Teaching justice and teaching justly - Mathew Schmalz

This article was downloaded by: [Villa, Marcos]
On: 12 April 2011
Access details: Access Details: Free Access
Publisher Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-
41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Christian Higher Education
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713669144

TEACHING JUSTICE AND TEACHING JUSTLY: REFLECTIONS ON
TEACHING WORLD RELIGIONS AT A JESUIT LIBERAL ARTS
COLLEGE
Mathew N. Schmalza
a
The College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA

To cite this Article Schmalz, Mathew N.(2005) 'TEACHING JUSTICE AND TEACHING JUSTLY: REFLECTIONS ON
TEACHING WORLD RELIGIONS AT A JESUIT LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGE', Christian Higher Education, 4: 1, 1 — 17
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/15363750590898713
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15363750590898713

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf

This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or
systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or
distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.

The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents
will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses
should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss,
actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly
or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

Christian Higher Education, 4:1–17, 2005
Copyright C Taylor & Francis Inc.
ISSN: 1536-3759 print / 1539-4107 online
DOI: 10.1080/15363750590898713

TEACHING JUSTICE AND TEACHING JUSTLY:
REFLECTIONS ON TEACHING WORLD RELIGIONS AT A
JESUIT LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGE

MATHEW N. SCHMALZ
The College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA

This paper examines how the teaching of world religions at Catholic Christians
institutions can contribute to teaching justice and teaching justly. The paper
Downloaded By: [Villa, Marcos] At: 03:06 12 April 2011

compares central issues engaged by History of Religions as a discipline with
those addressed within the Jesuit tradition of higher education as it developed
in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. While many scholars have argued
that the academic study of religion and theology are premised upon irreconcilably
opposed paradigms of teaching and scholarship, this paper argues that a creative
combination of the two disciplines can create a crucial space for reconsidering
justice within the contemporary classroom at Catholic Christian colleges that
embrace the Jesuit tradition of higher education.

On an unseasonably warm fall day, I was teaching a class in Com-
parative Religions during my ﬁrst semester as a professor at the
College of the Holy Cross. Although the class was only in its fourth
week, it seemed clear that the backgrounds of the students con-
formed quite well to a proﬁle of Holy Cross’s student body as a
whole: overwhelmingly Catholic. The subject of my lecture that
day was the religious life of Hinduism, most particularly the pu-
rifying ritual acts called samskaras. During my efforts to stimulate
class discussion, I drew upon what had thus far been a successful
method of making general comparisons to the Catholic tradition.
I talked about Hindu samskaras in relation to Catholic sacraments;
a deceptively simple point of departure that I thought would en-
gage the class. I mentioned the Eucharist. At that point, a student
raised his hand and asked, matter of factly, “What’s the Eucharist?”
The question “What’s the Eucharist?” from a student at a
Jesuit college ordinarily involves the issue of Catholic students
Address correspondence to Mathew N. Schmalz, Edward Bennett Williams Fellow,
Department of Religious Studies, The College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA 01610.
E-mail: mschmalz@holycross.edu

1

2 M. N. Schmalz

who know very little about Catholicism. But this question came
from a different quarter and elicited a very different issue.
Yusuf Gulleth asked the question, a student who had already
distinguished himself as one of the most engaged and engaging
participants in class discussions. Gulleth was pursuing a rigorous
program in chemistry but wanted to balance his scientific studies
by examining Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity in a comparative
framework. Underlying his desire for academic balance was Gul-
leth’s concern as a Muslim from Tanzania to explore Christianity
and Hinduism in a way that would relate to his own tradition
and religious sensibilities. The question that he raised then was
not a simple inquiry about the definition of a word so crucial
to Catholicism. Instead, it was a thoughtful challenge to the

assumption of a shared cultural knowledge within an institution
explicitly dedicated to the Jesuit tradition in higher education.
Considered more abstractly, Yusuf Gulleth was asking about justice
and whether the class itself was being taught justly.
Informed by Yusuf Gulleth’s question, this paper addresses
how teaching world religions at Catholic institutions can con-
tribute both to teaching justice and to teaching justly. To open
the discussion, we first overview the development of the discipline
of the History of Religions, the field with which the teaching of
world religions is most explicitly associated. We then compare the
changes experienced in the understanding of the History of Reli-
gions to those occurring within Catholic education. These changes
have forcefully elicited the question of justice, particularly as it re-
lates to issues of power and dominance. Against this background, I
outline some of the crucial issues relating to justice and the teach-
ing of world religions in Catholic institutions. In light of the ques-
tion put to me by Yusuf Gulleth, I argue that teaching world reli-
gions allows a methodological and imaginative space not only for
the comparative discussion of justice, but also for teaching justly.

