SEMINARIANS should get out more and find out what other faiths believe, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim leaders were told this week.
Research carried out by Dr Edward Kessler and Sheikh Michael Mumisa suggests that seminaries in all three faiths fail to teach their students about other faiths. This left them ill-equipped to act as leaders in modern multifaith Britain. The research was unveiled as a meeting in Westminster on Tuesday, hosted by the MP John Battle, former adviser to Tony Blair on religion.
“There is an inability at the heart of our seminaries to teach seminarians how to lead in a multi-cultural society.” It was a question of asking each faith what it would like the other faiths to know about it. “It is not rocket science, and frankly it is not being done”, he said.
Sheikh Mumisa said that Islamic and Jewish seminaries taught a centuries-old curriculum that called for a very close reading of medieval texts in their original languages, which left little time for the study of other faiths. They also showed little interest in doing so. Dr Kessler said that some Christian seminaries claimed to teach Judaism because they taught the Old Testament.
The report, The Training of Religious Leaders in the UK: A survey of Jewish, Christian and Muslim seminaries is published by Dr Kessler’s Woolf Institute of Abrahamic Faiths in Cambridge. The report also found that some seminaries could not make overtures to the other faiths because they were funded from Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. Those that did speak about other faiths did so in the context of Islamic jurisprudence or polemics.
Christian seminaries were better in theory, the report said. But they often failed to deliver in practice, because of pressure to teach a core timetable that left little time for other faiths. Those that did offer such modules made them voluntary, and they were poorly attended.
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