You can't understand our globalized world without understanding religion. But that's easier said than done. Casey Strine joins Matt Croasmun for a conversation on the Future of Theology, discussing core motivational and practical challenges that face both religious and non-religious people today.
You can't understand our globalized world without understanding religion. But that's easier said than done. For any given person, it's sometimes hard enough to understand your own religious perspectives. They often change throughout life, modified by experience and ideas. Modified by people and events. Modified by an encounter with the world and an encounter with God. Then go ahead and multiply that challenge by about 7.7 billion people and the ways that some of them collide and interact. Then we see a few things: we see that diversity is both a promise and a peril, we see that approaches to religious studies, sociology of religion, and the practice of theology all must be grounded in an "informed empathy," and we see that the only way to make progress is to accept responsibility and limits as an individual, and hope and commit to the necessity of collaboration.
Show Notes
About Casey Strine
Casey Strine is Senior Lecturer in Ancient Near Eastern History and Literature at The University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. He specializes in Old Testament biblical studies, but thinks deeply about the historical connective tissue that links people and societies over time and through space. Casey is also a project partner with the Yale Center for Faith & Culture's Life Worth Living initiative. Follow him on Twitter @CaseyStrine.
Production Notes
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
Casey Strine: So in a globalized world, where religion isn't going away, the study of theology--of understanding, when we think about that term as how people think about God, what people say about God, how that impacts what they actually do--is as important or more important than it ever has been. That is at its most basic level one of the reasons why what we do needs to continue to be done and why students should continue to think about studying it.
Evan Rosa: This is for the life of the world, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa, with the Yale Center For Faith and Culture. You can't understand our globalized world without understanding religion. That's easier said than done. For any given person, it's sometimes hard enough to understand your own religious perspectives, let alone others, let alone the globe's. That's because our individual religious perspectives often change throughout life, modified by experience and ideas, modified by people and events, modified by an encounter with the world, an encounter with our neighbor, an encounter with God.
Then go ahead and multiply that challenge by about 7.7 billion people and the ways that some of them collide and interact. It's then that we can see a few things. We see that diversity is both a promise and a peril. We see that approaches to religious studies, sociology of religion, and the practice of theology all must be grounded in an informed empathy.
And we see that the only way to make progress is to accept responsibility and limits as an individual, and hope and commit to the necessity of collaboration as a community. That's what Matt Croasmun discusses with Casey Strine in today's episode, a continuation of our series on the future of theology.
Casey is senior lecturer in ancient near-Eastern history and literature at the university of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. He specializes in Old Testament qbiblical studies, but thinks deeply about the historical connective tissue that links people in societies over time and through space. Casey's also a project partner with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture's Life Worth Living initiative.
Thanks for listening today, friends.
Matthew Croasmun: Casey, it's so great to have you here today.
Casey Strine: Thank you. It's really good to be here.
Matthew Croasmun: So we're gonna get to the future of theology, but let's start, let's start in the present. What is what's right with theology these days?
Casey Strine: That's an interesting question that I suppose depends a bit on how you understand theology, what does, and doesn't count as theology, and as someone in biblical studies who focuses on the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament, I'll think of that maybe differently than some other people's, but starting first from within that area, my field, I think diversity and creativity is one of the real strengths of theology today.
There are so many different things happening. I mean, sometimes it's a bit hard to keep up with all the new approaches, the new theories people are using, or ways of reading all of the ancient evidence that people are drawing on from different cultures and, and what have you, but the diversity and therefore, I think the creativity in theology, especially in biblical studies is really the valuable and thought provoking.
I mean, it's hard to go, if you go with an open mind to a conference, to open up a journal, to read a volume of collected essays and not read something that's coming at a topic you're working on from a very different perspective: one that might not be a perspective you be shared, but will inform what you're doing in some way can really, I think, round out our understanding of different questions and issues.
And so I think that's probably one of the best things about theology today is, maybe more so than at any point in the history of biblical studies as that section of theology goes, this real diversity, this real openness to trying new things, looking at texts and questions in new ways and being open to what we might find, how that might enrich an approach we've taken for many, many years or how that might open an entirely new line of inquiry that we hadn't thought of before.
Matthew Croasmun: That's a really kinda positive way of talking about a really diverse methodological landscape, right? There's a ton of diversity, methodological diversity, all, all over the place.
