Abrahamic Traditions on the Silk Road

By Kwok Pui Lan

The Silk Road refers to the network of roads connecting Ch’ang-an (modern-day Xian), the ancient capital of China, to the Mediterranean, with spurs into the Indian subcontinent, the northern Eurasian steppe, and southern Iran. When caravans went East and West on the ancient Silk Road, trade and commerce brought people of different cultures and religious traditions into contact with each other.

The Episcopal Divinity School (EDS) organized a one-day conference on March 3 to explore the interactions and cultural exchanges of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam along the ancient Silk Road. Speakers of the conference included scholars in Hebrew Bible, New Testament, early Christianity and theology, Syriac-speaking Christianity, Armenian Christianity, Islam, and Judaism and Christianity in Asia. The big lecture room at Sherrill Hall was filled to capacity with some 100 scholars from other schools within the Boston Theological Institute, EDS faculty, students, staff, and alumni/alumnae, and other guests.

The theme of the conference “What Would It Take to Move the Map?” was provocative. As Professor Lawrence Wills, who organized the conference with Professor Patrick S. Cheng, said, “There is increasing evidence of a rich history of Christians, Jews, and Muslims who moved eastward all the way to China, at a time much earlier than was previously believed.” The conference aimed to broaden our understanding of this long history of interactions of Abrahamic traditions.

A map is a tool to look at the world and to organize and constitute reality. It takes vision, courage, humility, curiosity, and restless inquiry to move the map to include the religious exchanges along the Silk Road.

I was asked to comment on the proceedings from the day in a final session. Here are a few of my observations:

First, we have to expand our imagination of the Christian tradition to include the many branches of Christianities and their interactions of other religious traditions. In the United States, the teaching of church history tends to focus primarily on Western Christianity, with little mention on Greek and Oriental Christianity.

For example, in his survey of textbooks on church history, Professor Cheng pointed out that many leave out or mention in passing Nestorian Christianity in China. This narrow and selective way of understanding church history fails to do justice to the complex and multilayered Christian traditions and impoverishes our knowledge of the many expressions and experiences of the divine.

Second, in order to expand our imagination, we need to learn to decolonize our minds, such that we will not read history and create cartography based on Eurocentric lenses. In his concluding remarks, Professor Christopher Duraisingh spoke of cultivating multiple consciousness and developing the capacity to see maps as synchronic and not diachronic. This reminds me of what the late Edward Said, the pioneer of postcolonial discourse, has said of contrapuntal reading of history—reading history as intertwined and territories as overlapped.

Decolonization of the mind means that we have to be aware of the impacts of the Latinization of the world in the first “globalization,” in which the people in the Americas were brought into the orbit of Europe in the early modern period. The Roman Catholic Church played important roles in this remapping of the world. Those of us who are Episcopalians would do well to remember the consequences of the Anglicization of the world. The British Empire has shaped and remapped the cultures and histories of peoples under its colonial control and the Anglican Church has played a vital part in it.

Third, we have to learn to live in a multipolar or Post-American world, cognizant of the shifting geopolitics and the rise of Brazil, Russia, India, and China as key players in shaping global economy and world affairs. China’s phenomenal economic growth will change our ways of looking at East Asia and its long interactions with Central Asia, West Asia, and Europe.

China has developed a new Silk Road strategy in order to secure oil and gas from the Middle East to fuel its economic growth. Vast pipeline networks have been built in the region and the Iron Silk Road project, an ambitious Eurasian railway network is being built to connect China to Turkey, Iran, and the European countries.

The ancient Silk Road is being remapped by many powers to serve present economic and political purposes. Our awareness of cultural and historical interactions in the past will help us to live in this brand new world of the twenty-first century.

Kwok Pui Lan is the William F. Cole Professor of Christian Theology and Spirituality at the Episcopal Divinity School and her most recent book is Globalization,Gender, and Peacebuilding: The Future of Interfaith Dialogue. 

Religious Perspectives on Borders and Transnationalism

By Dr. Susanna Snyder

     Keeping up with immigration issues anywhere is like trying to catch an eel with your bare hands. Newspapers run a story about it almost every day, in one form or another, and just when you think you’re getting close to understanding what’s going on, new legislation or procedures are initiated or something happens to an immigrant somewhere you hadn’t imagined was possible.

