Give peace a chance

JERUSALEM

IN THE OLD days of "Saturday Night Live," Chevy Chase mocked television anchors with a weekly SNL Newscast. He always began by saying, "Good evening. I'm Chevy Chase. And you're not." The line reliably drew laughs, needling as it did not only the culture of celebrity, but the universal human tendency to affirm oneself positively by defining someone else negatively.

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In Jerusalem this week, Jews, Christians, and Muslims have gathered to examine the ways their own respective theologies -- "I'm saved, and you're not!" -- have sacralized this habit of negation, making it a source of political denigration, even violence. More accurately, we Jews, Christians, and Muslims are searching our traditions for countering sources of affirmation of the "other," precisely as a way of standing against a global holy war.

This is the 18th International Theological Conference at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a long-established gathering of distinguished Jewish and Christian theologians (founded by Rabbi David Hartman and Harvard Divinity School Dean Emeritus Krister Stendahl), which, some years ago expanded to include Islamic religious thinkers.

This year several dozen men and women are arrayed around one large block of tables, about evenly divided among the three traditions, and among Europeans, Americans, Israelis, Palestinians, and others from the Middle East. Notre Dame, Duke, and the University of Arkansas are here; so are Lund, Haifa, Al Quds, and Bethlehem universities. A leading Catholic authority on Thomas Aquinas is here, together with a Protestant expert on Roger Williams, and a major scholar of Jewish political thought. A foremost Muslim-American scholar is here.

When this three-way seminar began a few years ago, the discussions were braced by the local war between Israel and Palestine. That remains, but now the new threat of a "civilizational" war between Islam and "the West" underscores the relevance of otherwise abstract discussions. But even before the "dialogue" begins, the presence at the table of Muslims from Europe and the United States requires an opening up of stereotypes: Are there no Muslims in "the West"? And what about the Palestinians who are Christian? As each group reexamines its attitude toward "the other," the titles of the formal presentations indicate the range of the week's moral and political reckoning:

 "Catholic Struggles Toward Full Religious Liberty; Appreciating Vatican II."

 "The Earliest Concept of an Islamic State with Non-Muslim Citizens."

 "Beyond Bi-Polarity: Shared Civic Discourse of Jews and Non-Jews."

 "Roger Williams on Civil Rule and the Religiously Other."

 "Building an Islamic Theology of Pluralism: Pre-modern Sources."

 "Ways of Peace in Rabbinic Literature."

Such topics might once have seemed impossibly arcane, but not here; not now. Justice for Palestinians, authentic security for Israel -- the very peace of the world are all at stake in such questions. For every person at the table, any temptation to devotional piety is preempted by the acknowledged fact of history, put succinctly by a rabbi; "Religion has never been a source of tolerance. Again and again we must ask, 'Why has there been all this killing in the name of God?' " Instead of glibly honoring the Christian tradition as a source of peace, a Jesuit salutes the civic tolerance made possible by the French Revolution. A Muslim declares simply that the self-aggrandizing of much contemporary Islamic thought represents "a new idolatry." Speakers from all three traditions admit the gap between the shared ideals of compassionate love and the failures of the past and present. But instead of rejecting the faith because of its failures, the common choice here is to seek -- precisely in the light of political crises -- principles of self-criticism from within the tradition that will yet prompt its transformation. And the self-criticism, crucially, takes place in the presence of the other, which leads both to insight and to honesty.

I have been part of conversations like this for six years, through fluctuations of despair, bitterness, and, more rarely, hope. The habit of negation is hard to shake, and even good intentions come up short. Yet this week something new is happening. The ancient conflicts are now tied to fuses of unprecedented explosiveness, which each participant understands. That, obviously, is why we came. It is why there has, perhaps, never been such a level of honest exchange. Instead of saying, "I'm saved, and you're not," the religious people from long-warring factions, gathered in peace at Hartman's table, are making explicit to one another the urgent new fact of the human condition: If all are not saved, no one is.

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.