On the other hand, it can feel sometimes, especially in biblical studies, like there's a, there's a fracturing and it can be hard to hard to cross even within a single discipline, these different methodological schools.
Casey Strine: There's no doubt. It's, it's a challenge. It's a two-sided coin. And on one side, diversity is really, really enriching and really, really helpful.
And I think in a discipline that at points in its history has been known for essentially having one way of doing what it does, this is a bit of a pendulum swing in the other direction, but a very, very good one. But undoubtedly, that diversity comes with a sense of well, those people are doing something I don't do-- do I really need to pay attention? Or how do I understand what they're doing well enough to try and engage?
You know, my current project is on the book of Genesis, about which there's just a massive amount of literature from all manner of different perspectives. And that's really, really great. But at least once a week, I think about my book project as a fool's errand.
How, how does one try and stay aware of all of the different approaches and the different literature? How does one mind even try and interact with that? Let alone grasp it and process it in any way. So, yeah, I feel daunted by it personally, and I think a lot of people in the discipline will feel very much the same.
Yeah. That's
Matthew Croasmun: one challenge facing theology. Is there anything, if we start with what's right? Is there anything else you'd say is just wrong or challenges for theology at these days?
Casey Strine: Well, theology, I think is in a position where it now has to do something very different than historically, and traditionally it has done.
Especially in a context like I'm in, which is a, a state funded secular research university where, you know, there's a bit of a question: what, what are we doing there? What, what is our role? That question is a, a different question if you teach in a seminary or you teach in an institution with some sort of confessional commitment, but for an institution like the University of Sheffield, indeed, for most of the institutions that we would see as our peers and our sort of colleagues in the United Kingdom, it's a really, really big question manifested interestingly over the last few years and a lot of discussion about what do we even call ourselves?
And there's been a big debate in the United Kingdom about, you know, do we have faculties of Theology or Divinity or Theology and Religion or Theology and Religious Studies. And I think that conversation, what do we even call ourselves, is symptomatic of the underlying issue, which is what are we? What are we doing? What are we providing to our students? Both at undergraduate level and at graduate level? Who do we see ourselves as? As scholars? So the diversity not only brings with this challenge of fracturing, but I think the diversity is also reflective of different people have very different understandings of what something that goes by the name theology--theology and whatever else one might use to describe it--really is. And so I suppose what I would say, maybe is wrong about theology. I'm not so sure it's wrong, but it's a, it's an issue we need to address is there's a lot of talking past one another. There's a lot of people who, if you seem to see it the way that I see it, we can talk to one another and we can do something.
But if you don't see things quite the way I see it, or you call what you do something slightly different than what I do, maybe I shut you off. Maybe I, I just go over here and have a conversation with people who seem more in my area, they use my vocabulary, they appear to have my view on things and that conversation feels easier and safer.
And so rather than building a new, different, hopefully improved theology, we may be building a lot of little different ones that go by a similar name, but don't look like anything that is the same when you get into more detail.
Matthew Croasmun: So given those challenges and given the pluralistic world we live in now, why should a student consider saying, yeah, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna study theology. Why do that now?
Casey Strine: It, it's an excellent question. I, I sometimes jokingly refer to it in the United Kingdom as the 9,000 pound question, cause that's what our students pay a year as undergraduate students. Right? So the 9,000 pound question is, what am I gonna get for my money? If I decide to go and do theology?
And there's lots of different ways to answer that question. I think the most compelling one, maybe for students, the one that has the broadest reach across people, whether they be academics, parents, potential students, policymakers, funders, et cetera, is, is this: whatever your personal background is, whatever your faith, commitment or lack of faith commitment is, we live in a world that is massively impacted by religion. We live in a world where over half of the people in the world, an overwhelming majority of people in the world have a religious faith that they would say substantially informs the way that they think about their family, their political decisions, their ethical decisions, all sorts of things.
Now, globalization, whatever one thinks of it, is another reality. And so if you want to be well prepared to live and work in this world, to build relationships with people from different parts of your own culture, let alone different cultures with different religious approaches, you need to understand something about that.
You have to understand something about what a sacred text is. How does a religious community relate to a sacred text? What, what does religious practice and, and, and, and liturgy and sacrament, or, or sacred space mean to a person from a religious background? If you don't, whether you believe the same thing or not, how are you gonna relate to those people? How are you gonna do a business deal with them? How are you gonna build a relationship with them to do hard political work or anything like that?
