The retirement of Pope Benedict XVI and the subsequent elevation of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio to the throne of St. Peter involves a number of “firsts” for the Catholic Church: the first papal retirement in 600 years, the first election of a non-European pope in the modern era, and the first Jesuit pope ever. Even the papal name chosen by Bergoglio—Francis I, in honor of St. Francis of Assisi—is a first. Many observers both within and outside the Church have interpreted these “firsts” as a sign that the papacy of Francis I will mark a departure from his most recent predecessors and will bring much-needed reform to a Church hamstrung by the sex abuse scandal, a rigid and opaque bureaucratic structure, concerns about the role of women in the Church, and the ever-dwindling ranks of the faithful.

Early actions and statements suggest that, in keeping with his namesake, the new pope will adopt a more humble, ascetic style, and work to reorient the church toward a fuller embrace of its mission to serve the poor. But critics have also pointed out that Francis remains bound to the same conservative positions on questions of sexuality, gender, and reproduction upheld by his predecessors. Moreover, questions have been raised about the new pope’s relationship to the military junta responsible for Argentina’s “dirty war” in the 1970s and 80s, when Bergoglio served as provincial for the Jesuit order in Argentina.

Does the election of Francis I signal a major shift in Vatican policy, structure, or doctrine? How significant is Francis’ status as an “outsider” to the Roman Curia, especially his background as a Latin American and a Jesuit? Is this status likely to position him as an agent of change within the Church, or do his theological continuities with his predecessors and the entrenched Vatican bureaucracy guarantee that any reform he initiates will be largely cosmetic?

Our respondents are:

Michele Dillon, Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociologyx, University of New Hampshire

John L. Esposito, Professor of Religion and International Affairs and of Islamic Studies, Georgetown University

Jeffrey Guhin, Ph.D. candidate in Sociology, Yale University

Cecelia Lynch, Professor of Political Science and Director of International Studies, University of California, Irvine

James Martin, S.J., Author and Editor at Large at America

J. Michelle Molina, John W. Croghan Assistant Professor in Catholic Studies, Northwestern University

Sarah Shortall, Ph.D. candidate in History, Harvard University

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Michele Dillon, Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociology, University of New Hampshire

The election of Pope Francis, an Argentinian Jesuit who has many years of experience ministering to and living amidst the poor is refreshing. It sends a symbolic reminder to the world that the Catholic Church is geographically universal and that its ethnically, culturally and economically diverse members enact an on-the-ground catholicity that continues the living tradition of Catholicism. Closer to home, it is also particularly significant to the growing number of Hispanic Catholics who are putting their imprint on American Catholicism that the new pope is from their home region and speaks their language. Symbolism alone, of course, does not produce institutional change. But change, I would argue, is an ever-present fermenting possibility in the Church. I know it is easy to point to the encrusted ways in which the church operates and to the many well-established doctrinal and institutional mechanisms it uses to resist the tides of social and cultural change in the name of Tradition. Yet, as Benedict’s resignation itself underscores, where there is a will to do things differently, it can be legitimated within the confines and with the imprimatur of the Church. The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) is the most obvious and the most transformative case in point; and yet it, too, was fully in continuity with already existing doctrinal strands in Catholic thought (a point recently reaffirmed by Benedict).

The many legitimation problems confronting the Church today call out for a willfully bold response from Francis. For example, the acute shortage of priests in the U.S. and its implications for the celebration of the Eucharist strike at the theological and the communal core of what it means to be Catholic. While some will resolutely resist change in the Church’s understanding of ordination for political and doctrinal reasons, the larger question demanding Francis’s leadership is whether the Catholic tradition can continue as a living tradition if its members cannot participate in its core ritual. Sometimes, particularly over the course of a long and pluralistic tradition like Catholicism, a discontinuity with settled practices (e.g., changes with respect to who may be ordained) may be necessary in order to sustain more important continuities (e.g., the Eucharist, which according to the Catholic Catechism is the vital source and summit of Catholic life).

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John L. Esposito, University Professor and Professor of Religion and International Affairs and of Islamic Studies, Georgetown University

The election of Argentinian Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a relative unknown and conservative initially seemed par the course, given all the conservative cardinal candidates appointed by John II and Benedict XVI. However, statements he made as a cardinal indicated a potential openness to change regarding issues like celibacy and gay marriage: “For the moment I’m in favor of maintaining celibacy, with its pros and cons, because there have been 10 centuries of good experiences rather than failures. It’s a question of discipline, not of faith. It could change.” And while he did publicly opposed the Argentinian government’s move to legalize gay marriages, he did eventually indicate support the Church’s recognition of civil unions for gay couples.

While Liberals or Progressives welcome a move away from Benedict XVI’s retrenchment and retreat from the spirit of Vatican II, Francis’ conservative theological opposition to married clergy, women’s ordination, and abortion/birth control are all significant hurdles. However, Pope Francis could lay the groundwork for future change. With regard to women in the Church, while he may not alter his opposition to women priests, a first step, based on recent scholarship that demonstrates women had prominent leadership roles in the early Church, would be to support their ordination as deacons. Given recent Vatican appointments, the Vatican decision last year to place Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), the main representative group of U.S. Catholic sisters, under the control of bishops, which was made without consultation or knowledge of Congregation for Religious, the Vatican office that normally deals with matters of religious life, may well be reversed.

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Jeffrey Guhin, Ph.D. candidate in Sociology, Yale University

If you want a pope who’s going to support abortion, women’s ordination, and gay marriage, Pope Francis is going to disappoint you. (If you want him to spend a lot of time opposing them, you’ll be disappointed too.) I don’t think those issues bother him, which, well, bothers those folks—liberal and conservative, Catholic and non-Catholics—whose first priorities are pelvic. While these are not “first world” problems (gay rights, women’s rights, and sexual health matter everywhere), glance at the global church and you’ll find they can sometimes obscure others: war, environment, poverty, and corruption, to name a few. Through its tradition of Catholic Social Teaching, the Church has maintained its Gospel commitments to peace and the poor, even if these teachings’ sometimes low priority make them the Church’s “best kept secret.” Because of his experience in the Global South and because his order vows to be loyal to the Vatican’s teachings but not tempted by its trappings (their founder Ignatius was sometimes misrecognized in Rome because of his filthy robe), Pope Francis will change things. Like that earlier Francis, he will lead by example, cleaning up Vatican careerism, striving to make our world cleaner and safer for this and future generations, and modeling a concern for the poor, whether blocks away or around the world. He will make a difference on gender as well: he’s appointing women to key Vatican positions, washing women’s feet, and attempting unprecedented though not uncanonical innovations. Pope Francis’s radical commitment to Gospel values might not be the precise political goals of estadounidense liberals and conservatives, but I hope I can be forgiven for believing, with that first Francis and this one, that a recommitment to Christ’s values of poverty, peace, and compassion might be enough.

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Cecelia Lynch, Professor of Political Science and Director of International Studies, University of California, Irvine

As a non-Vatican insider (thank heaven!), all speculation about the degree of Pope Francis I’s departure from the conservatism of his two immediate predecessors seems to be just that. However, an analogy with not-too-distant history of a different kind may be apt. I’m thinking of the Mikhail Gorbachev analogy—someone who was supposed to shake things up just enough, provide some new thinking, but not change the order of things. And of course Gorbachev himself intended to rejuvenate an ossified governing structure and alliance without bringing the whole edifice down. Yet Gorbachev helped set in motion a series of events that in the end went far beyond his vision or his control, opening spaces for restive social movements to grow, innovate, and initiate the end of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European alliance.

We can only hope that this Pope’s current initiatives, however modest at the moment, might open just enough space to engender a similar and perhaps even more revolutionary awakening of restive Catholics and Catholic theology in the world. It is unlikely that Francis will initiate a revolution in Catholic social teaching himself. Nevertheless, the theological and social resources are present for such a revolution, but each and every opening needs to be better articulated, acted upon, and expanded by Catholics across the globe. Such activism should not remain warehoused in either social or economic agendas, but should combine both in an across-the-board insistence on the transformational potential of Catholic teachings on “catholic” love and human dignity, if only they can genuinely include the poor and people of all genders and sexuality as equals.

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James Martin, S.J., Author and Editor at Large at America

Pope Francis has already initiated change in the Vatican. But when looking for “change” we should be careful to consider not only words, but also symbolic actions, which carry enormous weight in Christian and especially Catholic circles. Remember that Jesus did not only teach with words, but with his actions as well. The first Jesuit pope ever elected (itself a sign of change within the College of Cardinals) chose the name Francis, as a sign of his commitment to the poor and to what he would later call “a church that is poor.” So far he has eschewed many of the trappings of his papal office—setting aside some of the more elaborate vestments that popes have worn, choosing to move out of the grand Apostolic Palace (aptly named) into a small two-room suite, and also referring to himself not as “pope” but as the “Bishop of Rome.” On Holy Thursday, when priests traditionally wash the feet of parishioners to emulate Jesus’s washing the feet of the disciples at the Last Supper, and as a reminder that the true leader is the one who serves, Francis broke with tradition. Instead of celebrating this Mass at a grand church in Rome and washing the feet of priests, he went to a youth detention center and washed (and kissed) the feet of young inmates, including two women and a number of Muslims. Pope Francis’s unexpected liturgical action was a vivid symbol of his desire to do whatever is needed to spread the Gospel in new ways to a world hungry for authenticity. Will changes come to the Vatican? They already have.

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J. Michelle Molina, The John W. Croghan Assistant Professor in Catholic Studies, Northwestern University

In these early days of Francis’s papacy, change seems to be in the air. Yet the ethereal currents are impossible to chart, in part given the flimsiness of available categories. “Liberal,” “conservative,” “radical,” “outsider,” “entrenched,” are tin sign-posts that, in often too breezy assessment, rattle rather uselessly.

What is possible with a Jesuit as pope? We can best grasp the inability to easily capture this man and this moment if we approach “possibility” as framed by the philosophical practice that is the Spiritual Exercises. This program of spiritual renewal offers the means through which every Jesuit finds his vocation; he also takes up these meditative practices to shape his attitudes and actions in everyday life.

The purpose of undertaking the Spiritual Exercises is to know and overcome oneself in an effort to find God—in particular, the Jesuit seeks to discern God’s will as he evaluates his life in terms of the past, present and future. The question “what ought I do for Christ now?” is how every Jesuit—Pope Francis included—tests himself.

In other words, we would be wise to be attuned to how Francis prays. For Jesuits, prayer and meditation signal that life is full of possibility. As Bergoglio wrote in a recent publication: “To pray is an act of freedom.” To pray, he continues, is to take leave of self, of the desire for control, or any effort to gain the upper hand with God. And this meditative experience must find its full expression in the world as the Jesuit looks for God in all things. Or as Bergoglio says in the same publication, “My experiences with God are found on the road, located in the search itself, in the act of giving myself over to the search.”

If we inhabit a moment of suspense in these early moments of his papacy, so does Francis. Yet he has been trained to live in that tension, to avoid easy categorization, to discern signs, to listen, to test. Francis, as a Jesuit, is necessarily experimental, paying attention to the ordinary as he discerns what might be possible within the Church he now leads.

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Sarah Shortall, Ph.D. candidate in History, Harvard University

Like many people, my first reaction to the news of Cardinal Bergoglio’s accession to the papacy was “Who is that?” By no means one of the much-discussed frontrunners singled out in the lead up to the conclave, Pope Francis is something of an unknown quantity. This has in many ways inflated the expectations of Catholics across the ideological spectrum, who see in Francis an answer to the grave challenges currently confronting the Church.

A new translation of the dialogue between then-Cardinal Bergoglio and Rabbi Abraham Skorka provides some indication of the direction the new pope may take. These pages reveal to us, as John Allen puts it, a “moderate realist” whose unimpeachable orthodoxy on the major doctrinal questions is tempered by a characteristically Jesuit sense of flexibility and practicality. Citing the late Cardinal (and fellow Jesuit) Henri de Lubac, Pope Francis calls upon the clergy to avoid the temptations of both politicization and quietist retreat into a private faith that ignores the central religious significance of social engagement.

It will be interesting to observe how Francis squares these commitments with his new role as both a temporal and spiritual sovereign. I suspect that the main features distinguishing his papacy from that of his predecessor will remain at the level of personal style and symbolics. While Francis’ impressive humility and personal piety may help to rebuild the spiritual stature of an institution that has been severely damaged by revelations of sex abuse, corruption and curial infighting, the new pope is unlikely to push through the kind of substantive doctrinal reforms for which many liberal Catholics worldwide have been clamoring. At best, we are likely to see some reforms to the bureaucratic structure of the Curia and a more collegial leadership style. The appointment of the “G8”—an advisory commission of eight cardinals representing every continent—signals the new pope’s desire to reorient the Vatican towards a more global outlook that is responsive to the concerns of the local churches. It also signals a shift in the balance of power away from the Secretariat of State, which took on an expanded role under Benedict XVI. However, the new pope is unlikely to inaugurate a “Vatican Spring” of the kind Hans Küng called for in a powerful editorial penned on the occasion of Benedict’s resignation.

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This interview is being cross-posted at Reverberations, a new digital forum produced by the Social Science Research Council in conjunction with New Directions in the Study of Prayer.—ed.

Tanya Marie Luhrmann is a psychological anthropologist and a Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her work explores how people come to experience nonmaterial objects such as God as present and real, and how different understandings of the mind affect mental experience. She is the author, most recently, of When God Talks Back (Knopf, 2012), which The New York Times Book Review called “the most insightful study of evangelical religion in many years,” and of other books including Of Two Minds (Knopf, 2000), The Good Parsi (Harvard, 1996), and Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft (Harvard, 1989). Her latest project, supported by the SSRC’s New Directions in the Study of Prayer initiative, builds on and extends her research for When God Talks Back, taking her to India and Africa. On a recent rainy afternoon in Palo Alto, I spoke with Luhrmann about her work and its new directions.

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Steven Barrie-Anthony: In the final chapter of When God Talks Back, you argue that God for evangelicals is not a rejection of modernity but rather an expression of what it is to be modern. How is this the case?

Tanya Marie Luhrmann: I think that the two big characteristics of modernity are the availability of science, and pluralism. And these make the uncertainty of your own cognitive position much more available to you. So using the imagination to make God real helps to make God real. Doing this also has characteristics that we associate with postmodernity—the playfulness, the uncertainty, the sense that there is a there there but maybe we don’t really get to it directly. From what I know of early Christianity, the idea of seeing through a glass darkly was extremely salient in the first and second centuries, was less salient to a faith that was very confident, and is highly salient to modern people. It allows you to imagine God walking by your side. Are you just making that up or is it real in the world? C.S. Lewis is sure that God is real, but then, he’s also writing a novel about it. The availability of disbelief is a condition of modernity. You cannot but be aware that other people think differently—that they may disbelieve your belief. And the evangelical walking with God is a sort of suspension of disbelief, which is not really relevant unless disbelief is relevant.

SBA: And yet the evangelicals you study do not often turn away from their disbelief or doubt or skepticism; they are constantly returning to it.

TML: They don’t think of themselves as doubting God, but they are extremely articulate about how God is present through the human. They know that there are Catholics, Hindus, and Muslims, and it’s very difficult for a smart, university-educated person to say, “Hindus have culture, but we don’t, we have truth.” So you are committed to having truth, but you also have culture. You also know that if God is talking to you in your mind, first of all you have God. But at the same time, you are aware that you are mistaken some of the time. Holding both of these simultaneously is the modern predicament—the awareness of the uncertainty of your knowledge.

SBA: That’s fascinating. And it runs up against the typical critique of evangelicals, especially by Dawkins and the new atheists, that evangelicals are turning away from the modern predicament, away from ambiguity and rational discernment.

