Squaring up and Engagement of the Religious Other
Alexander Massad, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of World Religions
“Now, we are going to do an exercise called ‘squaring up.’ When you pass someone and make eye contact, pause for a moment, square up to them, look into their eyes, and then move on.” There is always that moment when someone passes by you and causally says, “how are you doing?” where I wonder, “do they mean that?” Inevitably, we just pass each other with a quick “good.” But, we never stop to actually talk about the question and the causal banality of our relationships continues. Now imagine you are walking and someone just “squares up,” looks you in the eyes, and then moves on. Granted, this was an exercise where we were told to “square up,” but the immediate presence of the other person’s existence, their being, immediately confronts. The other person’s presence demands interpretation, but all you get is silence. In this crucible of intimacy where my existence, and all that it entails, simply stands before another person’s existence, with all that their existence entails, my mind becomes flooded with thoughts. What makes this person different from me? Similar to me? What do I think of that? What do I think of myself? What do they think of me?
I am an Assistant Professor of World Religions at Wheaton College. My job is to get students to ask questions about what it means to be a Christian in light of the existence and growth of other religious traditions. I demand that the students ask questions such as, “What does this religion believe?” “What do they think about Christianity?” “What do I think about my faith and practice in light of what this other tradition believes and practices?” At a place like Wheaton, where students and faculty sign commitments to the Christian faith, religious diversity does not exist on campus. No, denominational differences are not the same as engaging Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, Hindus, Jains, etc. For the most part, students engage with other religions through texts and media resources. In this form, the student is barraged with multiple interpretations of the religious other.
Over the past few years I have begun to build connections with local places of worship and institutions of higher education in the Chicago area to facilitate student engagement with scholar-practitioners of other religious traditions. When students are face to face with the total existence of a person from another religious tradition who fervently believes and follows another tradition and is deeply knowledgeable about that tradition they become flooded with questions. How does this person believe so sincerely? What does it mean about what I believe? Why am I attracted to aspects of their tradition? Is that OK? Is that not OK? And so on.
This CACE seminar on “Performing Identity, Authority, and Community” not only reaffirmed the importance of face-to-face student engagement with the religious other, but the seminar also provided my with new pedagogical tools to facilitate student engagement with these deeper inter-religious questions of identity. From James Baldwin’s critique of American cinema, I have reworked my worship site visit questionnaire to include questions regarding the importance of lived experiences as a factor in understanding intra-religious diversity. I have also included a student reflection on how the student’s own lived experience brings insights and biases to engaging the religious other. From our exercise in memorizing and reading another colleagues monologue on “Something No One at Wheaton Knows About Me,” I am developing a proposal for a grant to have Wheaton students and students from the American Islamic College swap monologues about “Why I believe in God?” as a way to deepen inter-religious understanding.
The seminar was truly transformative pedagogically and collegially. There are so few moments in the academic year for Wheaton professors to learn from one another. As a liberal arts college where we want to take inter-disciplinary learning seriously, the CACE Faculty Seminar is a critical piece of developing a Wheaton College professor.