Tag: religion

Posted on

Simon Critchley on our desire for asceticism

It may do the philosopher Simon Critchley an injustice to take these two paragraphs out of the context of his book, Mysticism, when they’re somewhat unfathomable without the context of chapter 2 (“Seven Adverbs that God Loveth”), but I have to post these words somewhere for future reference! Critchley writes (p. 87)):

I am curious about the meaningfulness of asceticism today. The forms of ascetic practice in which people engage are legion: hot yoga, ceaseless meditations, extreme fasting, various forms of detox, excessive exercise, and compulsive devotion to routine, which was particularly acute during the COVID-19 pandemic. Or asceticism becomes pathologized, as with anorexia, bulimia, and other ‘disorders.’

We are strongly drawn by the desire for asceticism, it seems to me. We are fascinated by the extremity of mystical practice—think of the wildly self-destructive antics of female medieval mystics like Christina the Astonishing described earlier, the self-mortification of monks, stylites, anchorites, and the bands of itinerant flagellants in the early Middle Ages. But we find such behavior and its metaphysical demands too rigorous and weighty for our softer secular souls. For us, the purgation of sin has become a juice detox, the flagellation has become our relation to a bad selfie posted on social media.

Why did these two paragraphs grab my attention. I pondered that for a moment and I think it’s because it says something similar to the entire book by Carolyn Chen, Work, Pray, Code: When Work Becomes Religion in the Silicon Valley. She shows how religious we humans are…even when we’re super irreligious. We need patterns and rhythms. Religion used to provide that to most of us. As we become more secular, the desire for order and meaning doesn’t go away, we just plant it elsewhere. Harvey Cox made many similar observations in The Market as God. Even the great atheistic philosopher, Daniel Dennett, toward the end of the documentary I, Pastafari, says something about how secularism shouldn’t go back to the superstitions of religion but sure needs to discover all of the social benefits that those religions offered before it’s too late. I guess what I’m saying is that as annoying as statements like, “you may not be religious but you have a religion” or “we all worship something” may feel to those who have left organized religion, the fact is that they contain a truth. We humans can’t dump the things that made us human over all this long millennia of our evolution. At best, we can reword and reinterpret them. I think Critchley captures this with relation to the mystical impulse.

Posted on

The appeal of the papacy

Today, I watched ABC News as it live-streamed the selection of Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost to become Pope Leo XIV. As he was being introduced, and the audience was being read to in Latin, I wouldn’t say that I was in “awe” of the spectacle, but I did admire it. A short while later, I was talking with a colleague who is Catholic. We were surprised to see that an American been chosen. As our conversation preceded, I said something to the extent that even many of us Protestants, if we’re honest, look to whoever the Pope is to be an exemplar and we may look to him even for some form of moral guidance. Not on all things, obviously, but on many. (Even Benedict XVI, the only Pope that I’ve seen live in person as he spoke from a window into St. Peter’s Square when I was visiting Rome, was a man whose scholarship and theological intellect was worth hearing.) We pay attention to who the Pope is. We have preferences. And as I told him, I don’t pay attention to or care about whoever the Southern Baptist Convention elects to lead them. If I’m honest, I have a marginal interest in who the Episcopal Church choses. But the Pope? Well, he’s the Pope!

I don’t know why this is the case. Why do I, a Protestant with an affiliation with the Episcopal Church, care who the Pope is? What is the appeal of the papacy for a person like me? (I’m sure Catholics have their take!) It’s kind of like Americans who care about British royalty. Similarly to such Americans, most who probably wouldn’t want their to be a “King of the United States” (though many of Trump’s supporters seem open to the idea), care about who wears the Crown in England. If we didn’t, why did we watch Netflix’s drama, The Crown? Why did we care about Princess Diana or Prince Harry? Why do I as a Protestant, who wouldn’t want to be part of a theological tradition like Catholicism (I had my flirt with Catholicism briefly in the early 2010s), be invested in who the Catholic Church elects? I’ve shared some thoughts on this already (see “Why the next Pope matters”), but I think there is something about the majesty of it all that resonates with human nature, even humans like me who tend to be suspicious of hierarchies or at least see hierarchies as purely functional and acceptable only because society needs them to survive (I presume).

Posted on

Why the next Pope matters

Pope Francis died last night at the age of 88. As a non-Catholic, some may think that this is irrelevant to me, or relevant only in the way that news of the death of any major world leader is relevant. And I can see why, especially if you know me. As I’ve grown older, I’ve become more and more classically liberal Protestant. I’m more aligned with the theology of say a Paul Tillich than a Pope Francis.

“Il Presidente della Repubblica Sergio Mattarella incontra Papa Francesco” via Wikipedia

If I’m honest, as I’ve watched Christianity devolve and degenerate in the United States, I think less and less about my religion, period. I used to think about it all the time. I thought theologically consistently. I’ll confess that I’ve become disillusioned. What passes for Christianity today is an embarrassment. The past ten years have been nothing short of disheartening for me as an American Christian. I prefer not to think about it all that much if I don’t have to. Why waste my time on such a depressing topic?

