Teaching justice and teaching justly - Mathew Schmalz

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TEACHING JUSTICE AND TEACHING JUSTLY: REFLECTIONS ONTEACHING WORLD RELIGIONS AT A JESUIT LIBERAL ARTSCOLLEGEMathew N. Schmalza

a The College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA

To cite this Article Schmalz, Mathew N.(2005) 'TEACHING JUSTICE AND TEACHING JUSTLY: REFLECTIONS ONTEACHING WORLD RELIGIONS AT A JESUIT LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGE', Christian Higher Education, 4: 1, 1 — 17To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/15363750590898713URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15363750590898713

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Christian Higher Education, 4:1–17, 2005Copyright C© Taylor & Francis Inc.ISSN: 1536-3759 print / 1539-4107 onlineDOI: 10.1080/15363750590898713

TEACHING JUSTICE AND TEACHING JUSTLY:REFLECTIONS ON TEACHING WORLD RELIGIONS AT A

JESUIT LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGE

MATHEW N. SCHMALZ

The College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA

This paper examines how the teaching of world religions at Catholic Christiansinstitutions can contribute to teaching justice and teaching justly. The papercompares central issues engaged by History of Religions as a discipline withthose addressed within the Jesuit tradition of higher education as it developedin the wake of the Second Vatican Council. While many scholars have arguedthat the academic study of religion and theology are premised upon irreconcilablyopposed paradigms of teaching and scholarship, this paper argues that a creativecombination of the two disciplines can create a crucial space for reconsideringjustice within the contemporary classroom at Catholic Christian colleges thatembrace the Jesuit tradition of higher education.

On an unseasonably warm fall day, I was teaching a class in Com-parative Religions during my first semester as a professor at theCollege of the Holy Cross. Although the class was only in its fourthweek, it seemed clear that the backgrounds of the students con-formed quite well to a profile of Holy Cross’s student body as awhole: overwhelmingly Catholic. The subject of my lecture thatday was the religious life of Hinduism, most particularly the pu-rifying ritual acts called samskaras. During my efforts to stimulateclass discussion, I drew upon what had thus far been a successfulmethod of making general comparisons to the Catholic tradition.I talked about Hindu samskaras in relation to Catholic sacraments;a deceptively simple point of departure that I thought would en-gage the class. I mentioned the Eucharist. At that point, a studentraised his hand and asked, matter of factly, “What’s the Eucharist?”

The question “What’s the Eucharist?” from a student at aJesuit college ordinarily involves the issue of Catholic students

Address correspondence to Mathew N. Schmalz, Edward Bennett Williams Fellow,Department of Religious Studies, The College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA 01610.E-mail: [email protected]

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who know very little about Catholicism. But this question camefrom a different quarter and elicited a very different issue.Yusuf Gulleth asked the question, a student who had alreadydistinguished himself as one of the most engaged and engagingparticipants in class discussions. Gulleth was pursuing a rigorousprogram in chemistry but wanted to balance his scientific studiesby examining Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity in a comparativeframework. Underlying his desire for academic balance was Gul-leth’s concern as a Muslim from Tanzania to explore Christianityand Hinduism in a way that would relate to his own traditionand religious sensibilities. The question that he raised then wasnot a simple inquiry about the definition of a word so crucialto Catholicism. Instead, it was a thoughtful challenge to theassumption of a shared cultural knowledge within an institutionexplicitly dedicated to the Jesuit tradition in higher education.Considered more abstractly, Yusuf Gulleth was asking about justiceand whether the class itself was being taught justly.

Informed by Yusuf Gulleth’s question, this paper addresseshow teaching world religions at Catholic institutions can con-tribute both to teaching justice and to teaching justly. To openthe discussion, we first overview the development of the disciplineof the History of Religions, the field with which the teaching ofworld religions is most explicitly associated. We then compare thechanges experienced in the understanding of the History of Reli-gions to those occurring within Catholic education. These changeshave forcefully elicited the question of justice, particularly as it re-lates to issues of power and dominance. Against this background, Ioutline some of the crucial issues relating to justice and the teach-ing of world religions in Catholic institutions. In light of the ques-tion put to me by Yusuf Gulleth, I argue that teaching world reli-gions allows a methodological and imaginative space not only forthe comparative discussion of justice, but also for teaching justly.