A History of the History of Religions

There are many ways to understand the development of the aca-
demic study of religion. Most recently, many scholars of religion
have attempted to retrieve a subaltern tradition of “explaining re-
ligion” that includes the work of thinkers such Giambatista Vico,
David Hume, and Sigmund Freud among others (Preus, 1987).

Teaching Justice and Teaching Justly 3

But these explanatory efforts are valorized often in explicit con-
tradistinction to how “world-religions” has been taught within the
academic area of specialization that has come to be called “the His-
tory of Religions.” While the History of Religions has developed
in institutions other than those shaped by the Jesuit tradition, an
instructive comparison can be made of the development of History
of Religions with the development of Catholic higher education.
Indeed, History of Religions’ struggle with postmodernism pro-
vides an interesting parallel to Catholicism’s effort to rearticulate
its educational mission in the wake of Vatican II, since both ef-
forts remain concerned with how issues of justice and power shape
scholarly inquiry and pedagogy.

Theological Liberalism and Comparative Religions

The History of Religions initially developed as an interdisciplinary
project informed by philology and liberal theological sensibilities.
The beginning of the discipline is most immediately identified with
the philologist Friedrich Max Muller. In his lectures at the Royal In-
stitute of London in 1867, Muller (1882) coined the term “religion-
swissenschaft” to refer to the idea of a science of religion as an aca-
demic discipline. Muller was concerned with “the original natural
religion of reason,” an entity that could be retrieved by seeking to
understand the broad progression of religious phenomena within
human history (see also Kitagawa, 1959, p. 17). With Muller’s work
exerting a formative influence, the later half of the nineteenth cen-
tury saw a marked increase in the attention given to the study of re-
ligion as whole. For example, James Freeman Clarke published Ten
Religions: An Essay in Comparative Religions and assumed the chair
of natural religion and Christian doctrine at the Harvard Divinity
School (Kitagawa, 1959, p. 2). A profusion of works followed and
the turn of the century saw most notably the publication of C. P.
Tiele’s (1897) Elements of the Science of Religion and William James’s
(1990) The Varieties of Religious Experience. But the most significant
event for the academic study of religion was the World Parliament
of Religions, convened in Chicago in 1893. As Joseph Kitagawa
(1959, pp. 3–4) recalls, the statement of purpose for the Parliament
affirmed its mission: “to unite all Religion against irreligion; [and]
to make the Golden Rule the basis of this union.” Within three
decades, the study of religion had passed from an idiosyncratic

4 M. N. Schmalz

concern of philologists and liberal-minded theologians to a public
effort to find some unifying ground for all religious traditions.
This idealistic endeavor to unite all religions quickly passed
and instead became an exclusively academic project to study
religion as an irreducibly unique phenomenon. The intellectual
sophistication and rigor of the History of Religions in the 20th cen-
tury can primarily be associated with two scholars teaching at the
University of Chicago: Joachim Wach and Mircea Eliade. Joachim
Wach, who began his career at the University of Leipzig, focused his
work on developing a broad taxonomy of religious experience. In
his major works, Types of Religious Experience (1951) and The Sociology
of Religion (1944), Wach diagramed a schema of religions by focus-
ing upon key elements within religious life that structure religious

organization and experience. While Wach advocated a historical
method that also drew heavily on philology, he finally maintained
that History of Religions must be resolutely hermeneutic in its
focus upon the meaning embodied in religious phenomena (for
a helpful discussion of Wach, see Long, 1985). This approach
reached its greatest exposition in the work of Rumanian-born
scholar Mircea Eliade. Eliade propounded a phenomenology of
religion that drew upon the methodological stance of Geradus van
der Leeuw (1938) by employing macron epoche, or the bracketing
¯
of religious phenomena. For Eliade, religion was sui generis and
must be studied in and of itself without any kind of normative
evaluation. Within this methodological framework, Eliade (1974)
traced the morphology of the Sacred—from “hierophanies” in
which the Sacred was made manifest, to the “kratophanies” that
constituted emblematic expressions of religious power. As articu-
lated in Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries (1967, pp. 231–245), Eliade’s
goal was not only a “science of religion,” but a new humanism,
founded upon the History of Religions, that would reclaim the
Sacred in an era that had lost its myths of transcendence.
During its one hundred years of development, History of Re-
ligions drew upon what Joseph Kitagawa (1985, p. 128) has called
two “maps of reality.” The first map of reality was drawn by the
extending hand of the Enlightenment. The contours of this map
were cast in bold relief by characteristically Enlightenment atti-
tudes concerning the primacy of reason and by associated aversions
to dogma, ecclesiastic authority, and the pretenses of particular
religious traditions (Kitagawa, p. 129). But as Kitagawa also ob-
served, historians of religion also came to view religion in a more


positive light by arguing that the underlying essence of religion
had become obscured by “layers of historical accretion” and must
be retrieved (p. 129). But both these maps had a cross-cultural
span since the central claim of the History of Religions was that
religious phenomena could be compared across time and space.
Hinduism thus could be placed alongside Christianity and com-
pared to Islam. In this comparative discussion, however, any nor-
mative evaluation of religious phenomena needed to be carefully
circumscribed so that religious phenomena could emerge in their
clarity as sui generis manifestations of the Sacred.

