Last month, CIP was glad to host a one-day student symposium entitled “Rupture and Reconciliation”. Lia Kornmehl and Dr Hina Khalid came together to convene an interdisciplinary forum for scholarly conversations on these distinct, though interrelated, motifs.
The panels explored such questions as: how do mystics of the past, and theologians of today, destabilise neat religious categories? How does art offer us a window into the ruptures of multiple religious belongings? And how do communities reconcile themselves to new forms of living and worshipping?
Mystical Meanings
Noah Rouse began proceedings with a rich exploration of St Francis’ encounters with Islamic ecological principles, as codified in the Qur’an and Hadith literature. Noah deftly made use of the categories of rupture and reconciliation to highlight how St Francis’ theology enacts two interwoven boundary crossings – that of approaching and integrating the religious ‘other’, and that of embracing and cherishing the creaturely ‘other’. Noah’s reflections pivoted on one beautifully evocative fact: by enacting dynamic movements out of him-self in love and communion, St Francis rendered the ‘other’ no other at all.
Medomfo Owusu, from the Faculty of Music, then took the audience through the vibrant tapestry of Sister Thea Bowman’s womanist spirituality – a spirituality infused with lyricism and activism. Medomfo creatively employed the concepts of memory, space, embodiment, and God-image to examine Bowman’s womanist discourse, which seamlessly interlaced the social vocation of black empowerment with the devotional calling towards faith-centred living and loving. Taking Bowman as her scholarly point of reference, Medomfo offered us a luminous glimpse into the fertile words and fraught worlds of black women’s mystical meaning-making.
Identities Inscribed
Our second panel of the day began with a gripping tale of temple treasures: Ammie Vudathu took us on a journey through the underground vaults of the Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Southern Kerala, India, which have been the site of recent media attention and controversy. With inspiring sensitivity, Ammie got behind the headlines and into the lived reality of the royal family who are the temple’s custodians. Her paper showed us how this family perceive their custodial role as one of humble service to the divine, in contradistinction to traditional models of spatial and institutional ‘ownership’.
Lia Kornmehl’s paper addressed a similar interplay of religion, sacred space, authority, and paradigms of ownership – this time from the regional perspective of Uttar Pradesh, India. Lia’s intricate analysis of the legal disputes besetting the Gyanvapi Mosque/Vishwanath Temple in Varanasi underscored the complex, often distressing, ways that judicial and mythic vocabularies can become enmeshed, transforming religious sites into political battlegrounds.
McKay Bowman concluded this panel by exploring some of the ‘meta’ questions that constituted the subtle backdrop of the two preceding papers: what is religion, after all? Can a person only ever belong to one religious tradition? What kind of orientation to the world do religious traditions set forth? McKay insightfully proposed interreligious learning as a mode of actively resisting dominant conceptions of religious exclusivity.
Aesthetic Articulations
Musicologist Dr. Mark Seow began our third panel with a musical flourish, challenging the audience to consider the intertwined themes of pain and beauty in the music of Heinrich Biber. Mark outlined how scordatura, or the non-standard tuning of a string instrument, opens pathways for counterintuitive musical explorations that rupture the expected in favor of the dynamic, challenging the artist and the listener’s assumptions about the form and function of music.
Margarita Bonora, an MPhil student at the Faculty of Music, picked up on these notions to explore the conception of dialectics and the role of music in the writings and musings of French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. Margarita’s careful analysis of Maritain’s metaphysics outlined how the philosopher embraced poetry and music as fundamental avenues towards understanding the interconnections between the self, the divine, and the natural world.
Finally, Dr. Hina Khalid wove these themes of rupture and relation together in her narration of how legacies of Partition have shaped the Bollywood landscape. Hina focused on the love stories and lessons of the acclaimed movie, Veer-Zara (2004), and she adeptly led the audience through the epic while illuminating how the film’s plot, performances, and reception have all been influenced by the deeply embodied history of India’s bloodied independence.
Conversions and Contestations
At the start of the final panel, anthropologist Dr. Naomi Richman encouraged the room to reconsider “repair,” a common theme in anthropological and theological study, but one that is far from exhausted as a way to conceptualize reconciliation processes after ruptures. Naomi’s inquiry into the theoretical and practical history of “repair” highlighted its fruitfulness as a framework, a possibility that was corroborated by her fellow panellists in their following discussions.
Susie Triffit, a second-year PhD candidate in the Faculty of Divinity, surprised, delighted, and challenged the audience with descriptions of her field work with the Wrestling Church, an evangelical church with unorthodox methods that create and sustain durable social bonds between under-served communities. Susie explained that, while her fieldwork is very much in progress, her exploration has already illuminated the beauty and variety of pathways toward faith, healing, reconciliation, and community.
Divinity PhD student Michael Habashi rounded out the panel with an in-depth discussion on the fractures and unsuccessful reconciliations within the eons-long history of the Coptic Orthodox Church and Chalcedonian Churches. After tracing the churches’ intertwined histories, Michael explored why the two remain at odds to this day despite many attempted reunions and gestured towards how each community may move forward in light of their theological differences.
Conclusion
This year’s interdisciplinary CIP student symposium reckoned with the themes of rupture and reconciliation from a myriad of angles. Each panel provided a mosaic of approaches, from the musical to the anthropological, considering both what entwines and disrupts communities, the natural world, and the transcendent. All of the speakers courageously tackled difficult themes to generate lively and empathetic conversations throughout the entire day. On behalf of the entire organizing team, we thank all of the presenters and conversants for joining us!