But Pope Francis was a bright spot especially during this dark decade. Not because I agreed with him. Not because he was “liberal” in any sense of the word that aligns with what I think of when I think of that word. (Maybe he was “left” of Pope Benedict XVI but that’s not saying much.) He was a bright spot because the Catholic Church exists and will exist past my life time. There will be a Pope. Someone will be the Pope. The best that someone like myself can hope for is that whoever the Pope is, they’ll be pastoral, advocate for peace, care for the poor and the outcast of society, and try to model the type of Christianity that I would like to see exist in the world. Pope Francis was that type of Pope. While I may have disagreed with him on matters like gay marriage, there’s no denying that he was a man of compassion and love that far exceeded anything I’ve exhibited in my life. For that reason, he was a Pope that I admired, respected, and dare I say, even “followed” looking for him to provide us wisdom on topics ranging from the climate, to the economy, to war. He was a moral exemplar, through and through.

The next Pope matters because we needed and continue to need a man like Pope Francis in our world. There will be a man in the Vatican who will have influence over the world’s nearly 1.5 billion Catholics. If a man like Pope Francis is at the helm, it’s better for all of us, whether you’re a liberal Protestant like me, an atheist, a Buddhist, or whatever. His leadership helps make for a better world in ways that I know we can’t objectively measure but surely can feel. So, my hopes and maybe even prayers are with the Catholic Church as they choose their next Pope. Their decision impacts all of us.

Posted on

Meaning, significance, purpose, and “sonder”

More than a decade ago, I admitted something out loud in a conversation that I knew to be true to how I felt but that I was embarrassed to articulate. I was in my early-30s and I was disillusioned with much of my life. Things weren’t going as I had imagined they’d go. And I said, “I thought I would live the type of life that someone would write a biography about.” As I said the words, I knew they sounded foolish. They sounded narcissistic. It’s likely that they were narcissistic and foolish. But these delusions of grandeur had come from a sincere place. While I can’t unpack all that went into this misguided vision, I can summarize things this way: I had embraced a bad theology that led me to think that if I dedicated my life to certain higher spiritual ideals (“seek first the kingdom of God”) and forsook debased, “worldly”, selfish pursuits (“and his righteousness”), I would be rewarded with a life that was full of significance and meaning (“and all of these things shall be added unto you”). When I say “significance and meaning” I mean divinely given significance and meaning (see the Gospel of Matthew 6:3). The kind of significance and meaning that you “know” comes “from above” because other people recognize it.

There’s a little prosperity Gospel in there. There’s a lot of problematic theology around “calling” as well. (In religious circles, this is sometimes referred to as “discernment” where other people who have been called “confirm” that you have been called as well.) But at the time, I couldn’t get my head around why I was just another face in the crowd. I thought I had made a covenant (as in Matthew 19:27: “Look, we have left everything and followed you.”). Why had I committed myself to the path that I was walking if it led me obscurity? But not just obscurity, since this wasn’t about fame. Purposelessness. Meaninglessness. I felt unneeded. I wasn’t contributing to anything. Why didn’t I focus on a career path that would’ve let me pursue my own “selfish” goals, like wealth?! The exchange (as I imagined it) was for a life that would make an impact on the world. I wasn’t making an impact.

Thankfully, I got therapy. My therapist suggested, gently, that there may be a lot of meaning and significance in the world but that it wasn’t to be “found” or (divinely) “gifted”. She had me read Viktor E. Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning. I remember coming away with a new sense that significance and meaning could be created. The universe wasn’t meaningless. It was full of meaning. But that meaning isn’t necessarily inherit or objective. You don’t have to go on a quest to find it. You don’t have to pray, fast, and wait for it to be announced to you by an angel from heaven. You have to create it.

This places a lot of responsibility on the individual. As John Paul Sarte said in “Existentialism Is a Humanism”: “…man is condemned to be free.” But theologies that tell you that there’s a (single) divine will for your life that you must find is a greater condemnation. You’re responsible but powerless. It’s almost like you have to get lucky. You have to follow the divine calling the “right way” without knowing what that way is! The existential thinking of Frankl and Sarte is freeing in that while you’re responsible, there’s no “wrong” life for you to create. The condemnation is that there are many possibilities. But I’ve come to embrace “possibilities” as superior to the idea of a single, divine plan for one’s life. (If this needs theological rescuing for some readers, then consider this: we may be “creators” with a small “c” created by our “Creator” with a big “C” for a purpose of co-creating. I don’t know if that’s good theology but if theology is needed, then it’s better theology than the alternative!)

In my formative years, I heard preachers talk about “the good, acceptable, and perfect will of God” (Romans 12:2, KJV). These were framed as “three types” of divine will. Your life would fulfill it’s purpose only if you happened to discover the “perfect will of God” which is superior to the “good…will of God” or the “acceptable…will of God”. In retrospect, I don’t know how this exegesis worked but it stuck in my brain, tormenting me for years, even when I was shown that this isn’t the meaning of the quoted passage from the Bible’s Epistle to the Romans.

Eventually, I got a job teaching high school. I found it meaningful. It took me a little while longer to come to terms with the reality that my life could have meaning, significance, and purpose without approval by institutions ecclesial or academic. (Honestly, I think I may be arriving at that realization in its fullness only this year.) It took time to accept that I might be “only a high school teacher” and not a scholar, or a frequently published author, or a “thought leader”, or whatever else the previous generations’ equivalent to an “influencer” is! It’s unlikely that I’ll make a great contribution to theology, philosophy, or history. Instead, I’ll do my best to contribute to the formation of young people, some who will bluntly tell you things like “your class doesn’t matter” or “no one takes this [subject] seriously”. You smile and remind yourself that you said a lot of mean things as a teenager too!

