Leonard Swidler’s Influence on the Work of an American Evangelical and on Romanian Academia

Dr. Leonard Swidler—he will always be “Dr.” to me, for the respect that this bearded Anabaptist has for that clean-shaven Catholic is tremendous—is emphatic about the dual nature of the quest for interreligious understanding. It is relational, but it is also critical. His preferred terms are “critical thinking” and “deep dialogue.” When I first met him, I was already a critical thinker. Somewhere along life’s way I developed the habit of checking the other side of every coin, of second-guessing my initial proclivities, assumptions, and often hasty conclusions. This was refined and focused by two master’s degrees, the first in theology and the second in philosophy. By the time I arrived at Temple University I had already been exposed to world religions and the benefits of looking outward from one’s own tradition. However, dialogue was not yet on my radar. It should have been, but it was not. When I came to Temple as a Ph.D. student I began to interact with students and professors from many of the world’s major religious and philosophical traditions. I welcomed this, but I lacked a systematic approach to interacting with and integrating the insights of diverse traditions into my own belief system. I needed a systematic theory of interideological learning, and Swidler provided this essential addition to my education.

Swidler’s approach to interreligious encounters embraces the insight that people are inescapably situated within traditions that provide the context within which they evaluate beliefs, practices, and rival traditions. This insight has been applied to various domains, ranging from the physical sciences (Thomas Kuhn) to religion (Raimundo Panikkar) and ethics (Alasdair MacIntyre).¹ Swidler discussed this contextualization of belief in relation to interideological learning in his book After the Absolute: The Dialogical Future of Religious Reflection, which was the textbook used in the first of his classes that I was privileged to attend.² He also modeled this for his students. While Swidler finds great value in working within the Roman Catholic tradition, he has a critical scholarly knowledge of that tradition and, working from within, does not hesitate to oppose long-held Catholic beliefs and practices when critical reflection shows them to be in need of revision.³ His approach to ecumenism is no wishy-washy, touchy-feely inclusivism that accepts every opinion advocated by anyone as long as it is advanced with sincerity. It is an ecumenism based on critical reflection and the conviction that careful consideration of all options and the contexts that render them credible to those who hold them will lead to mutual understanding, ameliorate many sources of conflict, and have the greatest potential to lead to truth (appropriately understood).

As a committed Evangelical Christian, I entered his class unsure of what benefit a class with a professor who is both Roman Catholic and ecumenical would offer to me. The class began with Swidler’s introducing himself and relating his religious background, then he invited each of the students to do the same. The class was diverse, including two Lutheran exchange students from Germany, a Quaker, and a Muslim, among others. Clearly, I was not the only non-Roman Catholic. He set us at ease with his relaxed teaching style, but it was the content of his teaching as much as his style that made us feel welcomed, for he believes that it is beneficial to interreligious dialogue for each participant to be deeply immersed in a tradition. Hence, he encouraged us to know our tradition well and to speak from within that tradition. His goal was to convert us to deep dialogue and critical thinking, not to Roman Catholicism.

Throughout the course, Swidler led us in a discussion of issues by asking us what positions our traditions took on those issues or what insights our traditions could offer toward understanding or resolving the issues, and then he led us...