For the first Daily Theology Podcast episode of 2024, we welcome Heather Miller Rubens of the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies. We talk about how her early interest in Hebrew scriptures led to the study of Jewish Catholic relations, the work of the ICJS, and about how to do interreligious dialogue well. We focus especially on her forthcoming project, In Good Faith: An Argument for an Interreligious Society, and her argument that the public sphere actually needs more talk about religion, not less, if we want to live in a healthy and functioning society.
Dr. Heather Miller Rubens is the Executive Director and Roman Catholic Scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies (ICJS). She has a BA from Georgetown University, and an MA and PhD from the University of Chicago Divinity School. Her research focuses on theological, ethical, and political issues relating to the roles of religion and interreligious dialogue in the public square.
You can also see the full transcript for this episode below.
Thanks as always to Matt Hines of the band Eastern Sea for providing the music for the Daily Theology Podcast.
Transcript of Episode #50 - Heather Miller Rubens
#50 – Heather Miller Rubens
[Opening Music]
Stephen Okey: Welcome to the Daily Theology Podcast, a podcast on the craft and vocation of theology. I'm your host, Stephen Okey.
In today's episode, I talk with Heather Miller Rubens, who is the Executive Director and Roman Catholic scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies. We talk about how her early interest in Hebrew scriptures led to the study of Jewish Catholic relations, the work of the ICJS, and about how to do inter-religious dialogue well. We focus especially on her forthcoming project "In Good Faith: An Argument for an Interreligious Society," and her argument that the public sphere actually needs more talk about religion, not less, if we want to live in a healthy and functioning society.
Thanks to everyone who has subscribed through Substack, where this podcast is joined to my Okeydoxy newsletter. New episodes of the podcast will come out each month while newsletters will come out every two weeks or so. The next one of those will be on Martin Scorsese's "The Last Temptation of Christ" as part of my "Celluloid Christ" series.
I hope you enjoy the episode and thanks for listening.
[Music Transition]
Stephen Okey: Today for the Daily Theology Podcast, I'm talking to my friend, Heather Miller Rubens. Heather, thank you for being here.
Heather Miller Rubens: Thank you for inviting me.
Stephen Okey: You are the executive director, and Roman Catholic scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies, which sounds like a lot of heavy double duty. So I like to, I like to open by asking people, how did you get into doing theology?
Heather Miller Rubens: Yeah, so I went to Catholic school my whole life, from elementary school through college, at Georgetown University, where we met as undergrads so many, many years ago. And I was a double major in theology and creative writing. And towards the end of my time there, I actually took a Hebrew Bible class with Father Jim Walsh and started learning Biblical Hebrew with him, and he sort of encouraged me to keep going with religion, the study of religion, as did a lot of my other undergraduate mentors as well.
And I knew I wanted to, to, to study a religion that I didn't identify with. It wasn't mine and really very much enjoyed Hebrew, and so went to the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies for a 1 year masters and sort of immerse myself in the study of Judaism and the study of the Hebrew language, and then went to the University of Chicago to pursue a doctoral degree and an additional masters.
And at the University of Chicago I was able to combine my doctoral studies with Judaism and Christianity, and do that under the history of Judaism section. So, I actually trained as a historian at the University of Chicago, focusing on the early 20th century and Jewish Catholic relations in Europe and in the United States.
And then the job posted at the institute for, um, at the time the Institute for Christian and Jewish Studies. They were looking for a Roman Catholic scholar who was interested in Catholic Jewish relations, which was exactly what my dissertation was about.
And so I applied and landed at ICJS and, we're an academic nonprofit, and so the organization is very much focused on, not only religion in this kind of academic classroom, but religion in community. So we work a lot with, religious practitioners, so clergy and religious leaders and congregations, but we also work with the general public, and folks who have different relationships to religion.
And so, in my work at ICJS since 2011, I keep asking more and more theological questions and more and more questions of belief and how our beliefs, not only about our own communities, but our beliefs about each other, so, especially beliefs that cross religious traditions, really impact our, our relationship to one another and sort of helping people explore what that means.
So the, the kind of horizontal relationships, the intergroup relationships, between communities and between individuals, and then how that, the vertical relationship with, with the divine, with God, how that impacts those relationships.
Stephen Okey: So I want to step back, just to something you said, which was, you know, as you were wrapping up undergrad, you wanted to study something that was outside your own religious tradition or something that you did not yourself identify with. Why? What was it that was motivating you there?
Heather Miller Rubens: Ah, that's a great question. I don't know. I think it was a, uh,
Stephen Okey: That's fair.
Heather Miller Rubens: I like how, how much you could apply agency to, to some choices made in your early twenties. Um, I'm not entirely positive. I, I think I had a, just a deep curiosity about the Jewish tradition in particular and the Hebrew Bible was the sort of entry point into that.
And then just learning more about rabbinic tradition and interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, and how much it is different than Catholic interpretation, Christian interpretation of the Hebrew Bible. And so what does it mean when two communities share a common text, but interpret that text in, in different ways, and how do you sit with that? How do you sit with that reality? And again, even right within, of course, within each tradition, there's so much diversity that sort of internal diversity to interpretation, but diversity across traditions is what really interested me. And I wanted to go deeper into that.
Stephen Okey: Yeah, that makes sense. I know for me, part of why I went into theology was trying to work out my own issues, uh, on some level. And so it's, it's nice to hear something that's kind of a more healthy response, maybe, uh, for academic interests.
