Motherhood as Metaphor: Engendering Interreligious Dialogue

PREFACE

PREFACE In my first book, Monopoly on Salvation? A Feminist Approach to Religious Pluralism, I set out to discover what difference it would make to bring feminist theoretical and theological insights to bear on contemporary discussions of religious difference. It seemed that the theologies being offered were stuck at an impasse of seeing persons of different religions either as fundamentally ‘the same’ or as radically different. To this discourse on religious pluralism, a field dominated by male scholars, I brought the feminist theoretical consideration of our hybrid identities as a way of recognizing that each of us encounters our others with a dynamic mix of ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’. The multiplicity of who we are provides a multitude of possible sites of encounter, but nevertheless many things about our others remain inaccessible to us—they fundamentally remain ‘mystery,’ although we can encounter one another in solidarity and friendship. Because the theological discourse on religious pluralism has been dominated by male scholars, Monopoly on Salvation? has been well received as an alternative feminist approach within the landscape of approaches to religious diversity. And yet, about three-quarters of the way to finishing that work, I realized that the methodology I had employed fell short of the feminist methodological frameworks in which I had been trained. That is, while I brought to bear a new feminist theoretical framework to a previously masculinist discussion, I was nevertheless working with male-centered traditions, men’s voices, and men’s experiences. The resources I had available to me for thinking about ‘interreligious encounter’ were resources that had been formulated along the lines of malestream knowledge, where women’s experience simply was not captured in historical writings or put forth as example of xii Preface interfaith exchange. While the first book made its contribution, I realized that a more thoroughgoing feminist methodology might change the landscape more radically. With the research of this book I set out to ask the question: What difference would it make if it was women’s voices and experiences that constituted the data of interreligious exchange? Committing to a more thoroughgoing feminist methodology in drawing from women’s voices and women’s experiences, I now had a more daunting task in front of me. For while a range of men’s voices and experiences in interfaith contexts were available to me in published works of missionary documents, doctrinal statements, or historical accounts, in published works little was available that took women’s experiences as central. The original research for the book, then, was necessary before I could draw out from these experiences for theological consideration. For the theology that follows, I took three sites of women’s interreligious encounter as my starting point. First, I attended to the experience of Catholic women of the Maryknoll order in the mission fields of China (drawn from research at their archives in Ossining, New York). Simultaneously, I began an ethnographic investigation of an interreligious dialogue group of women in Philadelphia, with interviews conducted over two years. In addition to these explicitly ‘religious’ sites, I was compelled by my foremothers in feminist theology to recognize the secular space of the women’s movement itself as data for the consideration of women’s interfaith encounter. What difference does it make when women’s voices and experiences are taken as the point of departure for theological investigation? In the pages that follow I suggest several aspects of a distinctive approach to encountering our religious ‘others’: an approach that is fundamentally relational, grounded in friendship and the messiness of actual human lives; an approach that resists compartmentalizing ‘sacred’/‘religious’ over against ‘secular’/‘nonreligious’; an approach that insists that our religious orientations must be accountable to the practical, material, and social outcomes that they engender. The insights in these pages have come almost exclusively from listening to and culling the theological reflections from women across the faith traditions of the world. To them, in their courage, their particularity, and their persistent mystery, we owe significant debt and apology for having not considered the possibility of their deep theological knowledge before. ...