2013-05-21T15:31:41-04:00 John Thatamanil http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=john-thatamanil Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for John Thatamanil Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2797055 2013-03-02T18:22:28-05:00 2013-05-02T05:12:02-04:00

John Thatamanil http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-thatamanil/ Lent note: HuffPost Religion invites you to share your Lent reflections, experiences, stories and photos with us. Send them to religion@huffingtonpost.com and check out our Lent liveblog.

Lent can be for Christians a dour and dispiriting time because we suppose it to be a season to remember our sinfulness and move into repentance. But might Lent be reimagined as a season of joy? Yes, but only if we rethink "sin" and "repentance."

Sin is a word we are too quick to utter. It is, by no means, the primary word to be said about the human condition. That first word must be vulnerability. The second is woundedness. The third word is sin, a word that names not only our wounds but that we, in turn, wound others and ourselves. If we are to use the term, we must deploy it with great caution as it can exacerbate injuries rather than bring about healing. Only after we have spoken of vulnerability, woundedness, and sin can we turn to talk of repentance.

To be human is to be vulnerable. We are soft, fleshy beings who inhabit a universe full of beauty and delight but also danger. Its powers dwarf and overwhelm us. Not only are we vulnerable, but we know also that we must die. When awareness of vulnerability and mortality overwhelms, when the sharp edges of the world threaten us with loss and pain, we understandably act to shield ourselves from hurt and seek our own private well-being. Under these conditions, it is all too easy to be wounded and to wound.

We fragile creatures are wounded by and wound each other, through simple shortsightedness, inattention, partial knowledge, and preoccupation with our own needs and anxieties. Everything then hinges upon how we attend to the sites of our wounding. The gravity of the wounds we suffer can leave us fragmented, persuaded that we lack worth and are unlovable. In the worst cases, we find ourselves tempted to injure as we have been injured. The poison in the one who wounds is felt in the bodies of those who are wounded generating propensities for self and other destruction.

Of course, our propensities to wound and to be wounded are driven by more than compromised personal interactions. We live in the midst of distorted social, cultural, and economic systems into which we are habituated. We are captive to powers and principalities such as capitalism, nationalism, sexism, racism, homophobia, and militarism, to name a few.

The word "sin," is a comprehensive term we use to name these multiple realities. Sin names: 1) The power of structures of violence to wound human beings, other creatures and even the earth itself; 2) It names also our captivity to these powers of psyche and society; 3) Sin also names our collaboration with these powers of destruction. 4) Finally, the term "sin" names the fact that we are estranged from God when we wittingly and unwittingly enter into service to the powers and principalities.

When captive to sin, we adopt ways of being that constrict our finest capacities. We elect by way of inertia and even by furious self-injury to remain enslaved to smallness of spirit, believing that we are unworthy to enter into abundant life. Diminished and injured by abuse, by sociocultural narratives that teach us to despise ourselves because of the color of our skin or the nature of our sexuality, and by the crushing weight of unjust economic structures, the light and joy in our eyes dies a slow death and we become imprisoned. We are not only imprisoned; at our worst, we seek even to imprison others.

To repent is to turn away from captivity to these powers of destruction and enter into the joyous liberation that comes from service to Love. But how does that come about? What makes repentance possible?

At this juncture, Christians remember that Jesus did not call people to repent before they could enter the kingdom of God. He first proclaimed that our sins were already forgiven by the love of the Father and thereby invites all to enter into the coming kingdom. When the gracious proclamation of the God's embrace is heard and received, repentance follows. Repentance is a response to God's love and not its precondition. Repentance is the ongoing recovery of our true dignity as children of God.

But repentance can also be a disposition and a practice. Repentance, as I have come to think of it in light of Buddhist discipline, is not a once and for all act. Rather, it is the constant, moment-by-moment, act of returning, back to focus, back to presence, back to love. It is the realigning of breath, body, mind, heart and will under organizing intentions -- the intention to be gentle with oneself, the intention to be alert to the miraculous plenitude of this evanescent moment. Repentance is also the process by which we extrude from our systems the sociocultural and economic toxins that have seeped into our pores and seek to possess us. It is the sustained application of the anti-venom of love to our bodies, minds and souls.

This commitment to loving presence can be derailed by a posture of chronic self-indictment. Sin talk can hinder rather than help if it keeps us bound to self-negation. The returning is the key. Regardless of the harms I have done to others and myself, what can I do to live this moment and the next, and the next well?

Repentance is the labor of returning to ourselves, returning to our created goodness, and returning to the holy deep. We repent of the injuries that we have caused others but also ourselves. Fundamental to repentance is trust that a fullness of life waits to be born in us. This trust gives us the courage and the strength to refuse any power or way of being in the world that would bind and prevent entry into abundance. When we practice repentance, we seek to be free from captivity to cycles of woundedness and wounding. Reframed in such fashion, the word "repentance" can be emancipated from its narrowly moralistic connotations and can be heard once more as an invitation to joy.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2372220 2012-12-27T17:25:02-05:00 2013-02-26T05:12:01-05:00

John Thatamanil http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-thatamanil/
Newtown and Jesus' Bethlehem are bound together by a common horror: slaughter of the innocents. In Matthew's telling of Jesus's birth, King Herod hears from the wise men disturbing word of a newborn king. Frightened by this threat to his power, he orders the execution of every child under two born in and around Bethlehem.

"A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more" (Matthew 2:18). As soon as news of the shooting began to break, biblically literate Facebook friends began to post on their walls this harrowing verse from the Gospel of Matthew, thereby calling to mind the connection between Newtown and Bethlehem. Reading this text each year compels Christians to confront a hard truth: the Prince of Peace enters a wounded world in which there is no peace. This biblical scene of violence reminds Christians that we have always been asked to perform a difficult task: We are called to proclaim the coming of Emmanuel, God with us, in just those places and times when God seems most absent.

The slaughter of innocents and the birth of a child in excruciating vulnerability -- this is a profoundly counterintuitive way to speak of God's coming. Unlike the light and unblemished merriness that we wish each other every Christmas, the Bible offers no happily-ever-after fairy tale. The world into which the Christian Messiah enters is shattered by terror and ruled by Roman imperial power and its client dictators.

