Rosemary Radford Ruether’s Global Scope in Interfaith Reconciliation

Introduction

To say Rosemary Radford Ruether has an impressive scholarly range would be an understatement. Her intellectual scope traverses several thousand years of history and complex intricacies shaping present-day religious and feminist meaning. Her work amplifies women’s voices, critiques exploitative thinking, and promotes justice for suffering people. She uses her theological lens to encourage active participation in human and planetary wellbeing despite the extent of problematically extractive logic debasing our life-giving planet. Though known as a Christian ecofeminist theologian, Ruether wrote about, studied, dialogued with, taught, and collaborated among a wide diversity of religious and secular colleagues and friends from around the globe. Through Ruether’s work in interreligious conversation, she found collaborative partners in feminist, ecological, and justice-seeking movements from a variety of scholarly and religious communities. She facilitated new leadership by rendering decades of students into colleagues, offering a lived religion of kitchen table theology, actively using her professional position to level the playing field among emerging and established scholars. Although her voice was cut short by a stroke 6 years before her death in 2022, neither event kept her decades of incisively vocal scholarly work from a wide distribution and appreciation. ⁴ For this reason, this essay continues to name her voice in the present tense, as her prophetic participation in scholarly dialogue is far from complete.

This essay elaborates Ruether’s commitment to providing Christian self-critique as a theologically informed critical-constructive framework for interreligious dialogue. Traversing her textual territory of ecofeminist theology and interfaith praxis, her work appears below in explanatory vignettes, highlighting a variety of settings where Ruether cultivates and elucidates cross-cultural, interreligious, and interfaith connections. There will be particular focus on pluralistic, feminist insights in religious studies derived from engagement in interfaith, particularly Buddhist-Christian dialogues. ⁵ Her work provides a lived religious and scholarly ethic toward an emerging, defining edge, compelling forward the work of theological reflection, ethical embodiment, and religious integrity. Prior to terms emerging that currently enjoy popular circulation, Ruether’s work defined parameters for pluralistic, transnational, and intersectional feminist work in religious studies and interreligious encounter. Ruether’s trailblazing work defined the fields of religious studies and theology in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Perhaps beyond metaphorically blazing trails, a somewhat violent and ecologically intrusive metaphor, it can be said that Ruether’s rudder provides a deep and steady wake, on which generations of religious scholars continue to clarify direction and ride forward in self-critical reflection, counting their voices as valuable in work toward redemptive recovery within and across traditions.

Prioritizing Prophetic Margins

Over decades of writing and presentations, Ruether demonstrates a research agenda shaped by commitments to support under-appreciated, marginalized, contested, largely ignored, yet prophetic voices, particularly of women, through history and across contemporary geography. Ruether literally wrote the book on Sexism and God-talk, supporting feminist movements to question oppressive structures of thought and action. Ruether spent her long career in solidarity with historical and contemporary marginalized people, particularly women and particularly focused on her own Christian tradition. ⁶ In a 2001 publication, she writes,

It is hard to speak in a few words about what I find oppressive for women in Christianity. Analyzing the oppressiveness of Christianity for women and other marginalized people has been the lifework of myself and many other feminist theologians for more than thirty years. I am tempted to exclaim, “How can I count the ways!” ⁷

Amid trends toward secularizing or religious switching, particularly among feminist critics recovering from physical and psychological abuse associated with religion, Ruether did not give up on the luminous aspects of her traditions. She approached her work with a method akin to what Engaged Buddhist scholar Sulak Sivaraksa named Loyalty Demands Dissent (Parallax Press, 1998). For example, Ruether writes of feminist Catholic interest in women’s leadership:

Catholic feminists, lay and religious, of course, support the ordination of women . . . Many see the rages of the Vatican against this change as the last cries of a dying system. But many, myself included, are not especially eager to be ordained in the present system. Ordination would link them to a hierarchy of control that they presently somewhat evade . . . They do not believe that they would have this freedom as priests. For them ordination of women must come as part of a larger process of changing these structures of control. ⁸

In this example addressing variations among feminist Catholic Christians, Ruether asserts the need not for female figureheads reinscribing inherited hierarchies of controlling processes, but rather a larger move toward distributed power among ordained and lay community. Despite Ruether’s regular critical attention, she was never silenced or excommunicated as a Catholic, and maintained and largely grew in esteem among many Christian, interfaith, and scholarly colleagues interested in understanding critical intersections between theological assertion and ethical praxis.