The Problem of History

The idealism and expansive claims of the History of Religions even-
tually led to its fragmentation if not collapse. Strangely, perhaps,
the History of Religions had become resolutely ahistorical. Indeed,
within Eliade’s morphology of religious manifestations, history had
to be bracketed out as accident. Because of this, the History of Re-
ligions became subject to a variety of postmodern critiques. Chief
among the criticisms leveled against the History of Religions was
the charge that it made no methodological sense to ignore history
in humanistic scholarship. Since all knowledge is inevitably situ-
ated within the social and temporal context of human activity, the
effort to excavate or retrieve essences remained fundamentally mis-
guided. Moreover, the very idea of reclaiming the Sacred sounded
much like a theological project as opposed to a religio-historical
investigation. Most recently, Russell McCutcheon (2001) has ar-
gued that scholars of religion must become “critics, not caretak-
ers” and dispense with the romantic visions that have often brought
the academic study of religion perilously close to theology. Under
the withering ﬁre of both postmodernist and empiricist attacks,
the idea of a religionswissenschaft was seen as a mask concealing a
metanarrative that served universalizing religious interests.
The crucial point made in the criticism of the History of
Religions was that the discipline ignored relations of power. The
claim that religion was unique, so central to the projects of Eliade
and Wach, became understood as a kind of ontological claim
as opposed to an ordinary feature of classiﬁcation in which all
phenomena were reciprocally unique. While some historians of
religion now attempt to classify religious phenomena much as

6 M. N. Schmalz

a biologist would classify the organisms inhabiting the natural
world, such a project seems pretentious within a current academic
climate that would understand this and other totalizing aspirations
as the products of a crude scientism. Instead, the History of Reli-
gions has attempted to become more historical by understanding
religion as an intimately human phenomenon enmeshed within
discursive and nondiscursive relations of power. Contemporary
religio-historical studies, such as Bruce Lincoln’s Discourse and
the Construction of Society (1989) and Holy Terrors (2003) or Wendy
Doniger’s The Implied Spider (1998), see religion as a cross-cultural
manifestation of very human efforts not only to understand
existence but to dominate and control it and others. Within this
framework, History of Religions often becomes a demystifying

hermeneutic that unmasks the totalizing pretenses of religious
claims to divine truth. In this sense, historians of religions now
chart a kind of postmodern narrative of emancipation in which
justice becomes a central and abiding concern.

Catholic Education and the Concern for Justice

The trajectory of Catholic education in the United States followed
a much different course from that charted by the History of Re-
ligions. But if the History of Religions was in some ways disman-
tled in relation to postmodern critiques of knowledge, then so too
has Catholicism found itself forced to respond to contemporary
society and academic culture. Catholic education has tradition-
ally not found a place for the History of Religions, for, as Jacob
Neusner (1968, p. 37) has observed, the academic study of reli-
gion developed in an ethos of “cultural Protestantism” and was
explicitly accepted by liberal Protestant or secular institutions. But
as Catholicism has moved to consider the implications of educa-
tion for justice, it has created a space where its concerns meet those
of the History of Religions.

Pre–Vatican II Catholic Higher Education

For well over one hundred years, American Catholic higher ed-
ucation endeavored to maintain its own distinctive academic cul-
ture (see Marsden, 1997, p. 103). Catholic colleges in the United
States were structured by an initial orientation to the seminary


