The other week, I was talking with a friend of mine who is pastor of an evangelical congregation in Texas.

He was asking for my input on a multi-week series comparing different “world religions” with Christianity at his church.

Numerous, well-meaning pastors, lay leaders, and teachers like my friend have led such comparative studies in their own communities as a means to help Christians navigate contemporary religious pluralism. I even led a few of my own in my early days. While most of the leaders of these studies start with the intention to help their parishioners learn more about the world's religions, the way they go about it usually leads to nominally increased religious literacy. Even worse, these studies can exacerbate pre-existing prejudices or presuppositions about the religions they set out to better understand.

Which raises the question of whether there is any promise to comparing things like Christianity and Islam, the Quran and the Bible at all. The problem, I suggest, might lie in the very act of comparison itself.

‘I’ve seen you’, she said.

‘I’ve seen your work and I’ve got some things to say about it’.

This was how my interview with Khadija started in the back of a quiet café in downtown Newark, near Rutgers University. A local artist, Khadija is a Puerto Rican convert to Islam and the mother of a son killed by gang violence. In the café, she sits across from me with a mug clutched in her hands. She radiates energy and warmth, wrapped in layers of vibrant, colorful clothing. Setting her coffee cup down, she looks me directly in the eyes and said, ‘My husband said about you, “Oh, he’s probably just another crazy missionary trying to convert us”. And I said, “Ok, let’s see who this crazy person is”. And then we listened to your sermons for hours. I’m grateful that you’re here, to interview me, to talk to us, to help tell our story. That way, they can know we are just like anybody else, it just happens that we speak Spanish and we are Muslim’.

Khadija’s exchange with me– an ordained Lutheran pastor, theologian, and ethnographer – was marked by an array of intersecting identities and experiences. While our encounter was one where my work in the pulpit opened up a conversation, there was the latent possibility that my work could have harmed Khadija, stalled or stopped the conversation, or caused some other insurmountable issue in the midst of my research in the neighborhood where she lives, works, and prays. Over several years of ethnographic fieldwork, my relationship with Muslims, like Khadija, has not only brought insight in my academic research, but also influenced my theology and work in inter-religious engagement.

This, in turn, raised questions about the relation between ethnography and theology and what role ethnographic encounter might play in the dialogue and encounter between religions.

In this essay, I review and analyze three books:

Tastes of the Divine: Hindu and Christian Theologies of Emotion, by Michelle Voss Roberts
Untouchable Bodies, Resistance, and Liberation: a Comparative Theology of Divine Possessions, by Joshua Samuel
Theologising with the Sacred ‘Prostitutes’ of South India: Towards an Indecent Dalit Theology, by Eve Rebecca Parker

Each compares Christian and Hindu traditions in South Asian context. I examine them in order to address two interrelated questions:

are we beginning to see an ethnographic turn in comparative theology?
if so, what might that mean for both ethnographic theology and comparative theology?

The result, I hope, are some fresh reflections on ethnographic and comparative theology that will better serve a world increasingly marked by diversity, difference, and interreligious encounters. Encounters not unlike the one where Khadija ‘saw me’ and I, in turn, came to ‘see her’ and walk away marked, changed, and seeing my own theology and sociality in a new way through the process.

Thank you, to the editors at the journal Ecclesial Practices, especially Editor-in-Chief Henk de Roest. I appreciated their attention to detail through this process and the anonymous reviewers helpful feedback. I would also like to thank members of the “Ecclesial Practices Unit” at the American Academy of Religion, who encouraged me to pursue this project.

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