Since You Asked: More on Our Methods and Mission

In this episode, Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding Director Chip Gruen becomes the guest as producer Christine Flicker poses questions drawn from audience feedback. The conversation explores the methodological approaches, underlying assumptions, and programming decisions that shape the Institute's work in fostering religious understanding and a healthier public conversation on religion. Listeners get an inside look at how the Institute navigates the complexities of religious diversity in public life and the intentional choices behind its programming initiatives.

Transcript

Chip Gruen: 0:05

Welcome to ReligionWise. I'm your host. Chip Gruen, so today we're doing something a little different. We have talked for a long time, so Christine Flicker and I, who is the producer and editor of the podcast, have talked for a long time about whether we could do a mailbag episode, because we do get questions, whether it be at public programming, at conferences I attend, or professional development, where I'm talking about religious literacy and empathetic understanding, that we get questions. And a lot of the questions, I think, really go to the heart of what we do and why we do it, and how we do it, and how we do it, and how that might be different from other kinds of similar organizations. So we've gathered some of those questions and those comments together and tried to formulate a set of questions that can get to you know, sort of the gist of it. As it turns out, I was a guest on a podcast Maurice Bloom's, "Walk, Talk, Listen"a few weeks ago, I encourage you to go and find that and discovered that there were a lot of things that I thought might be interesting for our listeners to hear, but maybe weren't exactly in the wheelhouse of ReligionWise, so this incorporates maybe a little bit of that material as well. So though Christine likes to stay behind the microphone. I have coerced her into being co host for this episode and to fire off the questions. So Christine, it's great to have you here.

Christine Flicker: 1:29

Thanks, Chip. I'm glad to be here.

Chip Gruen: 1:31

So with all that being said, let's just jump right to it.

Christine Flicker: 1:35

All right, so the Institute emphasizes what you describe as religious literacy and reasoned analysis of religion in public discourse. Can you explain what this means and why it's important? How does religious literacy differ from interfaith dialogue, and what does this mean for how you design the programming?

Chip Gruen: 1:53

So I think the important thing to emphasize first is that in the public conversation about religion, it is dominated by this thing that we call interfaith dialogue. And one of the principal ideas, or the foundations of interfaith dialogue, is that I as a religious person, talk to you as a religious person, and we figure out what we have in common, right? We figure out maybe projects that we can work on together, that but it all ends up being, you know, foundationally starting from the place of your own religious identity. And so I've been thinking about this a little bit lately, of examples of how this can potentially be a problem. So one example is, I remember teaching a class on the historical Jesus years ago, and I had a Buddhist monk in the class, and we would talk about the teachings of Jesus as they appeared, you know, in the Gospel materials. And he said, Oh yes, you know, my master always used to say that Jesus was really close to enlightenment. And so it's an interesting right, dynamic. On the one hand, he is coming and learning about this material, but on the other hand, he is not shelving his own sort of religious identity, and so he's organizing the world in his own worldview, right? Though, it's sort of onboarding a different set of material. You know another example of this is when I teach a New Testament class, like one of the things we have to do is talk about Jewish foundations. And if you're a Christian student in the class, and you understand Judaism from Christianity's perspective, rather than from its own perspective, like you're going to go wrong, right? There's something that is not that full empathetic understanding, but is starting from a place that is already informed with a different worldview. And so what we really try to do is say, All right, let's bracket if we can, and that's not an easy thing to do, right? But bracket your own identity, bracket your what you think about the world, and really be as open to other ways of imagining the world than than your own. I think about this. We when, when I first was director of the Institute. We had one of our local theater professors came on and was talking about acting in a program that we did that was sort of tangentially related to the work of the Institute. Holly Kate and she talked about the care and, oh, you know, responsibility of inhabiting a character and really trying to get in, and it was really kind of influential on me, about thinking about how similar, right that is, that that is a practice of trying to be empathetic, trying to get into the skin of somebody else. Now we know. Right? You can't, you can't ever really get away from who you are, but you got to try, right? You got to try, and you got to try to understand people who are not yourself in this world, otherwise, it's a tremendously dull world.

Christine Flicker: 5:14

Yeah, I think we always talk about, if even for a moment, you can picture yourself in the shoes of someone, someone else's worldview and their existence, that it's just for that moment so important.