TML: Yes. And the new atheists are not exceptionally articulate about the limitations of human knowledge. These guys are just seeing a different beyond, a different more, whatever it is. It took me a while to recognize how sophisticated people were about belief. My own preconception was that belief was a proposition rather than an attitude. And I remember doing research for When God Talks Back and being in this prayer group with a bunch of women, and they were all so clear about their awareness of the possibility that they were wrong—not about whether God exists, but about whether God is present right here. So in fact as you bring God closer you become more aware that He might not be present. You allow yourself to tolerate the uncertainty, because the uncertainty is very clear. You give yourself the real literal text, but you interpret it in a way that makes it flexibly fictional even though it’s nonfiction. You are saying things like, “this is a love letter written to me,” but you’re sitting in a room with ten people, all of whom cognitively see the same text, but also believe that it is God’s specific, unique love letter written to each individual self.

SBA: I’m reminded here of how for Robert Orsi belief is less important than relationships. And for you as well, equating religion with belief seems inadequate.

TML: That’s right. It’s about attitude. Wilfred Cantwell Smith is my lens here. We think of belief as propositional, and of faith as an attitude, an orientation, a way of committing to a sense that the world is good despite all evidence to the contrary. So from that perspective, I resonate with faith. Belief is tough for me. Adopting the idea that the world is good despite evidence is almost an emotional attitude, a way of being in the world. The evangelicals are certainly strong on belief—but their practice is about changing faith.

SBA: A major form of the evangelical practice is kataphatic or “imagination rich” prayer. How does this prayer work in terms of altering the mind and helping evangelicals achieve an interactional relationship with God?

TML: It makes what is imagined in the mind more real. In kataphatic prayer you are saying that certain of your mental images are significant, and you are making these images more sensorially rich, you are allowing yourself to imagine them more vividly. The demand of religion is to teach you that the world as you know it is not the world as it is—and to teach you the capacity to see the world as it is, as something good. So you’ve got to make what is imagined real, and you’ve got to make it good. Kataphatic prayer helps you to do this. You are allowing yourself to live in a daydream, to walk with God, talk with God, hang out with Mary. And by treating the daydream not as ephemera but as something real in the world, it becomes a skill on which you can improve.

SBA: Thinking about religious experience in the language of daydreams and the like, how do you walk the line in your research between psychological reductionism where there is no such thing as God, and the reverse?

TML: Well, I think that if there is a God, then God speaks to us through our minds. So you need to accept and understand the psychology to understand the process. You can read When God Talks Back from different perspectives. From the purely secular angle, you might say that these people are just making it up, which demonstrates that it is all imagination. But from a religious angle, you might see the puzzle as: If God is always speaking, why doesn’t everybody hear? It’s really helpful to walk that line. I genuinely don’t think I have the right to pass judgment. And I don’t think that passing judgment is the point. Given that the question of ultimate reality is fundamentally undecideable, it’s more interesting to ask what we can know if we treat that seriously.

SBA: Readers persistently try to gauge your relationship to your evangelical subjects. Joan Acocella in her The New Yorker review of When God Talks Back observed that your attitude toward your subjects is “wavering,” difficult to pin down. Is this intentional?

TML: It is intentional. And I also probably do not have control over all of it. I think that the question of whether God is real is undecidable—but I still have a decision about it. I have a view. I struggle with the idea that there is this external ontology, but I have a lot of sympathy for the idea of faith. People do say things that are sort of ridiculous, and I cannot not hear those stories. I don’t tell a lot of those stories because I want readers to pay attention to these amazing experiences. But I also think that Joan Acocella struggled with the ambiguity of the anthropologist’s role. My duty as an anthropologist is first to understand. And as a journalist you are also trying first to understand—but judgment is much more part of the story that you’re telling. The Boston Globe called this “a curiously polite book.” And I mean, I do have a lot more to say about politics, but I didn’t want the book to be about politics because in my world it is such a powerful idea that their politics are wrong and therefore that these people are foolish. Of course, now I’m thinking that perhaps I should have included more on politics—but the book was so long already.

SBA: Non-evangelicals may view evangelical religion as weird, but politics often seem the bigger sticking point. Does introducing readers to evangelical religion absent politics allow outsiders to then begin approaching the politics in a way that is less divided?

TML: That is my hope. Since spending time in this world, I have come to understand how one could become so agitated about government programs.One of the things that is so striking about this world is that people imagine themselves in a relationship with God in which they are both changing.God is interacting with you, and you are becoming a better person, and your understanding of God is changing over time. There is a real aspirational quality to evangelical Republican politics. For many but not all evangelicals, this translates into the idea that government programs that encourage dependency are wrong: “We aren’t going to need entitlements. I’m not going to be an entitled person. It’s weak to want entitlements.” And now I have a much richer sense of how you could take that position. I still get driven up the wall; I find that my own political convictions are still as they were when I began. But I am less angry. When somebody says that we should cut welfare, at least I can appreciate more of where they are coming from.

SBA: Your project for the SSRC’s New Directions in the Study of Prayer initiative seems to emerge from and extend the research you did for When God Talks Back. You are looking at similar prayer practices, but comparatively across cultures that you view as having different “theories of mind”?

TML: Yes. I noticed two things from this book. First of all, the way people paid attention to their mental events changed their mental events. Giving significance fundamentally changed those experiences; the mental images felt sharper. And at the same time, there’s also something about the way people think about their minds. Americans think of thoughts as basically ephemeral, flighty, contradictory, and chaotic. And so in the American context what kataphatic prayer practice does is to teach people to take certain kinds of those thoughts very seriously. Now, when you look across the world, there are different conceptions of mind, different theories about the way that thoughts act on the world. And so I began to wonder: How would this affect the experience of God, the experience of prayer? I worked together with one of my postdocs looking at unusual spiritual experiences. One of these experiences was sleep paralysis or “night terrors,” a physiological experience where you are sort of awake but your body is sort of asleep, paralyzed. I talked to evangelicals in America, and something like 30 percent reported experiencing this, but it wasn’t a very rich category for them. Then my postdoc went to Thailand to research these experiences. Everybody in Thailand knew what sleep paralysis was, and they gave it a name. Two thirds had experienced it. And so it seemed to me that there was a story to tell. My hypothesis is that the way you pay attention to your mind and body probably shapes the experience of the mind and body.

SBA: You chose to extend your research on evangelical prayer in two places where you have also conducted research on schizophrenia—Accra, Ghana, and Chennai, India. What have you gathered so far about the operative theory of mind in each of these places?

TML: Very quickly and naïvely—part of the project is to become more confident about this—in West Africa, there is a sense that thought affects the world independent of the thinker. And so there seems to be this really powerful concern to scrub the mind clean. Negative thoughts are bad, and consequential. People are clear that prayer is about organizing the mind into the right position, about having the right thoughts and getting rid of negative thoughts. If you talk to Americans about talking to God, they’re hanging out with God, jumping with God, cuddling with God. And they have this idea that the mind is private, walled-off. Thoughts come and go. Their presumption, which even many psychologists share, is that it’s bad to ruminate about thoughts; that you make thoughts real by thinking about them. In Accra, evil is real, and it matters. And it is in part generated by the mind, so you have to clean out the mind. Thought is substantial; it’s not mere thought, it is more important than mere thought.

SBA: And in Chennai?

TML: In Chennai, thought is much more transactional. You are in some ways made as a person through interactions with other people. I haven’t yet figured out how this works religiously. But it’s clear from talking with people with schizophrenia that other people show up in your mind. Your relatives tell you what to do, they give you all these commands, good commands—You should do this, or don’t do this, or clean up, do chores, and so forth. There’s an interactive quality. It’s as if other people have the right to know what’s in your mind, or they do know what’s in your mind. So that’s very different.

SBA: What is the central hypothesis that you’re testing?

TML: That different local theories of mind change the experience of spiritual experiences, of God. I anticipate that people in these different locales will report differently their audible experiences of God, the presence of God, mystical experiences, out of body experiences. That people will talk very differently about prayer, about this daydream-like conversation with God. That there will be a shift in the topography of mental experience.

SBA: I wonder how your own spiritual or magical experiences have shifted your perspective or your desire to do a particular kind of work? You wrote an essay for Frequencies about an experience you had while doing your dissertation research on practitioners of magic in Britain—

TML: I had what I would call a hallucination. I was reading a book about a priestess of Avalon, and there was a lot about druids. And I woke up early in the morning and looked out the window—on the second story—and there were six druids standing there. I saw them. Then I did a double take, and they vanished. But the perceptual experience was a kind of veridical sensory experience. And that really impressed me. It wasn’t the only unusual experience I had while hanging out in that world, but it was the most vivid one. And it persuaded me that this was not about acquiring discourse. I was coming of age in the linguistic turn in anthropology, which focused on the way people used language, how they used and acquired words, the narratives they used, rather than talking about the psychological experiences that their words might represent. There was a shift against psychological experiences. And this was also at the dawning of cognitive science. If I were to describe what I went in looking for, back then—although I didn’t have the words then to describe it—I would say that I went into the world of magic looking for prototypes and schemas and heuristics and narratives and ways in which people cognitively organize their ways of understanding themselves so that they come to experience magic as working. But as it turned out, this was not about heuristics. This was something quite different. And that has altered the course of my intellectual life. I became really interested in training, and the way that spiritual and prayer practices change mental experience.

SBA: How do you think that coming from this position affects your ability—or whatever word you want to use—to yourself have experience while you do this research, and how do you think it colors your interpretation of that experience? Is it less real for you?

TML: I’ve sort of allowed my imaginative experience to become more real. I feel like I have given myself a little bit more freedom as a result of doing this research. But I am not right up there in the high absorption world. I am certainly not somebody through whom words march of their own accord. Really good novelists feel the story move through them, they don’t feel that they are in control of the story—the story happens to them. So, I’m impressed by the capacity to change mental habits, but I am also impressed by how difficult it is. I was part of a prayer group for a couple of years, and I enjoyed the prayer experience a great deal. I would not say that I am now an active pray-er. But I do give myself more freedom to pause and engage in the garden. It’s not as if I have created my own spiritual discipline. When I was doing the experimental work for When God Talks Back, I created a couple of these spiritual discipline tracks that I would use for myself and try to get caught up in the experience. I’m not doing that currently. I probably should.

SBA: You have written that walking and talking with God is “a process through which the loneliest of conscious creatures can come to experience themselves as awash with love.” Does this translate into addressing or beginning to heal late modern or postmodern alienation and anomie, or all the rifts and impoverishments that somebody like Robert Putnam talks about?

TML: I think so. There’s a lot of pushback against Putnam’s data, but I think that there is enough support to feel confident about it. God works as a social relationship in people’s emotional worlds; they hold God as what you might call a “self-object.” We know that when you pop people into a brain scanner and ask them to talk to God, the part of the brain that lights up is the same part of the brain that lights up when you have them talk to their friends or when you engage them in social activity. And I have done quantitative work that shows that the more strongly people affirm the statement, “I feel God’s love for me directly,” the more their loneliness and their stress decrease. So, does this God arise because of increased loneliness? That’s a stronger question. But I’m certainly persuaded that intimacy with God decreases loneliness.

SBA: I wonder if there are any social effects? If all of us were to begin walking and talking with God, would we enter a world that is just as disconnected socially but is experienced as far less lonely, or would that somehow translate into concrete person-to-person connectedness?

TML: In the church it certainly translates. If you go to one of these evangelical churches, one of the things happening is that you are creating very strong social bonds. A third to half of the church, depending of course on the church, meets together in small house groups. And those groups are powerful social engines. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a piece arguing that membership in the small group was the most powerful predictor of whether people donated money to a church. We at least know that people who are able to imagine God and to have a relationship with God also show up as more empathic, and my guess is that the more able you are to represent God, the more able you are to represent other people. That’s probably socially conscribed—you are probably imagining people in your group rather than other people around the world. This is one way of thinking about different kinds of political stories. People are often struck by the fact that I’m arguing that you can increase your empathy as you increase your relationship with God—but it doesn’t necessarily increase your commitment to social justice politics. What happens if somebody is by themselves and does these prayer practices, do they become more connected to other people? I don’t know. The kind of Dalai Lama-driven, Richard Davidson, Zen Buddhism-is-good-for-you approach would say “yes.” But we do not have that kind of data on kataphatic prayer practices.

SBA: Perhaps this falls under a lack of data, but what do you think about a connection between kataphatic prayer and ethics? I’m thinking of Jeffrey Kripal’s argument that there is no necessary connection between monistic mystical experience and ethics. Do you see ethical frameworks emerging from kataphatic prayer?

TML: I think that the more you feel loved, the more loving you become. We know this from human psychology. There is probably a certain amount of variation in what counts as the person to whom you become more loving. Being able to use your imagination is a content-free activity; you can use your imagination in various ways. If you are using your imagination in a Christian setting, and you’re doing Christian kataphatic prayer, you do more strongly connect to the Jesus of the gospels. Of course, there’s a lot of ethical variation in what that means to people. There probably is a story of increasing your empathy and compassion and concern, and again that’s the Richard Davidson story. But I think it is up for grabs toward whom you increase your compassion. It’s not obvious to me that just because you engage in spiritual practices, that you feel more compassion toward somebody who is not like you.

Ambivalence, avoidance, hedging, delay—these are but some of my responses to Michael Warner’s richly rendered provocation and response to my book Secularism in Antebellum America.

Indeed, was antebellum America secular?

To answer his title question definitively, yes or no, is to commit oneself to a vision of the present in which religion recedes into oblivion, or flowers, or does battle with its secular other. Definitive answers, moreover, serve a politics of normativity for they help determine the ideas, objects, and persons to be jettisoned, not to mention what views of the world become authoritative, which moral feelings count, and which ones become unaccounted for and forgotten.

Warner engages crucial work on secularity even as he considers the dissolution of the entrenched differential of the religious and the secular. Consequently, Warner’s essay is also incitement for a renewed interrogation of the history of the difference between the religious and the secular and how that difference makes a difference in the lives of individuals—no less for historical actors than for the scholars who study them.

Such interrogations must be rigorous and responsible to the archive but also, at the same time, be deft and willing to account for the precipitous declining ground of secular analysis. Such interrogations, I would add, portend nothing less than a reorientation of historical inquiry.

So although the question of whether antebellum America was secular cannot and should not be taken at face value, it and other similar queries have done much to establish the taken-for-granted status of the differential in many arenas of American life—jurisprudence, corporate culture, mass media, religious institutions, academic environs. What happens, Warner asks, when the categorical difference between the religious and the secular is shown to be historically contingent, politically expedient, and, most perversely, a product of the very era and imaginary this differential is now called upon to analyze? What happens when we possess insight into the making of religion in all of its varied registers yet inhabit a world in which that making has structured the very possibility of our recognition? What happens, as the stowaway Pip so slyly asks, when you unscrew your navel, when the boundary between self and world begins to become undone?

Why this knowledge and why now?

The question of the secular, as I take Warner to suggest, is not merely dizzying. It is, at some level, incomprehensible. And I agree, although I suspect that we have different spins on what incomprehension portends and what the stakes are for analysis.

*   *   *

Warner commends Secularism in Antebellum America for the way in which it illuminates a tension between “analytic distance and normative involvement.” He remains wary, however, of my “Derridean pathos” and flattening of “the complex relations among secularity (constituting the real in a social imaginary and establishing religion as a category), political secularism (a project for regulating religion so conceived), and various forms of ethical secularism.” This is a fair concern (although I would insist that my pathos is Benjaminian) and one that I will not so much counter as qualify with a series of normative claims.

I welcome Warner’s call to distinguish between the background noise from which conceptual patterns of religion take shape, political projects that seek to create these patterns, and the living out and through these patterns. These three analytical distinctions are (and will be) immensely helpful in thinking about a range of contradictions endemic to the secular age and, in particular, the cultivation of selves within discourse and the maintenance of privacy amidst a swirl of conceptual demands. And as Warner himself notes, I, too, have these distinctions in mind.

But I have to admit that analytical differentiation was not my primary concern while writing Secularism. Instead, I sought to tell a story that conjured the dense experiential measures of a secular imaginary circa 1851. Rather than distinguish between the moods and motivations, the institutional directives, and the conceptual atmosphere, I focused on the relationality of concepts across cultural fields—remarkable moments in which abstract workings of discourse channeled through frail human beings.

