Leonard Swidler’s Influence on the Work of an American Evangelical and on Romanian Academia
Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: Leonard Swidler's Influence on the Work of an American Evangelical and Romanian AcademiaDr. Swidler -he'll always be "Dr." to me, for the respect that this bearded Anabaptist has for that cleanshaven Catholic is tremendousis emphatic about the dual nature of the quest for interreligious understanding.It is relational, but it is also critical.His preferred terms are "critical thinking" and "deep dialogue."When I first met Dr. Swidler I was already a critical thinker.Somewhere along life's way I developed the habit of checking the other side of every coin, of second-guessing my initial proclivities, assumptions, and often hasty conclusions.This was refined and focused by two master's degrees, the first in theology and the second in philosophy.By the time I arrived at Temple University I had already been exposed to world religions and the benefits of looking outward from one's own tradition.However, dialogue was not yet on my radar.It should have been, but it wasn't.When I came to Temple as a PhD student I began to interact with students and professors from many of the world's major religious and philosophical traditions.I welcomed this, but I lacked a systematic approach to interacting with and integrating the insights of diverse traditions into my own belief system.I needed a systematic theory of inter-ideological learning.Dr. Swidler provided this essential addition to my education.Swidler's approach to interreligious encounters embraces the insight that people are inescapably situated within traditions that provide the context within which they evaluate beliefs, practices, and rival traditions.This insight has been applied to various domains ranging from the physical sciences (Thomas Kuhn) to religion (Raimundo Panikkar) and ethics (Alasdair MacIntyre). 1 Swidler discusses this contextualization of belief in relation to inter-ideological learning in his book After the Absolute: The Dialogical Future of Religious Reflection, which was the textbook used in the first of his classes that I 1 See Thomas Kuhn,
Source: Journal of ecumenical studies
Author: Michael S. Jones
Institution: University of Notre Dame
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W1042385635