Heather Miller Rubens: I'll also say, and this is something I've circled back to now in, in, in sort of my practice as a, I identify as kind of a scholar practitioner of interreligious dialogue at this point, that my academic interest is in the so called Jewish question. And so what does it mean for the modern nation state to be born in, in, in the sort of European context and to come up and say, religious diversity is a problem for the modern nation state.
And, you know, the, the, the horrific answer to the so called Jewish question is the final solution of the Holocaust. And so what does it mean when a Christian society decides that religious diversity internal within it, it's not possible and, and seeks a genocidal response. And so, and I think those questions about the status of religious diversity, what, what does it mean to live in a religiously diverse world?
Is that always a problem? I think that that is a core interest that I've carried from my time at Georgetown to my time at ICJS.
Stephen Okey: Yeah, I definitely, I want to keep talking about this one. So I had other questions I'll come back to, but you're currently working on a project called "In Good Faith: An Argument for an Interreligious Society," where you're dealing with this question, right, at least the reality of religious diversity in a, in a pluralist society. And there's definitely, as you've said, there's a framing of that as a problem that asks for a solution. And that solution has historically in many cases turned genocidal, violent, discriminatory. Could you talk a bit about this project and what you are sort of setting out to do?
Heather Miller Rubens: Yeah, so, after over a decade now at ICJS, I feel like I keep having to make an argument as to why people should engage in interreligious work, why people should engage honestly in more religion talk rather than less religion talk with one another. And so sort of the basic motivation is bringing that level of argumentation that I've made to both participants in our program, community members, and just the sort of broader community in the United States that that may or may not want to engage in religion talk as to why it's necessary.
And I, I think in the United States, and I very much want to ground our dialogue work in the United States, because interreligious work looks different in different social and cultural contexts, but in the United States, we have this kind of ideal of welcoming citizens of all religion and no religion, as a sort of an aspiration, but we just rarely engage interreligiously as a civic practice and so people aren't comfortable doing so.
And I would say that the question of how diverse citizens should bring their religious voices to civic conversations is the sort of animating idea as to why I want to write this book, and I want to make an argument for a multi religious democracy and what does a functional multi religious democracy look like.
And the book is not meant to be a blueprint of an answer to that question. It's to, um, I, I want to state that very clearly. It's a real framing. It's a framing of the question in a slightly different way, and an invitation to both regular citizens, to theologians, to political scientists, to legal scholars, to say, okay, well, what happens if religious diversity isn't a problem anymore, but what happens if religious diversity is actually the end goal that we're constantly working for.
Um, and that's including folks who would identify as as not religious or as secular or religiously unaffiliated. And so if that's the goal, how do we then reorient our conversations, to keep that goal, in place?
And I would say that there's two things that kind of stand in the way in the United States context. One is a sort of Christian nationalist or Christian supremacy response, which is saying religious diversity is a reality, but it's a problem. And there has to be one religious group that's on top and we may or may not tolerate the other religions or the place of non religion, or even dissent within religion, and so there's a kind of Christian supremacy as a domination model response.
And then what I'm, I'm coining the phrase secular supremacy as the other alternative, which I think is another domination response, but actually seeks to banish religious diversity from the public square and not allow for religion talk to be practiced.
And so what happens with where we've got one domination model that says, there's only one way to talk about religion and another that sort of pushes religion out. Most people don't have any real practice or comfort with engaging in religion talk across difference, and I think that that inability, that the fact that we don't really have both the intellectual space, the spiritual space to do that kind of work is hurting us as a, as a country.
Stephen Okey: I'm not a particular scholar or practitioner of inter religious dialogue, I sort of have, maybe my, dipped my toes in it. It seems to me that most of my encounter with it In theology, at least, has primarily been, so one, it's, it's often sort of tradition to tradition.
It's sort of a bilateral, but not, you know, often multilateral kind of conversation. And it tends to be very focused on either sort of theological questions. And so you get, Roman Catholic Muslim dialogue around, you know, the meaning of word of God or the role of Mary, things like that. Or it tends to be sort of good neighbor practices, you know, in terms of the, the local parish and the local synagogue have some kind of joint venture to build relationships and so forth. And, It's never really struck me particularly as something that people have focused on until what you're talking about, in terms of how is inter religious dialogue productive on the level of public discourse, the civic square, the public square. And so it's an interesting trajectory to be taking the questions that I think often emerge in inter religious dialogue.
Heather Miller Rubens: Yeah, I mean, to build on that, I would say that interreligious dialogue is sort of bubbling under the surface of a lot of culture war questions. I kind of don't like the term, and I think that, especially in the U. S. courts, there's increasingly attention, where anti discrimination values and principles are being pitted against religious liberty. And I feel like those argumentations are getting sharper and sharper, and only allowing a certain type of religious voice to claim to be a religious voice in the sort of public square and in a courtroom setting and the reality is, is that where there's a lot more religious diversity about questions around bodily autonomy, around gender, around being a good neighbor. What does it mean to have a business in a diverse community? All of those types of things. And so this is where it may be, it may be counterintuitive to a lot of folks that I think we actually need more religion talk to address this problem rather than less.
Cause I think there's a lot of people who are in favor of a multi religious democracy as a concept, as an ideal, but assume that the best way to do that is to privatize religion and to have no religion talk happen in the public square. And so I would say that we have done work with teachers and secondary education in both religious schools and independent or private schools, which you can imagine that they have like world religions classes, but also public school teachers who are encountering religious diversity in history and in literature and are unsure as public school educators how they can bring religious diversity and into their classroom and respect the 1st amendment and respect their students and respect themselves also in the process, understand where they're coming from in that space. And the fact that we can't have those types of conversations or have them very rarely, I think is a problem.