My book is full of moments in which people experience intensity without an identifiable cause, an affect that is quickly given emotional shape and linguistic form. My narrative strategy was to highlight the experience of agencies from beyond and without as a way to tell a story of how the buffering of selves was achieved by way of one’s vulnerability (and response) to discourse. These are moments, I argued, that secularism got under the skin—not as some dominant force that invades and snatches the body away from you but rather, a moment in which neither the self nor the world was in charge. Or to put this another way, a moment when the self became the self through its exposure to discourse, an exposure that did not boil down to seamless incorporation but generated a complex process in which submission was accompanied by swerve, structuration by negotiation.

In the end, I was interested in framing the particularity of secularism’s excess. Background conditions that were not merely contextual but were agents in a distributive field. For to study secularism is to study those forces that originate in a human world but nonetheless assume an inhuman intensity.

*   *   *

Secularism is about the conditions and processes that generate religion. These conditions are not immediately present to consciousness and these processes structure more than matters of religious adherence. The “location” of these conditions—perhaps even their ontology and mechanics—is a matter of contention (informed as it is by disciplinary location).

In Secularism in Antebellum America I asked a set of questions about these conditions and these processes as they related to a range of Protestant subcultures in the northeast, circa 1851. How did they convince themselves that they were religious or not or somewhere in between? According to what criteria and why? What were the effects of their conviction, for themselves, for others, and for us?

The truth (and falsity) of religion was forged in relation with slaves, Mormons, immigrants, Catholics, and native populations. Violence—real and imagined—against these populations was integral to the making of the secular imaginary I sought to account for, as were internal divisions within the orbits of Anglo-Protestantism. I did not emphasize these conflicts as much as I might have because I was more interested in demonstrating the epiphenomenal nature of conflict—by which I mean the way in which particular conflicts, bloody and real, were effects as much as causes of secularism.

So, for example, those who took violent issue with Joseph Smith’s revelations assumed that some religions were true and some were absolutely not. While Mormonism may have emerged out of the fires of revivalism, antipathy toward Mormons served to consolidate an evangelical public sphere even as the resulting authority of evangelical truth served to naturalize anti-Mormonism beyond evangelical precincts. In taking issue with the truth of Smith’s religion (the excess of his free choice, his literalism applied to a supplemental scripture, the hints of ecstasy and erotics that simmered beneath his pious stance) Mormon haters in Carthage, Illinois participated in the same discursive field in and through which Smith experienced his First Vision in 1820. That spring, in the woods of Manchester, New York, Smith was stuck in the dilemma of voluntarism. As he pondered the question of which church he should join, the golden plates were revealed to him.

*   *   *

Upon examination of different geographic sites, different epistemic registers and social arenas, different language games and institutions, I concluded that the making of religion in antebellum America was a massively normalizing phenomenon. Perhaps even more so than had been previously acknowledged.

I was animated, for example, by the multiplicity of sites where spirituality was being made, encouraged, diagnosed, and promulgated. Spirituality and its advocacy could be found across all manner of sites—from the American Tract Society headquarters on Nassau Street to the colporteur knock on the hinterland door, from the dexterous phrenologist with his calipers to Unitarian sermons, trance lectures, penny presses and etiquette advice manuals, from spirit communiqués and ethnographic encounters to the dreams of prison reformers and their wards, and the burgeoning discipline of moral science. Much went into the making of spirituality as a self-evident faculty of the human. Spirituality, as theorized at mid-century, served to instantiate a sense of potential immunity. Indeed, the “most spiritual man” was “the one most quickened with potential life” according to Universalists [E.F., “Spirituality,” The Universalist Quarterly IX (July 1852)]. Moreover, the conceptual terrain of spirituality fueled all manner of political projects directed at cultivating selves that were porous to the degree that the traffic between self and world was ideally and naturally a matter of self-regulation. Spirituality, in other words, did not so much allow individuals to deny porosity as much as forget it, strategically, in relentless acts of self-cultivation.

Here I witnessed a particular making and deployment of what, according to Charles Taylor, is the defining mark of the secular age—a buffered self. A buffered self is a discrete entity. A buffered self is smart in the brain and free in the person. A buffered self can, therefore, stand at distance from the religious to the degree that religiosity is one choice among many. For Taylor, the buffer is that which cuts across whatever distinction one would like to posit between the religious and the secular. Once located, this buffer “will demand from myself the highest attainable perfection in all things; and will apply negatively, —that I avoid all injury by self-control; and also positively, —that I secure all practicable improvement by self-culture.” The buffer, as a mechanism of self, serves to differentiate between 1) a western world in which individuals choose vis-à-vis the religious and 2) the “the world of spirits, demons, and moral forces which our ancestors lived in” and oftentimes chose for the individuals in question.

But how did this kind of self emerge as a default setting across the religious-secular continuum? What kinds of desire and force were at play in the making of a buffered situation—a self thinking about itself thinking about the world, from a distance, and a social environment that guaranteed the ability of that self to think, securely, across that distance? What about the constraints that enable the buffer?

Whereas Taylor places a definitive value upon the buffered self and its potential to stave off the world long enough so as to seek what he calls a state of fullness, I am skeptical of the concept of a buffered self—both then and now. I am suspicious of the way in which it feels so damn good, how it makes everyone an artist, how it offers an ironic defense against the algorithms that incessantly call upon us. For it is the buffered self that bolsters a bit too much and gives tremendous advantage as one seeks tactics and subtle strategies of resistance.

So I can appreciate the political freedoms instantiated by all manner of buffering formations: the social contract, provisions against pick-pocketing and leg-breaking, my mortgage, my life insurance, my Amazon wish list, my hyperlinked name at the top of this post, the MRI machines that resonate with my hydrogen nuclei (and erase my credit cards in the process), the designer drugs tailored perfectly to my taste for elliptical perception. But these formations do not resolve my porosity into a bounded commodity to manage and exchange. Their authority depends upon the persistence of my porosity and not its resolution.

And vice versa.

For the buffered self, I contend, is an advertisement, more of a social ritual than ontology. Earnest celebrations of the buffer make it incredibly difficult to sustain conversations about the ways in which the self is subject to the agencies of the object-world, to history, to strangers and expertly branded institutions, to forces that do not announce themselves as such. There is fullness and pleasure to be had in such relays, for better or for worse. As an advertisement that has been wildly successful, the buffered self occludes from consideration the complex conditions of its own possibility. And finally, theoretically, a buffered self leaves little room for the experience of dread, insights into the plurality of worlds we inhabit together, and consideration of the range of agents within those worlds.

*   *   *

Disenchantment is bound up in theses of secularization—a description of feeling and style within modernity as much as a prescription for thinking. Disenchantment is linked, of course, to Max Weber’s classic statement of the diffusion of instrumental rationality. As Weber made clear in “Science as Vocation,” a will to and dependence upon calculation had become a reigning principle, perhaps even an ethical imperative. In a lecture so sharp in its bleakness, Weber diagnoses an acute condition of reason—marked not by certainty per se but by the expectation of certainty. Passionate belief, in other words, is at the heart of disenchantment, namely, the belief in the human ability to rid the world of forces that, if they were to resist calculation, would effect us in incalculable ways. An abiding sense of incomprehension would serve the interests of neither State nor science nor sustained hierarchy.

Under the sign of disenchantment, the world at-large, and especially human being, become subject to efficient calculation to such a degree that the world and the human become means to the ends of organization and systematicity. As a generalization, Weber’s is generally true. But what is most interesting about Weber’s claim, and most in need of elaboration vis-à-vis secularism, is an analysis of the conditions that make such means possible and such ends desirable. For when such critical work is undertaken, we begin to sense that disenchantment is an apt moniker for neither the phenomenological nor sociological registers of modernity. Like the buffered self, disenchantment is a fiercely defended wish, often fulfilled but not a fait accompli.

This point is bound up in my interest in spiritualism as a complex of ritual practice, ideas, and affect. At mid-century evangelicals were horrified by spiritualism which they saw as an irrational and dangerous affirmation of an enchanted world. Spiritualists, in turn, insisted that séances and trance lectures would loosen evangelicals up, curing them of their unhappiness and their insanity. As one spiritualist journal suggested, it was precisely the accounting for ghosts that was the mark of a true best reasonable self—“the influence of Spiritualist teachings not only does not tend to produce insanity, but has a positively counteracting tendency” [The Spiritual Telegraph 1 (1853)].

In the myriad ways in which ghosts were named at mid-century, one can witness the strange play of enchantment and disenchantment that I argue is indicative of the secularity of a long nineteenth century. On one hand, we find throughout the spiritualist archive moments in which individuals sense that their very being was located elsewhere, on the horizon, outside of themselves. In these moments they sensed themselves in the throes of mediation, shot through with something ill defined, that nonetheless determined their present and future states of being. These moments, as strictly defined by the terms of secular modernity, were enchanted. Yet, on the other hand, these moments were indices of future certainty and fodder for ever more elaborate schemes of calculation.

The mid-century metaphysician Andrew Jackson Davis illustrates something about this distant yet effective backdrop of a secular imaginary, against which choices were encountered and decisions were made. Despite the fact that a spirit had instructed Davis that “the Whole System is a volume which even the highest seraph has not altogether read,”  Davis nevertheless offered detailed maps of the Whole. For even if mapping of the spirit-world was ever incomplete, it was the assumption that there was a “Whole” to be mapped that informed spiritualist practice and identity. To paraphrase Alex Owen’s description of British occultism at the fin de siècle, Davis did not recognize the relativism of his own self-reflexivity and could therefore assume his rightful place as lord of the universe.

Davis, like an American Tract Society official or individuals performing a phrenological exam on themselves, held a belief, and that is what it surely is, in the capacity to measure that which was essential, forever and ever, amen. The rendering of the entire universe, visible and invisible, as effectively compatible was also an instance of incredible discursive investment. Everything and everything, according to Davis, could and should be mapped. It was not the instantiation of systematicity as much as it was the promotion of it as an object of worship.

Warner suggests that one implication of my work is that the “literal hauntings of spiritualism were at root the realization of the metaphorical haunting [ ] in technological society.” I would qualify this by saying that it was not simply technology but the discourse of secularism (in and through which machines and mechanical metaphors assumed their strength) that was intensely felt yet never exactly present.

To appreciate the strange ontology of discourse I drew from the testimony of historical actors. I took seriously their visions of haunted terrains and the invisible mechanics of body, mind, and much else. For when alone, at rest “a sweet sense of estrangement begins to creep over me. In such a case, it is truly most delightful to see how sweetly what is left behind insinuates its presence. The walk, the solitary chamber even, are haunted unawares by a feeling which must be called social . . . which is, in fact, a very present presence.” On one level, encounters with “very present” presences were enchanting in the Charles Taylor (and Edward Burnett Tylor) sense—a survival of what we imagine to be primitive proclivities. On another level, such encounters followed a Weberian script of disenchantment in which wonder and dread were evacuated in the name of measured explanation. When incomprehension began to set in, so, too, did the work of parrying it. Yet on still another level, such encounters were not encounters at all. They were matters of enchantment in which the self did not simply experience an inert object world but found oneself in relation to it, mediated by it, and in some weak sense, determined by it.

*   *   *

So Warner is right to point out that bloody, violent religious dissent is largely missing from my story—for there were indeed robust and deeply-felt antagonisms that I do not discuss at any length. My interest in the saturated phenomena of secularism led to different questions concerning how antagonistic positions can serve larger historical trajectories. There was, indeed, a politics to all this spirit-seeing—exclusions and closures that were real yet did not always leave a mark.

For ways of knowing and unknowing, of overcoming the limits of the visible with nothing but the promise of disenchantment, of keeping the incomprehensible at bay through a relentless desire to calculate—bore directly on the management of various populations and the lives within.  Rather than a flattening I would like to think of my chronicle of antebellum epistemics as staging the consequential turns in which selves are affected in ordinary ways by the conceptual terrain of the religious even as they deploy these concepts well beyond their immediate interests. Within the political projects forwarded by John Edmonds and Eliza Farnham (prison reform at Sing Sing State Penitentiary) and Lewis Henry Morgan (anthropology and Indian removal), the art of governance was suffused with existential navigations, ethical binds, as well as the imagination of racial difference. In each of these situations, whiteness reigned. Racial difference was an epiphenomenon of secularism, namely a common sense linkage of true religion with right morality with an essential humanity with whiteness. This linkage was manifest in the cat o’ nine tails at Sing Sing and the legal seizures of native lands in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, proving, perhaps, that people can bleed and die by the force of the epiphenomenal.

*   *   *

As one studies the making of the religious/secular continuum and the exclusions that support its normativity, one can quickly find oneself writing from a position of pious skepticism. Secularization theses, and more specifically, the secular and the breadth and scope of its truth claims become foreboding in their immanence, in the ways in which they seem to structure so much of one’s analytical choice with so little fanfare. One, therefore, cannot be shy, methodologically or theoretically, when approaching such a theologico-politico-social scheme.

The study of secularism, among other things, gives lie to the old differential saws of structure and agency, cognition and culture. It forces us, among other things, to reconsider the very suppositions of critique as secular.

So I plead guilty to Warner’s charge of standing in awe, of seeking to appreciate (and conjure) something that escapes my analytical frame. But does such pathos, as Warner suggests, “project[ ] from its own powerlessness a problem that cannot be addressed, and before which one can only stand in a vaguely radical appreciation of the tragic”? Well, yes and no.

Secularism does not exist wholly beyond the feelings, principles, and practices it authorizes. However, some part of its logic escapes our sensory orbit, out-imagining our capacity to imagine it, to name it, to grasp in its immensity. This kind of strange ontology cannot be exposed like a garden-variety object of Enlightenment critique. It can be neither cut up nor quarantined nor assayed after dutiful collection.

Herman Melville suggested that such tragic appreciation had its reasons and was the mark of our supple humanity. For Melville, original sin was a condition of permanent enchantment, a condition that could not be overcome as much as continually assessed. (Melville’s perspective was an affirmation of the “pasts” of Edwardsian Calvinism, primitivism, and Catholicism that so many Americans were in the process of defining themselves against at mid-century).  As a matter of metaphysics and writerly conceit, Melville assumed that people were, in part, constituted by powers beyond their epistemic purview—“infinite socialities” that demanded that humans struggle to do the impossible: move beyond mere humanism. “There lies the knot with which we choke ourselves,” wrote Melville. “As soon as you say Me, a God, a Nature, so soon you jump off from your stool and hang from the beam.”

These lines served as my own writerly conceit in Secularism. Indeed, they reminded me of my own failure to grasp the socialities within me, eliciting both suspicion and sympathy for those who claimed otherwise. If grasping for the precision of system is endemic to a secular age, I sought, instead, to provide a diagnosis, and on more illusory, manic days, an anecdote to what Brian Massumi calls the “preconversion of surprise into cognitive confidence.” For what I wanted to conjure was how secularity, political secularism, and ethical secularism swirl together in a seemingly unfathomable mix, which is to say at the level of the historical actor and historian alike.

*   *   *

There is no outside from which to objectify and to take the measure of secularity. No single inquiry can gain definitive leverage uponthe massive yet intricate mechanics of how religion—as faculty, phenomenon, mood, and category—gets real. A range of perspectives is required. Consequently, I see a necessary (but not exclusive) role for genealogical approaches to the secular age. The “entangled and confused parchments” must be given their due even as one seeks analytic purchase upon different layers and different moments of the secular age. In tacking back and forth between an appreciation for the excess of systems and the necessary work of systemization, there is a productive (and dialectical) tension to be had in all of this subterranean earnestness.

Perhaps this dialectic is a disciplinary inheritance of religious studies, ever inhabiting what Leigh Schmidt has referred to as the charged space between suspicion and sympathy, itself a product of the intellectual environs of nineteenth-century America. So perhaps it comes down not to an individual choice between suspicion or sympathy, but rather an embrace of both under the canopy of a future field.

