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.

Not so straightforward

A recipe we found browsing online offered an unexpected aftertaste. The recipe is for "Cumin-Roasted Salmon with Cilantro Sauce." But a great fan of the recipe (whose remarks 25 other readers found helpful) substituted out almost everything! (Culantro apparently is an herb somewhat similar in taste to cilantro but much tougher and perhaps ten times as pungent - no wonder the sauce exploded in the mouth.)

This put me in mind of how I used to use such friendly amendments to recipes as an illustration of lived religion. What's intriguing isn't just that someone bowdlerized a recipe (and was praised for it), but that this virtuoso thinks they've actually cooked it in the first place. And that the obvious next step isn't to try to give the original ingredients a try, but to further improve the ersatz version forced by circumstance!

Mother's day roses

We were back at St. Joseph's Catholic Co-Cathedral today (I can't quite countenance going to Manhattan seven days a week), where they have a distinctive mother's day ritual which emerged through happy accident.

As described in the parish bulletin:

It is our parish custom to give a rose to all the women who are mothers or mother figures at the Masses. One year, we ran out of roses. Displayed prominently in the sanctuary was an image of Our Lady of Guadelupe and it was surrounded by bouquets of roses. I took some of the roses surrounding the image and gave them to the women who remained without a rose to take home. Mary would deny nothing to her daughters. The following year we gave flowers to everyone entering the church. At the offertory, everyone was asked to bring up a rose and place it before Mary. On Mother's Day, many mourn that they have never had the opportunity to be mothers; children mourn mothers who have died, and sadly it is sometimes mothers who mourn their lost children. Some people are angry due to their mothers' shortcoming; all mothers consider the ways in which they may have failed. So this Mother's Day, let us honor Mary, our heavenly mother and her daughters, for whom she would give everything - even her own Son.

We participated, what fun! Offering roses to the Virgen - who of course has a special relationship with red roses - had a special resonance since so many of the parishioners hail from across the Americas whose protectress she is. (Red roses are a little odd for most other mothers, actually, aren't they? A little too oedipal? Good to sublime those feelings heavenward!) It'll be interesting to see if this ritual sticks (designated "mothers and mother figures" no longer get to take a rose home), and, if so, if a different story emerges about it. 

Pedagogical Project

The MetroCITI seminar started its Fall meetings today. I was one of three participants sharing our thinking about a "pedagogical project" we're pledged to explore in one of our classes this semester. My project is tentatively called "'Religion making' and Students' Prior Learning," and it was wonderfully helpful to have to explain it quickly (ten minutes) to friendly folk from other schools and disciplines, and even more helpful to get their reactions and suggestions.

"Students' prior learning" is one of the key categories of our seminar. Learning happens only when new knowledge successfully grafts onto old, generating always different tensions, displacements and rearrangements with it, and the more a teacher knows of her students' prior knowledge the more effectively can she facilitate new learning. (The same goes for the teacher's prior knowledge.) The voluminous literature on "teaching and learning" pays remarkably little attention to this prior knowledge, however. Hence, in part, MetroCITI, one of several projects committed to finding ways of "surfacing" prior learning in the service of better education. ("Surfacing" here is a transitive verb.)

In religious studies "prior learning" is tricky. School instruction on religion is rare to non-existent in American students' experience, so what students know isn't religious studies. My training inclines me to dismiss it as a dangerous distraction from the work of academic work, faith-based and first-personal rather than evidence-based and critical, but I've been coming around on that one. It's only in this seminar that I'm learning to appreciate what students bring as learning. I had recognized that most of my students aren't aspiring scholars or religion, nor do I need them to be. Like the students of most religious studies courses, they are there for often spiritual reasons of their own. My first step was to realize (decide) that these aims and those of the academic discipline I teach can be compatible.

But the discipline has been changing, too. If my suspicions of students' unschooled religioisities were overdrawn, so perhaps was my confidence in my discipline. We're several decades into a fundamental critique of the academic study of religion is naive, ideologically complicit with Western colonialism and its legacies, and much less neutral than it supposes it is: the academic categories of "religion" it advocates are, it is argued, irreducibly Christian in origin, Protestant, and probably shaped by contingent experiences of political liberalism too. The academic enterprise is the more necessary, and the more valuable, knowing that even our modern American understandings of religion, spirituality, secularism and science are not universal. So I've been working on surfacing my prior learning - and its weaknesses. 

At the same time, scholars - including scholars in religious studies - have been helping us understand just how much more thoughtful and creative religious practice is than people used to think. Far from being "blind" followers of uncritically inherited beliefs and practices, we now expect to find agency, discernment, decisions about choices of inheritance and practice at every level. The "lived religion" movement which I've been following for a few years is one of the places where this is most explicitly thematized. As Robert Orsi reminds us, scholars navigate the same territory "between heaven and earth" as the people we study, both as individuals and as scholars.

All of this came together for me (though it was only making today's presentation that it became fully clear to me) in the idea that my students bring bona fide religious studies learning with them to my classes, even if they've never studied religion academically (or at all). "Lived religion" is not the same as religious studies - it asks different questions and is seeking different sorts of result - but it is more like it than I'd been able to realize. It asks questions, it sifts and compares, it tries things out. It has known and unknown loyalties, works with more and less explicitly held definitions of truth and value, but it seeks to correct its blindnesses.

So we get to my pedagogical project, which uses the category of "religion making" to analyze (appreciate and critique) both what religious "practitioners" and scholars of religion do. In today's presentation I introduced it this way:

draw in students’ prior learning to get them to see “religion making” as something happening on different scales and in different settings—the academy, the law, the media, and/but also lives of communities, families, individuals. My hope is that this makes more explicit the ways the academic study of religion can build on, complicate and enrich students’ prior convictions, experiences, hopes and fears. I would like my teaching to speak to students’ personal motivations while also allowing a focus on the distinctiveness, and the distinctive contribution made by, of academic study.

More easily said than done but worth a whirl. I'll let you know how we fare!