(Power, 1958, p. 56). Jesuit schools in particular were informed by
the educational ideals of the Ratio Sudiorum with its three divi-
sions of study: philosophy, theology, and the humanities (Power,
p. 64). Students were trained in classics, English, and associated
disciplines, with instruction embodying a pervasive moral empha-
sis. As Catholic education developed and expanded in the 19th
century, it maintained its clerical control and its aversion to partic-
ularistic or overly vocational emphases in curricula. Throughout
the 19th century, Catholic education found no room for the recon-
sideration of religion as a phenomenon, an approach tentatively
embraced by the institutions that endowed the ﬁrst chairs in Nat-
ural Theology. To study other religions, or to study religion itself
as a phenomenon, would of course mean compromising Catholic

claims to truth.
The philosophy informing Catholic education became a cen-
tral issue as the Roman Catholic Church continued to consider its
mission within American society in the 20th century. In his charac-
terization of Jesuit education at the turn of the century, John Court-
ney Murray (1964, p. 235) observed that instruction focused upon
stylistic, literary, and analytic skills that the Society of Jesus had
adapted from the educational curricula of the Renaissance human-
ists. This instruction culminated in the study of Thomistic philoso-
phy that provided a unifying vision of transcendent truth (Gleason,
1967, p. 46). Yet within this vision, the study of religion itself was not
necessarily considered to be an object of speculative inquiry. In-
deed, as late as 1964, John Mahoney (1964, p. 245; for comparison
see also Lauer, 1963) argued that in Catholic institutions “theol-
ogy is an academic limbo, whose concerns are irrelevant to the stu-
dents advancing knowledge in other subjects, not only because the
integration of theology with other learning is not accomplished,
but because such integration is a sheer impossibility.” Whether
or not such criticism was accurate in all cases, it is clear that
Catholic education maintained an alternatively triumphalist and
defensive posture until the convening of the Second Vatican Coun-
cil (see Gleason, 1998). Perhaps no better example can be found
of these attitudes than articles and editorials published in the
Catholic journal Thought that consistently inveighed against exter-
nal threats to the unifying integrity of the classical and Thomistic
heritage of Catholic higher education. Communism, secular
democracy, and prevailing trends in American higher education
were all seen as emblematic of a modern dissolution of values

8 M. N. Schmalz

(for example, see Kelly, 1938). From this standpoint, to study other
religions alongside Catholicism would only hasten the process of
fragmentation that Catholic education must fight against.
The Second Vatican Council brought into question many of
the traditional assumptions of Catholic education. Crucial to how
the Second Vatican Council changed the ground of discourse
was its description of the modern world. The seminal document,
Gaudium et Spes (Flannery, 1975, p. 907) drew attention to the gap
between rich and poor, the increasing power of science and tech-
nology, and also articulated a vision of the human race inhabiting
“a dynamic and more evolutionary” reality. The document extolled
the virtues of research and the autonomy of the sciences and other
methods of inquiry. To the effect of Gaudium et Spes, we could also

add the document Ad Gentes that evinced a more progressive un-
derstanding of Catholicism’s relationship to other world religions.
Religion and religious discourse thus must engage the world of
which they are inevitably a part.

The Society of Jesus and the Concern for Justice

For the Society of Jesus, reflection on the implications of the Sec-
ond Vatican Council came to emphasize the theme of justice. Un-
der the stewardship of Superior General Pedro Arrupe, the Soci-
ety of Jesus addressed itself specifically to the question of justice
in its 32nd General Congregation in 1974–1975. In the decrees
issuing from the General Congregation, the society enunciated its
vision of the promotion of faith and justice as a necessary response
to the challenges of the modern world. Specifically, the decrees
identified three characteristics of the modern age that required a
discerning call for justice (1977, B.24–28): first, a pluralism that
demands evangelization; second, the rise of technology and con-
comitant secularization; and third, the actual ability of human be-
ings to make the world more just. Given these pervasive charac-
teristics of the contemporary age, the 32nd General Congregation
emphasized that the promotion of justice must find concrete ex-
pression not only in evangelization and theological research but
also specifically within the society’s educational ministry. This em-
phasis on justice requires not only sensitivity to the marginalized
and the voiceless but also active solidarity with the poor, a point
made quite eloquently by Ignacio Ellacuria (1990, pp. 147–151) in


an address in which he diagrammed the mission of the Christian
university. Within the contemporary context of Jesuit education,
the phrase “men and women for others” is often repeated as an
exhortation to promote the justice that the society has committed
itself to achieve.
Decrees of the 32nd General Congregation had a great ef-
fect, not only because they were bold, but also because, to some,
they were controversial and even vague (see Tripole, 1994). But it
is also important to emphasize that the theme of the promotion
of justice was not something entirely new to Catholic theology.
In an engaging overview of themes within Catholic social teach-
ing, David Hollenbach, S. J. (1997) diagrams a clear line of devel-
opment and thematic unity in Catholic social teaching from Leo