I think the fear of my 20s and most of my 30s was that I would live an insignificant life. In a vast universe, there seemed to be nothing more horrifying than being just another person, a statistic, a name that future generations would forget. To be forgotten seemed like a form of eternal damnation. In my religious circles, I was told that I needed to create a “legacy”. In broader American Evangelical circles, people speak of a “purpose-driven life”. It was preached that God put us on this earth “for a reason” and to “make a difference”. It was as if living a normal, peaceful life would be a disappointment to God. That terrified me.

In my mid-30s, as I was deconstructing and recovering from this theology, a colleague shared a concept created by the author of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. He called the concept “sonder”. Here’s his definition:

n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

This word captured my fear but simultaneously empowered me with a realization. Even the most well-known people in the world whose lives seem more significant than the rest of ours have moments when they are background characters to other people’s stories. They may be a wealthy CEO but merely an insignificant person in their own child’s life. They could be a powerful politician who eventually becomes a rambling, tired old face on television. The fact of the matter is that no matter how “objectively” “significant” you try to be, the most important person in everyone’s life is themselves. We’re the “main character” in our own minds and even wealthy and powerful people are merely background characters in the lives of others.

For a few years now, off and on, I’ve pondered this word “sonder” and what it represents. And I’ve thought about how meaningful it is that we get to be mere “extras” that create the elaborate tapestry of someone else’s life. Think of this. In our individual insignificance (“an extra sipping coffee in the background”) we contribute to the greater, collective significance of what it means to be alive and to share in this life in this world. Even as the person who does nothing but turn on our kitchen light creating texture for someone walking through the neighborhood, we add to the lives of others. We’re significant in our insignificance. I think the Buddhists would call this “interdependence”. “Sonder” has the potential to infuse our own lives with meaning, significance, and purpose but in a way that is counterintuitive. It is an antidote to narcissism. It can prevent us from obsessing over how much we do and accomplish. It allows us to live lives that we enjoy knowing that in some small sense, even if we’re not “great”, even if we don’t “change the world”, no one can remove us from being part of the world as long as we’re alive.

Posted on

Can a religious studies class be a philosophy class?

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my ideal list of classes for high school freshmen (see “If I could select the courses high school freshmen take”). More precisely, I wrote about the classes that I wish students at the school where I teach had to take. One key idea is that we would offer a class that helps students think deeply about what it means to live a good life, what human flourishing looks like, and how we should treat ourselves and others. I don’t have interest in teaching something preachy. The goal is to help our students learn to think about these types of things, important as they are. But it must be done in a way that encourages them to take ownership of the questions and what they might mean for their futures.

Now, I won’t say that my idea has the green light just yet. But we are having important discussions. Something like what I pondered could become a reality as early as next year, at least with a soft launch. I’m busy outlining this potential class while reading everything that I can to help me prepare the lessons I would teach if we decide to move forward with my proposal.

The class as I’m outing it is basically a philosophy class. The tentative title is “Philosophy of Human Flourishing” which takes its inspiration from “The Human Flourishing Program” at Harvard University. Today, I mentioned the possibility of this class to some of my students. You see, I have two rituals to start each class: (1) a “Song of the Day” that ties into the lesson and (2) a “Question of the Day” that sometimes is connected but at other times can be contextual (e.g. “favorite Halloween candy?” near Halloween) or frivolous (e.g. “what’s your favorite fruit?”). Today, for my “Religion in Global Context” students, I asked, “What’s one ‘big question’ that you would like to have answered some day?” They shared some excellent questions (e.g. “Is there a God?”; “What’s true success?”). This is why I told them about the possible class we may offer. Some students seemed quite excited. A couple of seniors in the class expressed disappointment that they’ll graduate before it’s offered (not that they’ll be graduated but that we didn’t offer it earlier).

Then one student asked a good question, one I’ve been asking myself: “And this is a religion credit?” He didn’t say it in a negative way. He sounded excited that such a class would count toward his religious studies requirement if he chose to take it next year. But it’s a question that I need to answer, whether it’s asked positively or negatively. Can a philosophy course be a religious studies course?

Let me provide a couple of reasons why my answer is “yes”.

(1) Paul Tillich’s definition of religion.
(2) Religion asks us to consider how we should live.

The Protestant Christian theologian Paul Tillich, wrote in his book Theology of Culture, pp. 7-8:

“Religion, in the most basic sense of the word, is ultimate concern.”

A philosophy of “the good life” or of “human flourishing” (A) is about ultimate concern as well, both in how we live for ourselves and how we live for others, and (B) religious answers can be explored philosophically. By this second statement I mean this: a religious answer doesn’t need to be mindlessly considered or submitted to because it’s “revelation” (if such a concept applies to a particular religious claim). All religious answers come from humans. Yes, the approach is often different when we come at things religiously rather than philosophically but that doesn’t mean that we can’t consider from a philosophical vantage point what religions claim. Religion exists, in part, because people have had questions about our existence. If Siddhartha Gautama thought that our primary problem was dukkha, i.e. “suffering” or “disease” or “dissatisfaction” we don’t have to dismiss his diagnosis just because it has been understood religiously. In fact, we don’t have to dismiss his prescription for healing, namely his Four Noble Truth and his Noble Eightfold Path, either.

