When one is out to study religion, or to cover the religion beat, it can be awfully tempting to see religion everywhere you look as the all-satisfying explanation for everything. It’s the whole if-you-have-a-hammer-everything-looks-like-a-nail effect, right?

Today at Religion Dispatches I’ve got a review of the new book by Steve Fuller, a rather audacious and controversial philosopher of science. Though himself a secular humanist, he’s out to show that science, past and present, owes pretty much everything to the theological imagination—in particular, the Christian one. As much as there is truth to this—truth rarely appreciated as it deserves to be—sometimes even I have to draw the line. Not everything is about religion:

[T]here are proximate causes other than theology on hand for science’s development and sustenance. Europe and North America in the latter half of the second millennium had social arrangements, natural resources, habits of mind, and geopolitical competition that make for satisfying just-so stories too; only the most theologically self-confident would chalk it all up to religion. The globalization of science now underway, particularly as more and more important research takes place in non-Christian countries like China and Japan and by their nationals working in the West, a totally theology-centric narrative seems less and less plausible.

But even an anecdotal survey of what ways of thinking uphold the everyday habits of science today don’t quickly draw one’s mind to religion, nor do they necessarily stand in opposition to it. As in any profession, there are professionals competing for advancement and respect by trying to outdo each other in highly specialized contests, accumulating accomplishments that outsiders can’t begin to comprehend. All this depends on particular personality traits which, combined with lots of discipline and practice, amount to tremendous facility in the intellectual and technological tools of a given field. It’s paid for by private and public agencies which, in turn, steer research priorities. Science has also concocted its own narratives that serve some of the functional roles that religious ones otherwise might; I wonder what would have become of Fuller’s book had it focused not on theology but on science fiction, from Bishop Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone to Star Trek.

Sgt. Dougherty Park (map)
Brooklyn, New York
Saturday, July 24th, 2010
3pm-5pm

The search for proof and disproof of the existence of God through history can tell us as much about the people doing the proving as about any particular deity. What do they mean by God? What counts as proof? In this class at the experimental outdoor School of the Future taught by KtB senior editor Nathan Schneider, we will be using pictures to explore questions like these for ourselves. First, the teacher will present (again, in pictures) some of the classic arguments used to prove or disprove God’s existence in the past. Then, students will have the chance to draw pictures of proofs of their own, and we will discuss them in an open-minded, non-judgmental fashion, together with historical anecdotes from the teacher’s research on the subject. Drawing materials will be provided. No belief or disbelief in God required, nor any particular skill at drawing.

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Late last year, I published the sketch of an essay here called “Don’t Take Away My Memory Theater.” The feedback that came in the comments from you readers was enough to encourage me to try developing the ideas in it even more. Now, finally, a much-extended version has been published by the good people at Open Letters Monthly: “In Defense of the Memory Theater.” It is, at first glance, my contribution to the Great Speculation among bookish people about what is going to happen to reading when the machines finally take over, if they ever really do. It seems lately that just about every writer is required to submit some opinion on the matter. But I try to make my contribution reach a bit more than usual from matters of fact to those of spirit.

I am in no position to end with prognostication, to predict how all this business will turn out, or to recommend particular policy directives and consumer rules-of-thumb. The companies will have their way, of course; as the filmmaker Chris Marker once put it, I bow to the economic miracle. But I can end with a vision, and it can point to a posture.

Picture a library, in flames, overlooking the city in ruins below—the Library of Alexandria under Caesar’s assault all over again. Books by the thousands audibly crinkle as they incinerate, disappearing for all time, never to be read again and, in a generation or two, never to be remembered. They are all irreplaceable; their loss is exactly incalculable. They are now good only to fuel the fire. As bystanders, we’re consumed by horror. We imagine ourselves as the books, the books as ourselves. Everything is lost with them. Right?

Or, on the other hand, might we instead laugh and cheer? It wouldn’t be the first time at a book-burning. Why not? Isn’t there also comedy—a divine comedy—in what freedom would follow the immolation of civilization’s material memory? We have only ourselves again, ourselves and our God. Perhaps these flames might go by the name of progress.

