CLAL Special Features

Welcome to CLAL Special Features where you will find articles by guest columnists and roundtables on hot issues and special topics.

Jewish Public Forum Seminar: “What Is Religion For?”
November 19, 2001 

Pre-Seminar Response to the Question:

“What Is Religion For?”

By Tsvi Blanchard 

For me, the challenge, I would even say the temptation of September 11 was social despair. I saw a world locked into an endless round of violent hatred and destruction.  I had two responses. On the one hand, I turned to religion—especially the utopian imagination found in religionin order to mobilize my capacity for hope. I wanted to feel deeply the human capacity to imagine a better world in which the pain of the existing economic, political and cultural arrangements is overcome.  I wanted to experience ideas and images that in part express socially transformative visions.  

On the other hand, September 11 also reminded that one religion’s utopia is another religion’s nightmare. I saw how effectively a particular religion could mobilize resources for social change when it imagines its perfected world as the ultimate total triumph of its own doctrines, codes and institutions.  I saw a religion that understands the social struggle to realize its utopian vision in terms of coercion, domination and power—human and Divine. As a result, I am now considering the following questions.  

1.       In the present North American situation, can religion still articulate a vision of an ideal world that Americans could/would find engaging? Is there any real power left in the utopian element of religion?

2.       Can that vision be one that animates us to lessen or at least question forms of social coercion and interpersonal? Can religion use its vision to undermine the destructive inequalities and hierarchies that result from its role as an ideological support for class, gender, national, ethnic or particular institutional interests?

3.       Can religion articulate the vision of a society in which love, mutuality and solidarity replace personal satisfaction, social status and individual achievement as central animating values in the moral and spiritual realms? Can religion get us past a world of autonomous individuals bound only by mutually satisfactory contractual relations?

4.       How would religion connect the values of its utopian visions to the social policies and methods needed to a work effectively for their realization? Can religion help our means become informed by our ends?

 


    

To join the conversation at Special Features Discussion, click here.
To access the Special Features Archive, click here.
To receive  CLAL Special Features column by email on a regular basis, complete the box below:
topica
 Receive CLAL Special Features! 
       



Copyright c. 2001, CLAL - The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.