Philosophy is a mindset that requires us to be reasonable, logical, open, critical in the best way. It asks us to question the traditions we’ve inherited not to ignore them. This means that even as a class is structured around asking students to think reasonably and critically and to be logical and sound in their arguments, not appealing to divine revelation or tradition as an easy escape from tough questions about how we should live, we can include the insights of the world’s great traditions and some of the most prominent minds like Jesus of Nazareth and the Prophet Muhammad. If they had opinions on how to live, and those opinions have shaped humanity, then we should consider them! Religion can be mixed throughout a philosophy-first course so that students are thinking about religious matters especially when ethics, morals, and values are involved.

This doesn’t depart from how we’ve taught religion at my school. Even in classes that are primarily “religious studies” there’s no side-stepping the rigorous demands of studying religion in an academic setting. For this reason, the dichotomy between religion and philosophy, at least when considered through a Tillichian definition, appears to be a methodological difference at best, and a false dichotomy at worst.

A final word on this from the perspective of someone teaching in an Episcopal school. The reason-revelation divide isn’t a strong one in my context. All texts, traditions, etc., that claim the status of “revelation” are engaged with “reason”. Anglicanism has the three-legged stool of (1) the Bible; (2) Tradition; and (3) Reason. Wesleyanism added a fourth: (4) Experience. Now, I’m aware that for many Anglicans and Wesleyans, these legs aren’t equal. The Bible and Tradition take precedent. But there’s an argument to be made that they’re equal because they’re mutually interdependent. The Bible contains reasoning about which we must reason. Tradition contains reasoning about which we must reason.

Episcopal schools face a unique double challenge. First, they serve as private religious schools that promote academics, scholarship, reason, science, and the Enlightenment values in a market where many religious schools don’t. Second, they serve as private religious schools in an increasingly—for better or worse—secular society. In all likelihood, the Episcopal Church must be prepared to represent an increasingly minority position both culturally, as the denomination shrinks and shrinks and shrinks, but also ideologically, as less and less space is made for those who value the benefits of a secular society, and who share a commitment to many Enlightenment ideals regarding rationality, science, and technology, but who remain drawn to religion/spirituality and what it offers us. Our culture is sometimes pulled between extremes like exclusivist Christian Nationalism on one side and religiously disaffiliated, even anti-religious, secularism on the other side. For those who don’t want to give up their Christianity, or maybe I should say their religiosity, but who also embrace what it means to be a modern person, what survives of the Episcopal Church will (hopefully) carve out this small space that will be an essential space for many. It must be a space that embraces pluralism and openness but also welcomes people to discuss, think, and practice spirituality and value-formation. For this reason, I don’t see a contradiction between offering a class that counts toward one’s religious studies in a private religious school that happens to be heavy on philosophy and that introduces and explores religious concepts from a philosophical perspective. It’s what I’ve been doing for over eight years now!

(Of course, there’s nothing that says we can’t reframe the requirement as “Religion and Philosophy” which would be something you might see in many Catholic schools where theology and philosophy have been in dialogue from the beginning; where Thomas Aquinas, arguably the greatest and most influential thinker within Catholicism, was shaped by Aristotle as much as he was the Bible and Catholic Tradition.)

Posted on

Proselytizing for atheism?

It seems like every time I see a study on human happiness, there’s a common finding: religious people are happier, and often healthier, than irreligious people. For example, Religion News Service reports, “New ‘human flourishing’ survey links frequent religious practice to life satisfaction”. And this satisfaction seems to increase with the intensity of devotion. According to Ryan Burge, those who have invested their lives the most into their religion, clergy, report being very satisfied with their lives. Yes, we’re seeing more and more people who are identifying as “Nones” but this may not be for their betterment. And yes, clergy burnout is real but people from all sorts of vocational backgrounds experience burnout, identity crises, second guessing, doubt, etc. Whatever the trends, and whatever the trouble with religion, the data still points to the reality that religious people seem happier.

Personally, I’m a religious person with a skeptical bent. I’ve admitted numerous time that I can’t be an atheist more for emotional reasons than intellectual ones but I think there’s an intellectual reason to reject atheism even when it seems logical: being happy is also logical. If we can’t answer the question of “God” but we do see that belief in God tends to benefit believers, and that religious ritual and community tends to be better for people, then it’s logical to continue living a religious life while holding religious beliefs, even if tentatively.

One of my favorite “non-philosopher philosophers” is Albert Camus. I enjoyed reading his Myth of Sisyphus, but I found his critique of Kierkegaard unconvincing. In the face of existential angst, Kierkegaard advocates a “leap of faith”. For Kierkegaard, Christianity is the direction toward which we should leap but let’s say “religion” for our argument here. Camus said that in the face of existential angst, or “the absurd” reality that the universe is indifferent to us, that we have three choices in response to meaninglessness: (1) physical suicide; (2) philosophical suicide; (3) rebellion against the absurd where we create our own meaning fighting against the demands of a meaningless universe. My trouble with Camus was that his rebellion felt sort of…religious. If we can create meaning when it seems like there’s no inherit meaning, then philosophical suicide isn’t so bad after all. If a “leap of faith” provides me with socially constructed meaning prepared for me by those who have come before me that allows me to find a community of like minded people with which to live life, then philosophical suicide seem to lead to a heavenly place when compared with the other options. Personally, I don’t think Camus’ critique of Kierkegaard is as powerful as others do. And I can’t find a rational reason for trying to dissuade someone of the Kierkegaardian solution in favor of Camus’ or in favor of any other atheism. If one is convinced of their own atheism, this doesn’t trouble me but it seems heartless to make a mission out of proselytizing for atheism. Let people have their leaps of faith! The data indicates that it’s working for them!

