It’s a common refrain that one hears among those of us looking to think responsibly about the world’s religions: at bottom, they all have a common core, and the core is a genuinely good one.

That would be nice, but I’ve never really bought it. To be honest, I don’t even think it would be nice. All we’d have to do is follow the correct kernel of our religions and we’d be golden forever, end of story. So much of the interesting, complex, and messy stuff that makes learning about religions and about people so engrossing might peel away in the name of unity. And often, when such universal perennialism gets wheeled out, it turns out to be in fact a surreptitious assertion of a particular tradition, to which all the others become subservient.

But when Karen Armstrong, the British dean of comparative-religion-for-the-people, claims that all religions are really about compassion, when she goes on to promulgate a “Charter for Compassion,” and when TED throws its connections and tech savvy behind her, it’s hard to be too much of a curmudgeon. Sure, such things have come and gone again and again in history—how often have we heard calls for World Peace in Our Time?—but no less are we probably still responsible for giving it another go. And if a bit of fascinating religious mayhem has to be quieted in the process, so be it. There will still be science fiction.

That said, I’m glad to have had the chance to interview Karen Armstrong at The Immanent Frame. What she proposes is certainly a brave effort to mobilize her years of studying and writing into action, into a movement. It also represents an important example of activism and organizing from precisely the spiritual-but-not-religious vantage point that is supposedly able to do neither.

NS: Do you anticipate that the Charter will eventually translate into meaningful social change?

KA: All religious teaching must issue in practical action. This is something that has become very clear to me during the last twenty years, which I have devoted to the study of world religions. The doctrines and stories of faith make no sense at all unless they are translated into action. This is one of the essential themes of my latest book, The Case for God, which was being written at the same time as we were composing the Charter. We were all convinced that somehow the Charter must be a call to action. There was no point in us all embracing one another on the day of the launch if there would be no practical follow up. We need compassion—the ability to put ourselves in other people’s shoes, to “experience with” the other—in politics, social policy, finance, education, and media. Unless we can learn to treat all nations and all peoples as we would wish to be treated ourselves, we are unlikely, in these days of global terror, to have a viable world to hand on to the next generation.

Read more at The Immanent Frame.

At the Guardian today, I’ve got a short bit about secular, mainly Continental philosophers who, in recent years, have turned to theology:

[Slavoj Zizek] is one of several leading thinkers in recent years who, though coming out of a deeply secular and often-Marxist bent, have made a turn toward theology. In 1997, Alain Badiou published a study of the apostle Paul, whom he took as an exemplar of his own influential philosophy of the “event”. Three years later, Giorgio Agamben responded in Italian with The Time That Remains, a painstaking exegesis of the first ten words of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. The purpose of both was not a more enlightened piety, but an inquiry into the texture of revolution. Paul is significant to them because he ushered in, and in the process described, a genuinely transformational social movement.

When I arrived at UC Santa Barbara for my graduate work in 2006, I had some horrible, vague idea about wanting to study issues of interreligious dialog(ue)—it was a mess. I’d just finished an undergraduate thesis about evolution debates and wasn’t sure where to go next. Fortunately, the professor I found myself paired with, Ann Taves, knew better. Already an accomplished historian, she had lately become taken by all the research going on in the brain and mind sciences about religious experience. Since my head had long been in the religion and science stuff, we had fantastic conversations and, before long, I cooked up a master’s thesis with her about the theoretical models at play in the latest scientific research on religion. And now, she’s got a whole book about it: Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things.

Today at The Immanent Frame, I have the pleasure of sharing a conversation I had with Ann about her new book, as well as her distinguished new role as president of the American Academy of Religion.

NS: Like your plans for the AAR, Religious Experience Reconsidered attempts to expose humanists and social scientists to new approaches in the study of religion. What obstacles need to be overcome?AT: There have been certain problems in the study of religion that we keep coming back to and gnawing on without being able to solve very well. One is the relationship between experience and what we call religion; another is whether, when you’re defining religion, it is a unique—or sui generis—thing apart from other things; and a third is the threat of reductionism. All of these have been inhibiting our ability to bring scientific approaches to bear on the study of religion. What I try to do in this book is to open up pathways that will make it easier to engage the scientific literature on the study of the mind without simplifying the conceptual framework in ways that would frustrate scholars of religion. What I’m working on is just one possible avenue for doing this, but however we do it, we have to responsibly connect the study of religion to other disciplines. Humans are biological beings; we’re cultural animals, as one psychologist puts it. We therefore have to take our biology into account, as well as culture, and the way the two have interacted over the course of human history.

A couple weeks ago I was riding my usual route from home in Clinton Hill to the Williamsburg Bridge when I saw that the ground had shifted beneath my bicycle gears. As I crossed Flushing along Bedford Avenue, into the heart of Hasidic Williamsburg, Brooklyn, my bike lane was gone. Only a faint, sandblasted remnant remained.