Chip Gruen: 5:25

And I think one of the things, and I'm really excited actually, that we're going to have for our one of our events this year is the Wallenberg Tribute that happens every November. And if you're interested in attending that event, you know, reach out to us and we can get you information, but it's somebody who does religion and the alt right, and he, you know, he's has no sympathy for these people, but understands that if, if you want to, you know, be able to to deal with, encounter right, these abhorrent ideas, that you have to sort of be able to empathize with people who you might not want to have conversations with in normal right, in just the normal passage of things that might not be part of your world. And that, I think, is one of the other pitfalls of that interfaith idea is that you get people together who want to talk to one another. Well, there are a lot of religious ideas and religious communities and people who think that they're right and are not interested in sharing with anybody else. So are they just not part of the conversation, right? So I think that it opens up a whole nother set of religious communities when you can sort of say, I as a human want to understand any number of different groups you know who might not participate in public discourse otherwise.

Christine Flicker: 6:50

Your background as a scholar of ancient Christianity and your emphasis on studying religion from an outsider stance in the context of free inquiry suggests a particular methodological approach. How do you balance the study of religion with the experiences that people who practice traditions, both those that are the subject of our programming, and those that might be in the audience?

Chip Gruen: 7:11

Yeah, you know, one of the things that I've that I think informs my work, and is sort of disappointing to me, is I really love the discipline I'm in the religious studies discipline. And there's a certain sub community in that religious studies world that, you know, one of the monikers is, you know, neither critics nor caretakers, right? It's not our job to support religion and talk about how religion is this great thing and this positive force in the world. And, on the other hand, it's not our job to run it down and say, Oh, more people have been killed in the name a religion than any other cultural force, right? Like we're here to call balls and strikes. We're here to understand this thing as a human phenomenon. And it's disappointing to me how much that is not a part of the public conversation. I mean, that happens in religious studies, classrooms, in higher education all across the country, all around the world. It's not every religious studies classroom, but it's a big part of it. And I've really started to be interested, particularly with the Institute, of taking some of those lessons and making them less niche, less abstract, and showing their practical value, right? So we do professional development for school teachers, right? For example, there are lots of opportunities to do professional development for medical professionals or legal professionals or first responders, you know, people who need to understand religion, not in a kind of interfaith dialog kind of way. But hey, I'm encountering religious individuals and communities in my work. How can a more nuanced, more empathetic, more literate view of religious difference help me do my job better? And so that really informs our programming. That informs, you know, how we do what we do, and it is the case, if you listen to me long enough, I will drop ancient references on you. It is the case that that's what I studied, right? That religion in the Roman Empire was sort of the focus of my PhD work, although in a religious studies methodological, more broad methodological framework, but you know, the past, as it is said, is a foreign country, right? Like that there is a an act of sort of creative empathy because of the distance of 2000 years that you have to develop. And I would say to my students, if a method is a good method, it can transcend time, right? And it can transcend into different communities. And so I've taken, you know, what does it mean to try to understand ancient Christian Gnostics or, you know, marcionites, or whatever that I'm interested in in my own work. How can we translate that into thinking about our own local communities? And you know that ends up fueling the kinds of questions we ask, and really augments that, that critical distance, that scholarly distance, that I think is sometimes lacking in the public conversation.

Christine Flicker: 10:13

Your research increasingly focuses on using religious studies methods, as you just talked about, to influence the public conversation on contemporary religious diversity. This obviously suggests kind of a move from traditional academic scholarship towards a more public facing kind of work. In what ways do you envision religious studies methods being able to address religious literacy in that public conversation?

Chip Gruen: 10:39

Yeah, and I think you know, just kind of building on what we were just talking about, that this can be very hard for people in the public. I mean, I remember talking to a group of principals in the area and sort of giving my my spiel, my presentation, as a part of this professional development about how important it is to understand the the children in your classroom. In this case, because you're talking about public schools, and we live in the in the Lehigh Valley and increasingly diverse world, I think we'll talk about that little little later. It's an increasingly diverse community. And this principal came up to me and she said, I just never thought about talking about religion, not from a religious perspective. And, you know, sometimes, you know, when I'm sitting alone in the dark, I think, gosh, is everything I say about this topic just the most obvious thing ever. And then I realized, you know, I have something like that happen. I'm like, No, this is not native, right? This is not sort of the natural hardware we're given when we talk about religion. It is our sort of go to to want to talk about my religion, right when we have this and we, you know, we view it as this sort of deeply, not only personal, but private thing. And so we sometimes lack the capacity to do this well, and so it is a challenge right to bring this to a public audience. This is a little bit in the weeds, but I think it's really good example. I did a public talk, and somebody had sent me a poster on the golden rule. So, you know the golden rule. Of course, people from Christian backgrounds will know, you know, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And what this poster did is it trained. It said, Oh, this isn't just a Christian idea. You can find this in Judaism, you can find in Islam, you can find in Hinduism. And it sort of had quotes that, more or less you know, had a similar idea. So you might be familiar with what's sometimes called the Silver Rule, right? That is a sort of a less, less selfless understanding of this, don't do unto others as you would have them, not do unto you, or something like this, right? But you get various versions of something similar. It's just basic ethical principle, and I remember, so I sort of unpacked this thing and said, Yeah, but notice how this is saying that this is valuable in all these other traditions, because it's found in Christianity. So it's that thing of regular, you know, sort of normalizing other beliefs by finding commonality with the thing that you're already a part of, and that that's, that's sort of a questionable way to approach religious difference. And so I go in whole spiel, and somebody afterwards comes up to me, and he says, I really love that poster. Where can I get a copy of it? I shared the poster with him. It's not a, you know, a useless thing, but I was like, oh, you weren't listening really, right? So, so this can be right when, when you're, when you're sort of original software. Is to think about all religion in terms of your own that can be a real challenge.

