Mysticism, Experience, and Pedagogy in Jewish-Christian Dialogue

During several preliminary conversations, we recognized the lack of scholarly attention to mysticism and liturgical embodiment as a dialogic medium of communication and as a means to address and heal historic trauma.4 We also noted the richness and creativity in recent European, American, and Israeli scholarly collaborations exploring confluences and interactions between Jews and Christians throughout history.5 Our recent experimental college seminar at Wake Forest University, REL395: Seminar in Jewish-Christian Relations, constituted our effort to bring these two observations to bear on each other by developing a pedagogy, syllabus, and theory that could open new horizons of understanding and communication without diminishing the fluidity of mystical speech and cognition on one hand or interfaith academic work on the other. [...]our teaching engaged physical rituals, sensory experiences and meditative practices in addition to introspective and imaginative readings of mystical texts. If students were to understand mysticism as the promise of "stepping out" of debilitating signification, we posited, they needed as much an entry to mysticism that did not distance it from them as a conventionally objectified subject of study, the butterfly pinned to the board.15 Consequently, we did not dwell principally on the historiography-only briefly summarizing but not extensively chronicling transmission of mystical texts and concepts nor grieving the loss or marginalization of mystical discourse and practice-but intentionally included assignments intended to offer an experience of the mystics' practices, including elements such as silent walking meditation. See, inter alia, Bernard McGinn's magisterial four volume study, The Presence of God: A History of Western Mysticism (New York: Crossrroad, 1991-present); for an ecumenical entry into experiencecentered dialogue which also includes Islam, see Moshe Idel and Bernard McGinn, editors, Mystical Union and Monotheistic Faith: An Ecumenical Dialogue (New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1989); on questions of aesthetics and religious experience, see Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), and Andrew Vogel Ettin, The Service of Beauty.