A History of the History of Religions

There are many ways to understand the development of the aca-demic study of religion. Most recently, many scholars of religionhave attempted to retrieve a subaltern tradition of “explaining re-ligion” that includes the work of thinkers such Giambatista Vico,David Hume, and Sigmund Freud among others (Preus, 1987).


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But these explanatory efforts are valorized often in explicit con-tradistinction to how “world-religions” has been taught within theacademic area of specialization that has come to be called “the His-tory of Religions.” While the History of Religions has developedin institutions other than those shaped by the Jesuit tradition, aninstructive comparison can be made of the development of Historyof Religions with the development of Catholic higher education.Indeed, History of Religions’ struggle with postmodernism pro-vides an interesting parallel to Catholicism’s effort to rearticulateits educational mission in the wake of Vatican II, since both ef-forts remain concerned with how issues of justice and power shapescholarly inquiry and pedagogy.

Theological Liberalism and Comparative Religions

The History of Religions initially developed as an interdisciplinaryproject informed by philology and liberal theological sensibilities.The beginning of the discipline is most immediately identified withthe philologist Friedrich Max Muller. In his lectures at the Royal In-stitute of London in 1867, Muller (1882) coined the term “religion-swissenschaft” to refer to the idea of a science of religion as an aca-demic discipline. Muller was concerned with “the original naturalreligion of reason,” an entity that could be retrieved by seeking tounderstand the broad progression of religious phenomena withinhuman history (see also Kitagawa, 1959, p. 17). With Muller’s workexerting a formative influence, the later half of the nineteenth cen-tury saw a marked increase in the attention given to the study of re-ligion as whole. For example, James Freeman Clarke published TenReligions: An Essay in Comparative Religions and assumed the chairof natural religion and Christian doctrine at the Harvard DivinitySchool (Kitagawa, 1959, p. 2). A profusion of works followed andthe turn of the century saw most notably the publication of C. P.Tiele’s (1897) Elements of the Science of Religion and William James’s(1990) The Varieties of Religious Experience. But the most significantevent for the academic study of religion was the World Parliamentof Religions, convened in Chicago in 1893. As Joseph Kitagawa(1959, pp. 3–4) recalls, the statement of purpose for the Parliamentaffirmed its mission: “to unite all Religion against irreligion; [and]to make the Golden Rule the basis of this union.” Within threedecades, the study of religion had passed from an idiosyncratic


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concern of philologists and liberal-minded theologians to a publiceffort to find some unifying ground for all religious traditions.

This idealistic endeavor to unite all religions quickly passedand instead became an exclusively academic project to studyreligion as an irreducibly unique phenomenon. The intellectualsophistication and rigor of the History of Religions in the 20th cen-tury can primarily be associated with two scholars teaching at theUniversity of Chicago: Joachim Wach and Mircea Eliade. JoachimWach, who began his career at the University of Leipzig, focused hiswork on developing a broad taxonomy of religious experience. Inhis major works, Types of Religious Experience (1951) and The Sociologyof Religion (1944), Wach diagramed a schema of religions by focus-ing upon key elements within religious life that structure religiousorganization and experience. While Wach advocated a historicalmethod that also drew heavily on philology, he finally maintainedthat History of Religions must be resolutely hermeneutic in itsfocus upon the meaning embodied in religious phenomena (fora helpful discussion of Wach, see Long, 1985). This approachreached its greatest exposition in the work of Rumanian-bornscholar Mircea Eliade. Eliade propounded a phenomenology ofreligion that drew upon the methodological stance of Geradus vander Leeuw (1938) by employing macron epoche, or the bracketingof religious phenomena. For Eliade, religion was sui generis andmust be studied in and of itself without any kind of normativeevaluation. Within this methodological framework, Eliade (1974)traced the morphology of the Sacred—from “hierophanies” inwhich the Sacred was made manifest, to the “kratophanies” thatconstituted emblematic expressions of religious power. As articu-lated in Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries (1967, pp. 231–245), Eliade’sgoal was not only a “science of religion,” but a new humanism,founded upon the History of Religions, that would reclaim theSacred in an era that had lost its myths of transcendence.

