Interfaith at the American Academy of Religion

By Jeff Wilson

In November I went to Boston to attend the annual combined meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society for Biblical Literature. Together they constitute the largest gathering of Religious Studies scholars in the world, with more than 10,000 professors and researchers meeting to present papers, learn about developments in our subfields, and catch up with colleagues. It’s a heady time, with scholars studying every kind of religion that has ever existed, and people who represent all religious backgrounds (and none). Strolling the conference centre halls I constantly encountered theologians, Biblical scholars, sociologists, historians, anthropologists, and every other sort of person with a stake in understanding religious phenomena.

Given this great diversity, this is always an interfaith event by its very nature, and attendees are constantly learning from people studying other religions. And of course we end up making friends with colleagues of all sorts of backgrounds. I (a Buddhist) had lunch with my friends from grad school: a Mormon, a Jew, and a secular scholar of Protestant Christianity; we were disappointed that our Evangelical friend didn’t make it to the conference.

Beyond the diversity of the event as a whole, many sessions at the AAR/SBL conference are explicitly interfaith. For example, I attended the 40^th anniversary celebration of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies. This scholarly group emerged from a 1980 dialogue of Buddhists and Christians held in Hawaii, which led to the Journal of Buddhist-Christian Studies, several conferences, and eventually the creation of the Society. All told, this represents forty-five years of some of the oldest, most thorough, and most consistent interfaith work found anywhere. Members are typically Buddhist or Christian (occasionally both) but all gather to learn from one another in an exchange of perspectives and exploration of big life issues.

Another example was the Interfaith America breakfast. Interfaith America (https://www.interfaithamerica.org) is a decades-old organization dedicated to drawing on pluralism as a core cultural strength. As they describe themselves: “Applying the principles of interfaith leadership, we equip leaders to create institutional cultures where people respect, relate, and cooperate across difference. We delight in knowing that we walk this path with many others — college campuses, government agencies, houses of worship, civic groups, media organizations, private companies, other interfaith organizations, and individuals of goodwill everywhere. The 21st-century American city on a hill has a steeple, a mosque, a synagogue, a sangha, a ward, a temple, a gurudwara, a secular humanist society, and more. You and I are not just citizens of this city — together, we are architects of it. Now, let’s build.” Their breakfast at AAR/SBL was designed to bring together diverse experts to work on building religious literacy into health programs. AAR/SBL was the perfect place to seek partners for this work.

Yet another explicitly interfaith organization I encountered at AAR/SBL was the Interfaith Coalition Conference for Global Citizens (https://iccgc.kr/). ICCGC was started by a Korean Buddhist tradition but is diverse in its partnerships, seeking to develop a network of “global citizens” who work across religious and cultural lines to support advances in ethics, social justice, and environmental issues in step with rapidly changing technology and social orders. All in all, one thing that was driven home to me many times at the AAR/SBL conference is how Interfaith Grand River exists as one strand in a vast tapestry of interfaith work and groups across the world, from the small and intimate to the large and highly-organized. Collectively, there is an enormous number of people doing a tremendous amount of work to build cultures of peace, understanding, and solidarity among all people.