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intrude upon one another; they destabilize each other's meanings, and in turn unsettle the reader who is forced to learn to read differently if she or he is to master skillfully this disorienting material.
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Comparative theological reading shares features with this strategy of collage, as the constructive comparativist unsettles two (or more) traditions by excising important and familiar materials from their "legitimate" contexts in order to use them together newly, necessarily without prior warrant. The traditional interpretations woven around both texts, though recognized, are bracketed and rendered momentarily inarticulate. The reader, a member of either tradition who chooses to become a comparativist, is compelled to interact with the materials in a way that neither tradition would recognize as "its own way." She or he must work very hard with the newly aligned materials, each subjected momentarily to the disorienting power of temporary acts of decontextualization and recontextualization. The procedure is effective and productive, in part because there is no established, approved set of margins within which the reading can be contained; nor is there any entirely adequate summation, before or after the reading, of what the juxtaposition is supposed to mean. |
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This process of unsettling collage is in part what is accomplished in the juxtaposition of Amalananda and Aquinas printed earlier in this chapter. The reader can, if she or he wishes, see/read each text differently because they are now located together, and thereafter interpret each differently in light of the new possibilities and constraints thereby introduced. Or one may resist the collage, and refuse to look at the texts on the same page. |
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These five modelscoordination, superimposition, conversation, metaphor and collagehave been introduced in order to indicate ways in which we can imagine what we are doing when we read together texts from different theological traditions, and persist in this practice over time, and in a way more richly productive than the mere listing of similarities and differences. One may of course experiment with more than one of these models, since each focuses our inquiry in a different practical fashion: i. the strategies by which one makes the reading to- |
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