Cross-Cultural Religious Literacy:
You, The OTHER, and What Can Do Together

There is you, the other, and what you do together. Cross-cultural religious literacy wrestles with a basic question: if  solving our common, global, challenges require us to engage with people who do not believe like we do, then what is the framework of engagement? How do we think about engagement? What are the skills of engagement?

This framework of engagement suggests 3 competencies (how to think) and 3 skills (what to do) that can be used in any context, such that mutual respect and trust are built, across the dignity of deep difference, while taking on our global challenges.

Author: Chris Seiple, Dennis R. Hoover, dan W. Christopher Stewart

Editor: Daniel Adipranata
Interior design: Rycko Indrawan S.
Cover design: Rycko Indrawan S.

Publisher: Perkumpulan Institut Leimena, 2022

ISBN: 978-602-61538-7-6

Length: 82 pages

Cross-Cultural Religious Literacy:
Islam – The Personal Competency

Having “personal competency” means understanding our own moral, epistemological and spiritual framework, by understanding the texts of the scriptures and the traditions of our own religion, and also paying attention to what is written regarding participation with other religions. This also includes understanding why and how our character develops and deepens. As said before, the old religious literacy literature often does not emphasize the role of our ‘self’ as a starting point, sometimes even the subject of ‘self’ is not mentioned at all. Lenn Goodman (2014, 1, 3,) found that self-knowledge is essential for authentic dialogue and participation.

Successful dialogue requires us to know who we are, what we believe and care about, and that the so-called other people are indeed other people (different from us). Without the discipline of self-knowledge to deepen our curiosity, our interests collapse into mere approximation and conjecture… The self-knowledge required by pluralism is difficult to attain. This means trying to be at peace with oneself, reconcile the idea that what we inherit with our personal views and insights into being, and integrating oneself in a community even when one differentiates oneself from it. In any peaceful society, pluralism requires at least some tolerance. Religious tolerance does not mean equalizing all things. Pluralism protects differences. What it needs are respect and appreciation.

Author: Alwi Shihab, M. Amin Abdullah

Editor: Daniel Adipranata
Interior design: Rycko Indrawan S.
Cover design: Rycko Indrawan S.

Publisher: Perkumpulan Institut Leimena, 2022

ISBN: 978-623-88255-0-9

Length: 32 pages

Cross-Cultural Religious Literacy:
The Comparative Competency

Having “comparative competency” means we have to understand the moral, epistemological, and spiritual framework of our neighbor (another religion), as they understand it, and what that religion says about interreligious relations. This dimension of religious literacy includes various topics that are usually discussed in religion majors on comparative religion studies. However, we must also emphasize how important it is to develop an understanding of the religion that is lived by people of other religions, in other places. In other words, what is the threshold in the moral framework of others that allows a person to belong to a particular group and/or place? As we ask this question, we must note that things that do matter in one’s way of faith do not necessarily consist precisely in the official doctrine of that religion.

Author:  Chris Seiple, Henriette Hutabarat Lebang, David Rosen, David
Saperstein, dan Ari Gordon

Editor: Daniel Adipranata
Interior design: Rycko Indrawan S.
Cover design: Rycko Indrawan S.

Publisher: Perkumpulan Institut Leimena, 2022

ISBN: 978-602-61538-8-3

Length: 46 pages

Cross-Cultural Religious Literacy:
Collaborative Competency

“Collaborative competency” refers to knowledge of a particular place where two or more different moral frameworks, usually from different religions, meet as two individuals/institutions that share and try to fulfill the same goal. Collaborative competency means that we understand the spiritual, ethnic and/or organizational culture that is relevant to developing and implementing a joint project or program. Collaborative competency occurs when different individuals/institutions move from tolerance side by side (diversity), to awareness of self and others, and finally reach the stage of mutual participation (which is the heart of peaceful pluralism). When crossing into other people’s contexts, we must always respect the realities of living in a particular place, also placing collaborations and projects resulting in the spiritual, secular, ethnic, and organizational culture of our comrades, while acknowledging the power dynamics that exist.

This is applied when we make a prepared movement against another group of people. And the moment when we cross over to approach other people, requires more than just an engagement, it also requires leadership, because both parties have to establish common goals that accomplish the task at hand, and also to approach various government and civil society officials (which some, if not most of them are religious institutions).

Author:  Chris Seiple

Editor: Daniel Adipranata
Interior design: Rycko Indrawan S.
Cover design: Rycko Indrawan S.

Publisher: Perkumpulan Institut Leimena, 2022

ISBN: 978-602-61538-9-0

Length: 16 pages