The Compass Center

Students and Speakers at the Pre-Seminar Supper

Last week the Butler Seminar on Religion and Global Affairs on the topic of Sacred Places: Intersections of Religion and Ecology, held its final session, titled “Greening Indiana: Theologies and Ethics of Sustainability.” For the past year we have approached the work of ecojustice from a number of religious perspectives – Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu – and methodological angles – sociology, biology, film, literature, politics, economics, philosophy, and theology, among many others. In this last session, we trained our focus on local efforts toward sustainability and ecojustice right here in Indiana, with the guidance of three fantastic speakers: Lisa Sideris, Dori Chandler, and Jessica Davis.

Lisa Sideris is Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington and her research and teaching focuses on intersections of religion, science, and ecology. Dr. Sideris emphasized the need for a “public theological conversation” in which multiple perspectives (religious and secular) are welcomed in order to expand our vision of the health and wellbeing of the planet and what we can do in our local communities to address the environmental crisis. Dr. Sideris invited us to consider how our roots in a particular place and community have shaped who we have become; these roots provide our entrée into the work of ecojustice. However, as a culture we have a collective case of “environmental amnesia,” as each generation becomes accustomed to the status quo as “normal,” despite the environmental devastation we observe all around us. Paying attention to the history of our places and the changes that have occurred over the generations reminds us that human activity sometimes drastically alters a place and its ecology, compelling us to marshal every resource available to us – scientific, political, economic, social, historical, and religious – to address the environmental crisis, which is the defining issue of our time.

Dori Chandler is a board member of Hoosier Interfaith Power and Light, a member of the Citizens’ Climate Lobby, and Director of Interfaith Programming and Advisor of Hillel at the Butler Center for Faith and Vocation. Dori draws inspiration from the rabbinic notions of tikkun olam (“repairing the world”) and bal tashchit (“do not destroy”) to inform her environmental activism. Together with Dr. Sideris, Dori shared some startling statistics about the environmental crisis here in Indiana: Indiana ranks #46 in air quality in the US, #48 in overall quality of life, and #1 in the number of coal ash ponds and super-polluting power plants. Dori’s work with the Citizens’ Climate Lobby and Hoosier Interfaith Power and Light brings together Hoosiers of diverse backgrounds and religious and ethical commitments to lobby for legislation to address these environmental problems and to forge a new path toward sustainability and ecojustice in Indiana and beyond. Almost 80% of Hoosiers identify as religious, which means that any substantial change of course must include religious voices in order to be effective. HIPL is on the front lines of organizing religious communities to make the connections between religious faith and environmental activism, with inspiring results.

The last speaker was Jessica Davis, Director of Sustainability at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Jessica works with students, faculty, staff, administrators, and community partners to adopt and implement sustainable practices on the IUPUI campus and in Indianapolis. For example, IUPUI is a certified “bee campus” and “tree campus,” has seven LEED-certified buildings (and is constructing three more), has a student-run effort to combat food waste that in one year salvaged 30,000 pounds of food, and recently hosted the first Olympic trial in history that produced zero waste. IUPUI is doing good and important work on sustainability and is training its students to be environmentally-conscious citizens. In her talk Jessica took time to define some common terms for the audience. She defined sustainability as meeting the needs (not wants) of the current generation while at the same time allowing future generations to meet their needs as well. She further suggested that the key to successful sustainability efforts is meeting three related needs: successful sustainability efforts will be environmentally-friendly, socially just, and economically feasible. Her work at IUPUI embraces each of these goals with impressive results that are an inspiration to other institutions in the region.

The environmental crisis is urgent and it is doing real and lasting damage, here and now. We are in the midst of an existential crisis that will require drastic measures to address. In this session we were invited to find hope, empowerment, and energy for the work that lies before us. There is good and important work being done here in central Indiana in myriad ways, large and small, to address the environmental crisis and to create a better, more sustainable, more just future for us all.

The full video of the lectures and the Q&A with the audience is available here:

Brent Hege

CFV Scholar in Residence and Lecturer in Religion

 Source: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

One of the roles of the Center for Faith and Vocation is to invite students to engage the diverse religious communities on campus and in the community. The CFV Interfaith Council and CFV Scholars embrace this opportunity for interreligious engagement as central to their mission, but the CFV also offers workshops, lectures, film discussions, and other opportunities for engaging with religious diversity. This semester I am teaching an upper-level Religion course called “Religious Pluralism” and our focus is on the various ways Christian theologians have thought about religious diversity and the relationship between religious traditions.

In my role as CFV Scholar in Residence I work with the CFV Scholars to help them reflect more intentionally on their encounters with religious diversity; as a Christian theologian one of my tasks is to make sense of religious diversity from a Christian theological perspective. Religious diversity itself is simply a fact: there are multiple religious traditions in the world and even on Butler’s campus. But Christians and other religious people have disagreed about how to make sense of that diversity in light of their own religious commitments. In my course we start the semester with an introduction to these questions, Paul Knitter’s Introducing Theologies of Religion. In this helpful book, Knitter (a Roman Catholic theologian) proposes four “models” Christian theologians have used to make sense of the relationship between Christianity and other religious traditions.