The Gospel narratives suggest that the coming of God does not (then or now) undo our capacity to inflict violence upon each other nor does it radically reconfigure the conditions under which we live out our lives. On the contrary, these very conditions, in all their fragility, are sanctified by incarnation. When God assumes flesh and enters the world, this very world is accepted and embraced.

God does not first remake the world in order to enter it, and entering the world does not diminish the dignity of divinity. The incarnation affirms that our fragility and frailty are not contrary to divine intention. Rather, they too are taken up by divinity when God becomes flesh. This world, as it stands, offers the necessary conditions for love and community. The coming of God as a child affirms that this fragile world is as it ought to be.

God does not come to eradicate vulnerability but to teach us how to welcome it. Love comes to open our eyes to look for holiness not in might and power, not in any futile attempt to secure ourselves against each other by force of arms, but precisely in our delicate bonds with each other.

From womb to tomb, Jesus lives under the watchful eye of Rome's proxy rulers. The threat of violence, arrest and execution haunts his ministry, and it is precisely under these conditions that Jesus proclaims his good news of love of neighbor and love of enemy. Jesus did not issue his call to love in an era that was kinder and less brutal than our own. Instead he taught that love is the energy that is released when vulnerability is embraced. Love is the celebration of our mutual entanglement and our inseparability.

By contrast, every attempt to escape vulnerability brings about a loss of community. When we arm and barricade ourselves against each other, we sever the ties that bind. When we attempt to undo our vulnerability, we are caught in a logical and practical contradiction: We cannot simultaneously move away from and move toward those whom we are called to love.

The American love for the gun and the NRA's vision of an armed and militarized polity are an inversion of the Christmas celebration of the holiness of vulnerability. When we seek refuge in the gun, we refuse our unbearable proximity to each other. Devotion to the gun amounts to an inhuman quest to overcome our vulnerability, the very thing that binds us to each other in need and love.

Jesus' message to his age and ours is clear: Put down your weapons. You cannot defeat your enemies by means of power and violence. Only love can suffice. This is the message of Christmas, and in its light, Christians must testify that love for the gun is idolatrous -- the worship of a false God that cannot save. What Jesus said of money is true also for the gun. You cannot worship God and Bushmaster. Every weaponized attempt to escape our vulnerability is doomed to fail. Rather, we must labor to build the beloved community in which we can be vulnerable together in mutual care and love. This holy work is our only hope.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1873905 2012-09-11T12:34:45-04:00 2012-11-11T05:12:01-05:00

John Thatamanil http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-thatamanil/
Many, especially in New York, remember 9/11 because they cannot forget; the traumatic grip of memory is severe and unrelenting. What can "Never forget!" mean for those who have no choice in the matter?

For most, pausing to remember requires an act of deliberation. We who elect to remember must ponder our motivations. Do we remember to nurse grievance, to fuel Islamophobia, to divide neighbor against neighbor? Or do we perform the work of memory to honor the dead, support the traumatized living, and to recommit ourselves to the difficult and delicate work of healing? Given the enormous power of memory, everything depends on the why.

Perhaps the chief reason to be deliberate about the work of remembering is that our memories are never solely at our disposal. They can be activated and then manipulated by those who know that memories can be mobilized to public ends not of our choosing. The rawness of memory -- its capacity to render the flow of time meaningless and cast us back into a past that never passes -- has the power to inflame. Mindful of the malleability of memory, we must refuse to cede the labor of remembering to those who volunteer to perform that work on our behalf.

The memory of violation also brings with it the abyss of meaninglessness -- that first moment in which we ask, "Why is this happening?" and no answer comes. An open wound that cries out for the consolation of meaning is a precarious site on which the calculating and the opportunistic routinely build. The fires of false patriotism can be fanned, fears mobilized against those whom we cast as other and wars can be launched.

Some few seek to find meaning in suggesting that our wounds were well deserved, that American imperialism met its due reward on 9/11. But this is too thin a tissue to weave over so vast a wound. It seeks to anneal the absurdity of violence by a narrative that consoles no one, not least the families of those who died of no fault of their own, save that they worked in or near the World Trade Center. Such assertions even seem akin to the claims of some who are abused who elect to say that their suffering is deserved rather than acknowledge the wanton and meaningless cruelty of abuse. One does not have to embrace the myth of national innocence in order to recognize the futility in speaking of 9/11 as just deserts for American imperialism.

As a Christian, I am mindful that my tradition is constituted by the work of remembering the wounds suffered by a man who lived 2,000 years ago. It is a matter of perpetual mystery that the tradition insists that even the resurrected body of the Christ remains open. Into his side, Thomas inserts his hand. The resurrected body eternally bears the mark of its wounding.

Tragically, the wounded body of Jesus has itself over these millennia been deployed to wound others, most especially his own people, the Jews, who were accused of being Christ-killers. Christians have sought to close his wound by means of retaliatory violence. Even the injuries of the one whom Christians name Love Incarnate has been deployed in the service of hate. No site of wounding is safe.

But others have found in his wounding the power of a love that refuses to violate in return. Remembering his words on the cross, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do," his followers, Christian and non-Christian (like Gandhi) alike, have transfigured the work of memory to wondrous ends. Bearing in mind that he elected nonviolence as his tool of resistance against the enemies whom he loved, these followers refuse any path that would transform memory into justification for violence. Rather than wound those who wound, these few have testified to the binding power of love rather than the shallow consolation afforded by narratives of suspicion and vengeance.

In the end, no justifying narrative can assuage the wounds we suffer as individuals and as communities, certainly not narratives of vindication through violence. Perhaps Christian narrative refuses to close the wound of Jesus but leaves it open because only a body that remains open to the world in love is an adequate response to violence. The only power that can console is love, a wise love that takes care to remember our common vulnerability and so stands disarmed and open to a future beyond retaliation. The memory of the suffered wound becomes the occasion for a commitment to putting an end to the cycle of violence.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1516548 2012-05-16T12:02:09-04:00 2012-07-16T05:12:04-04:00

John Thatamanil http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-thatamanil/
But watching the nightly news -- no grand appeal to the course of history is necessary -- demonstrates that we get what we deserve when we configure public life as a value-free realm in which the unfettered pursuit of profit, power and private interest are invited to reign without regulation. Investment banks speculate, oil companies pollute, pharmaceutical companies charge whatever the market will bear no matter the cost to our bodies, and the earth is set on a course for catastrophic climate change. The poor go hungry, children live on the streets or in our subway tunnels and the fabric of our common life is torn asunder. The very idea that the citizens of a country might owe each other anything at all, that there may be priceless public goods that cannot be rendered into marketable commodities, is regarded as tantamount to socialism.

