, Catholic Christians, and the various Eastern Christian Churches.

A Fordham scholar shines new light on Christianity’s formative years in Syria, where Islamic State militants are looting and seeking to destroy the country’s past.

To get a sense of how the earliest Christians approached their faith, just look at the art they left behind. In January 1932, an international team of archaeologists unearthed several frescoes in Dura-Europos, an ancient walled city along the banks of the Euphrates River in southeastern Syria, near the Iraq border. The paintings—including some of the earliest-known depictions of Jesus—had adorned the walls of what scholars soon realized was the oldest known house of Christian worship in the world.

Established around A.D. 240, when Christians were still a persecuted minority in the Roman Empire, the church didn’t thrive for long. By 256, a Sasanian army had destroyed the border city, leaving the site abandoned for centuries.

A Cultural Heritage at Risk

By the 1930s, Dura-Europos had come to be known as the “Pompeii of the Syrian desert.” In addition to the church, archaeologists found evidence of a multilingual, multicultural society. They discovered one of the world’s oldest synagogues, temples to Greek and Roman gods, shrines to Sumerian and Syrian goddesses, and many well-preserved artifacts of daily life.

Today, however, the city’s ruins lie in territory controlled by Islamic State militants, who loot archaeological sites to generate revenue and attract attention. They’ve also put Christians and others in mortal peril as Syria’s civil war drags on.

For much of the past five years, Michael Peppard, Ph.D., associate professor of theology at Fordham, was working on a book about the excavation and interpretation of the Dura-Europos church—a site he was unable to visit due to the ongoing war. “Until about a year ago, the main question [people asked me] was, ‘What new is there to say about such an old discovery?’” he wrote in America magazine last January, when his book, The World’s Oldest Church: Bible, Art, and Ritual at Dura-Europos, Syria, was published by Yale University Press. “But now the first question everyone asks is, ‘What has happened to the site—did they … destroy it?’”

The answer, he wrote, is “both no and yes.” Many artifacts were removed decades ago, and several panels of the church frescoes are on display at Yale. But satellite photos have shown extensive looting, “which all but destroys [the site] for future archaeological purposes.”

The Cradle of Christianity

The cultural and human tragedies of the war were never far from Peppard’s mind as he worked on the book, which he dedicated to “the people of Syria, the cradle of Christianity.” In the book, he transports readers to Christianity’s formative years, combining theology and art history to prove that there are, in fact, new things to say about “such an old discovery.” He makes the case for a completely different understanding of several images from the site, most notably the image of a woman at a well.

Since the 1930s, almost everyone has assumed that she is the Samaritan woman from the Gospel of John, and that she symbolizes baptism, as represented by the “living water” of the well. Peppard contends that the painting is actually a portrayal of the Annunciation, “when Mary is told she is going to bear a son as a virgin.” He notes that Byzantine images of that scene, though produced much later, bear “an arresting formal resemblance” to the figure from Dura-Europos.

“If the image is the Virgin Mary, then not only is it probably the earliest datable image of Mary, but it’s also going to change the way we interpret the artistic program of this church,” Peppard said. The image of women processing, wearing white veils and carrying torches, has likewise been misidentified as a funeral procession, he said, when in fact it’s a wedding procession.

The Hope of a Spiritual Rebirth

Taken together, the paintings illustrate that these Christians emphasized empowerment, healing, and marriage more than death and resurrection. This isn’t surprising, he said, because “in this earliest Christian church, we don’t have any imagery of the resurrection. I think they certainly believed in it, and that it was part of their faith in who Jesus was and what it meant to be a Christian, but it’s a matter of emphasis.” For Peppard, the frescoes are ultimately about the “hope of new spiritual birth,” particularly in light of the ongoing war in Syria.

They’re “much more than museum pieces,” he wrote last January in a New York Times article on his research. “They illuminate a people and heritage that need salvation.”

In the case of “The World’s Oldest Church,” a new book by Michael Peppard, PhD, the art can be found in a third-century house-church in Dura-Europos, a walled city along the banks of the Euphrates River that once stood in present day Syria.

For Peppard, associate professor of theology, the book, published this month by Yale University Press, is an ambitious attempt to combine theology and art history to tell a new story about the oldest known house of Christian worship.

In addition to offering an up-to-date compendium of scholarship on the building, Peppard makes the case for a completely different understanding of three images that were found there: one of David and Goliath, one of a procession of women, and one of a woman at a well. All three were excavated in the 1930s and are housed at the Yale University Art Gallery.

