Religious Community and Abrahamic Traditions: A Comparative Conversation

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

To belong to a religion often means more than just sharing in a common cosmology and belief in the supernatural, adhering to a set of collective rules for behavior and action, or participating in public rituals that performatively and symbolically carry out a particular way of life; it also means being part of a community—and, sometimes, even a culture. As the renowned French sociologist Émile Durkheim pointedly observed in his 1912 work The Elementary Forms of Religious Life: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community . . . all those who adhere to them.” While much theological and religious studies scholarship has focused on the beliefs, ethics, and performative practices (or rituals) within particular religious traditions, this course takes a broader view. Instead, it focuses on fundamental questions pertaining to the notions of belongingness within—and across—three of the world’s major religious traditions. Specifically, this course examines the notions of religious communality, and the subsequent ethical principles that stem from them, in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, approaching this topic from a reflexive Christian theological perspective centered on the following questions: What does it mean to be part of a religious community? What is the meaning of religious belonging in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam? How do these traditions’ notions of religious communality relate to their professed doctrines and subsequent ethical principles? And what might a comparative examination of these traditions’ various understandings of religious communality teach Christians about what belonging to the Church means today? Beginning with an overview of the terms “belongingness” and “Abrahamic religions,” the first part of this course situates the notion of religious communality within the theological sub-disciplines of comparative theology and religious ethics, introducing students to valuable theoretical tools upon which the remainder of the course is built. Next, the second part of this course systematically compares various historical and contemporary notions of religious belongingness within the Christian Church to Jewish and Muslim notions of the Synagogue and Ummah, exploring how these traditions’ respective understandings of belongingness relate to their derived ethical notions of what religious communality morally entails. Finally, the third part of this course examines the ongoing phenomena of religious belongingness within shared, pluralistic contexts and asks: What might a Christian comparative theological approach to the ethics of religious communality look like in our day and age? And what might such an ethics entail for how Christians imagine the Church in itself and in relation to other forms of religious communality?