Too many American ears have become unmusical to the language of mutual care and obligation. Talk about employing the government to regulate industry and our banking sector and to offer a minimum standard of living for the poor and the elderly is subject to suspicion. Dare to suggest that government should seek to insure that school lunches are actually healthful for our children, and the cry will go up that do-gooders desire a "nanny state" which will coddle citizens at the expense of liberty. At what price will we seek a liberty that does not liberate? Meanwhile, "public servants" seek without shame to dismantle the safety net even as they labor to expand a bloated Pentagon budget with funds that even the Pentagon has the decency not to request.

In such times, the demand that love must be put to work in the public sphere as a force that drives toward justice hardly seems quaint, naïve or Pollyannaish. On the contrary, what seems fanciful is the foolhardy notion that companies will serve the public good out of the kindness of their hearts or that markets will order themselves spontaneously without regulation. How has it come to pass that the ideal of love seeking justice is regarded as utopian, and the notion that the collective good will spontaneously arise when each pursues self-interest is counted as sober minded economic science?

We diminish love because of a failure of imagination that reduces it to kindly feeling. Love is far more: love is labor. It is the demanding work of living out in mind, heart and body the truth of our being bound together. Love is what follows from the clear-minded appreciation that our mutual interconnectedness means that my wellbeing cannot be purchased at the expense of yours. Love seeks to bind together what has been torn asunder by blind self-interest.

A sad truth is slowly becoming self-evident: When we privatize and domesticate love, it is endangered in every sphere, public and private. Our marriages, partnerships and families cannot endure, let alone flourish, when an unregulated financial industry crashes the economy, puts mothers and fathers out of work and renders families homeless. Love is gravely imperiled when we permit the structures that humanize our lives to fall apart.

Ethicists, philosophers and theologians do well to remind us that institutions and corporations cannot love, even when the latter are declared to be persons. Hence, the public philosopher and prophet Cornel West reminds us that "Justice is what love looks like in public." When the ideal of love is made flesh in equitable structures, when corporations are rendered accountable to the public good, love becomes a "hard" and exacting good.

Of course, what needs also to be shredded is the very dichotomy between the soft and the hard -- a deceptive duality that obscures from view that we are all vulnerable creatures whose purchase on life is exceedingly fragile, especially when the life that we build together has about it no humanity, no heart and no accountability. In the end, we are all soft and fleshy creatures who must invest collectively in the difficult work of love made into justice if we, our children, and generations to come are even to have an inhabitable planet.

But how is such transformation possible if our impoverished imaginations continue to treat love as an airy confection, a sweet private balm that can, at best, sooth the wounds that we must necessarily suffer in the brutal jungle of public life?

We shall live by love, rightly understood, or die without it.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.956828 2011-09-11T10:03:26-04:00 2011-11-11T05:12:02-05:00

John Thatamanil http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-thatamanil/ The War of the Worlds, the one that panicked people because they thought the planet really was being attacked by aliens. But in another instant, I realized this was no fiction. I turned the car around, went back home and turned on the TV.

New York has a special place in my heart. In childhood, I lived in Brooklyn when I came to America from India. I thought of Brooklyn when I heard that debris from the towers had made it all the way there. I also realized that it was likely that someone I knew could be in those buildings. I found out, well after the fact, that two acquaintances should have been there, but one was late for work and another had stayed home to write his dissertation.

Virtually all of us remember where we were when word came to us of the horror. And then, most of us watched the events of the day unfold in real time. Recalling these memories ten years on, I find myself asking, just what do people mean when they say, "We must never forget?" What do those words mean? Barring dementia, I doubt I could forget those nightmarish events, and I was far removed from the scene.

Direct survivors of those events might well wish they could forget as they find themselves shackled to flashes of memory that intrude into waking life with such vividness that the line between past and present is stripped away. When visited by traumatic memory, the past refuses to stay safely in the past, and the flow of time is interrupted. Forgetting is a luxury that is not afforded them. When "forgetting" comes, it comes only after a great deal of intentional labor and gracious healing.

The relationship between memory and trauma is notoriously complicated. Survivors of trauma suffer such grave wounds that memory and even identity can be shattered. In many cases, survivors of rape, for example, cannot consciously recall the event itself as ruthless violence ruptures recollection. And yet, the body cannot soon forget but instead manifests this incapacity through the symptoms of PTSD; these symptoms show that the survivor has not yet been released from the grip of violence.

The gravest manifestation of the power of violence to remain alive and virulent occurs when the violated become abusers. When the venom of the abuser is injected into the abused, its unprocessed toxicity can perpetuate the cycle of abuse from generation to generation. The living death caused by what remains unhealed and so unforgettable is volatile.

Is collective memory in the wake of trauma akin to individual memory? It seems safe to say that survivors of trauma are deprived, in some measure, of the freedom to remember or forget. Autonomy has been stripped from memory. But can an entire nation be traumatized in analogous fashion? And if a people can be so traumatized, can its incapacity to forget traumatic violence generate in the nation the compulsion to repeat violence?

I do not know the answers to these weighty questions, but ten years after 9/11, the time has come to ask them honestly and forthrightly. We must recognize that the work of remembering is fraught, complicated, and even dangerous.

Over the last ten years, we have seen that some of our leaders have elected to keep the wound of 9/11 fresh in the collective consciousness in order to justify war. The nation is, time and again, tutored to remember 9/11 so that leaders can torture and launch unjustifiable wars on false pretenses. The 3000 lives lost on 9/11 have been used, or rather abused, to justify the deaths of over 100,000 souls in Iraq. Is this why we seek to remember?

