In my recent conversation with Jacob Kishere as part of his “Christianity beyond itself” series, we attempted to navigate the ways the “Christ impulse” can so easily get hijacked by culture-war crusader energy. Spiritual renewal thereby risks being conflated with civilizational chauvinism.
Midway through our dialogue, Islam came up. I felt how ill-equipped I am for that encounter, and how quickly a conversation that should be healing can instead further inflame civilizational divisions that have been raging for a millennium, more recently under the shadow of weapons of mass destruction. I’m committed to religious pluralism, to the sense that the Word speaks every tongue available to human beings, and that no single institution or language can contain the divine. But that commitment doesn’t exempt me from blind spots. If anything, it increases my responsibility to slow down, learn more about what remain foreign cultural grammars, and to be careful with the metaphors I inherit and repeat.
That’s why I invited Jared Morningstar into a follow-up conversation. Jared is in a rare position: a scholar-practitioner with deep philosophical training, a Westerner and a modern subject who is also a practicing Muslim, trying to hold together fidelity to the tradition’s depth, breadth, and richness with a critical, non-defensive honesty about real internal tensions.
We began with the word Islam itself, which is often translated as “submission.” Jared showed how, in Arabic, that translation sits inside a wider semantic field rooted in the same consonants as salam: peace, tranquility, rest. The connotation is less “conformity to an imposed order” and, for him, more like the Taoist wu wei: a harmony in which the active/passive dualism melts.
From there, the conversation opens out into a variety of intersections: the Qur’anic reverence for Jesus as Word of God (without an incarnational Christology), Sufi Neoplatonic currents like the Nur Muhammadiyah, and the shared Hellenic grammar that makes “Athens and Jerusalem” a more accurate origin story than the usual “foreign other” framing. Jared also complicated the usual modern western frame of “church and state” by describing Sunni Islam’s decentralized institutional ecology—legal pluralism, multiple schools of jurisprudence and theology, and the crucial point that Sharia is not akin to positive law in the modern Western sense, but a transcendent ideal approached through interpretive jurisprudence. Modern Islamic nation-states have become theocratic, but Jared’s reminders about recent history helped unveil possible colonial distortions, ie, the pathological fusion produced by the Western imperial importation of the nation-state form into a very different civilizational context.
I sought out this dialogue with Jared primarily because I needed it. I needed a friend who could both correct my shortcuts and deepen my sense of what’s alive inside Islamic spirituality beyond the noxious Western media environment that profits from narratives of clash and incommensurability. If Christianity is going to move beyond itself and avoid being captured by yet another instantiation of the civilizational crusade complex, then Christians (and post-Christians, and seekers circling the Christ) have to become more fluent in the other tongues in which the divine has been praised, feared, wrestled with, and loved. My hope is that this conversation contributes in some small way to that fluency. I offer it to your ears as a peace-full attempt to tune the heart to a cosmic music grand enough to include not only the more than half of humanity identified with the Abrahamic faiths, but all of humanity.
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