Interreligious Dialogue: Self-critical Conversation Not Conversion

Ruether presents narrative and analogical explanations for effective interreligious dialogue, emerging from experiential knowledge of processes for effectively engaging across differences. For example, in explaining interfaith conversation about the Divine, Ruether uses an analogy of simultaneity in quantum physics, in which light is both a wave and a particle. In religious conversation and in physics, neither aspect—wave or particle, one religion or another—is in need of synthesis through reductive logic. She criticizes the need to homogenize and oversimplify, instead respectfully paying attention to ways that difference can encourage self-reflection. To clarify intentions and pitfalls in interreligious conversation, Ruether writes,

What is the goal of dialogue? The ground rules of dialogue demand that not simply some truth, but equal truth must be accepted in the other faith. One must reject not only an exclusivist [mine is better than yours] view, but also a supercessionist [mine naturally results from yours as a function of time moving forward] view in which the other religions are conceded some truth, but in a partial way and in need of perfection by Christianity. ⁹

In this passage, Ruether conveys the importance of Christian humility in cross-cultural, interreligious encounter by acknowledging the damage done by Christians who, for example, viewed their faith as a historical replacement for Indigenous culture or Jewish traditions, enabling horrors of violence and genocide.

Instead, Ruether expresses a relational ethic of mutual understanding and reciprocity, in which collaborative, self-critical dialogue can foster self-understanding, rather than missionizing. Ruether repeatedly expresses how her own religious understanding has been rendered more vital through the work of interaction among other perspectives. In addition to exclusive religionists or pluralists, she acknowledges the ways some kinds of interreligious dialogue oversimplify each tradition by enhancing commonality, seeking integration at the expense of acknowledging critiques. The “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” of silence in pluralism becomes a hollow rendering of human encounter across differences, instead furthering an agenda of commonality at the expense of truth-telling. ¹⁰ As a feminist scholar of religion, Ruether collaborated with a variety of people committed to naming exclusionary institutional choices to disenfranchise women in discriminatory ways. By her work, she could be called an “intersectional” feminist, though that parlance emerged after decades of her work shone light on disenfranchisements at intersections of gender, race, religion, class, nation, and other divisively invoked categorical exclusions. ¹¹

Interreligious pluralistic encounter is central to Ruether’s work. Scholar Diana Eck and the Harvard University Pluralism Project developed a helpful framework for pluralism, defining four key aspects:

First, pluralism is not diversity alone, but the energetic engagement with diversity . . . Second, pluralism is not just tolerance, but the active seeking of understanding across lines of difference . . .Third, pluralism is not relativism, but the encounter of commitments . . . Fourth, pluralism is based on dialogue. ¹²

The Pluralism Project has been an effective partner to pluralistic work in scholarly, religious, and interfaith conversations across the globe since 1991. ¹³ The Project provides web and teaching resources for fashioning pluralistic learning opportunities. The Pluralism Project’s tone tends to encourage a human dignity framework for dialogue. With human dignity as an effective cornerstone implicit in the work of pluralism, both historically privileged and marginalized people can engage in effective dialogue from where they stand with invitations to raise or lower their voices apace with a leveling effect for all participants.

Although the Pluralism Project’s framework overlaps with Ruether’s commitments, the framework does not explicitly state, as Ruether does, the need for naming histories of colonialism, racism, sexism, and the multitude of ways human dignity has been quashed in non-pluralistic types of human-to-human encounter. Ruether communicates both dialogical goals and critical frameworks. As noted above and across her written works, Ruether similarly describes how effective encounter may render a religious person more faithful and more informed through active, “energetic engagement with diversity” through dialogical encounter. Such a method can be found in ecclesial base communities, Jesuit approaches to be transformed by love for the poor, and other Catholic, Christian, and other faithful welcoming for the stranger as friend with concomitant human dignity endowed by their creator or implicit in their humanness. Furthermore, Ruether does not stop at human dignity when addressing theological calls to prophetic potential, but she recognizes pluralistic encounter among enfleshments in phenomenal diversity among living beings sharing our world.

