Lecturer challenges religious stereotypes | Inland News | PE.com | Southern California News | News for Inland Southern California
By DAVID OLSON
The Press-EnterpriseMaura O’Neill taught classes on religion at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga, was adviser to the Muslim student group there, and had served as Catholic campus minister at Cal State San Bernardino.
Yet despite her broad exposure to different religions, even O’Neill harbored stereotypes, especially toward religious conservatives.
“I thought that (religious) conservatives were narrow-minded and insecure,” O’Neill, a self-described progressive Catholic, said after a lecture she gave Tuesday night.
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O’Neill no longer makes such assumptions.
Since then, O’Neill has talked to Orthodox Jewish women who define themselves as feminist, and to veil-wearing Muslim women who believe that feminist American women, not Muslim women, are oppressed.
Those conversations helped form her 2007 book, “Mending a Torn World: Women in Interreligious Dialogue,” which also was the title of the 22nd annual Morrow-McCombs Memorial Lecture that O’Neill delivered Tuesday night at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints near Cal State San Bernardino.
The setting for the address was fitting: A religious progressive speaking inside the chapel of a conservative denomination.
C.E. Tapie Rohm Jr., a former bishop at the Mormon congregation, said after the lecture that the only way to avoid religious polarization is by taking O’Neill’s approach.
“Her whole concept is dialogue: You can’t get to know individuals without talking to them,” Rohm said. “You have to understand the other’s viewpoint . . . and learn about other cultures and traditions.”
Rohm is a member of the interfaith advisory board that put together the lecture, which promotes understanding among Jews, Christians and Muslims.
O’Neill said religious progressives are most likely to come together for interreligious dialogue, but when they do, it’s typically to meet with fellow progressives from other faiths, not with conservatives.
“Lots of times progressives would say to me, ‘You’re going to get a conservative to dialogue?’” O’Neill said. “That’s a stereotype. And how many times have people said to me, ‘You just pick and choose what you want to obey.’ And that’s a stereotype.”
O’Neill said she became a feminist while living in a convent.
She was a nun for 15 years and was impressed by fellow sisters’ intelligence, educational levels and their lack of dependence on males.
Ina Katz, of San Bernardino, a member of Temple Emanu El, a Reform Jewish synagogue, said the lecture helped challenge her view that nuns and Muslim women who wear veils are by definition ritualistic and conservative.
“You shouldn’t just make a snap judgment about it,” Katz said.