Whether an entire people can be traumatized is a technical question I shall leave to others expert in trauma theory. But it seems evident that social groups can and so therefore must exercise the work of responsible remembering. The very urgency of the demand, "Never forget!" demonstrates that collective memory is fragile and requires deliberate labor.

Whether directly traumatized or not, a people can ask several questions: Why are we performing the work of memory? How should that work be undertaken?

Do our rituals serve to foment a perpetual sense of grievance, or might they bring about healing? How can we protect the dignity of the grief work of those who were the primary victims and survivors of 9/11? How is our grief unlike theirs? What can we do to insure that our grief work does not impede theirs?

The most urgent question we can pose is this: does our memorializing divide or reconcile?

If 9/11 is deployed to set our nation against others and divide us from within by pitting religious communities against each other, then our remembering is cheap and perverse. Such remembering diminishes the heroic sacrifices of those who died serving all New Yorkers that day, regardless of race or religion.

The work of memory is neither intrinsically innocent nor noble. Everything depends on the how and the why. Ten years on, it will no longer suffice to proclaim loudly that we will never forget.
When the impulse to remember is severed from our deepest longings for reconciliation and love, we leave ourselves vulnerable to those who would hijack the nation's hurt in order to injure others and perpetuate the malignant cycle of hatred and violence.

This we must no longer permit.
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.858693 2011-05-06T15:16:58-04:00 2011-07-06T05:12:01-04:00

John Thatamanil http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-thatamanil/
"Closure" has emerged once more in public conversation, this time surrounding the execution of Osama bin Laden. Numerous voices in the media have used the term when arguing that public celebrations were a sign of closure brought about by bin Laden's death.

Most recently, Rep. Duncan Hunter [R] has called for the release of bin Laden's death photos arguing that they would bring "closure" to the families of 9/11 victims. What precisely is meant by closure in this context? Can killing or evidence of killing (i.e. gruesome photos of a mutilated bin Laden) bring closure?

Before we can answer this question, we must first launch a conversation in which we think collectively about what we mean by the term itself. This hard question must be posed because the term is routinely employed to justify capital punishment: execution purportedly brings "closure" to bereaved families who live to see their beloved's murderer suffer capital punishment.

So, does closure mean that a prolonged season of mourning can now come to a close, since the disruptions inaugurated by the original event of wounding are no longer with us? Does it mean that fundamental psychological and spiritual needs of survivors and the families of victims are now met and brought to resolution? Can it mean that those wounded can now return to the world as it was before loss and violence?

The empirical data suggests otherwise. Studies on families of those who have suffered violent loss suggest that an execution does little to move these families toward a new level of health and functionality, even though they may be active campaigners for capital punishment. Michelle Goldberg, writing in Salon in response to the furor generated when Illinois Gov. George Ryan commuted the death penalty sentences of 167 death row prisoners, argued, "No psychological study has ever concluded that the death penalty brings 'closure' to anyone except the person who dies, and there's circumstantial evidence that it can prolong the suffering of grieving families."

Apart from social scientific studies, most of us intuitively suspect that healing and resolution are unlikely to magically arrive as a consequence of execution. It's hard to imagine, for example, how any family who has lost a child to murder can ever find "closure" when the murderer is executed. Trauma just is the sort of event that is never entirely resolved, something that we are never over and done with.

Christians have a special reason to find talk of closure to be uncongenial and unpersuasive. At the heart of Christian narratives is the wanton execution by the Roman state of an innocent man. That should, in itself, make Christians wary of state-sanctioned killing. But what is most striking about Christian narratives is that even the resurrection of Jesus does not bring closure.

Particularly in the resurrection story as narrated by the Gospel of John, Jesus' resurrected body remains unbounded and open to the world. To Thomas, who doubts what he is seeing, Jesus says, "Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe" (John 20:20). Not even the resurrected Christ possesses a closed body, a body free from evidence of wounds received. Thomas can stick his hand into it. This most mysterious of narratives suggests that not even the risen Christ and hence the divine life finds "closure." New life, yes; closure, no.

Perhaps then the church that seeks to be the body of Christ should forgo the quest for closure but seek instead to be a community that longs for healing transformation, not by ignoring its own wounds but by transfiguring those wounds into sites of and for communion.

As for the nation, can it be that our work does not rest in the futile attempt to close the traumatic wound -- and surely not by way of violence -- but in a strange alchemy wherein those places in our lives that have been painfully ruptured might become sites of deeper connection to others? Perhaps new life comes not from closure but from our arrival at a fragile, tentative moment in which the unsought for and undesired wound becomes for us a resource for deeper relationships?

What might this moment look like with respect to bin Laden's death? Perhaps now, Americans can recognize from widespread expressions of relief from mainstream Muslim communities, that we no longer need to ask the unproductive question, "Why do they, Muslim terrorists (the latter word is often intentionally left out to justify a clash of civilizations), hate us, Americans?"

Rather, Americans should recognize that "they" have more reason for peace of mind than "we" do. After all, Islamic extremists have killed far more Muslims than non-Muslims! With that recognition, perhaps Americans might also call into question how we demarcate the lines between "us" and "them," especially when such demarcations tacitly assume or explicitly assert that American Muslims are not genuinely American. Such healing of our national body may not amount to closure, but it might mean that our wounds can now lead to healing and perhaps even new life.
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.827793 2011-02-26T22:00:51-05:00 2011-05-25T18:35:25-04:00

John Thatamanil http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-thatamanil/
Unlike some who turn to Buddhism because of trauma from a toxic or inadequate version of Christianity, my love for Buddhism is not a product of alienation. My religious family of origin is not ideal -- no family is -- but my first Christian home, the Mar Thoma Church, and now the Episcopal Church, have done right by me. They both convey to me a progressive, justice-seeking, and reflective Christianity, one that never demands that I sacrifice intellect in order to embrace faith.

So why the fascination with Buddhism?

I am drawn to Buddhist traditions not to correct felt deficits in my own tradition, but to deepen my experience of the world by entering into another way of understanding and living. I seek a new kind of wisdom that our age requires.

