Benjamin Sax, PhD’08; Head of Scholarship, Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies (ICJS)

How has your Divinity School education impacted the trajectory of your career?

While my career has been unconventional, the impact of my Divinity school education has been immeasurable. Not only did it prepare me for nine years of university work—as a scholar, a teacher, and a justice advocate—but it also prepared me for a post-university career as a practitioner and facilitator of interreligious dialogue at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, Jewish Studies in Baltimore, where I have worked for the past ten years.

Very often in my work in Baltimore, I reflect on the courses and conversations that informed my experiences at Swift Hall. Teaching and developing programs around interreligious dialogue to adult learners, high school teachers, justice advocates, non-profit professionals, clergy, government employees, and seminarians and divinity school students is not always intuitive. It requires knowledge, patience, endurance, and empathy. Anyone who has studied at the Divinity School knows that it is difficult to complete your studies there without those traits. I broach each new challenge and opportunity as I would a doctoral exam: with excitement, nervousness, and commitment.

My biggest challenge is figuring out how we can create new spaces for dialogue. Dialogue is complicated, especially when some of our interlocutors focus on religious conversion. After a decade of work in interreligious dialogue, I have learned that most people of faith regard their humanity as refracted through the particularity of their religious community. Honest dialogue requires some acknowledgment that any religious faith, especially biblically or theistically orientated, engenders some intolerance, possibly even some prejudice. Religious knowledge is, after all, privileged knowledge, and privileged knowledge can infuse individuals with hubris or contempt for other religious traditions. 

This is a critical challenge for all religious and even non-religious people: How do we educate our children, our friends, our families, and our congregations to embrace the particularistic values of our religious communities while simultaneously allowing a space for values that may be at odds with our own? In a world where calls to tolerance abound, we don’t teach people simply to tolerate others. Tolerance is certainly important. However, in an ever-changing pluralistic and multicultural world, tolerance is only a place to ask questions. We need a broader place to truly engage it.

One of the salient features of my work at the ICJS is to help build a culture of interreligious dialogue. Our programs, courses, scholarship, and fellowships provide a foundation to develop new ways to listen dialogically (without initial judgment), while also advancing new ways to speak about our worldviews and theologies. Most of my own work is centered around teaching a basic practice of dialogue. My hope is to teach constituents new ways to encounter and respond to religious difference. Sometimes there is more to the experience than merely winning an argument. A culture of dialogue is based not on persuading in favor of one’s own worldview but on the dialectical skill of engaging in a joint search for truth. It should provide a language/discourse with which people can communicate even if they do not accept each other’s religious commitments.

Dialogue, for me, is not a means to an end. It does not have an objective. The dialogical space is not where you go to win an argument. Ideally, a dialogical encounter provides us with an opportunity not just to glimpse into a realm that transcends personal ambition or ideological conviction, but also to meet the needs of another. Such efforts help people not only become cognizant of the values and commitments informing their identities, but also help people realize that their values and commitments are more fluid and dynamic. These are orientations to experience and the world that are obviously informed by my encounters with students and faculty at the Divinity school.

Who is one of the most important people from your time on campus?

Paul Mendes-Flohr was an enormous influence on my formation, pedagogy, and current work. 

Anyone who has studied with Paul or has listened to a few of his public lectures may recognize this quote from Goethe: “To speak is natural, to listen is culture.” Over the years I have come to appreciate how Paul brought this orientation to life in his pedagogy and interpersonal relationships. I find myself often returning to this simple aphorism. While I continue to write in the field of modern Jewish thought, my day job is as a staff scholar for an institute that focuses on and engages in interreligious dialogue. Both these roles have been impacted by Paul’s professional work and, more importantly, by his way of being in the world. I often recall Paul’s kindness. He has taught me that dialogue—through kindness—is a way of knowing people beyond my understanding of them. I cannot thank Paul enough for the treasures of his insight, wisdom, wit, compassion, and, most of all, friendship. In the words of our sages: “May you be blessed and strengthened as you have blessed and strengthened your student.”

Why is it important to understand religion?

Religion is bedeviled by definitional ambiguity. Even though many people have difficulty understanding religion, understanding is essential to co-building civic space. Learning religion is similar to learning a language. If we really want to learn another language, we need to suspend our intuitions in the grammar, syntax, and other rules that make up and govern the language, so that we are not consistently measuring our language against another. We should never impose our language onto another, otherwise we will not learn that language. In the process of learning language, we notice that some words and concepts are easily translatable, while others are not. Some rules are the same; others are not. Some words exist in some language, where in other languages they do not. There is natural language and conventional language, which operate very differently.

In my view, religions operate similarly. They can have sacred texts, but how people orient toward and interpret them varies widely. Religion is sometimes translatable and comparable, but at other times is not. Religion may constitute the grammar of someone’s way of living, but for others it might not. As in language, the more you learn about another’s religion, the more aware you become of your own. Thinking about religion interreligiously can make an enormous impact in interpersonal relationships as well as in conflict resolution. The less literate people are about religion, the less pluralistic society becomes.

Is there any specific advice you’d like to give to a student or a recent graduate just starting their career? 

Be open to change. There is a world outside universities and seminaries that demands your expertise, experience, and wisdom. Imposter syndrome never fully goes away, but you really do have something unique and important to offer others. Each search committee at a seminary or university is idiosyncratic and usually political. Much of this is outside of your control, so don’t take rejection too personally. Be open to critique and the peer-review process. Most people want the best version of your research. Know your value. You have important skills that are applicable to many other vocations, so don’t settle for something that takes away your sense of worth or dignity.

Read outside your field and think about new ways to broach topics in religion. Think about the public. How can you shape your career to make your students aspire to be the best version of themselves by being accountable to others? Seek advice. There is knowledge and wisdom in places you might least expect. Don’t be afraid to reach out to those academics whose work you admire. Those email exchanges or quick conversations can be incredibly valuable. Try to resist valuing your academic work less than or greater than someone else’s.

We are all in this together.