From Initial Excitement to Maturity

There was a time in my youth when we treated other religious communities with suspicion, as we regarded them as rivals or even enemies who were wrong in their pursuit of salvation, being on a path by which they could not achieve that ultimate goal. There was a time in our theology courses when we mostly learned about differences between churches or religions and rarely about what we have in common. We learned the difference between Arius and Athanasius, Chalcedonians and Monophysites, Orthodoxy and Catholicism, Catholics and Protestants, Calvinists and Arminians, Presbyterians and Methodists, evangelicals and Pentecostals, and so forth--but not much about what any of them may have in common. Yet, even during my early student years it was no longer a time of uniform tensions. Among the professors and pastors with whom I had contact at Florida Southern College (Lakeland, FL) and Boston (MA) University School of Theology were those who were active in the Protestant ecumenical movement as well as in the National and World Council of Churches. Likewise, there were professors of world religion who accentuated appreciation rather than rejection of the insights of the great world religions. Classes with Fr. Georges Florovsky at Harvard Divinity School (Cambridge, MA) deepened my understanding of Eastern Orthodoxy, with which I had been superficially acquainted growing up in the Serbian part of Yugoslavia. Then came the electrifying election of a different kind of pope, John XXIII, upon whom it was possible to look with sympathy and admiration. Hearing speeches by Augustin Cardinal Bea and Gregory Baum at Harvard and then Boston's Richard Cardinal Cushing at the community church of my major professor Edwin Booth, as well as meetings with novices of the Dominican order of my own age all led to a Copemican revolution in my own theological orientation. It was thrilling. During my first years of teaching at the Methodist-affiliated Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, the Department of Religion organized a conference on the developments of the Second Vatican Council to which we invited the Catholic lay theologian, Leonard Swidler, to speak. Little did I know that this meeting with him would lead to a lifelong friendship and cooperation at the Journal of Ecumenical Studies, which he and his wife Arlene had started a few years earlier. My ecumenical orientation resulted in my becoming the first full-time Protestant professor of religious studies at the Catholic-affiliated Rosemont (PA) College in 1972. I have been teaching there ever since. The experience of expanding concentric circles of ecumenism and interreligious dialogue was analogous to the broadening of my culinary appetites. Growing up on my mother's cooking, I was at first unenthused by American food (except hamburgers and pizza). Gradually, I got used to it and eventually came to like it. As my palate became adjusted to one foreign food, it almost instantaneously became receptive, even eager, for other exotic kitchens. Similarly, my initial Protestant-Catholic-Orthodox encounters soon expanded into Christian-Jewish encounters, and then to the religions of the Far East, India, and the Middle East during a year of post-doctoral fellowship to study Asian religions. Eventually, I expanded this circle of religious encounters to include Islam, which took longer, as I had to overcome my distrust based on an early education that inculcated prejudice toward the Ottoman Empire's rule of the Balkans. This expansion of my own horizons went more or less parallel with J.E.S.'s expanding inclusion of scholarly studies from various perspectives. Manuscripts emanating from very diverse denominations and religions were accepted by us for publication. We were being praised as the foremost ecumenical journal in the world. There was one additional serious challenge to all religions--Marxism, a pseudo-religious ideology. I had grown up in Yugoslavia during various stages of the communist persecution of religion, though in that country it was less severe than in the Soviet Union and its satellites. …