The Story of a Life

 This post is not exactly about religion, but is about meaning. My wife of 50 years died on October 24, 2021. I nearly wrote the current euphemism 'passed away' but I am determined to write honestly. That she went on to an afterlife I believe, but in terms of this life she is dead. 

But is she?  Let me explain. I needed a small piece of notepaper and I grabbed a little square of sticky notes that were my wife's. The top had a message written at a Christmas in the past sometime. It said in her printing (her handwriting was always very clear too):  M:  GossBumps and Jack We2. I assume it was a scribbled note about toys to buy our two grandchildren. I folded it up to throw away, but stopped to write this. 

The note is a part of my wife, an indication of her annual happy (sometimes) task of buying Christmas presents. Her mind, her emotions, her spirit are present in that ink on that coloured paper. We are physical creatures and interact with the physical and leave bits and pieces of ourselves not only in the minds and hearts of others, but in the flotsam and jetsam of material objects. 

I've bought a red plastic file box that I have labelled the memory box. I cannot keep every little bit of material that my wife left behind. But I can keep items that meant something to her and perhaps now, a tiny bit of a scribbled Christmas gift list. Maybe it says more about her than any larger object. 

I just this evening remembered I had a Blogger site and found this ..... 

Religion as community

 For some unknown reason, this morning I began thinking about my mother and her faith. My mother was one of those individuals who was deeply religious all her life. Raised in the Episcopal Church in Rochester, NY but attended the Church of England in Canada (the name used by the Anglican Church of Canada until 1956) while at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario in the 1930s. She married my Dad, a United Church follower (baptized Methodist), in 1941 and was married in an Anglican church in Ottawa. After the war they settled in Montreal, but switched there to the United Church because their Anglican parish was Anglo-Catholic and both were not interested in that form of Christianity at all. In 1954, they moved to suburban Toronto and attended Thornhill United. In 1959, they moved to Windsor, Ontario and for a few months attended the local United Church. They then switched to St. Matthew's Anglican. 

This is the bare bones story. But what was swirling through my head this morning was the communal and social side of this story. This communal side is, I think, as important or perhaps more important than belief for many if not most. 'Church' is as much a story of being part of a community as it is of theology, at least for the ordinary members. 

I want to illustrate this with two anecdotes, one short and one longer. 

The short anecdote looks at my father, the boy baptized Methodist in 1918 and become United Church in 1925. He married my Mum in an Anglican church because the custom was that marriages occur in the bride's denomination. In his heart I suspect he preferred the United Church - I hasten to add  as it was in the past, not today. A generically Protestant church with all the usual moral strictures of strict Protestantism - all now pretty much abandoned. Why then, did he agree to attend an Anglican Church a form of Christianity that he stayed with until his death?  His story:  the Anglican minister was going door to door looking for converts to his new parish. The church did not yet have a church building, but had started very pragmatically with the hall. This building could be converted to worship Anglican style within a half hour. This is the first time I realized the importance of community: build the hall before the church. My Dad claimed that he hit it off with this minister at the door, and then took classes to become Anglican and the family switched. The two did have a love of English sports cars in common. But..... a few weeks before this happened, the minister at the local United Church my parents were attending,  passed around the 'pledge' in a service. The 'Pledge' was a pledge to avoid the consumption of 'spiritous liquors'. There was no way on earth my Dad was going to give up his Labatt's IPA he drank while watching the CFL on TV every Saturday every Fall.  I have always maintained that was the real reason for his conversion. My mother, of course, was Anglican anyway.

Turning to my mother, she became one of the church ladies at St. Matthew's.  I attended Sunday school there, then church after confirmation. But she was one of the ladies who set up the hall for pot luck dinners, weddings, baptisms, funerals, Sunday school concerts, etc. etc. Most Girl Guide, Brownies, Cubs, Scouts in those days met in church halls and my mother duly became a Brownie, then Guide leader. She also taught in Sunday School, preferring the very young. I remember that hall better than I do the church they eventually built. They had a collection of China cups, saucers, plates and silverware (though probably that was not actually 'silver') which they hauled out to place on the tables they set up, with good quality table cloths for parish dinners, or for any of the celebrations mentioned just now. Everybody knew everybody and there were probably about 400 adults who regularly attended services and these celebrations in the hall. My mother was part of this for more than 40 years until she was no longer able to live on her own. My elder sister and I had to bring her to the Niagara region to live in a nursing home at that point. When she died, we arranged the funeral at her old parish in Windsor as many there still remembered her well and my father, brother and one sister were already buried in Windsor.

I gave the eulogy at her funeral. I have to digress here for a minute to tell my favourite story of her that got a good laugh at the funeral, but also sheds light on one church lady. Christians do laugh at funerals, especially for those who have had a good, long life. In the late 1950s, my parents lived in the suburbs just north of Toronto. Highland Park Blvd. the first east-west street north of Steeles off Yonge, to be precise. She could walk a block to catch a bus on Steeles that would take her south to the nearest subway station at Eglinton to go into Toronto to shop. But for normal shopping she relied on my father to take her to get groceries. It was decided she should get her driver's license. My parents hired a teacher who came to the house. I was there watching that day. The fellow parked his car. My mother got in the driver's seat of the family car and he got in the passenger. This car was a 1956 Packaard with a huge V8 engine - a giant 1950s powerhouse of heavy steel and an engine that roared if coaxed. These houses had ditches running along the side of the road then - each driveway had its own little earthen bridge over the ditch, but there was the ditch. The car started, purring loudly, then my mother tromped too hard on the gas and it flew back into the ditch. She had missed the little driveway bridge entirely. It sat there for a few moments, pointing to the sky, with occupants inside gesticulating and saying something no one could hear....later i learned that the teacher wanted her to get out and he would try to get the car out of the ditch. My mother was a very stubborn church lady. Instead, she floored it.The engine roared, the rear wheels spun in the ditch - fortunately dry then - and it rocketed out of the ditch and went flying at our house. For some reason, no doubt her guardian angel, she slammed on the brakes and it stopped a few inches short of the house. The driving teacher emerged, white and shaking and said to my mother, also out by then. "I think that's enough for today". He got in his car and left, never to return. This is the essence of my church lady mother. Never underestimate church ladies is a good motto. 

I told this story at her funeral as I said. We went out the to cemetery for the burial. We came back to the church hall and the church ladies had set out the tables with good China and nibbles and coffee and of course tea for the mourners. I had the bitter sweet thought then and now that my mother had done the same for others probably thousands of times. 

This is what church is about. This is what any religion is about for ordinary followers. Yes there are varied degrees of assent to the theology, but this is religion for all those who belong to these small communities. 

More David Petts

I've finished a close reading of the short book by the archaeologist David Petts: Pagan and Christian, Religious Change in Early Medieval Europe. I had to grind my mental gears to accustom myself to the archaeological mode of writing, but I do like his conclusions. He notes that conversion to Christianity in the 6th and 7th centuries was not a clear cut process, adhering to 'book' Christianity. Mostly he focuses on Anglo-Saxon England in the early period of the spread of Christianity, but covers digs and evidence from many parts of western Europe in these early years of missionary activity.

