When I admitted that the reason I applied to Meadville, the UU seminary, because it was a way to lift up the skirt of the U of Chicago Div School and get into the tent without having to compete with a lot of Ph.D. candidates, my mentoring minister did not object, but he had a lot of warnings. Some were useful. Some things he didn’t know about.
Like, the prejudice against what they called “phenomenology” which is about the sensate world rather than some virtual dimension. Likewise, their need to be logical, reasoning from prior knowledge, and excluding emotion as a contamination. They didn’t like women either. Nor were they really acquainted with “the parish,” meaning the care of people with an affinity gathered in a congregation. Meadville was a side show about actual ministry.
But there were other streams of thought, like the core of comparative and historical religion, which prompted me to accumulate moments of intense meaning that were not traditionally considered “religion” because they made no explicit claim to be an institution. This meant I could include my experience with Blackfeet Bundle Ceremony as well as moments of high theatre. This took me to the discussion of religion as liturgy which is a performance that used what I had learned as a theatre undergrad taking classes in acting. Shared dimensions include the individual management of the performer/celebrant; the integration of other levels like music, building, education, management of birth, marriage and death; and the shared experience of the collected people.
Religion is also a culturally identified body of thought and performance developed in a particular time and place, emerging out of the ecosystem. Awkwardly, it often functions as a rival government, esp when it is displaced from its origin which the participants cling to as “the old country” of their identities. Before people moved around the planet in such numbers the government and the religion were the same thing.
The now growing category of “nonreligious but spiritual” opens a new approach that is particulate in terms of members and yet can be identified as a “thing.” A few very tentative groups are organizing.
Many “religions” began as dissent from the pre-existing, without the founders even knowing it was separate — like Christianity coming out of Judaism or Lutherans coming out of the Roman Catholics. Usually the dissent is framed as reform and in terms of dogma, but later is seen as a reaction to socioeconomic forces. Transcendentalism, for instance, though it didn’t continue to develop at the time — maybe what we’re seeing now is the eventual continuation. The catastrophic impact of climate change without any “big hand” of God certainly makes us wish for an Oversoul.
My mention of Eliade prompted my cousin, Katherine Rouzie, to point out a professor named Wasserstrom at Reed College, the UU founded college in Portland.
https://www.reed.edu/reed-magazine/articles/2019/wasserstrom-all-religion-is-interreligion.html
“The festschrift begins with an essay Steve once casually shared with GhaneaBassiri when they were preparing to coteach a course called “Theories and Methods in the Study of Religion.” . . .
The essay, “Nine Theses on the Study of Religion,” puts forth the idea that all religion is inter-religion, meaning religion is always relational. There are no clear boundaries between religions. That is why the term religion is useful. It captures as the scholar’s object of study the ways specific religious traditions have historically developed in relation to one another. Embedded in the concept of religion are specific religions, such as Judaism, Buddhism, or Islam. . . .Rather, Wasserstrom observes that systems of belief do not exist in and of themselves, in isolated categories. They exist among people. Given this, he reconsiders religion as faith and posits that the role and responsibility of religion scholarship is to make sense of the complex relations humans have maintained—both past and present—by appealing to the gods.”
Below is a quote from a Jay Livernois review of Wasserstrom’s book. “In the nihilistic aftermath of World War II, the efforts of emerging phenomenologist Mircea Eliade, Judaist Gershom Scholem, and Islamicist Henry Corbin formed the discipline of the History of Religions (in Ascona, Switzerland).” Until now I’ve not seen Eliade grouped with anyone (maybe Tillich) or called “an emerging phenomenologist.” I thought Eliade was stand-alone, unique. Given the resistance to phenomenology at the U of C Div School of my time, this helped explain why he was housed (both office and apartment) with we UU’s. (UU’s, of course, love prestige so welcomed him.)
This was before the wave of unchurched but spiritual people and just at the beginning of what I call the Algerian French philosophers: Foucault, Derrida, et al. No one suspected that we would ever be able to penetrate the neurological mysteries of cells and brains. These developments have made rational my insistence on religion as an immanence of meaning arising from the interaction of humans with ecosystems and achieving a transcendence of conventional behavior.
It was the very U of C insistence on analyzing one’s methods and sources, which they took to be access to the true value of a Ph.D., that forced me to be so self-conscious. Far from the prescribed steps of Euro philosophy, my methods were sloppy, random, happenstance, and therefore able to see what was invisible to some. The only explanation those scholars seemed to respect was supernatural. They were unwilling to give up mystical experience and I agree with that. They also couldn’t give up the metaphor of “God” but kept Him as a “thing” with a new name, love or something. Inevitably their systems drifted back to a big Pater in the sky.
from: “Nine Theses on the Study of Religion” a chapter in a very expensive book by Wasserstrom.
“I think the peculiar office of scholars in a careful and gloomy generation is to be (as the poets were called in the Middle Ages) Professors of the Joyous Science, defectors and delineators of occult symmetries and unpublished beauties; heralds of civility, mobility, learning and wisdom; affirmers of the one law, yet as those who should affirm if in music and dancing; expressors themselves of that firm and cheerful temper, infinitely removed from sadness, which reigns through the kingdoms of chemistry, vegetation and animal life. — Ralph Waldo Emerson Religious Studies, in so far as it is philosophically defensible, seeks a general perspective. The study of religion strives for philosophical understanding of the human as such and seeks species-wide generalizations.” Hmmm.
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