When I first took a job as a video game tester, I didn't realize that the way I experience video games would forever change. Instead of being a mode of escape or entertainment, I found that I couldn't play or watch a video game without constantly scouring the game for bugs. Instead of playing the story, I found myself saying, "I wonder what happens if I..." and then did just that, trying to break the game.
Needless to say, my experience, if not my enjoyment, of video games grew much deeper.
Since my (triumphant?) return to academia, I find that I am now constantly analyzing everything. One night I was trying to relax and hangout with Moonshynn. After dinner, we watched a kung fu movie, and I found that no matter how hard I tried, I could NOT turn my brain off. I was watching the movie, noticing implicit nationalistic undertones, pointing out frameworks -- basically, I was treating the movie as if it were some theory of religion I had been assigned to poke and prod until I could get it to all tumble down.
This deeper understanding of life has led to some interesting encounters over the last year, but none have been so thought-provoking as the bold assertion of an undergraduate in one of my courses. Two of the students, both undergraduates (I doubt this would have happened if it were graduate students), were discussing working at a museum and art in general. One of them asked if the other had seen the new art exhibit at the local art museum on Vishnu. The second student sighed and basically ended up saying that she had not, and did not intend to, because "it just isn't the Truth."
Now, this wasn't the first time that this particular student had made a comment regarding non-Christians and their apparent sin. The first time, she had mentioned that Haitians actually worship the devil, and that this was the reason for the recent calamities in that region. This was in a discussion, so I was within my rights to say, "Wait a second, that's not correct. They have a different religion; just because it's not Christianity does not make it devil worship." But this time, her statement was in the context of a personal conversation during a break in class. I wasn't about to interject and stir up some trouble because I took issue with her statement, especially since that statement came in a class where the students are charged with acknowledging and respecting viewpoints and interpretations that may not jive with our own.
I found her statement to be problematic because it has been my experience that whenever someone (or a group of people, for that matter) believes they have a monopoly on the Truth, they think that they can go and start doing horrible, terrible things to do those they can't get to agree with them. I someone without faith, I find that I do not have a readily available answer to what "Truth" is, or what the best path for discerning it, either (recently, I've been having an existential crisis, so I'm not sure I'm the best person to answer any of this, anyway).
But what really got me thinking was the response I got from people who did have faith. Relativism is a dirty term in the study of religion, apparently, but scholars and students alike are constantly kept in tension with maintaining the veracity of their own faith and espousing tolerance and attempting to build an interfaith community and dialogue. We are still employing our frameworks, but now loudly claiming that we are acting to promote tolerance of the Other we so recently (and violently) despised. So, while it may have been socially (and institutionally) inappropriate for this young woman to say that Hinduism did not represent the Truth, it may have been fully consonant with her beliefs...and the beliefs of Christians, generally.
So I find that I am now questioning the ability of interfaith dialogues to be well, actually interfaith. Do we say, as theologians and academics, that there are many things that hold Truth for the individual because of (insert theory here)? Or do we promote tolerance while tacitly asserting that our beliefs or way of living is more True than others? Can we actually participate in interfaith dialogues genuinely or are there some hard questions that we need to ask ourselves and one another to keep the entire enterprise honest?
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