Ricoeur, Interreligious Literacy and Scriptural Reasoning

More than ever, society today requires interreligiously literate people. This means people who do not seek the cover of their own symbolic community, where they meet only like-minds, but rather people who, not unlike the Greek God Hermes, have the flexibility to move between different worlds – communicating their convictions in a meaningful way to those who believe differently, and respectfully receiving the convictions of the other such that mutual enrichment and deepened self-understanding may result. Interreligious literacy is an expression of practical wisdom, which one acquires through experience. To achieve this requires pedagogical methods that enable a deep empathetic learning across traditions. This article develops an interreligious pedagogy that is inspired by Ricoeur’s hermeneutical anthropology and is made concrete in a practice called scriptural reasoning. Together with some theoretical reflections, I draw upon my experience as an interreligious educator to explain how scriptural reasoning as a practice of interreligious hospitality functions, the issues it raises, and the possibilities for new interreligious learning it opens up