     Take a look at what’s going on in Massachusetts at the moment. A bill currently under review in the State House—S2061 Act to Enhance Community Safety—is likely to have serious effects on immigrant communities if it is passed. Similar to laws passed in Alabama, Georgia and Arizona, it is designed to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deport undocumented immigrants. Among other things, it would allow law enforcement officers to check the immigration status of people arrested for certain offences—such as driving under the influence.

     But what has religion got to do with all of this, though?

     At one level, religious organizations are among the most prominent advocates for (and against) immigration inclusion. For example, Boston New Sanctuary Movement, a coalition of interfaith leaders and congregations that supports immigrants, states: “We people of faith support fair and just changes to our immigration system.  People who have worked hard here without documents for years deserve to have legal residency and a path to citizenship.”

     At another level, religion plays a large part in the daily lives of many immigrants. From providing a source of spiritual comfort, meaning, and community to practical support in the form of English language classes, accommodation, or legal advice, faith and faith-based organizations can be invaluable to new arrivals as well as those who have been living in the country for many years.

     The Migration, Theology and Faith Forum, based at Episcopal Divinity School, was set up to bring migrants, activists, and academics from different disciplines together to discuss these important issues. The MTFF will hold a symposium, “Borders and Transnationalism: Religious Perspectives,” on Friday, March 23, from 1pm to 4:30pm, to explore some of the intersections between religion and migration.

     Speakers at the symposium will explore such questions as how migrants are drawing on their faith and negotiating religious identity and practice—both on their journeys and after they arrive in the U.S. and what role faith-based organizations are playing in terms of practical support and advocacy—in support of and against immigrants? It will be multi-faith as well as interdisciplinary—with papers on Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism. Some participants will reflect on the root causes of migration while others will discuss what happens at the border or when people have arrived in the United States.

     No matter how you feel about the complex issues related to immigration, it’s important that we come together to learn more, especially as the situation is changing every day.

Dr. Susanna Snyder is Assistant Professor in Contemporary Society and Christian Ethics at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Liturgy on the Streets

By Rev. Elizabeth M. Magill 


     In her blog “Telling Secrets” Elizabeth Kaeton looks at the “Ashes to Go Movement” and asks an important question: What does it mean when we take liturgical actions to the streets?

     Is it worth the risk that the action will be separated from its meaning—not just from its immediate meaning, but from the bigger story that surrounds it? Is it worth the risk that people will accept ashes and yet not understand the meaning behind the words “remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Or, even if they do understand, that they will not have heard the bigger story of Christian salvation, will not get a handle on how Ash Wednesday is a small part of the Good News of Kingdom of God. Is it worth the risk that someone will see it is as magic symbol of something trite?

     Elizabeth’s question is one of the right questions. She decides that she will take her ashes “to stay,” that she will be part of the whole liturgy, that she will experience that liturgy with the community where she is an integral part. She’s not getting ashes and moving on, she’s getting ashes and being sent out by a community.

     This leads to another right question: what do we, as active Christians, take with us when we are sent out by our worshiping community?

     Certainly it begins with our love, patience, and kindness. Certainly we take our community organizing knowledge, our passion for justice, and our love of our neighbor.

     But can’t we also take our palms and our oil and our ashes? Our bread and our drink and our baptismal waters? Can't we take these out with us into the world?

     I know that these things may communicate less outside the context of the place that we worship. These things are only signs of something bigger, deeper, more powerful, and more wonderful. All of the gifts that we bring to the world are not fully understood in the world, nor, I must add, are the fully understood by any of us. 

     However, in fairness to the conversation, I offer the following experiences I have had working with Worcester Fellowship, an outdoor church offering worship to homeless and at risk adults. We offered a quick Ash Wednesday service followed by an hour hanging out, offering ashes to people walking through Worcester Common.

     First, there was the woman in Worcester Common who turned to me and said “Ashes? I haven't had ashes since I was a kid.” She then shared stories of her life since the last time she’d been to church, how the church had hurt her, and how she was now thinking about God again for the first time in a long time. When I put ashes on her, she understood what was happening in that ritual as well any other person receiving ashes inside or outside.
     Then, there was the young man who said, “No, thanks” when I first offered ashes but then came back and said, “Can I change my mind?” He told the story of the fight he’d had last night and how he was ruminating about that when I offered ashes. He realized that he has to “get right with God” if he thinks he is going to “get right with his girlfriend.” He understood enough to accept ashes without going inside.
     And there was the older woman who said nothing, but cried. Then she asked for a hug.

     And then the people who said yes, and accepted ashes with a quiet amen. And the people who simply took off their hats and said nothing. I don’t know what they understood.

