Not As Thorny As Might Seem: Issues in Scholar-Practitioner Collaboration

For twelve years, I have directed a set of campus-community programs in comparative religion and interfaith leadership. This includes lecture-dialogue and site-visit series, interfaith camps and conferences, photo-narrative projects about local-lived religion, and interfaith cohort and fellow programs. Over these years, I have also published three monographs and many articles/chapters in the critical study of religion, run several such conferences and workshops, delivered many such papers, and established one such unit at the AAR. I teach classes both in the critical study of religion and the cultivation of interfaith leadership. Among the workshops I run and the presentations I give, approximately one-half concern interfaith leadership. And my work in the community has me routinely collaborating with dozens of local religious communities and several nonprofits.

Wearing these “two hats”—one constructively (inter)religious, the other critically scholarly—produces a fair amount of internal conflict from time to time. I routinely wrestle with the three exemplary issues for this session: how to bring a measure of rigor to the scholar-practitioner dialogues and interactions that I participate in and program, how to negotiate these two different roles within myself and with my students in the classroom, and how attune myself to the ethical questions that invariably arise in wearing these two hats in my scholarship, programming, and teaching. Although I do not have hard-and-fast answers or solutions to any of them, I can bring to them a measure of experience and perspective, one from which these issues are not as thorny as might seem.

First, rigor: As a scholar—in particular a “global-critical” philosopher of religion—much of my recent critical scholarship has been directed toward developing categories suitable for the globalization of philosophy of religion, ones that go far beyond (or are entirely differently from) the ones that have structured western philosophy of religion. I bring this sensibility and sensitivity also to my practitioner-oriented, community-engaged work. In particular, I have sought to articulate categories and topics for the lecture & dialogue series that “work” for not only scholar lectures about globally diverse religio-philosophies but also interfaith dialogues between members of my city’s diverse religious communities. In the case of the very first lecture & dialogue series (2012–13), this category/topic was that of “religious responses to suffering,” my attempt not only to broaden the traditional-western category of “evil” but also to draw in practical, practitioner-oriented efforts to “respond” to pain, suffering, and injustice. Of the many scholar lectures, one especially stands out, a lecture entitled “Dancing Our Sorrows Away” about responses to suffering in Choctaw Native American traditions. Even more relevant, however, is the way in which this category and topic resonated with local practitioners of diverse religious traditions in our community dialogues—not only Jews, Christians, and Muslims but also Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Pagans, Bahais, and Humanists. In sum and short, I would like to think it possible, at least in this respect, to bring some of the rigor of critical scholarship to community-practitioner programming in a way that enhances rather than stifles it. 

Second, negotiating both roles, wearing both hats: This comes up for me in many different ways—in my community work with practitioners, in the classroom with students, in my scholarly and “popular” presentations, even in my own scholarship. In the classroom I often employ forthright and explicit “hat switching,” also featuring some of the relevant ethical quandaries (some of which are addressed below), especially for my interfaith students who engage in community-engaged learning and programming. I want these students to be keenly aware of not only the insider-outsider tensions involved in the academic study of religion but also the biases and orientations that these students bring to the study of religion (especially about its truth, meaning, nature, function, value). Nevertheless, there are uncomfortable moments too, ones that usually involve my own (religious) atheism. Not only students but also community practitioners can find it incredible that someone who cultivates and encourages religiosity and understanding as much as I do can be an atheist. Typically, I will in such cases, speak about the religious dimensions of my own atheism, how I am also “religious” about the study of religion, and my burden for innovating new religiosities for post-supernatural “religions.” If anything, this personal touch makes the difference, with these students and community practitioners coming to respect and value my own position and spirituality.

Third, ethical issues: There are far too many to list. Here, I will limit myself to tensions that arise between scholar- and practitioner-representations of religious traditions. Hinduism, of course, leaps to mind, especially when Oriental constructions claim age-old fidelity. But here I focus on Sikhism, a religion with which I have interacted more in my city. On the one hand, Sikhs will tell me (and others) that it has never been Hindu but rather was its own religion from the get-go, that there are no caste or gender hierarchies in it, and that it is absent ritual. On the other hand, history speaks differently in the first case; local practices, in the other two. Yet, the more I have spent time with these communities, the more I have met members for whom these issues are also “live.” Very recently, I spoke to one young man who recently had an arranged marriage back in India. When I asked him about whether even Sikhs needed to marry within caste, he replied that, for him, this was critical. Indeed, the very reason why we have two different gurdwaras in my city involves caste differences. Here, the upshot might simply be this: as I have spent more time with these communities, gaining their trust, becoming a member of sorts, they themselves have given voice to these very same issues, ones that the academic study of religion all-too-often limits to the rift between insider-practitioners and outsider-scholars. If anything, my own work in my local community and in my scholarship entirely problematizes this way too neat distinction.