Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori opened Trinity Institute's 38th National Theological Conference, titled "Religion & Violence: Untangling the Roots of Conflict, An Interfaith Dialogue," as the preacher on January 21 at an interfaith Evensong. Links to her sermon and the entire service are available here.

The program was designed to consider how the three Abrahamic traditions -- Christianity, Islam and Judaism -- become entangled with violence and discern "the resources within the traditions for living together in peace, without losing our unique identities," according to the institute's website. Participants spent time after each address in small theological reflection groups. Those who were not at Trinity viewed the presentations via video downlinks at 64 sites around the United States and the world.

James H. Cone, the Charles A. Briggs distinguished professor at Union Seminary in New York City, told those gathered at the January 22 morning session that to violate any person's dignity "is to transgress God's great law of love."

Cone said he was "speaking from the perspective of a people who have endured violence in America.

"If you live in a racist society, and are not preaching against racism, then you are not preaching the Gospel," Cone said, adding "I say most white churches are not preaching the Gospel.

"Because Africans were prevented from freely practicing their native religion" he said, "they merged their knowledge of their cultural past with Christianity" to create a world of meaning for themselves.

This meaning, he added enabled them to survive 246 years of slavery and 100 years of legal segregation augmented by "a reign of white violence, and terror that lynched more than 5,000 black people."

"Black slaves' faith in the coming justice of God was the chief reason that they could hold themselves together in servitude, and even fight back even though the odds were against them," he explained.

The idea of justice and hope, said Cone, should be "seen in relation to that important theme of love."

Theologically, he explained, God's love is "prior to the other theme," but in order to separate the "love in the context of black religion" from a similar theme in white religion, it is important to emphasize that "love in black religion is usually linked with justice and hope."

"God's love is made known through divine righteous liberating the poor into a new future," he stated.

Cone asked if it was possible to create a just and non-violent society where love and justice "flow freely between blacks and whites" and "among all the peoples and faiths of the world."

"Let us hope that enough people will bear witness to justice and love so as to inspire others to believe that with God and the practice of freedom fighters, all things are possible," he concluded.

Cone's presentation can be viewed here.

Susannah Heschel, Eli Black chair on Jewish studies at Dartmouth College, opened with her presentation January 22 with a reflection on the relationship of her father and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Heschel said the two had "an immediate sense of connection" when they met in 1963. They were connected by their "souls, the Bible, their courage and the prophets."

"Dr. King revived my father's hope and respect for Christianity," she said.

Heschel said it is clear to her how often we "identify or probe our religious traditions through the help of another."

She noted that when researching a book about Abraham Geiger, a 19th century Jewish scholar who helped lead the foundation of Reform Judaism, she learned he wrote a great deal about Christianity and Christian origins.

"It was important for him because it helped him in his understanding of Judaism to talk about Christianity," she said. "It helped him redefine the Pharisees as liberalizers of the 1st century and in that way identify modern Reform Judaism not as a deviation from orthodoxy but as recapturing liberal pharisaic religion."

She went on to explain that "religion is not magic."

"It does not magically keep people good, noble, humane or psychically normal," she said.

Heschel reiterated a portion of Jefferts Schori's Evensong homily that "the truth is beyond the moment of revelation." We cannot define our theology, Heschel said, based exclusively on our historical experience.

"Judaism's historical experience has become part of the text of God's plan that we have to try to understand," she said. "So for centuries, Jews believed that we are prisoners of war in Gentile hands."

Nonetheless, she said Jews' historical experience has to be mediated, limited and chastised "by religious text and theological insights."

"We have had adversaries, we have been hated, but the Bible reminds us that evil is never the climax of history," Heschel said.

Heschel's presentation can be viewed here.

On January 23, author and peace activist James Carroll used the image of Jerusalem's place as the center of all three religious traditions to trace a trajectory in the human condition which he argued evolved out of primitive religion's emphasis on bloody sacrifice of innocent victims to God or gods as a way of "making sense of the problem of death."

Saying his concern is with religion and war, Carroll said that nations have used the concept of sacrificial violence to justify continuing to conduct wars long after the strategic need for more killing has passed. Sacrificial violence is cast as serving the cause of peace and giving meaning to the continued violence.