In an older era, a person was accounted wise if he or she attained to a practical mastery of one tradition. Think St. Francis of Assisi. But our age requires also (not instead of) a new kind of wisdom: the capacity to see the world through more than one set of religious lenses and to integrate into one life, insofar as possible, what is disclosed through those lenses. Think Mahatma Gandhi. His theory and practice of nonviolent resistance integrated ideas and practices drawn from Jainism, Christianity (Jesus' Sermon on the Mount in particular), and, of course, Hinduism.

For lack of a better phrase, I call this binocular wisdom, an extension from binocular vision, vision generated by both eyes, the only kind that yields depth perspective.

We need the depth perspective of binocular wisdom for many reasons. First, increasingly many among us incorporate into our lives religious practices drawn from more than one tradition. Christians who do vipassana meditation or yoga are increasingly the norm. What is less common is reflection about the meaning of multiple religious participation. Few ask how, for example, the Buddhist wisdom that drives vipassana and Christian wisdom enacted in the Eucharist might be held together.

We also need this kind of wisdom because interfaith marriages are becoming routine. A great temptation here is to downplay religious matters for fear of conflict. Or, the most insistent parent is permitted to win: all right, the kids can go to church and not synagogue. But might this kind of double life be a source of promise and not a divisive problem? We need binocular wisdom to pull this off.

And, of course, we also need binocular wisdom to address the vast global crises of our time such as the growing gap worldwide between the rich and the poor and ecological problems that no tradition can navigate alone. Christian teaching about the natural world as God's good creation when taken together with the Buddhist quest to end self-seeking desire promises more than either tradition can offer alone.

How might such wisdom and integration work?

Let's begin with a small example: "Life hurts." That is my working, albeit non-standard, translation of the Pali phrase sabbham dukkham, the First of the Buddha's Four Noble Truths, which is customarily translated, "All is suffering." The latter is the more accurate translation, literally speaking, although it suggests that neither pleasure, satisfaction, nor contentment is possible in life. That is a manifestly mistaken reading of Buddhist wisdom. One need only spend a few minutes around Tibetan Buddhist monks or enter a vast lecture hall in which the Dalai Lama is speaking to feel in one's bones the profound joy that marks the lives of advanced practitioners.

So, what does the First Noble Truth show me as it is lived out in practice?

To say that life hurts is to name a truth that most of us spend every waking moment avoiding. Through mindfulness practice which, counter-intuitively, is the practice of leaning into life's hurts rather than running away from them, I am coming to see daily just how much time I spend in futile attempts to evade regular visitations of pain. The memory of a lost love, the sudden intrusion into mind of some personal failing, the nagging anxiety of the undone task -- mindfulness practice helps me to recognize and abandon my unrealistic quest either to avoid or to anesthetize myself from these jabs of hurt that visit me, often many times a minute.

By holding my aversion to pain in gentle, compassionate, and attentive regard -- another way to understand mindfulness -- I gain a measure of liberation (the standard translation of "nirvana") from the conditioned, even addictive patterns that drive my behavior. Still more, the practice of compassionate regard is happily addictive, and it bleeds over into my disposition toward others. I am reminded that others too are making their way through twinges, jabs, and outright blows of suffering. The irritations, failings, and even the flat out nastiness of others are not about me but the disturbing fruit of unaddressed hurt.

What does this practice mean for my Christian life? As my own vipassana teacher, Gordon Peerman, an Episcopal priest who is also an advanced Buddhist practitioner, loves to say, "Buddhist practice enables me to operationalize the Christian calling to love my neighbor." That sounds exactly right to me because it is confirmed in my experience.

I am no saint. But I am now somewhat less prone to irritation when my tween daughter insists on winning an argument. That is no advanced accomplishment on the road to mystic vision, but it is a lovely gift on the way toward a gentler life, a life that is all the more Christian for being Buddhist.

This blog post was first published on the blog site of the Episcopal Divinity School, 99 Brattlehttp://99brattle.blogspot.com/2011/02/binocular-religious-wisdom-learning.html.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.708693 2010-09-11T20:56:56-04:00 2011-05-25T17:35:19-04:00

John Thatamanil http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-thatamanil/ inform us about how best to live human life. But do our traditions effectively transmit practical wisdom to the people who inhabit them? Do they transform? Even if we grant that they have been efficacious in the past, the question remains: are they effective now, in this historical moment?

Let's take up one concrete concern: how well do our traditions -- Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and others -- communicate the importance of authentic self-love? Standard Christian preaching and teaching give the impression that self-love is tantamount to self-obsession, or, at the very least, selfishness. In my many years of churchgoing, I cannot recall hearing a single sermon commending an ardent desire for the self's own flourishing as a positive virtue.

The call to lose ourselves in the service of our neighbor is profound; it is a true aim and goal of all authentic spiritual life. But can I lose or give away a self I do not have? What can I give if I believe I have nothing to offer?

Do our traditions intimate that we are ourselves priceless treasures, that we ought to desire our own well-being, not at the expense of others but as a precondition and prerequisite for loving others? An important moment prompted me to take this theme with greater seriousness. In the Eastern Religions classes I taught many years ago, I showed a now-dated but lovely film, "The Footprint of the Buddha." In that film, the interviewer and narrator Ronald Eyre asks a Buddhist monk the question, "Can a person who does not love himself love another?" And the sagacious monk responds with an irrepressible chuckle and emphatic seriousness, "It is impossible." Eyre adds later in his narration, "Come to think of it, even Jesus said, 'Love your neighbor as yourself' -- not more than yourself and certainly not less than yourself."

Eyre is right. But Christians should ask forthrightly if this simple wisdom is communicated in the life of Christian churches, especially in total depravity traditions, traditions which insist that because of the Fall, the human being is utterly broken and haplessly driven by self-centeredness. Might it be possible to recognize the truth of our brokenness without vitiating the vital importance of self-love? Perhaps a mark of our "depravity" is our limited or broken capacity for authentic self-love -- that we confuse care for self with narcissism?

Even the core Christian doctrine of justification by faith through grace is typically communicated to believers as teaching that God loves us despite the fact that we are unlovely and unlovable. Other resources in Christian traditions, like the teaching that we are made in the imago dei and the doctrine of the goodness of creation, are regularly undermined by a radical emphasis on the human being as a sinner who stands lost through primordial fallenness that has besmirched and even erased what once was lovely in us. How might those who stand broken by violence and trauma, persons who already feel ugly and damned, hear and receive such teachings? In what way does the idea that we are loved despite the fact that we are in truth unlovable serve to heal and console?