I read this book because of debate over Christian missions in North America, primarily in the region now called Canada, in a course I teach.  The residential schools are also a popular focus of student attention. It occurred to me that I don't know how many of the children forced into these schools were already Christian. Another area of debate that arises regularly in this course is that slippery term syncretism. Just how Christian were those baptized by members of the Anglican Church Missionary Society, not to mention other Christian missionaries. This arose from a paper I gave a long time ago at what used to be called the Learned Societies Conference, now the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. It is also a central focus of David Petts's look at early medieval Europe and conversion. 

I was working at the time for an ethnohistorian from the anthropological side, Mary Black Rogers. She was completing a study of the Weagamow area begun by her late husband Edward S. Rogers, who had been Curator of Ethnology at the Royal Ontario Museum and one of the earliest ethnohistorians.  Mary allowed me to dig deeply into the evidence and studies amassed between 1958 and 1974. I focussed on a Cree (or perhaps Orkney-Cree) Anglican priest at Big Trout Lake who left a large body of records on his ministry in the Severn river area, including Weagamow. My paper found that this apparently fully converted  native person, allowed a fair degree of elasticity in practice that a later Euro-Canadian priest assigned there found dubious. 

Without going deeply into the evidence here, baptisms were eagerly followed by native peoples still living a mostly traditional lifestyle, but Christian burials were rare. More interestingly were marriages, which mostly followed Christian theology and Church of England rites. I say mostly, because I found a few instances of this Cree priest marrying men who had more than one wife 'in the custom of the country' (a phrase found frequently in the records of the Hudson's Bay Company posts). There were also a very small number of apparent marriages in the church that were according to Christian theology,  bigamous. This is difficult to ascertain clearly because of the multitude of names that Oji-Cree peoples ordinarily used. Ed and Mary had spent a large amount of their time sorting out names so I am moderately convinced that marriage customs continued to follow indigenous cultural norms while employing Church of England rites. 

Now, the Petts book. His study of early medieval Europe and the case studies he uses from Anglo-Saxon England note that burials only gradually became matters for the Christian church. Even Christian sources don't focus on burial as a religious act often in the early mediaeval period. Gradually archaeology has found Christian goods in burials, but this is not a Christian practice in 'church' terms. Christian burials theologically speaking do not include burial with other objects. Yet burial with objects is common in this period where these burials are definitely Christian. This suggests a mingling of cultural norms carried forward from pagan practices into early Christianity. In other words, what we call syncretism. 

For my teaching purposes and for my own curiosity, the seemingly partial conversion of Oji-Cree peoples in the Severn River region has a strong mate in early Christian Anglo-Saxon England as well as in much of western Europe. David Petts spends a part of his book discussing the differences found in historical writing concerning Christian missionary work in Europe and the evidence of grave goods. His plea is to use both kinds of evidence and not to judge this issue based only on church norms. Rather, the growth of Christianity involved the maintenance of pre-Christian practices within a new Christian context and not the complete abandonment of former societal practices along with conversion. 

Language and Religion

I am in the process of reading a short book (long article?) by an archaeologist, David Petts, Pagan and Christian:  Religious Change in Early Medieval Europe.

He raises the idea that liturgical language needs to be viewed differently than has been the usual way it is interpreted. For example, the use of Latin by the Church in western Europe up to the Reformation, despite most people, including priests, not understanding the language. I recall reading somewhere a few years back that the last place where Latin was a commonly used language was in a part of northern Italy in the 9th century. I would assume this was not the classical Latin I was taught in High School or university (most of which I have forgotten). Probably it was a vulgar Latin where much of the complex grammar of Cicero was flattened out and made more easily used in conversation. The last evidence of even this form of Latin dates from the 9th century.

David Petts's thesis is that holy or sacred languages such as Latin in the medieval church did not have the purpose of communication in the sense we use language today. This Latin was not used to communicate facts or ideas. Rather this Latin communicated the sense that listeners were now in the presence of the divine rather than the ordinary or secular world.  In one of the courses I teach, I have students read a description of the emotional impact of the Mass on late medieval hearers. Students almost universally are surprised that people attending could not understand the language, yet still seemed eager and even passionate about attending. The thesis that David Petts advances explains this passion for hearing an incomprehensible language. The language is not incomprehensible, but communicates on a deeper and emotional and spiritual level.

Beauty

Years ago Richard Dawkins, while debating the Archbishop of Canterbury, was asked what he would miss if religion had not existed. His reply was Buddhist and Hindu temples because of their beauty.

I meditated long on this and believe that religious architecture in general comprises the most beautiful architecture humanity has ever produced: no matter the religion.

Secularization Revisited

I came to my often neglected blogger blog because yesterday I watched a short, 15 minute TEDx talk on secularism and why religion will not recover. I began thinking about the place of religion in society back when there seemed no threat to religion as a functioning, normal aspect of society (1964). The fellow who gave the talk is an English Sociologist who taught for a time at the University of Essex, although he lives in the United States now. He presented as cool, soft spoken reason personified. His talk was carefully organized, with points on a screen, built logically and using evidence, (well, if statistics can be considered evidence when presented alone).  A brief bit of research into his background reveals a scholar who has focussed his career on the sociological study of religion through the lens of statistical analysis.

I posted a few comments to the effect that what has replaced religion as a societal basis was chaos not order. I mentioned particularly the culture of entitlement which I hypothesize as being the new foundation of modern society - if that can be considered a foundation upon which to place our common house. I mentioned also the collapse of reasoned discourse as a norm and its replacement with a 'the loudest win the debate' ethos. Most of the other comments were of the celebratory, 'religion is dying at last' sort, with a few Christians citing scripture. There seemed to be no reasoned critique of his talk.

For those who accept the arguments of the New Atheists, the debate is over, or to borrow from Climate Science, 'the science is settled'. My thoughts posted on that TEDx talk and here in my own blog are at no such complete and dogmatic state. I am at the stage of  early hypothesis. What surprised me about the talk was the underlying implication that the victory of secularism in the western world is a case of 'the science is settled' amongst sociologists. Yet I know from my preliminary reading that there is no such consensus. At present I am reading slowly and carefully through a book entitled, Rethinking Secularism, a collection of essays on this topic edited by Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer and Jonathan Antwerpen. The introductory essay, written by the three editors, shows no such unity of analysis on the state of the 'science'. The essays that follow are by historians, philosophers, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists and one expert in International Relations. They come from a variety of backgrounds. Most teach in U.S. universities although not always American born and trained. One writes from India, one from the Netherlands and there is one Canadian (whatever we are these days!). I read the book quickly a while back and recall the chapter on India as the most interesting for its very different view of the role of religion in society and its critique of the very term 'religion'. This was one lacuna I noticed immediately in the TEDx talk:  there was a very loose use of the term 'religion' as though those listening would know immediately what that is. He implied that 'religion' is the institutional church with its buildings, and rituals and preaching. I found that very curious indeed. I insist from my students that they define the terms they are using and not expect that every reader will know what is meant by a term as though there were no debate on its use.