That’s an excerpt from a new essay of mine in The Huffington Post, one of two pieces I published today on the controversy about the lane’s removal. Since it’s a corridor I bike along regularly, and since I’ve long been curious about the religiosity of those who live along it, I did what I could to understand what happened and why. Most of my fellow cyclists believed that religious prudishness was mostly to blame, but what I learned from conversations with Hasidic men on Bedford convinced me that we cyclists have to share some of the blame for the lane’s removal as well. I write in my piece for Religion Dispatches:

That’s what nearly everybody walking up and down Hasidic Bedford in daytime says as well. When asked directly about it, they concede that they believe many cyclists to be inappropriately dressed, even while insisting that that alone was not reason enough to remove the lane.

An ambulance driver said that there had been a lot of accidents with children, though he had never personally seen with one. A man named Moshe, however, said he did once see a child hit by a bike. “It’s terrible,” he said. A yeshiva school bus driver complained, in an extended conversation aboard his bus, “bikes don’t obey any laws.” He doesn’t think religious concerns about clothing were the motivating force at all. “It is a free country,” he said.

“The problem is how they ride on it,” added a Hasidic man named Abraham while checking his mailbox on Bedford. “They don’t care about the kids.” Both a bicyclist and a school bus driver, he enjoyed using the bike lane but now is glad, for the sake of safety, that it is gone.

I go on to call for a new sense of responsibility among bicyclists for their own behavior, especially where neighborhoods provide lanes for us on their streets—both for myself and my fellow cyclists. Again, in HuffPo:

The city has added hundreds of miles of bike lanes in recent years, and bicycle commuting has more than doubled since 2000 as a result. I see new lanes being added all the time and feel grateful every time I do. Each one lowers my chances of getting whacked by a taxi.

As the city finally starts investing in keeping us safe, it is time for cyclists to do our part. “There is not a single community board meeting about bike lanes where cyclist behavior is not an issue,” says Wiley Norvell of Transportation Alternatives. His organization has launched Biking Rules!–a program to encourage more responsible riding in New York City.

The rules are simple and, from now on, I’m going to do my best to follow them: Pedestrians come first. Stop at red lights, and don’t ride against traffic. Obey the laws. Wear a helmet, and use a light in the dark.

Read the rest of these at Religion Dispatches and The Huffington Post.

I’ve got a zany new essay at Religion Dispatches today about a lecture earlier this week in Brooklyn, “A Philosophical Proof of Santa Claus.” Jamie Hook, the evening’s presenter, did a masterful job of miming some of the issues at play in debates about God—though in the guise of a fellow whose existence, this season at least, is for many people a somewhat more urgent question.

Mr. Hook, who describes himself as a “socially omnivorous urban dandy,” began this “passion play for the non-believer” with a story of loss of faith: the memory of telling a seven-year-old boy that Santa Claus doesn’t exist and subsequently watching him fall into a two-week depression. “We had made his world smaller,” Hook remembers. He devised this lecture, following the suggestion of Rainer Maria Rilke, to “restore enchantment to the world.”

Hook promptly proceeded to a Wikipedia-style historical sketch of the origin of the idea of Santa Claus, followed by a 12-minute original anthropological video of actual, believing children articulating the substance of their Christmastime convictions. These two accounts were utterly at odds. The children didn’t hesitate to delve into amazing speculations about how Santa may have once been an ordinary man, or preceded the evolution of the human race, or came from a supernova-ed star long ago. None of them, significantly, were willing to either question their belief in Santa or to prove it—aside from the testimony of having seen him at school or the remains of his nocturnal deliveries at home. As Hook pressed them from behind the camera to explain, the children only became firmer in their self-assurance.

Read the rest at RD.

What concerns me about the coming literary apocalypse that everybody now expects—the full or partial elimination of paper books in favor of digital alternatives—is not chiefly the books themselves but the assortments in which they find themselves. Specifically, I am concerned about what’s going to happen to my own library. For public and academic libraries, however vital, I think I’ll leave the fretting to the experts and hope that a deal can be struck between Google’s armada of scanners and well-meaning librarians. My fear is for the eclectic, personal collections that we bookish people assemble over the course of our lives: our memory theaters.