And so the book is trying to make an argument that we need to be doing this more with one another, and recognize also that it's, it's iterative work. It's really messy work and it requires a long period of time and a commitment to relationship. Because I think that there's another way in which interfaith as it's often practiced is polite conversation done in a one 60 minute session, and then that's it.
And that's not the kind of, it's a one off thing, and that's not the kind of work that we try to do at ICJS and it's not the kind of work that I'm actually talking about in the book, I, I want to see folks who are in long term relationships with one another in their communities, whatever those communities may be, they may be geographically located communities, but they also may be professional communities. But to, to bring religion into those spaces and to not exclude religion from those conversations.
Stephen Okey: So in talking about the main situations or themes that you're looking at in this project and you talk about Christian nationalism or Christian supremacy and this idea of a secular supremacy, as both being domination models. This makes sense historically in terms of, you know, a lot of the sort of secular push has been to, has been resistant particularly to Christianity in the U. S. Because it's been the dominant religious tradition in the U. S. for so long. And the sort of Christian supremacist or Christian nationalist response, especially in the last, like, 20, 30 years has been a reaction, or maybe I guess back to the seventies, right, is in many respects, it's a, it's a counter reaction. It's a reaction to reaction to this, what that group would see as a, as a drift or a slide or a decline of the proper place of Christianity in the U. S. The approach that it sounds like you want to craft is something much more cooperative and complementary than competitive, I think. Is that fair?
Heather Miller Rubens: Kind of fair.
Stephen Okey: Okay.
Heather Miller Rubens: Let me, let me, let me respond to that. So a big part of the project, I think, is trying to attend to the emotional response and the question of what do folks fear. And I spent a lot of time trying to spell this out because I think you're right. And this is a kind of a rough breakdown, a crude breakdown, but I would say in the again, thinking about this in the United States, on the sort of more conservative, arguably more religious side of things, which would sometimes translate to the quote unquote rights, but not always, that there is a hostility to Christians and a hostility to religion is real, that sort of scorn is real.
There's an argument for the loss of religious freedom and Christian religious freedom on the one side. And then there's the kind of rise of the so called "nones and dones" and the sort of deinstitutionalization of religion, and all of this creates a certain amount of fear and anxiety about the place of religion in society and in community. And so I would say that the fear is actually of an absence of religion or too little religion in society and in life. And that that absence argument is, is what's assigned a sort of causal role in a lot of social problems.
And that leads to, okay, well, then we need to bring Christianity back in, in a very dominant way to sort of deal with that absence. And so that, that's the sort of emotional register, I would say for folks.
And that on the, on the, you know, the sort of left, I think that there's an argument that there's too much religion, right?
So if the other side is saying there's too little, the other side is saying, there's too much religion. And so it's an argument of presence. And instead of hostility to Christians, there's hostility to religious and racial minorities or minorities of other kinds. There's a religious takeover of the courts, right?
So, exemption from anti discrimination laws, as opposed to a loss of religious freedom. And then there's a takeover by Christian extremists with kind of January 6th looming as a, as a recent apex of of what Christian extremism looks like in this country. And so rather than seeing a fear of the deinstitutionalization of religion, there's a fear of of January 6 level violence.
And so I would say that the folks in that camp then jump onto the secular supremacy bandwagon and say that there can be nothing good about religion. So we are going to push religion out of the public square entirely, and I would say that both of those models are, are where folks tend to try to, to, to fit themselves in, but neither model actually sees a multi religious democracy as a possible or desirable.
I think everybody kind of desires it in a certain way, but as, as, as a real possibility to work towards. And so trying to account for that sense of fear and anxiety, I think, is a really important part of of the work in the, in the project.
Stephen Okey: In the research that you've done on it so far, how do you find or see the place of non Christian religions in participating in this public question? I don't, I don't mean prospectively like in the future, but currently there's a, a growing but sizable Muslim minority in the United States, there's a Jewish minority, there's, you know, there's Hindus, Buddhists, so forth, none of which have the sort of numbers or the cultural capital, I think, that Christianity does or that arguably secular "nones and dones" perhaps do. Does that question make sense?
Heather Miller Rubens: No.
Stephen Okey: Okey, let me try it a different way. So within a political question about religion in the United States, one sort of interesting development since the 70s or so has been the increasing political split within U. S. Catholics, so between more left wing, more right wing Catholics. And one of the, I don't know if it's a result of this or sort of a parallel of this is you get a lot more right wing Christian bunching around political ideas, regardless of denominational affiliation, and you get some more sort of left wing bunching around ideas among Christians across denominations. And so sort of historical denominational ties became less and less significant in this larger political question.
And one thing I've noticed in some public discourse lately is the way that some people are seeing particular religious commitments from Islam in terms of questions around gender and so forth, or at least communities within Islam are being essentially sort of right coded because they fit with that. And so you have a longstanding and especially, in the last 20, 25 years, often sort of right wing Christian hesitance or suspicion around Islam writ large, but now there's this sort of like small opening of, and yet they're on our side on, you know, whatever this issue of the day is.
So anyway, that's a way of getting back to within the two very broad groups you're talking about of an ideological Christian domination, an ideological secular domination. There's a whole host of other religious groups in the US that don't obviously fit into either of those.