During its one hundred years of development, History of Re-ligions drew upon what Joseph Kitagawa (1985, p. 128) has calledtwo “maps of reality.” The first map of reality was drawn by theextending hand of the Enlightenment. The contours of this mapwere cast in bold relief by characteristically Enlightenment atti-tudes concerning the primacy of reason and by associated aversionsto dogma, ecclesiastic authority, and the pretenses of particularreligious traditions (Kitagawa, p. 129). But as Kitagawa also ob-served, historians of religion also came to view religion in a more



positive light by arguing that the underlying essence of religionhad become obscured by “layers of historical accretion” and mustbe retrieved (p. 129). But both these maps had a cross-culturalspan since the central claim of the History of Religions was thatreligious phenomena could be compared across time and space.Hinduism thus could be placed alongside Christianity and com-pared to Islam. In this comparative discussion, however, any nor-mative evaluation of religious phenomena needed to be carefullycircumscribed so that religious phenomena could emerge in theirclarity as sui generis manifestations of the Sacred.

The Problem of History

The idealism and expansive claims of the History of Religions even-tually led to its fragmentation if not collapse. Strangely, perhaps,the History of Religions had become resolutely ahistorical. Indeed,within Eliade’s morphology of religious manifestations, history hadto be bracketed out as accident. Because of this, the History of Re-ligions became subject to a variety of postmodern critiques. Chiefamong the criticisms leveled against the History of Religions wasthe charge that it made no methodological sense to ignore historyin humanistic scholarship. Since all knowledge is inevitably situ-ated within the social and temporal context of human activity, theeffort to excavate or retrieve essences remained fundamentally mis-guided. Moreover, the very idea of reclaiming the Sacred soundedmuch like a theological project as opposed to a religio-historicalinvestigation. Most recently, Russell McCutcheon (2001) has ar-gued that scholars of religion must become “critics, not caretak-ers” and dispense with the romantic visions that have often broughtthe academic study of religion perilously close to theology. Underthe withering fire of both postmodernist and empiricist attacks,the idea of a religionswissenschaft was seen as a mask concealing ametanarrative that served universalizing religious interests.

The crucial point made in the criticism of the History ofReligions was that the discipline ignored relations of power. Theclaim that religion was unique, so central to the projects of Eliadeand Wach, became understood as a kind of ontological claimas opposed to an ordinary feature of classification in which allphenomena were reciprocally unique. While some historians ofreligion now attempt to classify religious phenomena much as


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a biologist would classify the organisms inhabiting the naturalworld, such a project seems pretentious within a current academicclimate that would understand this and other totalizing aspirationsas the products of a crude scientism. Instead, the History of Reli-gions has attempted to become more historical by understandingreligion as an intimately human phenomenon enmeshed withindiscursive and nondiscursive relations of power. Contemporaryreligio-historical studies, such as Bruce Lincoln’s Discourse andthe Construction of Society (1989) and Holy Terrors (2003) or WendyDoniger’s The Implied Spider (1998), see religion as a cross-culturalmanifestation of very human efforts not only to understandexistence but to dominate and control it and others. Within thisframework, History of Religions often becomes a demystifyinghermeneutic that unmasks the totalizing pretenses of religiousclaims to divine truth. In this sense, historians of religions nowchart a kind of postmodern narrative of emancipation in whichjustice becomes a central and abiding concern.

Catholic Education and the Concern for Justice

The trajectory of Catholic education in the United States followeda much different course from that charted by the History of Re-ligions. But if the History of Religions was in some ways disman-tled in relation to postmodern critiques of knowledge, then so toohas Catholicism found itself forced to respond to contemporarysociety and academic culture. Catholic education has tradition-ally not found a place for the History of Religions, for, as JacobNeusner (1968, p. 37) has observed, the academic study of reli-gion developed in an ethos of “cultural Protestantism” and wasexplicitly accepted by liberal Protestant or secular institutions. Butas Catholicism has moved to consider the implications of educa-tion for justice, it has created a space where its concerns meet thoseof the History of Religions.

Pre–Vatican II Catholic Higher Education

For well over one hundred years, American Catholic higher ed-ucation endeavored to maintain its own distinctive academic cul-ture (see Marsden, 1997, p. 103). Catholic colleges in the UnitedStates were structured by an initial orientation to the seminary



(Power, 1958, p. 56). Jesuit schools in particular were informed bythe educational ideals of the Ratio Sudiorum with its three divi-sions of study: philosophy, theology, and the humanities (Power,p. 64). Students were trained in classics, English, and associateddisciplines, with instruction embodying a pervasive moral empha-sis. As Catholic education developed and expanded in the 19thcentury, it maintained its clerical control and its aversion to partic-ularistic or overly vocational emphases in curricula. Throughoutthe 19th century, Catholic education found no room for the recon-sideration of religion as a phenomenon, an approach tentativelyembraced by the institutions that endowed the first chairs in Nat-ural Theology. To study other religions, or to study religion itselfas a phenomenon, would of course mean compromising Catholicclaims to truth.