Peppard said he is most excited about the image of the woman at a well. Almost everyone assumes that she is the Samaritan woman from the Gospel of John and that she symbolizes baptism, as represented by the “living water” of the well. Peppard said that the painting is actually a portrayal of the annunciation, “when Mary is told she is going to bear a son as a virgin.”

“If the image is the Virgin Mary, then not only is it probably the earliest datable image of Mary, but it’s also going to change the way we interpret the artistic program of this church, and maybe change the way we think about what they thought they were doing there,” Peppard said.

The image of women processing has likewise been misidentified, he said, as a funeral procession when in fact it’s a wedding procession.

Taken together, the paintings illustrate that these Christians emphasized empowerment, healing, marriage, and incarnation more than death and resurrection. This isn’t surprising, he said, because very few images of the Crucifixion exist from this time.

“In this earliest Christian church, we don’t have any imagery of the resurrection. I think they certainly believed in it, and that it was part of their faith in who Jesus was and what it meant to be a Christian, but it’s a matter of emphasis,” he said.

“So what are they emphasizing if they’re not emphasizing the cross and resurrection in this baptistery? They are emphasizing imagery of marriage, which is very common in Syrian Christianity—that becoming a Christian was like getting married to Christ and having a covenant with God.”

The story of Dura-Europos illustrates how Christianity evolved differently in different regions, he said. In the year 300 A.D. Christians were spread as far east as Dura-Europos and as far west and north as present day Morocco, Spain, and France. The Roman emperor Constantine had not yet converted to Christianity (which would make it the mainstream faith in the Roman empire), and communication and travel were still difficult.

Peppard also wondered why the baptistery of this church would feature a fairly grim image of David and Goliath. It might be because, at the time, Dura-Europos was the last outpost before one crossed the river into Persia and the Sasanian Empire, the most fearsome empire next to the Roman Empire.

“The Goliath image is in the style of a Persian warrior, so they’re styling their enemy in the guise of their real enemy in the world. This is part of their militaristic imagination. They feel threatened by this goliath across the river, so they imagine their initiation as Christians as empowering—gaining the power of David so that they can, when they need to be, be ready for the battles in their life,” he said.

“This is an urban outpost in the middle of nowhere in Eastern Syria, in the desert perched above the Euphrates. Let’s not presume they were like Christians from 2,000 miles away who they’d never heard or talked to.”

For his semiannual McGinley Lecture, delivered on April 8, Patrick J. Ryan, S.J., examined the moral and religious questions that have always surrounded usury—more commonly referred to today as interest, the bane of credit card holders everywhere.

“I dedicate my lecture to my credit card company … that recently tried to charge me $24.34 in interest and late fees on a bill for $2,” said Father Ryan, the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society, at the outset of his talk, “Usury: A Moral Concern for Jews, Christians and Muslims.”

From that light beginning, he delved far back into history, to the Book of Exodus, which forbade Israelites to charge one another interest, and exhorted them to repay loans in short order. The ability to lend at interest to non-Jews helped the Jews survive during the diaspora that followed the Roman devastation of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., Father Ryan said. Other “landless merchant minorities” have included the Armenians, Parsees, Huguenots and Quakers, he said.

Until the 16th century, Christian authorities opposed the charging of interest, finding justification in the words of Christ, Father Ryan said. St. Thomas Aquinas condemned the practice, “claiming that it involves selling the same thing twice: the money loaned and the use of that money,” he said.

Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians “eventually overcame their hostility to charging interest on loans as money came increasingly to be recognized as a commodity that fluctuated in value—like fresh fruit and vegetables—and that its use as a loan involved a risk for the lender, a risk that had to be shared with the borrower,” Father Ryan said.

Today, most Christian churches only define usury as interest that’s excessive. “Some form of reasonable interest is more or less taken for granted,” he said.

Father Ryan spoke at the Lincoln Center campus and delivered the lecture again on April 9 at the Rose Hill campus. The lecture took a “trialogue” format, with visiting Jewish and Muslim scholars offering responses to Father Ryan’s talk.

Hussein Rashid, Ph.D., a professor of religion at Hofstra University, said the proscription of usury in Muslim thought “must be seen as part of an ethical complex that forces an individual to consider their obligations to God and to God’s creation, including humanity,” he said.

“The network of conditions on capital revolve around the idea that it is meant to be put into service” and not hoarded through the charging of interest, he said.

Rabbi Daniel Polish, Ph.D., of Congregation Shir Chadash in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., said the presence of usurers and financial fraudsters poses a challenge to all three faiths.