The speaker, David Voas, has excellent credentials and a highly successful career in the statistical analysis of religion. I was surprised that he seemed unaware of equally erudite critiques of the secularization thesis.

Here is the talk:  Why there is no way back....by David Voas

Dreams

I am nearly finished grading a student assignment in one of the history of religion courses I teach. I came across the idea of dreams as inspirations, in this case a bishop named Aubert had a dream in the year 708 that Michael the Archangel told him he should build a church. The small church that resulted was the foundation of Mont St-Michel Abbey.

I wonder at dreams as inspiration.

The literature on dreaming is vast, encompassing scientific research, philosophical thought and religious beliefs.

Dreams as in the tale I opened this post with are the typical asleep dreaming ... usually I forget mine, but many people have vivid well-remembered dreams on a regular basis. I don't. This could be because my dreams happen while I am awake. This was an elementary school sin..."Stop day dreaming!"  I day dream as much as I live in whatever this place called the 'real' world is; my mind is always going off in directions alternate to the physical space. I might be standing in line at a supermarket or walking my dog Toby and my mind is floating off to the side or up and back or living in an alternate universe while my body continues on its linear trajectory.

Perhaps mystics are those who live more in this dreamscape than in the physical landscape.

Definitions

Something occurred to me just now: our Western propensity to define things, religion in this case. To define means at root, to draw a boundary around something so one knows not only what it is, but what it is not. I wonder why we need this? Perhaps to impose order on chaos (one element of a definition of religion). Somehow i doubt this reflects reality.

Can religion be considered something apart? Or is it an element of entanglement? There seems to me to be a degree of artificiality in Western Civilizations need to assign definitions of categories, rather than view reality holistically.

Religion the Foundation Stone?

Originally I planned two blog posts here, but as my brain kicked into gear, I realized these are part of the same thought. I was going to write about an hypothesis that Christianity is the foundation stone of Western civilization. I have heard this discussed and the idea interests me but I haven't thought deeply about it, or looked for evidence pro and con. I was going to write a second post about the closure of a single church near my home. The essence of this second post was to be the decline of Christianity in the West. Further thought on this made me toss around the idea that we are seeing a change in Christianity rather than a decline. I decided that these thoughts are connected.

Is the decline of Christianity in the West merely part of the ages old dance of religion within society? Will the product of this dance, once the music stops, be an entirely different civilization? This lead to the further thought, was there ever a single 'Western' civilization?  And if so, when and how did it begin? Historians have delighted in dividing history into eras. Apparently we are entering or are already in 'post-modernity'. Modernity is held to have got going in the 15th century, so is about 500 years old (give or take a century or so). Prior to that was the mediaeval period and prior to that the 'ancient' world, or 'classical' civilization. All these periods belong to what is called Western civilization. This overarching theme (if I may call it that) is accorded a start with ancient Greece and the ideas of philosophers there and a form of early democracy, especially as found in the city state of Athens. Rome conquered the Mediterranean world and what is now western Europe (from which comes the label 'Western') and in its organized commercial and legal world spread these Greek ideas and thus was the midwife of 'Western civilization'. Western ideas died for a time when the Roman empire collapsed in western Europe and the western Mediterranean but revived in another sub-period labelled 'The Renaissance', the rebirth. The technology of movable type added a volatile fuel to this movement, et voilà Western Civ.

Where does religion lie in all this?  Both the ancient Greeks and Romans were pagans of similar hue. The Greek gods and goddesses were more petty and human than the more powerful Roman versions, perhaps reflecting the differences in political power of the two cultures. Religion both reflected and supported the overall culture. But Christianity, a very different idea about the nature of existence was born and nurtured, albeit often violently in the Roman world. This is a mystery despite the number of studies done on this topic. History is mostly a story of gradual, glacial change, but every so often an event occurs that is seismic rather than organic. Christianity survived its first three centuries as an outsider faith where it was periodically and violently attacked by both state and populace. Yet it emerged as the official religion of the Roman Empire.  Nietzsche once famously pronounced the death of God. A fourth or even fifth century Nietzsche would have proclaimed the death of gods as Christianity gradually supplanted the old gods even among the general populace.

I don't really know what Nietzsche meant and I am not alone in that,  but the image below of pews being sold off in a Presbyterian church in Canada in 2018 gives a hard face to the surface meaning of his comment. This congregation was formed in 1905 and they built a very plain, serviceable building for their worship and for the community that is at the core of all Christian groupings. Dare I say, community is at the core of most religions, though not all. Certainly it is for the 'peoples of the Book' (to borrow from Islam): Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Even those religions where community is not emphasized by their religious professionals, the ordinary followers organize themselves into small communities: the Buddhists, Taoists, neopagans and so on. Christianity too has a foundation stone called the equality of the individual person before God, regardless of social status.  Yet people are social animals and we need fellowship. As this blog post is about Western Civilization and thus Christianity, I will reel my thoughts into focus here. As I started this paragraph, this church community began in 1905. In 1921, they expanded and renovated their building, then in 1967 built a new place beside the old. It is the new  you see being disassembled in the photo below.

I mentioned that history usually changes organically but sometimes with an earthquake. This congregation had the money and the optimism to build an entirely new church in 1967. At that time in Canada, the generation who had fought the second world war were at the apex of their earning. The economy was booming with low unemployment and low inflation. Wages were going up at a greater rate than costs. This congregation used their old building as a Sunday School and for meetings and communal activities such as pot luck dinners and scouts and guides. This was also the era of the baby boom. Churches were filled with adults and even more so with their children.  Families often had three, four, five or more children. Yet just over fifty years later, there were only a few adults remaining and even fewer children. One generation is all it took for Christianity to collapse into insignificance in Canada. This congregation has moved in with another and sold their buildings to a developer. For three hundred years Christianity grew slowly from a breakaway sect of Jews in the ancient world, to becoming the officially sanctioned religion of the entire Western world. Over the next five to six hundred years it came to encompass the tribal societies that had displaced the Roman empire in the west. There it consolidated for another five hundred years. Then for four hundred years Christianity expanded with European commerce and military might based on technology to all parts of the world.

In fifty years, this all dissolved. And here is a picture of a small part of that dissolution.

Renewal

Currently I am re-reading Thomas Merton's Ways of the Christian Mystics. For those unfamiliar with Thomas Merton, he was in the last part of his life a Trappist monk, who became a modernized eremitic. I say modernized because he remained connected to the world through extensive correspondence and writing, while living a solitary life on the grounds of his abbey. He died, in fact, on a trip to Thailand for an ecumenical  conference on the spiritual life. One of his main interests and focuses of correspondence were with Buddhist monks.

In this little (and it is little: truly pocket sized) book he surveys English (Catholic), Russian and  Protestant spirituality and monasticism. The point of this brief post was prompted by this latter chapter. In it he discusses the surprising revival of Protestant monasticism in the post world war 2 period. He places Anglican monasticism outside of this, noting in an unexplained sentence that it is 'catholic'.