The philosophy informing Catholic education became a cen-tral issue as the Roman Catholic Church continued to consider itsmission within American society in the 20th century. In his charac-terization of Jesuit education at the turn of the century, John Court-ney Murray (1964, p. 235) observed that instruction focused uponstylistic, literary, and analytic skills that the Society of Jesus hadadapted from the educational curricula of the Renaissance human-ists. This instruction culminated in the study of Thomistic philoso-phy that provided a unifying vision of transcendent truth (Gleason,1967, p. 46). Yet within this vision, the study of religion itself was notnecessarily considered to be an object of speculative inquiry. In-deed, as late as 1964, John Mahoney (1964, p. 245; for comparisonsee also Lauer, 1963) argued that in Catholic institutions “theol-ogy is an academic limbo, whose concerns are irrelevant to the stu-dents advancing knowledge in other subjects, not only because theintegration of theology with other learning is not accomplished,but because such integration is a sheer impossibility.” Whetheror not such criticism was accurate in all cases, it is clear thatCatholic education maintained an alternatively triumphalist anddefensive posture until the convening of the Second Vatican Coun-cil (see Gleason, 1998). Perhaps no better example can be foundof these attitudes than articles and editorials published in theCatholic journal Thought that consistently inveighed against exter-nal threats to the unifying integrity of the classical and Thomisticheritage of Catholic higher education. Communism, seculardemocracy, and prevailing trends in American higher educationwere all seen as emblematic of a modern dissolution of values


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(for example, see Kelly, 1938). From this standpoint, to study otherreligions alongside Catholicism would only hasten the process offragmentation that Catholic education must fight against.

The Second Vatican Council brought into question many ofthe traditional assumptions of Catholic education. Crucial to howthe Second Vatican Council changed the ground of discoursewas its description of the modern world. The seminal document,Gaudium et Spes (Flannery, 1975, p. 907) drew attention to the gapbetween rich and poor, the increasing power of science and tech-nology, and also articulated a vision of the human race inhabiting“a dynamic and more evolutionary” reality. The document extolledthe virtues of research and the autonomy of the sciences and othermethods of inquiry. To the effect of Gaudium et Spes, we could alsoadd the document Ad Gentes that evinced a more progressive un-derstanding of Catholicism’s relationship to other world religions.Religion and religious discourse thus must engage the world ofwhich they are inevitably a part.

The Society of Jesus and the Concern for Justice

For the Society of Jesus, reflection on the implications of the Sec-ond Vatican Council came to emphasize the theme of justice. Un-der the stewardship of Superior General Pedro Arrupe, the Soci-ety of Jesus addressed itself specifically to the question of justicein its 32nd General Congregation in 1974–1975. In the decreesissuing from the General Congregation, the society enunciated itsvision of the promotion of faith and justice as a necessary responseto the challenges of the modern world. Specifically, the decreesidentified three characteristics of the modern age that required adiscerning call for justice (1977, B.24–28): first, a pluralism thatdemands evangelization; second, the rise of technology and con-comitant secularization; and third, the actual ability of human be-ings to make the world more just. Given these pervasive charac-teristics of the contemporary age, the 32nd General Congregationemphasized that the promotion of justice must find concrete ex-pression not only in evangelization and theological research butalso specifically within the society’s educational ministry. This em-phasis on justice requires not only sensitivity to the marginalizedand the voiceless but also active solidarity with the poor, a pointmade quite eloquently by Ignacio Ellacuria (1990, pp. 147–151) in



an address in which he diagrammed the mission of the Christianuniversity. Within the contemporary context of Jesuit education,the phrase “men and women for others” is often repeated as anexhortation to promote the justice that the society has committeditself to achieve.

Decrees of the 32nd General Congregation had a great ef-fect, not only because they were bold, but also because, to some,they were controversial and even vague (see Tripole, 1994). But itis also important to emphasize that the theme of the promotionof justice was not something entirely new to Catholic theology.In an engaging overview of themes within Catholic social teach-ing, David Hollenbach, S. J. (1997) diagrams a clear line of devel-opment and thematic unity in Catholic social teaching from LeoXIII’s Rerum Novarum to Gaudium et Spes and beyond. Hollenbach(p. 227) argues that Catholic conceptions of justice have alwaysbeen associated with the themes of human dignity, mutuality, andparticipation in community. From these themes issues an eschato-logical vision of “sharing” in the death and resurrection of ChristGod with “Christian justice”—in Hollenbach’s words (p. 227), “aspecification of how this sharing is to be made present in the re-lations between persons in history.” The call to promote justice ineducation is then simultaneously a prophetic call to critique, aswell as an invitation to solidarity and discernment.