It is time to defend, tooth and nail, the spirit of our precious bookshelves. I think of the work of historian Frances Yates (which now sits on my shelf), who chronicled the the great “memory theaters” of ancient orators and Renaissance humanists—spaces they would conjure in their minds in order to help them memorize all the precious accoutrements of civilized knowledge. In the age of the book, our memory theaters have become externalized; we have entrusted them to our bookshelves. As I look over my own shelf, I see my life pass before my eyes. The memories grafted onto each volume become stirred and awakened, presenting themselves to ready access. Such libraries are particular to their possessors, the manifest remainder from years of thinking. Without the bookshelf’s landscape to turn to, I don’t know how I would think or write. […]

At The Immanent Frame today, I interview Mark Johnson, executive director of the pioneering pacifist organization, the Fellowship of Reconciliation. (I wrote about the Fellowship in a recent book review for Commonweal.) We discuss the FOR’s current work, its legacy, and how it is adapting to the the challenges of religious (and non-religious) diversity in its ranks.

NS: How is the FOR’s religious identity evolving today?

MJ: We’re forced to ask ourselves what it means to do peacemaking in an interreligious—or even a secular—world. There’s quite a bit of anxiety among many people, who are asking, if the community consciously opens itself more broadly to humanists and avowed atheists, what confidence do we have that we will share basic values in common? But you can argue, I think, that atheism or agnosticism or humanism are as much religions as any denomination or sect in terms of having an identifiable set of values and, eventually, sets of rituals that shape how people think about and act in the world. A lot of what we struggle with is simply a matter of words. I love Charles Taylor’s arguments about the emergence of the secular age. We’re also reading Peter Berger and Anton Zijderveld’s very nice new book, In Praise of Doubt. Doubt lies at the heart of the practice of pacifism. You can never know, ultimately, how you’re going to respond when confronted by violence. Absent a total conviction or confidence that you’ll act nonviolently, can you characterize yourself as a pacifist? Part of the conversation that we’re having, also, is about how doubt can create the space for being more accepting of more people.

Read more at The Immanent Frame.

I’ve got a new essay today in Obit that takes the new 2012 movie as an occasion for a reflection on why folks are always so eager to proclaim the end of the world: “You Broke It, You Bought It.”

Though the word “apocalypse” now is usually taken to mean a world-ending calamity, the original Greek word strictly translates as “revelation.” This meaning is as relevant today as when the New Testament’s last book was promulgated with the word as its title. The havoc wrought matters less than what it reveals. Because there’s only our one world, predicting its end is the ultimate jackpot in the contest for Truth. Whoever is right about how the world ends is probably right about other important things as well. Foretelling the apocalypse is an audacious attempt to assert the universality of a particular tradition and its beliefs.

I’ve found this stuff more and more worth thinking about lately as a way of exploring the imaginary dimensions of the climate crisis. What kinds of ends of the worlds have cultures imagined previously? What will the end of our world really be like?

In the last several decades, there have been numerous—and largely unprecedented—efforts around the world to develop and enact protocols for what to do in the wake of conflict and horror. From Nuremberg, to South Africa, to Guatemala, different models have been tried, and each bears lessons for the future. At The Immanent Frame today, I interview Daniel Philpott, who is working to develop a holistic framework for such work under the banner of “reconciliation.”

When we reason about justice, whether it is the justice of war or of reconciliation, we’re providing a set of moral standards. We know that they’re going to be violated. But I still think it is important to articulate them. For instance, in courts of law, if we’re trying to decide whether something is a war crime, we need some standards to know what that means. Even if moral standards aren’t always respected, people need to be able to make moral claims against violators. The ethic of reconciliation and just war theory provide a proscription for what just action ought to look like. Military academies in the United States take just war theory very seriously. This is what they teach their soldiers: no, you can’t kill civilians; no, you can’t wage aggressive war. The standards are really tough, and people are expected to conduct themselves in that way. It’s also ensconced in international law. My dream is that the ethic of reconciliation will have a similar status, providing a cookbook for how to approach certain problems, even if, at times, it is going to wind up being compromised.

“Bonjour, hello,” I’m told, finally reaching the front of the long line at the convention center cafe. It’s Montreal. I can say “bonjour,” at least. Wouldn’t that be polite? But that could invite an incomprehensible flurry of Quebecois French, which would only serve to remind me how utterly I failed to learn the language from my dear mother, who is fluent. “Hello,” I say, and order a breakfast sandwich without the ham. It comes with ham anyway.

“How’s your French?” I ask my friend, a graduate student who is here to give a paper that examines the early Christian thinker Origen through the perverse lens of Georges Bataille. “I can read it fairly well.” When he orders, he orders in English too.

Religion is back in Montreal, a city that, when it tore off the habit of de facto clerical rule during the last century, thought it had done away with the stuff. Body parts and sexual acts aren’t the bad words here (the neon awnings of strip clubs abound); say the name of a part of a Catholic church out of context in Quebecois French, and chances are you’re cussing. But over the last week, frustrating every hope for blessed laïcité, 4,500 religion scholars converged under the shadow of the royal mount for the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. […]