Christine Flicker: 13:56

You have argued that knowledge of world religions from a non confessional perspective is not a luxury, but a necessity for 21st Century leaders, and that the most important attribute that the academic study of religion offers is the ability to understand others. Can you explain what you mean by a non confessional perspective? And then, how does that claim about the academic study of religion affect the work of the Institute?

Chip Gruen: 14:20

Yeah, so non confessional is just kind of a fancy way of talking about, you know, not from a religious perspective, right? So in our religious studies classes, we don't teach people how to be a better Christian or a better Jew or a better Hindu, right? It's not, it's not seminary, it's not theology. It is studying religion is a cultural product, right? So the example I sometimes give is in a political science department, you shouldn't, I don't know if this is true of all political science departments, but you shouldn't learn how to be a better Republican or how to be a better Democrat, right? You learn about political processes. You learn about political systems. You learn about how they work, right? Maybe you learn how to be an inside operative from that, but it's not the fundamental goals. And so it is here, right? So you learn how religion functions. Some of it is history. Some it is phenomenological. Like, what is it, you know? What is it like to step into a cathedral, for example, what are the rituals that you'll see? How do you understand those? And you know, and maybe you know students, using that example, Catholic students come learn about their own tradition, and they are happy with that and that that's good, but that's not my fundamental goal. My fundamental goal is to sort of offer up a more neutral view, non confessional view of this thing as a thing that humans do, religion as a thing that humans do. And you know, my take on this, I really, I'm biased, of course, but I really think that that we should be one of the most popular majors on campus, because no matter what you do, you have to deal with people, right? And or you get to deal with people. I can be more positive. You get to deal with people. So, you know, if you're in pre med, like, what a great second major, right to major. And we have students who do this, but how you understand what it is to be human, how you understand what the relationship is to the body, is to the self, what you think death means, what you think birth means, what what is like? All of those questions that are dealt with from religious perspectives are front and center in the doctor's office a lot. And so if you haven't considered right that you know those more more abstract, more cosmological questions when you're talking to a patient, you're really missing out, right? I like to tell my pre med students that being a doctor is not like working on a car, right, that there's, it's not like you just take one part out and put another in, like there's a whole context there, that if you're going to be a good doctor, right, you need to pay attention to. And I think that you could run down the gamut of professions. I mean from, you know, business, if you do, I mean not only international business, but just, you know, business generally, that you're going to deal with people who fundamentally view the world differently from the way that you do and and even if you don't know all the ins and outs of that worldview that you're encountering, that it is a different worldview would make you so much better at what you're doing, or, like I said, law, we do a lot with school teachers, right? That you know that the religious diversity in your classroom, how you how they think about the world, and what their family background is, and how that affects the way that they think again, of all of these things, what it means to live a good life, what is the purpose of education? So many of those things are inflected by religion. So yeah, so I think that that's really that's why I say it's not a luxury, but a necessity. If you're going to deal in our smaller and smaller world with lots of different kinds of people like this is a leg up for you.

Christine Flicker: 17:59

Part of the Institute's mission emphasizes learning how to examine, analyze and publicly discuss religious traditions productively and without judgment, and you've written about the need for a dispassionate third party perspective when viewing religious phenomena. Understanding and analyzing while withholding judgment seems central to academic religious studies, but as we discussed, it can be really challenging for public audiences. How do you help community members develop these analytical skills when discussing traditions that may conflict with what they hold as deep beliefs?

