Breaking barriers

While some interpretations of religion may entrench believers, John Sheveland seeks strategies to break down barriers to help people see each other as part of the same body.

Sheveland guides Gonzaga University juniors in a class on inter-religious dialogue to help understand today’s religious-based violence in light of Christian and Buddhist thought.

He focuses on the two faiths as examples of how religions address problems and offer solutions.

From doctoral studies in theological anthropology at Boston College, focused on comparing classical Christian and Hindu authors, Sheveland has a background in inter-religious dialogue related to many faiths.

“In Catholic thought we use relational anthropology, noting that religion is not just individual but that individuals live profoundly in relationship,” he says.

“It’s a communitarian construct. Human beings are social animals who are meant to be in relationship with God and with neighbors.

“In the Catholic church we often use the word ‘solidarity’ related to justice,” Sheveland adds. “Solidarity asks for deeply empathetic identification with others, especially victims of injustice.”

Solidarity is based on understanding that the whole community is degraded if one person is degraded, he says.

“Empathy is more than sympathy,” says Sheveland. “It means we identify with the other. It means your experience as a victim is my experience.

“There is also ownership of one’s complicity in injustice, which gives tools for acting to remove the injustice.”

After a childhood in Los Angeles, Sheveland moved with his family to Portland for his junior high through college years, majoring in history at the University of Portland.

A freshman class in world religions changed his direction, so after graduation he went on to study for a master’s degree, which he completed in 1999 at Yale Divinity School in Hartford, Conn.

Sheveland worked for three semesters at Mount St. Mary’s College in Los Angeles before he came to GU as an assistant professor in religious studies in September 2006.

Of the 60 junior students he has taught in three semesters, one was Buddhist.

“We focus on one faith, Buddhism, in order to go into it in more depth than would happen in an overview of several religions,” Sheveland explains.

Discussions wrestle with how to respond to religious extremism that leads to violence or hatred.

“Islam, for example, means ‘peace,’ ” he says. “It is not an inherently violent faith. Muslim extremists distort Islam.

“We also look at Jewish extremism that leads to violence and at Christians who might think their religion calls them to bomb abortion clinics.

“For those on the religious fringes, hate and violence are part of their identity. They have a distinct ideology. Every world religion has such faulty expressions.”

Even among Buddhists, Sheveland says, there were Japanese Zen Buddhist samurai warriors who tied their ideology to their religion.

He observes that for fundamentalists of any faith, their religion is a security blanket.

“What extremists believe and do is not a product of their religion, but of their psychological makeup,” Sheveland says.

When they tie their religion to an ideology, others may be drawn in or be complicit in their actions – as many Catholic and Protestants were in “superimposing the cross over the swastika,” literally and figuratively, in Nazi Germany.

“Ideologies co-opt religion,” says Sheveland. “So people became convinced that Jews were the reason Germany lost World War I, or for the economy tanking.”

Both Christianity and Buddhism offer correctives that can counter such complicity, he says.

The Christian understanding of the body of Christ and the Buddhist understanding of true love and compassion can help believers understand people outside as well as inside their faith communities, Sheveland says.

“The notion of the body of Christ is prophetic at this moment in our society when some count and others don’t, when some are marginalized and some are doing well,” he says.

“Jesus was concerned about the poor, those disenfranchised by the power structures and hierarchies.”

Understanding that the body of Christ includes everyone, Sheveland says, can change how people view each other.

Similarly, he says, the Buddhist concept of loving compassion can help people transcend bias and prejudice, learning to love beyond the boundaries humans erect.

Sheveland, who attends St. Aloysius and St. Peter’s parishes in Spokane, also teaches an upper division class on Buddhism.

Next semester, he will teach a graduate class on theological anthropology of Christianity, dealing with “understanding the human person as a creature of God, forgiven in Christ, belonging to Christ and seen as Christ.”