XIII’s Rerum Novarum to Gaudium et Spes and beyond. Hollenbach
(p. 227) argues that Catholic conceptions of justice have always
been associated with the themes of human dignity, mutuality, and
participation in community. From these themes issues an eschato-
logical vision of “sharing” in the death and resurrection of Christ
God with “Christian justice”—in Hollenbach’s words (p. 227), “a
speciﬁcation of how this sharing is to be made present in the re-
lations between persons in history.” The call to promote justice in
education is then simultaneously a prophetic call to critique, as
well as an invitation to solidarity and discernment.
Catholic education and the History of Religions were both
shaped by the very real demands for a more relevant discourse
about religion and its relationship to the contemporary world.
In pursuing the rather contrived comparison between contem-
porary Catholic discourse about justice and the concerns of the
History of Religions, what is clear is that in both spheres of dis-
course there is a fundamental appreciation of religion’s complex
place within human life. Religion is not somehow disengaged from
human reality but enmeshed within it. Moreover, the very fact of
contemporary pluralism requires new methods of understanding
religion in connection with issues of both power and justice. In this
concern, both Catholicism and History of Religions have often
embraced methodological forms of unmasking—whether in the
form of prophetic critique or through deconstructionalist analy-
sis. Issues of justice and power are not necessarily synonymous or
isomorphic, but they do clearly have a very intimate relationship.
If this is so, then the History of Religions does have a place within

10 M. N. Schmalz

the continually developing Catholic discourse on education and
the promotion of justice.

Teaching World Religions and Teaching Justice

In an essay in Justice and Peace Education, Monika Helwig (1986,
p. 15) argues that there is no discipline better suited for social jus-
tice and peace education than religious studies. In her carefully
argued piece, Helwig diagrams a variety of themes that religious
studies courses could emphasize in their consideration of justice:
sin, redemption, materials from liberation theology and scripture.
But to this rich proposal we might also add that religious studies
includes the History of Religions and that, in the effort to en-

gage questions of justice, the History of Religions and Catholic
theology could have a fruitful, if sometimes contentious, partner-
ship. All too often in Catholic institutions, History of Religions
has become simply “World Religions.” Within this classiﬁcation,
Catholicism is usually considered within the domain of theology,
while all other religions are relegated to broad World Religions
survey courses. But if mutuality and community lie at the heart of
Catholic conceptions of justice, then a comparative consideration
of other traditions alongside Catholicism might lay the ground for
a broader discourse about justice, human community, and solidar-
ity. Put more polemically, to so privilege Catholicism and Catholic
discourse about justice often militates against articulating a vision
of justice sensitive to both pluralism in the classroom and in the
world as a whole. While it is important to consider both normative
and foundational questions in discussions of justice, I would argue
that the History of Religions offers a necessary complement to ex-
plicitly Catholic considerations of justice precisely by setting such
a discourse within a comparative framework that is open to critical
self-examination.

Theology and the Academic Study of Religion

One of the most suggestive recent efforts to approach “world re-
ligions” in a way that is sensitive to questions of both teaching
justice and teaching justly is Francis Clooney’s Hindu Wisdom for
all God’s Children (1998). A Jesuit priest and comparative theolo-
gian, Clooney moves beyond the conventional understandings


of justice education as a rather static exercise in what var-
ious religious traditions “say” about justice. Instead, Clooney
presents a multilayered approach to understanding Hindu reli-
giosity that invites the reader to an openness that “is mindful
enough to welcome the stranger at our gate” (p. 136). Clooney
presents the visions of Mohandas Gandhi and Mahasweta Devi
(who chose to live with the poor) while also introducing as-
cetics and mystics such as Ramana Maharishi and the Tamil
saint Satakopan. Throughout Hindu Wisdom for all God’s Children,
Clooney draws the reader into the complexity of the Hindu re-
ligious imagination by focusing upon how existential questions
and symbolic imagery are joined. For example, when discussing
Hindu creation narratives, Clooney draws attention to how im-

ages of “male and female” as well as the “the eater and the
eaten” articulate both the “complementarity and conflict” at the
heart of the continuing creation and recreation of the world
(pp. 7–10). In relating Hindu visions of creation to traditional
Judeo-Christian accounts, Clooney’s discussion moves back to
the familiar, having radically expanded the ground for appreci-
ating both the differences and similarities between the Hindu
and Christian traditions. Through Clooney’s discussion, Hindu
wisdom remains firmly situated within its Indian context but
also moves to engage more abstract questions that are nonethe-
less rooted in the very specificity of human life. Clooney thus
not only teaches “justice” through his exposition of Hindu un-
derstandings of the purpose and nature of human life, but he
also teaches “justly” by refracting Christianity through a Hindu
lens and thus reversing the conventional tendency to understand
Christianity as “normative.” But this emphasis upon “Hindu wis-
dom” in no way makes Clooney’s investigation less Christian.
Indeed, Clooney describes his work as a “spiritual task” and
observes:

Those of us who are Christian can keep looking upon the face of Christ,
never imagining that we need something more than Christ; in Christ God
keeps giving us more, so that we can also contemplate in Christ all the
experiences and wisdom of the religious traditions around us.

