Today I'm sending off my paper for a symposium on the theory of religion as a resource for the study of Chinese religion to be held in a few weeks in Taiwan. As I know next to nothing about Chinese religion (and won't be learning much, as all the other papers but one will be delivered in Mandarin!), I'll be talking about the theory of religion.
In fact it will be my first chance to try out some of the key ideas from my book project on an unsuspecting world - specifically that modern western theory of religion has focused on problems of evil and meaninglessness, overlooking the continuing experience of the good. The new idea in this paper is that understanding religion as responding to evil makes ritual incomprehensible - it's just magical busywork meant to take our minds off things. If we see religion as a response to a world "ethically irrational" also in good - grace, serendipity, harmony, order, fecundity - things like ritual make more sense, since the goods of the world are more like an invitation to dance than a philosophical problem or existential challenge.
Some ritual surely works to anesthetize, and some to placate fears of dangerous powers. But there's also ritual like the dancing in Australian Aboriginal traditions, which someone has eloquently described as being part of the earth's own movement.
