Presenters within this session explore relational themes from diverse religious and interreligious perspectives. John M. Thompson challenges contemporary perspectives on friendship, as he discusses the relationship between the Buddha and his archnemesis Devadatta, depicted in the Lotus Sutra, and poses the possibility that a frenemy could turn out to be the best friend we could ask for. Regardless of specific religious commitments, Charles Guth III helps scholars resist apolitical conceptions of friendship as he connects spirituality and social justice, thus integrating mystical and political dimensions of friendship with the Divine. Soren Hessler examines the friendship between Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, a founder of the Jewish Renewal Movement, and Howard Thurman, Christian mystic and social reformer. Interreligious friendships emerge as central to their leadership styles and legacies. Finally, Julie Siddiqi and Lindsay Simmonds—a Muslim interfaith activist and an orthodox Jewish academic—explore questions about the public significance of a private friendship during times of polarization and conflict.
The paper examines the friendship forged by Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, one of the founders of the Jewish Renewal Movement, and Howard Thurman, Christian mystic and social reformer, beginning in the 1950s when Schachter-Shalomi was a graduate student at Boston University and Thurman was serving as the dean of Boston University’s Marsh Chapel. The paper argues that interreligious friendships are central to the leadership styles and practices of both religious leaders and examines the legacies of friendships among other religious leaders trained in Thurman and Schachter-Shalomi’s intellectual lineages at Boston University and Hebrew College respectively and beyond. The paper also gives particular attention to the influences of Schachter-Shalomi and Thurman on two pairings of contemporary Jewish-Christian friends: a senior rabbi and mid-career United Methodist pastor/academic, each with deep ties to Hebrew College and Boston University respectively, and a pair of their students, each now emerging into prominent national religious leadership positions.
According to an influential tradition in Christian theology, human flourishing is at least partially constituted by enjoying friendship with God. One worry about this tradition is that it encourages disengagement from the world, and thus functions ideologically to support an unjust status quo. In this paper, I argue that seeking friendship with God need not be in tension with striving to achieve social justice and freedom from oppression. Indeed, it can provide powerful motivation for participation in liberatory politics, and participation in liberatory politics can serve as a site for enjoying friendship with God. Whether the goal of sharing friendship with God is repressive or liberatory depends principally on one’s conception of what God cares about and seeks. If one conceives of God as caring deeply about justice and seeking to end oppression, then a theology of friendship with God can be a valuable resource for liberatory politics.
In this paper I discuss the relationship between the Buddha and his archnemesis Devadatta, specifically as depicted in the Lotus Sutra. In traditional Buddhist lore, Devadatta is something of the “Judas of Buddhism,” in that he tries to usurp Buddha’s role as leader of the sangha, encourages a royal patron to murder his father, and even seeks to kill the Blessed One on several occasions. He is, thus, regarded as one of the greatest villains in Buddhist history, yet in the Lotus the Buddha proclaims to his rapt audience that Devadatta was his “good friend” (kalyna mitra) whose life and teachings were instrumental in his (the Buddha’s) own awakening. Devadatta’s example in the Lotus suggests that common understandings of “friendship” may be inadequate and even misleading from a Buddhist spiritual standpoint. Paradoxically, perhaps a “bad friend” can turn out to be the best friend we could ask for.
As the conflict in the Israel-Palestine region continues, committed friends and interfaith relationships have been severely strained across the globe, and the past eighteen months have been catastrophic for many of the friendships forged between Jews and Muslims in the UK.
Nevertheless, despite the polarised voices and radical opinions, some friendships have flourished. Through auto-ethnography and more recent anthropological work on friendship, this session will work to disentangle the complications of a robust friendship across religious belief, political affiliation, and the expectations and allegiances of a person’s own faith community.