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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Having Conversations7/20/2006 11:57:58One thing I like very much about trying to make a living at religion is the kind of conversations that comes up daily when the people I come across ask inevitably what I do and so forth. With great generosity (I usually don't ask) they share with me something about the role of spiritual things in their own lives or in their opinions. This summer I am traveling a great deal, and when traveling, this sort of thing happens several times a day. It is a great gift, and one of the reasons I like this "profession" so much, and I try to consider every such conversation to be a valuable part of my education, something to be heard both for the improvement of my soul and my work. Last week a chat about religion wound me up borrowing a stranger's car. Yesterday one brought a man to tell me about his girlfriend who had died in Katrina. Everyone tells me about their parents. Locating myself daily in these conversations, I find, is a constant reminder of the difficulty of the scholar's position who takes a special interest in religion. I discover constantly the quiet biases that are buried everywhere in our societies, convictions that are usually hidden from the visible marketplace. It may be that I am a little too willing to stretch my own location in order to open people up. With some I am a pious Christian or what have you, while with others I am a critical unbeliever like them. Or a million other roles. What strikes me as strangest is that I have no difficulty, at this point in my life, floating among these seemingly contradictory positions. I enjoy them all, and in the appropriate conversation, any of them can feel like a deeply relevatory language. And that is sort of the way I approach them. Religions, though, are not languages precisely, and the consequences for floating between them are different. Doing so makes me nervous on a number of fronts. Still, I am unrepentent about my motivation in doing so: to see into the worlds of others and share among them. A lot of people I know in religious studies, both students and teachers, have gotten tired of these incessant conversations with people, these pourings out of secrets without provocation. One advisor of mine would just tell people who asked that he was simply a philosopher, which would end the conversation a bit more quickly and painlessly. I wonder if I will ever lose interest in getting my head talked off for an hour about some stranger's personal revelations like that. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
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