Ecofeminist Theology as Self-critical Christian Leadership

Ecofeminism provides a means to both critique and construct worldviews toward a well-being society for all people and planetary lives. For example, ecofeminism critiques extractive epistemologies, or ways of thinking, which remove value from people and places, conveniently laying groundwork for normalizing their exploitation. Ecofeminism draws parallel lines between the ways women are dehumanized and the earth is commodified, drawing these parallel lines back to problematic patterns of thought, which normalize oppression for women and the earth. A similar insight circulates in intersectional feminism, noticing the ways Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) suffer in ways inseparable from gender, class, sexuality, nationality, and other such points. ¹⁴ By naming problematic thinking undergirding structural disenfranchisement, Ruether and others encourage reflection and ethical action to reverse such exploitative patterns of thinking and how they play out among individuals and through institutions.

Ruether’s ecofeminist theological method offers critical attention to false and distorted religious claims, in the service of a greater intent to rehumanize, reanimate, and revitalize epistemology and language in service of socio-cultural activities to counter exploitation. ¹⁵ Her approach is inextricably linked to religious meaning, which in turn can emerge in interreligious dialogue. For example, Ruether writes, “The magnification of evil through false sacralization happens when leaders claim divine privilege to accumulate wealth, exercise authoritarian control, repress dissent, and call for violence toward others.” ¹⁶ In her book on globalization, Ruether reflects on the use of force as abusive and antithetical to stable, sustainable cultures:

“Violent ways of treating the earth and violent ways of treating other humans are both inherently unstable. Neither form of violence nurtures the natural energies of those who are abused, and so both demand continual inputs of force to maintain themselves.” ¹⁷

Ruether asserts that violence and stability are mutually exclusive, particularly where inherently unstable violence supports also inherently unstable empire because of the constant need for further violence. Additionally, Ruether wrote extensively about the dangers of economic globalization, which adversely affect vulnerable people worldwide. In her work to participate in justice, she emphasizes harms committed by economic elites controlling access to life-sustaining resources at local to global levels. These critiques appear across many of her life’s work, as thematic and enduring critical legacies for further theological reflection, but her work did not end with critique.

Characteristically, Ruether’s thorough critique does not end with a critical “mic drop,” ¹⁸ but, instead, goes on to offer constructive resources to ward off evil tendencies. Her antidote to imperial violence, repression, economic exploitation, and unapologetic greed is an apparently simple theological task: “keep a healthy principle of repentant self-questioning built in to their quest for relation to the divine.” ¹⁹ As a theologian, Ruether differentiates between humble communion and attempts at “fusion” with the divine, which tend toward idolatry. Through critical self-awareness, Ruether not only defines methods for responsible religiosity, but presents a robust method for engaging in interreligious dialogue, as a means to further self-understanding. This kind of self-referential concern offers appropriate ethical means for maintaining non-idolatrous religiosity:

We readily recognize this abuse when we see it in other religions, but are less alert to our own idolatrous abuses of power. What this suggests is that the most valid critique of religion is self-critique, the cultivation of a mature balance [for example, in the case of Christianity] between worship and communion with the divine and a recognition of our difference from the divine. ²⁰

She asserts the importance of self-critique, not only as a nice encouragement, but with the strongest of terms, naming self-critique as “the most valid critique of religion” and as a mature differentiation from the Divine for those who might be tempted to misuse authority donned through religious means, normalized through representations of a “Divine” mantle.

