World leading exponent on Reconciliation gives Temple Lecture in Muslim College - 29/6/2010
When Anjum Anwar and Canon Chris Chivers gave a paper recently at an international conference on reconciliation held in Cape Town they met Professor Bjorn Krondorfer, Professor of Religious Studies at the Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies St. Mary’s College of Maryland, USA.
They had both heard of Professor Krondorfer’s ground-breaking work to bring the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors into dialogue with the grandchildren of Nazis, and expressed the hope that the professor might be able to come to Blackburn.
An opportunity arose when Professor Krondorfer found himself attending a gathering of Holocaust scholars in London and thus, on 29 June, he was able to travel to Blackburn.
Taking The Future of Memory: Reconciling Past Hurts and Present Conflicts as his topic, Professor
Krondorfer gave a masterly introduction to the exacting work of reconciliation that he has modelled in different contexts.
Courageously, using the ambiguities of his own story as a native German, he took a Christian-Muslim audience straight to the heart of the most difficult, long-lasting and far-reaching of conflicts – that in Israel-Palestine – the very conflict most likely to spark the sharpest of debates across Lancashire’s divides, for instance.
Probing what he called a ‘two-hundred-year present’ – the past, present and future each person embraces within their own life-story and experience – he outlined principles for reconciliation which he illustrated using the Middle-Eastern context as his main case-study, a context in which he has sought to advance and fashion a working methodology through moderating a group of Israelis and Palestinians who meet each summer to face the difficult questions that divide their communities.
Inevitably this produced sustained questions from the audience of mostly under-twenties.
But what was most remarkable about the evening was the venue for the lecture itself.
The Bishop of Blackburn, for whom the Temple Lectures represent an important extension of the teaching ministry symbolised by his ‘cathedra’ had graciously given permission for this lecture to be given not in the cathedral – as have all the previous Temple Lectures – but in the Muslim College in Moss Street, Blackburn, and the college’s principal had equally graciously agreed.
exChange has worked very closely with the college over a number of years, and many of the students – preparing for leadership roles as scholars in the Muslim community, and from countries as diverse as Canada, Hong Kong, Algeria and Mauritius – have attended lectures and events at the cathedral. But it was surely another first for Blackburn for a bishop’s teaching ministry to be taken to a Muslim College and to be delivered in the main congregational space there which is the Mosque itself.
The event was a powerful symbol indeed of the deep relationships developed between cathedral and college, of which the most delightful moment in an evening of many such moments was the way in which the young and enthusiastically questioning students ‘mobbed’ the lecturer afterwards, spontaneously bombarding him with supplementaries. It was a picture of how things could and should be between communities, and of the sort of mutual learning and friendship in respect of which the cathedral leads the way locally, nationally and internationally.
Photos: Shuaib Karriem, intern with exChange form University of Cape Town