A hunch

Reading about "Buddhism Modernism" at the same time as I'm learning more about "religion" in China in the last century is giving me some interesting ideas. David McMahan, whose Making of Buddhist Modernism is our current text in "Buddhism and Modern Thought," makes clear that the bookstore is an important locus.

What could be more commonplace than a Buddhist - or perhaps someone simply "into" Buddhism - going to a good bookstore, browsing a bit, purchasing a translation of a classic primary text, then going home and reading it? Besides meditation, most western Buddhists would consider reading Buddhist books one of their primary activities as Buddhists, and many have come to Buddhism through books. ([Oxford University Press, 2008] 16-17)

I've regaled you with Carl Bielefeld's hilarious account of what role texts actually play in traditional Buddhist societies of the past - reading them, especially as a lay person, is so rare as to be nonexistent. And we all know about how Buddhism is "invented" as a textual construct by western Orientalist scholars in the 19th century, and how this textual Buddhism, privileging a pure primitive teaching over later elaborations and practice, affected Buddhist modernizers in Asia. But the way these texts now reside in bookstores all over the place, where anyone can leaf through them (along with Rumi, The I Ching, The Gnostic Gospels and of course The Varieties of Religious Experience) and perhaps take them home to read, is worth thinking about on its own. The Orientalists were seeking a sure foundation in the oldest texts, but the denizen of the Religion-Philosophy-Spirituality-New Age section of her local bookstore has other interests. McMahan stresses the importance of "perennialism," the idea that all traditions articulate the same unchanging Truth, in making Buddhist ideas accessible to the West (71f). But nowadays people may be looking for something specifically "Eastern."

Like other large-scale religions ... Buddhism has become detraditionalized among many adherents, including the rapidly emerging affluent and educated middle-class populations of various Asian countries, as well as in the West among converts. Among western converts, detraditionalization occurs in part because most of them learn about Buddhism from books that portray it as part of an amorphous "Eastern mysticism" that is considered largely independent of institutional structures. Popular literature in the West often presents the "essence" of Buddhism as primarily about inner experience rather than its institutional and social realities. This approach has created a new kind of quasi-lay community of Buddhist sympathizers [a term from Thomas Tweed] who read popular Buddhist books and do some meditation and an occasional retreat but do not necessarily identify themselves exclusively as Buddhist. These sympathizers ... may not be committed to Buddhism in any institutional form, may reject or simply be unaware of doctrines unpalatable to late modern sensibilities, and may also be "Hindu sympathizers," "Daoist sympathizers," and "neo-pagan sympathizers." It is not just their eclecticism, though, that makes them particularly modern - the religious lives of many, if not most, traditional East Asians throughout history has been constituted by an amalgam of beliefs and practices from a variety of traditions. What marks such contemporary spiritually eclectic Buddhist sympathizers as embodying detraditionalized Buddhism is the fact that they quite consciously feel free as individuals to adopt or reject whatever bits and pieces they choose from Buddhism, as well as mixing and matching them with fragments from other traditions, thus creating their own personal religious bricolage. Autonomous reason, freedom of choice, and intuitive insight are implicitly considered superior to external authority, even though part of that freedom may include placing oneself under the guidance of a spiritual teacher. (43-44)

A few months ago I would have dwelt on how this conforms with the picture "lived religion" gives us of contemporary life, which of course it does (along with questions about its historical and cultural specificity). Now what strikes me here is a possible parallel with the unfolding religious world in China, and especially what I understand are called "cultural Christians" (wenhua jidutu 文化基督徒). Largely based at universities - professors and students - these are apparently people who have developed a keen interest in Christianity and embrace some of its teachings but don't choose to be baptized or join an actual church community. They learn about Christianity as part of "western culture" from books, and integrate elements of what they find into their lives without feeling the need to connect to the legacies of interpretation and practice of actual churches and denominations. Yang Fenggang, in the first book I read on the subject, stressed that this "religion as culture" sector - independent both of the state and religious authority - plays a distinctive and significant part in the story of religion in China.

It sounds like - for a few of the same and many different reasons - Christian traditions could be as textualized, dismembered, reassembled and hybridized in China as "Buddhist" ones are in the modern West. Especially in the context of a society which doesn't expect people to (at least claim to) belong to one or another faith tradition or community, there's no reason necessarily to expect that cultural Christians will wind up in what we would recognize as church traditions. It'll be fascinating to learn more about this in situ, to see how far the analogy goes...

RUDimentary

Have I told you about "resource use decisions" (RUDs)? This deliberately unlovely, bureaucratic-sounding formulation is my contribution to the ERSEH (Everyday Religion and Sustainable Environments in the Himalayas) project. It came to me the last morning of our workshop in Shangrila, and now it's time to write it up. We're putting on a big conference in March, and want to circulate the papers well in advance. If my ideas prove helpful, they might shape some of the other papers.

RUD emerged from discussions about what on earth "everyday religion" was, and in what ways studying it might be useful in promoting environmental sustainability. "Everyday religion" was a term chosen by our little organizing committee at the one organizing meeting I had to miss - I'd been pushing for "lived religion." I continue to think of the two as cognates although, in fact, they're the fruits of different intellectual projects and disciplines. Engaging concerns of sociologists, historians and anthropologists as well as scholars of religion, they provide different problems and prospects. More grist for the theorist's mill! But also, one hopes, occasion for helpful clarifications.

According to sociologist Nancy T. Ammerman, studies of "everyday religion"

privilege the experience of nonexperts, the people who do not make a living being religious or thinking and writing about religious ideas. That does not mean that "official" ideas are never important, only that they are most interesting to us when they get used by someone other than a professional. Similarly, everyday implies the activity that happens outside organized religious events and institutions, but that does not mean that we discount the influence those institutions wield or that we neglect what happens within organized religion "every day." We are interested in all the ways in which nonexperts experience religion. 

Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives (Oxford 2007), 5 

That sounds pretty good to me as a start. It speaks to the populist anti-authoritarianism I preached when giving my talks in India in January, though it doesn't go as far as I'd like. There is expertise outside of specialists and status-conferring institutions, I'd want to insist, and there are traditional religious events outside these institutions, too. I worry about the passive implications of the language of "experience," even in a study emphasizing the ability of individuals and collectives to improvise and sustain alternatives to the work of institutions (13).

The "everyday" also brings all sorts of conceptual challenges with it. A distinguished anthropologist gave a talk about the everyday at New School recently which suggested that many of her colleagues (readers of Heidegger!) distrust the everyday as thoughtless, unconscious and, most damning, incapable of transcending itself; I encountered a similar perspective at the Center for the Study of the Developing World in Delhi. There's also a suspicion of the everyday deep in classic religious studies perhaps most visible in Weber's theory of "charisma," defined as out-of-the-everyday ausseralltäglich, and threatened by the everydayification Veralltägliching usually rendered "routinization" in English translation. To one of my religious studies colleagues, RUD sounds like the worst kind of routinization. These aren't debates I wanted to get involved, but it's actually proved good in helping me tease out the stakes of our proposals.

My preference, as you know, is for "lived religion," the view that what historian Robert Orsi calls "religious creativity" happens at every level and all the time: there is ... no religion that people have not taken up in their hands. The study of "lived religion" is in its way more ambitious than the exploration of "everyday religion." It directs attention to institutions and persons, texts and rituals, practice and theology, things and ideas – all as media of making and unmaking worlds. If the latter acknowledges (while challenging the dominance of) expert and institutional religion, the former implies that besides "lived" there is nothing but dead religion - even specialists in their institutions have lives and have creatively to make and maintain worlds. World-making is, I think, not only a great way of describing what people do, but a way to avoid anxieties about "syncretism" based on problematic ideas of purity.

Robert A. Orsi, “Is the Study of Lived Religion Irrelevant to the World We Live In?"

Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 42/2 (Jun. 2003): 169-174, 172

"Lived religion" is still in the same ballpark as "everyday religion," attending as it does to unofficial and domestic(ated) practices. But it might be better called "everywhere" or "everyone religion." Though it shares the preferential option for the non-specialist, it's really a theory of religion as a whole (and of religious studies as an ideological distortion of that whole). As you've seen me thinking and teaching about it, the lived religion approach inverts the view of the nature and history of religion which comes from specialists and was long replicated by academics. Religion isn't primarily the experience of something outside human life, but emerges from the challenges (and blessings) of life. Not everyone does it well - there are people with special gifts, many developed through special training, and it's natural to enlist their services - but everyone does it. And while we're at it, religion isn't just about otherworldly things. (Not Heidegger but the American pragmatists are the philosophical sources here.)

"Lived religion" has blind spots of its own, I'm sure, but I think it has great promise. For instance, on the vexed question of what is to count as religious. Ammerman again offers a good start:

Sometimes the participant is clear about what is happening, while the observer misses the religious dimension. At other times, the observer sees something of religious significance, while the participant is not so sure. … [W]henever people talk about and orient their lives in ways that go beyond everyday modern rationality, when they enchant their lives by drawing on spiritual language and concepts and experiences, they are engaging in religious action. Not everything is religious (or even spiritual) but when either observer or participant uses that category, social scientists should be interested in knowing why and how and to what effect. (224-25) 

Just how the participants' and observers' perspectives are to be brought together is the biggest question. My instinct here is to focus on the why and how and to what effect but Ammerman goes on to suggest that some kind of definition of religion is needed after all, and trots out the language of "sacred" and "transcendence" already hinted at above in "enchant" and "spiritual," along with "sacred others" like gods. I'm not sure we can do without something but this all sounds very monotheistic to me, indeed Protestant. As with the language of "experience" there seems a presumption that religion comes from outside and takes you outside ordinary life. I remember that at our first ERSEH discussion in Kathmandu one scholar embraced the category of "everyday religion" because, unlike most western "religion" theory which was about otherworldly things, this sounded like the dharma of South Asian traditions. 

I hope we can punt on the definition of religion by focusing on things people actually do and the decisions they make about them - our focus is given by concrete questions of environmental sustainability, not theoretical questions like "what is religion?" or "are all people religious?" or meaninglessly broad queries like "what is the Buddhist view of environment?" And so we come to "Resource Use Decisions," which only seems like a bureaucratic charisma-killer. Rather than supplement apparently non-religious categories used in studies of environmental sustainability with specifically religious ones, it stretches them in such a way as to let religious world-making flow in.

Here's the proposal from Shangrila:

The ERSEH project focuses on the way everyday religion shapes and is shaped by environments broadly understood, with an eye to informing policy on issues of environmental and cultural sustainability. It hopes to enrich studies of religion, environmental sustainability and the rapidly changing and politically and culturally vital Himalayan region by attending to the resource use decisions of ordinary people in their religious lives. These key terms are used not in their conventional economic ways but in a manner expanded and enriched by dialogue with the concerns of religious and environmental studies. 

• Resource is understood in ways attentive to "sacred" as well as "natural" and "human" resources as constructed by different peoples. Resources are components of a complex social-ecological system in which individuals, groups and institutions not only use resources, but modify them, create them, and destroy them. Frameworks like RED facilitate the modeling of connections between components of each local "system" and can help clarify what is known and not known. Examples might include water supplies, time, the sacred energies of mountains, or the powers of religious objects and specialists. 

• Use refers to the engagement of resources involved in all human practices. It draws attention to the variety of ends of human activity, far exceeding the emaciated ideal of homo oeconomicus, and to the various and new ways in which resources are crafted, exploited and improved by design. Examples might include sustenance, purification, propitiation of dangerous powers or festal squander. 