And so I'm just sort of wondering from your research, what do you see has been the place of those communities in this larger question?
Heather Miller Rubens: So I would say our experience at ICJS, and that's mostly what the book is writing from is sort of what does it mean to do this work in a sustained fashion for a long period of time? And so it's, it's telling the stories of folks who are in our fellowship programs, or have been longtime dialogue practitioners at ICJS and, I would say that that that's the sort of basis for a lot of the storytelling.
And so it's, it's more anecdotal than it is sort of holistic. And it's more, it's very much placed in a kind of Baltimore, Maryland context.
Even in Maryland, which values toleration of an incredible amount of diversity, there's been a spike in antisemitic violence, particularly since 2020, and vandalism and hostility. In Montgomery County, there was a series of graffiti attacks that were happening and just an increase in the need for Muslim and Jewish religious communities to always have police presence and or security at all of their houses of worship.
That's the reality of those communities. So the Jewish and Muslim communities may agree on some social issues with certain pockets of Christians, but whether or not they feel safe in communities where those Christians have control, and whether they would be allowed to continue to to practice, I think that that is true. And I think that the other thing is just to realize on the numbers front that we're talking about just a couple percentage points of the whole U. S. population. Maryland again is a, we have a one of the highest, both Jewish populations and Muslim populations in the United States.
So we're able to do interreligious work with communities and practitioners in a way that may not be possible for other American cities, and so I think that that's a real benefit, but the sort of day to day concerns of Muslim and Jewish friends is more about the religious bigotry and sort of religiously inflected violence that they're experiencing.
Stephen Okey: Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. I don't think by and large for individuals or movements that are issue driven in some sense that the wellbeing or union with confreres is all that important. And so it makes sense to me on the level of the concerns you identify in the Jewish and Muslim communities are in large part about safety and security and being able to thrive and the interest in at least some Christian communities is much more how is this useful for us and not primarily about the well being of that particular group in and of itself. So that makes sense, to me, anyway.
Heather Miller Rubens: And I would say that there's a way too, I don't want to skip over because we're on the, the Daily Theology Podcast that that theology kind of undergirds this whole discourse and specifically theologies of supersessionism. And I think that that coming, especially in the post Holocaust, Christian theological environment, the real reckoning that happened with, with the idea of what does it mean to think that your religion is the chosen favored religion that then replaces the Jewish community, and sort of the movement to sort of recognizing God, God's covenant, God honoring God's word, and God honoring God's covenants. So then if there's a way to sort of rethink and reframe and undo supersessionism in a certain way, what does that actually look like with when you move that into sort of political theology and questions of public theology.
But I don't want to skip over the sort of logics of supersessionism and how that type of theological thinking is the kind of root problem that we at ICJS are trying to work on because I think that those logics, and I also think that there's a lot of richness in sort of the black theological tradition, in the last sort of 15 years, to think about how the logics of supersessionism have created the environment for anti black racism and anti brown racism. And so again, how those Christian theological concepts can and sort of have unfortunate after lives that have real harm for communities.
And so that sort of challenge of supersessionism, again thinking about that with our Muslim brothers and sisters, I think is a real challenge for both Christian and Muslim traditions in the future.
Stephen Okey: I mean, it's interesting, and this goes back to what you were saying earlier about your own early interest in Hebrew scripture and Judaism is this tension or this connection between two different broad traditions that share a text, and interpret the text differently and the sort of subsequent history of how they interpret that text and how that shapes things is different. There's a strong sort of theological link between Christianity and Judaism. And then there's the strong historical link, especially in terms of Christianity and Judaism in Europe. And one thing I think that we often tend to overlook is, I don't know that there's quite as strong a theological link between Christianity and traditions other than Judaism.
I think that's just sort of a historical reality probably. But the historical connections between Christianity and other traditions are much richer and less focused on, I think, than many Christians often realize.
Heather Miller Rubens: Yeah, I would challenge that
Stephen Okey: No, please do. You're, you're the expert on this.
Heather Miller Rubens: on this. And again, I was trained in Christian Jewish relations, so I still feel like a novice in Christian Muslim relations, but you don't get Aquinas without Muslim interlocutors.
Stephen Okey: That's true. Yeah.
Heather Miller Rubens: And so you really have, especially in that kind of Mediterranean basis, we grew up together, like, all 3 traditions are influencing, borrowing, challenging each other for for a really long period of time.
And we don't exist without each other in a, in a really sort of an Aquinas is the easy shorthand example to
Stephen Okey: No, that's fair. That's, that's, that's a totally fair pushback. I think part of what I'm thinking about is, and I, and I don't know, I'm more of a novice on this question, I think, than you are, but so many questions that seem so central to Christian theology, like the concept of the Messiah, right? This is a thing that Christianity imports from, or I don't know if imports is the right word, but develops from the Jewish tradition. The concept of covenant and the sort of shift from talking about, you know, the, the people of God as the people of Israel to the people of God as the church.
These are sort of the things I guess I'm thinking about as like the, the obvious theological connections. When you get to the point where, you know, Aquinas is drawing on Avicenna and Averroes, and Maimonides from the Jewish tradition, there is something about that that seems a bit different in terms of, and again, also correct me I'm this, but one of the things that sometimes tilts then towards Supersessionism is the way that some Christians will see Judaism as sort of like the, I don't know, the field in which Christianity is planted and blooms and flowers from, and it, it comes across also sometimes in the, what is it, the elder brother in faith, right? Like that's another phrase. And there's not quite the same sense of, like in the family model, where does Islam fit? Um, is it like the younger cousin or, I don't know, next door neighbor.