Thank you so much to all of you who took the time to comment and encourage. Fleshing this piece out, in particular, and putting it before readers means a lot to me.

If you don’t know the name Hypatia, you should. In the grand mythology of the Enlightenment (to which, on optimistic days, I subscribe), her murder at the hands of a Christian mob marks more or less the end of Greek philosophy and the beginning of the Dark Ages. Now, for those of you who don’t know her, there’s a blockbuster historical epic movie about Hypatia (though it has scored only limited distribution in the U.S.). And, for those of you who don’t trust blockbuster historical epic movies, I’ve got a review of it on Religion Dispatches today:

Hearing about Agora’s success in Spain last year—the highest-grossing film of the year, sweeping up awards—couldn’t help but bring to my mind the empty insides of so many of that country’s churches, still charred after the various anti-clerical mobs of the last few centuries. I wasn’t the only one to make that association. With predictable ressentiment, an open letter came to Amenábar from the Religious Anti-Defamation Observatory, a Catholic watchdog in Spain, warning him: “Your film is going to awaken hatred against Christians in today’s society.”

American “Catholic evangelist” Fr. Robert Barron adds in his Catholic New World review, “I wonder if it ever occurred to Amenábar that his movie might incite violence against religious people, especially Christians.” One can only hope that it’s not a good enough movie to drive people to the streets.

In an interview with the New York Times, though, Amenábar turned the tables on his pious critics. “Fundamentally, this is a very Christian film about the life of a martyr,” he explained. “Jesus would not have approved of what happened to Hypatia, which is why I say no good Christian should feel offended by this film.” In this respect, at least, his sentiments have historical basis.

Keep reading to find out why.

As I’ve worked on questions of religion and reason, both in the academy and as a journalist, the John Templeton Foundation has been around every turn. As I called, corresponded, and visited with many of the leading thinkers in the science-and-religion discussion, caution was the prevailing tone—some even joked that I should get them on the record saying something nice about the foundation. Those not applying for money now expect to do so in the future, if they haven’t taken a principled stand against it. It is probably for this reason that, in all the books and articles published on science and religion year after year, none addresses in any great depth what is really the biggest science-and-religion story of the last quarter-century: the Templeton Foundation itself.

With a new article called “God, Science and Philanthropy” in The Nation, I’ve attempted to change that. It’s a close look at a fascinating and controversial organization, created by a most uncommon man:

Templeton’s own spirituality was eclectic. Though a lifelong Presbyterian, he imbibed the wisdom of religions both Eastern and Western, ranging from his friend Norman Vincent Peale, the prophet of the organization man, to Ramakrishna. Early on, his mother exposed him to the Unity School of Christianity, a turn-of-the-century movement that emphasized positive thinking and healing through prayer. The Unity School considered itself progressive and even, loosely speaking, scientific: a practical application of Christianity to modern life.

Out of his humble origins in small-town Tennessee, Templeton built a career as one of the great architects of globalization—”the dean of global investing,” Forbes once dubbed him. As he grew older, though, his wealth ever multiplying, Templeton began turning his attention away from business. “All my life I was trying to help people get wealthy, and with a little success. But I never noticed it made them any happier,” he told Charlie Rose in a 1997 interview. “Real wealth is not in money; it’s in spiritual growth.”

It’s yet another chapter in history’s sloppy tango between science and religion.

Ever since the Israeli strike on the Gaza Freedom Movement’s Freedom Flotilla on Monday, I and the rest of us at Waging Nonviolence have been exploring ways of understanding what happened. My first essay, “Nonviolence and the Gaza Freedom Movement,” simply raises some questions that we might be asking as new information about the incident slowly trickles out. “Were the activists really acting nonviolently?” “How are the mission’s success and failure being measured?” “Whose suffering is the media considering grievable?” “What laws were violated, and why?” —and more. I’ve been glad to see that piece gaining some traction around the web; it has been picked up at Common Dreams, In These Times, and Sojourners.