Catholic education and the History of Religions were bothshaped by the very real demands for a more relevant discourseabout religion and its relationship to the contemporary world.In pursuing the rather contrived comparison between contem-porary Catholic discourse about justice and the concerns of theHistory of Religions, what is clear is that in both spheres of dis-course there is a fundamental appreciation of religion’s complexplace within human life. Religion is not somehow disengaged fromhuman reality but enmeshed within it. Moreover, the very fact ofcontemporary pluralism requires new methods of understandingreligion in connection with issues of both power and justice. In thisconcern, both Catholicism and History of Religions have oftenembraced methodological forms of unmasking—whether in theform of prophetic critique or through deconstructionalist analy-sis. Issues of justice and power are not necessarily synonymous orisomorphic, but they do clearly have a very intimate relationship.If this is so, then the History of Religions does have a place within


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the continually developing Catholic discourse on education andthe promotion of justice.

Teaching World Religions and Teaching Justice

In an essay in Justice and Peace Education, Monika Helwig (1986,p. 15) argues that there is no discipline better suited for social jus-tice and peace education than religious studies. In her carefullyargued piece, Helwig diagrams a variety of themes that religiousstudies courses could emphasize in their consideration of justice:sin, redemption, materials from liberation theology and scripture.But to this rich proposal we might also add that religious studiesincludes the History of Religions and that, in the effort to en-gage questions of justice, the History of Religions and Catholictheology could have a fruitful, if sometimes contentious, partner-ship. All too often in Catholic institutions, History of Religionshas become simply “World Religions.” Within this classification,Catholicism is usually considered within the domain of theology,while all other religions are relegated to broad World Religionssurvey courses. But if mutuality and community lie at the heart ofCatholic conceptions of justice, then a comparative considerationof other traditions alongside Catholicism might lay the ground fora broader discourse about justice, human community, and solidar-ity. Put more polemically, to so privilege Catholicism and Catholicdiscourse about justice often militates against articulating a visionof justice sensitive to both pluralism in the classroom and in theworld as a whole. While it is important to consider both normativeand foundational questions in discussions of justice, I would arguethat the History of Religions offers a necessary complement to ex-plicitly Catholic considerations of justice precisely by setting sucha discourse within a comparative framework that is open to criticalself-examination.

Theology and the Academic Study of Religion

One of the most suggestive recent efforts to approach “world re-ligions” in a way that is sensitive to questions of both teachingjustice and teaching justly is Francis Clooney’s Hindu Wisdom forall God’s Children (1998). A Jesuit priest and comparative theolo-gian, Clooney moves beyond the conventional understandings



of justice education as a rather static exercise in what var-ious religious traditions “say” about justice. Instead, Clooneypresents a multilayered approach to understanding Hindu reli-giosity that invites the reader to an openness that “is mindfulenough to welcome the stranger at our gate” (p. 136). Clooneypresents the visions of Mohandas Gandhi and Mahasweta Devi(who chose to live with the poor) while also introducing as-cetics and mystics such as Ramana Maharishi and the Tamilsaint Satakopan. Throughout Hindu Wisdom for all God’s Children,Clooney draws the reader into the complexity of the Hindu re-ligious imagination by focusing upon how existential questionsand symbolic imagery are joined. For example, when discussingHindu creation narratives, Clooney draws attention to how im-ages of “male and female” as well as the “the eater and theeaten” articulate both the “complementarity and conflict” at theheart of the continuing creation and recreation of the world(pp. 7–10). In relating Hindu visions of creation to traditionalJudeo-Christian accounts, Clooney’s discussion moves back tothe familiar, having radically expanded the ground for appreci-ating both the differences and similarities between the Hinduand Christian traditions. Through Clooney’s discussion, Hinduwisdom remains firmly situated within its Indian context butalso moves to engage more abstract questions that are nonethe-less rooted in the very specificity of human life. Clooney thusnot only teaches “justice” through his exposition of Hindu un-derstandings of the purpose and nature of human life, but healso teaches “justly” by refracting Christianity through a Hindulens and thus reversing the conventional tendency to understandChristianity as “normative.” But this emphasis upon “Hindu wis-dom” in no way makes Clooney’s investigation less Christian.Indeed, Clooney describes his work as a “spiritual task” andobserves:

Those of us who are Christian can keep looking upon the face of Christ,never imagining that we need something more than Christ; in Christ Godkeeps giving us more, so that we can also contemplate in Christ all theexperiences and wisdom of the religious traditions around us.