I’ll finish David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss sometime this weekend. It’s a book that I’ve enjoyed and that has challenged my thinking. I want to share an extended quote that captures what I’m trying to say (from pp. 305-306):

To proclaim triumphally that there is no God, no eternal gaze that beholds our cruelties and betrayals, no final beatitude for the soul after death, may seem bold and admirable to a comfortable bourgeois academic who rarely if ever has had to descend into the misery of those who lives are at best a state of constant anxiety or at worst the indelible memory of the death of a child. For a man safely sheltered from life’s harder edges, a gentle soporific may suffice to ease whatever fleeting moments of distress or resentment afflict him. For those genuinely acquainted with grief, however—despair, poverty, calamity, disease, oppression, or bereavement—but who have no ivory tower to which to retreat, no material advantages to distract them from their suffering, and no hope for anything better in this world, something far stronger may be needed. If there is no God, then the universe (astonishing accident that it is) is a brute event of boundless magnificence and abysmal anguish, which only illusion and myth may have the power to make tolerable. Only extraordinary callousness or fatuous sanctimony could make one insensible to this. Moreover, if there is no God, truth is not an ultimate good—there is no such thing as an ultimate good—and the more merciful course might well be not to preach unbelief but to tell “noble lies” and fabricate “pious frauds” and conjure up ever more enchanting illusions for the solace of those in torment.

Earlier, Hart says that atheism “should be classified as one of those religions of consolation whose purpose is not to engage the mind of will with the mysteries of being but merely to provide a palliative for existential grievances and private disappointments. Popular atheism is not a philosophy but a therapy (p. 305).” Whenever I’m drawn to atheism, which is two or three days a week, I recognize this about myself. But I find theism brings me more healing than atheism can, so I remain theistic. I don’t think theism is “philosophical suicide”. In fact, I don’t think we can truly know whether or not the word “God” has a referent. So, if we can’t know one way or the other, but it makes us happier and healthier to assume that God does exist, then isn’t it logical to try to find reason for believing in God?

Yes, the concept of God can be used to harm but it can be used to heal as well. So, I see value in arguing for a more loving, humane concept of God and against some of the disastrous and destructive visions of God, but it’s not clear to me that atheism is the best antidote to bad theism. Good theism seems like a better antidote. More importantly, it’s not clear why anyone would want to try to convert a happy theist into an atheist for any reason other than the selfishness of disdain toward theisms that they hold no longer. If an atheist is satisfied with a universe without transcendent meaning but they know conversion to atheism may ruin someone else, shouldn’t that person be left alone? The “Four Horsemen” seem sadistic.

Atheism may be an accurate worldview. If I were to adopt it, I wouldn’t bother theists about their theism. I would think, “We have this one life and our goal is to be as happy and comfortable as possible before we cease to exist—it’s to find enjoyment in this existence—and those people seem to enjoy their concept of ‘God’ so why harm them?” Would I challenge ugly theisms? Yes. But theism in general? I see no sense.

In his book Is God a Delusion? A Reply to Religion’s Cultured Despisers, the philosopher Eric Reitan said this after a couple of chapters addressing theodicy and arguing that theism remains a more hopeful response to theodicy’s problems than atheism is: “To deny human beings this faith is to condemn many to a worldview according to which the horrors that shatter so many lives will never be redeemed. When religious experience gestures towards a transcendent and redemptive good, it’s not irrational to live as if that good is real—that is, to set aside cynicism and despair, and to love what is good wholeheartedly, without the timidity or paralyzing anxiety that so often accompanies the fear of loss (p. 209).” In other words, if someone has created a symbol of goodness and hopefulness, why try to remove it from them? If “God” isn’t real but the concept helps relieve suffering and pain for many, it’s inhumane to try to take this medicine from them. Reitan’s book addresses the dangers of theistic certainty and fundamentalism, and I acknowledge those are ideologies that atheists can helpfully interrogate, but there’s no good reason to tear it all to the ground completely in the name of atheistic certainty and fundamentalism. Our existence is difficult and painful. If “noble lies” and “pious frauds” are all that religious “truth” is, then there’s a therapeutic benefit to them. Why disturb that, especially if atheism provides atheists with their own therapeutic benefit? To each their own theistic or atheistic therapy!

Posted on

Buddhism, Existentialism, and the Enneagram

I’m suspicious of personality tests like Myers-Briggs and the Enneagram. My suspicion is based on a principle. Those tests are understood by many who take it to reveal the static personality-type that you inherited. Whereas I tend to see people as creating the dynamic personality that they want. Or, if you want to propose a more passive way of seeing personality, we are dynamic personalities that are created by realities ranging from our genetic inheritance to our social situatedness.