I don't know. But I think that's part of what I'm, I think that's part of what I'm thinking about in terms of the theological connections and how they, the valence of them seems very different to me between Christian and Judaism and Christianity and Islam. And then I think probably more attenuated with other traditions beyond that.
Heather Miller Rubens: I mean, I think that there's a certain particularity and specificity of shared scripture in the Jewish Christian relationship, but I would say with Islam, you have shared figures, right? So Abraham, a whole book of the Qur'an is dedicated to Mary
Stephen Okey: Yeah.
Heather Miller Rubens: and Jesus is in the Qur'an as well. And so you have a really rich tradition in the Qur'an, which the Muslims will recognize as as revelation of all of these stories and figures and imaginings, and if you, you spend time both looking at the Qur'an and then looking at the exegetical traditions around the Qur'an, it illuminates ways to go back to, I think, the Christian Bible and Christian scriptures as well.
And I would say that possibility has really been encouraged and supported by Pope Francis and his papacy and even Fratelli Tutti is just such a lovely encyclical about what does it mean to have these conversations. Though I would say Fratelli Tutti does tilt towards the sort of dialogue of daily life or the dialogue also, right, the, the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue has the sort of fourfold types of dialogue that are understood and I'm, I'm paraphrasing here, so don't, don't quote me on this, but there's the dialogue of daily life.
There's a dialogue of sort of like. I would say civic projects, like common problems, right Fratelli Tutti looks, it says we're sharing this planet and there's an environmental crisis. There's a crisis of poverty. How do we address these problems together? And Christianity and Islam again, looking ahead, are going to be the, the sort of two big players on the global stage, right? While in the U. S. context, Muslims only make up less than 3 percent of the population in the global context, Christianity and Islam are the two big kids on the block. And so, we need to figure this out in a meaningful way.
But then I think that the right, the two other types of dialogue. So we've got daily life, civic projects. Then we've got the dialogues of theological exchange. So these types of dialogues and then the dialogue of mysticism, which I always, I always forget because I'm not a practitioner, but I think that there actually is a really important access point there. And we actually have experimented in the last couple of years with people sharing their spiritual practices with one another. And what does it mean to talk about that? What does it mean to talk about your prayer life with someone else?
And then to hear them talk about their prayer life is actually so powerful and so incredible. The sort of mystical exchange part, it's not something I've trained in or, or, or, uh, have regularly practiced, but I actually have, like, I am, I am now totally on board with, with having that be part of the conversation because I think that there's a, a real beauty there to hear about someone else's spiritual practices and spiritual life.
Stephen Okey: It's a great thing, even just without the inter religious dimension of it, even just in a single tradition. It's incredibly striking to do that work with students who have whatever religious background or training or experience or positions that they have when they bring to the course, they're often really struck by trying out a practice that they are not familiar with, even if it comes from a tradition that they identify with. And I think some of that is, and maybe this goes back to the sort of, in a funny way, kind of the, the privatization of religion part of the secularization thesis, which is that modes of prayer are often things that it seems like people don't reflect on in any kind of deliberate way, and so even having conversations with, I mean, in an ecumenical context, you know, conversations that I've been a part of between Roman Catholic and Baptist students or various Protestant students, is even the, there's a tension over memorized prayers versus extemporaneous prayer and how one, um, for people on each side, one has seemed more authentic or has seemed more reverent, and just sort of the way that they cast these things is so fascinating to me. And so I haven't had the opportunity to do it, but I can imagine sort of extending that out with other traditions would be really fascinating with students.
Heather Miller Rubens: Yeah, actually intentionally we do work with Christian seminarians, Jewish, rabbinical students, and future Muslim religious leaders. Sometimes they identify as seminarians, sometimes they don't, and intentionally brought that into our kind of, we do a week long intensive retreat study course with those three communities and the possibility and opportunity of presenting worship became a sort of central feature of what we did this year in a really interesting way. And so all of those sort of Muslim students did an instructional moment, they invited us to watch them do evening prayers and folks were invited to participate if they wanted to do so, and were given sort of help and guidance and instructions.
And then all the Christian students, which was an interesting thing too, because we had folks who were at CUA and we had folks who were from Fuller, so I will try. We had a really broad, broad range of of Christians as well as to whether they wanted to share some sort of communion, Eucharist, something.
We actually also had an ordained Catholic priest who was a part of this program as well, or we ended up doing an Episcopalian prayer service. It was the sort of journey that the students went on through the week as to what they could share and all participate in, and still have it be, register as authentically Christian and two of our folks, we were following the Episcopalian order of prayer service and two of our folks who grew up in an extemporaneous tradition said we want to bring that in. And so we made space, the students, alright the faculty are sort of facilitating, we're not directing this, and so the decision was to make space for that.
So, interspersed within the Episcopalian order of service was extemporaneous Christian prayer and it was, it was, it was, you know, the ecumenical conversation that happens in an interreligious space is fascinating. And then the rabbinical students, led us all also in a sort of regular daily morning prayer service.