Today, I added a further discussion of that first question and its consequences: “Gaza, the Mavi Marmara, and the Prospects of Fighting Back.” There, though the facts of the case are still far from clear, I address the reasons and ramifications of activists attempting to fight back against Israeli soldiers—particularly for the fledgling nonviolence movement in the Palestinian territories.

See also our initial post about the events, a wrap-up of early news coverage, and a report about a solidarity march in New York.

The future of the cause for justice in Palestine-Israel is very much riding on how the story of what happened that night in the Mediterranean is told. If there is to be a future, really, it means thinking through the problems in ways that get beyond the familiar intransigence.

I recently had the pleasure of a Midtown conversation over lunch with writer, scholar, and filmmaker Reza Aslan, which appears today at The Immanent Frame. In it, he shares a number of quite radical ideas, including his support for the one-state “solution” in Palestine-Israel, the un-uniqueness of Jesus, and, as well, the prospects for an academy that can speak more relevantly in the public sphere. The latter hits especially close to home, since the experience he speaks of here took place at my beloved U.C. Santa Barbara religion department, where I did my graduate work. It’s a tough challenge he poses. Though, I have to say, I’d hate to lose some of those masterpiece dissertations on vowel markings.

NS: […] What can scholars do to be able to speak relevantly, the way you have, to the public—and to each other as well?

RA: I’m very pessimistic about this. Academics have been reveling so long in their own private language, speaking to each other and not to anyone else, that it’s going to be very hard to break through the current paradigm. I’ll give you an example. I wasn’t finished with my Ph.D. when No god but God came out. The book was very successful, but life became miserable for me in my department. Professors who had been working with me suddenly turned their backs to me. Unnecessary obstacles were put in my way. There was an attitude—not just amongst the professors, but amongst my fellow students as well—of Who the hell do you think you are? How dare you take this discussion that we’re having in a room with four people and make it palatable to a large and popular audience? Things got so bad that I actually had to switch departments, and I ended up getting my degree from a different department altogether. That, to me, is an example of the problem academia has, which earns it legitimate criticism for being out of touch with the concerns of people outside of its walls.

NS: How do you think scholars can learn to take part in broader conversations?

RA: It’s often a total waste of time. You can’t be trained to speak to the media in a weekend seminar before going on Anderson Cooper. You have to be immersed in the kind of world in which there is no division between the academic and the popular. I honestly think that the best hope that we have is to foster a new kind of student, one who doesn’t spend eight years in the basement of Widener Library at Harvard poring over a thirteenth-century manuscript and writing a dissertation on the changes in the vowel markings of a sentence. That kind of scholarship has a very small role in the world we live in now. We need scholars who understand that there is no division between the world of academia and the popular world. Trying to take staid academics and teach them to use words with fewer syllables is not the way to break that wall down.

In an attempt to tame the back-and-forth we had on Bloggingheads recently, religious and philosophical ethicist Richard Amesbury and I have a text interview today at The Immanent Frame, which covers a similarly broad range of themes: human rights, the definition of religion, and New Atheism.

NS: Is there something that, above all, ties together your interests in international relations and philosophy of religion?

RA: I’m interested in the significance of borders—the lines we draw between in-groups and out-groups. The concept of “religion,” like that of the nation, represents an attempt to articulate a collective “we,” in opposition to perceived alterity. In the United States—though not only here—these two ideas have reinforced and shaped each other in interesting and problematic ways. Yet, because they can be imagined differently, for different purposes, religions and nations are also sites of ongoing conflict, whose boundaries are always subject to renegotiation. The goal of a social critic, as I see it, is not to eliminate exclusions—these are inevitable—but to render the operations of power visible and contestable. The moral ideal of human rights is important to this task because it reminds us that every construction of collective identity is ultimately contingent and in tension with our common humanity.