     I am glad I accepted the gifts the church community gives to me, and that I took the risk to take those gifts with me, outside. Perhaps the value of taking the gifts of the church outside its walls is the gift the giver receives from the people in the world.

The Rev. Elizabeth M. Magill (EDS ’02) is called “Pastor Liz” on the streets of Worcester where she offers lunch, worship, and pastoral care every Sunday at 1pm. Her blog is outdoorchurch.livejournal.com.

The Gift of Myanmar: Balancing Motherhood and Scholarship

By Grace Ji-Sun Kim

     Yangon, Myanmar is a city of contrasts—beauty mixed with pollution, breathtaking pagodas alongside broken down homes, fancy malls beside street vendor and open markets, and sidewalk restaurants along with air-conditioned westernized ones. Everything is a sharp contrast. My recent visit provided the opportunity to see the contrasts within my own life in new ways. 
     When I accepted the invitation to speak at Myanmar Institute of Theology in Yangon, Myanmar, my friends and family criticized me. They were uneasy about my decision to travel to a developing country and warned me about the political unrest and danger I might face. They were especially critical of my decision to take my ten-year-old daughter along with me.  Why should a mother of three who is already busy with teaching, writing, household chores, and mothering spend eleven days away from home in a volatile country?
     I have often felt torn between being a good mother and being a reputable scholar. I’ve felt criticized by other mothers because teaching or research took so much of my time away from my children.  For over a decade, I lived with constant guilt of trying to establish myself as a scholar and trying to be the best mom I can be. 
     On the other side, the scholarly world often criticized me for bringing a child to a scholarly event, as I looked more maternal than scholarly. Up until two years ago I travelled to every American Academy of Religion annual meeting since 1996 giving numerous papers and participating in committee meetings with at least one child at my side.

     I tried to rationalize that I was not such a terrible mom by remembering how much I was trying to do. I gave birth to two children during my PhD studies and one while searching for a job.  I nursed all three kids until they were one and I speak in Korean to them as part of sharing as much of my cultural heritage as possible. I drive my kids to Korean school, ballet, soccer, basketball, and school events.  I even serve home cooked meals as often as I can. Surely that showed that I was not such a terrible mom, but doubt still lingered.

     In Yangon, I gave three lectures and preached two sermons.  At my first lecture, my daughter listened for about forty-five minutes before a local woman came to take her shopping.  It was a prearranged shopping event, as I thought she might be bored listening to my three-hour lecture.
     Later my daughter said that once she left the room she kept thinking, “I want to be with my mom.  I want to listen to my mom’s lecture.”  She said that she was thoroughly enjoying listening to my lecture.  She said that I was saying so many important things and was disappointed that she had to leave.
     It was at that moment that I realized that my daughter might have her own ideas about my mothering. She thought I was a great and wonderful mom.  In my daughter’s eyes, I was the greatest mom in the world, who took her out of school to visit Yangon.  I was a fascinating mom whom people found interesting enough to come out to hear on a day that the seminary was closed for entrance exams. It was in that moment in Myanmar that I—for the first time—felt whole as a mother and as a scholar. To her, I was not a “terrible” mom.  That made all the difference.
     I didn’t have to live with the internal tension of trying to please my Asian culture, which expects a good mother to stay home, and the competitive world of theological scholarship, which expects me to continuously contribute to theological discourse.  I can be who I am.  I traveled half way across the world to realize that I can be both mother and scholar. It doesn’t have to be either/or.  All the guilt lifted during that precious moment with my daughter.
     I have my daughter to thank for this affirmation after struggling trying to please both sides. She showed me how I can be both scholar and mother at the same time. And Myanmar helped me embrace both the beauty and the struggle inherent in each.

Grace Ji-Sun Kim is Associate Professor of Doctrinal Theology and the Director of the MATS program at Moravian Theological Seminary in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She is the author of The Holy Spirit, Chi, and the Other: A Model of Global and Intercultural Pneumatology (Palgrave Macmillan) and The Grace of Sophia: A Korean North American Women's Christology (Pilgrim Press). 

What Would It Take to Move the Map?

By Dr. Lawrence Wills

Maps, whether real or mental, omit as much as they show.

In our universities and seminaries, the early history of Christians and Jews in the West is studied in exacting detail, but it is often a one-sided process: the movement of Christians and Jews—and Muslims—to the East is largely ignored.

