Dear Ellen Armour

Dear Ellen Armour,

Thank for your essay on "Theology in modernity's wake." I found your words point hopefully and helpfully to ways that we can mediate some of the inherited tensions between theological and religious studies. I appreciate both how you linked these tensions to the dilemmas of modernism and how you asked us not to overstate those dilemmas—in other words, to recognize that we have to face up to how we remain modern in many ways. By way of response to you, I would like to outline and then extend five claims embedded in your approach to "religious studies, theological studies, and the tensions of modernity." My first question is to ask whether you recognize aspects of your own approach in this outline. My second question is to ask to what extent you would tolerate these extensions. OK? Here are the five:

1. The world's "turn to religion" is a response to the decline of modernity.

There is powerful evidence for your claim, which makes it all the more troubling that the academy tends to take insufficient account of its implications: among them, the strong possibility that what some decry as "the world's turn to fundamentalism" is also a strong indictment of the inadequacies of modern secularism. What alternatives are there to either radical secularism or radical fundamentalism? AAR scholars should be well equipped to answering this public question.

2. What has declined is the modern model of " 'man' as surrounded by and self-reflected in his four others –his racial, sexual, divine, and animal others." In this model – which we might also label "humanism"—religion came to be considered an aspect of human subjectivity.

You offer what I find to be a brilliant portrait of modern humanism as a model of four doubles. Your portrait suggests that if academics take responsibility for their part in modernity, then they ought no longer to assimilate the world (or their subjects of inquiry) to the terms of the cogito (of "Man the Measure"). Against a radical postmodernism, however, I take you also to suggest that this need not lead academia to skepticism, for there are measures available other than either the cogito or its simple negation. Might we say that there are, for example, three-valued logics for philosophy, quantum and string theories for natural science, and, for religion, a host of noncogito-based reasonings (relational, social, textual, scriptural, liturgical, ritual, and so on)?

3. Academic divisions between "theology" and "religious studies" are symptoms of this modern model. With the decline of modernity, we should therefore re-inspect these divisions, which also means re-inspecting the modern model of "Man the Measure" and, thus, of "Man the Measure of Religion." This means re-inspecting the strictly humanistic presumptions of both religious studies and modern theology.

Within Jewish philosophy and theology, this re-inspection is illustrated in the line of thinking initiated by Hermann Cohen, the great Kant scholar who added, however, that only prophecy introduced that attention to the other (and Other) that grounds ethical, as opposed to merely conceptual, thinking. The line continued through his students Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig and his student Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas offers the most well-known model for turning to the other/Other to interrupt humanistic solipsism. I find his model powerful, except that I would like to see more embodied (less spiritualistic) versions of it that begin more with the fact of societal life than with the self and its other. Do these sources relate at all to your project?

4. Academic humanism also tends to insulate academic inquiry from lived practices: both as sources of information and sources of criteria for receiving and judging the outcomes of inquiry. This means that, as practiced in modernity, both religious studies and theology have been under-informed by empirical studies of everyday religious practice and under-attentive to the way this academic inquiry does and ought to impact religious life in everyday society. In other words, our academic studies have not caught up to the religious turn in post-modern society.

Would you agree that some recent postmodernist writings—including the recent postmodern "turn to religion"—may continue rather than interrupt this "effete" tendency in humanism? I am thinking of the hyper-intellectualism among some students of Derrida, which I read as not quite in sync with the older, pragmatic critique of humanism that was exemplified in Charles Peirce's work. For Peirce-Dewey, the academic job is to put intellect to the work of helping repair broken and oppressive institutions and practices. Of course, this work may require highly abstract thinking, including mathematics. But would you agree that one job of theologians and religion philosophers may be to keep such thinking in relation to its ultimately reparative ends (making sure the "ultimate" is in the near future!)?

5. On the other side, we should also re-inspect tendencies in the modern Church to claim independence from academic criticism. If the modern divide works both ways, so should the post-modern alternatives. On the one side, academic inquiry should be a source of the kind of inquiry that attends to and responds to the institutions of everyday social life. On the other side, these institutions ought to call for and attend to the results of this kind of inquiry.

Shall we say that, in general, modern religious studies and theology has tended to divide what goes on in religious "houses" (traditions of church, synagogue, mosque, and such) from what goes on in academic theory? And, rather than recommend blurring the distinction between these two, shall we say you recommend our raising up a third activity—practices that bring problems and sufferings in the houses to the attention of the theorists and that bring the literature and hypotheses of the theorists to the attention of the houses? If so, would you recommend that the AAR itself might turn more to the work of housing such mediating practices, beginning with dialogue among AAR scholars and those who work in and for those religious houses?

Thank you for your encouraging words!