The call to open oneself to Hindu wisdom for Clooney is ultimately
a call to open oneself to Christ who reveals Himself in all things.

12 M. N. Schmalz

Francis Clooney writes as a Catholic theologian and speaks
to a primarily Christian audience. Within the context of educa-
tional institutions with a religious identity, Clooney’s work could be
well complemented by an approach that draws upon the scholarly
methodology provided by the History of Religions. Historians of
Religions would query Clooney’s understanding of “wisdom” and
ask to what extent wisdom is often determined by relations of power
(Schmalz, 2003). Sensitivity to issues of power would also lead
Historians of Religion to observe that in presenting “Hindu wis-
dom,” Clooney engages texts which only members of the Brahmin
caste are eligible to read and explicate. Finally, Historians of Re-
ligions would reflect upon the implications of appropriating the
texts from another religious tradition for use within an explicitly

Christian context. For example, does such a move finally subsume
Hinduism within Christianity or the figure of Christ? In this ef-
fort, do Hindu wisdom and conceptions of justice become simply
expressions of Christian wisdom and Christian understandings of
justice? Such questions would not be to dismiss or to undermine
Clooney’s project, but rather to bring theology and the academic
study of religion into critical and self-reflective engagement over
what it means to teach justice and teach justly.
Critical self-examination or reflexivity provides the materials
for constructing a bridge over and between the contested aca-
demic turf occupied by theology and the History of Religion.
The strongest objection to any joining of theology with the aca-
demic study of religion is that they reflect two fundamentally op-
posed ways of understanding religion itself (for an early reflection
on this issue, see Kim, 1972). The differences between theology
and the academic study of religion were brought into sharp relief
in a series of heated exchanges between the Catholic theologian
Paul Griffiths (2000) and the critical historian of religion, Donald
Wiebe. In a collection of essays, Wiebe (2000) explicates the theo-
retical foundations of the approach to religious studies now most
aggressively advocated by his former student Russell McCutcheon.
Wiebe argues for a robust scientific paradigm for religious stud-
ies, a paradigm that embraces a rigorous “naturalism” in order
to explain religious phenomena. Against this position, Griffiths
observes, quite correctly, that the term “religion” is an eminently
Christian creation that loses much of its relevance when applied to
other forms of life such as Hinduism or Islam. Because religion as


a category is born from Christian theological reflection, to assume
that it exists independently of theological discourse is to be funda-
mentally mistaken. Griffiths pushes his critique further by observ-
ing that science and other forms of “naturalism” also make episte-
mological claims which Wiebe and his followers fail to recognize as
eminently contestable. Interestingly, however, both Griffiths and
Wiebe would probably join together in resisting the postmodern
trend in the History of Religions: Griffiths would collapse the His-
tory of Religions into theology, while Wiebe would surely maintain
that the subject and object of academic inquiry become hopelessly
blurred in what I have described as the “postmodern narratives of
emancipation” that characterize much scholarly work in religious
studies.

For both Griffiths and Wiebe there is a strong desire for both
intellectual clarity and, indeed, existential firmness in scholarly
work—although both Griffiths and Wiebe sharply disagree as to
where this intellectual and existential ground can be found. But
scholarly disciplines are curious things; they change as they are
continually shaped not only by intellectual investigation but also by
configurations of power. In a thoughtful response to Alasdair Mac-
Intyre’s After Virtue (1984), the philosopher D. Z. Phillips (1992)
observes that there is a strong tendency to romanticize how re-
ligious traditions and, by extension, scholarly disciplines seek to
present a coherent vision of the world and human activity. Draw-
ing upon the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Phillips would call at-
tention to how messy human “forms of life” can be—a view that
would be echoed in the writings of the former Jesuit Michel de
Certeau (1990) who observes that much of human life is funda-
mentally about “making do.” While hardly a popular position, one
could argue that scholarly disciplines, whether theological or sci-
entific, are also ways of “making do.” In specific response to both
Griffiths and Wiebe, one could also argue that the History of Reli-
gions occupies a provisional middle ground between theology and
the social sciences. The academic study of religion then becomes
an imaginative construct, not unlike alchemy, that is produced in
a continuing exploration of and negotiation with contemporary
religious pluralism and cultural diversity. While the History of Re-
ligions is not a discipline in the conventional sense, it is perhaps
because of its ambiguous status that it can have the power to create
new vantage points of perspective and destabilizing insight.

