Strange, as I reflect back on the AAR experience I find that, once again, I have shifted in my view of religion. I seem - egad! - to be moving toward a pro-religion stance. Not that religion is good for people, though that might be true (often it's not), but that it might in some sense be - yoicks! - true.
Time was, I took refuge in the formulation (coined by Joe Bulbulia) distinguishing religious studies from theology, "they study God, we study them." That made religious studies safely kin of anthropology, history and the other human sciences. Religion(s) might or might not be true - we learn to leave those questions open (or aside) - but our business is with human beings and their deepest convictions. Religious studies is a necessary discipline because the other disciplines do not take the depth of these convictions as seriously as it deserves - not as potentially true but as part of human experience and culture.
But now I find I'm closer to a different position: that religious studies is a necessary discipline because it alone confronts students (and we're all still students on this one) with the fact that there is no consensus on what is real. One studies religious traditions not only because they are expressions of the human spirit and "nothing human is foreign to me," but because they collectively point beyond the secular pieties of academic life. I'm sounding a bit like William James, who described the writing of his Varieties of Religious Experience thus:
the problem I have set myself is a hard one: first, to defend (against all the prejudices of my "class") "experience" against "philosophy" as being the real backbone of the world's religious life ... and second, to make the hearer or reader believe, what I myself invincibly do believe, that although all the special manifestations of religion may have been absurd (I mean its creeds and theories), yet the life of it as a whole is mankind's most important function.
I don't know about "experience" (though James' rich conception of it is far better than common ones); I want to say something about the real. Not just that there are different views of what's real - is there life after death, do animals have souls, is there purpose in the universe, does the devil exist, etc. - or that there will always be different views here. No, part of me wants to say that religious traditions record and generate experiences of a world where more is possible than modernity imagines or allows. I'm not talking supernaturalism, necessarily, since I accept Dewey's (and before him Durkheim's) criticism of an unproblematic conception of the natural, but something more like Wislawa Szymborska's laconic observation in a poem I've quoted before (a potential epigraph for my good book):
I'm not saying I have experienced more than commonplace miracles, but that I am finding myself inclining toward the view that the commonplace miracles are just the start, and that the study of religion forces (or permits) us to consider where it might lead.
Here's James again, in another letter about the Varieties, and then I'll close for today:
The Divine, for my active life, is limited to impersonal and abstract concepts which, as ideals, interest and determine me, but do so faintly in comparison with what a feeling of God might effect if I had one.... yet there is something in me which makes response when I hear utterances from the quarter made by others. I recognize the deeper voice. Something tells me: -- ‘thither lies truth’ ...
Time was, I took refuge in the formulation (coined by Joe Bulbulia) distinguishing religious studies from theology, "they study God, we study them." That made religious studies safely kin of anthropology, history and the other human sciences. Religion(s) might or might not be true - we learn to leave those questions open (or aside) - but our business is with human beings and their deepest convictions. Religious studies is a necessary discipline because the other disciplines do not take the depth of these convictions as seriously as it deserves - not as potentially true but as part of human experience and culture.
But now I find I'm closer to a different position: that religious studies is a necessary discipline because it alone confronts students (and we're all still students on this one) with the fact that there is no consensus on what is real. One studies religious traditions not only because they are expressions of the human spirit and "nothing human is foreign to me," but because they collectively point beyond the secular pieties of academic life. I'm sounding a bit like William James, who described the writing of his Varieties of Religious Experience thus:the problem I have set myself is a hard one: first, to defend (against all the prejudices of my "class") "experience" against "philosophy" as being the real backbone of the world's religious life ... and second, to make the hearer or reader believe, what I myself invincibly do believe, that although all the special manifestations of religion may have been absurd (I mean its creeds and theories), yet the life of it as a whole is mankind's most important function.
William James, "[Experience and Religion: A Comment],"
extract from a letter to Frances R. Morse, in The Writings of William James,
ed. John McDermott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 740-1
extract from a letter to Frances R. Morse, in The Writings of William James,
ed. John McDermott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 740-1
I don't know about "experience" (though James' rich conception of it is far better than common ones); I want to say something about the real. Not just that there are different views of what's real - is there life after death, do animals have souls, is there purpose in the universe, does the devil exist, etc. - or that there will always be different views here. No, part of me wants to say that religious traditions record and generate experiences of a world where more is possible than modernity imagines or allows. I'm not talking supernaturalism, necessarily, since I accept Dewey's (and before him Durkheim's) criticism of an unproblematic conception of the natural, but something more like Wislawa Szymborska's laconic observation in a poem I've quoted before (a potential epigraph for my good book):
Commonplace miracle:
that so many commonplace miracles happen.
that so many commonplace miracles happen.
I'm not saying I have experienced more than commonplace miracles, but that I am finding myself inclining toward the view that the commonplace miracles are just the start, and that the study of religion forces (or permits) us to consider where it might lead.
Here's James again, in another letter about the Varieties, and then I'll close for today:The Divine, for my active life, is limited to impersonal and abstract concepts which, as ideals, interest and determine me, but do so faintly in comparison with what a feeling of God might effect if I had one.... yet there is something in me which makes response when I hear utterances from the quarter made by others. I recognize the deeper voice. Something tells me: -- ‘thither lies truth’ ...
William James, letter to James Leuba,
cited in The Varieties of Religious Experience
(1902; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1985), xxiv
cited in The Varieties of Religious Experience
(1902; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1985), xxiv
(The pictures, incidentally, are from Torrey Pines Beach this afternoon. The first our most recent rockslide, the second the promontory leading to Flat Rock.)