As Warner’s provocation makes clear, scholarship on secularity must offer a sustained engagement with the complexity of the situation and its complicity in that complexity. Such immanent criticism “pursues the logic of its aporias, the insolubility of the task itself.” If future critics of secularity were to follow this melody laid down by Theodor Adorno—own up to it boys and girls!—they would seek the impossible: to draw from the inheritance of secular critique while simultaneously resisting its allure.

According to Adorno, “A successful work [of] immanent criticism is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure. Confronted with this kind of work, the verdict ‘mere ideology’ loses its meaning. At the same time, however, immanent criticism holds in evidence that the mind has always been under a spell. On its own it is unable to resolve the contradictions under which it labours. Even the most radical reflection of the mind on its own failure is limited by the fact that it remains a reflection, without altering the existence of which its failure bears witness.”

In light of this inevitable failure to grasp, from within, the making of an immanent frame, how to continue to write without buying into the reality of belief or the buffer between you and me, me and the archive, you and the archive? What kinds of sentences might yet achieve a hint of leverage—not upon the thicket, the blur, this secularism—but rather in light of it?

In Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation, I argue that religious traditions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in particular—offer a way of thinking about justice that poses an alternative to the globally dominant liberal peace and that holds out great promise for societies rebuilding in the wake of massive injustice.

Bronwyn Leebaw, in her post, notes that I seek to stave off the fate of Sophie Wilder, a character in a novel who converts to Catholicism then becomes estranged from her friends and family. Mirabile dictu, unlike Sophie Wilder, my book has met with great efforts to understand it, absorb it, and engage it thoughtfully, this at the hands of six reviewers each of whose own scholarship has contributed crucially to the contemporary conversation about the justice of dealing with past injustice. I am grateful. I am heartened, too, that each reviewer fundamentally “got” the book, grasping and in many ways finding sympathy with what I strove to argue.

The disagreements, though, are more interesting in a forum like this one so herein I focus on them. Two main criticisms appear in the reviews. Both concern the application of the ethic to the real world. One has to do with the overlapping consensus I have sought to construct among four schools and traditions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the restorative justice movement. Leebaw, Colleen Murphy, Leslie Vinjamuri, and Alex Bellamy question whether this consensus leaves out many other traditions and perspectives in the realm of transitional justice. Mark Freeman states a different version of the criticism in asking whether I stretch the terms of the argument too widely in trying to accommodate multiple perspectives. The second has to do with the ethic’s aspiration to holism. Is it not utopian? Murphy, Leebaw, and Vinjamuri each ask this question in different ways, worrying that the ethic is unable to provide guidance, resolve dilemmas, or handle backlash, adverse effects, political manipulation, and other problems of politics as usual.

Let us begin with the question of consensus. Murphy doubts that the ethic will receive the endorsement of secularists who do not subscribe to restorative justice, while Vinjamuri believes the same is true for a range of “local traditions and customs,” “many faith traditions,” some liberals, the Burmese, and communities that have mediated human rights in locally particular ways.

Consensus, however, is not the first or most important criteria by which my ethic—or any ethic—ought to be judged. As Murphy recognizes, my ethic has two tasks, the first of which is prior to the second. This first task is to set forth and defend a concept of justice. This concept, like any other ethic, whether that of Confucius, Kant, or Averroes, should be accepted or rejected, endorsed or argued with on its merits, not on whether a given set of people agree with or disagree with it. A valid criticism of this first task would be, “this is not an adequate notion of justice because it omits, contradicts, fails to specify,” and the like, and not simply “this or that group thinks differently.” The purpose of an ethic, after all, is to judge, practices, actions, and other concepts of justice. This would not be possible if the ethic found “agreement on every side of a multifaceted argument,” to use Freeman’s phrase. Just as we would not expect advocates of racial equality to seek agreement with segregationists or religious freedom with defenders of blasphemy codes, so we should not judge an ethic of restorative justice inadequate because it fails to find agreement with, say a consequentialist or a balance retributivist (two of the competing conceptions that I outline in the book). Now, the disagreement between my ethic of political reconciliation and its interlocutors is not as sharp as in these examples; some of the reviewers remark upon my efforts to find common ground with other points of view. I make these efforts indeed. Still, disagreements there are—with liberalism, consequentialism, balance retributivism, opponents of forgiveness, “agonistic” theorists, and other points of view. Whether the zone of disagreement with these other views can be reduced depends, as with any argument about ethics, on what sort of persuasion takes place in conversation among the viewpoints, not on whether the ethic converges with positions that exist prior to the conversation.

It is only once the substance of the ethic has been developed—the job of the first task—that I am interested in trying to show that it can command widespread endorsement. Because the ethic is generated from particular religious traditions and a school of justice, and because I hope that it will have wide applicability around the globe, I am interested to show that it might achieve endorsement beyond any one of these traditions. Leebaw argues that I draw from the Christian tradition more than any other. She is right; I do. I then try to show that the core commitments of the ethic—its notions of justice, peace and mercy—find resonance in the Jewish tradition, the Islamic tradition, and the restorative justice school of thought. Restorative justice is important because it has secular articulations and thus shows that the ethic is expressible in secular terms—an important trait if the ethic is to travel to the United Nations or organizations that typically operate in secular terms.

It is not my aim, though, that the ethic will be practiced only among these traditions. For the sake of realism I choose to develop this group of traditions. The framework of overlapping consensus, though, is one in which other traditions might join. In my travels in Africa, I have discovered numerous tribal traditions whose rituals and practices of reconciliation deeply resonate with the ethic of political reconciliation. They are holistic and involve several interconnected practices, many of which are the same as those in the ethic. One of the greatest theorists of restorative justice, Australia’s John Braithwaite, argues that restorative justice is the approach to dealing with the past that resonates with the vast majority of the world’s cultures and religions over the course of history. This is a big claim whose validity I am unable to evaluate. But if Braithwaite is even close to being correct, then the potential for overlapping consensus is strong.

None of this is to deny the challenge and the likelihood of partial results in finding resonance on the ethic among traditions. Traditions themselves contain internally conflicting schools; in the book I note these in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as dimensions of the ethic in which convergence between these entire traditions will fall short. It is difficult to say ex ante, prior to the hard work of searching for mutual resonance,how much convergence between the ethic and any given tradition will be possible. No tradition will converge fully. As Murphy and Vinjamuri rightly note, many ethics will not sign on given their currently extant beliefs, prior to a conversation in which mutual persuasion is attempted. Most importantly, the pursuit of consensus, the object of the second task, is a pursuit based upon a fixed set of commitments, those developed in the first task. Given these commitments, given that they will converge and diverge with the range of views out there in the world, how wide can the zone of agreement be extended?

The real world is also the subject of the other major concern raised in the symposium. I do not account adequately, the criticism runs, for what will likely happen when the practices hit politics: backlash, backfire, manipulation, strategic use on the part of the powerful, and breakdown in moving from practice to product. The ethic’s notion of justice is too encompassing of everything to make hard choices and resolve dilemmas about anything and is unable to show in what sequence practices ought to be adopted. My response is threefold.

First it is all true! That is, politics is replete with all of these dynamics. I might add to my interlocutors’ litany the constraints imposed by the balance of power between rivals during a transition as well as the effects of time, over which possibilities for justice expand and contract. Here it is worth quoting a passage from the book:

Commending reconciliation does not deny the difficulty of reconciliation any more than advocacy of human rights or economic equality denies that both of these values are massively violated in the world today. One practice but not another will occur in one country while another combination of practices will occur in another country; any practice will occur in pieces and in parts and will remain imperfect and fragmentary. While the justifications for the practices will show how, in principle, they might be restorative, none of these rationales warrants assurance that these restorations will be successful where citizens have suffered colossal injustices. Political reconciliation will be compromised by the obstructions of the powerful, the destruction of institutions, the chaos of the aftermath of war and dictatorship, and by the simple complexity of the practices. (61)

I might add that I argue for political reconciliation, the kind that applies to citizens in the political sphere, and not comprehensive reconciliation, relevant to all of life. Political reconciliation is more circumscribed and limited and less ambitious.

I suspect, though, that my interlocutors will not be satisfied by my admission that the ethic will be partially achieved. They seem to be asking that my theory predict, explain, and provide guidance through these complexities. I am doubtful, though, that this is possible, precisely because of the utter complexity and variability of these factors. Let me add to the above litany of breakdown a further complexity: the real world is also replete with breakthroughs. Though all of the six practices in my ethic are fraught in their application, all of them have taken place abundantly all over the world in the past generation: truth commissions, reparations settlements, apologies, acts of forgiveness, trials, and so on. In my reading of the cases, I discovered that along with unintended effects and perverse incentives, there are truth commissions for which polls show victims approving, cases of victims whose demand for revenge is dampened by effective acknowledgment, acts of forgiveness that victims report as healing and that sometimes change the hearts of perpetrators, and so on.

Once the range of malfunctions and successes alike are factored in, it becomes an extremely ambitious task to account for what sort of dynamic is going to obtain in what sort of situation. I do make some limited claims about sequence. For instance, I note that practices like forgiveness and acknowledgment best take place after a war has ended or a dictatorship has fallen. This is a weak claim, though, and even it is too simple. The anti-apartheid movement in South Africa espoused reconciliation even during the struggle against apartheid, a theme that would have great effects after the transition. Even the premise behind sequencing—that events are discrete phenomenon with a clear beginning and end—may prove questionable.

It is really social scientific knowledge that is needed to understand these dynamics of application, not ethical reasoning, which is the sort that I take on in the book. Perhaps social scientists will make progress in offering strong and useful generalizations about what sort of dynamics obtain under what sort of conditions. In that case, ethics and social science could be complementary. Vinjamuri, for example, has done valuable comparative case study work showing that trials undertaken during war rarely facilitate and often hinder the achievement of piece—a useful thing to know. Still, my sense of the potential of social science to yield broad generalizations—a sense that I have developed in over two decades in political science—is that even the best empirical work will not yield laws and patterns that are strong and robust enough to tame the vastly situational judgment that decisionmakers must bring to their choices. Perhaps I will be proven wrong, but this is my strong sense.

Does this mean, then, that the framework is so vague, abstract, and removed from political reality that it provides no guidance? Such a conclusion would be disappointing, for one of my hopes for the book is that it would reduce the gap between theory and practice. My second response to my interlocutors is that the ethic does in fact provide significant guidance for just action. It cannot and should not supplant the zone of choice in which a decisionmaker must apply prudential judgment but it does point the way to some approaches rather than others. What the ethic does for the justice of dealing with the past is much analogous to what the just war theory does for war. Its norms definitively rule out some courses of action like the intentional killing of innocents and preventive war and offer other criteria for action like proportionality, last resort, and right intention. Even these criteria, especially the latter ones, leave substantial room for judgment as to whether they are fulfilled, while no criterion can substitute for strategy, battle plans, or the likely effects of choosing one course of action over another. Even if a given attack is just in principle, will it likely inflame the enemy population into a debilitating counterattack? Even if a plan secures a just victory, will its losses so harm the morale of the troops that the war will be lost and its just cause defeated? No ethic can answer such questions. I follow Aristotle and Aquinas in bequeathing them to the virtue of prudence. Still, though, the ethic provides criteria that will rule out some choices and narrow down others. It certainly provides far more criteria than Realism’s open-ended notion of the national interest.

So if my ethic of reconciliation provides concrete guidance, of what does this consist? Here are eleven illustrative resultant conclusions:

1) We should reject a “cheap reconciliation” that lacks human rights, the rule of law, accountability and other values. This stands as a sharp critique to numerous leaders who have advocate reconciliation in just these terms.

2) The ethic has an answer to the question of amnesty and the dilemma of peace vs. justice. It says that amnesty is always a sacrifice of justice but one that might be justified (though still as a second best) if necessary to secure peace or a transition to democracy and that ought to be accompanied by other restorative measures.

3) We should reject the dichotomy of punishment vs. forgiveness that has been deployed by a wide range of practitioners in the international community, usually to the detriment of forgiveness. Showing how these practices are compatible opens the door to a wider practice of forgiveness (judicial punishment already has strong support).

4) The ethic also addresses numerous other objections to forgiveness that stand in the way of its advocacy and practice.

5) Community justice forums as a mode of practicing punishment ought to be expanded and improved (while less ought to be expected from the International Criminal Court).

6) Apology and reparations are complementary. One ought not to be practiced without the other. Examples show victims rightly complaining when one appear in isolation.

7) Reparations ought to focus less on restoring victims to their status quo ante and focus more on acting as a symbolic communication. This has implications for determining reparations’ magnitude and mode of delivery.

8) Acknowledgment is at its best when it involves victims in an active, personal way. Local community forums perhaps perform this best. A commission that offers a report in which victims are little but statistics performs this worst.

9) Collective apology is ethically justifiable but ought to respect the right to dissent from it.

10) Collective forgiveness, a practice that is rare, is justifiable and might become more widespread.

11) It is entirely appropriate for religious actors and religious actors to be involved in transitional justice; the record shows that they have much to offer in terms of leadership and resources. They should not be sidelined by secular arguments for “public reason.”

Again, none of these conclusions can tell us, say, when a leader should agree to amnesty rather than continue to fight and pursue prosecution, what to do in the face of backlash and denial, and the like. The conclusions do offer judgments, though, that favor some courses of action and disfavor others and that ally with some existing paradigms and stand opposed to others.

Third and finally, we do well to remember that the purpose of ethics is not simply to prescribe specific courses of action. One of its purposes is to guide judgment and assessment, whether or not one is directly involved in the action. Again, a passage from the book, this one from the conclusion, helps to make the point:

What does justice consist of in the wake of its massive violation? I chose this as my framing question for a deliberate reason: because justice matters for its own sake, as an end in itself, even apart from whether or how often it is enacted and with what results. To hasten to results is to ignore this intrinsic importance or else to adopt, perhaps unreflectively, an ersatz consequentialism. Two friends sit in a café hotly debating the death penalty. Neither is an employee in the criminal justice system, an activist, or a friend or relative of a victim or defendant. Their country’s death penalty laws are not about to change; each of their votes matter infinitesimally. Still they argue, cajole, and rejoin, ever more heatedly. It matters to them a great deal what sort of justice their government renders, what sort of society in which they live. Conversations like this one take place continuously, ubiquitously, over innumerable issues. To the people who engage in them, justice matters. Justice matters all the more if one believes, with philosopher John Rawls, that it is the first virtue of social institutions. (286)

In countries confronting past injustices and seeking to move forward, too, thousands of ordinary people simply want to know how to think about justice. They turn to their frameworks, religious, cultural, and philosophical. So, the frameworks are important.

Even for those involved in the action, though, ethics is not simply a matter of making hard choices and confronting difficult dilemmas, though it is importantly that. It is also a matter of reconceiving the field of possibilities, of thinking creatively and expansively so as to open up pathways that might not have been conceived otherwise. Thinking of justice, peace, and mercy in a new way does not merely show us what move to make within a game but also helps to restructure the game—that is, the ends and means of politics. As Nukhet Sandal recognizes most directly, this is what I believe religious traditions can help us do.

Today, at the beginning of 2013, the world is confronted by a bewildering array of protracted and new armed conflicts: Syria, Gaza, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Sudan, Myanmar, Mali, Chad, the Central African Republic, and Libya are just a few of the many parts of the world wracked by violent conflict. And, although some of the rhetoric about the burden of civilian suffering compared to military casualties in these so-called “new wars” may have been overblown (not least because civilians have always paid a heavy cost in war), there is little doubting that non-combatants remain firmly in the firing line. The injustices of war are legion and extend to killing, torture, mutilation, sexual and gender based violence and abuse, forced displacement, and much else. For all that the world’s governments proclaim their commitment to the protection of civilians of armed conflict, and for all the writings on the moral and legal constraints introduced over the past three millennia or so, war always produces more than its fair share of injustice. Even “good wars” produce injustice: recall A. C. Grayling’s withering dissection of allied terror bombing in Germany during the Second World War.

