IDI: Interreligious Dialogue Initiative

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.

October 2020

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)

November 2020

Although the news on Saturday morning, November 7, at last promised a reprieve from the bellicosity of the last four years, we remain a divided and broken country. In a healthier time, disagreements could give rise to productive debates. Now they seem tinged with the threat of violence. This also makes it difficult to address the many exigencies of our time, including the ecological crisis, systemic white supremacy and economic inequity, and the pandemic.

As a Buddhist priest in the Soto Zen tradition, I share, along with the ICTC, as well as members of the Interreligious Dialogue Initiative, the sense that these challenges drive us deeper into our spiritual practices for the requisite wisdom, patience, compassion, and action to respond to our hurting country and its emergencies. We cannot sow the seeds of nonviolence and healing unless we first have the courage to confront the roots of violence, including those in our own heart.

Following the ICTC’s winter theme "The Non-violent Shift," the first IDI speaker, Claude AnShin Thomas, will address the issue of non-violence from a Zen Buddhist perspective. As a teenager, Thomas fought in the Vietnam War as a helicopter gunner. As he confessed in his moving book, At Hell’s Gate: A Soldier’s Journey from War to Peace (2004), “My job in Vietnam was to kill people. By the time I was first injured in combat (two or three months into my tour), I had already been directly responsible for the deaths of several hundred people. And today, each day, I can still see many of their faces." Returning home from the War, he suffered severe bouts of PTSD and lived a self-destructive and unstable life.

Thomas eventually took up the path of Zen. Bernie Glassman ordained him and gave him his Dharma name, AnShin, Heart of Peace (as well as Angyo, Peacemaker). He has dedicated his practice to non-violence and peace-making and this practice includes a rigorous practice of takuhatsu, Buddhist begging. He has walked almost 20,000 miles on peace pilgrimages, carrying no wallet and no money.

Claude AnShin Thomas learned to cultivate non-violence out of the hell of violence. He, and his nonprofit Zaltho Foundation, serve those who have undergone suffering and traumatic violence, helping them heal and sowing the seeds of peace. For more information, see: https://zaltho.org

Given the prevailing pandemic conditions, this will be a Zoom event at a date to be determined in February. I look forward to joining you as we learn from this remarkable peacemaker, healer, and powerful spokesperson for ahimsa, the way of nonviolence.

Jason M. Wirth

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"