Ruether names a primary key to engage in productive interreligious encounter, avoiding mutual critique or navel-gazing. Instead, she encourages participants to be willing to acknowledge limits in one’s own tradition and have the courage to share these issues beyond the boundary of the tradition. This truth-telling impetus is not a means to undermine the tradition, but rather, to maintain integrity as integral integration of more than the “good” news, in order to make space for honest conversation among self-critical partners among a variety of traditions. Ruether’s self-critical, pluralistic, interfaith encounter method intersects with the work of transnational feminism, which provides space for cross-difference mutual empowerment and learning, which can facilitate resource sharing to address, interrupt, and counteract oppressive circumstances. Her work exemplifies self-critical Christian leadership, facing atrocities rooted in Christian distortions, and generating Christian alternatives in life-giving, inclusive theology and ethics prioritizing people and living communities, who suffer directly from such distortions in exploitative situations.

Embodiment and Ecofeminist Theology

Critiquing the Christian doctrine of dominion, which normalizes hierarchies placing men above women and people above nature, Ruether asserts the importance of reflecting on embodiment in religious feminism and ecofeminist theology:

The sexist hierarchy that links maleness to the rational mind, which is seen as having sovereign power over the body represented by the female, heightens this anthropocentrism [human-centered perspective]. A male ruling class elite is seen as having dominion over subjugated humans, such as women and slaves, as well as non-human things. Despising women and the body is integrally related to despising the earth. These ideas lend themselves to the belief that the earth is not our true home, just as the body is not our true self. Instead, redemption is seen as a flight from the body, the woman, and the world into an otherworldly disembodied immortality. ²¹

Ecofeminist insights into Christian cosmologies affirm connections between normalized hatred of the body, women, enslaved human beings, and the living world. When redemption requires escapism exiting the world as we know it, a renewed creation is obsolete. For example, as fantasies of space travel interlink with escapist theology, contemporary climate peril is rendered in a disembodied framework, reduced in primacy in a cosmic search for home elsewhere. ²² Nevertheless, Ruether’s conclusions in multiple volumes continue to articulate ways to renew love for Creation in relation to a loving Creator, envisioning integration, dignity, and well-being among Creatures.

Women’s Dignity and the Parliament of World Religions

Ruether participated in the 1999 Parliament of World Religions, where a newly articulated 1994 Global Ethic figured centrally. The Parliament’s Global Ethic brought together interfaith participants to name commonalities and consider metaethical, “transcultural” principles shared among the traditions, a project typical of twentieth-century interfaith relations. Ruether suggests that this self-selecting group of people represented largely progressive people from each religion, thus the common threads may be universal to contexts where human rights, sustainability, non-violence, and other global norms are accepted. Nevertheless, even with metaethics of cross-cultural relevance, Ruether questioned the spaces that these metaethics may have overlooked. For example, “Gender equality is typically the area of this ‘universalism’ that is most unacceptable to the particular traditions.” ²³ After discussing the Parliament’s global work to articulate agreed ethical norms, she discusses the need to differentiate between valuable richness of human diversity and the “differences that do harm,” such as racism, enslavement, gender imbalances, and wealth of the few against the many. ²⁴ Since the late 1990s, the prominence of a metaethics of women’s participation in education and leadership increasingly has been integrated into global institutions, such as the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, revised into the Sustainable Development Goals. ²⁵ In 2023, the Parliament of World Religions includes “Women’s Dignity” among its primary priorities, convening a Parliament Women’s Task Force, enabling global women’s religious coalitions. ²⁶ Ruether provided critical reframing attention to women’s dignity, which after decades has become a central tenet of the same organization where she offered this critique.

Discerning Self-critical Effectiveness in Interfaith Engagement

Among Ruether’s first major works was a book on Jewish–Christian relations, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (Seabury Press, 1974). ²⁷ The book focused on harmful social effects of Christian epistemologies, critiquing thought systems which translate to oppression of Jewish people across Christian history. Her work brought light to Christian theological underpinnings for atrocities in the twentieth century and earlier. The book received a warm welcome in a variety of Jewish communities. Ruether received speaking invitations for Jewish community events, though Ruether noticed that some interfaith invitations appeared to regularly fit a pro-Zionist message, enabling a vision of Israeli homeland without room for additional, historically significant, one might even say “indigenous,” claims to the land. ²⁸ When Ruether challenged and provided critique of Palestinian confinement as refugees in shared Israeli-Palestinian homeland, some Jewish community leaders branded her anti-Israel, and her invitations petered out. Through her initial experience in interfaith engagement, Ruether befriended Palestinian Christians and endeavored to amplify their concerns over decades of interactive engagement. Ruether realized that her Christian self-critical work might fit into agendas she did not share, though over time she also found Jewish ethicists, ecological theologians, and other collaborators, who shared her interest in understanding and addressing material damage from imperial, exceptionalist theological distortions in Christian, Jewish, and other religious settings. ²⁹ With this reticence, she tentatively entered into further interfaith engagement in Buddhist-Christian dialogues, invited by her former Claremont professor and Christian process theologian John Cobb.