Not without reason, then, Daniel Philpott starts from the assumption that war leaves behind wounds of injustice. These are not just physical bodily wounds—though they are paramount—but are wounds in the form of violations of human rights, wounds of ignorance about the source and circumstance of injustice, wounds derived from lack of acknowledgement, and what Philpott describes as “the standing victory of the wrongdoer’s political injustice.” Taking a somewhat Kantian line, Philpott notes that wrongdoers are also themselves wounded by their acts, a view that also finds strong resonance in the religious traditions that he examines.. Their wrongdoing creates a moral sickness that inhibits fulfilment and happiness. As Philpott reminds us, the technology of the gas chamber was first developed as a way of saving German firing squads from the trauma caused by their deeds.

When all the wounds of war and oppression are taken into account, it is perhaps unsurprising that so many peace processes—as many as half by some calculations—are doomed to fail. Sometimes, the victory of the wrongdoer is allowed to stand. Those, who like I, have visited post-war Srebrenica understand the palpable sense of injustice felt by the mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters of the more than 7,600 Bosnian Muslim men and boys who were massacred when that town was “ethnically cleansed.” Today, Srebrenica is an almost 100% Serbian town. The victory of injustice was allowed to stand. Other times, victims of rights abuse may resent the absence of acknowledgement or reparation; perpetrators may be reluctant to acknowledge their wrongs or relinquish their gains. Whatever the precise nature of the tension, the social bonds and contracts that knit societies together will have been destroyed; trust broken; resentment amassed. No matter how much effort and how many resources are dedicated to the rebuilding of institutions, infrastructure and homes, peace is unlikely to be durable unless it rests on the firm foundation of genuine reconciliation. This is why Just and Unjust Peace is such a welcome, and important, read. It makes both a well-reasoned argument in favor of a politics of reconciliation in the face of war and oppression and sets out six principal methods for achieving that goal: building socially just institutions, acknowledgement of past wrongs by the perpetrators, reparations, punishment, apology, and forgiveness.

At its heart, this book is a passionate and compelling defense of political reconciliation written in the spirit of some of the great peacemakers of our time. Desmond Tutu and some of the controversies he has aroused is a frequent point of reference, but the tenor of the book also reminds us of the logic behind Ramos Horta’s decision to privilege the normalizing of relations with Jakarta above retribution and punishment after the bloodshed in East Timor. The central points—and the tools for restoring societies to balance—will be familiar to students of peace studies. Mark Amstutz’s work on political forgiveness springs to mind. But what this book adds—brilliantly to my mind—is a deep and well-argued account of why communities, states and international organizations should pursue this path, and an account firmly rooted in political philosophy and religious tradition.

Naturally, there are points that could be quibbled with in terms of the logic of some of Philpott’s argument. As other reviewers have pointed out, reconciliation is not necessarily a prerequisite to peace—if we understand that term to mean “the absence of war.” There are plenty of cases where peace has prevailed without reconciliation. North and South Korea, Japan and Russia, and Bosnia are conflicts where there has been little evidence of reconciliation of the sort espoused by Philpott but also no resumption of armed conflict—yet. However, I am less worried than others about this possibility because whilst what Johan Galtung described as “negative peace” (i.e. the absence of war) may prevail without reconciliation, “positive peace” (i.e. the absence of fear, the fulfilment of human rights) almost never will. Without reconciliation and the forging of positive peace, communities will always be wary, always insecure, always unsatisfied and—for the utilitarians among us—will always misdirect precious resources and energies away from productive and fulfilling activities and towards their own protection from future threats. As scholars in International Relations know only too well, this can in turn create “security dilemmas” in which one group’s preparations for self-defense appear aggressive to another, sparking that group to step up its own preparations. Herein lies one of the ways in which negative peace can degenerate back into violent conflict. What is more, peace without reconciliation is much easier when the unreconciled parties have an international boundary or ocean between them. Where the lines of dispute are communal and fuzzy, as they often are in the aftermath of civil war (by far the most common kind of war today), the day-to-day necessities of engagement make reconciliation all the more pressing.

Another source of criticism has been that Philpott grounds his ethic of reconciliation in three major religious traditions—Christianity, Islam and Judaism—and a secular ethic he describes as the “liberal peace.” The cornerstones of the politics of reconciliation he sets out are derived from what Philpott claims to be an “overlapping consensus” across these traditions. Of course, though, this remains a decidedly partial account of justice principles, none of which originate from Africa for example. This problem worries me less than it worries others primarily because most of the ethical traditions I’m familiar with embrace most of the values that Philpott includes within his account of reconciliation and because Philpott himself acknowledges two key caveats to his argument—that reconciliation will never be complete or perfect and that the precise form that it takes should differ according to the context. Philpott is right, in my view, to recognize that religious traditions have ethical content that can be useful to reconciliation. We need to recognize, however, that the application of religious arguments and concepts may be more helpful in some circumstances than in others, and that Philpott’s own reading of the essential aspects of those traditions is itself partial and downplays elements that are antithetical to reconciliation. As Norwegian diplomats engaged in the Oslo peace process in the Middle East would attest, contested claims to ownership over sacred sites rooted in a theological epistemology that knows no compromise are one of the few utterly impenetrable obstacles to reconciliation.

Yet these strike me as issues that present themselves in particular contexts. Of course—as Philpott acknowledges—the politics of reconciliation must make sense in the time and place in which it occurs; it must be rooted in the locale. Tutu’s use of religion during his time as chair as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa was right in that time and place. It was right, precisely because it was Tutu. It may not be right in other settings. Whatever the configuration, however, it is clear that the politics of reconciliation should be front and center of any attempt at building peace in the aftermath of war and grave injustice.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) celebrated its ten-year anniversary last summer. During its first decade of life, both the shadow and the actuality of international justice in the form of investigation, trial, and judgment have become a central feature of many conflicts, ongoing and concluded. Nearly a decade before the ICC opened its doors, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission attracted enormous global attention, and the moral sanction against racial violence at its core resonated across the globe. And yet, the concept of reconciliation that defined the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has not occupied the same coveted (if also contested) international space that international justice—through trials—does today. If anything, advocates of justice and trials have subsumed reconciliation and truth seeking into a package of justice that has trials at its core. In his new book, Just and Unjust Peace, Daniel Philpott forces us to rethink this ordering. Political reconciliation is at the center of Philpott’s conception of justice. The ethic of reconciliation is, in Philpott’s words, “a concept of justice that aims to restore victims, perpetrators, citizens, and the governments of states that have been involved in political injustices to a condition of right relationship within a political order or between political orders—a condition characterized by human rights, democracy, the rule of law, respect for international law; by widespread recognition of the legitimacy of these values; and by the virtues that accompany these values.” The six practices that Philpott identifies as core to reconciliation (building socially just institutions, acknowledgments, reparations, punishment, apology, and forgiveness) encompass much that is central to liberal peacebuilding, including trials, but together these present a far more ambitious standard for just peacebuilding. These practices aim to restore relationships, a task that Philpott identifies as fundamental to securing a peaceful future.

Philpott suggests that the ethic of political reconciliation can succeed on two grounds where the liberal peace, and its alternatives, has failed. The first is in its ability to generate widespread consensus, and the second to deliver a more robust peace. Here Philpott is on to something. Undoubtedly, there has been significant domestic opposition in multiple cases to the incursions of the International Criminal Court, the international ad hoc tribunals, and other practices associated with liberal peacebuilding. Sometimes opposition has been grounded in the claim that international justice does not resonate with local understandings of justice or domestic traditions. But Philpott’s efforts at generating consensus may err in assuming that a prescribed ethic which is compatible with that “zone of agreement” between Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and also restorative justice can surmount this critique. In one sense, this is a minimalist approach that recognizes the need for bringing on board followers of a small number of major traditions with considerable global influence. In another sense, though, the basis for consensus is quite thin. Local traditions and customs as well as many faith traditions remain excluded or at least not explicitly included in justice and reconciliation efforts. At the level of practice, an ethic that embraces human rights as central to reconciliation may also be more problematic than Philpott acknowledges. Much attention has been devoted to the crucial role of agents in negotiating norms and introducing practices that resonate locally. Brokers, norm entrepreneurs, vernacularizers, and the like, who are capable of adapting, translating, negotiating, and articulating norms and practices into local contexts, are not part of this account any more than, perhaps, a negotiated consensus among stakeholders.

Scholars and practitioners cast their gaze on transitional states in the Global South when they think of peacebuilding. But, in the current international environment, generating consensus on the value of Philpott’s six practices among leaders in the North may be difficult, even when these practices sit comfortably within the zone of agreement that Philpott identifies. The liberal peacebuilding that Philpott critiques includes practices that liberal democratic states in North America and Europe have frequently shunned. Only weeks ago Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe threatened to withdraw Japan’s apology, one of the ethic’s core practices, for its World War II sex crimes. Whether naming, shaming, persuasion, or some other tactic by proponents of reconciliation and justice will be enough remains to be seen. Tougher sanctions from the international community may also prove crucial to generating consensus, as they did when softer efforts by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and its NGO supporters to persuade the Serbs to deliver Slobodan Milosevic to The Hague failed.

More important than consensus, for Philpott, political reconciliation aims to generate a more robust peace, one that goes considerably beyond simply ending violence and delivers restorations for the injustices incurred. The restorations that reconciliation strives for are important on their own terms, and so Philpott rejects the sparse frame of a consequentialist ethic. Consequentialism is not problematic, he claims; it is just incomplete. But Philpott does not attempt to articulate a causal theory for how to bring these restorations about, which is problematic, since the political context and the sequence in which his six practices are deployed may affect the outcome. For example, the relationship between socially just institutions and the use of punishment is hotly debated by consequentialists and liberal peace advocates. Consequentialists have argued that in the absence of robust institutions that can contain spoilers, punishment may trigger adverse effects that are harmful to any form of peace, let alone reconciliation. As another example, human rights are central to the political ethic of reconciliation, but forcing human rights into the conversations about reconciliation too early in a transition may well backfire. In Burma, civil society advocates have been reluctant to embrace the language of human rights for fear it will undermine their efforts to engage constructively in fostering a democratic transition. They also fear that premature engagement with human rights initiatives led by the state will lead to co-optation.

In many cases, peace and democracy have flourished without the kind of restorations Philpott refers to. Philpott may claim that the ethical conditions for political reconciliation have not been satisfied in such cases, but the relationship between practices (apology, for example) and product (a restored relationship, for example) cannot be assumed, and many things intervene along the way—a fact that Philpott will be painfully aware of given his extensive fieldwork and engagement in the real world of peacebuilding. Still, restorations may sometimes be settled through the satisfaction of democratic participation, may require renewed violence, or may be best settled through the apologies and reparations that Philpott prescribes. There are also fundamental sequencing questions that force us to look beyond the six practices of political reconciliation and toward preconditions that may determine their effectiveness. For many, reconciliation has been prescribed by the powerful as a means of co-opting revolutionaries and putting out rebellions. A just peace may depend on rejecting reconciliation until those who reject repression have succeeded in the violent overthrow of a repressive regime. Even those with benign intentions may seek to negotiate a peace that mitigates violence in the short term only to generate protracted repression and subsequent outbreaks of violence. The robust peace that Philpott’s ethic of reconciliation aspires to achieve may well presuppose a just war fought to a decisive end.

Political reconciliation sets the bar for post-conflict peacebuilding high. It encompasses much of what the liberal peace does, but asks for far more. At the same time that its efforts to generate consensus may not be ambitious enough, it may also simply be too ambitious. Just and Unjust Peace gives us a highly sophisticated, careful, rich, and persuasive conception of justice by which to evaluate post-conflict peacebuilding. Few works have attempted such a daunting task, and those that have do not compare. If, however, one accepts its aspirational—even utopian—qualities, Just and Unjust Peace articulates a vision for post-conflict states that will undoubtedly generate important debate and raise our expectations.

I read Daniel Philpott’s new book, Just and Unjust Peace, around the same time that I finished a novel by Christopher Beha, entitled What Happened to Sophie Wilder? In Beha’s novel, the titular Sophie is a precocious writer who, to the surprise and bewilderment of her friends, undergoes a profound conversion to Catholicism. Sophie’s conversion distances her from her cohort in Manhattan, where she was the star of her graduate writing program. Although they do not come right out and say it, her friends are puzzled that this brilliant and sophisticated writer could embrace religion with such devotion. They no longer know exactly how to communicate with her and she is unable to convey her experience in a way that they understand. Her former friends treat Sophie with polite regard across what seems an unbridgeable divide. But Sophie’s dying father-in-law responds to her piety with ridicule and anger. “God. The first totalitarian,” he says. “Has to control everything…I don’t see what’s to admire.”

One of Philpott’s goals in Just and Unjust Peace is to challenge both sorts of reactions to the role of religion in debates on ethics and justice: the polite, but perhaps patronizing, stance of detachment, as well as the presumption that religion is essentially incompatible with democratic freedoms. He proposes bridging the two as a way to broaden and better ground an ethical debate on the central question that animates the book: What does justice consist of “in the wake of its massive despoliation?” (3). This is the question that has been at the center of ongoing debates on transitional and international justice, but Philpott goes about addressing it in a wholly original way. Instead of grounding the inquiry in a preliminary engagement with prevailing international legal standards, he begins by articulating a general theoretical approach to justice and reconciliation, and then uses it to examine contemporary institutions and practices.

The result is an impressive and rewarding discussion that addresses debates on transitional justice, as well as debates on the role of religion in international politics. Philpott’s theory of justice emerges as a grand synthesis of traditions and goals that are routinely taken to be in conflict with one another. He rejects the opposition of forward-looking and backward-looking approaches to justice, calling for practices that are “Janus-faced, peering in both directions” (6). He dismisses the persistent view that the pursuit of justice is in tension with the goal of political reconciliation, insisting that justice must encompass reconciliation and that any ethically grounded conception of political reconciliation must also entail a commitment to justice. At the same time, Philpott proposes a theoretical approach that aims to bridge the gulf between religious and secular responses to injustice.

Philpott addresses claims asserting the incompatibility of religion and rights by suggesting that such claims tend to be premised on the view that religious believers invariably identify their ethics with a kind of argument by fiat, such as, “policy X is ordained by the Lord and that is that!” (111). This kind of logic, insists Philpott, is typical of bad religious arguments, but not religious arguments per se, adding that “we do well to remember that there are secular forms of these arguments too” (111). He reminds readers that the international humanitarian legal tradition emerged out of Christian theological writings on just war theory and that religious activists have played an important role in various struggles to expand civil and human rights.

At the same time Philpott takes on the claim, prominent in liberal political thought, that political argumentation must be expressed in a secular “public” language. To exclude religious rationales from the process of public justification, he argues, implies that people should offer rationales other than the ones that actually motivate them in efforts to defend their political views. As an alternative, Philpott proposes an approach to integrating religious and secular ethics that is grounded in what he calls “rooted reason”—one that invites those motivated by religion to present their full rationales, but also insists that they remain open to alternative views and be capable of re-expressing their ethics in a secular language. The goal he envisions is a “mutual resonance, involving a reciprocal back-and-forth process of comparison and efforts at mutual understanding” (21).

From this starting point, Philpott seeks to ground his approach to justice in an “overlapping consensus” between the liberal tradition and ideas drawn from ancient texts in the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions. In a series of chapters dedicated to examining ideas from each tradition, Philpott relies primarily on ancient texts for guidance, with less attention to the way that living traditions and contemporary religious practices might inform responses to the specific problem of political injustice. The theoretical framework that emerges seems to be organized around a discussion of reconciliation that is drawn largely from the Christian tradition, while works from the other traditions are mined for potentially compatible ideas. It seems to me that the kind of mutual understanding Philpott calls for in his preliminary chapters would benefit from greater attention to what might be learned from unique and conflicting approaches to framing the problems that he sets out to address. Nevertheless, these chapters make for interesting and evocative reading.

Just and Unjust Peace advocates a restorative approach to justice that addresses the “wounds of political injustice,” conceived broadly as encompassing violations of human rights, harms to persons, lack of knowledge about political injustices, and the absence of acknowledgment from officials. In keeping with restorative justice principles, Philpott’s approach encompasses harms or damage experienced by the wrongdoer as well. To this list, Philpott adds the wounds inflicted by the “standing victory” of the wrongdoer’s injustice. Philpott argues, given that political injustices are associated with a particular political order or program, the failure to effectively oppose or defeat that political order will continue to be experienced as a wound by its victims.