Chip Gruen: 18:35

So I want to answer this by getting a little more specific about the kinds of programming we do. So if you're a ReligionWise listener, you know you can see that we really run the gamut around different types of not only religious practice, but also ways in which religion affects public life in a million different ways, like we really want to be all encompassing. And if you're not a ReligionWise listener, regularly go back and listen to our back catalog, but one of the other events that we do is called WorldViews. And WorldViews happens live on campus, although you can stream that as well. Go to religionandculture.com, and you can find the links for the live streaming, get on our mailing list and all of that. But that is different. It invites people from religious communities to talk about their own worldviews, their belief and practice, how their community interacts with and is a part of the the local area or the region. And you know, you know, Christine, we have these conversations all the time because, on the one hand, they are a really interesting primary source for our constituency, right to hear a, you know, for example, we had someone who was a certifying Rabbi for kosher regulations on a couple of years ago, and to hear him talk about kashrut, right, and to talk about the how of that and some of the why. It just gives you a totally different right perspective. But like I say, we are really interested in casting a very wide net. And so we will have people from Jewish communities, Christian communities, Hindu communities, Muslim communities, and then also, you know, pagan communities, or humanists. We had a humanist on before, or, you know, we really try to spread that net out so that if is, if it is something that you might encounter within our own landscape, you will encounter it in WorldViews. And you can imagine, you know, that that might ruffle people's feathers, and we've a great supporter of the Institute, comes up to me sometimes to say, Well, this one was a hard one for me. You know? And it's like, yeah, that's That's right, right, that's right. Because if we're only ever surrounded by things that we, you know, are very comfortable with, we're not growing, we're not learning, we're not sort of stretching those muscles as to how to, you know, how to encounter difference. And, you know, and we push that envelope. We had a Raelian on last year on WorldViews, you know, which is one of the UFO religions really interested in Alien discourses. And, you know, we got a comment online. Somebody had responded and said, Why do I need to pay attention to this charlatan religious practice, right? And, you know, clearly not the words I would use. I think we need to respect, you know, particularly our guests, but people in our world generally. It's like, Yeah, but look at the opportunity for methodological sophistication here, right? Like, how can you practice taking something seriously and learning about it, understanding it when you have no regard for it, right? So shelve that judgment, shelve that no regard in order to strengthen those muscles, because you can learn lessons. I mean, maybe you'll never come into contact with a Raelian again in your life. But if you're strengthening those muscles about how to deal with difference, then you know, I don't know, you grew up in a Baptist house, you go to a Catholic wedding. Like you have the tools then to understand and unpack and to and to really appreciate something that is different from what you might you might be used to. Another thing that we have dealt with, and we've talked about this in our WorldViews program as well, is that there are different ways of talking about religion, obviously, so that our WorldViews guests come as insiders, right? And talking about their deeply held beliefs, right? Talk about their own communities, and I, as a scholar, some of my colleagues in the audience of scholars. Some of my students certainly will be doing this dispassionate perspective, trying to understand and trying to analyze, and not every guest who comes to talk about their worldview is particularly interested in that. So we've thought about doing a talkback session that is separate. You know, like I say, we try to be very respectful and empathetic to our to our guests, but I always like to have my students talk afterwards, like, what did you notice? What met your expectations? What didn't meet your expectations? And so there's a little bit of a bifurcation there between what happens in the session, and what might be the debriefing that happens after. So to go back for just to give an example of this, talking about the kosher regulations like one of the things that you notice if you're thinking sociologically about religious systems or religious practice, is that kosher regulations just sociologically separate people who follow kosher from not, I mean, even something as simple as our dining hall on campus, which has great kosher offerings, but they because of some of these regulations, they are served on paper rather than on ceramic. And so there's something that is an immediate tell that you're eating the kosher food, and it's like, that's fine. I mean, nobody's judging anybody about that. It's a perfectly great thing. The food is good. I eat at the Noshery myself, but it is a visible recognition of a particular kind of practice and that that serves certain sociological goals, whether they're intended or not. Well, that might be a weird thing to talk about, right with this person who does the certification, because I think he would not imagine, or want to imagine, these regulations as something that separates people, right? He would want to see it more as something that binds the community together. So, you know, there is sensitivity here.

Christine Flicker: 24:35

So listening to you, it is clear that emphasizing difference, rather than just focusing on similarity as a key method for getting at the religious literacy and empathetic understanding. Do you ever receive pushback on this idea that calling out difference is creating division? When what we should be doing is bringing individuals and communities together?