Prisons in the United States are a profound kind of disaster, and lately I and some friends have been doing some thinking about how the conversation can be changed, away from the self-defeating logic of “tough on crime” to something that will actually, well, be tough on crime, rather than simply tough on the bodies and souls of criminals—and, by extension, a mark of shame on our whole society.

Hear, for instance, last week’s discussion hosted by Killing the Buddha, The Prison-Spirituality Complex. Also, in the current issue of Tricycle, I review a new book by one of the panelists at that event, Yale professor Caleb Smith. Since Tricycle is a Buddhist magazine, I took the opportunity, also, to interview and discuss Buddhists who are involved in prison work. (Unfortunately the review is available online only to subscribers. Buy it at your local Whole Foods!)

Solitude can be a vehicle for liberation, or it can tear a person apart; the American cult of reclusive individualism, after all, has given us wise men, intrepid pioneers, and mountaintop transcendentalists, but also desperate housewives and deranged unabombers. Caleb Smith, a professor of English at Yale, reveals in “The Prison and the American Imagination” that nowhere is this contraditction better and more brutally expressed than in our penal institutions.

Since the opening of Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary in 1829, the corrections business in this country has carried on a love affair with isolation. Though well after passing from the control of its Quaker founders, the city ensured its flagship prison was suffused with their theology of the Inner Light. Inmates lived alone in cells lit by a single skylight—the “eye of God”—where they ate, slept, worked at handicrafts, and waited. The intention was that a man would drift into reveries of meditation, coming face to face with himself and the divine spark within. Prison, said one of Eastern State’s founding documents, will “teach him how to think.” Reformist hopes also took on the transformative language of born-again evangelism. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, imagined that upon an ex-con’s release people would proclaim, “This brother was lost, and is found—was dead and is alive.”

My instinct is that, with religion so centrally a part of the birth of the American prison disaster, religion will somehow have to be part of the solution.

What does it take to make reconciliation—even forgiveness—possible? Today at The Immanent Frame, I talk with Eduardo Gonzalez, a sociologist who directs the International Center for Transitional Justice’s program on truth and reconciliation commissions. Before that, he was involved in organizing and executing the commission in his native Peru. We discuss, among other things, the ritual performances that allow victims’ voices to be heard:

NS: You’ve described the truth commission process as, in some sense, a performance. What does it take to create a compelling, effective performance that is also an authoritative arbiter of truth?

EG: When I talk about a truth commission as a performance, that is not to suggest that it is some kind of fictional show. In fact, people opposed to truth commissions suggest just that. I prefer to talk about performance in a different way, referring to the language and codes utilized by victims to tell their stories. The language of victims, particularly those who come from marginalized groups, is rarely the language of the public sphere or the state. They do not typically come to a commission with written evidence or lawyerly arguments. The language of victims is oral and performative, transmitted through the family and the community. These performances may include storytelling, demonstrations, religious ceremonies, and vigils for those who were killed. Truth commissions need to provide an appropriate setting for people to channel those performances. We did that in Peru through public hearings, which I had a role in developing. The hearings were specifically designed to enable people to express their views in a way that they found appropriate, and that way was typically performative.

NS: What did you do to make the hearings more hospitable to these performances?

EG: Beforehand we examined videos of the Ghanaian, South African, and Nigerian truth commissions. We were pretty unsatisfied with what we saw. Truth commissions in those countries had decided to utilize the visual language of courts in order to gain credibility. A courtroom is supposed to convey majesty, authority, and impartiality. But we thought that if a truth commission is to take seriously the right to truth and the duty of memory, it needs to do everything differently. Rituals in a court of law revolve around the accused and the parties whose testimonies converge on the accused. The judge and/or the jury have the ever-present capacity for unleashing violence, because the end result of a trial can be a punishment. In a truth commission, however, the role of the commissioners is entirely different; they are presiding over a healing ritual for the victim. Their role is one of accompaniment, of support. For that reason, we had victims and commissioners sharing the same table. Instead of everyone standing up when the judge comes in, the commissioners and the public stood when a victim came in.