• Decisions draws attention to the decisions people, individually and even more so as members of collectivities, make about resource use in ever changing social, economic and cultural landscapes; our attention is directed not only to what is decided but to how decisions are come to, as people seek advice and examples, cite, balance or contest authorities, seek validation from various sources, and give reasons of various kinds to various stakeholders. Many decisions are not experienced as such; it is interesting to observe when and how habitual decision-making practices are upset, recalibrated, and return to habitual status. Examples might include daily sacrifices, contributions to religious institutions (like sending sons to a monastery) or the amending of a ritual in the face of a changed resource environment. 

This model does not claim to be exhaustive but, together with the flowchart of interactions of environment, religion and state/development, offers a template for facilitating the analysis and integration of case studies. The deliberately mundane categories of resource, use and decision are intended to focus attention on different elements of social, ecological and symbolic systems; we may emend or replace them as a result of our studies. We may conclude that the terms, even as stretched, are still too utilitarian, or that they fundamentally distort indigenous understandings and experiences of agency. Even these, however, would be useful insights to offer environmental policy-makers. 

RUD was offered as a synthesis of many discussions and, in the absence of other proposed syntheses, has by default become our shared platform. I think it has a lot going for it, especially in the ERSEH context. Does it solve the problems of "religion," "world religions" and "everyday religion," and of the integration of participants' and observers' categories? It may not even successfully skirt them. But it does make clear to our research collaborators, innocent of the academic study of religion if not of western ideas of "religion," what we're about.

Sure, the RUD terms don't sing the way "sacred" and "transcendent" and the like do. They're not supposed to! (I actually like that the acronym can be pronounced rude.) But we've also stripped the ecologists' language of its secular halo. Who knows what we might discover!

Worldly wisdom

Between preparation for classes, running the First Year Program and ensuring the Buddhism and the Future of the Liberal Arts roundtable was a hit, I have been finding little bits of time to reflect on the paper I'm giving in Lisbon paper just over a fortnight hence. (!) For the last week or so it’s been in my #1 back burner space, and this weekend I was able to give it some relatively undivided attention.

I think I’ve got not only an interesting argument but a very interesting one. I proposed the idea “Leibniz’ Theodicy as a Metaphysics for Lived Religion” originally because I could rehearse my favorite past argument about Leibniz (last presented at the International Leibniz Congress in Berlin in 2001!) and because I had “lived religion” on the brain. Perhaps I also thought it might give me an occasion - that is, force me - to reflect on what the study of lived religion has to say to the theodicy crowd to which I used to belong. In any case it has, and some things have emerged which are, at least to me, new and exciting.

What I knew I would say was that Leibniz’ Theodicy is meant not as a tome of philosophical theology, intended for the life of contemplation, but as a toolkit for helping people get over philosophical doubts which threaten to scuttle their active lives of ethics. This isn’t the way most people read Theodicy and it’ll be fun to try it out again. (Reception in Berlin was pretty enthusiastic; I take my invitation to the current conference to be related to it.) The infamous claim that this is "the best of all possible worlds" (BOAPW) is not prospective or even summary, but to be used only as we pick ourselves back up again after attempts to enact what we take to be God’s antecedent will meet with failure. It has no further content, since the status quo is no indication of what the future should be like.

BOAPW engages us not at the level of the contemplative philosopher, parsing arguments, but at the level of the agent, trying to work out “in his little world” what God calls him to do - a level at which, I argued, we are not trying to track this world but imagining possible worlds of good and striving to realize them. Say I try to help someone in distress, something God surely antecedently wants, but she is swept away by a wave before I can get to her. I am not to conclude that helping people in distress is wrong, or that God has no care for those in distress (including this unfortunate), but rather that in this case, and for reasons I may never know, other goods prevailed. We all know about such difficult choices from our own lives, and so we can understand – if only in a schematic way - what it means that God cannot promote every possible good but only the best combination. Leibniz thinks this recognition allows of a "Fatum Christianum," a resilience which is not just Stoic resignation at necessity but joyful acceptance as we recall that God is a "good master," whose perfect wisdom means that the better outcome will, in fact, emerge. Théodicée for Leibniz means not the justification of God (to and by humans) but the "justice of God," a justice congruent with ours; the experience of divine justice, if only schematically, reaffirms our capacity to make right judgments, and our power and responsibility to act on them.

The BOAPW argument in this way is in fact the opposite of what most people take a theodicy to be - a final closed account of the place and nature of evil in the world. I think it's really a prophylactic against just this, refusing us that closure now (even as we may hope to glimpse it in heaven) but without slipping into claims of mystery. It does this by turning us away from judging the world as a whole. We can't do that - it's not only infinite, but its "bestness" relative to others involves comparison among infinities (I §10) - but we also don't need to. Leibniz’ genius is to see in the common claim of BOAPW (he claims it's neither new nor rare, but implied by many stances) a way of domesticating the mystery, the infinity, of God in a way which affirms our grasp of the smaller world in which we live and work.

All of that is a dozen years old. In 2001, as in the dissertation I was riffing on, my argument was all about ethics. (The diss was called "The Ethics of Leibniz' Theodicy" and the Berlin talk "The Moral Import of Possible Worlds.") Now my topic is lived religion. Is it similar enough that the same argument can be made? I was drifting away from the philosophical theodicists and ethicists already, more interested in lived theodicy and ethics. But I'm happy to report it's more than that! You’ve been hearing about lived religion in its many forms all over this blog, from the course last Fall to the ERSEH project, from my presentations on everyday religion in India and on queer Christianities to my current first year seminar, so I don't need to say much. Just one thing, well two, okay three.

First, for the lived religion scholar "religious creativity" (Robert Orsi's term) is not the monopoly of geniuses and specialists, but something in which everyone engages. (Everyone, even religious geniuses and specialists!)
Leibniz, while he was doubtless partial to princesses and emperors, was really concerned for everyone. Unlike most of Leibniz' works the Theodicy was published, and published in French, to make it accessible to a wide reading public.