What interested me, however, were his comments on the revival and renewal of Christianity in the first two decades after the end of the second world war. He saw this Protestant style monasticism, exemplified by the Taizé community as evidence for a revival and rejection of arid formalism. In the changes in liturgy, the moves towards a simpler Christianity focused on worship and charitable action in the world, he saw a pan-Christian revivalism and renewal.  Thomas Merton died in 1968, so he could not predict nor see the collapse of Christianity in the western world that began to be evident in the 1970s. Sociologists working in the last decades of the 20th century crunched the numbers and saw slippage as early as the 1950s. The Canadian sociologist Reginald Bibby, for example noted that despite the exponential growth in church construction and membership in the 1950s, churches were actually growing slower than the rate of population increase. Vitality hid an inner crumbling it seems. Sociologists have since begun to posit a change to another type of Christianity replacing institutions with individual or even online realities. But this is not a theory accepted by all such. Steve Bruce, the English sociologist sees decline, not change. Historians have joined the debate, attempting to find the time where decline began and reasons why.  Callum Brown the British historian of religion places the collapse as beginning in the 1960s and assigns the reason to the disappearance of women from the institutional church.  Debate rages among scholars of all sorts over whether the United States is the lone hold out or not in this western collapse of Christianity. So, soon after Thomas Merton's death churches emptied, the western world changed laws to root out Christian foundations, atheists began their boldest attacks on Christianity (claiming they were attacking 'religion' but Christianity was their target).

Of course, only time will tell but at this point the future does not look good for Christianity, and I would argue for western civilization as a project. Despite what that curious bunch called 'the new atheists' might argue, western civilization rested on a foundation of Christianity.

The Protestant Work Ethic?

I just finished watching a series by Niall Ferguson where he looked at 'western' civilization and its rise and potential fall. He quite creatively posits six 'killer apps' that made the West dominant: competition, science, medicine, property ownership, consumerism and the work ethic. (PBS has a nice, easy to remember page listing these:  Six Killer Apps  ).

Like all television presentations there is much left out, primarily nuance, but in general he makes a good case. The principle curiosity (as in a curio), is his resurrection of Max Weber's protestant work ethic theory. I have profound difficulties with social scientific theorizing as humanity is, in my view, much too supple and complex to be understood or predicted in a theory. Weber's is not accepted uncritically anymore in any case, so i was surprised to see him use this for his final of six shows. This leads Dr. Ferguson to ignore Catholicism in the United States and in China. He compares the U.S. and China in terms of the Protestant work ethic in this last episode. He mentions only Protestantism assuming that the only innovative and hardworking people in either society are Protestants. You can make a case for Christianity being tied to the rise and dominance of the West, but not just Protestantism. In an earlier episode, he contrasted South America with North America and suggested that the rise of North America to prosperity was in part linked to Protestantism. This ignored the fact that there were large numbers of Catholics in North America. I should mention here that by 'North America'  he actually meant the United States. Yet the wealth that industrial capitalism brought to the U.S. was in the second half of the 19th century at a time when Catholic immigrants largely provided the cheap work force for new factories. You could make some case for this in Canada's history, as French Canada remained pre-industrial with a pre-industrial mindset bolstered specifically by the Catholic church - but not for the United States. In English Canada, Protestantism and industrialization dominated from the 1850s, though the cheap workers were mainly English and Irish, both Catholic and Protestant.

I would agree that the 'work ethic' is intrinsic to the rise and dominance of the West, but I wonder if it can be attributed to Protestantism alone. There is a link perhaps, but one more associated with individualism than directly to Protestantism. The United States did and does have a Protestant based mentality, to which Catholics are integrated. Hmmmmm. So, maybe he is correct in the end, but with a savage disregard for nuance in his arguments.

I'll think about this more and post when I have more marking to procrastinate from....

An Advent Meditation on a minor matter

Last Christmas season I bought a laser light that projected little green and red points of light. At first I aimed it at my house front as is common. I noticed a few stray lights hitting the branches of our tree in front. These looked like small lights I had climbed high to attach to the branches.

So I moved the projector back, and aimed it up into the branches .... et Voilà ... I had strung all the branches with little lights.

For some absurd reason I found this beautiful. The projector had a timer, so at dark they would come on, and before dawn turn off. Every chance I had, when outside at night, or from my front upstairs office I would look at these lights in the tree. Their tiny, insignificant loveliness transfixed me.

The season ended and I took the projector out and put it away until this year

Two weeks ago I set it up before the ground had frozen, driving the stake into the ground and aiming the projector as last year.  For two weeks I was again transfixed, every night. I took a video on one of the early nights as there was a light snow falling and the laser caught the tiny flakes in the air and produced little floating sparks to add to the beauty in the tree.

Last night, December 11, I looked out from the upstairs office window and there were no lights. I went downstairs and out front to see if the wire had come unplugged.

The projector was gone. There was snow about that had been falling for about an hour but no footprints, no projector. I walked up the street to a neighbour's house as he had a projector too - fancier than mine. He had nailed it to a telephone pole that stood on his lawn. His was gone too - ripped away from the base. I found the base of my projector still frozen into the ground and knew that the thief had broken it off to take it.

For some reason, this minor loss of rather cheesy beauty strikes me deeply. I was angry at first, then thought perhaps this thief needed to sell the projector for 5 or 10 dollars. Or maybe he was one of those individuals I have come across in life who lack morality. Whose only braking system is a desire not to be caught. In either case, an object of pity rather than anger.

I am left with almost hoping the theft was a necessity for some money by someone destitute.

I am left with a hole where beauty once lived.

Crusades

The 'Crusades'. 

If a person knows nothing about history at all, they have heard of the 'Crusades' and they know all about the Crusades. The Crusades in this telling are the exemplar of the violence they see as endemic to religion, and by 'religion' they mean Christianity. To Muslims who also remember the Crusades, they are an epithet to hurl at that false religion Christianity. They are also a call to arms to recover what they see as the proper place of Islam in the world and also to recover 'Andalusia', their poetic word for Spain and Portugal.

When I mention the Crusades at all in teaching, it is that the first Crusade was preached by Pope Urban II in 1095 ostensibly to recover the Holy Land from Islam. I add another layer briefly and state it also had the purpose of keeping medieval western warriors from the pleasures of killing each other and to kill those who adhered to the wrong faith instead. These words of mine typically have no impact on students who are embedded in our anti-religion (Christian) culture of today. That religion (Christianity) is evil is a meme now that is heard from the mouths of those entirely ignorant of history to those with some knowledge. It is heard from the mouths of the highly educated and from those with only a basic education.

