We were encouraged by the sharing of experiences from a variety of settings. We are religious educators from Western European countries hosted by the World Council of Churches, Education and Ecumenical Formation Team gathered to reflect about the changing role of Religious Education (RE) in a time of growing pluralism. Geneva 19 - 23 October 2000 I An invitation for conversation The discussion culminates with Siona Benjamin: a Jewish female artist who grew up in Hindu and Muslim India, attended Catholic and Zoroastrian schools, and has lived in America for many decades-all these aspects of her life resonate in her often very syncretistic paintings.Consultation organized by the Education and Ecumenical Formation and Interreligious Relations teams in cooperation with the Comenius-Institut, Münster, Germany Cultural syncretism sometimes interweaves religious syncretism-which can connect and has connected Christianity or Judaism to Eastern religions-and a profusion of women artists in the last quarter of the century has added gender issues to the matrix. The Holocaust not only raised new visual questions and possibilities for Jewish artists, but also did so from the opposite direction for the occasional Christian-particularly German-artist. Such a direction continued to spread more broadly across the 20th century. This, together with evident paradoxes regarding secular and spiritual perspectives in the work of key figures in the visual arts, led to a particularly rich array of efforts from Jewish artists who revision Jesus as a subject, applying a new, Jewishly humanistic perspective to transform this most traditional of Christian subjects. Specific religious developments and crises in Europe from the 16th century to the 18th century brought on the emancipation of the Jews in some places on the one hand, and a contradictory continuation of anti-Jewish prejudice on the other, the latter shifting from a religious to a racial basis. Syncretistic preludes to visual artists in the 19th and 20th centuries, suggesting some of the breadth of possibility, include Pico della Mirandola, Kabir, and Baruch/Benedict Spinoza. Instead “syncretism” will not be treated as a concept that needs to be distinguished from “hybridization” or “hybridity,” although different modes of syncretism will be distinguished. While this issue is noted-after all, art has always been interwoven with politics-it is not the focus of this article. An obvious and particularly negative instance of this is the history of the Inquisition as it first affected Jews in late-15th-century Spain and later encompassed indigenous peoples in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. This process intensified in the Colonial era when the West expanded its dominance over much of the globe. This has grown out of the increasing consciousness, since the 1960s, of the political implications of that term in the course of Western history, in which hegemonic European Christianity has addressed non-Christian religious perspectives. The term “syncretism” has, in certain specifically anthropological and theological circles, acquired a negative connotation. It may be a matter of religion alone, or it may be a matter of other issues, such as culture or gender, which may or may not be obviously intertwined with religion. It may also interweave three or more traditions. The specific directions taken by syncretism in art is also varied: it may be limited to the interweave of two religious traditions-most often Jewish and Christian-in which most often it is the minority artist seeking ways to create along lines consistent with what is created by the majority. These are at once chronological-arising out of developments that may be charted over several centuries before arriving into the 19th and 20th centuries-and political, spiritual, and cultural, as well as often extending beyond the Jewish–Christian matrix. Religious and cultural syncretism, particularly in visual art in the Jewish and Christian traditions since the 19th century, has expressed itself in diverse ways and reflects a broad and layered series of contexts.
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