Why black American theologians went to India
The Ebola outbreak is centered in three West African countries where almost 4,500 people have died; 17 people have been treated for the disease in Europe and North America, most of whom are health and aid workers who contracted the disease in West Africa. Americans are vigorously debating whether to place a travel ban on anyone trying to enter the nation from affected regions. But as this disease outbreak underscores our globalized, interconnected reality, we need to share resources and ideas to promote healing and public health, at home and abroad. Advocates of interreligious engagement—through their willingness to move across dangerous boundaries—show us how exchange does not necessarily beget vulnerability; it can bolster our humanity.
To begin a series of lectures in 1947 at the University of Calcutta, black American theologian William Stuart Nelson thanked his audience for coming “in spite of great inconvenience and some danger.” Calcutta was a city on edge. A year earlier Hindus and Muslims had massacred each other, killing thousands. Violence still throbbed at a lower ebb. Days before independence—and partition—Nelson spoke about how people could share common cause despite ideological differences. Essential to this possibility, he argued, was “a belief in the plurality of values, the many-sidedness of the good.”
Interreligious learning is crucial for the peaceful resolution of global differences, Nelson told his Calcutta audience. Love is integral to Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Shinto, Sikhism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, and Christianity. This love is not sentimentalism, rather it is, in each case, a call to action on behalf of fellow human beings. Though appealing to what he called a “universal truth” reflected through these traditions, Nelson did not minimize religious differences. In fact he worried that interreligious learning had been limited by “our failure to recognize values in the diversities in these religions.” It is possible, he insisted “that the love life of religion is best developed by one set of practices among one people and another set among another.”