The first model is Replacement, or “exclusivism.” In this model, Christianity alone is true and all other religions are understood to be false and misguided ways to God. Only Christians can be saved, so in this model the goal of dialogue is conversion. This model is typically espoused by conservative evangelical and fundamentalist Christians.

The second model is Fulfillment, or “inclusivism.” In this model, Christianity alone possesses the fullness of truth, but other religious traditions can also include glimmers of God’s truth. Non-Christians who devote themselves fully to their tradition and who seem to live holy and grace-filled lives are considered to be “anonymous Christians.” Jesus Christ is the sole savior of the world, so if anyone is saved, they are saved by Christ, but in this model Christ can be active outside of Christianity. This model is typically espoused by Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants.

Replacement and Fulfillment are the dominant models in most Christian churches, at least in terms of their official teachings. However, two additional models are becoming more popular, especially in Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant circles.

The third model is Mutuality. In this model, all religious traditions are understood to be the product of particular cultures, each responding to the Ultimate Reality with the help of the language, concepts, customs, and worldview of their respective cultures. All religious traditions are assumed to have “rough parity” and all are assumed to be headed toward the same goal of union with Ultimate Reality. Each tradition uses different symbols for that reality and develops different doctrines, rites, texts, etc., to make sense of it, but all religious traditions share the same essence and the same goal. This means, then, that no religious tradition can claim to uniquely possess the final and ultimate truth. A common metaphor for this model is that all religions are paths up the same mountain. The goal of dialogue in this model is to develop a deeper understanding of what all religions have in common.

The fourth model is Acceptance. This model developed in response to the Mutuality model, which some theologians criticized for ignoring or downplaying the genuine differences between religious traditions. Acceptance theologians emphasize the differences more than the similarities: the religions are really different, and that’s a good thing! Some Acceptance theologians even suggest that there are multiple “ultimates,” multiple “absolutes,” and multiple “salvations.” Furthermore, each religious tradition can only be fully understood on its own terms, from the inside, because each religious tradition has its own thought-world and its own symbol-system that can’t be “translated” without losing something essential. The goal of dialogue in this model is to develop a richer understanding of these differences in order to make me a better Christian and you a better Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, Hindu, etc.

Each of these models has its strengths and weaknesses (as all models do), and each model tries to balance what Knitter calls the Christian “teeter-totter” of the uniqueness and particularity of Jesus Christ on the one side and the universal love of God on the other. Each model approaches the “teeter-totter” differently, and other religious traditions will try to balance their own “teeter-totters” in similarly diverse ways.

These four models invite us to think deeply and seriously about the reality of religious diversity while also trying to make sense of the truth claims of our own religious tradition in light of that diversity. For some, one of the models will strike us as doing a particularly good job of balancing that “teeter-totter,” while for others none of the models will be successful. It’s very possible that additional models are needed to help us live fruitfully and faithfully in a religiously diverse world.

Brent Hege

CFV Scholar in Residence and Lecturer in Religion

On Tuesday, October 30th, we held the second session of the yearlong Butler Seminar on Religion and Global Affairs, whose topic this year is Sacred Places: Intersections of Religion and Ecology. The second session was entitled “Non-Theistic Perspectives on the Environment: Buddhist and Jain Ecologies” and featured two eminent scholars of these traditions, Dr. Daniel Cozort of Dickinson College in Pennsylvania and Dr. Christopher Key Chapple of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

In the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, theological thinking about environmental issues typically makes reference to God as Creator, which means that the Earth and all its creatures are inherently good and worth protecting because they are products of God’s creative intentions. However, Jainism and certain traditions within Buddhism, such as Zen and Theravada, are non-theistic, which means that there is no notion of a deity creating the universe. For Jains and for Buddhists, the universe is often conceived as eternal, so there is no need for it to be “created.” So how do these non-theistic traditions frame care for the environment?

As we heard in the lectures, there are robust environmental ethics in both of these traditions, rooted in beliefs and practices specific to religious traditions with their origins in India. For example, Buddhism teaches that the root of human suffering is delusion and ignorance about reality and this is expressed in the “three marks of reality”: suffering, impermanence, and no-self. All of life is suffering and dissatisfaction, rooted in our ignorance of the way things really are. The way things really are is impermanent, in flux, and radically interconnected. But the deepest roots of our delusions stem from our tendency to think of ourselves as separate, independent, permanent selves, rather than as interconnected with all existence in fundamental ways. When we understand that we are not independent beings but “interbeings” and when we understand that everything exists in interdependence on everything else, we can alleviate suffering and focus our energies on loving and caring for all beings.

The Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh asks us to imagine a simple piece of paper to understand “interbeing.” We tend to think that this piece of paper has an independent existence, but when we think more deeply we realize that this paper couldn’t exist without the trees, and the trees couldn’t exist without rain and sunshine and nutrients in the soil, and the tree couldn’t be turned into paper without loggers and paper mill workers and salespeople, and none of those people could exist without food and drink and shelter and parents, and so on and so forth. When we really see the paper, it turns out that we’re holding the entire universe in our hands! So to care for one part of the earth is to care for everything in it, ourselves included.

