JOSEPH CUNNEEN, with his wife Sally, began publishing Cross
Currents in December 1950.
People have been kind enough to say that keeping Cross Currents
alive all those years since 1950 was an achievement, but looking back at
its beginnings offers as many reasons for embarrassment as for
satisfaction. Although my colleagues and I were united in wishing to
emerge from the Roman Catholic cultural ghetto of our childhood, we
hardly realized how narrow our world still remained. If, almost by
instinct, the journal was ecumenical from the beginning, what was
perceived as healthy openness was often the result of fortuitous
discoveries and the immediate lessons of World War II.
As a GI student in Paris after that war, I remember encountering Dieu
Vivant, a review founded by Père (later Cardinal) Jean Daniélou,
and struggling through an issue with articles by Karl Barth, Martin
Buber, and Nicolas Berdyaev, as well as Daniélou himself. It did not
take me long to understand that these eminent thinkers, although
inhabiting different religious worlds, were most often raising parallel
questions; I had to familiarize myself with new vocabularies, but it was
clear they all had something to say to me.
Interreligious collaboration had a poignantly dramatic meaning to me
as a member of Patton's 3rd Army, stumbling across a Nazi concentration
camp in the Spring of 1945 where an emaciated survivor greeted me with
the cry "Shalom." In view of the large-scale failure of
organized Christendom in the face of Hitler's murderous fury against the
Jews, it was hardly accidental that the most credible voices for a
quarterly that hoped "to explore the implications of Christianity
for our times" were representatives of the intellectual/spiritual
resistance against Nazism. I would not have been able to explain the
theological meaning of religious pluralism, but could easily understand
why members of the French resistance did not submit comrades to
denominational tests before setting out to destroy a railroad bridge
over which the Germans were bringing supplies.
Although my colleagues and I felt an instinctive support for the
desire of former colonies to throw off their chains, the journal we
produced still reflected a European-centered world. I can remember
meeting Vietnamese students in a Parisian café during the summer of
1945, young Marxists who knew Jefferson and the U.S. constitution better
than I did and hoped to return to Indo-China to help create an
independent nation. I did not believe that France would employ military
force to retain control over their colony, and was supremely confident
in assuring these students that the U.S. would support their cause
because of our dedication to the principle of self-determination.
Such memories make it clear that for me -- and also, I believe, for
my fellow-editors -- sustaining Cross Currents over the years
was a way of continuing our education in public. Although we were
fortunate that there were well-educated and independent women involved
in planning the journal and serving on the editorial board, none of us
could yet foresee the immense and ongoing importance of the women's
movement. Of course, the still-limited possibilities for women's higher
education meant that the production of women scholars had not yet
reached a critical mass, but it is humbling to recognize that there were
only three women writers published in the first decade of Cross
Currents -- Simone Weil, the German biographer Ida Frederike
Goerres, and the Polish philosopher Anna Morawska. (To his credit, the
late Erwin Geissman, an active editor from the start, translated the
preface of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex prior to its
U.S. publication. Unfortunately, the U.S. publisher refused permission
for us to use it as a separate essay and alert our audience to what was
coming.)
It should be emphasized that none of the original editors of Cross
Currents was a theologian or cleric; we had no intention of
creating a journal for specialists in religion. At the same time, we
believed that aspiring Christian intellectuals in any field should be
theologically informed. This meant that a given issue might contain both
Yves Congar on true and false reform in the church and a sociologist's
analysis of racism; André Néher on the messiah of Israel and
recommendations for moving "from the economics of avarice to an
economy for mankind"; Simone Weil's "Beyond Personalism"
and a study of African colonialism; Martin Buber on the education of
character and Romano Guardini on Dostoevski's Grand Inquisitor; Karl
Barth's insistence (at the height of the McCarthy period) that the
church should be identified with neither the West nor the East, along
with an essay on Christian conscience in the face of war. Fortunately,
we were correct in assuming that the concerns of our readers were as
wide as those of my co-editors.
There were a growing number of U.S. contributors during the 1960s,
and increased interest in Latin America and liberation theology in the
70s, but despite important articles from a range of Jewish scholars,
prior to 1990 when it became "the Journal of the Association for
Religion and Intellectual Life," Cross Currents reflected
a basically Christian ecumenism. After that point there was not only a
significant Jewish presence, but the board supported the editors'
increased efforts to include Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist writers. But
there are no grounds for complacency -- the dialogue to which the
journal is dedicated has barely begun.
One problem is that the limited financial resources of Cross
Currents allow little possibility for sustained contact with
possible dialogue-partners on other continents, particularly Asia and
Africa. There are also inevitable difficulties in translating the
thought-categories of non-Western traditions into a language that would
be fully understandable in today's North American
intellectual world.