Second, lived religion scholars find that people are eclectic in their religious lives, syncretic and pragmatic bricoleurs. They are unconcerned with consistency or the purity of systems. (Remember those 28% of American Catholics who reported believing in reincarnation.) This horrifies systematizers and those who make their livings running religious monopolies. To them it seems  unmoored and self-indulgent, but to lived religion scholars these feats of bricolage can come with the imprimatur of real life. (One need not define everyday life in secular terms.) It's not that anything goes, either, as - especially when understood in its social and intersubjective context - lived religion exhibits what Meredith McGuire has called a "practical coherence" (Lived Religion, 15), which is not quite what Bourdieu meant by the "logic of practice" but closer to Michel de Certeau.
Leibniz was a notorious eclectic.

Third, and this is where the dovetail with Leibniz is most exciting, lived religion is all about what Orsi calls "world-making." What makes lived religion more than just corner cutting, making do, little patches and fixes is that – at least at those moments which he calls moments of rupture – people are refashioning worlds. Worldmaking is a slippery term but fruitful. It's a little bit like what Weber in his theodicy theorizing meant by the intellectual's need to make the world a "meaningful cosmos," concerned with the "practical irrationality" of the world (you can't be an effective agent in it), but smaller of scale. The "sacred canopy" maintained by an entire society which Peter Berger made of Weber's ideas seems unnecessary; people get by with what Christian Smith has called "sacred umbrellas."  
The scene where a religious world is remade is, methinks, precisely where Leibniz thought the BOAPW argument had its place. BOAPW is not itself a picture of a livable world, but it helps us get from the ruins of one to a more promising new one. It explains that our efforts to imagine and act in worlds are well-grounded, but also why they encounter roadblocks. This is what I'm calling a metaphysics for lived religion - or shall I call it a metatheodicy?

This is plenty for a paper. It has interesting implications for reading Theodicy and for understanding Leibniz’ religion more generally, as well as his place in the history of the philosophy of religion. It shines light on an aspect of the BOAPW argument that is not often noted, and builds a bridge between "practical" and "theoretical theodicy" that is not itself - as many vindications of practical theodicy are - too general to be of practical use. In practice, consolation and encouragement are more important than explanation, and invocations of mystery are common, but this doesn't tell us a thing about what consoles or encourages in a particular case. There are best practices in practical theodicy, and theoretical concerns come to play here as well. A question I'll leave my Lisbon audience with: when and why - and how - is a religious world so shattered by calamity that people abandon theism altogether?

But there’s more, and this is the thing I wonder if I tasked myself with this topic to work my way through. I've been arguing for yonks that theodicy is a modern project, usually citing Odo Marquard, and have offered all sorts of explanations for its emergence. But only recently have I really started to come to terms with the fact that ours is now a post-theodicistic as well as a post-modern age. (Smith's sacred umbrellas were harbingers for me of this understanding.) This connects to the rise and fall of secularization theory, which I'm persuaded has something to do with the rise and fall of the nation state system. What would a sacred canopy for a pluralistic, syncretic and transnational family look like?

I recently happened on a talk by the sociologist Peter Beyer which has me thinking excited new thoughts about all of this. (I've assigned it as part of my first year seminar, a pendant to and upsetting of Weber's "Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions.") Beyer argues that the various institutions/spheres which became functionally differentiated as a result of modernization - the part of secularization theory everyone accepts - are contingent and might have taken on quite different characters. What determines the forms they take is what he calls the "mutual modeling" of different spheres, and what defines the period just ending is a mutual modeling of church and state whose emblem is the Treaty of Westphalia, birth certificate of the modern state system.

Beyer is interested in "post-Westphalian" things (now religion mutually models with media and economy, he suggests), but I'm drawn to the pre-Westphalian, too. And specifically to Leibniz, whose world was the Holy Roman Empire, a world not of self-defining states but an endless self-callibration of parts and parties. A model for what comes before the age of theodicy? BOAPW in action? Lived religion as politics? Stay tuned!

A salty-crunchy surprise kick

In lived religion discussions I always emphasize that religious devotés (individually, in families, etc.) don't just unthinkingly assimilate an entire creed and suite of practices, but pick and choose, add and substitute to make the religion their own.

Most of my students think this is hunky dory. Some wonder if anything goes, however, a few ask if ordinary folks really have the resources to make good choices, and others wonder if this isn't the death of all traditions by a thousand cuts - what lets anything stay stable enough to be a tradition? If this bricolage really is something which deserves to be honored as "religious creativity," it can't be mere corner-cutting and self-indulgence, but formed by a serious effort (I'm partial to the word "faithful" here, but others don't like it as much) to live the tradition.

Analogs to all of those questions came to me in an unexpected place today when I was looking at the "Ratings & Reviews" of an online recipe for a lemon rice and eggplant-chickpea curry. It had an impressive 5-star rating from its reviewers. But, it would appear, almost none of the reviewers had actually followed the recipe! Here are some of the top ten reviews: (See if you can reconstruct the recipe from them!)

This was a super easy dish to make and took no time at all. I did not add the curry paste (not a curry person) and it tasted awesome. First time I have ever made eggplant and was happy with the result. 

This was yummy. My boyfriend, a big-time carnivore, was a little surprised when he asked me what kind of meat was in it, and I said, "none." I left out the eggplant because he is not a fan, and only added 1 1/2 tbsp of curry paste. I substitute the Basmati rice for Jasmine, because that's what I had in the pantry. I would definitely make it again, next time with chicken or perhaps even lamb, and I would add the full 2 tbsp of curry paste. 

Quick, easy to make and best of all delish! I have made this twice now and like adding more curry paste but then I am a big curry fan. I would recommend those new to curry to stick to the recipe as is. The cashews add a nice crunch and a touch of sweetness. 

Amazing! (I added another heaping teaspoon of curry and skipped the cashews) 

Made this last night for the first time. I skipped the rice part and just made the main part and it was absolutely delicious! I can't wait to eat the leftovers for lunch today. It would probably be great with chicken too if wanting to add a meat. I didn't have cashews, so used roasted peanuts and it gave the dish a nice salty-crunchy surprise kick. 

 the highlight of this dish has to be the rice. the vegetable topping is also great, reminds me a bit of ratatouille. ive already prepared this dish a few times, making various substitutions along the way, for example i replaced the eggplant with zucchini, chick peas with black beans. it always turns out great!

