Beyond Us and Them: An Inter-Religious Journey

The Ecumenical Review, 1985

Mixed Blessings is a collection of essays written by a variety of authors with wildly different backgrounds. The result of a workshop on Indigenous encounters with European religion, the volume seeks to explore the gray area not commonly explored in these encounters-namely, how Christianity was adopted and used by Indigenous individuals in order to communicate with colonizers. Despite this common theme, the topics vary widely, starting at the roots of colonialism in the seventeenth century with essays by Elizabeth Elbourne, Timothy Pearson, and Amanda Fehr, who all discuss the use of ritual and ceremony as a means of engaging power. Beginning in the seventeenth century and concluding in the nineteenth, the three authors together give a startling portrayal of how First Nations adapted to colonial Christianity, changing it in order to communicate their own wants and needs, while at the same time expressing their frustrations at how colonial officials were behaving toward Indigenous communities.

2018

Mixed Blessings , Defining Metis , and Perishing Heathens all move scholarly dialogue past mere indictment of the colonizer’s religion toward the possibilities of Indigenous refusal, acceptance, adaptation, and politically motivated use of Christianity. Read together, these three books function like a primer on the possibilities and pitfalls involved in studying often tense and ambiguous moments of interreligious and cross-cultural encounter. This review offers an overview of each text and then highlights ways in which all three situate themselves in relation to Indigenous perspectives, address the difficulty of accessing Indigenous history through archival sources, and contribute something significant to the field of Indigenous studies.

Historical Papers

Those who write about the religious dimension of the history of Indigenous and settler peoples in Canada have to begin by making some preliminary decisions even before they consider any evidence. They need to decide what kind of things religions and spiritualities are: can they be neatly defined by a set of characteristics (such as doctrine, ceremonies, institutional affiliations, devotional attitudes, experience of the holy), or are they so diverse and fluid that they break through whatever boundaries we try to draw? Are some religions, or religious elements, truer or worthier or more important than others? Do the terms "Indigenous" and "western," and similar pairs, denote clearly contrasting social essences, or are they overlapping, imprecise, catch-all categories? Are some cultures more advanced than others? Is colonialism a good thing that benefits the colonized, or a bad thing that oppresses them? Depending on their premises in these matters, most histories of Indigenous and settler religious relations in Canada take one of five historiographical approaches: conventional colonialist, reversalist colonialist, encounter, post-colonial, or decolonizing. I am not claiming any novelty for these categories, but I hope that identifying, illustrating, and comparing them will be helpful for our historiographical interrogation of texts about Indigenous-settler relations, and for orienting our own research. As with all models, these are ideal types; some historical studies present characteristics of more than one model, and some historical studies may not fit any of them. But quite a number of these accounts do fit fairly neatly into one of these categories.

2010

THE HARMONY WAY:" INTEGRATING INDIGENOUS VALVES WITHIN NATIVE NORTH AMERICAN THEOLOGY AND MISSION by Randy Stephen Woodley Given that Western models of mission have failed among Native Americans and that colonial practices have devastated native communities, this research sought a better way of pursuing Christian mission among Native Americans by asking two questions: (1) Do Native American have a generally shared set of values that could guide the construction of new models for mission in North American Native communities, and, if so, to what degree are these values shared among Native American communities? and, (2). What resources (particularly values) are available within the Native American communities themselves for developing appropriate models of mission and could such resources be developed into authentic, integral mission models? I began the project with a three-pronged framework from a biblical/theological construction of shalom, a contextually based anthropologically...

Spirit of Reconciliation, 2020

Authors representing ten faith traditions talk about their community's work towards Indigenous Canadian Reconciliation. The book is a joint project of The Canadian Race Relations Foundation and The Vancouver School of Theology

Please quote Mission Studies when using the article. Key words: multi religious belonging – theology of religion – insider movements – religious pluralism

Your Voice at the Center. Religica Theolab, The Center for Ecumenical and Religious Engagement, Seattle University, 2023

one of my theological mentors, emailed me a number of years ago saying, "The future of humankind depends on a very different attitude toward other faiths than we have shown in the past." Hinson's challenge for the wellbeing of humankind constitutes a call to build respect, relationships, and cooperation for the common good across lines of religious difference. These crucial elementsrespect, relationships, and cooperationcomprise the way that Interfaith America, founded by Eboo Patel, describes religious pluralism. Used this way, pluralism is not simple diversity or a particular theological perspective about similarities or differences among religions. It is, rather, the accomplishment of these three elements across lines of religious difference. Diana Eck at Harvard Divinity School and founder of The Pluralism Project, likewise, sees pluralism as this kind of achievement. In 2016, I wrote an article for The Interfaith Observer entitled "Unpacking Pluralism." My intention in that piece was to disentangle different uses of "pluralism" because these divergent uses seemed to lead to confusion. In that article, I analyzed Eck's use of pluralism in contrast with John Hick's usage that centers on the "Real." Hick claimed that the Real characterizes the ultimacy represented in most religions. The Real, per Kantian thinking, is a thing-in-itself that cannot be sensed directly, but only perceived through external phenomena. Hick used Kant's thing-in-itself vis-à-vis interpretations of phenomena to explain why religions, though all derived from the Real, are so different. Due to the fact that we cannot perceive the thing-in-itself, the Real is encountered and interpreted differently in different traditions. Thus

Asian Missions Advance, The Quarterly Bulletin of Asia Missions Association, 2021

Reading Religion, 2017

There are two kinds of academic writing, if we classify the work by the nature of the author’s expertise. The first one, the most prevalent, is the kind of writing that is born out of the scholarly work of the author and is primarily based on research and teaching experience. The second kind, comparatively harder to come by, is the writing of a scholar that is the result of an entire lifetime of study, research, teaching, understanding, and more importantly, dialogue. Interreligious Encounters is a rare gem of the second kind of academic writing. When the reader lays their hands on it, and sees the name of the author, they are already overawed with great expectation and tremendous reverence. Michael Amaladoss is a rare theologian and practitioner, who has long critically examined his own faith tradition in order to have meaningful dialogue with other faiths.