Philpott grounds his theory of justice in ethics and principles, but articulates it as an array of practices aimed at ameliorating these various wounds. Such practices, he argues, ideally ought to include efforts to build socially just institutions, acknowledgment, reparations, apologies, punishment, and forgiveness. Philpott’s discussion of these practices offers an interesting counterpoint to scholarship that has sought to measure the impact of individual transitional justice through statistical analysis of cross-national data. “The practices complement one another, complete one another, and weave together,” he argues (174). The implied critique of a certain emphasis on isolating and measuring the impact of individual transitional justice mechanisms reminded me of Michael Pollan’s response to nutrition science. The problem with the kind of approach, Philpott suggests, is that it can blind us to the complicated and dynamic ways that various strategies work together synergistically.

One of the most interesting chapters in the book is on the theme of punishment, which makes an important theoretical intervention in ongoing debates on restorative justice and legalism. These debates have tended to position restorative justice in opposition, not only to prosecution, but also to retributive rationales for punishment. Philpott rejects this opposition. He offers a compelling case that retribution is a dimension of restorative justice and one of its most important moral responses to political injustice. At the same time, he takes on those who have attempted to analyze the role of war crimes trials only in relation to their impact on goals such as improvement in human rights practices, stability, democratic change, or deterrence. The fundamental problem with this essentially consequentialist approach, Philpott observes simply, is that it “does not deal with the past” (91). Indeed, it is a strange thing to consider that the literature on transitional justice, an arena of study and practice that emerged in connection with the goal of “dealing with the past,” has increasingly identified “success” with achievements that have very little to do with the quality of their response to past wrongs. Philpott counters this trend by making the case for the integrity of retribution as a moral response to political injustice, while also rejecting the “inordinate focus on incarceration,” characteristic of Western criminal justice systems (65). He does so by situating the role of punishment in the larger context of efforts to pursue reintegration and repair.

Philpott’s theoretical approach is so holistic that one gets the feeling that many of the questions or potential criticisms that one might raise for him would likely be acknowledged and then swallowed up into his grand theoretical framework. This quality enriches the book, but is also one of its vulnerabilities. There is integrity in the way that Philpott engages his theoretical interlocutors. In presenting his own arguments, he takes care to identify and acknowledge what is most compelling in the strongest opposing view. In making the case for forgiveness as a practice of justice, for example, he begins with the voice of Francine, a victim of the Rwandan genocide, whose narrative immediately reveals how absurd—even obscene—appeals for forgiveness can appear to those who have survived atrocities. Such passages model the kind of “ethic of engagement” that he takes to be integral to the goal of establishing dialogue across lines of conflict and belief.

In addressing various critics, however, Philpott never seems to name or fully confront what is perhaps the most significant challenge animating various debates on the theme of addressing political injustice: the threat of backlash. Political injustices are defined here as violations or deviations from international norms, but they are also, importantly, crimes of obedience. Despite all of the various forms that they take, political injustices share certain features as a result. These are abuses that have been rationalized, normalized, or legalized by officials under a prior order, and actively or tacitly supported by a significant portion of a population. Efforts to acknowledge such wrongs as wrongs, let alone punish those who committed them, are invariably met with backlash and denial to varying degrees.

Most, if not all, of the positions that Philpott engages here, most theoretical debates on transitional justice, have taken shape in response to this particular challenge. The potential threat of backlash and denial is the main reason that scholars have perceived the goals of peace, or reconciliation, and justice to be in tension with one another. The “peace versus justice” debate, in all of its many forms, is premised on the view that peace requires some form of preliminary effort to address the potentially volatile forces of denial. The persistence of efforts to deny or rationalize past wrongs is one reason that so much attention is given to truth commissions as a mechanism for addressing political injustice. It is also the reason that many scholars and policymakers have suggested that forward-looking responses to the past may be in tension with backward-looking responses. Calls for retribution, acknowledgement, and apologies in response to past wrongs are blamed for stirring up conflict and destabilizing the peace precisely because they aspire to challenge persistent forms of denial.

Philpott’s assertion that these debates are positioned around false dichotomies depends on his having set such problems aside. As it is elaborated, the model seems to envision a world in which those who supported the political injustices in question have already come to appreciate that they were in the wrong. In such a world, the message of censure associated with punishment or acknowledgement should not be rejected as illegitimate “victor’s justice” as long as these responses are conducted in accordance with established norms and certain procedural guidelines. Although Philpott recognizes that any remedy for political injustice must begin with efforts to establish just institutions, the theory says little about the fact that it is due to the persistent threat of backlash that such efforts have often been associated with compromises on backward-looking responses to political injustice. The model also sidesteps the question of how transitional justice practices may be manipulated, limited, and utilized strategically by those in power, or how they have been in many of the exemplary cases that he discusses.

How, then, should the forces of denial and backlash be addressed in efforts to remedy political injustice? If Just and Unjust Peace avoids a direct response to this question, it offers three indirect responses. First, the broader logic of the argument presented in Just and Unjust Peace seems to suggest that the most promising way to resolve such conflicts, as well as conflicts regarding the role of religion in politics, is to begin by focusing on points of possible convergence rather than difference, and that from this starting point, a foundation for common understanding might be established and deepened over time. There is wisdom in this suggestion, but it raises a difficult question. When does such an approach provide a foundation for bridging differences and when does it function instead to avoid conflict or mask compromise? Second, Philpott sometimes seems to suggest that, working together synergistically, the various practices of justice that he enumerates will function to effectively neutralize those who continue to deny or rationalize past wrongs. For example, punishment conducted in the restorative mode advocated here, situated in the context of broader measures aimed at advancing reconciliation and repair, might be less likely to trigger hostile backlash than punishment conducted with the goal of stigmatizing or excluding. This is a useful suggestion, but I think it minimizes the intensity of backlash that often accompanies even minor forms of acknowledgment. Ultimately, if they are to function as he suggests they should, Philpott’s practices of justice must be accompanied by significant political struggle and transformation.

The third way that Just and Unjust Peace addresses the problem of backlash is the most interesting to me. In a larger sense, the book may be read as insisting upon the value of articulating an ethic of justice and reconciliation that is held at a remove from calculations regarding backlash, power dynamics, or ongoing rationalizations of abuse and violence. Like Socrates in his response to Thrasymachus, the book insists on the importance of disentangling our discussions of what justice might mean from the manner in which it has been institutionalized, and hold such discussions at something of a remove from our assessments of what is possible or practical at a given time. For all of its attention to empirical studies and professed pragmatism, Just and Unjust Peace is, in that sense, a visionary exercise. It outlines an ethic that is “not so much a solution to evil as it is a response…that in the political realm will always be partially achieved” (5).

Marcia Pally’s incisive essay on “the new evangelicals” highlights a relatively small but growing population of white evangelicals who appear to be embracing broader, less conservative visions of the common good, and public policy views (at least partially) more in line with Democratic politics than their recent forebears.  While her descriptions presumably are not limited to those who necessarily call themselves “new evangelicals,” she does invoke the work and ideas of public evangelicals who clearly self-identify as such. This points to an interesting observation worth considering here: to assume the mantle of newness is to make an ideological statement as well as a historical claim.

Newness is a fascinating, and very loaded concept.  It expresses ideas of innovation and progress, as well as rupture and substitution.  Whether presented in the form of prophetic revelations, revolutionary ideologies, or consumer branding, “the New” is always wrapped in a combination of promise and threat – it promises to improve upon the old, while threatening to eclipse and even replace it.  Newness inspires hope as well as fear, with a provocative power that sometimes borders on the messianic.

It is hardly surprising then that evangelical Protestants, for whom “authentic faith” is all about radical rebirth and regeneration, have historically placed so much stock in things new and improved, often against heavy resistance in their own ranks.  There were the “New Light” evangelicals, whose religious enthusiasm inspired mass conversions in the eighteenth century, but also led to historic schisms. In the nineteenth century, Charles Grandison Finney promoted “new measures” of revival, generating celebrity while drawing his own share of detractors. The 1940s saw the emergence of the “new evangelicalism” (version 1.0), a self-conscious effort by the likes of Carl Henry and Billy Graham to recover the evangelical brand from fundamentalists.  The “New Christian Right” of the 1970s was a reactionary juggernaut that redefined the arena where evangelical political and cultural activism took shape.

The point is not to downplay the actual newness or significance of growing evangelical centrism—or as I prefer to call it, plasticity—in contemporary US politics and public culture, but rather to think about this shift in relation to evangelicalism’s long and fraught history of constant renovation. This is important because every new movement and shift in the field of evangelical engagement stands in tension with its densely layered past, and this tension can be felt most acutely by participants on the ground. Exacerbating the tension further is the fact that virtually all known varieties of evangelical religiosity, whether they are branded as “new” or “old,” rely on the common (but conflicting) belief among participants that what they are doing is closer in spirit to the ministry of Jesus, and truer to the letter of biblical law.

Several years ago I did fieldwork among socially engaged evangelicals who sought to mobilize popular support for social outreach initiatives in predominantly conservative congregations. The resulting book, Moral Ambition: Mobilization and Social Outreach in Evangelical Megachurches, focused on individuals who would likely gravitate toward, or at least be sympathetic to the current “new evangelical” agenda. Yet my research also showed that socially engaged evangelicals occupy very complex positions in the wider milieu of white evangelicalism. They engage in ministry activities that many churchgoers admire and even valorize, but their efforts also bring out lingering disagreements, fears, and doubts about the future of evangelism, and intensify longstanding debates about whether the mission of the church is ultimately meant to be a proselytic or social one.

Rather than representing one side of that debate, the socially engaged evangelicals I observed often found themselves caught squarely in the middle of it, seeking to draw both inspiration and institutional legitimization from multiple strands of Protestant tradition, from the defense of strict biblical orthodoxy and personal pietism to the millennialist optimism of nineteenth-century social reforms and the prophetic justice orientation of Martin Luther King.

All of these influences make up an intriguing mélange of ideals and sensibilities that animate the moral universe inherited by today’s evangelicals.  They are the reasons we perceive evangelicalism as a field in constant flux, oscillating between paths of engagement and separatism, progressive reform and reactionary protest.  The reality is that much of the time these apparently polarized impulses are actually coexisting and overlapping throughout the evangelical subculture, even within the same denominations, churches, and small groups.

For those evangelicals who stand committed to one path of engagement over another, the matter of newness is often unambiguous—in with the new, out with the old, the only way forward.  But for others, perhaps a more reserved majority of non-activists, newness is a motivational framework that is at once extremely attractive and problematic.  This is because any tradition that thrives on newness must also seek to protect the continuity of tradition, paradoxical as all that might seem. As we evaluate the potential long-term effects of evangelicals gradually (and partially) moving away from the religious right, we should remain mindful of the historical, cultural, and institutional forces that will fuel their movements and at the same time restrain or subvert them.  This is not just about a pendulum swinging back and forth from right to left, though this will almost undoubtedly occur over time. In a grander sense, it is about agonistic and heroic quests for newness, and evangelicalism’s enduring struggle to be continually reborn.

Marcia Pally’s post tracks the important fact that contemporary American evangelical social and political engagement is fragmenting. She rightly observes that such fragmenting is not historically novel, and is a self-consciously critical response to the power of the Religious Right.

To read of “robust polyphony” among evangelicals was especially welcome to me, as I addressed this phenomenon in a recent ethnography, Emerging Evangelicals (NYU Press, 2011). As a cultural anthropologist, I explored the identities fashioned, practices performed, histories claimed, institutions created, and critiques waged among evangelicals influenced by the Emerging Church movement. Pally’s astute analysis returned me to a question I stopped short of fully developing: does fragmentation equal change?

While it is clear that evangelicalism is diversifying, it is unclear what this amounts to. We see voting blocs split, financial donations broaden, volunteer labor disperse, and moral-political agendas expand. But, do these fragmentations signal tectonic, hard-wired, all-bets-are-off cultural change? Or, is it more superficial (which is not to say unimportant or not deeply felt) social change? Do electoral politics and other shifting forms of activism amount to fundamental change, or merely changing patterns of action?

Briefly, consider one example: evangelical anti-human trafficking campaigns. This is not an example Pally cites, but it exemplifies her point about a diversifying consciousness. Evangelicals, in step with other faith-based and secular actors, are devoting increasing attention to the global problem of labor and sex trafficking. A thorough canvassing of evangelical anti-trafficking would be most welcome: how many organizations exist, how much money they raise, where in the world they work, and so forth. But, the more vital qualitative question is what cultural materials evangelicals use to conceptualize and conduct anti-trafficking activism. Consider a representative organization. Unearthed, a film ministry founded in 2009, culminates its lead documentary with: “Even if we were to rescue every victim of sex trafficking today, there’s still gonna be a demand for millions and millions and millions of new slaves tomorrow. Because at the root of sexual exploitation is a demand, and it’s driven by men. If we want to change this thing systemically, if we want to stamp it out at the root, what men want at the deepest level, like their hearts and their desires, have to be changed.”

Does this hint at a profoundly different evangelicalism? I would say ‘no,’ because the organizing cultural logic is individualist, moralist, and male-centered. Unearthed relies on a thin model of agency. If men stop masturbating to pornography, going to strip clubs, and paying prostitutes for sex, then human trafficking will grind to a halt. Females – and, strikingly, a wide range of females – have little to no agency: an adult exotic dancer and a 10-year old sex slave are imagined as much the same. Moreover, the structures that create the conditions for and reproduce trafficking are systematically undervalued in the discourse of organizations like Unearthed. Global poverty, hunger, labor demands, punitive and legal policy, and transnational migration routes are scarcely mentioned or completely absent.

The fragmenting of evangelical activism is undeniably important. However, we must be cautious in what we make of it. As the case of anti-trafficking suggests, it would be easy to mistake a “new” evangelical cause for a “new” evangelicalism. We need clear theories of cultural change to make proper sense of shifting ground. What kind of re- project are we witnessing: a re-organizing of existing evangelical culture, or a re-making?

Celebrating the ideological diversity of contemporary evangelicalism, Marcia Pally heralds the advent of a religious non-right. Shattering stereotypes of a monolithic conservatism, she performs a valuable service.

As Pally notes in her essay, this isn’t the first time evangelicals have hoisted the banner of social reform. Recalling the activism of nineteenth-century American Protestants, she sees the “new evangelicals” as their contemporary successors.

You don’t have to go back to the nineteenth century to find evangelical progressives. Like Jim Wallis and Ron Sider, many got their start in the 1970s, building institutions that are still around today (Sojourners, Evangelicals for Social Action, Bread for the World).

The grandson of a Moral Majority supporter, I wasn’t exposed to this part of evangelicalism.  Like grandma, I assumed that most evangelicals “prayed Republican.”

This began to change during my young adult years. Blessed with a well-stocked church library, my congregation owned a copy of The Cross and the Flag (1972). Edited by a trio of Christian historians, it featured a who’s who of reformist evangelicals, including Paul Henry, Ozzie Edwards, and Nancy Hardesty. Reading its indictment of Christian nationalism, I felt connected to a new kind of evangelicalism. Chapters on poverty, ecology, racism, and militarism outlined a different agenda from the one found in my grandmother’s Moral Majority Report.

As David Swartz documents in Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism, the autobiographies of other evangelicals reveal similar stories of inter-generational influence. More than any other book, Carl F.H. Henry’s The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism (1947) inspired the evangelical activists of the 1960s and 1970s. While David Allen Hubbard kept a copy under his pillow at Westmont College, Samuel Escobar read about it as a student in Peru.

It is easy to see why. Calling for greater social engagement, Henry ridiculed evangelicals for debating the morality of the card game Rook “while the nations of the world are playing with fire.”

Henry’s generation called themselves the “new evangelicals.” By using the same label to describe today’s evangelicalism, Pally hints at this religious lineage. While grateful for her research, I wish she had done more to explore these connections.

