Given the last post, and my interest in spirituality, I’m looking forward to this new project: Frequencies, a joint effort by Killing the Buddha and the Immanent Frame.
The experiment is simply to ask “scholars, writers, and artists what they think of when they think of the word spirituality.”
100 essays over 100 days.
Lillian Daniel rants about the passenger in the next seat in the airplane who says, “I’m spiritual but not religious,” upon learning that she is clergy. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve had the same experience, and the same reaction, both in my earlier life as a professor of Religious Studies (when I would usually pass myself off as a scholar of European History) and since I’ve been ordained a priest.
Of course, people who say they are “spiritual not religious” can be vacuous; but worship and life in Christian communities can be vacuous as well, as Trevor Wax reminds us.
Sometimes, such people are little more than individualist navel-gazers; sometimes, they are on quests for meaning and authenticity. Sometimes, they are burned out on organized religion, or worse. They are so damaged by life in communities of hate that they cannot conceive or ever experience the life-giving power of Jesus Christ. Sometimes, their journey has taken them away, as in the case of a woman I spoke with this week, who after years of faithful attendance, and active involvement in outreach, finds the liturgy no longer speaks to her soul. Instead, it is painting that feeds her soul. Sometimes that phrase, “I’m spiritual, not religious” is a formula they’ve learned to help them deal with the absence in their hearts that they cannot comprehend.
From Cathy Lynn Grossman of USA Today.
Greg Garrett on post-9/11 literature
James Martin, SJ on his return to Ground Zero after 10 years:
From Cathleen Falsani, who was a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times: “The Question remains the same”
And a moving portrait of The Rev. Tom Winslow, who was a chaplain at Ground Zero.
Yes, says Mark Chaves:
In “American Religion: Contemporary Trends,” author Mark Chaves argues that over the last generation or so, religious belief in the U.S. has experienced a “softening” that effects everything from whether people go to worship services regularly to whom they marry. Far more people are willing to say they don’t belong to any religious tradition today than in the past, and signs of religious vitality may be camouflaging stagnation or decline.
Bradley Wright says, “Don’t jump to conclusions.”
a decline might be overstating the case, and says polarization is a better description. He recently plotted survey data over the last 25 years recording what Americans say about the importance of religion in their lives. Those who say it’s extremely important have grown slightly, along with those who say it’s not at all important. But the number of people who said it was “somewhat” important dropped from 36 percent to 22 percent in about 20 years.
Mark Harris, who is a member of the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church, has written two posts imagining our Church’s future. They are available here and here. He is writing in response to the financial shortfall anticipated in the coming triennial budget, but I think there are deeper issues at stake. In both of his posts, he imagines something other than the existing diocesan structure. In the first, he wonders how dioceses might band together on certain matters, administrative, programmatic, and even disciplinary (we’re attempting the latter here in Wisconsin). In the second, he advocates for more horizontal networking.
The deeper question is how does our Church re-imagine itself in a post-Christian context. We’ve inherited most of our structures from past generations–the institution building from the nineteenth and twentieth century, the diocesan structure from the early Church (well, actually from the Emperor Diocletian’s administrative restructuring of the Roman Empire in the 4th century), and the question is whether these structures can be adapted to fit a context where commitment to institutions, especially religious ones, is low.
It’s not just about the money, though it is about that. It is about reaching out and meeting people where they are at, being open and welcoming to people whose journeys bring them to us, for a few days, weeks, or years, and offering Christ’s love to people in places, and in ways, unconceived by past generations. The new media revolution allows us to imagine and create new ways of encountering and connecting people, new ways of being Christ’s body in the world, and old structures. old ways of doing things, old ways of thinking may prevent us from seizing the opportunity.
Interesting study explores attitudes toward death. It seems that to many people, somebody in a persistent vegetative state is seen to be “deader” than someone buried in a coffin. This is especially true for religious people. The authors of the study postulate that belief in the afterlife is a cause of that discrepancy.
David Berreby comments. He wonders about the implications of such perceptions:
Still, most of us in industrialized societies don’t see death or severe brain damage up close. Hence, a tendency to see mental incapacity as somehow more dead than death could have practical and political consequences—especially in an ever-grayer societies in which instances of dementia are expected to double in the next 20 years.