What started me thinking about this, now? Well, I don't get much time to read and what time I do have to spare I use in writing. But I have decided to discipline myself to set aside a few minutes each day in the morning for reading. I have three books on the go  at present. One is a Christmas gift from about ten years ago (that time span is a perfect illustration of my lack of reading time), called London: the biography by Peter Ackroyd. I am reading this because I, too, have written several 'popular' histories although mine are as minimally popular as his are maximally so. The second is Indian School Days by Basil H. Johnston. I am reading this for work purposes, to get a handle on the residential schools furor that grips Canada at present. As an historian I take a cool and careful attitude, but I want to understand the ongoing furor. I knew a close friend of Basil Johnston and know from that reference that his account of residential schooling is likely to be absent emotionally unverifiable extremes and thus, for me, believable. The third is the concern of this blog post.

Ways of the Christian Mystics by Thomas Merton is gripping (I wanted to say 'fascinating' as that word properly defined is a more accurate representation of the book's impact on me, but the word 'fascinating' like so many words today has become weak and watery from overuse and improper use alike ... somewhat like saying 'awesome' has nothing much to do with 'awe' anymore... but that is a topic for a whole blog post or even book of its own.). It is gripping on more than one level. Thomas Merton was a superb craftsman, even artist, of the English language. He was also that rare commodity in the modern western world, a Christian mystic. Mysticism still imbues the Christianity of the broader Eastern Orthodox world, but the 1960s burned mysticism out of western Christianity except for a few isolated pockets. Secondly, the book itself is a joy:  a Shambhala Pocket Classic, books which are true pocket books, bound with sewing not just glue, lovely cover designs, readable fonts inside and each page embossed with a red margin and red titles at the top. I carry this book or Merton's Thoughts in Solitude with me when I travel. Even in a busy airport terminal I can enter a universe of mystical thought through these portals.

I am re-reading Ways of the Christian Mystics and have arrived at Thomas Merton's meditation on the Crusades. Like most mystics, Merton lived in this world and understood it in a way academic historians should but sometimes do not. That is, he sees and even touches the warts along with the smooth unblemished parts of life. He sees them as a whole, in context and not from the modern view of accusation and moral superiority that has become endemic recently.

In the section I am currently reading, Merton is discussing pilgrimage. He talks about its origins and its inevitable institutionalization, hedged about with rules and regulations in the manner of all human endeavours, whether linked to the purely secular, or to the human craving for the transcendent. (My apologies for using a compound/complex sentence in this day of short sentences and short thoughts).  Eventually he gets to the First Crusade, which was preceded by the practice of pilgrimage to Jerusalem as a form of penance for great sin. As an example, he mentions Duke Robert II of Normandy who walked barefoot to Jerusalem as penance for the murder of his brother. This is to say that the medieval West knew the way there and knew what was there; they were not ignorant of geography or the political and military situation.

When the Pope, Urban II, preached the crusade it was not only to free the Holy Land from non-Christians, but as a massive redemptive and penitential act for western Christianity as a whole, according to Merton. The ultimate goal was oddly similar to that of the 19th and 20th century evangelical millennialists: to prepare society for the Second Coming of Christ by cleansing the world of the sin and violations of the teachings of Christ that had become too common in the eyes of many. We are and have been a civilization here in the West always seeing decline and alway proposing ways to correct and do penance for our sins, errors and crimes. The Pope saw the Crusades as a means to bring about a purity and unity among all the world's Christians, centred on the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. To quote Thomas Merton here:  "Thus we see that in the course of time the peaceful and defenceless pilgrimage, the humble and meek 'return to the source' of all life and grace, became the organized martial expedition to liberate the land promised to Abraham...." 

Merton was of the opinion that the Crusades were linked to the later development of the Renaissance and of the modern versions of Christianity, but in the situation of the times, an unmitigated disaster.
Beward of unintended consequences is a useful axiom. The First Crusade, which among all the many military ventures into the Middle East was the purest in intention, was a disaster from the point of view of the Pope's prayers. Not only was Christendom not united, but it was more deeply and lastingly divided as a result. Christianity in the West in particular also took on a militant tone. I recall singing Onward Christian Soldiers lustily as a boy in Sunday School in the United Church and the Anglican both. The late 20th century saw a recession of this confident and bold Christianity established by the Crusades into the minds of the West and its replacement by an anemic and apologetic faith.

Thomas Merton looked back at the Crusades from the attitude of a mystic and a devout Christian. I look at these military ventures from the more contextual and holistic attitude of the trained historian. The trick to being an  historian in the 21st century is to do as I never tire of quoting:  'To re-think the thoughts of the past', that precious bit of wisdom from R.G. Collingwood. You must practice a kind of backwards looking anthropological participant observation and immerse yourself in that other country, the past, and think and feel as its citizens did, while keeping a part of yourself as an observer. You must understand especially when dealing with faith, that religion/faith/ritual/ etc was not a hobby, nor an add-on but integrated and embedded into individuals and into society at the deepest levels of psychological, emotional and lived experience.

The Crusades are a useful lens to enter the medieval mind and the incipient modern mind. They are also useful delimiters of the shifting and always vague boundaries between purity and impurity that are one of the marques of being human.

Lifestyle and Religion

While nearing the end of another term teaching courses that explore the intricate dance of religion and society, a perennial thought arose. Christianity is a religion that places proselytizing close to its heart. Early missionaries in different parts of the world debated among themselves whether religion and culture/society must reflect the European integration of these two. That is, was 'correct' Christianity only possible in a European, or European cloned aspect?  Was it necessary for missions to convert the society in order to convert to the faith?  The Jesuits got into trouble with Head Office in the Vatican sometimes by stretching their frequent, though not uniform, practice of 'going native'. I think of the Jesuits in China who dressed as mandarins and allowed ancestor worship. The Jesuits in Canada seemed to go part way, acting like 17th century anthropologists engaged in participant observation, though at the same time creating separate Christian villages among the Wendat. And of course, there was that early capitalist enterprise, the Hudson's Bay Company that booted Methodist missionaries out of Rupert's land for their habit of attempting to destroy the native hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Not, I add, because of any modern identity politics paradigm but for the hard fact that this damaged the fur trade. In the modern world, there is the Day of the Dead in Mexico; in Africa there are a number of Christian/native religion mixes.  I could stretch a point, perhaps to breaking, to mention the official, state-approved 'Catholic' church in China today.

These are just random musings, rather than rigorously researched thoughts on this interesting phenomenon. But I think this gets to the source of the success of Christianity's expansion into many very different cultural contexts around the world. My much more limited understanding of Islam, another proselytizing faith, has encountered the fact that the Sufis - often considered heterodox Muslims by the Islamic mainstream - were the most successful group in converting Africans and Asians to Islam.

"Most wars are caused by religion" (no)

I had a two day debate with a fellow who said that and more. He also gave a random list of rulers who had caused wars to be fought and because some were Christian, that to him meant that religion caused the particular wars they pursued. It was quite a list including figures such as Napoleon - I guess for this person Napoleon's conquests were in the name of Christianity.

Well this may seem extreme, but there are a lot of people out there who repeat this meme as though it were true in some existential sense. I am thinking about this phenomenon, now so common in the western world. I am  not quite sure what to make of it yet and this blog post is a first written effort to sort this out in my mind.