The call to open oneself to Hindu wisdom for Clooney is ultimatelya call to open oneself to Christ who reveals Himself in all things.


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Francis Clooney writes as a Catholic theologian and speaksto a primarily Christian audience. Within the context of educa-tional institutions with a religious identity, Clooney’s work could bewell complemented by an approach that draws upon the scholarlymethodology provided by the History of Religions. Historians ofReligions would query Clooney’s understanding of “wisdom” andask to what extent wisdom is often determined by relations of power(Schmalz, 2003). Sensitivity to issues of power would also leadHistorians of Religion to observe that in presenting “Hindu wis-dom,” Clooney engages texts which only members of the Brahmincaste are eligible to read and explicate. Finally, Historians of Re-ligions would reflect upon the implications of appropriating thetexts from another religious tradition for use within an explicitlyChristian context. For example, does such a move finally subsumeHinduism within Christianity or the figure of Christ? In this ef-fort, do Hindu wisdom and conceptions of justice become simplyexpressions of Christian wisdom and Christian understandings ofjustice? Such questions would not be to dismiss or to undermineClooney’s project, but rather to bring theology and the academicstudy of religion into critical and self-reflective engagement overwhat it means to teach justice and teach justly.

Critical self-examination or reflexivity provides the materialsfor constructing a bridge over and between the contested aca-demic turf occupied by theology and the History of Religion.The strongest objection to any joining of theology with the aca-demic study of religion is that they reflect two fundamentally op-posed ways of understanding religion itself (for an early reflectionon this issue, see Kim, 1972). The differences between theologyand the academic study of religion were brought into sharp reliefin a series of heated exchanges between the Catholic theologianPaul Griffiths (2000) and the critical historian of religion, DonaldWiebe. In a collection of essays, Wiebe (2000) explicates the theo-retical foundations of the approach to religious studies now mostaggressively advocated by his former student Russell McCutcheon.Wiebe argues for a robust scientific paradigm for religious stud-ies, a paradigm that embraces a rigorous “naturalism” in orderto explain religious phenomena. Against this position, Griffithsobserves, quite correctly, that the term “religion” is an eminentlyChristian creation that loses much of its relevance when applied toother forms of life such as Hinduism or Islam. Because religion as



a category is born from Christian theological reflection, to assumethat it exists independently of theological discourse is to be funda-mentally mistaken. Griffiths pushes his critique further by observ-ing that science and other forms of “naturalism” also make episte-mological claims which Wiebe and his followers fail to recognize aseminently contestable. Interestingly, however, both Griffiths andWiebe would probably join together in resisting the postmoderntrend in the History of Religions: Griffiths would collapse the His-tory of Religions into theology, while Wiebe would surely maintainthat the subject and object of academic inquiry become hopelesslyblurred in what I have described as the “postmodern narratives ofemancipation” that characterize much scholarly work in religiousstudies.

For both Griffiths and Wiebe there is a strong desire for bothintellectual clarity and, indeed, existential firmness in scholarlywork—although both Griffiths and Wiebe sharply disagree as towhere this intellectual and existential ground can be found. Butscholarly disciplines are curious things; they change as they arecontinually shaped not only by intellectual investigation but also byconfigurations of power. In a thoughtful response to Alasdair Mac-Intyre’s After Virtue (1984), the philosopher D. Z. Phillips (1992)observes that there is a strong tendency to romanticize how re-ligious traditions and, by extension, scholarly disciplines seek topresent a coherent vision of the world and human activity. Draw-ing upon the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Phillips would call at-tention to how messy human “forms of life” can be—a view thatwould be echoed in the writings of the former Jesuit Michel deCerteau (1990) who observes that much of human life is funda-mentally about “making do.” While hardly a popular position, onecould argue that scholarly disciplines, whether theological or sci-entific, are also ways of “making do.” In specific response to bothGriffiths and Wiebe, one could also argue that the History of Reli-gions occupies a provisional middle ground between theology andthe social sciences. The academic study of religion then becomesan imaginative construct, not unlike alchemy, that is produced ina continuing exploration of and negotiation with contemporaryreligious pluralism and cultural diversity. While the History of Re-ligions is not a discipline in the conventional sense, it is perhapsbecause of its ambiguous status that it can have the power to createnew vantage points of perspective and destabilizing insight.


