On Academia and Empathy

Dianne M. Stewart, MDiv ’93, is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Emory University. Her research focuses on African heritage religious cultures in the Caribbean and the Americas. She credits her multireligious teaching and learning with being transformative. “Exploring multiple religions—acquiring substantive understanding of more than one tradition—can open the door to empathy,” says Stewart. She spoke with HDS about her education and her recent receipt of a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.  

What led you to HDS as a student? 

Growing up, religion intrigued me. I attended Catholic schools from ages 6 to 18, and many of my classmates’ families had immigrated to the U.S. from Italy and Ireland. I would attend friends’ birthday parties and would see statues of Catholic saints with small dishes of food offerings at their feet during the Lenten season. Some even practiced mild flagellation to share in Jesus’s sufferings. Even at that young age, I was fascinated by people’s religious practices and noticed incongruencies between institutional religion and what we describe in religious studies as “lived religion.”  

I entered college at Colgate University passionate about literature, and I majored in English. However, I often enrolled in religion courses, including a semester abroad in Central America to study Latin American feminist theology. I took five classes with Josiah Young, who introduced me to the scholarship of James Cone, a founding figure in Black liberation theology. Cone’s focus on Black experience, human suffering, and theological imagination inspired my curiosity about Black religious cultures. I realized too that I aspired to write in a register different than what English departments then expected. They championed the intensification of abstract theorizing about the human condition, but I appreciated the study of literature for other reasons. I decided to pursue further study in religion. HDS was on my list of potential institutions; when I visited, I thoroughly enjoyed my experience.  

How has your HDS education made a difference in your scholarship and teaching? 

I had a well-rounded, expansive education at HDS. I studied with excellent professors such as Margaret Miles (the first woman granted tenure at HDS, in 1985), David Hall, Bernadette Brooten, Richard Niebuhr, Gordon Kaufman, and John Carman. I also learned from amazing scholars in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program: Inés Talamantez, Jean Humez, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, Frances Foster, Teresia Hinga, and Hyun-Kyung Chung. The depth and breadth of my education at HDS taught me to embrace conceptual and methodological tools across subfields in religious studies and cognate fields. The curriculum grounded me in the study of religion and its varied methods.  

Harvard also enhanced my studies of African religions and philosophy. Having access to such resources helped me build competency in what I later called “Africana religious studies.”  

How do a multireligious education and an appreciation of pluralism make a difference in the world? 

Religion shapes how individuals and societies navigate life stages, challenges, and opportunities. It also influences how they engage neighbors and enemies interpersonally and publicly in political, national, and international contexts. Literacy in multiple religious traditions allows a deeper understanding of one’s own tradition because surviving our environment requires comparison. We are naturally comparativists. As we learn about a different culture or religion, we measure new information against beliefs and practices vital to our identity, which forces us to contend with what we do and don’t believe. Religious pluralism teaches us to understand how efficacy and fulfillment are experienced through connection to forces beyond human control, and it offers opportunities to reckon with the limitations of human knowledge and culture.  

Such informed introspection can provide an aperture to empathetic ways of relating to others. I think pluralism teaches us that religion is a language that conveys human commonalities and differences we can learn to appreciate.  

You have studied with paradigm-shifting scholars, such as Delores Williams, WSRP ’81, and James Cone. How have they, and others, inspired your work? 

I recently wrote an intellectual biography of Delores Williams for T&T Clark’s forthcoming Handbook of Modern Theology. I note that academics have given significant attention—rightly so—to scholars doing important work in Black maternal studies: Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Joy James. Their scholarship has transformed the field of Black studies and shifted our theorization on the rise of the modern world. Williams was part of that transformation. What these scholars have done in the fields of English, history, and philosophy Williams did in the theological context. Her work has shaped my scholarship and influenced my creation of the concept of “motherness” to describe the principles of sociality and practices of care spiritual mothers uphold in the Orisa and other African religious traditions.  

James Cone showed me a new method for conducting theological research. His scholarship was informed by Black history, culture, and experience. Although he was a strict theologian, Cone actually inspired me to do historical and ethnographic research so I could understand the history, culture, and experiences of people who rarely leave behind written records because their theology and religion are primarily embodied in quotidian practices and ritual life. I took this method to heart and applied it in my work on Caribbean communities—specifically in Jamaica, my natal home. Like Cone, I wanted to interpret the Black religious imagination while remaining “accountable to the history and culture of my people” (Cone), especially their understudied yet salient African religio-cultural heritages.