I've considered and studied religion in history for a long time now. I began when quite young, but only as an adult in graduate school did I apply the discipline of academic historical thinking to religion and its place in society. I guess that would be my starting point: that religion, as far as I know, is usually integrated into society. To go to an even more basic level, humans are social animals whose survival has always been predicated on forming societies. That is, we humans are too physically weak to survive and then thrive on the basis of our physical presence. We need to band together, that is, to form a society.

Now, religion.... my present thinking is that human beings seem to always have had a spiritual side - that wondering about the possibility of more than what our senses can apprehend or comprehend is intrinsic to human psychology. This 'feeling' or 'curiosity' or 'need' (and there are probably more to add to this list),  I am tentatively assigning the word 'spiritual' and 'spirituality'.  I don't know how strong the glue is on the reverse of this label, whether it will peel off at some point, or someone else will scribble out the words and write in their own. But that is where my thinking resides at this moment. Next, I would call 'religion' a society of spiritual individuals. That is, just as humans had to bond together in social groups to survive physically, so too we bonded together in spiritual social groups we call religions. Human beings do not live compartmentalized lives, or we didn't for most of human history. So it is an artifice to say that 'religion' is separate from 'politics' or 'medicine' or 'sex' or any human social activity or grouping. Each individual human contains all these and that means that religion, like all other social groupings is integral to society as a whole.

So in an odd and truncated sense, my debate partner was correct. Wars are fought by people who are religious because they are spiritual, but also the same warriors exist in a political context and a health context and a sexual context .. in short, in a variety of contexts that make up the whole. All these elements of a context go to war, but I doubt that the 'religion context' is primary. The evidence of actual wars shows only a few where religion was the prime motive. For most, power and politics was the initial motivation and the goal.

Politically avaricious rulers discovered in the 16th century that religion could be used to motivate an entire population to fight a war where once wars were the glory and joy and goal of only a warrior class. By using religion, a king or a Duke or a Margrave (titles for monarchs were various) could mobilize an entire population rather than just warriors who lived to fight, or even just a newly invented professional army. This meant that 'civilian' populations also became the deliberate target of armies, rather than accidental victims of soldiers trampling down crops or stealing cows on their way to battle other warriors.

So religion as defined above is involved, but as a tool and as a part of the character of a society but not as a prime motivation.

The Five Senses

Religion is usually studied from a doctrinal viewpoint. There is often some mention of historical development in this, but the approach almost always is to discuss ideas and how these ideas are transmitted in words printed on a page or presented on a screen. The default attitude to religion is intellectual. You read about and think about the Four Noble Truths in Buddhism, or the Bhagavad Gita in Hinduism; the Bible; the Qur'an, etc. You might also place these words in the context of a place and a time. You discuss secularization in the United States as compared to western Europe since the mid 20th century; you discuss Henry VIII and his Act of Supremacy; you discuss Luther and Calvin in early modern Europe; you investigate the Rashidun.

Two disparate sources of information got me thinking about this approach to understanding religion.

The first is a reading I have students encounter in a course I teach on Religion and Society in the western world. The reading is Chapter XI in Peter Ackroyd's biography of Thomas More, 'Holy, Holy, Holy'. Here the author describes the religious experience of Thomas More prior to the reforms initiated by King Henry VIII. This very short chapter (5 and a bit pages) brings the sensual experience of religion in London, ca. 1500 to readers. It hints at beliefs, but the beliefs of both ordinary, illiterate Londoners and literate alike, but concentrates on what it smells like, sounds like, tastes like, feels like, looks like for a person living faith in that day. My intent is to entice students away from the standard 'religion as doctrine' view, to do what the historian/archaeologist/philosopher R.G. Collingwood called 'rethinking the thoughts of the past'. Only I want to go one step further and have 21st century students 're-sense the sensuality of the past'.

The second source is very different. I subscribed recently to an online magazine called Aeon Magazine. Today there was a quirky article - very few words introducing a  21 minutes video. The video, by Berlin based Spanish artist Ignacio Uriarte is called  History of the Typewriter as Recited by Michael Winslow.  Michael Winslow, you might recall, is the guy in the Police Academy movies who could make all those sounds - I thought it was movies magic, but apparently he actually does make those sounds with his own mouth. This film uses Ken Burns style titles saying which typewriter model and its year, white on black, followed by a a clip of Michael Winslow making typing noises with mouth, microphone and some metal instrument he sometimes uses to manipulate his lips, (I think). This obviously has nothing to do with religion, except it does. We don't just live inside our heads. We live in a world where the keys I am tapping right now feel a certain way and do make a certain, soft sound. The chair under my bum feels, the floor under my socked and slippered feet has a feeling. The air moves or doesn't move; there are house smells. If the window is open there are outdoor sounds and smells. I hear my dog moving about, panting. I can hear the background noise of a TV downstairs. As I type this I am muttering the words (I have a writing technique that says I must say the words out loud as a kind of copy edit). In  a church there might be the smell of wax from candles and at Easter from a Beeswax Easter candle, the faint hint of incense perhaps, the feel of hard wood pews, floors either carpeted or not, and the air - don't forget the air - it might be still, or air conditioned, or smell of an aged building. Lighting might be bright and harsh, it might be old and soft. I attended a Russian Orthodox Divine Liturgy once where the only lighting was from hundreds of tall, thin candles stuck in sand in chest high containers, providing a kind of flickering mystery that took the eye a while to adjust and allow a degree of normal vision. The typewriter film reminded me of this. The sound of a typewriter was something experienced as background for many from the 1880s into the 1980s, whether mechanical or electric. You did not notice it especially, but this video reminded me it is gone now, replaced by the soft, plastic tapping of fingers on computer keys on my laptop, and no sound at all when using a phone or tablet (except for the occasional swear word or strangled laugh when you hit the wrong letter or autocorrect 'dis-corrects'). There is some blending of old to new because I learned to touch type in High School and laptop and desk top keyboards are laid out the same way for the standard letters.

Anyway, all this reminded me that when studying religion - it does not matter which religion - ideas, words, texts are for those who are not religious professionals, merely the tip of a very large iceberg. 

Newfoundland and Anglicanism

I am in the process of writing a review of Beating Agains the Wind: Popular Opposition to Bishop Feild and Tractarianism in Newfoundland and Labrador, by Calvin Hollett.  The review is for a little journal called Fides et Historia, a Journal of the Conference on Faith and History. This is an excellent organization of evangelical scholars, mostly found in the many small church colleges in the United States. This may seem an odd place for a Catholic such as myself. But, their level of scholarship, camaraderie for any scholar of religion and sheer joy in their work welcome anyone serious about the history of religion. I subscribed for a few years until the pile of editions grew too high for my home library. Apparently they remembered me as an historian of Anglicanism and of Canada, so sent me a note asking if I would be interested in reviewing this book. I was and am.

The book is interesting in that it focusses on a particular aspect of the history of religion that is my own focus: the religion of the 'people in the pews' rather than the leaders, theologians, ecclesiastical structure and so on.