Chip Gruen: 24:58

I think this is a great question. Actually it's, it's one that was, was asked of me at a at a conference on thinking about religious diversity in public education. We were doing a program there, and I'm sensitive to it, right? In a world that is so polarized and there's so much animosity, right, even you know, politically, much less racially or religiously or culturally, right? There's lots of suspicion. That emphasizing similarity knee jerk reaction seems like the thing that makes most sense, right? Can't we all just get along? Can't we all agree right on X or on Y, and I think that I don't blame anybody for feeling that way. I think it is, again, a good sort of first step. But if you take that to you think about the consequences of that, I think it's in the long term more dangerous and more divisive than confronting difference from the get go, because, and I think, you know, I think we've seen this on our own campus. You take something like, you know, if you take any kind of religious conflict from around the world, that, if you've been telling yourself that there really are not fundamental differences in the way that you view the world, that you really agree on the most important things. And then an event happens that splits the community, and one group says, you know, understands it one way, and another group understands it another way, but that if you haven't stopped to consider why people might view those events differently, right, you've convinced yourself that we all really do just see the world the same way. My code for this is we're all pink on the inside, right? If you don't think about the cultural and religious difference that that might lead people to understand or interpret or unpack events differently. Then when something like that happens, you're left looking across the table and thinking, I don't know you. I thought I did, but I don't, right. And so I think our strategy here, and I say this all the time, particularly in those WorldViews sessions that I've mentioned and some of our other professional development programs that we do, is that if you have relatively low stakes conversations across difference, then that can prepare you for when there is a high stakes conversation across difference. So one of my favorite programs that we did is we had local some members of local Muslim community reached out about World Hijab Day, that happens in February. And so we had someone leader, a female leader from that community, who came and talked about wearing the hijab. And you know, at least from where I'm sitting, that feels much lower stakes, right? Then one of the local Imams always says, I want to come and I want to talk about Jihad and what that means, and that's higher stakes, right? But you can practice with thinking about, Okay, this community, or members of this community, have a head covering, and what does that mean, and why is that important to them, and how do they want to be treated when they're wearing it, and what does it signal, and all of those things like, you know, no doubt that everybody went home from that event and slept just fine that night, even though we were talking about difference, right? Even though we were talking about something that is a marker of cultural difference, and we got into more complicated things there, right? You can talk about gender and power dynamics and leadership and all of these sorts of things, but it was good practice. And again, I mean, I always think about, like lifting weights here, right? That you need to sort of prepare your your intellectual, you know, capabilities, the way that you prepare your muscles, right? You need to test them and and those are good tests. And then when something harder comes along, well maybe you're better prepared to deal with it. No, I think if you go into a room, a diverse room, whether, again, racially, culturally, religiously, gender, sexuality, and you just convince yourself that everybody is really fundamentally the same, you're going to have that erode really quickly, and you're not going to know how to deal with the differences there. So my take on this is to deal with difference head on from the very beginning. And this can be easy. I mean, we have a program called Understanding Our Neighbors, that is a book project for elementary school libraries and classrooms. And you know, this can be as zero entry as you want it to be, where the food that is eaten in this community looks different than the food that you might be used to, right? And that's okay, yeah. Right? That that that can be a conversation about difference, you know, and then you obviously can get more more complicated from there.

Christine Flicker: 30:07

Yeah, I always think of it as, you know, again, that muscle memory that you're building of practicing that skill. And though our topic is about religion, over the years that I've been working with you here at the Institute, it's that skill is coming up in just conversations with people where I where they'll say something, whether it's political or whatever the case may be. And I think, okay, suspend my judgment. You know, think about the empathy of trying to understand their worldviews. Why might they be thinking that way? What's What are they coming from that brings that opinion to this circumstance? And you're right, the more that you do that with low, low impact, low risk, we talk about that as we bring up our children, you know, in this low risk, low consequence environment, what can you learn about interacting with other people that you could then take to the more difficult situations?

Chip Gruen: 30:58

I mean, think about, you know, I've been thinking more and more about about how these muscles are good for other things, other than understanding religious diversity and again, our political, you know, situation right now is just really, really awful, right? And think about watching, I mean, nobody watches the evening news anymore, but Right? Think about watching a film clip of people just absolutely in one another's faces, yelling at one another. That's what we don't want, right?

Christine Flicker: 31:22

Right.