Many journalists and scholars believe that the evangelical left was a reaction to the religious right. So do many evangelicals.

Like other religious communities, evangelicalism has experienced a break in its “chain of memory.” Suffering from historical amnesia, millions of evangelicals have forgotten about their tradition’s social witness.

By telling the stories of “evangelicals who have left the right,” Pally’s book may help them to remember.

The single-page list of possible terms circulated to contributors to the Frequencies project on a genealogy of spirituality has the clean feeling that comes courtesy of the alphanumeric. All those capital Hs in a row; all that happy cacophony, from Horatio Alger to LSD to the White Dog Café (Philadelphia, PA), contained by the stuttering letter. Jarena John John John Johnny Jonathan Joseph. One is enjoined widely—“what comes to mind when you think of spirituality”—while sensing that one’s flights of association will be easily contained. You left out (speaking of them) John-John.

One could say that this is what spirituality itself does. It is elastic, while expressing common rules of order. It contains everything, while conforming to strict limits. As the curators note in their invitation, with some understatement: “Few incidents or characters in the history of spirituality can be contained within national borders.” But do we—yet—know what contains spirituality? Do we yet know if anything does, and thus whether there can be history (or genealogy) here, rather than simply classification?

These questions are not intended to threaten the project. One would be hard pressed, I suspect, to advance a preemptive critique of a history of spirituality—of the very idea of such a thing—that was not already considered in the Frequencies conference room. Of course such a history is impossible. That is why it must now be attempted.

I would like to contribute to this attempt, if not a preemptive critique, then something like the question of whether or how one could be disobedient to its terms—the question of the project’s concept. Like the question to spirituality itself, one asks: is there really anything that could not go on the list? This might seem a playful or obnoxious intervention. It is playful in tracking the spirit of the call while taking its investigative thrust to potentially absurd lengths; it is obnoxious in pretending serious engagement while revealing the project itself to be absurd. I mean the question in neither sense.

In elucidating what I do mean, it is instructive to bring to mind the late metaphysical work of spirituality connoisseur William James. James spent the better part of his career as psychologist and philosopher attempting to debunk metaphysics of its spiritualist pretensions, while also, not incidentally, carrying on with theosophists and occultists. After achieving notice for his essays on religion, pluralism, and belief, and at the same time as he was honing his pragmatic theory of truth, James developed his own metaphysical theory, which he called radical empiricism. Fascinating as a historical document, radical empiricism is distinguished mainly by the claim that the world is composed—not of mind and body, or temporality and eternity, or indeed any of the other famous dualisms in the metaphysical water, then and now. Radical empiricism was to be a monism, whose basic unit is experience.

James’s theory has the advantage of cohering with his pragmatist commitment to make truth something we can see, feel, taste, practice, do. His rejection of standard (in his view, “Hegelian”) metaphysics was that it posited a world (“Spirit”) subject to none of these things, a world therefore useless in providing a framework for the investigation of what really does exist and matter, among which James’s empiricism stressed the relations between things as much as things themselves. It is also worth noting that the “incident or character” of James’s philosophy always toyed with, and was consistently received in the light of, a fairly explicit nationalism. America would be the land of a properly grounded, empirically contained, pragmatic philosophy, cutting itself loose from the decadence of an ethereal European spirit forever spilling out into tyrannical and sloppily conceived social and political projects. James’s solution, a radical empiricism, makes such a spirit subject to the containment of American knowhow: experiment, revisability, and an overall temper of constructive, this-worldly optimism. Dams and railroads would be built; souls and their sicknesses studied, diagnosed, and allayed, if not cured.

I call James to the task of considering the nature of a history of spirituality since he was himself so aggressively interested in the spiritual—in both fertilizing and disciplining it. But I also call on him for the scope of his philosophical ambition. James’s metaphysical system, unlike those of the Idealists he loved to lampoon, has as one of its features that, as with our list of terms concerning spirituality, everything, presumably, can be contained within it. It is a theory of everything.

Is this a problem? First to the task of what it means. A thinker like Spinoza has often been called a monist. By this, readers mean that he sews up all of life’s particularities into one, single, existing substance. This reading can still afford to acknowledge that Spinoza understood substance to be infinitely modified. For the point, so it goes, is that its modifications are nevertheless, finally, of this one thing. James was against such pictures of the universe. His appeal to experience was precisely meant to give us the “blooming, buzzing” confusion of life—the smell of a dog’s nose, the angle of a roof as it is about to collapse, the agony of guilt over a failed connection with someone, the moments of longing for death. Finally, American readers have always felt, in turning to James after a spell in the archives of the Germans and the French: someone to give us the sense and taste of the damned gorgeous springtime in Cambridge MA, and not merely, as Schleiermacher vaguely promised, the sense and taste of the infinite.

And yet. Does James really get around the problem of how to have, while also theorizing what it is to have, experience? Does James really give us a theory of everything that marks what that everything shall smell and taste like? To do this question justice would take us deep into the bowels of modern philosophy—into, at the very least, the curious logic of an apriori worldview centered elsewhere than in the mind. Kant thinks, for example, that we meet up with the world of blooming experience with a mind that already orders it; James thinks we meet up with singular objects in the world with a self that is already experiencing, or better, a self that already is experience. There is a critical difference in the shape of the two positions. For Kant, we are limited to experience, and the work is to make this limitation and its structure as pellucid as possible. What it leaves out. What it leaves in. For James, we are limited by nothing, whose name (the thing, the nothing) is experience. It is noteworthy, then, that James’s theory of experience, in leaving nothing out, has a harder time than Kant’s at specifying what is left in—what it is, in short, that we are having an experience of.

It is enough in this context to suggest something like the following about James, concluding with some questions to a history of spirituality. What James was evidently after with his concept of a radical empiricism was a way to resolve the call of spirituality. As a sick-souled, genealogically-stressed denizen of the Cantabrigian beau monde at the turn of the twentieth century, James was fascinated by the more colorful of spirit’s possibilities. But in his philosophical commitments, he was a critic of spirit, Hegelian, Bradleyian, Blavatskian, and otherwise. James wanted to give us the real, and he felt sure that this real was both empirical and absolute—that the empirical was not simply the place of experiment and Baconian habit, but was also mind. This might seem a surprising claim in the light of James’s insistence that the turn to the empirical saves us from all forms of rationalism. But it is one that makes sense both of his various personal commitments and of his inheritance of a Kantian seriousness with respect to the integration of the person. James, like Kant, felt it important to admit that there were cracks in existence. He simply thought he knew how they could be philosophically, which for him meant empirically, resolved. That this resolution in a thinker like James comes couched in the language of open-endedness only serves to underscore the maddening sleight of the apparently decisive thing that nevertheless has no borders.

So again: is this a problem? The problem I want to draw attention to is that James comes up with a theory of the way things are that—by virtue of the decision to resolve dualisms before they arise—gives us no insight into its logic of inclusion. This would be as if a moral philosophy or psychology proposed a theory of what to do or how to live without reckoning with the obstacles (psychical, social, intellectual, animal) to doing so. James’s theory of radical empiricism cools our desperation over being split—mind from body, higher from lower, Jew from Greek or male from female, if you want to go that route. In doing so, however, it abandons us to a different problem. Put simply, everything can count as experience. But what is the concept of everything? The problem is not that everything can count. The problem is: what is an everything? What do I have when I have it? What are the grounds of distinction within it, or between it and itself, if not some other? How might everything (or anything) fail (to be everything)? What is or what could be failure? I scramble for the simplest of images here: a queue for a roller coaster, say, in which the gate keeper is checking that the prospects meet a list of qualifications, a list of qualifications that everyone happens to meet. Who is that gate keeper? And: must she keep checking?

The list supplied for the genealogy of spirituality has this quality of an itemization that requires continued checking even as everything could be included in it. This is not to say its curators imagine themselves gate keepers. Just the opposite. The call makes clear that the charge is to roam as far and wide as possible. Still, those possibles would—I suggest—be exceedingly unlikely to fail inclusion on the list. Let me amend. They could not do so. Like James’s reading of the metaphysical tradition, the list excludes only what it does not desire (what does not exist); of things desirable, all are present. Everything is—however implicitly—present. And yet there is no account of what this everything tears itself loose from. Experience—or spirituality—as opposed to what? In this silence, James ironically mirrors the logic of his own bête noir, an otherworldly spirit struggling to make the world fit reason (the monistic Spinoza, the benighted Bradley), while evading the logic of his ostensible quarry, an immanence of spirit, which is present, pace James, in the dialectical Spinoza, who locates spirit in creaturely life, in the pragmatic Hegel, who culls reality redolent with smells, in the mechanic Kant, who knows the difference between an engine we make and our fantasy of one. James confuses the universal (all) with finite inclusion (everything), failing both spirit and its histories, both what spirit is and what it isn’t. With a universal, one could say, the gate keeper is the position that founds the all on a primary exclusion (choice); with an everything, the gate keeper is simply the delirious confusion of not having to choose—the confusion of redundancy. Although James’s radical empiricism promises to subordinate spirit to experience, it yields what looks like nothing so much as spirit augmenting itself infinitely through the undifferentiated logic of its suppression.

Is the Frequencies list a sign that its call is caught in this same confusion?

I pose the following final questions:

What is the relationship between the call to consider spirit and the provision of a list of spirit’s projects, the implication being that this list, like the alphabet, could come to an end while being, in its inner nature, expansive to infinity (JJJJJJ…)?

What has this gambit already decided about spirit in imagining its projects alphanumerically, and not in substance and subject?

What is a history of the alphanumeric if history is already (is it not?) the alphabet’s undoing—the decision (expository, creative, poetic) to count Jarena and not John-John? What is the nature of such a decision in this project? Would it, like the list itself, get its own line on the list?

The project of Frequencies hints—against conventional wisdom—that spirituality can be contained by its manifold histories; by a history of the manifold. Might there also be a value in ascertaining whether spirituality is not already contained, a list of lists, a theory of when and where its own decisions make distinctions, apriori, as it were—before we assimilate it to the White Dog Café in Philadelphia, PA? Might there not be something in spirit itself—and not simply in our alphabets—that finds it(self) everywhere? Might this not be spirit’s own creative history of us?

I am a sick man. I am a jealous man. Endowed with a certain Mediterranean vigor I am spiteful, sickened to death by Tom Brokaw’s shit-eating grin, disgusted with my family and former friends, fearful of aloof dot-commers in a Biblical way, their SUV’s, their palm pilots, their material stink swarming around me. But I will be honest with you. I harbor such strange opinions because I have fallen into the literary life. A noble calling, you might say. But I did not choose this hell, this torture that even the most vile of Chinese sadists couldn’t stomach. I have yet to find my own voice. I have yet to be original in any sense of the term. I am a garden-variety critic, a poetaster with no skill, only taste. I am a scab, aware at all times, night and day, that I am derivative, the new and improved version of what already came before. I want to be an artist, a sayer of truth. But I am blocked. Hindered and haunted by the words of another. To make a long story short, I am obsessed with Don DeLillo.

A confession, gentle reader, of what lies behind.

I have been in contact with others who share my obsession, chat room buddies, friends of friends who pick up used copies of White Noise to give away at parties, and last but not least, The Don DeLillo Society, an academic clique of which I was once a proud member. Founded in 1999, we organize and sponsor panels on DeLillo at various literary conferences. We are the gauntlet of DeLillo criticism. If you want to say something about DeLillo you must first go through us. We are in the know. Nothing that DeLillo writes, says, or does eludes our grasp. We understand how DeLillo relates to contemporary issues of race, gender, and class. We have come to realize the subtle workings of his mind and how they relate to our own.

I was recently forced to resign from the DeLillo Society after a colleague suggested that we write a book together about DeLillo’s depictions of media violence. I had thought of this already! So I punched him in the nose. I was soon fired from my University post and he is suing me. I am suing the University for wrongful termination. The Chronicle of Higher Education has gotten involved (too involved if you ask me!), milking the story for its salacious metacommentary.

I am now unemployed, a stay-at-home dad with no prospect of gainful employment. But in order to maintain appearances, I will let you in on my imaginary—where I am coming from and what I take for granted when I speak of things DeLillo. I have never been to prison. I was born in Akron, Ohio but tell people I’m from Cleveland. I love cats. When I was twenty-two I applied to law school but was rejected by every goddamn one, a sign, I believe, of things to come. I am quick to anger. A victim, plain and simple.

My life can be summarized by my cultural obsessions beginning with my mother’s soap operas in the summers between second and third grades—Days of Our Lives and Another World— intrigue, murder, and sex whose narrative was jointed and deferred. I quickly moved onto KISS—KISS tapes, KISS jacket, KISS dolls, KISS cards and the prized #18, a solitary Ace Frehley on guitar, a sparkling, spacey vision of silver and white. Only my friend Brett Beadow had been blessed with #18, at that time a point of contention and awkward jealousy. I then spent five years thinking about nothing but baseball cards, arranging and rearranging them in plastic pockets, stealing packs from the drug store, memorizing statistics and perfect mint prices, going to card shows and collecting every Pete Rose card there was, every year, all mint, all Charlie Hustle, from the 1963 rookie card to the 1984 Fleer update. After the cardboard heroes lost their luster, I moved onto more sophisticated fare. Before DeLillo there was Galaga, Prince, Led Zeppelin, and Bon Jovi, Civil War battle reenactments, Laurie Anderson, semiotics, and Moby-Dick to name only a few.

I fell into the words of Don DeLillo on November 16, 1997 (now a family holiday). That was the day I first began reading Underworld. It took eight days of slow, methodical turns, one page at a time, copious notes, tears, and illumination. I would read sections over and over again. I would spend hours on a single paragraph. The first line a coded message, a direct challenge to the reader, hanging there, waiting for me to decipher it.

He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.

Since then I have read everything by DeLillo at least three times, collected all the first editions, written fan letters to DeLillo on a weekly basis (Don DeLillo, c/o Scribner, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY, 10020), lurked around chat rooms dedicated to his work under a myriad of user names, sometimes picking fights with myself in order to assure victory. I have a bumper sticker on my car that reads “If You Love Don DeLillo You’re Too Close.” I have used Americana (DeLillo’s first novel) as a bedtime story for my sons. I hope to pass on something special to them through DeLillo’s linguistic code. My orange tabby, Barbara, is named after DeLillo’s wife.

It seems as though I was born to be a critic, zeroing in on different chinks in the cultural armor, deconstructing them, looking for an opening, always searching for a way out. I am a tragic and pathetic figure, an angry young man who resents giving you, dear reader, the literary facts of the day:

Born on November 20, 1936, Don DeLillo was raised in the Bronx, attended Catholic high school and later Fordham University. Like Salman Rushdie, he worked as a copywriter for Ogilvy and Mather before moving onto fiction. Unlike Rushdie, however, DeLillo has never been the target of an Islamic fatwa. He has never been buddy-buddy with Bono or undergone cosmetic surgery. DeLillo usually passes on such pomp and circumstance for a reason. Great writers and their work, he says, are “too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation. We’re all one beat away from becoming elevator music.” In keeping with his professed outsider status, DeLillo rarely grants interviews. He does not appear on Charlie Rose. He doesn’t write book reviews or participate in writing workshops or the academic life.

Last summer my DeLillo mania grew progressively worse. I experienced unexplained blackouts, alternating episodes of depression and euphoria. In July I made a DeLillo kachina doll out of old New York Times and scraps of cloth, perfectly proportioned to his thin, 145 pound frame. I began to experiment with DeLillo scratch-n-sniffs, a different smell for each of his books. In August I set up a small lab in my basement, complete with beakers and Bunsen burners. I have yet to complete my chemistry project but I imagine a gamut of literary aromas, each sticker in its own way a summation of plot, characters, and denouement. Here is what Ratner’s Star smells like. Go ahead. Scratch your screen:

I know this smell.

You know this smell.

Because we have slipped into the stream of DeLillo’s sensorium—the writer who once described himself as a literary terrorist; the writer who does not ruminate over subtle emotional shifts or the minor grievances of domestic life; the writer who does not deal “painfully and honestly” with the latest political crisis.