14 M. N. Schmalz

Teaching Justice

If pluralism and diversity are generally recognized as crucial is-
sues in the contemporary world, then no discourse about justice
can proceed in a context bound by exclusively one tradition. With
specific regard to Catholic claims about justice, while they arise
from a coherent tradition of inquiry, they exist within a broader
context of often competing understandings of the nature of jus-
tice itself. A comparative examination of Catholic understandings
of justice with those of other religious traditions would recognize
the pressing demands of contemporary pluralism and also open
new possibilities for mutual understanding and collective action.
For example, a course that extends Clooney’s approach in Hindu

Wisdom might focus on conceptions of the Self in Christianity and
Hinduism and proceed by contrasting Christian conceptions of the
Self as a teleological whole to Hindu understandings of the Self as
fluid and changing in its interactions with others. Such a course
might then move to consider the views of justice that proceed
from these differing conceptions of Selfhood, initially focusing on
Catholic documents that make strongly universalistic claims about
the nature of justice and then examining Hindu texts that reflect
a contextually sensitive understanding of justice and its demands.
The course might conclude by examining how these differing con-
ceptions are expressed in practice. While attempting to preserve
difference, a comparative discussion of Dorothy Day and Mahatma
Gandhi, for example, might lead to an interesting consideration of
similarities in social praxis that allow for solidarity across cultural
and religious boundaries. A comparative approach to questions of
justice would then draw upon the methodology of the History of
Religions by understanding Christianity and Catholicism precisely
as world religions.
Beyond a comparative approach to teaching justice, the His-
tory of Religions offers an important corrective to totalizing dis-
courses based upon exclusive understandings of religious iden-
tity. The strength in making claims about justice, at least in a
Catholic Christian context, is that they are normative. Such norma-
tive claims, however, can often too quickly sweep aside the diversity
and specificity of human life. This is precisely the argument made
against the universalizing projects of historians of religion like
Mircea Eliade and Joachim Wach: too often they ignored history


and the contingency of human life. To understand religion and
religious understandings of justice is to examine a particular form
of discourse—a discourse made possible not only by individual
and collective spiritual longings and intellectual inquiry but also
by discursive and nondiscursive formations of power in the speci-
ficity of human relations. To address the question of justice within
such a framework is not to dismiss it but to offer an important cor-
rective to claims that move too quickly into generalization about
the complex and culturally defined nature of human experience.
Openness to critical self-examination is essential to any religious
tradition, especially given the all too human tendency, pithily de-
scribed by the singer Bruce Cockburn, to want “justice done on
somebody else.”

Teaching Justly

When Yusuf Gulleth asked me to explain the Eucharist, he was rais-
ing an issue about whether I was teaching justly. Just as universal-
izing claims about justice can often ignore cultural specificity and
difference, so too can generalizing assumptions about the compo-
sition of the classroom marginalize those whose voices most need
to be heard. To deprivilege Catholicism in the classroom of a Jesuit
college might seem at best counter-intuitive or at worst a violation
of the very mission of the institution. But, as Yusuf Gulleth gently
pointed out to me, Catholics are not the only ones who fill the
seats in the Catholic classroom. If one of the crucial themes in
Jesuit discussions of justice is concern for the marginalized, then
Catholic institutions must be sensitive to this issue within the aca-
demic communities they seek to build.
Beyond the specific issue of classroom diversity, it is crucial for
Catholic students to begin to understand their own tradition not
only as it relates to others but also as it is seen by others. To this
end, understanding Catholicism within the framework of the His-
tory of Religions offers a mode of discourse that is sensitive to the
cross-cultural variations of religious expression. When employed
in this way at Catholic institutions, the History of Religions assumes
a role not dissimilar to that envisioned in the early development of
the discipline. Indeed, by emphasizing an initial bracketing of nor-
mative claims about religion and justice, the History of Religions
could be seen as an initial step in the eventual cooperation of

16 M. N. Schmalz

religions. While most contemporary Historians of Religion would
ﬁnd such a goal a grandiose fantasy, it is one worthy of consider-
ation when speaking of teaching world religions, teaching justice
and teaching justly.

References

´
Certeau, M. (1990). L’invention du quotidian I: Arts de faire. Paris: Editions
Gallimard.
Clooney, F. X. (1998). Hindu wisdom for all God’s children. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis
Books.
Doniger, W. (1998). The implied spider: Politics and theology in myth. New York:
Columbia University Press.