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Teaching Justice

If pluralism and diversity are generally recognized as crucial is-sues in the contemporary world, then no discourse about justicecan proceed in a context bound by exclusively one tradition. Withspecific regard to Catholic claims about justice, while they arisefrom a coherent tradition of inquiry, they exist within a broadercontext of often competing understandings of the nature of jus-tice itself. A comparative examination of Catholic understandingsof justice with those of other religious traditions would recognizethe pressing demands of contemporary pluralism and also opennew possibilities for mutual understanding and collective action.For example, a course that extends Clooney’s approach in HinduWisdom might focus on conceptions of the Self in Christianity andHinduism and proceed by contrasting Christian conceptions of theSelf as a teleological whole to Hindu understandings of the Self asfluid and changing in its interactions with others. Such a coursemight then move to consider the views of justice that proceedfrom these differing conceptions of Selfhood, initially focusing onCatholic documents that make strongly universalistic claims aboutthe nature of justice and then examining Hindu texts that reflecta contextually sensitive understanding of justice and its demands.The course might conclude by examining how these differing con-ceptions are expressed in practice. While attempting to preservedifference, a comparative discussion of Dorothy Day and MahatmaGandhi, for example, might lead to an interesting consideration ofsimilarities in social praxis that allow for solidarity across culturaland religious boundaries. A comparative approach to questions ofjustice would then draw upon the methodology of the History ofReligions by understanding Christianity and Catholicism preciselyas world religions.

Beyond a comparative approach to teaching justice, the His-tory of Religions offers an important corrective to totalizing dis-courses based upon exclusive understandings of religious iden-tity. The strength in making claims about justice, at least in aCatholic Christian context, is that they are normative. Such norma-tive claims, however, can often too quickly sweep aside the diversityand specificity of human life. This is precisely the argument madeagainst the universalizing projects of historians of religion likeMircea Eliade and Joachim Wach: too often they ignored history



and the contingency of human life. To understand religion andreligious understandings of justice is to examine a particular formof discourse—a discourse made possible not only by individualand collective spiritual longings and intellectual inquiry but alsoby discursive and nondiscursive formations of power in the speci-ficity of human relations. To address the question of justice withinsuch a framework is not to dismiss it but to offer an important cor-rective to claims that move too quickly into generalization aboutthe complex and culturally defined nature of human experience.Openness to critical self-examination is essential to any religioustradition, especially given the all too human tendency, pithily de-scribed by the singer Bruce Cockburn, to want “justice done onsomebody else.”

Teaching Justly

When Yusuf Gulleth asked me to explain the Eucharist, he was rais-ing an issue about whether I was teaching justly. Just as universal-izing claims about justice can often ignore cultural specificity anddifference, so too can generalizing assumptions about the compo-sition of the classroom marginalize those whose voices most needto be heard. To deprivilege Catholicism in the classroom of a Jesuitcollege might seem at best counter-intuitive or at worst a violationof the very mission of the institution. But, as Yusuf Gulleth gentlypointed out to me, Catholics are not the only ones who fill theseats in the Catholic classroom. If one of the crucial themes inJesuit discussions of justice is concern for the marginalized, thenCatholic institutions must be sensitive to this issue within the aca-demic communities they seek to build.

Beyond the specific issue of classroom diversity, it is crucial forCatholic students to begin to understand their own tradition notonly as it relates to others but also as it is seen by others. To thisend, understanding Catholicism within the framework of the His-tory of Religions offers a mode of discourse that is sensitive to thecross-cultural variations of religious expression. When employedin this way at Catholic institutions, the History of Religions assumesa role not dissimilar to that envisioned in the early development ofthe discipline. Indeed, by emphasizing an initial bracketing of nor-mative claims about religion and justice, the History of Religionscould be seen as an initial step in the eventual cooperation of


16 M. N. Schmalz

religions. While most contemporary Historians of Religion wouldfind such a goal a grandiose fantasy, it is one worthy of consider-ation when speaking of teaching world religions, teaching justiceand teaching justly.

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