Document Type

Presentation

Publication Date

9-13-2024

Abstract

I propose to discuss two assignments I used in “Religion and the Sermon in Appalachia,” an Honors seminar I taught in Fall 2023. The first belongs to the “teaching” aspect of my title. In the summer of 2020, the Charleston-based Islamic Association of West Virginia published a four-part video series entitled “Understanding Christianity” on its YouTube channel. In a total running time of approximately three hours, Imam Nasir Abdussalam gives an Islamic perspective (not necessarily the Islamic perspective) on “Christian History,” “Paul & the Original Christians,” “The Early Church & Sectarianism,” and “American Culture.”

On the “preaching” side, we discussed an event that took place in June 2023 at Davis Memorial Presbyterian Church in Gassaway, WV. Here is a description from the website of the Synod of the Trinity in Mechanicsburg, PA:

“Rev. James Riggs…invited a leader from the Islamic Association of West Virginia to participate in a dialog sermon with him centered on the Biblical story of Hagar and Ishmael… With James and…Nasir Abdussalam standing side-by-side at the pulpit, James opened the dialog sermon by giving a Judeo-Christian perspective of the reading. James then sat down, and Nasir remained to tell the Muslim interpretation of the passage.”

Most of the students were practicing Christians or had come from Christian backgrounds, with little prior knowledge of or experience with Islam. They were thus intrigued to hear Abdussalam assert that Christians and Muslims see Hagar and Ishmael as the “same story” teaching the “same lessons.” They also had to process Abdussalam’s negative views of their faith traditions, seen in such statements as evangelical Christians are known for an “arrogant affirmation of their own subjective experience” and racism is the “greatest moral failure of Christians in America.”

My presentation will thus be more a “case study” than a research-driven argument, which I see as an asset and a special contribution to this conference. My experience as the professor, my students’ experience as students, and the audience’s perspectives on interfaith relations will, I trust, all come together to spark some very fruitful and provocative discussions indeed.

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Copyright © 2024 Ellison.

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