Eliade, M. (1974). Patterns in comparative religion. New York: New American Library.
Eliade, M. (1967). Myths, dreams and mysteries (Philip Mairet, Trans.). New York:
Harper & Row.
Ellacuria, I. (1990). The task of a Christian university. In Jon Sobrino (Ed.),
Companions of Jesus. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, pp. 147–151.
Flannery, A. (Ed.). (1975) Pastoral constitution on the church in the modern
world. Vatican II: The Conciliar and post-Conciliar documents (pp. 903–1001). New
York: Costello Publishing Co., Inc.
Gleason, P. (1967). American Catholic higher education: A historical perspective.
In Robert Hassenger (Ed.), The shape of Catholic higher education (pp. 15–56).
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gleason, P. (1998). In search of unity: American Catholic thought 1920–1960.
The Catholic Historical Review, 75, 185–205.
Grifﬁths, P. (2000). The very idea of religion. First Things, 103, 30–35.
Helwig, M. (1986). “Religious Studies,” in D. M. Johnson (Ed.), Justice and peace
education (pp. 15–26). Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.
Hollenbach, D. (1977). Modern Catholic teachings concerning justice. In John
C. Haughey (Ed.), The faith that does justice (pp. 207–233). New York: Paulist
Press.
James, W. (1990). The varieties of religious experience. New York: Vintage Books.
Kelly, W. A. (1938). Needed: A directive philosophy of education. Thought, 13,
197–205.
Kim, J. (1972). Belief or anamnesis: Is a rapprochement between History of Re-
ligions and Theology possible? Journal of Religion, 52, 150–196.
Kitagawa, J. (1959). The history of religions in America. In Mircea Eliade and
Joseph Kitagawa (Eds.), History of religions: Essays in methodology (pp. 1–31).
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kitagawa, J. (1985). The history of religions (Religionswissenschaft) then and
now. In J. Kitagawa (Ed.), History of religions retrospect and prospect (pp. 121–
144). New York: Macmillan.
Lauer, Q. (1963). Catholics and freedom of thought. Thought. 38, 514–
528.


Lincoln, B. (1989). Discourse and the construction of society: Comparative studies of
myth, ritual and classification. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lincoln, B. (2003). Holy terrors: Thinking about religion after September 11. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Long, C. (1985). A look at the Chicago tradition in the history of religions: Retro-
spect and future. In J. Kitagawa (Ed.), History of religions: retrospect and prospect
(pp. 87–104). New York: Macmillan.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. (1984). After virtue. South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University
Press.
Mahoney, J. (1964). The American Catholic college and the faith. Thought, 39,
239–252.
Marsden, G. (1997). The outrageous idea of Christian scholarship. New York: Oxford
University Press.
McCutcheon, R. T. (2001). Critics not caretakers: Redescribing the public study of reli-
gion. Albany: SUNY Press.

Muller, M. (1882). Introduction to the study of religion. London: Longmans and
Green.
Murray, J. C. (1964). On the future of humanistic education. In Arthur A. Cohen
(Ed.), Humanistic education and Western civilization (pp. 231–247). New York:
Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.
Neusner, J. (1968). Judaism in the history of religions. In James Helfner (Ed.),
History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History. Supplement 8: On Method in
the History of Religions (pp. 31–45).
Phillips, D. Z. (1992). After virtue? In Phillips, D. Z., Interventions in ethics (pp. 42–
60). SUNY Series in Ethical Theory. Albany: SUNY Press.
Power, E. J. (1958). A history of Catholic higher education in the United States.
Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing.
Preus, J. S. (1987). Explaining religion: Criticism and theory from Bodin to Freud. New
Haven: Yale University Press.
Schmalz, M. N. (2003). “Tradition and Transgression in the Comparative Theol-
ogy of Francis Xavier Clooney, S. J.” Religious Studies Review, 29, 130–136.
Society of Jesus. (1977). Our mission today: The service of faith and the promotion
of justice. Society of Jesus: Thirty first and Thirty second general congregations (B.24–
28). St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources.
Tiele, C. P. (1897). Elements of the science of religion: Part I. Morphological. New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons .
Tripole, M. R. (1994). Faith beyond justice. St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources.
van der Leeuw, G. (1938). Religion in essence and manifestation (J. E. Turner, Trans.).
London: George Allen & Unwin.
Wach, J. (1951). Types of religious experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wach, J. (1944). The sociology of religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wiebe, D. (2000). The politics of religious studies: The continuing conflict with theology
in the academy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Teaching justice and teaching justly - Mathew Schmalz

Recomendados

Recomendados

Más contenido relacionado

Destacado

Destacado (11)

Similar a Teaching justice and teaching justly - Mathew Schmalz

Similar a Teaching justice and teaching justly - Mathew Schmalz (20)

Más de Marcos Eduardo Villa Corrales

Más de Marcos Eduardo Villa Corrales (20)

Teaching justice and teaching justly - Mathew Schmalz