Berkley Center

Background: In this exchange on July 23, 2012 in London, Fr. Damian Howard, S.J., and Colin Steele discussed culture and globalization. Fr. Howard explained his critique of liberalism and also elaborated on his work in areas foreign to Christianity and Western culture. The two also discussed the European integration movement and the state of the Catholic Church in England.

Describe your vocation as a Jesuit.

I joined the Jesuits in 1990 because the order had a great reputation in terms of its spirituality, its diversity of works, and its overall energy. I liked the idea of living Ignatian spirituality, and I was drawn to the ministry, community, and variety of apostolic options that are the hallmarks of Jesuit life. Since joining, I’ve travelled to a range of countries in Europe, South America, the Caribbean, North Africa, and the Middle East. Currently, I’m working as a lecturer in Heythrop College (the Jesuit college within the University of London), focusing on Muslim-Christian relations.

You’ve been sent to a lot of places and you teach an inherently cross-cultural subject. What does travelling teach you about coming into contact with other cultures?

Living elsewhere is self-relativizing. The old cliché about other cultures being the best mirror of one’s own is true; living amongst other people and learning how to adjust to them and their ways forces you to become conscious of culture in ways that you’re not at home, and from there you quickly get into self-critique of the ingrained suppositions you didn’t even realize you operate with. You begin to learn that your way of living is not the only way—nor the only valid way. In some sense, you can’t really go home again: if you’ve lived authentically somewhere else, that place becomes a part of you and you realize you don’t fit neatly into either where you came from or where you’ve been.

As a Jesuit, I bring some extra perspectives and presuppositions to the project of inculturation or inter-culturalism. A central tenet of the Ignatian worldview is “finding God in all things”—assuming that God is in fact present and at work in all people and places. This means that we have to work to see the ways in which God is expressed in people and places that are different or even seem frightening to us. That precept commits one to a certain amount of effort at inculturation; if we find things off-putting at first, we can’t just retreat, since we know that God is there somewhere and we are called to seek Him out.

Another fundamental paradigm Jesuits bring to the table is a conception of cultures as fundamentally coherent wholes, not just a mass of titillating otherness. As with finding God in all things, this means that we can’t give up on, write off, or dismiss other cultures with caricatures. We have to look for parallels to what we know in what we don’t; even if you can’t be a Muslim and a Christian at the same time, we do have to figure out how to live together. Getting to know someone else’s world and entering authentically into it takes a lot of work, but that’s necessary to get over one’s own prejudices and not only process but actively seek out the aspects of the Other that are surprising and challenging. I’d add that a daily examen really helps with that process, as it gives one time to take note of the surprising things that happened in one’s encounter with the other, the things that didn’t quite fit into the picture I had worked out for myself. That’s when I learn.

One of the original missions of the Jesuits (which is still present today) is Ignatius’s charge “to help souls.” How do you go about doing that in places that are very foreign and that may not wish to convert to a different faith?

Humility helps a lot with that: you’re not going to be helping souls on Day One, almost certainly not in Week One, and perhaps not even in Month One. (Clearly, you can be a positive addition to society and a good guest from Day One, but you’re unlikely to feel like you’re really “helping souls.”) Not until you know the culture fully enough to operate effectively within it will you stand a chance of tangibly helping souls. Both in the learning process and the helping process, discernment of spirits is a key tool. You’ve got to do a lot of what I call “discerning listening”—listening in a deep way that invites sharing of culture. Along the way, you’ll learn to hear what people are really saying in the words they’re saying, and from then you’ll be able to begin helping them discern better on their own.

All the time, too, you have to keep in mind that all humans are similar on a spiritual level: there is a universal action of the Spirit that all of us are trying to access and express in our own ways. That’s communicable even across faiths and cultures, and attempting to do so often teaches one important lessons about one’s own faith. As a Christian, too, I always work with reference to the fact that Christ is the ultimate answer of my tradition to the questions of the spirit. That doesn’t rule out interacting with others; rather, it forces me to consider how they are configured to the Christian truth in ways that I can (and sometimes can’t) understand. The first step for me towards being better at working with different faiths is to be a better Christian. And as I say, that process—especially when conducted in dialogue with people of other faiths—hones my self-critique, as well. I’m motivated to work for real justice, but I’m likewise more prepared to see and acknowledge the faults and failings of the liberal tradition that forms the basis of so much of Western culture (including my own).

Could you explain your critique of liberalism in a bit more detail?

For one thing, the liberal tradition posits individual liberty as one of its highest values, yet when there is a sincere cultural disagreement amongst individuals or groups, the system tends to come down on one side or the other. Gay marriage is a perfect example; liberalism wants to protect and celebrate individual liberty, but it also wants to assume a normative progress towards the legalization of gay marriage. I’m not so sure you can have it both ways. Liberal culture embraces a notion of progress, which can also distort our perceptions, making us see the world in an oddly black-and-white way. We tend to think, “We liberal democracies treat women with liberty and dignity, whereas those backward Islamic regimes don’t.” In reality, women are better represented in the Pakistani Parliament than the U.S. Congress! And the universal availability of pornography via the Internet does not do much to promote the dignity of women.

I am not denying that there are issues with the way women are treated in some non-Western cultures, but the situation is far more nuanced than our self-image wants to admit. I’d say that’s one of the liberal tendencies I have the most difficulty with: the ingrained assumption that we’re one or two little, obvious reforms or tweaks away from perfection. In fact, I don’t believe we’re going to see perfection realized on this earth, so we have to learn how to deal with messiness. Our desire to coerce others into realizing what our vision of the perfect society looks like can get violent, too. Our liberal democracies have been to war something like four times in the last couple of decades.

Given that we’re in the U.K., which is part of the Europeanization project but physically and culturally distanced from it in some important ways, how would you describe U.K. attitudes towards the EU and European integration?

Catholics (myself included) have on the whole been in favor of increasing integration. In fact, Europeanization was originally a Catholic project, born from the minds of the post-war Catholic elite and deeply informed and inspired by Catholic social teaching. After two world wars within a few decades of each other, the post-war leaders knew they needed and wanted to create a radically new system that would prevent Germany and France ever going to war again by drawing them into a co-dependent relationship with each other. It was a little Marxist in its execution in some ways, assuming that you start by changing the material situation and that the political and identity issues will simply fall into place afterwards, but the project is profoundly Catholic in vision. (Ever notice that the EU flag is the crown of Mary?) It took an important turn in the 1980s with [German Chancellor Helmut] Kohl and [French President François] Mitterrand, and the euro itself was essentially the price Germany had to pay for reunification. These days, with the U.K. still outside the euro and the EU itself showing some cracks, British Catholics might still more pro-integration than Protestants on the whole, but the EU certainly isn’t at its most attractive right now. Still, only very few really want to see it go.

Speaking of British Catholics, could you give me a snapshot of the Church and its flock in England right now? Frankly, I’ve been surprised to find it as vibrant as it seems.

We’ve undergone a huge shift in the last 15 years or so from being basically a church of Irish immigrants and their descendants to a very diversified, multi-national, multi-racial one. In fact, the Catholic Church is now the largest religious group in London. The leadership of the Church is usually rather slow to adapt and I think it’s fair to say that we haven’t always kept up with the pace of change. I’m the only Catholic theologian in the country working on Muslim-Christian relations, for example, and many Catholics do not necessarily see that relationship as worthy of cultivating. That’s going to have to change in such a diverse Church and in such a diverse city.