A but/and (not) (also) B
and gave some examples to get them going: Catholic but not practicing, spiritual and secular, atheist but open, Buddhist and also Jewish, religious but not spiritual. Students ran with it:
Religious but not spiritual
Faithful but skeptical
Interested but not committed
Spiritual and intuitive
Traditional, but not religious
Raised Roman Catholic but not practicing
Jewish and spiritual, or conversely, religious and cultural
Agnostic atheist
Curious but not fully convinced by any religion
Pagan and spiritual
Spiritual and a little Jewish
Catholic on paper but not really
Spiritual and a little Jewish too
Jewish but not kosher
Interested but not open
Jewish and spiritual
Spiritual and open
Muslim, but only sometimes
Open but unaffiliated
Catholic but not guilty
Superstitious but science-driven
Spiritual but not traditional
Catholic childhood but now a spiritual adulthood
Agnostic and searching
Vulnerable but self preservative
Religious but not practical
Not concerned and not worried
Religious but also liberal
Cool, and in just 3 minutes - one of the things you can do with zoom that you can't do in an in-person classroom! What was interesting, I noted, beyond the particulars, is what it means to identify with a but or an and. This is part of the "after religion" landscape, where more and more people feel they have to/can parse their relationship with traditional communities and identities. Like SBNR, when not taken generically, each is a refusal to identify in a simple way - is the promise of a story. It takes us beyond the barren Protestant landscape of the Pew religion surveys whose central interests are identification (understood primarily in terms of belief) and participation (understood in terms of regular congregational worship). Later in the class we'll look at limits and problems of this imagined capacity for self-definition; students who listened to the "Killjoy's Introduction to Religion" podcast I assigned have been introduced to some of them. But at this stage - our first real class together - it seems better to honor and explore the hope of the SBNR.
The other interactive part of class came after I'd breezed through some of the Pew data on declining religious identification and participation (conventionally defined) in the US and a broader global view (where we noticed the "after religion" as well as the "before religion"). We considered the project of the Sacred Design Lab, the latest iteration of an endeavor whose earlier versions I've regularly used in "Theorizing Religion." (They'e allied also with Harvard Divinity School and Krista Tippett's "On Being Project.") These post-religious spiritual entrepreneurs help groups, organizations and companies address the "soul-deep needs" of people after religion.
We see a future emerging in which the wisdom of our ancestors is remixed to make countless new iterations of soul-centered design. In practice, "designing for the human soul" for these "translators" and "interpreters" of "ancient practices" means finding non-religious ways of articulating the "50,000 year old questions" (as one of their partners termed it in a conversation a few weeks ago) and how these have been addressed by traditions from every time and clime. These practices are stripped of "accretions of orthodoxy and hegemony," and "rejiggered" for "emergent challenges." I'm not sure whether this will speak to my SBNR largely design-based students, but I'm hopeful. To start them off, I shared a list of the "ancient practices" named in the Sacred Design Lab brochure we'd read and invited them to share ideas about where these were from and what they were good for. It's a capricious but stimulating list.
mikvah
rites of passage
veneration
journey
ablution
alchemy
meditation
lectio divina
libation
alms
witness
intercession
metta
covenant
memento mori
mandala
adornment
tea ceremony
testimony
elders
relics
text
guide
drumming
bindi
centering
praise songs
prayer beads
feast days
stained glass
Next week, as we turn to the archetypal SBNR practices of yoga and mindfulness, we'll start to question the ethics and efficacy of such appropriation of what the Sacred Design Lab partner called "the human birthright." But for now I'm hoping that students are pleasantly surprised to find their vocabularies expanded and energized, their search a little less lonely and less abstract and disembodied.
For good measure - but this was almost certainly too much - I finished the class by tracing some of the contours of "spirituality," then turned to James Miller's Daoist-inspired critique of the unsustainable modern distinction between philosophy, science and religion as dealing with the allegedly separate realms of "inner, metal subjectivity," "nature and the environment" and "theology and the supernatural." They're not distinct, of course, and appreciating this means we should realize we're not only in an after religion moment but also after philosophy and science, at least as conceptualized by unspiritual moderns. Whoa!