There is increasing evidence of a rich history of Christians, Jews, and Muslims who moved eastward all the way to China, at a time much earlier than was previously believed. There is, in fact, an entire “lost history” of these groups in the East, not because the evidence is not available or accessible, but simply because our universities and seminaries choose to ignore it.

The “What Would It Take to Move the Map?” conference is organized to address the simple yet fundamental question: What would it take to move the map to include a more inclusive history by introducing eastern narratives into this early history?

It is partly a matter of reintroducing some of the new findings about these groups in ancient Armenia, Syria, India, Inner Asia, East Asia—which some of the experts at this conference will do. But this conference will also encourage participants to reflect on the challenges and benefits of integrating an eastern history into the bigger picture. For instance, how can this realignment of the map and expansion of historical themes teach us about movements of religious groups in other areas, say, in Africa or South America—or the United States?

Modern global issues demand that we think anew about the interconnections and take measures to integrate the history of the East and West. It is natural for people in the West to have been more interested in “their” history, but from the beginning there have been non-Europeans present whose history was simply ignored. Is European and American history “their” history? What happens when more and more people in the West are from Africa, the Middle East, or South or East Asia? What happens when more of the West’s relations are with the East? The broadening of the historical map goes hand-in-hand with the broadening of the modern map, which is becoming increasingly complex. This conference will provide a forum for essential conversations on integrating new historical knowledge with our common maps, laying the foundation for a more thorough and complicated understanding of modern global concerns.

Dr. Lawrence Wills is the Ethelbert Talbot Professor of Biblical Studies at Episcopal Divinity School and author of Not God’s People: Insiders and Outsiders in the Biblical World.


“What Would It Take to Move the Map? Abrahamic Religions on the Silk Road” is a one-day conference that will take place at Episcopal Divinity School on Saturday, March 3^rd from 9am to 6pm. The conference will explore the overlooked histories of ancient Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the Middle East, India, and East Asia. This conference is part of EDS’s interfaith initiative funded by a generous grant from the Henry Luce Foundation of New York. For more information visit www.eds.edu. 

Celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Birthday the Day After

By Joan M. Martin

Yesterday was The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s national holiday.  Children were interviewed on national TV reading the words of the civil rights leader etched into the new MLK, Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.  Churches, synagogues, and mosques held interfaith worship services across the country. 

Original manuscripts of Dr. King’s speeches with his own handwritten editing comments crossed out or added were released for the first time by the King Center in Atlanta, GA. Most governmental offices and public schools and services observed the day by being closed. Yes, there were even several of those corporate commercials entreating us to “Keep the Dream Alive!”

Staff and administrative offices were closed at Episcopal Divinity School, but I worked yesterday, as did most faculty members and students and several librarians. Classes met so that students could receive the required teaching-learning hours necessary for full course credit for the two-week January Intensive Session. Rarely does the Dr. King’s birthday fall during the winter intensive session, so it really felt odd to be in class! 

So I began my class on the “Ethics of Vocation and Work in Church and Society” reminding my seminar participants that throughout his life Dr. King championed the civil rights of laborers, poor whites, people of color, and the right to organize by the U.S. labor movement.  We recalled that Dr. King spent his last days alive in Spring 1968 in solidarity with striking black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. 

There, he marched, spoke, and prepared the way for the proposed Poor Peoples’ March on Washington to occur later that summer.  How fitting and proper that our seminar understood at a new and deeper level Dr. King’s vocation to participate in creating God’s “beloved community,” and his work of human rights and solidarity given in the ultimate measure, with his very life.

This Martin Luther King, Jr. birthday 2012 falls in the midst of the greatest economic insecurity in the U.S. since the Great Depression, and in the uncertain shockwaves of the instability of global capitalism in the European Union and the recession in the U.S. economy. In July, The Christian Science Monitor reported that, “All racial groups lost ground in the recession, but blacks and Hispanics lost a bigger share of their net worth, a new study finds. As a result, the wealth gap is at its widest in at least 25 years.” 

Further, Paul Krugman suggested in The New York Times yesterday, “If King could actually see American now … he would see that … what we actually became is a nation that judges people not by the color of their skin — or at least not as much as in the past — but by the size of their paychecks. And in America, more than in most other wealthy nations, the size of your paycheck is strongly correlated with the size of your father’s paycheck. … Goodbye Jim Crow, hello class system.”