And what are the practices whereby we actualize in ourselves the wisdom of longing for one's own flourishing and growth? As it happens, there are crucial meditative disciplines of loving-kindness in Buddhist traditions for just this purpose. It may seem astonishing that the tradition that most emphatically insists that there is no self (anatta) may routinely do a better job at transmitting the wise practice of self-care and than do Christian traditions which customarily insist on an eternal soul.

These questions are complicated by a curious sense of spiritual democracy derived from the Protestant notion of the "priesthood of all believers." For some Protestants, this has come to mean that no one knows any more about how to live the spiritual life than anyone else does. The idea that contemplatives across traditions may know more about the stages of religious life because of their proficiency in spiritual discipline seems to many a curiously illiberal idea. For Protestants, the notion seems also to emit the odor of "works righteousness."

If we are to discover our way to authentic self-love, I fear our religious traditions, left to their own devices, may not suffice. They are far too often patriarchal, elaborated by male monastics who loathe women's bodies and who are too often averse to bodies in general, including their own, whose desires are felt to be intrinsically unruly and essentially distorted.

In addition to the diligent contemplative practice that our traditions commend, they need to be corrected by good feminist/womanist reflection and sound psychotherapeutic wisdom to escape temptations toward self-loathing and body-loathing. We need therefore not just the wisdom of comparative theology -- traditions learning from and correcting each other -- but we need feminist comparative theology and secular philosophies of right erotic desire, for the love of the body, and also desire for our own embodied flourishing in this very life.

Ultimately, we need this wisdom to be practical -- practice rich so as to be practicable. How are we to feel, think and live our way into the wisdom of authentic self-love? This is a vital question not because self-love is close to the end of the spiritual path (Whitney Houston is wrong; this is not the greatest love of all), but because it may well be the precondition for passionate self-giving love for the human other and the Divine Not-Other (who is Love itself). Authentic self-love is not the end of the spiritual path, but it is nonetheless a precious gate through which we must pass. ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.667297 2010-08-03T14:41:50-04:00 2011-05-25T17:15:21-04:00

John Thatamanil http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-thatamanil/
Christians violate basic religious commitments and obligations by fanning the flames of hatred and sowing the seeds of violence. The most dramatic example of Christians betraying their own values is the call by the Dove World Outreach Center for a Quran-burning day to mark the ninth anniversary of September 11. Some outreach!

Those who have the most to fear from this virulent disease are Muslims. But Sikhs and others likely to be mistaken for Muslims also have reason to worry. In the wake of 9/11, Indians and others who were "Middle-Eastern looking" were attacked. A Sikh man, Balbir Singh Sodhi, whose turban made him a conspicuous target, was among those who were murdered. The toxic mix of racism, founded on the ignorant assumption that Muslims must come in some variety of brown, and widespread religious illiteracy make for a dangerous cocktail.

After noting the risks posed to Muslims and racialized others who appear to be of another religion, it must also be said that the carriers and transmitters of this disease are vulnerable to moral corruption and religious malpractice.

Christian partisans seem to forget that the Ten Commandments, which many love to post in public but few seem to read in private, prohibit bearing false witness against neighbors (Exodus 20:16). To malign a global religious community, to caricature the Prophet Muhammad, to insult and even burn the scriptures of another faith -- such actions manifestly violate a core ethical mandate that is supposed to order Christian life.

To tell untruths about the traditions of our neighbors is an exercise in bearing false witness. Ignorance is no excuse. Christians should realize that they are sure to misrepresent the most cherished convictions of coworkers and neighbors if they elect to abide in ignorance. When Christians refuse to engage in the patient truth-seeking study of other traditions, they fail to perform the work that love requires. By remaining in ignorance, they leave themselves prone to easy manipulation by unscrupulous politicians who spread misinformation and foment fearmongering.

Christians who do not know much about their neighbors' traditions place themselves in a position of moral vulnerability. When we speak about traditions we do not know, we are sure to get it wrong. And when that speech is driven by anxiety and apprehension, it is a safe bet that we shall bear false witness. In so doing, Christians compromise their own spiritual lives.

Adopting a posture of truth-telling and love does not mean that Christians are bound to uncritical silence about other religious traditions. Just as Christians should expect to be called out when they engage in racist behavior that is sanctified by appeal to religious rhetoric -- as in the case of Christian arguments on behalf of racism, slavery and apartheid -- so it is possible to speak in loving criticism about what seems awry in the traditions of others. Truth spoken in love is a far cry from slanderous speech. The former can be a part of a deep interreligious friendship; the latter violates trust and ruptures relationship.

But the labor of judgment is a precarious business. It must be remembered, after all, that the KKK, Christian militia members like Timothy McVeigh and abortion clinic bombers are all Christian terrorists. It is worth asking why this conjunction of terms is never seen in the press.

Few expect every church to apologize for these extremists. Would it be fair for our Muslim brothers and sisters to ask why American Christians have not collectively and forcefully denounced these extremists or the still very recent systematic brutalizing of black bodies under Christian slavery, slavery that was far from an isolated exception but was instead a national norm sustained by appeal to the Bible? A microscopic minority of Muslims perpetrates acts of terror, and yet all Muslims are held to blame. Slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and lynching were part of the very fabric of American life. They were condoned and even endorsed by American Bible-believing Christians. The racist legacy of these past wrongs still persists. Many American Christians find it easy to tarnish Muslims in general but have yet to come to terms with America's Original Sin!

My point is that no religious tradition is innocent of grievous, even calamitous moral harm. The weighty work of repentance, redress and repair falls upon all traditions alike.

Faced with this sobering truth, Christians in particular must return to the core guiding principles of faithful living. Of these principles, none is more central and precious than Jesus' reiteration of the ancient commandment, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Leviticus 19:18; Mark 12:31).