So in a globalized world where religion isn't going away, the study of theology--of understanding, when we think about that term as how people think about God, what people say about God, how that impacts what they actually do, is as important or more important than it ever has been. So at that level, I think we have a really compelling answer to the 9,000 pound question that is at its most basic level one of the reasons why, what we do needs to continue to be done and why students should continue to think about studying it.
Matthew Croasmun: I agree with all of that, that I think is, is the case that we need to be building, or at least part of the case we need to be building. But let me play devil's advocate here for a moment. Why is that not just a case for why to do Religious Studies or why to do Sociology of Religion? Is this, is there any value in, it seems safer in some ways to say, well, let's just do this as a third person--what they do, what they think, what they believe. Theology, it seems to me at least, adds in at least an element of the second person or first person kind of element to it, given all that you just said, why not just stop at Religious Studies? Is there value in adding that kind of first order reflection for oneself?
Casey Strine: I think there is. And I think the question is how do we do it? I mean, we, we have to recognize we live in a world, we especially, again, in a, in a state-funded secular institution like I do, we live in a place where it's not a confessional institution. It's not easy to be speaking first person, whatever one's religious background is about what you do.
But I think it's massively important. I mean, it's one thing as the old adage goes to read a book about how to do something, and it's another thing to be alongside someone who's doing it and learn from them. And so I'm a big believer and a very passionate advocate for the idea that we need both practitioners and critical outsiders talking about these things with our students. We, we need both practitioners and critical outsiders talking about these issues with every audience, whether that be in the media, whether that be in, even in, within religious institutions, et cetera. If you're going to study ancient Judaism, if you're gonna study ancient Christianity, if you're gonna study what those things are like, you have to engage in some way with someone who's practicing those religions today and their appropriation of that to truly understand why that ancient community, why that ancient practice has any relevance.
But you can't just stop there. I think if you, if you want to have a full understanding, it's then allowing a critical outsider to come in and say, without wanting to demean what you believe, here are some challenges to that--here are some questions; here are some ways in which maybe in a 21st century world that doesn't seem to work as well, or doesn't seem to make sense.
But what would be even better I think in many cases is if the dialogue could then turn from that critical outsider being just a critical ,outsider to speaking as a practitioner themselves, whether they be a secular humanist, whether they be from a different faith standpoint, whatever it is saying, and here's how I look at it. And, and that dialogue ultimately being something where, in a sense, you're almost overhearing a robust discussion between two people talking about the way they view things and, and the way they live in the world, rather than this sort of detached or heaven forbid someone actually state their personal view, the the, the, the norm by which they wanna live their life in a public environment to one where actually it's robust engagement between those that people are overhearing and hearing strengths and weaknesses about from inside and outside, both to learn about it sort of in that third person view, but also then to make some decisions about what it is that they believe themselves.
Matthew Croasmun: So you're already encouraging us to think about dialogue and about conversation. One of the facts of the, of the way that theology works right now. And this is a shared state with many of the humanities, is that more or less theology is a lonely vocation. We have the ideal of the kind of lone genius scholar who write, let's say his work of, of genius alone. I've had faculty describe the, the life that one chooses as a scholar is a monkish life. This is something has to be right about that, but you saying that this isn't how it has to be. In fact, maybe it can't be how it, it, it is going forward. Didn't why, why do you think the, the hope for the future of theology is in collaboration?
Casey Strine: Right. Well, in one sense, it takes us back around to where we started. I'm thinking about diversity and thinking about the good and bad sides of that coin. Diversity: strength, fragmentation, fracturing, not feeling like one can keep up with everything is the second point. So we know that there are strengths in specialization. We know that having someone that can do that monkish thing, where they spend hour upon hour upon hour on a problem, on reading everything, there is about a particular question, really making themselves, you know, literally the world's expert on that is beneficial. It's beneficial to scholarship. It's beneficial to our understanding of a text, an ancient culture, what have you. But the other side of that, right, is, is, like you say, is, is the isolation that comes with that. Not being able to explain that to someone else, not being able to put that set of knowledge in dialogue with other things we know.
We're all finite, we're all human. There's only so much we can read. There only so many, so many hours we can work, no matter how hard we'd like to push ourselves, no matter how much coffee we drink. Yeah. And so the answer to how do you both, I think, draw out really reap the benefits of specialization without losing the sense of putting these things in dialogue with one another is collaboration, is working together.