Thus far in my reading and thinking, the book does very well in unearthing the religiosity of mid 19th century Newfoundlanders. I wish I could say the same of the author's critique of Bishop Feild and more particularly of the Oxford Movement that Feild represented. I get the sense without good evidence Dr. Hollett is himself an evangelical as his tone seems to be one of opposition to anglo-catholicism (which he insists on calling tractarianism throughout) rather than scholarly detachment. It is no small matter either that his first name is Calvin. The insistence on the term tractarian is itself an indicator.  While the ritualism of the later anglo-catholicism did arise out of the Oxford movement, or Tractarianism, it is not equivalent. Tractarians or members of the Oxford Movement did not consider ritual to be important. They did consider that the church to be a divine institution which should not be controlled by the state. This was the genesis of their movement in fact. They were intellectuals, perhaps too much so except in the case of John Keble who spent the last 30 years of his life as a rural parish priest. He was an intellectual but one who lived happily among  his congregation and who in turn saw nothing distant about him. Anglo-Catholicism was focussed determinedly on ritual, to the point they were often labelled ritualists by their enemies, though not inaccurately. Feild was, if Dr. Hollett's description of the man is correct, a ritualist or Anglo-Catholic. Using the term tractarian is therefore misleading.

Anyway, I am learning about what Dr. Hollett calls the  kitchen Anglicanism of a people who were not urban in outlook or lifestyle. My studies focussed on urban culture and my conclusions suffered from a lack of a look at rural society.

A quick thought

I am marking final exams (well, actually those of you reading this post will note that I am procrastinating). Something a student said in the course of answering a particular question struck me as profound. That is, the student noted that religion prior to modernity was experiential and today is literal. That is, prior to the 'privileging' of doubt, religion was an experience, or rather an intrinsic part of the holistic experience of life. With the growth of literacy as part and parcel of modernity, religion became something one thought about and wrote about and talked about. The student said 'literal' however, not 'literate'. I don't know if this was a considered and deliberate word choice. But 'literal' is a more profound comment than that indicated by 'literate'.  We, today, do live in a literal world. This era is the age of seeing only the material. Where some Protestant Christians read the Bible 'literally', the semi-atheist majority here in the West read life literally. Life is about physicality: comfort, pleasure, happiness, indeed a world where pleasure and happiness are equivalent, and a horror of pain in any degree. This explains perhaps why 'assisted dying' is the new next best thing. The old Christian, Jewish and Muslim ideal of the sanctity of suffering is now seen as a form of madness, inexplicable to the literal mind. Externalized belief served to tear faith from its internal moorings and set it adrift to float with other aspects of thought such as science or pleasure or psychological state... all the components of the organic machines formerly called humans.

Well, back to marking.

Or.

Maybe I will take my dog for a walk.

Then do some more marking.

Rambling Thoughts upon reading Taylor’s Varieties of Religion Today version 2

Rambling Thoughts upon reading Taylor’s Varieties of Religion Today

Charles Taylor lays out an interesting philosophical look at early 21st century society and the place of religion today in a short (roughly 100 pages) book Varieties of Religion Today, where he ruminates on William James’s book, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). James’s book was based on  his Gifford Lectures given over 1901-02, just as this short volume was based on Taylor’s Gifford Lectures given in 1999. While the two are separated by the neat figure of 100 years, Taylor sees James’s work as mostly holding true for today, but with some modifications necessary. 

It is the second part of Taylor’s lectures and book that interest me most. Here he looks at the state of western society and therefore, of religion in western society at the very beginning of the 21st century. What he sees is the gradual growth of the individual pursuit of happiness and of the growing emphasis on the individual in society, two elements of modernity. Prior to the post-world war 2 period, this individualism was embedded in various checks such as ‘good citizenship’ of the sort envisioned by the founders of the American republic and their ideal of rule by the citizen, in a sexual morality that promoted and protected the family unit, and an ethic of hard work and productivity. What Prof. Taylor sees happening after the Second World War is the gradual removal of these checks on individual behaviour and their replacement by one only: that individuals do no harm to other individuals. He notes that this is not an abrupt change, though the 1960s can be seen as the turning point, but a change where old verities exist and perhaps recede alongside this new total unleashing of the individual. 

He uses several terms as labels: paleo-Durkheimian, neo-Durkeimian, post-Durkheimian, expressivism and the Culture of Authenticity. 

To boil down Durkheim’s work to sound byte size, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, one can say that Durkheim saw religion as being essentially functional and about social cohesion.  By this light, crowds doing the wave at a football game could be seen as playing out a religious ritual - that is, a social ritual (as opposed to an individual ritual) that has the function of binding a group together in a common identity. 

When Taylor uses the term paleo-Durkheimian, he means it in this pristine sense and ascribes it to societies with a dominant church to which all are required to belong. Here in specific historical terms he refers to western Europe prior to the Reformation and the Catholic church. In this system also, there is a division between the sacred and the profane, but one where they are nonetheless, linked. Religion permeates society at the political level and at the level of daily life.  Neo-Durkheimian is used to denote a period where denominations have emerged with profound theological and ritualistic differences, but which accord a degree (sometimes less and sometimes more so) of mutual respect to one another. In this period, an individual may join whichever denomination suits their individual comfort. You might, to put this in obvious terms, belong to a Baptist congregation because you are comfortable in that particular congregation and at the same time accept the individual choice of a neighbour who joined a Catholic church. There exists a sense of an invisible ‘church’ consisting of accepting God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and of these denominations being merely individual expressions of a system that is both basic and overarching at the same time. It is also expected that this invisible church guides and directs society, but a level of individual choice has become the norm.  Religion here is still serving a function of joining a society together, but with a large step towards full individualism. Hence neo-Durkheimian. 

Post-Durkheimian is the situation obtaining today. Here Charles Taylor is less clear (to me, anyway). He earlier introduces the term expressivism, which seems to denote the gradual strengthening of the sense of passion as leading to religious truth rather than theological thought. Theology in the Middle Ages, was considered to be the Queen of the Sciences. This was the place where intellectuals who today are for example Physicists, congregated to understand the essential reality of the universe. Theology was a strict intellectual discipline with rules of thought carefully and arduously learned and followed once one became a Master. The truths of God, morality, social relations, the purpose of life and the physical world  were the objects of study and thought. Purpose lay at the heart of this intellectual pursuit in contradiction to modern day Physics which now posits a cosmic accident as being at the very beginning of existence. Scholars then saw Jesus as the Alpha and the Omega (beginning and end), now scholars see pure chance as the alpha, but human will as the omega. Taylor seems to suggest (and again I would need to read more deeply into his work to verify this) that expressivism, the victory of passion and feeling over intellect has led to this current situation. Taylor traces the growth of expressivism through historic periods quickly:  this is, after all a short book based on a lecture. He sees it beginning in the 18th century, which although historians have labelled this the Age of Reason, it was also the age of a reaction to hard logic in the Methodist movement and the Pietists who form the instigator of Methodism. Modern Methodists are not a passionate folk, but in the 18th century they based their view of Christianity on emotion more than reason. He then  looks at the impact of urbanization and industrialization which had their beginnings contemporary to Methodism and Pietism, and at the Romantic era and at the growth of individualism as being factors. 