That calling to love is irreparably harmed when the degraded culture of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib spills out into American life at large. When Christian churches hold Quran-burning days and when rally organizers urge protesters to bring dogs because Muslims hate dogs, we are not far from the Abu Ghraibification of American life. When practices that mimic torture spill out into the country at large, civic life is corrupted and the Christian calling to Christ-like living is eviscerated. When paranoia strikes deep, we risk losing not only our country but indeed our very souls.
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.607286 2010-06-10T16:05:00-04:00 2011-05-25T16:45:26-04:00

John Thatamanil http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-thatamanil/ "Advancing Interfaith and Community Service on College and University Campuses." At that meeting, Eboo Patel, founder of Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC) and member of the President's Advisory Council, invited attendees to ponder the following scenario: "Walk out of this room and onto the street, tap anyone on the shoulder and ask them to say something about environmentalism and human rights, and they can respond. Now imagine asking about religious pluralism or interfaith cooperation. Most would be at a loss." That is the situation that Patel and the White House Office seek to transform. Their shared goal is to transform interfaith cooperation from "niche to norm."

But why should President Obama and the White House care about this vision? As an invitee to this week's White House Conference, that was the question I was eager to have answered. As a predictable progressive committed to the Establishment Clause, I tend to become squeamish when the words "White House" and "Faith-Based" enter into close proximity.

So, how would administration officials like Joshua DuBois and Mara Vanderslice, who run Obama's White House Faith-Based Office, nuance this issue? I found the answer in a phrase repeated by several administration officials: "social cohesion."

Drawing upon the work of Diana Eck, creator of Harvard's Pluralism Project, Patel observed that America is now the world's most religiously diverse country. The question for our country is this: Can such diversity be mobilized on behalf of social cohesion rather than fragmentation? Patel asks, "Will religions become bubbles, barriers, bombs or bridges?" Can we bypass the predicted clash of civilizations?

Obama's leadership team offers an emphatic yes to the latter question. I am pleased to report that despite a remarkable assembly of Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Christians, Muslims and humanists, there was not a Huntingtonian in the bunch!

There is a question that Eboo Patel wants campus leaders to confront: "Who gets to our youth first? Religious pluralists or religious militants?" The felt urgency of Patel's question should demonstrate that there is nothing Pollyannaish about his vision. He soberly appreciates the strange, seductive power of religious militancy. But what Patel and this White House know still better is the transformative power of interreligious cooperation.

Patel has robust reasons for his optimism. IFYC brings together thousands of young people from across the country -- Christian evangelicals next to young women in burqas, Buddhists, Hindus and others -- to work together on projects of interfaith service. Theologies differ but overlapping ethical passions motivate young people to raise money, to build homes and to tutor children. Powerful bonds are formed across religious traditions when young people work for the world's welfare and then converse about what convictions drive them to labor for the common good.

The White House's conviction that sustained connections across religious communities can foster social cohesion is neither a matter of wishful thinking nor warm-hearted anecdotes. The research of Ashutosh Varshney offers social scientific evidence. In his book, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India, Varshney sets out to answer an important question: why are some cities in India prone to ethnic conflict whereas others are not? Varshney demonstrates that those cities that have rich networks of associations in which persons are routinely brought into relationships across religious traditions are precisely those that best resist the turn toward violence. Patel and his IFYC colleague Cassie Meyer, who use Varshney's book in their interfaith course at the University of Chicago Divinity School, are trying to do just that with university campuses as the vanguard of a larger social movement.

But questions remain. What comes after interfaith service? What about the non-religious? Here, administration officials take their bearings from Obama's Inaugural Address: "For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers." They know that non-believers, too, are committed to serve the common good.

In a few days, I am off to serve as Project Director for the American Academy of Religion/Luce Foundation Summer Seminars in Theologies of Religious Pluralism and Comparative Theology. Here, some of the nation's leading theologians will gather for work the White House cannot do. We meet to learn how the world's religious traditions think about the meaning of religious diversity. We convene because, as teachers, we believe that classrooms, too, must be vital sites for cultivating the religious literacy that Stephen Prothero, a speaker at the conference, has long called for.

But still more, it is the conviction of this interreligious group that their traditions must develop internal theological reasons for hospitality toward and learning from religious others. Some of these reasons already exist; they are as old as, if not older than, our mutual suspicions. In the mandate against bearing false witness against our neighbors, in various formulations of the Golden Rule, and in the call to love the neighbor, religious traditions offer robust theological reasons for turning toward others without erasing difference.

I believe that vital service must be wedded to deep learning across religious boundaries. Ultimately, either project without the other is unsustainable. We cannot claim to love those whom we do not know, and we cannot know those whom we refuse to love.
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.552935 2010-04-28T02:09:00-04:00 2011-05-25T16:15:25-04:00

John Thatamanil http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-thatamanil/
What binds many atheists together is an unshakable conviction that they know everything there is to know about religion, namely that it is irrational bondage to immutable doctrine. No amount of counterevidence can convince such atheists otherwise. What irony! But where do they come by this knowledge about religion? Their expertise seems to be derived by virtue of sheer sentience alone.

By contrast, if a theologian were to broadcast her convictions about molecular or evolutionary biology without some years of careful reading and study, she would be met with jeering laughter and summarily dismissed. Why then are uninformed atheists who have never read in theology exempt from similar derision? Sadly, every pedant believes himself entitled to his unearned convictions about religion.

It should go without saying that tremendous expertise in biology does not entitle one to claims of expertise on religion. Dawkins is a fine biologist, but he knows precious little about religion. Terry Eagleton has made this point brilliantly: "Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology." To Eagelton's quip, I can only say Amen.

In interreligious dialogue circles, participants operate under a fundamental ethical constraint: never compare the best in your tradition with the worst in another's. A Christian who compares liberation theology with caste in Hinduism is making an invidious comparison. A similar constraint should apply in conversations between atheists and the religious. Atheists who tar the whole of religion by contrasting the insight of Einstein with the fulminations of fundamentalists are engaged in egregious dialogical malpractice.

But most atheists are ill equipped to abide by this rule because they know nothing about Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, medieval women mystics like Julian of Norwich or major thinkers from other traditions like Śaṅkara or Nāgārjuna. Absent such knowledge, caricature becomes inevitable.