Now that might take the form of like-minded people from different areas, picking a question that's bigger than what any one sort of individual feels like they can do and, and kind of networking their brains together in some sort of working group to try and come up with an answer that spans all of this diverse work that's being done. But it might equally be people from very different perspectives, putting their positions in dialogue, either with the hope that they find common ground they didn't know they had before, or simply they understand better where they agree and they disagree, both in their own understanding of where they stand with respect to one another, but also for the understanding, they might articulate to other people. We believe this, they believe that, this is what we share. This is what's different. You know, there doesn't have to be anything necessarily wrong about that. Indeed, understanding why we disagree better, it can really be a positive thing.
And so I think that for me, collaboration is both about the ability to do things one can't do on their own in, in a field where specialization does matter, where the amount of stuff that's getting published, it's just growing exponentially every year, but it can also be about understanding difference and disagreement more specifically and more accurately.
Matthew Croasmun: In many ways it sounds like what you, what you described on the teaching end is also true in the, in the re in the vision of research that you have is namely that one of the main products we're looking for is informed empathy. Right? That's that, that we're, that we're learning. So it makes sense that it would need to happen not alone in one person's mind. But there's so much in academia that militates against collaboration. Publishers aren't particularly fond of multi-author works. That's just like pulling teeth to convince them, to take them up usually because the, cause we're not the only people that kind of idolize the work of the lone genius.
The book reading public small as it might be also has, has that ideal. Tenure committees don't don't ,the, the currency in our field in biblical studies is the monograph. It's, there's so much social machinery, professional policy that works--where do you see finding the kind of getting the sort of leverage to make the sort of collaboration possible? How's this not just professional suicide for those who decide to engage in it?
Casey Strine: Well, it's a good question. I, I, I, I don't know. There are a lot of institutional forces, not just within colleges and universities and seminaries, but as you suggest within the publishing industry within media, within sort of popular opinion that militate against that. I mean, we do for better or worse often still live with this, uh, underlying notion of the great individual as the really fundamental unit of intellectual progress, and that's not to, to undermine the value of the individual in any way, but it is to say we are finite limited human beings. So I think one thing to say is that there is a bit of a risk there, and there is a bit of a, of a need to press against some established norms within publishing within society in general.
I think that's helped by a greater understanding in our contemporary world, that community and working together in collaboration and teams really are important. And that's not just, you know, university. I mean, you ask anyone who works any field of business, any area of teaching and, and they'll talk more about, oh yeah, we're, we're always being put in teams or being told to do things in teams.
And, and some of that is not particularly good. A lot of that comes out to be what I kind of call cosmetic collaboration, where I'm still doing my thing and you're still doing your thing. We just happen to be doing it near one another--
Matthew Croasmun: or parallel play.
Casey Strine: Exactly.
Matthew Croasmun: Like toddlers--
Casey Strine: Exactly. That, that's not collaboration. That's what I call cosmetic collaboration. It looks like on the surface, you have a team that looks like on the surface you have a group that's working together. And really what you do is you have individual activity side by side, but robust collaboration, I think really is so hugely important. And, and, and there's a greater understanding of its potential benefit in society as a whole, in the way groups and, and communities of people are becoming so much more important in our society.
And I hope that feeds its way into our academies. I think that part of what's required is for those of us who are in the academy who would like to do that sort of work to be making an argument for why philosophically, epistemologically, and pragmatically there's value in that because if we don't have a case at all three levels, why me as a Hebrew Bible Testament scholar, you as a new Testament scholar, along with maybe someone who works on early church history and someone who works on medieval systematics and someone who works on 20th and 21st century systematics need to work together to do a fully robust project, you're never gonna break that, the power of that notion that the individual scholar is the basic fundamental unit of intellectual endeavor and progress.
Evan Rosa: For The Life of The World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured biblical scholars Casey Strine and Matt Croasmun. I'm Evan Rosa, and I edit and produce the show. For more information visit us online at faith.yale.edu. New episodes drop every Saturday, sometimes midweek. If you're new to the show, welcome friend. Hit subscribe in your favorite podcast listening app, and we'd love your feedback. Ratings and reviews in Apple Podcasts are particularly helpful, but we're just as happy to hear from you by email at faith.yale.edu. We read each comment and do our best to respond and improve the show, bringing you the people and topics that you want to hear.
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