My views begin with the influence of Buddhism. I’m not Buddhist but I’ve studied enough Buddhism over the years to know that Buddhist concepts of the self—or more precisely the no-self (anattā /anātman)—make a lot of sense to me. Our existence is transient. Our bodies are constantly changing. Yes, there are consistencies in our personalities and appearance over time but consistencies don’t reflect concreteness. Buddhism places a premium on the changing nature of reality, which includes us. When I reviewed Jay L. Garfield’s Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self, I said this about anattā /anātman:

its a Buddhist doctrine that teaches there’s no essential “I” underneath my physicality, emotions, perceptions, mental formations, or even consciousness. Instead, “I” am the culmination of these realities; their intersection, if you will. Buddhists call them “Skandhas” or “Aggregates” or “Heaps” that together make “me”. Buddhists reject the idea, encapsulated in the Indian concept of the “Atman” which has parallels to the “soul” of the Abrahamic religions. Hinduism’s “Atman” is the “real me” underneath it all. You could change my body, thoughts, feelings, etc., but those aren’t the “real me”. The “real me” is the Atman that holds it all together. Buddhist say “no,” there’s no “Atman” (hence, “anatman” or “no-Atman”) underneath it all. What makes “me” who “I” am are all these realities. For those familiar with Greek philosophy, which posits an underlying “essence” that shouldn’t change (e.g. humanness) and “accidents” that do change (e.g. gender, eye-color, weight, height) from human to human, in a way Buddhism teaches we are our collective “accidents” and that’s what we must embrace when we speak of “I”.

Or, as K.T.S. Sarao states it (“Anātman“), more succinctly, “the ‘self’ or ‘person’ (Pāli. puggala, Skt. pudgala), conceived as an enduring entity, simply does not exist and that everything is a succession and in flux, there being nothing that is substantial or permanent.”

I’m not saying that I’ve abandoned something like the “soul” or “mind” as an emerging property when I say that I find this Buddhist concept attractive. I’m saying that the Hindu concept of Atman, which can understood to be somewhat static, or the “soul” of Cartesian dualism, seems unsatisfactory. Whatever it is that we experience when we experience metacognition, when we reflect and when we speak of “I,” it seems unlikely that it would be static while everything else about us and our world is dynamic. So, no, I haven’t embraced a more extreme form of anattā /anātman, or the language we hear from philosophers like Daniel Dennett, that consciousness is illusory. But I do want to say that whatever consciousness is, whatever mind is, whatever “soul” is trying to capture, that changes with us like all of us changes. It’s evolving. It’s not static and there to be “discovered”.

The aforementioned personality tests, whether intentionally or not, leave people seeing themselves as something settled. They need to find what that is. Then they can appreciate it and use it to their benefit. Each form of settledness includes strengths to be harnessed and weaknesses to be suppressed.

There are some aspects of Existentialism that align with the Buddhist critique of a static-persona paradigm. Kevin Aho’s Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article “Existentialism” is helpful here. First, Aho’s comments about Existentialism’s emphasis on embodiment:

Against the standard “Cartesian account,” the body is not regarded as a discrete, causally determined object, extended in space, and set apart from the disinterested gaze of the cognizing mind. The body is not something I have. It is a site of affectivity and meaning. It is who I am. And I cannot obtain objective knowledge of my body because I am already living through it; it is the experiential medium of my existence. “The body,” as Sartre puts it, “is lived and not known.”

We aren’t being with bodies; we are bodies. We are a static personality in a dynamic body. All of our existence is dynamic.

Second, Sartre’s comment that “existence precedes essence” is key. Aho summarizes it this way, “there is no pre-given or essential nature that determines us, which means that we are always other than ourselves, that we don’t fully coincide with who we are. We exist for ourselves as self-making or self-defining beings, and we are always in the process of making or defining ourselves through the situated choices we make as our lives unfold.” At a glance, this may sound like the claim that we’re not limited by our bodies but that’s not the claim at all. Existentialism posits two important concepts: facticity and transcendence. Aho summarizes facticity this way:

Acknowledging existence as a self-making process does not mean the existentialist is denying that there are determinate aspects or “facts” about our situation that limit and constrain us. This is our givenness (or “facticity”), and it includes aspects of our being such as our embodiment and spatiality, our creaturely appetites and desires, and the socio-historical context we find ourselves in. But what distinguishes us as humans is that we have the capacity to rise above or “transcend” these facts in the way we relate to, interpret, and make sense of them. If I am compelled by a strong desire for sex, alcohol, or cigarettes, for instance, I do not out of necessity have to act on these desires. I have the freedom to question them and give them meaning, and the meanings I attribute to them shape my choices and the direction my life will take going forward.

How does facticity relate to our transcendence? Aho notes, “we are self-conscious beings who can surpass our facticity by calling it into question”. We can see what we are but then reinterpret it and even will to reshape it to a degree. This means that we are “free” but as the more mature expressions of Existentialism acknowledge, that freedom is “mediated”. Aho observes of Sarte:

…he realized that this early account was far too abstract, interiorized, and influenced by Cartesian assumptions. It failed to engage the social, historical, and material conditions that invariably limit and constrain our freedom. He came to recognize that our choices and actions are always mediated by the world, by the sociohistorical situation we’ve been thrown into. He sees that the idea of radical, unconditioned freedom “is nonsense. The truth is that existence ‘is-in-society’ as it ‘is-in-the-world’”.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty developed this insight. Aho summarizes, “In Phenomenology of Perception, for example, Merleau-Ponty makes it clear that the options we choose to act on do not emerge out of nothing. They are already embedded in a sociohistorical situation ‘before any personal decision has been made.’ The ways in which we create or make ourselves, then, are always circumscribed by the meanings of our situation. We are simultaneously self-making and already made.”