“How do each of our traditions go about educating our adherents that ‘religion’ is not limited to ritual, or expressions of faith, that ethics and morality are not restricted to sexual matters … that our work and the way we pursue it is a powerful witness to our faith commitments or a mockery of it?” he said.

“This is a subject we would do well to struggle with together.”

The 21st-century world is shrinking.

But even as globalization becomes the reality, Christian theology still struggles to make sense of the dilemma of religious difference: If Christians believe in the truth of their tradition, does that mean that billions of believers in other faiths are wrong?

According to Jeannine Hill Fletcher, Th.D., a professor of theology who specializes in systematic and feminist theology, the reason that theology has stalled on matters of religious diversity is due in part to a reliance on deductive methodologies that begin exclusively with Christian tradition and doctrine.

“Theologians have tended to ask, ‘What does the Bible say? What has tradition said?’ and then take this body of theological principles and apply them to the situation of having a neighbor of a different faith,” said Hill Fletcher, who has published widely on religious pluralism and interreligious dialogue. “That approach has gotten us far, but not far enough.”

She argues that by zeroing in on established Christian tradition, the doctrinal method misses what actually happens when members of different faiths come together. “Our thinking about religious diversity is compromised by not having this on-the-ground sense of actual human beings,” she said. “We project things theologically that don’t match people’s lived realities.”

Moreover, because the history of Christianity consists mostly of the experiences and teachings of men, theology’s continued use of a doctrinal approach means that women’s voices are largely absent from the conversation.

In her newly released book, Motherhood as Metaphor: Engendering Interreligious Dialogue (Fordham University Press, 2013), Hill Fletcher asks what difference would it make if the conversation no longer pivoted on Christian doctrine, but rather the experiences of those working on the ground—especially women.

She discusses three examples of on-the-ground interreligious work being done by women: the missionary work of Maryknoll Sisters in China prior to World War II; the secular feminist movement; and a contemporary interfaith dialogue group that began in Philadelphia in 2001. Using archival information and interviews, she examines how the women work with people of other faiths and what we can learn from their experiences.

She found that in all three case studies, the women recognized that their work as missionaries, suffragettes, and activists brought them into contact with other women embedded in roles as mothers, daughters, caregivers, and breadwinners. As a result, they tended to tacitly appreciate that individuals are more than their religious, cultural, or national identities; each person is part of a complex network of roles and relationships, all of which contributes to who he or she is.

Such an appreciation, she said, also had profound theological implications.

“[For instance,] the Maryknoll missionaries went with a clear direction—they wanted to convert women [to Christianity]. And their early letters were all about saving these poor women and bringing them to the light,” she said. “But then you see them struggle with this cognitive dissonance, where they begin to see these other women as complex, part of this multiplicity… So the [Christian] teaching that they’ve inherited is put into conversation with a lived experience, and some of their theological thinking changes.”

Their appreciation of this complexity illustrates a key feminist theory of personhood—that the most accurate way to conceptualize ourselves is not as individuals primarily, which is the popular modern conception, but rather as relational beings, individuals embedded within networks of relationships.

As the title suggests, Hill Fletcher employs the metaphor of motherhood throughout the book to describe what a deeper appreciation of this complexity would look like.

“It’s not about biological motherhood. It’s about thinking about how that subject position of mother illuminates something about relationality and our need to care for others,” she said. “It’s a metaphor for our caring for one another and bringing one another into being beyond family and beyond community for a world that needs care.”

Theology, she said, needs to mirror the complexity of lived experience. In terms of religious identity, this would mean that whether one identifies as Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or Buddhist is less important than how these traditions have contributed to who one is.

“The doctrinal approach has categorized people as [Christians and] non-Christians, but these on-the-ground experiences approach the religious other with a much more complex notion,” she said. “We need our theologies to take seriously the fact that religion isn’t just about what I believe or what I do on certain days of the week. It’s about a complex dynamic of who I am as a human being.”

While making headway on this question of religious diversity is indeed important for Christian theology, Hill Fletcher said that it is critical for an increasingly globalized world, where people of different nationalities, cultures, and religions are no longer anonymous others, but instead are neighbors, coworkers, and friends.

“We can’t afford not to get to know our neighbors of other faiths. We can’t afford not to cooperate across religious lines,” she said. “The world that we live in—we’re in this together. So either we find those ways to get to know each other, appreciate each other, and maybe do some interesting theological thinking together, or we close in on ourselves.”