 

Jainism also offers a robust environmental ethic based on its central teaching of ahimsa, or non-harm. Jainism, like Zen and Theravada Buddhism, does not profess belief in a deity. Jains believe that everything that exists is composed of both spirit and matter, or “life” and “non-life.” People, animals, rivers, mountains, rocks, tables, chairs: all contain both life and non-life. All things are capable of suffering, so Jains believe that everything that exists must be treated with care and respect. Jain monks and nuns go barefoot to remember their connection to the Earth and to step lightly on it, minimizing the harm they might do to any living thing. Some monks and nuns will sweep the ground before they take a step and wear a mask to avoid breathing in or drinking another living thing. Jains are typically vegetarians and also avoid eating root vegetables such as carrots, potatoes, or onions, because eating these vegetables requires killing the plant. Jains are also likely to work in fields such as medicine and education: areas that promote life and wellbeing. Jains also take five vows, including non-harm, telling the truth, only taking what is freely given, chastity, and not possessing more than is needed. It is perhaps obvious how these vows contribute to a vibrant environmental ethic, as Jains pay careful attention to their impact on all beings. The environment must be protected and cared for because the environment is full of beings capable of suffering, so we must always take care that our actions do no harm.

Buddhism and Jainism are ancient traditions with many valuable insights to offer us as we confront serious environmental crises of our own making. To understand nature as alive and as capable of suffering and to understand our interconnection with all things should inspire compassion and mindfulness of the way we walk upon the earth.

Brent Hege

CFV Scholar in Residence and Lecturer in Religion

 

On Saturday, October 20th, I had the privilege of accompanying nine Butler students from the Interfaith Council and the CFV Scholars on a service project organized by Keep Indianapolis Beautiful, a local environmental organization involved with beautification projects designed to create or enhance green spaces in Indianapolis. We were joined by groups from IUPUI, IU School of Law, and other local citizens to plant 94 trees in the Riverside Neighborhood on the near-north side of Indianapolis, adjacent to Riverside Park.

The Butler students come from a number of backgrounds (Muslim, Jewish, Roman Catholic, mainline Protestant, evangelical, and secular), but each had similar reasons for participating in this service project. At a debriefing lunch following the project they spoke of feeling called by their religious and ethical traditions to care for the Earth, to enhance the lives of their neighbors with beautiful trees, to spend time with one another and make new friends while doing good in their community, and to protect Indianapolis’s waterways from pollution (each tree we planted will intercept about 100 gallons of water in each rainfall, water that would otherwise overwhelm Indianapolis’s sewer system and send raw sewage into our waterways).

The project directors from Keep Indianapolis Beautiful taught us how to prepare a tree for planting, how to dig a proper hole, how to plant the tree, and how to reuse the sod and mulch the tree to ensure that it will provide shade and beauty, shelter birds and insects, capture water and carbon dioxide long after all of us have gone. Residents of the neighborhood came out to greet us and thank us for planting trees in front of their homes and several of the residents were overjoyed to see that “their” trees had finally arrived. One resident, a recent immigrant from West Africa, was so excited that he spent two hours helping us dig, prune, and plant! The students engaged all of them in conversation and were pleased to put a human face with their morning’s work.

In our conversation afterwards back at Butler’s Center for Faith and Vocation, students were clearly energized and inspired by their work, despite having been up since before 8:00 on a Saturday morning. Every one of them was glad they participated and wants to do similar projects in the future. Furthermore, they agreed to spearhead an effort next year to include even more Butler students in KIB’s tree-planting projects so that more of their classmates could experience the joy of service in care of the environment and our community.

As a result of this project the students learned something important about interfaith engagement as well. Even though they come from different backgrounds and had specific motivations for caring for the Earth, they all ended up working together on the same project toward the same result. The Christian students shared biblical texts about the Earth as God’s creation and Christ’s command to serve others, the Muslim students shared Qur’anic texts about doing good for the neighbor and reflected on Zakat (charity), one of the Five Pillars of Islam, the Jewish student discussed the concept of tikkun olam (reparing the world) as a religious obligation, and the secular student reflected on their humanistic motivation to serve the neighbor and care for the Earth. Each student had their own motivations for engaging in this project, but they also learned about how other religious and ethical traditions conceive of the imperative to care for the Earth, its creatures, and our fellow human beings.

This kind of work is happening at Butler all the time, at the CFV, in Butler’s many student organizations, in the Greek houses, and through the annual BITS program (Bulldogs into the Streets). Many student organizations on campus require their members to complete hours of community service, so that students can put their learning into practice for the good of their communities. And if what I experienced on Saturday morning is any indication, these projects make a profound and lasting impact on everyone who participates in them, far beyond simply satisfying requirements for courses or membership in student organizations. So the next time you see a Butler student, I encourage you to ask them about the service projects they’ve done and prepare yourself to be swept away by their energy and enthusiasm!

Brent Hege

CFV Scholar in Residence and Instructor of Religion