It always turned out great, but in what sense did these people actually prepare the same dish? The fact that they posted reviews of it suggests they thought they did. Enough to rate it and recommend it, in any case. My quandary. Do I cook "it" tonight? Do I join the community of those who have made the recipe their own, a community which honors the individual cook's exigencies, quirks and commitments, and teaches us how, when and why to make adjustments ourselves? I'd feel a fuddy-duddy for actually including chickpeas, eggplant, curry and rice!

One big challenge for lived religion understandings is explaining why traditions don't just entropically explode or subside or dissolve. One set of explanations involves authority, welcome and unwelcome, desired and feared, externalized and internalized, sometimes mystified as "custom." But a second is suggested here, a community which models a creative faithfulness, providing resources for and - perhaps - setting bounds to it. Enough to call it a tradition, in any case?

Lived religious geography

My first year students hit the jackpot today. I'd talked them through the walk we made (part of) on Tuesday, explaining why I'd chosen each site, and then asked them to think of a few sites in their hometowns they might show someone interested in the "lived religion" of the place. Each then shared her/his tour with a neighbor, and the neighbor reported on something that struck them from this tour. Great things emerged!

My tour:
• Roman Catholic church of St. Francis Xavier to suggest the individuality of congregations, how much bigger and varied a big church may be than its official line, and the paradigmatic lived religion of queer Christians;
• Limelight Marketplace (in erstwhile Episcopal Church of the Holy Communion) to evoke secularization, prise apart religious life from religious buildings, and suggest that nightclubs, if not malls, might offer some "religious" solace;
• Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art to explore the continuum between religion, spirituality and art, and to think if cultural centers like museums might serve religious needs too;
• the Salvation Army to introduce the privatization of religion thesis and the ways religious organizations have reacted to it;
• Village Presbyterian Church for more building secularization but also to tell the story of the cohabitation of different religious communities in the same building (and its limits);
• Tiles for America, an example of the spontaneous memorialization which is a prime locus for lived religion, not explicitly religious but symbolic; and finally
• the 2nd cemetery of the Spanish Portuguese Congregation Shearith Israel, to recall the palimpsest of grids in New York, and to raise the question: where are the dead New Yorkers?

What they came up with:
• a church in the Bronx which broadcasts its services live on a big TV screen out front, where they are followed by some people who aren’t comfortable with the community inside;
• a Catholic school, also in the Bronx, elaborately transforming the school auditorium into a church for holy days: altar, new lighting, etc.;
• Prosperity Dumplings on Eldridge Street in Chinatown
• Whole Foods, in London;
• a group which met on Sunday afternoons in Annapolis to solemnly ring fourteen singing bowls;
• the bedroom of one student, which has to Buddha statues as well as the signs of the bat mitzvah she organized for herself;
• stops on the Great Ocean Road where you can leave other people behind and be alone with the raw power of nature;
• a local video store in New Jersey, now closed, which was a family not only for those who worked there but for many others;
• hookah bars in Palestine, and here;
• abandoned churches in Chicago now inhabited by homeless squatters, as well as a Catholic neighborhood with shops selling all sorts of paraphernalia, and a tree a whorl in whose bark reminds some of the Virgin Mary.

Fresh face

I'm having a Lived Religion moment over a story in yesterday's Times. A woman in her eighties, concerned that her favorite representation of Jesus, a 19th century fresco in her local church, was being destroyed by water damage, restored it. The result doesn't look much like the original, it's true. But the original surely didn't look much like Jesus. The Times reports that the blogosphere has been having a field-day with the supposedly simian character of Cecilia Giménez' work - and I'm sure the Times article will inspire more. I'd like to know how Giménez and her community feel about her work. Apparently she did it with priestly approval and in broad daylight; the "disfiguring" was discovered only when the heirs of the painter of the fresco came by to have it restored. Who exactly has a problem here, and is it a religious problem?

Actually, I think I might use this in class. In their celebration of the religious resourcefulness of ordinary people, my "Lived Religion in New York" students moved too quickly to disdain specialist knowledges in religion, the ordinary person being assumed to be competent both to define and to find ways to meet her own needs. Since then I've been thinking about presenting religious specialists as sustained by ordinary people who need their special gifts and skills (who can then, and only then, shape these needs). Giménez may be unapologetic about her faithful attempt to render the face of her Lord, but also prefer the work of a trained artist... (Word is she's bedridden with anxiety over the ruckus she's caused.)

On the other hand, wouldn't it be cool if someone experienced a miracle cure in front of the new "Ecce Homo"?!

Lights, camera

As part of a project called "Spiritual Narratives in Everyday Life," research subjects were given a disposable camera and asked to take pictures of places important to them, and then, later, to talk about each picture. It's a great way of letting interview subjects co-construct the research. And sometimes, as in this picture of a beloved public gazebo, it uncovers modes of experiencing one might never otherwise learn about. I'd love love love to find a way of integrating such Photo Elicitation Interviews (PEIs) into my upcoming first year seminar, "Lived Religion in a Secular Age." But how? Suggestions welcome!

