Casey Strine / Informed Empathy: Approaching Religion through Theology, Understanding, and a Commitment to Diversity

You can't understand our globalized world without understanding religion. But that's easier said than done. For any given person, it's sometimes hard enough to understand your own religious perspectives. They often change throughout life, modified by experience and ideas. Modified by people and events. Modified by an encounter with the world and an encounter with God. Then go ahead and multiply that challenge by about 7.7 billion people and the ways that some of them collide and interact. Then we see a few things: we see that diversity is both a promise and a peril, we see that approaches to religious studies, sociology of religion, and the practice of theology all must be grounded in an "informed empathy," and we see that the only way to make progress is to accept responsibility and limits as an individual, and hope and commit to the necessity of collaboration.

Show Notes

• Diversity and creativity are one of the strengths of theology today.
• Sometimes diversity of thought and methodological practice can lead to fracturing.
• Strine on one of the challenges of working in theology: “You know, my current project is on the book of Genesis, about which there's just a massive amount of literature from all manner of different perspectives. And that's really, really great. But at least once a week, I think about my book project as a fool's errand.”
• Theology is more diverse and more creative than it ever has been, so it has to change and adapt. One person cannot keep up with everything going on.
• There is a debate within theology about what to even call itself.
• “Rather than building a new, different, hopefully improved theology, we may be building a lot of little different ones that go by a similar name, but don't look like anything that is the same when you get into more detail.”—Strine
• Croasmun asks, given those challlenges, why should a student study theology?
• “In a globalized world where religion isn't going away, the study of theology--of understanding, when we think about that term as how people think about God, what people say about God, how that impacts what they actually do, is as important or more important than it ever has been.”—Strine
• Theology needs practitioners of religion and critical outsides talking with students.
• Strine seeks “robust engagements” in theology that give students and others the opportunity to “[hear] strengths and weaknesses…from inside and outside, both to learn about it sort of in that third person view, but also then to make some decisions about what it is that they believe themselves.”
• One of the challenges to robust engagements—”theology is a lonely vocation,” Croasmun points out.
• Strine on the need for collaboration: “We're all finite, we're all human. There's only so much we can read. There only so many, so many hours we can work, no matter how hard we'd like to push ourselves, no matter how much coffee we drink.”
• One vision of collaboration: “that might take the form of like-minded people from different areas, picking a question that's bigger than what any one sort of individual feels like they can do and, and kind of networking their brains together.”—Strine
• Another vision of collaboration: “But it might equally be people from very different perspectives, putting their positions in dialogue, either with the hope that they find common ground they didn't know they had before, or simply they understand better where they agree and they disagree.”—Strine
• There are powerful social and institutional pressures against collaboration in academia.
• Strine warns against “cosmetic collaboration” which does not actually foster robust engagement and dialogue.
• To build a theology of collaboration and community, “what's required is for those of us who are in the academy who would like to do that sort of work to be making an argument for why philosophically, epistemologically, and pragmatically there's value in that.”—Strine

About Casey Strine

Casey Strine is Senior Lecturer in Ancient Near Eastern History and Literature at The University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. He specializes in Old Testament biblical studies, but thinks deeply about the historical connective tissue that links people and societies over time and through space. Casey is also a project partner with the Yale Center for Faith & Culture's Life Worth Living initiative. Follow him on Twitter @CaseyStrine.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Casey Strine and Matt Croasmun
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give