Toward Buddhist-Christian Feminist Pluralistic Encounter

Ruether participated in Buddhist-Christian dialogue for decades through the International Buddhist-Christian Theological Encounter. ³⁰ This organization provided an environment to cultivate friendship and collaboration with fellow feminist scholar Rita Gross, who published an incisive feminist work on women in Buddhist history, which remains relevant for the study of women in historical Buddhism. Ruether and Gross co-authored the book Religious Feminism and the Future of the Planet: A Buddhist-Christian Dialogue (Continuum, 2001), which emerged from their interreligious dialogue. For this book, both authors offered critiques and liberating elements from each scholar’s tradition through autobiographical notes and inspiration from the other scholar’s tradition. Together, Gross and Ruether demonstrated a working method developed over decades of collaboration and articulated a shared vision of renewing religious feminism and ecology.

Steady Commitments, Changing Terminology

When teaching over a half century, terminology is liable to emerge and change. For example, when teaching on global women’s religious environmental perspectives and leadership, Ruether used the title, “Third World Feminist Theology.” ³¹ Despite academic terminology moving away from “First” and “Third” World, due to critiques that these terms reinscribe colonial and Cold War lines across land, Ruether’s students challenged her terminology. Her response was not only accurate, but it also demonstrated her approach to allyship. She answered these critiques by saying, “This is what my colleagues in these places call themselves.” ³² Ruether’s accountability measure remained in relation to the people she represented, as her scholarship amplified their voices to reach her classes of ministerial and academic students of religion, as well as her presentations, which delivered historical, theological, and practical insight into the work of countering exploitative relations, renewing environments social and ecological. Without using the term, “ally,” Ruether enacted allyship with her colleagues, whose work she sought to amplify through offering invitations to speak and inclusion in edited volumes. She used her social power and institutional grounding to assist “Third World” feminist scholars to reach a wider audience, cultivating North American students toward greater global, inclusive perspective.

Conclusion

Some short-sighted religionists might see the work of Rosemary Radford Ruether and other feminist theological colleagues as stones in their theological shoe, yet Ruether’s work has offered illuminating insight in places where distorted religious interpretations have fueled misused authority, cruelty, and exploitative horrors. As a final metaphor to conclude this article, I offer that, instead of a stone in the shoe of Christianity, each of Ruether’s critiques provides a healthy grain of sand to the Church’s oyster. As a single grain of sand arrives within an oyster’s shell, the body of the oyster generates a powerful and regular method, which over time renders sand into a pearl. Perhaps, Ruether’s critical self-reflection within her Christian tradition may, through its discursive function, invite further critical, varied, reflective conversation, rendering growing pearlescence via ongoing conversation over time. Layer after layer, responsive strata add to a small grain of sand, and eventually emerges from the Christian shell a whole, gleaming orb of pearlescent, shining, multivocal insight.

As Ruether’s critical, pluralistic method describes, she spent her time offering self-criticism within the body of the Church, keeping her vision clear to serve justice and love kindness in daily ways that, taken together, amount to a vast corpus, contributing to Christian theology, pluralistic religious studies, and interfaith interactions. Although some might render her work as external to their traditions, perhaps our pearl metaphor might expand to recognize the sea itself as the sea of living beings seeking well-being, stability, and freedom, each participating in a brief span of precious life. Ruether’s long career rendered her opportunities to apply self-critical theological attention, and taken together, these studies build into a wide necklace of precious pearls of wisdom, which remain in our keeping as she enjoys eternal rest.