By Ryan Singleton, DisciplesWorld contributing writer

CHICAGO (04/14/09) — How do culture and theology intersect? Students at the Disciples Divinity House of the University of Chicago will have the opportunity next week to hear from leading thinkers on the subject, thanks to two of the house's doctoral students.

On April 22-23, the University of Chicago Divinity School will host “Culturing Theologies, Theologizing Cultures: Exploring the Worlds of Religion,” the divinity school's 2009 D. R. Sharpe Lectures. The William Henry Hoover Lectures of the Disciples Divinity House (DDH) are one of the event's co-sponsors.

“This conference will bring together scholars and practitioners to re-examine the role and value of culture in theological reflection and the role and value of theology in cultural reflection,” said Kristine Culp, dean of DDH.

The study of the intersection of theology and culture has been a long-time focus of the university, Culp said, dating “back to the early ‘Chicago School,’ which included DDH dean and philosopher of religion, Edward Scribner Ames, and includes the contributions of mid-twentieth century Chicago theologians Paul Tillich and Langdon Gilkey," Culp noted.

"It seems fitting that two current Theology PhD candidates and Disciples Divinity House Scholars, Garry Sparks and Chris Dorsey, have picked up this conversation in organizing the conference,” Culp said.

For Sparks, this series of lectures represents an important shift in rhetoric from the question of “if” to “how.”

“It’s not whether or not ‘if’ theology…is inherently interdisciplinary but rather ‘how.’” Sparks said. “This ‘how’ can’t only be answered by theologians…but must occur within active cross-disciplinary participation, humility, and availability to and with those disciplines.”

The Sharpe-Hoover Lectures will bring together Webb Keane, anthropologist at the University of Michigan; Larry Bouchard, professor at the University of Virginia and DDH Board president; Jean Comaroff and Robin Shoaps, anthropologists at the University of Chicago; Robert Franklin, Morehouse College president and social ethicist; and Souleymane Bachir Diagne, philosopher at Columbia University.

Kathryn Tanner and William Schweiker, both professors at the University of Chicago Divinity School, will give the conference's opening and closing lectures, respectively.

The goal of the conference is not only to achieve mutual, interdisciplinary conversations but to foster intercultural discourse, as well. Sparks said he believes that if modern scholarship requires theology to take into concern other disciplines and theoretical positions, then those fields of study and approaches ought to consider theology with equal concern and attention.

At the center of Bouchard’s lecture will be Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner’s "Homebody/Kabul," which “confronts the ethics of knowledge, corruption, and compassion,” according to Bouchard.

The play takes place in the early 1990s, detailing the story of a “lonely and overmedicated British housewife — a ‘homebody’ — falling under the spell of an out-of-date travel guide for Afghanistan,” according to an NPR review in 2001, shortly before the production was set to open. The play “is meant to cast an equally critical eye on the political and social chaos in Afghanistan, and its relationship to the West — and about trying to escape unhappiness by seeking out ‘otherness.’”

Bouchard will use this work as a tangible conversation piece in order to explore the “ethical gains and losses we entail in such encounters: does knowing — even knowing as loving — entail moral loss insofar as it risks objectifying (or subjectifying) others? How should we think about such loss in relation to loving one another?”

DDH established the Hoover Lectures in 1948 “to encourage a vital discussion of Christian unity,” Culp said. “Today the conversation has widened to include inter-religious perspectives. The lectures explore the issues with which Christians wrestle as they seek to understand and share life before God in the midst of the whole, interconnected world."

”Given that religions arise out of cultural contexts and subsequently affect those contexts, religion and culture share a historical, mutual relationship," Sparks said. However, “it has only been within the past 100-plus years that we have developed the conceptual tools by which to critically reflect on ‘culture’ — socio-cultural anthropology is a relatively new science,” he said.

“This, then, is inverted when addressed to those in the other disciplines: if theology should now take into explicit concern ethnographic, linguistic, critical theoretical (literary, post-colonial, feminist, Queer, etc.), etc., should these other disciplines do the same in regard to theology and their respective increased concern and attention on studying the religious dimension of culture and peoples?”

According to Culp, past Hoover Lecture series have explored ‘The Civil Rights Movement as an Ecumenical and Interfaith Movement’ and ‘Humanity Before God: Contemporary Faces of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Ethics.’ “ In 2005, the series examined religion and the arts.

Previous Hoover lecturers include Taylor Branch, James Cone, John Cobb, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, James Gustafson, Vincent Harding, Ronne Hartfield, Beverly Wildung Harrison, Mark Jarman, Bernard McGinn, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Bernice Johnson Reagon, according to DDH’s website.