He cited the English monarchy's portrayal of the loss of life during World War I in religious terms through its adoption of the hymn "Jerusalem". The hymn promises, in part, "nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, till we have built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land."

The English were taught that "a brutal god was being appeased," Carroll said, "otherwise, parents would never have sent their innocent sons out for that carnage, and their innocence was the point."

He also critiqued the religious rhetoric of the U.S. Civil War, arguing that Abraham Lincoln sacrificed a generation on the altar of the concepts of unity and freedom, and began a tradition of the U.S. casting its wars in a religious sense of duty and destiny.

That era's hymn to war was the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" which linked the North's efforts to Jesus' redemptive sacrifice, Carroll said, citing the line, "As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free."

Carroll cautioned the gathering that he was not solely criticizing the leaders of nations. "It isn't that we would do it differently if we had been in charge," he said.

The difficulty is that modern societies "don't even know how to talk about this," he said.
Primitive religion, he added, "had the virtue of being able to be direct in its sacrificial culture" while subsequent cultures and nations have retained a reliance on such bloody sacrifice without even acknowledging the implications of that reliance.

Thus there is a need for dialogue that does more than simply foster mutual understanding and trust, Carroll said, calling for dialogue that also changes the traditions from within.

"Reforming theology is the way to peace," he said.

Carroll's presentation can be viewed here.

Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan spoke to the institute January 23 by way of a video link from London. The connection was required because the U.S. State Department will not allow Ramadan to enter the country after first accusing him of endorsing terrorism and then saying he had given money to two charities which the U.S. says supports terrorism through the Palestinian militant Islamist organization Hamas.

The Rev. W. Mark Richardson, professor of systematic theology at the General Theological Seminary and moderator of the institute's plenary sessions, called the State Department's decision a "case in point" of how violence and hostility attempts to prevent dialogue.

"We refuse to let the State Department's decision stop us entirely," Richardson said, to applause.

With evening light illuminating the Thames River and the British Parliament building behind him, Ramadan called on his listeners to humbly examine and then act out of "the universal message we are sharing."

In that acting, all people must humbly acknowledge that they do not have all the answers and humbly pledge to be consistent in acting on what they do understand. "Self-criticism is the starting point," he said.

"Every one of us is living with contradictions" and it is hypocritical not to acknowledge the imperfection of our knowledge, Ramadan said.

All people of faith should acknowledge their need of God and their understanding that God has mercifully kept silent about some things so that we can use our minds and other resources to search for meaning in our lives, Ramadan said.

He added that self-examination and self-education can lead to a dignity and justice out of which each person will know best how to act. "You can be the first promoter of violence if you don't check yourself," he said.

"At the end of the day, we have to try to be the best witnesses to our messages," which though they are culturally encoded, he said, still have basic elements in common. Ramadan called this the "intimate universal."

"What we are facing today is not the clash of civilizations; we're facing the clash of perceptions," Ramadan said.

Some of that clash of perception is going on within Islam, he said. Some Muslims who adhere to a literal interpretation of the Koran have placed him outside of Islam because of his teachings, he said. There needs to be an "intra-community debate" about reforming Islam's practices in the light of today's world.

"I'm not representing all the Muslims. I am representing a trend, which is a reformist trend, trying to be faithful to the principles but at the same time facing the challenges of our time," he said.

Some Muslims are literalists about the text of the Koran who do not contextualize the words for today's situation and confuse principles with the historic model of Medina where Muhammad founded Islam. Instead of trying to replicate the Medina of the 600s, Ramadan argued, Muslims should extract from the model "the universal eternal principles and to try to be faithful to the principles today with new models."

Still, Ramadan says he must continue to speak with such literalists because he respects some of their views and sometimes he may forget the importance of the text.

"If I want to change something from within, I should always be in touch with them, talk to them, have a critical debate and to challenge some of their views," he said, adding that even though those literalists may put him outside of Islam, he considers them to be an important part of the tradition.

"I have the duty to continue the critical debate" with them, he said.

Ramadan's presentation can be viewed here.

The institute's closing panel discussion is available here.

-- Daphne Mack is a correspondent for Episcopal Life Media and editor of Global Good. The Rev. Mary Frances Schjonberg is Episcopal Life Media correspondent for Episcopal Church governance, structure, and trends, as well as news of the dioceses of Province II.