Wealth, poverty, unemployment, job creation, access to healthcare, racism, and the role of government are the issues that Dr. King believed were “inextricably bound” to the human flourishing from the perspective of economic and class injustice.  The call for “jobs” must entail job creation commensurate with the skills of the unemployed, particularly in the declining middle class, with income that preserves and creates new formations of stable civic and economic communities. 

Just as important and perhaps even more so, is the educational and skills development for entrepreneurship in service, technology, and information/communications industries for those in racially and economically marginalized communities – urban, ex-urban, and rural – that provides for serious competitive opportunity in economic sectors where there is economic mobility.  For such changes to be envisioned, the old “private/public sector” arrangements will have to give way to new forms of partnerships of all the stakeholders, beginning with those who need work and those who need the physical and community infrastructures of economics to be repaired and to grow as an integrated program with “green” integrity.

In the electoral season now upon us, as well as in the continual grassroots organizing coalescing under the canopy of the 99%, we have yet another opportunity to concretely struggle with nature of “The Dream” for the second decade of the 21st century and beyond, and to participate in the creation of the “beloved community” ever before us. Let our cry, “Remember the Dream,” be more than a once a year sentiment.  Rather, let it be an active engagement in it as our vocation and work in church and society.

* The Reverend Dr. Joan M. Martin is the William W. Rankin Associate Professor of Christian Social Ethics at the Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Conversion of a Conservative to a Liberal

By William Bronson

Growing up, I lived in a bubble. I saw the world working fairly well. My father had a successful small business in high tech carbide tool and die making. He had started it when his employer, a subsidiary of General Electric, was going to close its repair shop, which my father ran. He made a deal that he would continue the work as a private contractor and take on other customers as well. He and his partner worked hard and the company became a success. My brother subsequently took over when Dad retired and now my nephew has taken over from him. My niece also worked for the company and her husband still does. Through all their hard work, wisdom, and diligence, the company has prospered.

I went into aviation and flew first for Northeast Airline beginning in 1966 when I got out of five years in the Navy where I earned my wings. Then Delta bought out Northeast in the early seventies. Delta was originally run by some caring entrepreneurs and we were told we were a family. Then greed walked in, in the form of some savvy CEOs. Ten years into my retirement, they declared bankruptcy as some other airlines had done, and hired people back the next day at a fraction of their salaries. Meanwhile they dumped their retirees on the taxpayers through the Pension (partial) Benefit Guarantee Trust Corp. set up by Congress for the apparent purpose of enabling bad corporate behavior. The bankruptcies were related to the ruse of corporate raiding of pension funds during good times and then finding them short during bad times.

So I learned that not all corporations are created equal. Big business didn’t play by the same rules as small businesses. Looking at big business through historical lenses, it became clear that so-called free enterprise mainly meant that they were free to enlist the services of government and taxpayers through their so-called representatives to gain unfair advantage over competitors and labor.

Looking overseas, the picture appeared even worse. Colonialism and neo-colonialism have resulted in half the world struggling to subsist on less than $2 per day, while most wealth is held by the very few.  Now globalization and so-called free trade agreements have only accelerated the distance between rich and poor.

America is not left out, with financial game playing that resulted in a crisis and bank bailouts by taxpayers who were threatened that things could get even worse. Then foreclosures became rampant due to unemployment due to nervous markets due to all of the above. Then Occupy Everywhere arrived as bright young students burdened with debt supposedly to be paid off by cushy jobs figured out they had been had like the rest of us. They are using the same techniques as the Arab Spring only instead of malicious military dictators, the villain has become the oligarchy, the same oligarchy that was responsible for the dictators. It is a money game and Obama doesn’t know which side of the street he should stand on.

I used to believe, simplistically, that if government stayed out of the way, free enterprise would create utopia and private charity would take care of the poor, especially if our society was liberally sprinkled with conservative Christian virtues.

Now to my horror, much like Frank Schaeffer, I discover that I helped enable a government which with great hubris has spent trillions creating mayhem overseas under the pretense of protecting ourselves and democracy through its escalated war on terror which has become a cash cow for the military industrial complex that Eisenhower tried to warn us against.

Having just observed Veterans Day, we were treated on all channels to a depressing litany of ruined lives by those lured into the military by promises of $15,000 signing bonuses and college educations. Now left damaged and maimed, many of them have to sort out whether they were in fact saviors of democracy or pawns in a very sick money game.

What to do now? I suppose pray that 2012 will in fact bring about some new worldwide epiphany that changes things for the better.

* William Bronson, DMin ’08, was an airline pilot for many years and author of How to Get to Heaven.