Roman R. Williams, "Picturing Religion in Everyday Life," Sociology of Religion: Newsletter of the Sociology of Religion Section of the American Sociological Association 11/1 (Fall 2009): 4-5 and “Space for God: Lived Religion at Work, Home, and Play,” Sociology of Religion 71:3 (2010): 257-279, 259-60.

fashionable religion

In the welter of end-of-year activities we started something new this week, too. A Swedish fashion designer who has recently joined the Parsons School of Design Strategies contacted our religious studies program to propose some sort of collaboration. In Gothenberg he had attended several seminars in the Theology Faculty. Apparently his dissertation explored the applicability of the liberation theological concept of "base communities" to innovative fashion production, although he seems more interested now in talking about heresy. In any case, I invited him to class a few times, and then, Monday night, we had a first official gathering on the religion-fashion connection, in a studio at Parsons - half a dozen faculty and students from each program attended. I thought I might end up with something wearable by the end of the event but that will come later. For now it was just a free- wheeling discussion exploring affinities, metaphors, synergies, of which there are more than a few. It turns out that the Integrated Design Program explains its relationship to design and design studies more generally much the way lived religion relates to "institutional" religion. "Capital F fasion" is, he says, like organized religion, with its authorities, sacred texts and practices, but what they're interested in is more fluid, more egalitarian, spunkier - and integrated with all of life. Everyone gets dressed, his Dutch colleague P said, there's no reason fashion (small f) shouldn't be part of everyone's everyday life. (She doesn't seem to think the same about religion.) We have much to teach each other and learn from each other. We reconvene in February - join us? If not wearables we'll at least be producing a few pamphlets on the subject!

Duck, here comes Christmas!

Someone sent me the link to someone's collection of the "worst nativity sets." Some of them are pretty awful, but as a set they raise some rather interesting "lived religion" questions. Is this religion? Isn't it? Something like this awful-wonderful zombie nativity must be a gag, as is the bacon and sausage nativity you'll have to look up on his site. But cupcake topper nativity seems like it could be an expression of some

 

kind of piety. And what about dog nativity? While I'm not a dog person I can see how this might be more than dog-worship, might be its own tender expression of "O come let us adore him." Celebrate the coming  of Christ into your life by expressing something of yourself: isn't that the sort of thing "lived religion" takes seriously? But wasn't Jesus' human form sort of central? Maybe not. WWJD? Better a moose than a zombie.

HASK not

For our fourth Lived Religion in NYC fieldtrip (the others took us to Eldridge Street, the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine and the Rubin Museum of Art) we did something rather interesting today. We went to the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen. But we didn't volunteer; we stood in line, and ate sloppy joes, cole slaw and corn on the cob with the other guests. My original idea had been for us to volunteer, but that would involve arriving at 9:30 and staying at least until 12:30, not possible for busy students. A logistical constraint became a pedagogical opportunity. It is harder to receive than to give, and we got to see HASK from the receiving end. (Our presence contributed something though, if only conversation fodder: some folks evidently thought us refugees from last night's razzia on Zuccotti Park!) And maybe some of the students will make the not unprecedented move from guest to volunteer.

I timed the visit to come in the middle of our reading of a book about another well-known New York food charity whose name misleadinlgy suggests a religious connection, Courtney Bender's Heaven's Kitchen. Bender's participant observation is of the community of volunteers in the kitchen of God's Love We Deliver, an organization which brings food to homebound people with AIDS. The kitchen volunteers never see the recipients of their work, and don't talk about AIDS. They also, Bender found, rarely talk about religion. What do they talk about? Bender's a good listener, and describes the gossamer-like threads of spirituality, memory, habit, etc. which make this a community. GLWD's mottos are food is love,  food is therapy and food is charity. Bender finds the kitchen workers disdain such explanations as marketing; "food is the message." But the mottos do help define some of the very different and even conflicting rationales for feeding programs - it's not just nutrition - and I was eager for students to sense the wordless but eloquently polyvalent message of food prepared at a place like HASK, and to see the overlap of the different HASK communities: guests and volunteers (maybe even that both are outreach missions of the church)... Did they get it? We'll see once we discuss student reflections on Thursday.

The whole thing went much more quickly than I anticipated. I was expecting (planning!) to spend half an hour in the line but we were in in ten minutes. The food happens very quickly, too, and is quickly eaten. Not that anyone is hurrying you on; au contraire, you feel welcome to take your time, make yourself at home, and people do. But the staff and sixty volunteers pass in a blur. It's all friendly efficiency (and the food was tasty!). From experience I know that the stations of volunteers are involved in conversations as warm and disjointed as those Bender found at GLWD. But the contact between the worlds of volunteers and guests is like the interlocking of gears, perfectly fitting but touching only for the briefest moment. Both are in movement - am I letting a metaphor get out of hand here? - but in different directions. Part of the fulfillingness of volunteering at HASK is precisely being part of so well-oiled a machine. Is it also the precisely defined and limited contact with guests - not that different from GLWD's kitchen workers who never saw the people who ate their food? HASK has recently moved the food service volunteers into the church space, so volunteers and guests share the space. Have people's experiences changed?

(Pictures from here and here)

A magician in the classroom?

A magician visited "Lived religion in NYC" today. I mean that almost literally, in two senses. The visitor is a specialist in helping couples design interfaith marriage services (for which she also officiates). She described to us the long process of exploring the partners' religious backgrounds, practices and hopes with them, soliciting accounts of their understandings of their relationship and of marriage, and of her work translating it into the at once mystical and dramatic "language" of successful liturgy. She had brought along two liturgies she recently developed for us to look at, one Jewish and Hindu, the other Kabbalistic and Wiccan, and as she talked us through the second one, you really got a sense of how the "change in ontological status" she had told us a marriage service needs to effect was effected. It's a kind of magic.

But she's a magician in another, more technical (and anachronistic) sense as well. I'd invited her to our course at this point because we have explored all the things ordinary religious people do for themselves, without the support or sanction of "organized" religion or religious specialists. And yet ordinary people support organized religion and religious specialists too. Why? It's not just external compulsion and the temporal power of spiritual organizations. I've been suggesting that there are things one might feel the need for a specialist for, and this visitor was supposed to exemplify this. As she explained how difficult it is to do what she does well, this seemed confirmed.