Post-Durkheimian means for Taylor, the abandonment of religion as having a societal function. It is now to be a matter of personal emotional interest, or even intellectual interest, but personal, passionate and primarily individual. Finally, in the post world war 2 period comes Taylor’s concept, the culture of authenticity. By this he means an understanding of the nature of life that emerged from expressivism. To be authentic, an individual must create their own way of being, that comes authentically from within your personality and predilections, and is not dictated by social norms including religion. 

In the mediaeval world of western Europe, there was one religion and a societal acceptance of two spheres of the sacred and the profane within that mental universe. There were physical objects and places which were recognized as sacred and those apart from the sacred were profane (or in more modern terminology, secular). Religion was experienced societally - individual happiness with or contentment with was not regarded as vital. Religion and society were integrated (to use my own terminology). I prefer integrated to other possible descriptors such as entangled or unified because I want to convey the idea that ‘religion’ and society, politics, daily life, work, play, pain, failure, success and so on were not separate categories, but part of an integral whole. 

How do I concatenate this with Taylor’s thesis of the separation of the sacred and the profane? I will have to think more deeply about this and read more of Taylor and perhaps Peter Brown on the origins of the mediaeval mentality as I do not at present see an obvious answer. Where they do meet is in particular places and times where human beings meet or enter. Thus, a church is sacred and people enter the sacred while literally entering a church building. Unlike today, there were other sacred places such as holy wells, or entire cities such as Jerusalem. There were objects that were sacred, primary among them being the bread viewed or consumed in communion at the Mass. ‘Communion’ is a good term here as it indicates ‘communication’ or ‘communing with’ the sacred ‘other’ and letting it enter your body.  In a more holistic or perhaps neo-Durkheimian sense, I would suggest that there existed an overarching reality that included the sacred and the profane into the same existence, that connected this world and the other world of pure God. They were connected, but not the same.  But I am no theologian or philosopher so must ground any thinking here in my study of the idea of mentalitié drawn form the work of the French historian Michel Vovelle, but that is another can of worms avoided here. 

In the modern world - that mental universe which began to overcome the mediaeval mindset - individualism began inexorably to replace the more holistic sense of reality that had obtained, not only in the western European culture, but that of the more Mediterranean centred world of ancient Rome. One can argue time frames,  but let us say that it began with the Renaissance and we can use Petrarch as a marker in the same way Taylor uses the 1960s as a marker of change. This is not a specific point of time, but a hinge moment. Petrarch’s ascension of Mount Ventoux is a tale of the conversion experience away from a holistic, social existence to one focussed on the individual called humanism. Modern research has cast doubt on this event, but that too is indicative of the change from a world that allowed for mystical experiences to one that always tries to debunk any mental or physical universe other than the purely material. 

Yet for Taylor, that individualism was still bounded and limited by other ideals still accepted by society in general and individuals in particular. Thus we may now be generally inhabiting a post-Durkheimian universe, but many still live in a neo-Durkheimian place where there is a real religious and Christian reality that acts as an overseer of individual choice to join a particular denomination or even to be agnostic or atheist. The next stage, not considered in this 1990s meditation of his, would require analysis of the impact of theist and non-Christian religion becoming significant in the West. Would the growing numbers of Muslims and Hindus serve to strengthen neo-Durkheimian society? That is, would Islam, for example, take its place alongside Presbyterians and Catholics? The present tense fear of Islam in the United States is probably more an indicator of a struggle to place this non-Christian religion within the context of a society that is still mostly neo-Durkheimian. For Canada, we are dominated by a post-Durkheimian mental universe so any struggle would involve the full privatization of Islam, rather than including it alongside Christian denominations, which are already mostly privatized. Again, I would stress that this is not a neat and tidy process, but messy and chaotic in the extreme. Any analysis or comment must require a large degree of humility on my part and on that of any other thinker. Fortunately I have a vast store of that.

Religion and Categories

I am reading a textbook I found a while back in my university of Guelph mailbox from Oxford UP. I have a lot of unread books on shelves and stacked on the floor. This book is nice and short and clearly written and gives a good overview of theory as used by those who teach in Religious Studies departments. My university does not have such a department, though years ago there was a move to create a 'minor' in Religious Studies at the U of Guelph. That came to nothing as the order of the day for universities is to cut back on the Arts and Humanities and move what little money they have into more pragmatically oriented disciplines.

In any case, I teach, write, think about religion from the perspective of an historian. That is to say, I am interested in the place of religion, of faith, of all the aspects of religion within a society and as part of its culture as it changes over time. But this roughly 200 page book gives a good introduction to theory. I have read the introductory section, mostly to see where my intellectual meanderings had placed me in this theoretical universe of thought.

The author, Chris Klassen (whom I met once long ago) teaches religious studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He goes over various approaches to defining religion, while sensibly noting that definitions are not as solid as one might think or perhaps hope. Definitions fluctuate and change with new research and with the times.
He then looks at different theoretical approaches to the study of religion. He surveys the 'cognitive' approach:  looking at religion as ideas or theology which then affects culture, using the 19th century work of Sir James Frazer as best expressed in the book, The Golden Bough; at the functional approach, as expressed by Emile Durkheim in his book, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), which looks at how religion affects society by attempting to understand  universal basic elements of religion. The he surveys Max Weber and his thesis found in 'The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism'. Weber combined Luther's idea that "labour is a calling from God" (p 12) and the Calvinist view that if you prospered financially in life, this was a sign you were one of God's elect. Prof. Klassen then looked at Marx and his view that religion was part of 'superstructure' and designed to support the modes of production or the 'base' of society. Usually people do remember Marx calling religion the 'opiate of the masses'. Next up is William James, a psychologist who studied religion as an individual experience at the psychological level in his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). I have a little book that builds on this work by the philosopher Charles Taylor called 'Varieties of Religion Today' published in 2002 and based on a Gifford Lecture he gave. James's book was also based on a Gifford lecture. Next comes Mercea Eliade, perhaps the first scholar of World Religions - the others touched on so-called primitive religion, but mostly used Christianity as being 'religion'. Eliade studied a variety of religions and from an historical perspective and focussing on myth and symbolism. He thought religion  should be studied for its own sake, not as an adjunct to other areas of the human experience.
Then Chris Klassen gets to what is the meat of the matter, in my liking and view anyway:  Clifford Geertz and the anthropological approach; and a newer way to study, the 'lived experience' approach. Students of mine will recognize that I teach religion from this latter means: religion is something people do, live, experience and is often different and sometimes wildly different from the official doctrines and practices of a religion.

I think I will post more on this book as I move through it in my spare time. But for now, this introduces the ideas contained within and which will likely spark ideas in me too.

Klassen, Chris. Religion & Popular Culture: A Cultural Studies Approach. Don Mills, ON, Oxford University Press, 2014.