Interreligious Learning

Jess Navarette, speaking at Harvard’s Bhakti Yoga conference in 2025, defined comparative theology as “the study of religious faith, practice, and experience, especially the study of God and of God’s relation to the world.” Because the capitalized word, “God,” is used and usually identified with the deity of the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Navarette undoubtedly used the term as a general placeholder for divinity, whether in the form of a deity or impersonal, as in brahman in Hinduism. This begs the questions: what is divinity and could a definition apply to every religion? Answers to these questions can be fruitfully informed by what Navarette calls “interreligious learning” in theology, which in turn is not exclusively applicable to Christianity. Rather than presuming that I have answers, I want to explore how such learning can be fruitful in advancing knowledge of religion as an arguably sui generis domain.  

The full essay is at "Interreligious Learning."

Yale Divinity School

On February 21-23, 2024, Rowan Williams, a former archbishop of Canterbury, delivered a series of lectures on the topic of solidarity in moral theology. In my own research, I relate that field to ethics and historical economic thought. Williams’ theory of solidarity goes beyond what he calls “the vague feeling of empathy” that is emphasized in the moral writings of David Hume and Adam Smith. Williams has solidarity, unlike mere "fellow-feeling," reach a person’s identity and even one’s soul through a shared experience of existential fragility. Solidary pertains to interpersonal relations and is thus relevant to neighbor-love, which includes being willing to attend to the human needs even of one’s detractors and enemies, as well as just plain rude people. I contend that the upper echelon at Yale Divinity School is at two-degrees of separation from this sort of solidarity, especially as it is wholistic rather than partisan in nature. It is no accident, by the way, that the self-love that characterizes the school's culture has manifested in some courses being almost entirely oriented to advocating very narrow ideological partisan positions, politically, economically, and on social issues at the expense of sheer fairness to students, wholeness, theology, and academic standards. At the time, the school was accepting 50% of studen applicants. I leave these ideological and academic matters to the side here so I can focus on the astonishing distance between the school's dean and the sort of solidarity that he heard of in the lectures and that could lead to Christian leadership for Yale's Christian divinity school, which includes two seminaries.  

The full essay is at "Yale Divinity School." 

Yale's Original Sin

I take it as a matter of divine justice that redemption can elude a convenient, belated atonement, especially if the atoning individual or institution does not really grasp the root of the original sin and thus the sin continues under other manifestations even though admittedly they may be less severe. I contend that when Peter Salovey, Yale University’s president, apologized on behalf of the Yale Corporation for having oppressed two Black men nearly two centuries earlier, he was not aware of the university’s underlying exaggerated fixation on the insider/outsider dichotomy that was still salient in 2023. To be sure, Nietzsche wrote that the strong should maintain a pathos of distance from the weak, lest the latter beguile the former into voluntarily renouncing their innate strength. Kant distinguished intimacy from difference as together making up the dialectic of attraction and distance. When a customer with the strength of having money naturally distances oneself from a rude employee of a retail company who is resentful, such distance is hardly artificial. Yet when a university whose administrators and faculty feel the emotional need to distance themselves qua insiders from outsiders to such an extent that even alumni who return to campus to work on academic projects, such as writing a book, are relegated as outsiders—hence not “members of the community”—then the distancing stems from a rather unnatural pathology. I contend that such a pathology still plagued Yale like an invisible blanket in 2023, almost two-hundred years after that university had refused to allow two black auditors to speak in courses at Yale’s theological seminary (divinity school). That original sin, although atoned for, still ran through Yale’s puffed-up veins in 2023, hence intimacy and strength continued quite naturally to elude that university—the redemption of which would require more of a mirror than an apology to two dead Black auditors could provide. Although Yale appeared in 2023 to be self-confident to external stakeholders and the general public, Nietzsche’s advice applied to people considering coming or giving to Yale nonetheless: The strong should not get too close to weak, resentful birds of prey just as a healthy person should not go to a hospital lest  even such a person becomes sick too.

The full essay is at "Yale's Original Sin."

Some Academic Degrees Are Not So High: Is Your Degree Overvalued?

American higher education contains its own erroneous nomenclature. Most notably, people having earned one degree in law or medicine are told even by their schools that the degree is doctorates.  Common sense alone can point out that merely three or four years of courses in an academic discipline do not a doctorate make, especially considering that the first year or two consist of survey courses (i.e., courses that survey the different areas in a subject rather than go into depth). That having a prior bachelor’s degree is a required does not mean that the first degree in law, medicine, or divinity is advanced, for the prior degree is not in those schools (of knowledge). For instance, a person can go to a law school in America with a BA in English. Even if a person in one's first degree in medicine, the MD, has earned a prior degree in biochemistry, that subject is not medicine and thus is not relied on. I was surprised when a medical student told me that very little of even his bio-chemistry major was taught to the first-degree medical students. Hence medical students can major in different subjects without being at a disadvantage in the survey courses in the first degree in medical schools. 

The full essay is at "Some Higher Degrees."