Ever since John Locke argued that religion was essentially a “private search” and must be radically excluded from political life, we have prided ourselves in the West on the separation of church and state. John Esposito, of course, has famously ignored this shibboleth. In the past, students were not content to acquire a purely academic understanding of their faith; their aim was not to earn a doctorate or a professorship. Instead, they expected to be spiritually transformed by their studies—an experience that propelled them out of the classroom and back into the mundane, messy, and tragic world of politics. This essay traces this theme in Indian and Chinese traditions as well as in the three monotheistic faiths. All insist that poverty, inequity, cruelty, and exploitation are matters of sacred import and that after achieving Enlightenment one must, as the Buddha insisted, “return to the marketplace” and work practically and creatively to heal the suffering of humanity—a message that is sorely needed in our tragically broken world.
Beyond repair: Staying with breakdown at the interstices