Rethink the meaning of 'differences,'
noted theologian advises seminarians

After her lecture, Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, right, enjoyed a lively interaction with, from left, seminarians Javier Davila, Romeo Dabee and Professor Nelson Rivera. Listen to the lecture online: Introduction Lecture Complete Requires free RealAudio player

To overcome the challenges posed by "differences" between people in this new century, people need to rethink the issue of differences by seeing boundaries not as a way of keeping people apart, but rather as an opportunity to relate.

"We need to reconceptualize our understanding of differences and see them as a positive element rather than a stumbling block," Theologian Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz told faculty, staff, students and friends this week at The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia. Not to do so both in individual relationships and on a grand scale globally will only make tragedies like September 11 more likely over time, she predicted.

Isasi-Diaz enjoys a moment with the Rev. Nelson Rivera, assistant professor of Systematic theology and Director of the Seminary's Latino Concentration.

Isasi-Diaz, Professor of Theology and Ethics at Drew University Theological School, said learning to deal with the differences between peoples is a key challenge for the new century. Frequently people who see others as "different" set up boundaries as a device for separation, she said. "But boundaries actually are a way for us all to be drawn together to know each other better. Relationships between people with differences lay a foundation for how such people will conceptualize the differences, she noted. And when people share their points of view they fill in gaps in their own personal experiences.

"The goal is not to replace your own perspective, but to embrace the partiality (perspective) of others as a corrective to your own," Isasi-Diaz said. She was speaking on the topic, "Rethinking Differences: Embracing Diversity in Our Getting Smaller World."

The theologian said that embracing the differences between people requires a willingness to acquire knowledge of reality that goes beyond the intellectual rigors of book learning. Such a willingness involves "what you do with your mind" in becoming aware of reality, taking responsibility for what is learned in that awareness, and then being willing to do what one can "to transform reality," she said.

A desire for justice is a key motivator, she argued, including being willing to listen to the cries and demands of the poor and oppressed and being open to understand what is at the heart of those demands. And she said being fully aware of reality requires an earnest person "to be in the midst of it, present in a lively interaction. You will need to enter into the world of others and know that world (of the poor and oppressed) through their senses." Such an immersion, she suggested, will likely involve a participant in not only being more knowledgable, but also being willing to change reality.

Isasi-Diaz has done some of that immersing personally. She has served as a missionary in Peru, done research in her native Cuba, and goes to church at a small Roman Catholic parish in New York's East Harlem. She sprinkled her presentation with passionately delivered anecdotes.

"The problem is what we do with differences," she said at one point. "Are differences made into obstacles, used to keep things apart, to marginalize, exclude and separate us? We need to think more communally. We need to emphasize what we have in common with our differences. Does that mean we do away with differences? Assimilation of that kind is a worldview in which the powerful force the 'differences' of others into the characteristics of a main (powerful) group," she said. Such an imposition forces the powerless to adopt an identity that is not their own. To survive, powerless groups adopt a flexibility that turns into a negative experience because the oppressed eventually lack a level of experience and knowledge of their culture. They become further marginalized.

At the same time a privileged group "tends to lose touch with its own specificity," she said. She noted that in her research she had discovered that white males often have a particularly hard time defining their characteristics as a group.

"One of the problems is that we assign consequences to differences," she said. "We make judgments that others are better or worse rather than to say we are just different."

She said that a positive outcome of learning to "rethink differences" will be an emerging focus on "what connects us. We can decentralize ourselves and not make ourselves the main and only point of our perception," she said. "I am a mirror to you. If we develop an ability to travel between our different worlds and enter the worlds of others, then we can learn how others see us, how they construct themselves, and what role we play in that construction."

Such traveling will promote empathy and make possible deep dialogue and solidarity with those who are different, she said, leading to an "intrinsic interconnection" between God's different people of today.

The consequence of not working through our differences to understand and reinforce common interests, she warned, will only be more events like September 11 in which the world's most powerful people "will destroy not only others but also their own moral fiber."