Chip Gruen: 31:23

And so you know, when next time you see that, think about, all right, what could some empathy for somebody who's very different from you? It doesn't mean you agree with them. It doesn't mean that you think their ideas bear equal weight to yours, even, or that they're legitimate, right? But just sort of thinking about why, given who they are and their worldview and where they're coming from, maybe how they grew up, or what their community looks like, just for 30 seconds, how can that help you interact with them better, more fruitfully, not only for your own good and your own sanity, but for theirs. But it's tough, right? It's tough, particularly as the conversations are more heated and closer to the bone, right? You don't want to give your opponent that much grace, right, or that much legitimacy. But I would argue that that's only imagining them as humans, right, who operate and humans are capable of bad things, right? This should be a surprise to no one. Humans are capable of believing bad things, of acting badly, of being intolerant. So we're trying to provide a set of tools that allows us to think about that difference, or perfectly fine people who the Methodist next door. You can understand them too, right? Like that there's like that this is just a way of understanding humanity.

Christine Flicker: 32:52

As we think about and what we've been talking about a lot has been sort of our local community here in the Lehigh Valley. But the Institute also seeks to address global religious diversity. How do you balance the needs of the local community with this broader perspective? Do you find that local audiences are more receptive to certain types of religious diversity than others, and how does this influence the programming decisions?

Chip Gruen: 33:15

You know, I think we're we're in a really good place to do the work that we're doing. So, you know, we've mentioned the Lehigh Valley, sort of mid Atlantic. We're about an hour north of Philly, an hour and a half west of of New York City. And this area, I've been in this area for about 20 years now, and even in the time that I've been here, it's gotten, I mean, the Sikh community, actually, I was gonna say it's gotten more and more diverse, right? I think we're recognizing the diversity more and more. Like the Sikh community has been here way longer, right, since the 80s. The local, or the local Syrian community, that is some Christian and some, you know, some Muslim, has been here. I mean, the local Syrian Christian community has been here 100 years. I mean, it's very old. So it's not just a matter of chronology, but, you know, of this area getting more diverse over time, but, but I think demographically, it is shifting a little bit, right, even though these communities have been, have been here a while, so that there is more immigration to the Lehigh Valley, we have a very we have some industries that attract people from particular kinds of communities, or that, because there are old communities, these seem like safe or welcoming things for new immigrant families to come here, so that they grow so. So I think that the local and the global collapse a little bit when you can find Islamic communities, Hindu communities, Sikh communities, Jain communities. You know, every variety of Christianity and Judaism that you can think of, pagan communities. Like a lot of the religious diversity that is global is here as well. Now, obviously it's inflected differently, right? That it, it sort of manifests itself differently in a 21st Century, moderately urban environment than it would in South Asia or in the Middle East, or wherever those those religious systems or the religious communities originated. So I don't think we're having to make that distinction as much I mean, as if we were in a more homogeneous area. And for us, it's really great too, because we have local informants, right? We have people, we have local communities that we can tap. So one of the great joys of my position is being able to make relationships with the Hindu Temple Society or the Islamic Education Center of Pennsylvania, or the local church of Jesus Christ, Latter Day Saints. We got a great, a great informant from that community, you know, the local there's a Lehigh Valley Pagan Pride organization making connections with them. We want to be involved, right with all of that diversity, we want them to be a part of what we do and to appreciate not only that we're trying to understand and trying to bring greater literacy about their communities, but also that they have as much responsibility as anybody else to understand communities that are not there themselves either. So makes me, you know, incredibly happy when you see your friends from local Muslim community who come for the event that features Hinduism, for example, right? Because we, you know, this is a two way street. It's always got to be a two way street. You know, one of the old, I think that this is a ascribed to St Francis, but I love it, so I'll give it to St Francis again, who knows where it originally came from, but it's "understand before seeking to be understood." And I think if we all did that right, if we all sort of, you know, rather than wanting to tell our story, and maybe that's why it's taken four years for me to want to talk about on the podcast, you know, like, what the methodological right underpinnings are. We want to share other people's perspectives and stories first. But if we seek to understand others before we tell everybody right or want to share our own stories, then you know, we're halfway home then.

Christine Flicker: 37:18

You have argued that contemporary discourse too quickly dismisses religious motivations as, quote, unquote, really being about politics, power or class, refusing to take religious aspects seriously. Yet you also note that religion is something we are encouraged not to discuss. What's your assessment of the state of religion and public discourse?