There are many reasons to favor modesty and even rapprochement between persons on both sides of the theism/atheism divide. First and most obviously, neither theists nor atheists can know whether God exists. When questions about ultimate reality are raised, we have left the field of secure knowledge for the terrain of searching intuition. All are engaged in the hard labor of interpreting experience. We may have a high degree of confidence that our reading of experience is well grounded, but no one is afforded the luxury of proof. Adopting a measure of confidence that correlates well with the degree of certainty possible within a given discipline is a pragmatic mark of prudence. Theology is not Euclidean geometry!

Second, a great many Christian theologians who are influenced by mystical theologies believe with Paul Tillich that it is truer to say that God does not exist than to say that God does. God is the ground of being or being itself and not a Supreme Being. God does not exist; God is the source of all that exists. This conception of divinity far exceeds the simplistic theism that most atheists reject. Atheists are right to say that many conventional accounts of God are implausible, but this is hardly news to reflective theologians. Neither conventional theism nor ordinary atheism is a compelling option.

Third, not all atheists and agnostics are irreligious. Religious naturalists also experience life as imbued with wonder and mystery and so offer a compelling nontheistic option that is deeply resonant with mystical theologies. Even Dawkins is open to some modes of naturalistic religiosity. On the other side, progressive theologians, especially those involved in interreligious dialogue, are well prepared to recognize the force of nontheistic options because of their engagements with East and South Asian religious traditions (Daoism, Buddhism, Advaita Vedānta) that are not interested in positing a supreme being. Sadly, the possibility of finding such fertile common ground is lost in the midst of mean-spirited apologetics.

The squabbles between fundamentalists and the New Atheists are especially tragic because left-leaning religious communities and progressive atheists cannot find each other in the midst of all the sound and fury. Cut off from a deeper dialogue that moves beyond antagonism, they fail to make common cause on behalf of a shared vision of ecological and social justice.

But strong alliances are possible not only between Christians and persons from other religious traditions but also between religious communities and curious, open-minded atheists, especially those graced with genuine wonder at the mystery of existence. Deepening their shared appreciation for mystery should drive theists and atheists alike toward a disposition of humility.

Claimed by such humility, liberal theists and atheists can come to see that they have a great deal in common: curiosity, willingness to interrogate and revise fundamental convictions, reverence for life, and a deep sense of sorrow about the damage inflicted upon the body politic by militant fundamentalists, whether they be theistic or atheistic. ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.532004 2010-04-09T13:36:49-04:00 2011-05-25T16:05:22-04:00

John Thatamanil http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-thatamanil/
This week's PBS broadcast of David Grubin's documentary The Buddha is a happy exception to this stale routine. The appearance of this film reminds us of what is so sorely lacking in the public square: knowledge of other traditions which can, in turn, foster interreligious dialogue.

Pundits and preachers do talk about religion in public space, but that back and forth is routinely confined to the tired squabble between Christian fundamentalists and atheists. In religion as in politics, the most virulent partisans frame the debate and consume all the oxygen. We are left to choose between the likes of Richard Dawkins and Pat Robertson, and neither knows much about religion.

The nationwide release this week of The Buddha enriches our collective conversation. Religious communities, particularly churches, should use this opportunity to turn away from futile engagements with condescending atheists and embrace the much more demanding work of Buddhist-Christian dialogue.

David Grubin's documentary is an aesthetic treasure. Grubin makes an interesting narrative decision: he lets two poets, W. S. Merwin and Jane Hirshfield, do much of the talking, far more than the Dalai Lama or Buddhologists, although they are present as well. Siddhartha Gautama's quest for enlightenment is infused with poetic yearning; his venture comes across as one man's unrelenting effort to solve the ordinary but sacred riddle of living well in the midst of impermanence and death.

Buddhism is depicted with accuracy as the labor of learning to see clearly and wake up to life just as it is: a painful but nonetheless exquisite transitory flux. Rather than securing ourselves against life's evanescence by swimming in a sea of addictive poisons like greed, hatred, and delusion, the Buddha eliminates habitual egoism by cutting out the root ignorance that binds human beings to samsara: the illusion of self. Released from that falsehood, human beings are free to embrace life in all its fragile interconnectedness with care and compassion.

Suppose viewers become readers and follow up their viewing with a deeper encounter with Buddhist wisdom. What questions come next? Christian viewers of the film will surely be impelled to ask, what does Bodhgaya have to do with Jerusalem? What have the Buddha's teachings to do with the teachings of the Jewish carpenter from Nazareth?

The Roman Empire executed Jesus because he came proclaiming the Kingdom of God, which was an absolute inversion of the Kingdom of Caesar. Jesus announced the coming of God whose arrival gives rise to a new world order in which the poor, the oppressed, the wounded, and the outcast are accorded pride of place. His disciples came to believe that Jesus was the embodiment of the kingdom that he proclaimed. In and through him, they felt the healing power of a subversive political holiness grounded in God's love for the marginalized and the broken.

What is the meaning of the Buddha for the Christ and of the Christ for the Buddha? Can we wed together the Buddha's transcendent peace together with Jesus' shalom? The halls of academia and religious communities do not lack for learned scholars who have some mastery of one of these traditions. But we are terribly short of thinkers and practitioners, clergy and lay, who can think these two traditions together. That quest is not only an intriguing intellectual challenge but also a vital cultural project because American life is increasingly marked by intermarriage and religious hybridity. The ranks of the religiously hyphenated grow daily, but few communities are equipped for this new reality.

The time has come for religious communities to demand a new kind of clerical leadership. Every religious leader -- Rabbi, Imam, or Priest -- must be required to know a second religious language. Seminaries must develop new curricula adequate to the changing American religious landscape. These institutions must inculcate in students a measure of religious multilingualism.

And all of us, lay and clergy, must demand a new civic culture marked by interreligious hospitality and by a deep desire to learn not just about but from the faith of our neighbors. We must rise to one of the great spiritual challenges of our time: the hard work of integrating multiple religious wisdoms into our personal lives and public vocations.

John Thatamanil is Assistant Professor of Theology at Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville, TN. He is the author of The Immanent Divine: God, Creation and the Human Predicament. An East-West Conversation.]]>