IDI: Interreligious Dialogue Initiative

Interreligious Dialogue Initiative

A Message from the IDI Chair, Dr. Jason Wirth:

This has been a difficult year for all of us. In addition to the many challenges that we have endured, some more than others, this time also saw the passing of Peter Ely, SJ, a cherished friend of many of us. As a founding member of what came to be called the Interreligious Dialogue Initiative (IDI), under Peter’s steady guidance, I witnessed not only his erudition and wisdom, but also his open heart. This inspired me deeply. Over the years I witnessed him engage in fair-minded debate with atheists, and dialogue appreciatively and generously with many of the world’s religious and spiritual paths.

In the months before his passing, Peter asked me to replace him as the head of the IDI. This was Peter’s way. Although earlier in my life I had been trained by the Jesuits (Saint Ignatius College Preparatory in San Francisco and the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester), my own lifelong discernment took me to Japan where I was ordained a priest in the Soto Zen lineage, which goes back to the great Kamakura master, Dōgen Zenji (1200-1253). Yet Peter recognized that my Zen training and commitment had opened me up to all sincere spiritual striving, regardless of its institutional or personal manifestations. Unless we consign our spiritual practices to escapist fantasy, they share with all other genuine and honest spiritual practices a commitment to the great matters of human living and dying. We consequently have much to learn from each other in open dialogue, debate, and philosophical engagement.

It remains my privilege and happiness to accept Peter’s offer and to walk in his admittedly large footsteps and I would like to dedicate my first year to his memory and legacy. Given the many challenges and opportunities that confront us, I hope to use Peter’s generous and radically open example as an inspiration and guide.

I am also happy to be working with my friend and colleague, Dr. Jeanette Rodriguez. I travelled with her and Dr. Ted Fortier to Cuernavaca, Mexico to stay with the Sisters of our Lady of Guadalupe and later with them to El Salvador. These two trips were deeply formative for me and they strengthened my resolve to engage in the important work of the IDI ahead. (It is now officially a part of the work of ICTC.) I also acknowledge here the wonderful work of Jessica Palmer, the assistant director of the ICTC. I plan to have updates and reflections in each issue of this newsletter.

The IDI will sponsor and organize one major public lecture each academic quarter. I am still busy planning this year’s events, but the first one will engage intersectional justice in an age of global migration and will likely be offered in early November. The winter lecture will engage the issue of non-violence from an interreligious Buddhist perspective. The spring lecture will engage our local indigenous sisters and brothers.

Please feel to contact me with questions and suggestions. It is my hope to offer spiritually rich and provocative programming that will nourish our whole community, religious and non-religious, traditionalists and seekers.

Tetsuzen Jason Wirth (wirthj@seattleu.edu)

Corona Sutra

With Jason Wirth, PhD

Tetsuzen Jason Wirth, Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University and a Soto Zen priest, offers a Dharma talk (speaking from the heart regarding the great matters of living and dying) that also seeks to offer some Zen words of encouragement during the current crisis. He begins with a brief reflection on a line from the Heart Sutra and then ties its thought to the words of Zen Master Dogen (1200-1253). In so doing, he tries to understand how Dogen would also have seen our crisis as a sutra, a moment the study of which can lead to an awakening and a deepening of our practice.

Past Messages from IDI

Spring 2020 - A Message from the IDI Chair, Dr. Jason Wirth: In the summer of 2019, Peter Ely invited me to be his successor as the leader of the Interreligious Dialogue Initiative (IDI) beginning in AY 2020-2021 and I accepted. I consider this a great honor and responsibility as we help facilitate the exploration of the many religious paths shared by members of the Seattle University community, both on campus and beyond, and as we deepen our respect for them and enrich our own paths by sharing in the wisdom and compassion of other paths. We will continue to feature a major speaker every academic quarter who will engage the Catholic intellectual and spiritual tradition by building bridges to and opening channels of communication with other traditions. I plan to dedicate my inaugural year to Peter Ely and his immeasurable legacy. May he rest in power and may his wise and kind spirit continue to guide us in our shared work across traditions.

Upcoming Event: A Conversation with Barbara James, moderated by Fr.Pat Twohy, SJ

The IDI will welcome Barbara James, a great-grandmother from the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community. She is a most respected elder in both longhouse and church life ways among the Coast Salish. Fr. Pat Twohy, SJ, Director of the Rocky Mountain Mission NW and Chaplain to urban Native Americans of the Seattle Archdiocese, will introduce Ms. James. Tentatively scheduled for Fall 2020.

Past Reading Selections: The Seven Types of Atheism by John Gray

For a generation now, public debate has been corroded by a shrill, narrow derision of religion in the name of an often vaguely understood “science.” John Gray’s stimulating and enjoyable new book, Seven Types of Atheism, describes the complex, dynamic world of older atheisms, a tradition that is, he writes, in many ways intertwined with and as rich as religion itself.

Things Fall Apart

THINGS FALL APART tells two overlapping, intertwining stories, both of which center around Okonkwo, a “strong man” of an Ibo village in Nigeria. The first of these stories traces Okonkwo’s fall from grace with the tribal world in which he lives, and in its classical purity of line and economical beauty it provides us with a powerful fable about the immemorial conflict between the individual and society.

Myth, Literature and the African World

The ways in which the African world perceives itself as a cultural entity, and the differences between its essential unity of experience and literary form and the sense of division pervading Western literature, are just some of the issues addressed. The centrality of ritual gives drama a prominent place in Soyinka's discussion, but he deals in equally illuminating ways with contemporary poetry and fiction.