Finally, Existentialism emphasizes “Authenticity”. This is the desire to live as ourselves; to avoid the herd-mentality as much as possible. This isn’t being non-conformist for the sake of non-conformity but instead being honest about our likes and dislikes, our desires, tastes, dreams, and ambitions, even when the broader society of which we’re part doesn’t sign off on them. This is where the concept of “bad faith” enters the picture. Aho again:

Sartre and Beauvoir refer to inauthenticity in terms of “bad faith” (mauvaise foi), where we either deny or over-identify with one of the two aspects of human existence, either facticity or transcendence. I am in bad faith, for example, when I over-identify with my factical situation and deny my freedom to act on and transform this situation. I am also in bad faith when I over-identify with freedom and deny my past conduct and the fact that my choices are limited and constrained by my situation.

When I hear people say “I did this-or-that because I’m Enneagram 8,” I hear a bad faith comment. We may say this in jest. I joke about being from California or my French heritage when something I do irritates or intrigues people I know, but it’s mostly a joke. I know that being from California isn’t determinative and even less so that a bunch of people in my family tree have French surnames. But there are those who take these identities to be determinative of who they’ll be…no, who they are since being and becoming is incorrect. Personally, I want to say that Buddhism’s emphasize on the transitory nature of all reality and Existentialism’s emphasis on our ability to self-reflect and self-interpret (and to some degree, though limited, self-improve) means that Enneagram-identities are choices. We want to understand ourselves. We want an identity. These are convenient pre-packaged ones. I guess they’re no worse than when I identify with my career or field(s) of study. There’s an urge to say, “that’s me, that’s my ‘type’ and my identity and my place with my people”. But I think in doing this we’re saying this is who we want to be and we’re saying this is the interpretation of ourselves that we like.

Posted on

PLATO’s “Philosophy in High School” Conference

Lucio Mare’s presentation of Hadot and the philosophy of history and science

Yesterday, I spent a few hours attending a conference via Zoom called “Philosophy in High School”. It was organized by the Student Advisory Council of PLATO: the “Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization”. What I admire about this conference most was that it combined presentations from faculty and students. As a member of the “Educational Resources and Review Committee” of the Society of Biblical Literature, I can say that I’ve been part of conversations around what it could look like to do something like this for the field of biblical studies. I’ll say more about that idea below. For now, let me praise the student organizers who made the “Philosophy in High School” conference a reality. They did a great job!

Sin Man Lea Cheng and Xiaotong Chen presenting on how philosophy is useful for teenage life

I attended four presentations. The first was by Lucio Mare of Stanford Online High School. He spoke on “Philosophy as the Education of High Schoolers: Using Pierre Hadot’s ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life’ to Teach History and Philosophy of Science”. The remaining three presentations were by students: Sin Man Lea Cheng and Xiaotong Chen, “Philosophy: making life vibrant”; Sophie Zhang, “How can learning about ethics help high school students inside and outside of school?”; and Kate Given, “Transforming Classroom Conversation with Philosophy”. All three were well done! As a high school teacher, I know that it can be difficult to get students prepared for 5-10 minutes of presentation. These young people had a half hour set aside for presentations and discussions!

Sophie Zhang’s presentation, “How can learning about ethics help high school students inside and outside of school?”

While philosophy has its own uphill battle agains the cult of STEM (and FYI, philosophy and STEM shouldn’t be rivals at all, so this means we’re doing STEM wrong!), biblical studies is much further down the hill when it comes to attracting enough young people to do a conference like this one. There are a few reasons.

First, philosophy is far more accessible. Yes, the Bible can be found anywhere but good tools for studying the Bible are difficult to find. Where I live in San Antonio, it’s difficult to keep up with current biblical scholarship because there are few libraries who do. For example, when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, I could spend a day at the Flora Lamson Hewlett Library at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. There were a ton of resources there. But San Antonio has nothing quite like this. While I know there are topics within analytic philosophy (e.g. philosophy of mind) that share similar limitations when it comes to resources and that prevent entry by people who can’t keep up with the quickly unfolding literature on the topic, there’s so much more than you can do under the purview of “philosophy” than you can under “biblical studies”.

Kate Given’s presentation, “Transforming Classroom Conversation with Philosophy”

Second, and this is related, you can philosophize from anywhere about anything at any time. There’s the story of how Raymond Aron was sitting with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir at the Bec-de-Gaz bar in Paris in 1932-33 drinking apricot cocktails when Aron, who had been studying the “phenomenology” of Edmund Husserl, told Sarte and Beauvoir, “if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!” (See Sarah Bakewell’s The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, pp. 1-3.) I can philosophize about friendships, education, music, movies, traffic, city planning, travel, etc. I can do biblical studies with regard to the Bible and the reception history of the Bible, which is extensive but also limited in comparison.

Third, as I’ve discussed recently, biblical studies are less attractive to young people because the Bible is becoming less attractive to young people. We’re in the midst of a cultural shift away from Christianity, so there’ll be fewer people reading the Bible in the future. Teens are philosophizing all the time, whether or not they’re aware of it. Teens aren’t reading the Bible all the time. You would know it if you’re were doing it! What it means to study the Bible is a more restricted activity.

If we’re to create a conference on biblical studies that includes high school participants, we’d have a fourth and final obstacle: philosophy has a rational air about it. When people encounter the Bible prior to reading it in an academic context, the vibe is something like “devotional”. How a conference for high school readers of the Bible wouldn’t devolve into a series of devotionals or apologetics is something that would need to be discussed. Religious studies may have more promise here. (In other words, something connected with the American Academy of Religion.)

That being said, it was wonderful to see a conference like this one. Kudos to PLATO and their Student Advisory Council. I hope to see future conferences like this one!

