ABSTRACT

Let me begin by saying that some of these chapters evoke in me a response that surprises me. I find myself in corners that threaten to position me as a colonized subject once more, a “native” who has to be shown the light, a non-Christian from a “limited access country” (India in my case). While I have no intention of countering some of these (offensive?) strains on their own terms, I do feel that as someone in ELT, as one who would be prime “meat” for CET, and as one having grown up in a postcolonial, multi-religious space1 where Christianity can only be understood against a most heterogeneous landscape, it is important that I speak to what may be perceived as irrationality and arrogance implicit in some of the “Christianity Only” strains in CET. My aim in this small piece is to nudge this discussion to another plane, one where we are speaking not so much about any particular religious discourse but what it is we ELT people need to be vigilant about when we begin to speak about (our and others’) religious affiliations in relation to our profession. Running thickly through the Loptes and Chamberlain pieces seems to be an unalterable, fixed idea of Truth and God. Such an unmutating understandingand that, too, of the uncontainability of God-belies the historicity behind religious “ideals” (Christian, Hindu, or any other), something about which we teachers and academics cannot be sensitive enough. Missing from their chapters is a quiet, deliberate reflection on what sense of the ideal-Christian in the present case-is reproduced by CET, and how tugs toward preserving this “ideal” can be seen to convey a sense of regression. The relative intemporality in their positions seems to overlook some crucial issues: the Husserlian corpus of geometry that all religions follow, mandates to carefully pass on “traditions” over generations, a teleological establishment of religious themes that gain credence with repeated enactments over time (as in the case of particular religious rituals), a constant eye to the future that younger generations are being “socialized” into. Religions the world over are predicated on such assumptions, and succeed in creating systematized, “geometrical” horizons in order to circumscribe coherent, “stable” domains. Furthermore, these ideals are presented to us in all their historicities and traditions. It seems to me that it remains up to us teachers, academics, to recognize that these religious geometries are not natural phenomena-like stones and mountains-but our human assemblages that exist in our collective space of humanity.