Although there have been important in-depth exchanges -- especially
the extended visits of Buddhist monks to live and pray at U.S.
monasteries and convents -- too much of the academic study of Eastern
religion has been unintentionally condescending. There are an increasing
number of universities that offer scholarly study of Eastern scriptures,
but all too often these religions are treated as museum-pieces, as if
millions of devotees are not practicing them as strenuously -- and
(inevitably) as imperfectly -- as others practice Christianity and
Judaism in the West. Even when there is an awareness of their continuing
vitality, too many teachers, whether believers or not, tend to teach
Eastern religions in terms of strained comparisons with Christianity. As
Raimon Panikkar writes in The Intrareligious Dialogue,
"Western culture constructs a philosophy or religion and considers
it universal" (p. 43). In his forthcoming Gifford lectures, he
even relates this intellectual narrowness with the either/or approach to
issues fostered by superficially understood theistic assumptions that
are unconsciously shared by atheists.
The problem is not bigotry but the premature assumption that we
understand others before we have genuinely listened to them. Few of us
are sufficiently grounded in our own convictions to meet the demands of
Panikkar's inter-religious dialogue, in which we recognize that we will
never understand the position of the other "unless I believe it to
be somewhat true," as Americans we need to reflect on the virtual
absence of significant international dialogue at a time when U.S. power
goes virtually unchallenged. If few mourn the passing of the Soviet
Union as a rival superpower, even fewer seem ready to point out that
even as the U.S. insists on exporting its brand of democracy to other
cultures, it makes virtually no effort to understand them. At major
economic conferences that crucially affect the lives of millions of
women, peasants, and unorganized workers, the "Big 7" make
decisions without hearing from representatives of the world's majority.
In the name of "the new world order" and "free
trade," there is virtually no dialogue with those who will suffer
most by putting such slogans into practice, and little disposition to
recognize that the disparity between rich and poor is rising -- in our
own country as well as the world as a whole.
Why cannot those who would rightly decry the imposition of religious
standards on passing congressional legislation recognize that there now
exists a virtually unchallenged orthodoxy in the way major international
economic policies are reached? Who listens to the angry voices of those
at the bottom of the economic ladder? Poor countries apparently have no
right to complain about the prices at which they are forced to sell
their raw materials or to show that the forced opening of markets can
prevent the indigenous growth of their own economic potential.
The failure of the Republican-controlled Senate to ratify the
test-ban treaty with Russia shocked many, but it is no more arrogantly
nationalistic than our long-standing exploitation of the UN, using
strong-arm methods to force through desired declarations, while simply
ignoring it when we cannot get our own way. (See Ernest Childers'
article, "Empowering the People in their United Nations," in Cross
Currents, Winter 1994-95.) The unwillingness to carry out a serious
plan of disarmament, beginning with the elimination of nuclear arms, and
the rise in our military budget, renders suspect even a humanitarian
employment of U.S. military power. Meanwhile, the instinctive generosity
of ordinary Americans is stifled by a media fixation on scandal and
frivolity: we know a great deal more about O. J. Simpson and Monica
Lewinsky than we do about international responsibility for the horrors
in Rwanda or the rigid terms offered at Rambouillet that made violence
and counterviolence in Kosovo inevitable. How many serious documentaries
have there been on the murderous effects of our sanctions in Iraq or the
squalid conditions of maquiladores just south of the Rio
Grande?
It is not hard to understand the limits on real political dialogue
when the media are increasingly controlled by a handful of powerful men
and our political parties compete primarily for more and more money to
wage campaigns without substance. There is much handshaking and
exploitation of patriotic and religious symbols, but little chance to
hear from ordinary working people, from parents who see the
ineffectiveness of our schools, or from former welfare recipients who
have received little training to help them effectively enter the work
force but still have young children to care for.
The irony is that those who would protest most eloquently against
possible encroachments on the separation of church and state fail to
challenge the de facto establishment of a nationalistic,
quasi-democratic capitalism. It is this unofficial religion that has
justified aggression against any nation that challenges our hegemony,
and using our frightening military power in a way that teaches those we
designate as outlaw nations that might makes right. Is it surprising,
when serious dialogue has been ruled out from the start, that others
pursue dangerous policies with indifference to international law, hoping
to enforce respect by building up whatever arms they can procure?
I have touched too fleetingly on many complex issues and am all too
aware that much criticism of the U.S. is based on simple jealousy. But
precisely because of the unparalleled political and cultural dominance
exercised by our country, we Americans bear an extra measure of
responsibility in insuring that there is real dialogue, that those with
little or no power receive a real hearing. Even with the best
intentions, there is a kind of imperialism in assuming that we know what
economic/cultural/political policies should be followed by countries we
patronizingly refer to as "underdeveloped." Despite all the
rhetoric regarding multiculturalism, such usage smells of a century-old
colonialism: must other countries ape America in order to be considered
"developed"?
Over the past fifty years I have had my narrow assumptions regularly
challenged in Cross Currents. But today when academia, the
media, and most religious groups are officially more tolerant and
multicultural, the danger is that our ability to hear others may be
dulled by our own sense of righteousness. Real dialogue seems harder
than ever just when it is absolutely necessary for any progress toward
peace and justice. Such dialogue is as essential now as it was fifty
years ago, and Cross Currents is still a unique forum for
carrying it on.
Copyright of Cross Currents is the property of
Association for Religion & Intellectual Life and its content may not be copied without
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capabilities of the retrieval software used for access. This content is intended solely
for the use of the individual user. Source: Cross Currents,
Spring/Summer 2000, Vol. 50 Issue 1-2
