I’m not a cheerleader for the Fighting Irish. (I certainly don’t look like one). I’m not even Roman Catholic or a Notre Dame alum. Nor am I a Muslim. I’m not “secular” either. So perhaps I’ll be forgiven for indulging in a little rah-rah for Notre Dame and its recently initiated project on Contending Modernities: Catholic, Muslim, Secular.
A Notre Dame Affair to Remember
The formal launch of Contending Modernities in New York on the night of November 18th was very much a Notre Dame affair. That might make some people wince in our culture of self-promotion-only-so-long-as-it’s-subtle. But Notre Dame—in every sense—was everywhere. And yet the fact that the Contending Modernities launch was so evidently a Notre Dame event is something Notre Dame should be proud of—even as proud, perhaps, as its 27-3 victory over Army that same weekend.
From a lectern displaying the “University of Notre Dame” name and seal, the evening commenced with remarks by the priestly president of Notre Dame, Father John Jenkins of the Congregation of Holy Cross, who began by placing the Contending Modernities project in a theological frame that Jenkins as a scholar of Thomas Aquinas was well placed to articulate: that both the Catholic and the Islamic traditions rightly consider faith and reason “twin pillars” of knowledge and of the highest human goods. In the audience intently listening to (and exemplifying) the remarks of Father Jenkins was a pluralistic intermingling of Notre Dame alumni wearing “Fighting Irish” hats, lapel pins, and fleece jackets with young Muslim women wearing headscarves. There were also numerous others of neither Catholic nor Muslim persuasion, from secular social scientists to Protestant theologians.
The stately addresses that followed—from a distinguished Muslim jurist from Egypt and two American Catholic scholars, including the dean of Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters—all in their own way insisted on the need for a dialogue as genuinely pluralistic as the audience in attendance that evening. Perhaps it may not seem very interesting or courageous to stand up for dialogue. Who’s against dialogue, after all?
Too often, in fact, “dialogue” in our modern world is not the “inclusive” interaction of “diverse” standpoints it’s advertised to be but a constricted conversation whose participants have already been pre-screened and whose diversity has already been filtered through a putatively modern grid—whether a secularism that screens out supernaturalism or a liberal “reasonableness” that screens out any role for religious authority. Interreligious dialogue in particular often imposes a steep price of admission: emphasize the universal; play down the particular; deny altogether the possibility of any privileged path to salvation. But a dialogue so narrowly framed won’t represent very many of the world’s convinced religionists. Nor, finally, will it do much good—at least not if it aims at genuine peace and understanding between the determined believers who actually populate our world.
As Catholic scholar of Islam and Bryn Mawr president Jane McAuliffe put it in her remarks at the Contending Modernities Launch: “Too often interfaith initiatives tiptoe around certain topics for fear of sparking conflict.”
Towards a Catholic Conversation…
Spurning the dead-end of a narrow dialogue that pointlessly engages only the “diversity” of the likeminded, here a great Catholic university has launched a project that attempts something much harder but also (potentially) much more valuable: a catholic conversation, if you will, among the determined representatives of deeply divergent communities and traditions of thought—Catholic, Muslim, secular. In that sense, it is a dialogue much broader and deeper than your average “interfaith” initiative, for it directly engages the inescapable and growing realities of secularity and secularism in the world.
After all, self-identified “seculars”—or people who decline to identify with any particular religion—are the fastest growing “religious” group in the U.S., and are growing with rapidity in surprising locales around the globe, such as Brazil. As Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor has outlined in his magnum opus, A Secular Age, even where religion is strong, many societies have acquired a background culture that is secular in the sense that faith is no longer the presumed, default option of individuals.
But if secularity is a stubborn and indeed expanding reality in our world, it is hardly sweeping the global board. As recently as the 1980s, a consensus of social scientists embraced the thesis that religion faced inevitable decline at the hands of “secular modernity.” Since then, numerous scholars across several disciplines have broken the presumed linkage between modernity and secularity. Rather than being supine in the face of an inexorable syndrome of modernity, they have shown, many religious individuals, ideas, and institutions have persisted, innovated, and expanded their influence across the spheres of modern society. In the process, religious actors have often constructed their own viable visions and forms of modern life.
The result is that modernity has assumed a form not predicted by the so-called “secularization thesis”: the dynamic co-existence and competition of “multiple modernities”—religious and secular—rather than the dominance of a singular “secular modernity.”
…that Modernity Needs
If all these modernities were already alike and fundamentally in agreement, there would be no need to bring them into conversation. But they are not alike, and that diversity is respected rather than patronized when it is made the premise of a genuine and inclusive dialogue.
In launching such a dialogue, Notre Dame has embarked on something that merits more than a passing glance: a Catholic university investing its time, resources, and energy into hosting a very modern kind of conversation between radically different religious positions, communities, and traditions. It does not claim to speak for these traditions. Nor is it merely conducting sterile, arms-length research about these traditions.
Instead, Notre Dame has set a rich table around which it is gathering active and devout Muslims, serious Catholics, convinced secular individuals, and, in time, representatives of other religious traditions and communities as well, in order to hear them speak for themselves in their own distinct and particular voices. In other words, an institution representing a tradition that predates modernity is hosting a very modern conversation—modern not only in that it is expansive, inclusive, and open-ended but also in that it honors (rather than patronizes) modernity by paying it the respect of honest and robust investigation. A kind of radical religious commitment has built the platform for a radically and truly inclusive project.
A hundred or even fifty years ago, few observers of the global religious scene, I suspect, would have predicted that such a conversation could be not merely passively endorsed but also launched and sponsored by a Roman Catholic institution. Surely a Catholic institution would have been the last place to find such a conversation.
I’m no Notre Dame cheerleader, but surely Notre Dame deserves at least a moment of glory for showing that sometimes the last shall be first.