The news reports last week about a study that found better-educated Americans attending church more regularly than less-educated (and presumably less-affluent people) led to conclusions that instead of reducing religious commitment, higher education enhanced it. That’s the wrong way to read the data.
In the first place, religious involvement is decreasing across the board; it seems to be decreasingly less among the better-educated. There may be all sorts of reasons for this, most notably the increased prevalence of divorce and single-parent families among working and lower-middle class Americans. Family-friendly churches want their families to be traditional–husband, wife, and two children.
Second, there is the problem of how the research was done. It’s not clear from the piece to which I linked above, but I assume questions about attendance at religious services were asked to survey participants. In other words, people were self-reporting their activity. These sorts of studies are notoriously unreliable. The difference between the answers given by different socioeconomic groups might be due, not to actual differences in behavior, but in different attitudes toward what they think they “ought” to be doing. That is to say, it may be the case that better-educated, more affluent Americans still feel pressure to be involved in religious institutions, something other groups no longer sense.
After the earthquake and then Hurricane Irene, many (including several facebook friends) wondered whether plagues of locusts or frogs were next.
Never fear, writes Stephen Prothero. We Americans rely on science, not the Book of Revelation, for our interpretation of natural disaster:
When it comes to earthquakes and hurricanes, however, our authorities are geologists and meteorologists. Most of us interpret these events not through the rumblings of the biblical prophet Jeremiah or the poetry of the Book of Revelation but through the scientific truths of air pressure and tectonic plates.
Well, some of us do. And then there’s Michele Bachmann. Her campaign says she was just joking.
A sermon from Mark Harris on the hurricane.
The slacktivist explores the reasons behind the fish symbol and tacky Christian t-shirts. They are much less prevalent in Madison than they were in Greenville, but still. He comes to the same conclusion I did, that they are not so much tools of evangelism as they are symbols of an in-group, and that what mattered was public identification as a Christian, rather than Christ-like behavior.
A Roman Catholic perspective on this topic.
This puts me in mind of a student I had once who seemed to have a different t-shirt with a catchy Christian theme for every day. On the other hand, he couldn’t be bothered to actually read the Bible we were studying in class that term.
A new study on the effects of meditation may explain why it helps improve focus and minimize pain.
Mark Vernon explores meditation in a different way, writing about his experience of Buddhist meditation on retreat:
But I became increasingly struck by how myself and my fellow retreatants placed one concern above all others: ourselves. We were there to attend to our own wellbeing. The practice was presented as a kind of self-administered therapy for the soul. There was an occasional ‘metta’ meditation, to develop an attitude of loving-kindness towards others. But the task was basically to observe yourself, and that set up a dynamic with which I grew increasingly uncomfortable – one of self-absorption and self-obsession.
He concludes:
Western Buddhism offers a model of the self that is, in fact, complicit with modern individualism. Christianity, though, can claim to be radically different. Its discovery is that we are who we are in relationship, with others and with God. To be human is to be the creature for whom our own existence is too small for us. That, it seems to me, is both true and avoids the narcissism and the nihilism with which western Buddhism flirts.
I’m not a big fan of the sci-fi/fantasy genre which might be surprising given my demographic (you know, a white guy, kinda geeky, who reads and has always read a lot). But there have been a recent uptick of interest in the blogs I read about the relationship between sci-fi and religion (or Christianity), so in case you are a sci-fi freak and haven’t seen them, I’m providing you with the links to follow.
First up, a few weeks back, The Guardian’s Comment is Free blog asked the question: What can science fiction teach us about God? Answers from British sci-fi authors.
Then came Julie Clawson’s blog post on Sojourners. Of high quality sci-fi, Clawson writes, “they are the stories that mean something. Stories that through their imaginings of alternative worlds tap into the power of the prophetic to deliver the message that our world too is not absolute, but imagined and therefore capable of change.”
On a related note, the annotated Bible of Philip K. Dick, the prolific and talented author of Blade Runner and many other works, is up for sale on ebay. In 1974, Dick had the first of a series of visions. His last novel is an imaginative retelling of Episcopal Bishop James Pike’s spiritual quest and death in the desert, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.
Preaching Grace on the Square 