But then it became clearer and clearer to me that she may be a religious specialist but is no sort of segue to organized religion. To my surprise I was thinking in Durkheimian terms (terms we all supposedly learned to shed in graduate school!). What she offers is not religion but magic. She works as an individual for individuals, and maintains her standing through her ability to effect results. Her authority comes from this effectiveness, and comes from her distinctive life and personality, not any sort of authorized training, lineage or ordination. (The answer to the question how she could marry a Mormon and a Catholic, for instance, is simply and finally that she has. Now that's magic!) When I quipped that, in light of the fact that half of all Americans now marry across religious lines, her line of work might be something one might mention when asked "what can you do with a religious studies degree?" she put me in my place: she didn't learn how to do this from books.

We all shed Durkheim's religion/magic distinction, though, because he seems simply wrong to see in one the guarantee of a shared moral life in community, in the other an individualistic and amoral practice which could not generate anything like such stability and meaning and may even undermine it. (I've often quoted John Gager's suggestion that in fact "magic" is no more than a name for "religions we don't like," "religion" a name for "magic we do like.") In this specific case, is not the interfaith marriage liturgist helping individuals transcend individual needs and deepening and extending moral communities?

Extended family

Today could have been the day we exploded the category of "lived religion," but I'm not sure anything like that happened. We've been discussing the adoption and adaptation of mizuko kuyô 水子供養 rituals in America as chronicled in Jeff Wilson's brilliant book, Mourning the Unborn Dead: A Buddhist Ritual Comes to America (which I've discussed before). This gave us an opportunity to think about the work of ritual - what it does and how - and whether the mysterious continuum from fertilized egg to successfully delivered baby isn't perhaps better understood through ritual than definitions and artificially drawn lines. (I put on the board the awful proposed amendment to the Mississippi State Constitution which is likely to be voted in at the next election: the term ‘person’ or ‘persons’ shall include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.)

I also got to talk about what in other classes I call the question of the limits of the moral community. A discussion of rituals for "children who unfortunately were not able to be born" (to use the language used at Hasedera in Kamakura) let me suggest that our discussions of "lived religion" have focused only on "human beings who managed to be born and haven't yet died." But no religion thinks that's all there is, and certainly no lived religion, which where ties with ancestors, the departed, and whatever other forces and agents there are perhaps most intimately felt and maintained.

To make the point I recalled the painting above, Charles Willson Peale's portrait of his family - painted over thirty-five years (1773-1809), during which time his first wife died and he married again: both wives are in the portrait, and the two little girls at the table died as children. I recalled other family portraits from the exhibition at the New-York Historical Society where I saw this one which included gauzy figures of babies who had been stillborn. Not so easy to answer the census-takers question "how many people are there in this family or house?"

What happens to "lived religion" when we expand the sense of the community in this way, and take into account the fluid boundaries which lead William LaFleur to entitle his book on mizuko rituals in Japan Liquid Life? We don't - well, I don't - want to endorse an approach which accepts the "buffered self" Charles Taylor thinks replaced the "porous self" in our "secular age."

Lived religion at OWS

I'm not sure if this "sacred space" has been at Occupy Wall Street all along - I noticed it for the first time today. It's at the other end of the park from Broadway, where the interfaith services happen at 3:30 on Sundays. Next time I'm down there I'll take time to investigate what has found its way to the altar, and ask what activities have constituted themselves around it.

Noch einmal, mit Gefühl

A few weeks ago a friend of mine introduced me to the recordings of the Brahms symphonies which Marin Alsop made with the London Symphony Orchestra. They're lovely, dancerly in some places where I've grown up hearing ponderousness, and generally luminous. My friend thinks it's because Alsop is a woman. "Women hear differently," she explained; after all, one hears with one's whole body. I've been mulling that intriguing observation over ever since.

Today I brought it up in class, as we were discussing McGuire's sophisticated and often surprising discussion of gender and lived religion. Students had come up with many examples of religious traditions where women and men have different experiences because of different roles, different access to spaces, etc. Is it only cultural construction of gender she's getting at, I asked, and let the image of a person at the center of an orchestra playing Brahms frame the difficult and historically fraught question of gender and religious experience. It made everyone uncomfortable. A good thing?

Another bric in the wall

We've finished our reading of Meredith McGuire's Lived Religion. Going through it again, with a class, really heightens my appreciation of its achievement, as well as my awareness of roads she hasn't taken. I'm asking the students to follow up two sources she refers to as a way of learning from her and/but also learning how she works from others' research. My illustration is an article by Otto Maduro to which she refers in her closing discussion of syncretism and bricolage. She argues that syncretism is the norm - it is anti-syncretism that needs to be explained! - but the contrast with his argument makes her individual bricolage-focused study seem to present rather too rosy a picture of religion, by still implicitly separating religious from political and ideological structures and ideas.

I would like to see more studies ... of the syncretizations at work in Methodist history between the Wesleyan tradition, on the one hand, and, on the other, U.S. white supremacy, middle class ethos, and Manifest Destiny. Similarly, I would encourage researchers on Pentecostalism to zero in on the ongoing hybridizations in the Assemblies of God between its Holiness heritage and the extraneous trends of dispensationalism, Armageddon theology, and the gospel of prosperity-alongside with the abandonment of an earlier openness toward women leaders and pacifism. I would suggest to those researching the history of missions to study the processes of integration of (and resistance to) capitalism, militarism and U.S. hegemony into the evangelizing practices, among others, of both U.S. Protestant and Catholic missionaries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. To those interested in the sociology of Puerto Rican Christian churches I would propose to reconstruct the dynamics leading to the pervasive recasting of Puerto Rican nationalism as a religious heresy.

 

Otto Maduro, “‘Religion’ under Imperial Duress: Postcolonial Reflections and Proposals,”

Review of Religious Research 45/3 (Mar 2004): 221-34, 229-30

The skinny?

One of the students in Lived Religion in New York City sat down in front of a coffee shop in Williamsburg with a sign - "Got a religious tattoo? Want to talk about it?" Many people weren't just willing to talk, but let her take their picture. Awesome! But I need to report that one of our Religiou Studies Program alums, a body artist of some distinction, is very cynical about the significance of religious tats.