The Greening of Interreligious Dialogue between Christianity and Buddhism for Flourishing of the Oppressed Others: Particularly Focusing on Sallie McFague's Embodiment Theology and Joanna Macy's Engaged Buddhology
This dissertation focuses on the issue of the reconstruction of our interreligious dialogue between Christianity and Buddhism from an ecological feminist perspective. The new reconstructive work in our time is to cope with the unprecedented challenges presented by our postmodern sense of reality as interconnected and by the possibility of a massive ecological destruction. These new challenges to the religious discourse result from liberative, dialogical/pluralistic and ecological movements in our time. The core of the reconstructive work in religious discourse relies on how thoughtfully we treat Others as subjects. The interreligious pluralists have dealt with religious Others, and now have begun to include poor Others and nonhuman Others. However, the issue of gendered Others still remains as terra incognita within interreligious discourse. This dissertation aims at relocating religious Others, gendered Others and nonhuman Others within our religious discourse.
The exemplars of my research are Sallie McFague (a Christian ecofeminist) and Joanna Macy (an engaged Buddhist). McFague's reconstructive work is based on the practical dialogue among Christianity, feminism and ecology. She tries to “re-mythologize” the God-world relationship from women's “embodied” knowledge, eventually seeing God as mother, lover and friend and the world as God's body.
In the face of massive social suffering and ecological devastation, Joanna Macy insists on the “new turning of the Dharma” in the socio-political sense. Through dialogue between the Buddha's Dependent Co-arising and the general systems theory of postmodern science, Macy tries to reveal the liberative and engaging characteristics of the Dharma for the sake of personal and social transformation. Her most creative works lie in her eco-practices, which link the feelings of despair and powerlessness for the sake of solidarity with oppressed human Others and nonhuman Others, empowering Buddhists' engagement in social activism.
McFague's and Macy's works have shown the necessity of a planetary agenda for the flourishing of all beings, collegial work with Others, a feminist vision of a new global community structured in a non-hierarchical, cooperative and ecological way. Contrary to logocentric and doctrinal dialogue, McFague and Macy claim that our religious discourse must be a liberative and engaging practice for the suffering Others, beyond mere tolerance of the differences of Others.