But I, I want to go back to that as like a, a bigger topic because the prep work we did as faculty in that space was to really take seriously the question of what happens when you're attending the worship service of another religious community? Are you a participant, or not? And then what, what are the sort of questions that sort of flow from that? And I think that there's a way of, alright Krister Stendahl coins, the phrase, holy envy, that is something that I think is a very much part of interreligious. It's part of the interreligious canon, if I could say that there is such a thing in the United States. And he's offering this reflection, at the time, right, he's a Lutheran Bishop, Krister Stendahl, and he is also faculty at Harvard Divinity School and sort of a leading figure in 20th century Christian thought.
And so he is asked what does it mean for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to be asked to build a house of worship somewhere. And in his sort of response saying, I support the, the Latter-day Saints building their house of worship. He coins this phrase "holy envy".
And there's three aspects of this, if you're not familiar with the phrase. He says, number one, if you want to learn about another religion, ask its adherents, not its enemies. Number two, don't compare your best to their worst, so do apples to apples and oranges to oranges, and number three, to leave room for holy envy, to leave room for the space of being able to see something in another tradition and to admire it and to respect it, but not necessarily adopt it, right? Like, I think that the sort of the concern about appropriation and appropriate appropriation, is a live one, but then the concern about, like, whether or not, if you're incorporating something, is it, is it heretical? Is it idolatrous? Is it somehow breaking with your tradition is sort of a related one.
And so the holy envy as a phrase, I think, leaves open this creative possibility of seeing something and appreciating something, but not necessarily bringing it in. And so we see the opportunity to attend other people's worship as a space where holy envy could possibly, come into the interreligious exchange.
Stephen Okey: So first of all, I had not heard those three conditions before, and those first two just seem almost universally applicable, uh, in any kind of engagement or conversation. To the third too, and I, I was thinking about this a little bit when you were talking about this group of students that you had and you're trying to sort of navigate what is a ritual that we can actually celebrate together, that it sounded like that the Christians within the community could all be on board with is what it sounded like, is that fair?
Heather Miller Rubens: Yeah, so, so there's a difference between an interfaith event where you're, you're trying to make the event where everybody can participate. And then what we're trying to do in this is to actually have a, a Muslim event, a Jewish event, and a Christian event where the other folks can observe, and ask questions about and, and see what it's like to worship in another religious tradition. So it's a slight, slightly different ask.
Stephen Okey: And it's interesting in that, because the narrative that you have, there's already this part of sort of like, ritual flexibility within it. And I think a sort of common vision of ritual is that it's not terribly flexible, it's deliberately ordered and structured in such a way, and, I mean, clearly rituals have developed historically over time, they're not always identical to what they were 50, 100, 1000 years ago, but whenever you are tinkering with them, there's this sort of question or this tension about, like, is there a point at which this moves away from, in that case, the Christians are, what are they representing to these other traditions who are watching it when they're already kind of tinkering with, you know, particular aspects of it?
I think about this, question I ask intro undergrads, we'll talk about the concept of tradition. And I think I've used this example of a podcast before, so I'm, I'm sorry to any of my listeners who've heard me talk about this, but I'll ask them about, what are traditions you and your family have? And we'll often, if it's a fall semester course, we'll kind of zero in on Thanksgiving and you know, what are your traditions around Thanksgiving and that sort of thing. And I'll start sort of posing adjustments to that in terms of who is invited or what are you eating or what is the order of the day and at what point do you get to something where it's just not recognizably Thanksgiving anymore, where the tradition has changed and it's super unclear actually because it's you know you can have a thousand steps before you get there.
And so it's interesting to think about that and this idea of holy envy and that there's something about admiring another tradition and respecting it and potentially sometimes drawing something from it, but also not trying to take all the things you like from it because ripping from the context in and of itself adjusts the meaning of it on some level.
Heather Miller Rubens: Yeah, and is arguably an act of violence in some way, or could be an act of violence in some way. And I think the other aspect of this and the way we framed it as faculty for these future religious leaders. Right? Again, it's so wonderful to be able to work with seminarians and rabbinical students and sort of Muslim, you know, folks who are committed to serving their communities in some way and are also going to be interfaith leaders in the respective geographic locations where they find themselves.
And so to, to sort of prepare them for that type of work and what they can lead their communities in, but we also talk about the sort of host guest dynamic and the sort of value of hospitality, and what does it mean when you're the host, right? What's incumbent upon you if you're inviting folks to a house of worship, what do you want them to know about the ritual or the service?
I would say that in Catholic tradition, there's not a lot of explanation, like, when you walk into a mass anywhere in the world, it's like, it's just going on. It's just going on. They're not, there's not a lot of guidance. If you're, if you're totally an outsider, you're kind of like, huh, but other traditions actually have an explanation model, like, kind of built in for this.
Stephen Okey: So I'm at a Catholic institution, we pretty much every fall celebrate mass of the Holy Spirit as like the welcome back to school mass. And I have long described this as accidental first communion, because if you don't tell people upfront, how it goes like a lot of people, especially freshmen who have no experience or knowledge, they're just going to do what everyone around them is doing. And so in the last few years, the monks here have gotten really good about, you know, if you're Catholic or if you receive communion, if you're not cross your arms, all that kind of stuff. But for a long time, it was just sort of like whatever happens, happens, and there wasn't that kind of explanatory, quick intro to what we're doing.
Heather Miller Rubens: Yeah, I mean, it's right. So what, what should you participate in? What should you not participate in? How should you dress? And then the why of all of that, right? Because I think sometimes we can present rules, and they seem arbitrary, and they can, like, actually reinforce stereotypes, and so partly what we try to do is to, to really push them as future religious leaders to explain why, why don't you invite everyone to receive communion?