Shin Buddhism: Bits of Rubble Turn into Gold by Taitetsu Unno

While Zen Buddhism flourished in remote monasteries, the Pure Land tradition was adopted by the common people. With a combination of spiritual insight and unparalled scholoarship, the author describes the literature, history, and principles of this form of Buddhism and illuminates the ways in which it embodies this religion’s most basic tenet: "No human life should be wasted, abandoned, or forgotten but should be transformed into a source of vibrant life, deep wisdom, and compassionate living."

The Jew in the Lotus, by Rodger Kamenetz

While accompanying eight high–spirited Jewish delegates to Dharamsala, India, for a historic Buddhist–Jewish dialogue with the Dalai Lama, poet Rodger Kamenetz comes to understand the convergence of Buddhist and Jewish thought. Along the way he encounters Ram Dass and Richard Gere, and dialogues with leading rabbis and Jewish thinkers, including Zalman Schacter, Yitz and Blue Greenberg, and a host of religious and disaffected Jews and Jewish Buddhists.
Current Faculty Research: The Buddhist/Christian Dialogue: Departing from St. Francisco Xavier's Letters on Japan. A Multi-Year Collaborative Research Project involving faculty at Seattle University with faculty at several universities in Japan

Jessica Ludescher Imanaka, PhD "Towards a New Philosophy of Shingon Missionary work in Predominantly Christian Countries"

Naomi Kasumi, MFA "How the Visual and Aesthetic Impressions Contributed and Reflected on St. Xavier's Letter and Himself as well as the People especially in Kagoshima, Nagasaki, Japan"

Douglas Peduti, S.J. "Language: Flashpoint of Difference and Discussion, Source and SUmmit of every Foreign Encounter"

Sharon Suh, PhD "Toward an Intertextual and Interreligious Understanding of Religious Conversion as Conversation in Shusaku Endo's Silence and Deep River"

Michael Trice, PhD "A New Reading of Francis Xavier's Letters on Japan."

Jason Wirth, PhD "Rethinking Philosophically how to take up the Dialogue, Historically Inaugurated by Xavier, between Shingon and Jesuit Spirituality"

Zen and Morning Star with Fr. Robert Kennedy, SJ

Robert Kennedy is one of three Jesuits in the world who answer to the titles “Father” and “Roshi” or venerable Zen teacher. He is not only a Jesuit priest and Zen master, but also a psychotherapist and former professor of theology at St Peter’s College in New Jersey. He is a representative of the Institute for Spiritual Consciousness in Politics at the United Nations. He is the author of Zen Spirit, Christian Spirit and Zen Gifts to Christians. Watch the recording of the lecture below:

2019-20 Events

The Crossroads Matrix: Spirituality, Cosmopolitanism and Black Subjectivity in Fela! On Broadway and Marvel’s Black Panther by Saheed Yinka Adejumobi, Ph.D., Department of History, Global African Studies, and Film Studies

When modern European Christian missionaries along with African apostles and converts translated the Holy Bible into African indigenous languages and myths, they simultaneously transmogrified the Yoruba deity Esu, the guardian of the Crossroads, into the biblical Satan. In many Christian communities throughout the Africa diaspora, the Crossroads became associated with a pathological site where a pact is to be struck with the Devil in exchange for knowledge and power; and the potential cost of this exchange is the loss of human lives or souls.
An alternative interpretation rooted in West African Yoruba cosmology holds that the Crossroads is a portal through which humanistic utopian impulses can be actualized. In this presentation, I explore the African Crossroads Matrix as a metaphor for both material and psychological sacrifice, appreciating lessons of the past, and embracing the potential of new ideas, both material and spiritual. These forces, I argue, make the Crossroads a zone for the exploration of future histories reflecting cosmopolitan ideals that uphold more equal post-hegemonic and even post-racial imaginations.
We often take for granted, in contemporary settings, how subjective definitions of spirituality, visions of moral order, and power are reified through knowledge production and the culture industry. I engage with two major artistic productions that reside at the center of the Crossroads Matrix: Fela! On Broadway (2008-2012) and Marvel’s Black Panther (2018), both conceived, funded and produced in North America but with stories, semiotics and aesthetic research done in Africa. These works challenge post-colonial geopolitics, modern global ethics, and Africa’s general exclusion from enjoying the full benefits of its natural and cultural resources.
Drawing on these themes, my presentation asks, who is a full person? Who is Cosmopolitan? Who controls narratives of the past, the present, and the speculative future? How have people of African heritage defined intellectual, semiotic, aesthetic and cultural expressions throughout periods of slavery, colonialism, dislocation, exile and migration? What have they done with timeless exposure to new ideas of spiritual and material significance? Do African-derived spiritual and humanist values deserve more recognition for their ability to absorb new ideas and pervade creative and expressive cultures on a global scale?

About the Interreligious Dialogue Initiative

The Interreligious Dialogue Initiative (IDI) established in 2012 under the auspices of Mission and Ministry and now, as of Fall 2015, located within the Institute for Catholic Thought and Culture (ICTC) aims to awaken sensibility in the Seattle U. community to the richness of the world’s religions, a richness abundantly represented on our campus, and to move beyond mere tolerance to engagement. The IDI steering committee includes on-campus representatives of various religious and spiritual traditions and key areas such as Campus Ministry, Theology and Religious Studies, and the School of Theology and Ministry. Beginning in the academic year 2019-2020, the IDI will be shifting its focus in a new direction. Each quarter IDI, in collaboration with various other groups and initiatives on campus, will sponsor a public forum designed to deepen awareness of religious traditions and spiritual pathways. We hope that these events will emphasize the continuing creative role of religions in a secular age.

Read the text from the 34th General Congregation of the Society of Jesus, Decree 5: “Our Mission and Interreligious Dialogue.” https://jesuitportal.bc.edu/research/documents/1995_decree5gc34/