Chip Gruen: 37:39

I get frustrated a little bit when you have a world event, or, you know, something in the news, or interaction with the community that, on the surface is looks religious right, and you know, some of some other fields in academia will look at that and say, Oh, well, religion is just a thin veil for, you know, power or class or politics or other things. And so what you really need to do is you need to understand the politics, you need to understand the sociology. You need to understand, right, the history of the region, whatever, trying to regularize religion underneath another kind of way of knowing. Now I'm here to tell you history and sociology and politics and political science, and you know, some of the discourses on power that we have all great, super useful. Absolutely, go study all that stuff, but don't do it at the expense of the motivations of the what the people say themselves, right? If I say I'm doing this as a religious individual, maybe you need to understand their religion and their religious community. One of the places, and this is equal on the right and the left. I mean, you can probably guess my I will never out myself politically, but you can probably guess my leanings. But here I will give you an indictment of both the left and the right when talking about religion, that when something bad happens in the name of religion, that you'll get a politician or somebody in the public square will stand up and say, well, that's not legitimate Christianity, or that's not legitimate Judaism or legitimate Islam or legitimate Hinduism. This is the tradition has been hijacked for their own nefarious purposes. I don't I'm not in the I'm not in the business of talking about what is real, authentic tradition and what is not. I can talk about if I were of x tradition, that is not the way that I would want to interpret it and understand it. So much of what we do is sticky or difficult, right? But you get somebody who bombs an abortion clinic or something like that, horrible, heinous right? Right, really awful. But they say that they do it because their Christianity demands it, right, that this is what Jesus wants for them to do. Not the way that I would interpret the tradition, right, not the way that I would sort of sign up to be Christian. But I think that to dismiss that is not a sincere motivation is short circuiting your ability to understand why they do, why they chose to do this thing, right? And you know, you can think about about any number of things that people claim to do as a part of their religious practice. And I think if we just dismiss religion as a motivating factor, it doesn't get us closer to understanding. And if understanding is the way of countering, deradicalizing, you know, then, then I think, you know, I think that the understanding piece is more important than the satisfaction that we might get by saying that's not my religion, right? My that there's no way that you could come from, you know, the Christian religious tradition, for example, and do that thing. Well, there is a way, because we can see that it happened, and it happens in patterns, right? So maybe we need to, you know, take seriously these, these people and think about it, right? What is the scriptural interpretation that happens within that community? How do they understand history? How do they understand community? How do they understand the good life? How do they understand eternal life? How do they understand, you know, death and so forth. It's not going to get you further away from understanding what they've done, right and why they might have done it. Doesn't mean you have to condone it. Doesn't mean that you have to accept it as a legitimate form of activity or a legitimate kind of discursive way of understanding. But it's there, right? And I think hiding our heads in the sand doesn't help. Doesn't help at all.

Christine Flicker: 42:04

I always think of it as kind of like you're trying to understand something without seeing all the data. That all of those things weigh into the end result. So let's switch gears a bit and think about the Institute operating within a liberal arts college. How does the context of Muhlenberg College affect the work of the institute? What advantages does it offer and what challenges do you face in maintaining community engagement while serving an academic institution?

Chip Gruen: 42:34

Yeah, it's, you know, I've always said that being in a liberal arts environment, being in a small college like Muhlenberg is great for what I do, that I know colleagues and some of those other disciplines we've just mentioned right in history and sociology and anthropology and philosophy and so forth, and so we have this really great opportunity to think about shared phenomena, right, history or culture or whatever, from a from a variety of different perspectives, and that's really great. And you know, in the context here in particular, you know, we have great support from our administration right that really sees what we do as valuable. And some of that is tied to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, the Lutheran heritage of the of the college. So we celebrate, for example, Raoul Wallenberg mentioned the Wallenberg event earlier, courageous moral action on behalf of others. Right that? The idea is that on behalf of others has roots right in in the tradition in some places and and so while we don't practice Lutheranism like I wouldn't say what we do is particularly Lutheran it certainly has overlaps. It has overlays that really make it a part of the history and heritage of college. And I think that's great The challenges. I mean, we could talk about the challenges facing higher education generally right now, and those are stiff, right? Those are very stiff. I think one of the challenges is because of the financial commitment that is higher education. Parents, for reasons I don't blame them for, are really interested in the what the business community used to only be the business community would call ROI. Now it's everybody talks about ROI return on investment. You know, what skills are you going to get from that major, that education, that class, that justify you spending the time and money to do it. And so those skills are, very often you dual column accounting or computer programming, or, you know, whatever, statistics, right? Those things are really easily quantifiable skills that might be useful in the workplace, although I think even that is starting to be challenged a little bit with the rise of of AI and computer technology generally, depending on the field that you're looking at. Humanities disciplines like ours have long sort of we've had always bad language and talking about the soft skills, or the transferable skills, being able to think critically or write cogently or whatever, right? The yeah, we'll take that, right? We teach all that that's good. What I would really like people to recognize, though, is what we talked about earlier, like understanding humans is important to living in the world, and I think we do that right? And I think that's our challenge, is it's hard to get people to see and take seriously that, right? I think the other thing we joke about is, if you declared your major when you were 70 years old, religion studies would be the biggest major on campus, right? Because people start to think about, you know, those big questions, right, questions of meaning and value. I mean, not that 20 year olds never think about them, but the proportion of your thinking gets bigger and bigger as as you move on in your in your life. And so, you know, convincing a 20 year old that you know this is not only useful, but this is part of the good life, is thinking about these big questions and learning how to operate and understand your own world like is deeply meaningful in itself and will help you navigate our world better. And that's that's our challenge is to be promoters of what we do as not just this fun thing on the side or this thing that some people are interested in, but something that is essential for navigating the world as best as you can.

