Scott Steinkerchner, O.P.

Ph.D., Boston College, 2005
Visiting Assistant Professor of Interreligious Theology
Curriculum Vitae
Website

Especially interested in
the many intellectual and spiritual benefits that come from confusion. My dissertation dealt with how productive dialogue can occur between different thought systems. I am fascinated by ultimate questions of meaning and how different religious systems construct meaning differently and therefore have different insights into life. My primary dialogue partners in this quest are from various strains of Tibetan Buddhism.

Currently researching
interreligious medical ethics, especially questions concerning end of life issues. I have also just finished a book on how to pursue interreligious dialogue when the odds of agreement are small. In these cases – which represent the norm – I suggest that we do not seek agreement, but instead find other ways and other reasons to talk.

Other interests
include running, backpacking and internet development. I am the promoter general of the internet for Dominicans around the world, and I travel regularly in order to better understand how this diverse group of people can be brought closer together through better communications available via the internet. In my travels, I always enjoy running early in the morning, particularly in a place I have never been before. Seeing people starting their day is a great way to get a sense of a new culture..

Challenged by
the current polemical and narrow attitudes in the Church and the world. I entered the Dominicans in 1989, shortly after John Paul II’s first World Day of Prayer in Assisi and just before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Apartheid in South Africa. There was such hope in the world, as these events made possible what was formerly thought impossible: people of different faiths praying together; people locked into opposing ideologies talking to and living with one another; oppressive political structures crumbling. Today I see many people working in the opposite direction, sewing intolerance, fear and division, and worse – and sometimes doing it in the name of God.