What does it mean to have an open table? What does it mean that there's a lot of internal Christian dissent around that concept? And to see it as a teaching opportunity. I think that that that movement into the why, like, not only the do's and don'ts, but why, why those rules exist?
And again, going back to sort of my original thing, people are so afraid of having that why type conversation? Because they think that this type of religion talk is necessarily combustible or necessarily going to lead to offense or necessarily going to bring something really negative into a group dynamic.
I want to kind of challenge that and say, no, it actually could be a really incredible opportunity for sharing and for learning and for growth, as long as you're kind of stepping into it with a certain amount of, I would say, humility, right? And a certain amount of curiosity, and a certain amount of charity, for your interlocutor.
Stephen Okey: I think also for a fair number of Christians, they have trouble understanding dialogue as not, in some sense, oriented towards conversion. And that the purpose of presenting the faith is to, I mean, it is to evangelize in terms of spreading the good news, which is fair, but there's this sense that for some, if it's not oriented towards conversion and becoming Christian on some level, then what's the point, or, or it has failed in some sense.
Heather Miller Rubens: You know, the tension between mission and dialogue since Vatican 2 is real, right? And I think that that is entirely unresolved theologically, and in practice. And I think that there are folks who don't want to participate in dialogue that doesn't lead to conversion. So I think you're entirely right on that, that there's a scope of people.
I actually had a Muslim colleague recently talk about the ideas of differentiated labor within religious communities and how, because there is, there's, there's always some folks who show up at ICJS and our programming who have that proselytizing orientation, and that's not always Christians, right?
Muslims, less so Jews, mostly Muslims and Christians, and so trying to sort of help that person say, can you, not suspend it right because it's there and actually owning that and naming that I think is actually really important to be an in good faith partner in the conversation, to sort of say that this is what I'm bringing to the conversation, but I'm going to try to put it over here for a few minutes to listen. Because I think that also is a real issue right if we're constantly working about proclamation, it doesn't actually leave a lot of space for for listening. And so what does it mean to just sit and actually really try to listen to somebody else and understand what they're saying on their terms? That I think is a huge part of it now.
Oh, my colleague, my Muslim colleague, differentiated labor. And so it's like, you know, not everybody in the Muslim community can can teach the 5 year olds, right? That is a gift and a calling for certain types of folks, but everyone in the Muslim community agrees that teaching the 5 year olds is important.
And so somebody needs to do it. And so he's like saying, could that actually be a goal for interreligious dialogue? Maybe not everybody in the Catholic community should be participating in religious dialogue because they can't or don't or, or don't have an orientation or an aptitude for it, or don't feel comfortable doing it.
It doesn't bring them any sort of sense of purpose. But I would like to make the argument that everyone in the Catholic community should be happy that somebody's doing it. And that that's not entirely true. Like, I think that there are some folks who actually are really concerned about interreligious dialogue and want to maintain a sort of orientation towards our mission and proclamation that is geared only towards evangelization and not towards a sense of listening or understanding. And so that that I think is is the challenge, but I don't think there's anything wrong with saying that certain folks that interreligious dialogue isn't for everybody and I don't want to say that in an elitist way because I don't, you know, we, we try to bring in folks who are at all different walks of life and levels of knowledge and comfort.
But I, I think that there are some folks who just aren't, in the same way that not everybody should be teaching the 5 year olds, not everybody is really, that that that isn't their jam within the religious community and that's okay. So,
Stephen Okey: Yeah, I feel this very strongly having a three year old and like, not knowing, and I feel embarrassed as a theologian, I don't necessarily know how to talk to her all the time about religion, but it's my job and I'm her dad. So like, you know, I'll figure it out, but it makes me glad I'm not, I'm not the one teaching the five year olds. It's not my talent.
Heather Miller Rubens: But I, I think that's actually, I would say that some of my best conversations, theological conversations have happened with children, with my own children and with the children of other folks, and in these interreligious spaces, because I would say that there's something about a fresh set of eyes on some of these questions that's really clarifying and in an incredibly wonderful way, and so when somebody's coming in from, like, another tradition, not that they're a child or child-like, the questions are sophisticated, but they're looking at something that you've been looking at your whole life. And they're saying, huh, explain that to me, explain what you think is happening here.
And that, I think is actually, this is what I say to a lot of folks. I think I'm a much better Catholic as a result of interreligious engagement because I have to be able to explain what I'm doing and why I'm doing it on a regular basis in a way that if I wasn't doing interreligious dialogue, I, I, I wouldn't unless I was talking to my, my kids.
Stephen Okey: Yeah, something I tell my students, especially in intro level classes, because there's always, there's a proportion of students who will ask questions and talk every day, there's a proportion who are never, never going to talk if they don't have to, and there's like a sort of a middle group that can go either way. But one of the things I always tell them is, at the beginning of class, at least my approach, I always ask for questions. What questions do you have? You know, from the reading, the topic, from last week, whatever. And I tell them early on, like, my favorite days are usually days where someone has a really good question that ruins whatever I was planning to do that day. Not that I'm not prepared and don't have slides and don't like talking about it. But it's like, if you can throw the game off with a really good question, it's the best day. And I think they get the most out of them too. And it happens probably a couple times a semester in any given class. And I wish more students would take it as a challenge and not just sort of a like isn't he nice
Heather Miller Rubens: I think that's true in adult education as well, that I think we come in with a certain set of plans and a certain also, if you're teaching the same course multiple years again, the sort of seminarians, rabbinical students work, we've done a version of it for almost 10 years. And then in so many ways I'm always thinking about last year's problems when I'm dealing with this year's class, or this year's cohort, and then they come in with a whole new set of issues and problems and challenges and and you have to kind of pivot and adjust and I 100 percent agree that those are the best days and the best conversations when you are are truly listening again, truly listening to your students and truly listening to your dialogue partners and taking them seriously.
