Interfaith or inter-nihilism?
August Gathering at The Threshold
We began our meetings at The Threshold with Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited, and June’s conversation — facilitated by Rabbi Victor Gross — was quite rich. It sparked something further: Marvin Lee Anderson, PhD, wrote a paper digging deeper into Thurman, exploring how his grandmother shaped his Christian worldview, and how the origins of Jesus had been reframed in the image of white men in power. That paper carried us through July’s gathering.
Now, for August, Victor introduces us to a new voice — one of the essential religious thinkers of the twentieth century. Here, in his own words, is his invitation:
An Invitation: Reading Abraham Joshua Heschel’s “No Religion Is an Island”
In 1965, Heschel delivered his inaugural address as the first non-Christian member of the faculty at Union Theological Seminary in New York. It was one of the quietly radical statements of interfaith thought to come out of the twentieth century. Its opening line still lands with force: No religion is an island. We are, he insisted, all involved with one another. What happens to one faith community happens, in some measure, to all.
That wasn’t an easy thing to say in 1965. It isn’t an easy thing to hear today, either — which is exactly why it’s worth reading, and discussing, together.
Heschel wasn’t offering polite ecumenical niceties. He was making a serious theological argument: that a tradition can hold to its own truth without treating another’s as a threat, that isolation is not the same thing as integrity, and that indifference to other faiths is itself a theological failure. He wrote as someone who had lost family in the Holocaust, who had fled Nazi Europe — who understood, in ways few of us have had to, what happens when religious communities turn their backs on one another.
Heschel leaves us with some hard questions:
Can we hold our own tradition seriously while genuinely respecting someone else’s?
Where is the line between religious conviction and religious contempt?
What do we owe each other across lines of faith — not as an abstract ideal, but as a practical matter of how we live?
In this same lecture, Heschel warned that the alternative to interfaith engagement was “inter-nihilism.” We’ll sit with that phrase together — what it might mean for the state of religion, and of our moral universe, today. We’ll also trace how Heschel links theology to ethics in confronting contempt for the other, and ask: does that same moral urgency still hold for us now?
You can read the lecture here: https://utsnyc.edu/wp-content/uploads/Heschels-No-Religion-is-an-Island.pdf
We still live with the question Heschel posed six decades ago — how different communities can stand alongside one another. Join us as we take it up together on Thursday, August 27 at 2 pm, MT.
 | A guest post by
|