Living large

The "lived religion" segment of "Theorizing Religion" has become quite exciting. My old stalwart, Meredith McGuire's Lived Religion (ch. 2) starts us off. Last year's discovery, Elizabeth Pérez's Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition (chs. 1, 4, 5) builds on it, the last chapter paired today with this year's crush, Tracy Fessendon's Religion around Billie Holiday (intro, ch. 5). We'll continue next week with a visit to the Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room and an exhibition about arts and activism at the Rubin Museum of Art, and wrap up with William Connolly's "Evangelical-Capitalist Resonance Machine." There's a little serendipity in there - I'd originally planned something else for Monday but will be late for class because of a doctor's appointment - but it all comes together to a much more complicated picture than I've been able to convey before.

Not that McGuire on its own isn't good stuff. She lays out powerfully the ways in which accepting modern understandings of religion means ratifying the victory of a "Long Reformation" battle against the lived religion of pre-Reformation Europe. But on its own, it can play into spiritual but not religious students' anarchist tendencies. McGuire is not saying that everyone has their own religion, everyone doing and believing just what they choose to, but students think she is. So it's good to turn to Pérez, who not only stresses the work in community of becoming "seasoned" (which happens in places like kitchens), learning new ways of narrating one's own life story in relation to sources of power, but reminds us that devotés invariably insist they did not choose their role but were hunted down by the orisha they now serve and are protected by. Neither individual nor freely chosen.

Fessendon's evocative account of the religion in the "ambient feelings and moods, energies, pressures, frequencies, powers" in the midst of which jazz singer Billie Holiday made her life and work takes the "lived religion" approach into a whole new dimension. If McGuire makes us aware that each person makes use in distinctive ways of a local repertoire of motifs and practices and relationships, Fessendon gets us thinking about where that largely unchosen repertoire comes from, and how, through it, religious sensibilities may affect people on the margins or even beyond the boundaries of a given community. Billie Holiday may have been Catholic mainly by process of elimination, but considered in tandem with the religiously (and racially) inflected images and institutions she found a way to make her own may yet have lived in a kind of communion with the saints. Her famous "My Man," which she performed for the residents of the House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls (where she'd spent formative time between the ages of 9 and 11) sounds like a love song to - or by! - an all too human saint.