I think that that is a sign of both respect for them, but also of real possibility for for for interesting conversation.
Stephen Okey: So as maybe a last question, what are you sort of looking forward to slash hoping for with the ICJS in the next five, 10 years? What's the dream? What's the goal?
Heather Miller Rubens: I would say that the goal is to make the interreligious society, which is our organizational vision, to make a really good model here in Maryland, for what that could look like, and to see it happening across sectors. So, congregational life is certainly part of what we do, supporting both ordained and recognized religious leaders as well as lay leaders within congregations, but we've been expanding to thinking about, justice makers. So it was sort of nonprofit professionals and how they understand justice as an interreligious concept, and then teachers in secondary education.
But we recently partnered with the chaplaincy innovation lab at Brandeis University to do a statewide survey of chaplaincy and spiritual caregiving in Maryland to understand sort of what's happening on that front. And I think that the, the space of spiritual caregiving. Is just incredible, and it's going to be a huge kind of growth arena in the United States, particularly as congregations and denominations are struggling and de-institutionalizing and to understand what's happening.
Um, what kind of spiritual care is happening in secular spaces or in workplaces, and how we can equip people to have better conversations in those spaces. That's the arena for growth that I think we want to kind of lean into. And so, again, this idea of more religion talk, making people a little bit more uncomfortable in different spaces, I think is a really interesting one.
Stephen Okey: I am all for more religion talk.
Heather Miller Rubens: Thinking about the future and ICJS and where we want to be and what kind of work we want to do, I feel a certain urgency around creating an opportunity and a space for people to have conversations about religion because I think that those spaces are shrinking and particularly as the academy and programs are cut at colleges and universities across the country and departments are folding and there's going to be less and less space for people to have conversations around religion, and I think that that's a real need for us as an organization to be able to step into that space as an academic nonprofit and say, can we create online forums or opportunities for folks to learn and to participate in that way, which is why we're trying to keep all of our online courses short and free, and to also create opportunities for folks to participate who may not be able to, to seek a degree, but still want to have an inter religious or an interfaith religious dialogue training. Could we do sort of weekend retreats? Can we do sort of a hybrid where we're, we're talking with a couple folks for a little while online and then do an intensive, in person gathering and how do we make this happen not only for folks who are in seminary or heading into congregational life, but also a reality for everyday Americans who are interested in, in talking about religion and spirituality and the place of religion in our society.
Stephen Okey: Yeah, it's a real challenging context for higher ed today across a lot of different dimensions, especially for theology and religious studies. I think part of your point to, we need more religion talk, speaks to the kind of denigration that theology and religious studies and history of religions, and humanities more broadly often get in society as, you know, useless, nonproductive labor. So I, I think that there's a lot to commend this idea of more religion talk, because the degree to which we downgrade, or set aside religion talk in society is an enormous problem or part of the problem.
Heather Miller Rubens: Yeah, and not only do we sort of say that it's useless, but other times we view it as just dangerous. And so, therefore, I think that those are the 2, 2, 2, you know, does it not serve a function or is it actually going to be harmful? And I think that if there's a way to say, no, there's a possibility for this to actually be creative and life giving and to create a community of flourishing by having these types of conversations.
That's the type of space that I want to lean into and not to be, naive or, or, or pollyannish about the sort of difficult histories that are, are present within interreligious encounter and inter-religious thinking that there, there's some really awful things that have happened, in the present day and historically as a result of religious thinking and religious communities gaining power and imposing their power on other folks. I don't want to say that that's, but that's not the only story, right? Like that, you have to have that that sort of good religion, bad religion trap that folks either want to say religion is all good all the time or religion is all bad all the time.
How do we say? No, it's both right? Because we're humans and we're the ones who are sort of bringing this into existence, but we need to explore ways in which religion and religious communication can actually lead to sort of life giving possibilities for us as a human community.
Stephen Okey: Yeah, I think it's good and important too to recognize there's clearly the concern for as you talk about, people going into religious leadership in various traditions, people in the broader public, and their sort of formation and understanding and making that available.
And I think also, and this is part of what, well, at least my sense of part of what, you know, you work in is you're working in an academic environment that is something other than a university. And I think that part of the challenges for theology and religious studies and related fields in the future is thinking through the challenges that these disciplines face.
What is that going to look like in the next 10, 15, 20 years, with the decline of theology faculties or religious studies faculties or the decline of the humanities more broadly, or the decline of the role of these kinds of disciplines within core curricula, and the training and formation of future scholars of theology and religion within a context that doesn't have the same sort of economic demand for them, even with what I think is probably a social need for them.
Heather Miller Rubens: Yeah, I think the, the challenge of how this type of work fits into a certain vision of the economy, and a practice of the economy is, I think one of the bigger challenges for just religious studies in general and theology in general, but also for interreligious studies as well.
Stephen Okey: Well Heather, thank you so much for talking with me today.
Heather Miller Rubens: Well, thank you so much for the invitation and for the great conversation.
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Stephen Okey: This episode of the Daily Theology Podcast was produced by Stephen Okey.
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