Posted on

An assessment that I’m glad I gave (and how it relates to what I’ve been saying about biblical studies)

As the past quarter drew to a close, I introduced a new assessment to my students: a “Quarterly Writing Assessment”. I asked them to write a short response (ten sentences minimum) to a prompt that in summary asks them to tell me one thing they’ve learned that has changed their perspective/shifted their paradigm; one thing that would be missing from their education if they hadn’t taken my class.

For my own psychology, I’m glad I gave this assessment. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell whether students are really learning anything. How much are they memorizing for a quiz or test? How much are they turning your required work into passing busy work? Will it stick?

As I’ve been grading these assignments, I’m heartened. My “Introduction to the Bible II: The Christian Scriptures” students have been telling me about how they’ve come to recognize the Bible’s internal diversity; how interpretive paradigms have shifted over time; how it’s ok if someone else interprets the Bible differently; how “messianism” as a concept has shifted how they look at Jesus as “Christ”; how the differences between the Gospels has influenced who they understand Jesus to be; why Mark’s Jesus is so secretive about his identity and John’s Jesus is so loud about it; how Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount and in his parables have them pondering why Jesus favored the oppressed and marginalized.

My “Religion in Global Context” students have told me that they understand why studying religion is important; how religious illiteracy has negative consequences; how they’ve realized that not all religions look alike; how they’ve realized that there’s no single way to define “religion”; how they’ve learned a bit about Hinduism, Sikhism, and Islam; how they’ve been introduced to questions about reality and metaphysics through Indian philosophical categories (e.g. Brahman, Atman, karma, samsara, moksha, dharma) in ways that have them rethinking what they understand to be “real”.

My “Religion in the United States” students have told me how they learned about the diversity of Christianities in the original Thirteen Colonies and adjacently how diverse Christianity is; how the Founding Father’s views of Christianity weren’t monolithic; how some Founding Fathers (e.g. Samuel Adams; John Jay; John Witherspoon) may receive approval from confessional/creedal Christians today while others (George Washington; John Adams; Thomas Jefferson) are more complicated; the importance of the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment; the role of the Supreme Court and IRS in shaping how Americans view “religion” and how religion is practiced here; the nature of Indigenous American religion.

As I read what my students wrote, I felt like each class was indispensable to their education. It made me proud of what our catalog offers. The funny thing is this: I think we need a class on ethics and I think we need a class introducing philosophical thinking. Since students have to take only 2 semesters of religion to graduate, I don’t know where these classes fit or if they do fit at all. I do know that as frustrated as I may be at times when it comes to teaching religion in a world where STEM is squeezing the humanities to death, I don’t doubt for a second that our society needs what our humanities classes have to offer.

I want to return to my biblical studies students because I’ve been writing a lot about those classes the past few days. First, I mentioned that I’m faced with an existential crisis when teaching this class. I’m teaching the sacred texts of a dying institution in America: the Bible of the Christian Church. I’m aware that many of my students, presuming trajectories hold, won’t be reading their Bibles as adults and likely many won’t be part of any Church.

This led to me reflect on how critical approaches to the Bible play a part in demystifying the Bible but also this act results in the eventual demise of biblical studies. As more and more people see the Bible as another human creation (and the Church as a human institution), fewer of them will be interested in it. Eventually, this will impact the future of biblical studies, shrinking our ranks, leading to the closure of our programs and our presses, because I’m confident that many biblical scholars entered biblical studies in order to have religious questions answered. The irony is that in our effort to dismantle dangerous forms of biblicism, we’re simultaneously depleting our “farm system” (to use a baseball term) because biblicist cultures give rise to future biblical scholars (or so I presume until empirical data proving otherwise is shown to me).

Finally, I argued that critical approaches to the Bible remain the right approach, even knowing the consequences, because at this time and place (21st century United States), if we fail to help students deconstruct biblicist views of the Bible then biblicist views of the Bible will remain the default interpretation of the Bible. This isn’t to say that people will read the Bible accepting its authority through a biblicist paradigm alone. Many will reject the Bible outright presuming that the line that biblicist draw in the sand (read it as the inerrant “Word of God” or leave “the Church’s Bible” alone) is a real line that one either crosses or doesn’t. In other words, I think there’s a necessary gamble. If we want contemporary young people to mature into adults who show interest in the Bible as “wisdom literature” with which they can wrestle in a life-giving way—even non-Christians, just as I, a Christian, wrestle with the Vedas and Upanishads, the Dhammapada, the Quran, etc.—then we must show that the black-and-white paradigm of biblicism is a false dichotomy. If we want them to approach the Bible as a source for creative theological thinking, they must realize the Bible is a conversation-starter, not a conversation-ender.

Do I wish we could skip past the deconstruction of biblicism in order to help students read the Bible wisely? Yes. Do I think we can do this without risking the effects of residual biblicism remaining with our students? No. I don’t see how we can lead students to a mature understanding of the Bible without dispelling the mythologies of our culture. If you doubt what I’m saying, go to Barnes & Noble. Walk through the section related to the Bible and to Christianity. Recognize that this is the dominant understanding of what the Bible is and what Christianity represents. Realize that many adherents to Christianity and readers of the Bible think the selection at Barnes & Noble is normative; recognize that many who reject Christianity and the Bible agree. This shouldn’t be. It doesn’t have to be. At least I hope it doesn’t have to be.