Christine Flicker: 46:32

Okay, so the question that you like to ask all of our ReligionWise guests, I will now ask you, what have we not talked about? What would be something that you would want to make sure to talk about before we end today?

Chip Gruen: 46:45

I think I would answer this question you know asked me on 10 different days, I would probably have 10 different answers. But one of the things that you know, here we are sitting in August. We're getting ready to at the end of the month go back and meet a new group of students that I'm teaching. And the thing that I think on the first day of class, that I emphasize more and more and more and more, is engagement. It is really easy to operate in autopilot through this world we live in. It is really easy to scroll through one's phone, right? Let AI do the heavy lifting for you, to check out of what's really important in our world. Don't do that, right? That that is not what it means to be human. We are inquisitive by nature, as Clifford Geertz, the anthropologist, says, we are meaning seeking animals. And I think to neglect that aspect of who we are and what it means to be human will not only lead to a more impoverished life, spiritually, mentally, emotionally, but also a less successful one. And so choose to engage and here I'll give the pitch for what we do be engaged with us, right? Unfortunately, our listenership is highly dependent on if people like or subscribe or comment on episodes, but if you think what you've heard is useful on ReligionWise, do all of those things so that you can help somebody else the algorithms to find other people, right? We can use these tools. We can use the sort of strangely dystopian electronic world we live in to talk about the meaning and value and the things that are so important that help us connect with other people. If you're really super interested, come to Muhlenberg College and you know, some Tuesday evenings and during the academic year and come to a a WorldViews session, or reach out to us for an invitation to the Wallenberg Lecture. You may quibble with how we do things right, and you may have disagreements with our methods and how we operate, and I'm totally fine with that. That's great. I'd love to have that conversation, but we really for no ulterior motives, try to address these problems that are so pressing. And we need conversation partners. We need people to help us on that journey. So be engaged with us. And if you're a part of a religious community that you feel has not been adequately represented in our programming, reach out to us. We are happy to take suggestions. Or if you're a lawyer or a doctor or a teacher or a EMT or you know, a business person you know who likes to think about the intersections of your field and religion. You know, that's a great ReligionWise episode, one of the ones I'll just give a pitch about how this may not always seem again, part of our native programming, but one of my favorite episodes we've done on here, I encourage you to go back and look was Dustin Grim, who is a funeral director. And think, thinking about, how does thinking about religion affect the way that you deal with end of life issues as a funeral director, like that's fascinating. That's interesting. And I think that that is one of hundreds of places where religion interacts with our professional lives or our cultural lives. You don't have to be a priest or a rabbi or a pastor to have interactions with religion. So that's what we try to do. So be engaged with us. You know, we're always happy to have the conversation. And I just want to give a shout out to Christine, who has hosted this episode. She does not like to be behind the mic. She likes to be behind the scenes a little bit more, so I really appreciate her crossing over and joining me in this episode. So thank you very much.

Christine Flicker: 50:48

Thanks, Chip. This has been fun.

Chip Gruen: 50:52

This has been ReligionWise, a podcast produced by the Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding of Muhlenberg College. ReligionWise is produced and directed by Christine Flicker. For more information about additional programming or to make an inquiry about a speaking engagement, please visit our website at religionandculture.com There, you'll find our contact information, links to other programming and have the opportunity to support the work of the Institute. Please subscribe to ReligionWise wherever you get your podcasts, We look forward to seeing you next time.