But as DeLillo prophecies, the culture that contains us eludes our desire to mark it, to use its content to remind us of our formal freedom. We are ever haunted by visions of a more complete self, an identity fully realized—a kinder, gentler, more articulate version—someone who volunteers, who makes a difference, who sinks the three-pointer at the buzzer, who publishes brilliant tomes, who captures the zeitgeist, who is loved unconditionally and bravely chooses a fate. This is the “naked shitmost self” that we believe, desperately, tragically, is there, somewhere. “Even when you self-destruct,” cautions a DeLillo character, “you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others.”

I know exactly what he is talking about. Because I am a humble apprentice. Because I have absorbed and digested Don DeLillo. Because I am the fungus that lurks between his toes.

This is my demonic side, the part that goes without saying, the part that is controlled from without, the part that we, dear reader, don’t like to admit to ourselves because we can’t. Like Livia Majeski from Valparaiso, “We feel things. We become addicted to things because life, itself, is habit forming. We start things and can’t stop.”

We seek comfort in the never-ending stream of gadgets and digital doo-dads—all those products endowed with a life-force independent of the human touch. The NASDAQ soars or plummets, money talks, your new iMac works for you. All the while the individual is reduced to an inanimate object at the mercy of market forces. On your knees, beckons the radio man, bow down and breathe in that new car smell, the smell that soothes the wounds of childhood. This is what it’s all about, the otherworldly scent of densely pressed aluminum and vinylized leather that brings you closer to God.

This is the spiritual spiral that has led to my scratch-n-sniff experiments, breaking the world up into signifieds and signifiers, the way things smell and how I talk about these ways and these smells.

But I am ready to be healed, to begin to refuse analogy, to deny that everything is connected to everything else. To move across, away, and beyond DeLillo.

This condition, of course, was depicted brilliantly by DeLillo in chapter 39 of White Noise when the narrator Jack Gladney becomes aware of his own cynicism and confronts Willie Mink, the mysterious inventor of Dylar, an anti-death-anxiety drug to which Mink has become addicted. The main side effect of Dylar is linguistic decadence in extremis. When Jack says “Falling plane,” Mink panics and grabs the arms of his chair. When Jack whispers “Hail of Bullets,” Mink dives to the floor and begins “crawling toward the bathroom, looking back over his shoulder, childlike, miming, using principles of design but showing real terror.”

I want to someday say these words and know, in a visceral way, that they are not my own. I want to be redeemed, bathed in the blood of Latin letters. I want to jettison quaint, well-behaved narratives with neat plots and worked-out endings, to feel the incoherency of modern life on a deeper level, to write as a form of religious meditation in which language is the flawed and final recourse to enlightenment.

A version of this entry was originally published in SPEAK 20 (Fall 2000): 12-17.

Witness the wonders of Allan Chumak, the white-haired media phenom of the late-Soviet age, who promised to heal from a distance using only his hands, and the television broadcast. The large amber-shaded glasses. The unbroken gaze. Here he is, sitting inside the television box, which is now inside youtube inside your computer, inside your very own home.

To watch Chumak—and I mean really watch him, without interruption or preconception and until the end—is to enter into his world. You have to believe, lest you be left outside—a belief whose compensation is a pleasant sensation, the twilight feeling of sleepy-awakeness, a combination of TV-initiated alpha-waves and gentle hypnosis.

Chumak began appearing on Soviet state television during the late-1980s—the time of “Gorby,” perestroika, socialism with a human face. He was allotted a small, though by no means nondescript, corner of the morning program 120 minutes, at 7:15 am, when people all across the Soviet Union would tune in for some distance healing. Describing the source of his powers, Chumak would describe a magical moment when, at the age of 42, a torrent of energy pummeled his body like a waterfall and the world was revealed to him as a “fantastic diversity of energo-informational interaction.” Since that time, Chumak has been able to focus this “energy” through his hands for the purpose of healing.

Watch it again.

There is a certain reliable regularity at work in his programs. First there is the greeting and a brief explanation of the malady du jour—in this case allergy and respiratory disorders. Then there is a discussion of etiology—always for Chumak a disruption of “the harmony of every process in the organism.” Then the proposed resolution, a recalibration through his reiki-like hand movements. The cure takes place right then and there. A sympathetic current of sorts, perhaps aided, back then, by the static electricity gathering on the convex curve of the screen. There is an excess of force, too, though, and viewers are invited, with a mysterious half-smile, to place jars of water or cream (“whatever you like”) next to the television to be “charged” (zariazhennyi; also loaded) (:30). Finally, the recommended pose: “You ought to be free and comfortable…. Place your hands on your lap, arms down, and close your eyes. Only pay attention to those feelings that appear during the session.”

This posture of blindness and relaxation is the posture of faithful submission. It is an embodiment of vulnerability and trust, of innocence and expectation—a posture from which it would be extremely difficult to mount a defense were someone to punch you in the gut.

So much of what we might imagine about time and place—the late Empire moment—has been conjured from out of the smoke and mirrors of capitalist triumph. At the risk of falling prey to a post-Cold War imaginary, twenty-five years hence I imagine all those Soviet bodies in their apartments, stilled before the television. Perhaps it is no coincidence that so many found themselves in this position while living in the twilight of empire. It was the 1980s, after all, and the smell of the end of history was there like a dying animal. Or so it has become: imaginings must be taken, like a shot of bad tequila, with many grains of salt. Others, of course, experienced it very differently—as a chaotic and hopeful time in the Soviet Union. A time of exciting revelation that followed decades of so-called “stagnation” under Brezhnev. Gorbachev had introduced reforms to both the media environment, known as glasnost (literally transparency; openness), and to Soviet institutions (perestroika). People were again able to read more widely; opinions critical of Soviet life became more widely circulated. These new openings brought what anthropologists have documented, retrospectively, as sudden “break of consciousness” (perelom soznaniia) and “strong shock” (sil’neishii shok). Many new cultural forms emerged at this time, but among the most curious was the rise in mass-mediated “extrasensory” healers sent out live via the state broadcasting channel to the entire Soviet Union. Chumak is not alone. There is also Kashpirovsky’s televised hypnotism.

Watch it again.

Chumak was inside your home long before you clicked the link above. Consider, for instance, a resonance with a viral strain of American spirituality wrought of the fascination with national collectivity, media technologies, and gods. There is a dream here, utterly familiar. A voice that can only imagine itself in terms of everything or nothing, with little in between. Think, for example, of Whitman penning the following lines in 1855, five years prior to the Civil War:

I SING the Body electric;
The armies of those I love engirth me, and I engirth them;
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the Soul.

These and other alignments of spiritual uptick and political-economy suggest that Chumak speaks to a history redolent with spirit, technology, and empire, a history shared by Cold War adversaries, a history of mutual collapse.

I cannot help but watch Chumak. His wordlessness. The opening and closing of his jaw. The motion of his head, moving side-to-side, nodding, but bent on being still. He is intentional about not making sound, and so there are sounds of silence—lip smacking, throat clearing, the just-detectable sound of breathing. A knocking in the studio and a door closes—the lifting of the veil for a moment, reminding us the there are others there in studio, behind camera—a whole crew, perhaps, involved in this production.

The viewer is not a viewer. In asking us to close our eyes, Chumak has asked us to shuffle the sensorium. He has turned the clock back on modernity’s forward march of the gaze. TV is here meant to be experienced through the ears, on the skin, by the nose, and finally in the viscera. As I close my eyes now, I can recollect hearing my own 1980s television—its sound that is no sound: that high-pitched squeal of household appliances that only reach the ear from another room. I can feel the dancing dust on the screen under my fingers and the hair standing up on my arm. I cringe with anticipation at the crackling that gathers under the finger until the electrical shock! And I can smell it—that distinctive combination of household particle and arcing electricity. Don’t stand so close to the television!—not just an admonishment to protect the eyes, but also, perhaps, a warning born of suspicion of the industrial everyday. The TV was to deadly electrification as the microwave was to nuclear warhead.

Watch it again.

A typology of Chumak’s hand movements:

1. Fine-tuning: Tweaking the miniscule mechanics. Smaller movements are required.

2. Stroking: While holding one hand still, the other moves outward, as if petting a cat.

3. Gathering up and drawing out: An invisible sphere is constituted with both hands. Once constituted, one hand periodically pulls some threads out of it.

4. Tending to the sphere: The hands pack and repack the sphere.

5. The sign of the cross: Reminiscent of the Christian rite, the right hand draws a plus sign (usually several times vertical followed by several times horizontal).

6. Straightening up: Again, smoothing that which has been conjured.

7. Equalization and balance: The hands move as the hands of a scale, seeking equilibrium.

8. Silence: The hands punctuate action with inaction. Resting in midair, the hands await further instruction.

There has always been an interesting convergence between faith, media and power. Yet here it is not just very much like, but in fact asserted, the mundane gesture, captured by electricity and projected through a TV tube can carry with it an unseen “energy”—an energy with a power to cure from afar, bypassing the gaze. A metaphysics of morning television. An energy that is not an effort. An energy that doesn’t make a sound. An energy that comes as much, if not more so, from within as without. In this way, Chumak becomes the channel for your soul—your soul channel.

Watch it once more. When I turn the youtube transmission up, I hear two tracks now—the hiss of television, and what could be the bleeping of digital information.

Can I still place a jar of cream next to my computer monitor to charge it up? Was the TV the necessary medium for distance healing? Or does it have to do with the experience of late Empire and the failure of our language to articulate the decline? Or maybe it was some combination of naïve fascination with the television, only just making its way into the households of the world as an everyday object? We can’t know, and the ingredients of spiritual experience of this type seem scattered like electrons in search of a screen.

On youtube, a certain “achalkov” keys in his own riposte to Chumak’s session: “Awesome! After this session my mobile telephone was charged!”

I grew up by the shores of Lake Michigan. We used to play a game in the summer time. At the beach we would try to smash through the waves that crashed upon the shore. For some reason I really enjoyed the body-shaking feeling of a wave reverberating through my bones. As I think back on it now, I was communing with the superhuman force of ocean currents.

Much later in my life I was exposed to the more gruesome power of such waves. I was part of a team conducting an ethnography of a series of coastal villages in Northwestern Papua New Guinea that were wiped away by a tsunami. We were trying to understand how people in the community dealt with the trauma of that event.

In the short story, “The Seventh Man” Haruki Murakami describes a wave as a doorway into the “other world” that characterizes many of his stories. The other world is the world of thought, dreams, death, and imagination. The story is about a man whose childhood friend was swept away by a giant wave. Two waves came; the first one swept his friend K away. Then, the narrator admits, something slightly unbelievable or counter-intuitive happened when the second wave hit:

In the tip of the wave, as if enclosed in some kind of transparent capsule, floated K’s body, reclining on its side. But that is not all. K was looking straight at me, smiling. There, right in front of me, close enough so that I could have reached out and touched him, was my friend, my friend K who, only moments before, had been swallowed by the wave. And he was smiling at me. Not with an ordinary smile—it was a big, wide-open grin that literally stretched from ear to ear. His cold, frozen eyes were locked on mine. He was no longer the K I knew. And his right arm was stretched out in my direction, as if he were trying to grab my hand and pull me into that other world where he was now. A little closer, and his hand would have caught mine. But, having missed, K then smiled at me one more time, his grin wider than ever.

⁂

I don’t know what spirituality is, but when I think of the word, I think of waves—thought waves.

Because I am interested in the materiality of thought and its medium, I often ask myself: what is thought made of? What is its material?

Perhaps thought is like a sound wave.

Certainly one medium of thought is sound waves. Thought travels in sound waves.

Sound waves are waves of pressure. Like most waves in nature, sound waves must propagate in a medium, for example air or water (sound traveling in such media has different properties depending on the medium).

Perhaps thoughts, like sound, need to travel in a medium. Or maybe they work differently, like light, and do not need a medium at all.

In former centuries physicists looked in vein for the medium in which light traveled; they called this imaginary medium aether. Then physicists discovered that light can travel in a vacuum, that light does not need a medium. Indeed, light was its own medium. Here was a paradox on many levels: light as both matter and wave, a matter-wave. Sometimes light has properties of matter—photons can move other pieces of matter like a billiard ball. And sometimes it has properties of waves—it can be refracted, reflected, interfered etc…

Perhaps thought has this dual nature too.

⁂

As William James said: “our brains are colored lenses in the wall of nature, admitting light from the super-solar source.” James was giving a lecture at Harvard on the subject of human immortality. When James spoke of spirituality or the spiritual he meant consciousness. James was trying to deal with the problem of consciousness, the so-called “hard problem” about how the brain relates to consciousness. We are not that much further along now than we were 100 years ago when James gave his speech.

James thought sense could be made of the idea of immortality, that some version of consciousness could be thought to survive death. Or at least he thought that brain death was not necessarily the complete death of consciousness. Perhaps there was some general form of consciousness, one consciousness, that beamed like light. James speculated that brains were lenses that changed the nature of that light and created individual consciousness. Brains, then, did not cause thoughts or consciousness (in what he called a productive function); instead brains had a transmissive function, akin to how vocal chords constrain air to produce a voice but do not themselves produce the voice.

James challenged those puritans of science who thought that the brain produces consciousness. “’Thought is a function of the brain’” for them– just as, “’Steam is a function of the tea-kettle,’ [or] ‘Light is a function of the electric circuit,’ [or] ‘Power is a function of the moving waterfall’.”

In contrast, those who thought the brain had a transmissive function saw the brain as an apparatus for letting consciousness loose upon the world.

James looked to Shelley’s Adonaïs: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion, etc in order to make his point: “Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,/Stains the white radiance of eternity” (stanza 52). The brain, according to James, was a threshold like this many-colored glass.

The Greek subtitle of Shelley’s poem is from the Epigram on Aster, which Shelley was translating at the time of Keats’ death: “Thou wert the morning star among the living,/Ere thy fair light had fled;/Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving/New splendour to the dead.”

⁂

I live in Europe where the frequency in which power utilities transmit electricity, that is, waves of electrons, or electric charge, is 50 Hz. In most places, in other words, a wave of electrons cycles 50 times per second.

If an ocean wave hit the shore 6 times every minute, its frequency would be .1 times per second, or .1 Hz.

A heart with a pulse of 60 beats per minute is 1 Hz.

The US transmits electricity at 60 Hz. The waves hit 10 times more times per second than in Europe.

In either case, the pulses are coming too fast to perceive consciously. But, if you record your TV with a video camera, in most cases you will observe a pulsating, flicker effect due to the difference between the frequencies of the recording device and the 50 or 60 Hz. pulse of the television.

⁂

I had a student last year who was allergic to “electricity, electromagnetic radiation, and wireless internet.” She lives in a home completely free of electricity, except for an old computer she uses for limited periods each week. I never saw her; we communicated exclusively by email.

James would have appreciated the situation of my former student. Her example suggests not only that thoughts are embodied, but that thoughts are physical things—or at least, that they exist at a physical level. This example also suggests how human thought is closely bound to technology, that it is connected to our electrified universe. In the case of my former student, the most likely culprit is the technologically produced electrical energy interfering with the electrical and chemical pathways that regulate homeostasis in her brain and body, in her psyche and soma.

Some of this may sound strange, until one considers that waves themselves also carry energy. Photons, for example, are the fundamental unit of light; they propagate with different frequencies that are characteristic of different forms of electromagnetic radiation or energy.

Unlike light, utility power is transmitted by moving an electrical charge; that is, a wave of electrically charged particles. Such a wave generates a magnetic field.

⁂

Neuroscience is a young field, just at the beginning. The physics, nuts, and bolts mechanical processes of the brain are pretty well understood. Signals within the body and brain are composed of chemical variations and electrical changes. Though there are many types of communication within the brain, a most basic one is composed of neurons. Neurons create electrical potentials that “fire” and propagate throughout the brain. The patterns of firing in the brain can also be described as “waves”. Unlike the electric wave that is transmitted on a power line, the medium of transmission of brain waves are cells, biological material. However, as in the case of my former student, it is possible that such biological material can be destabilized by electromagnetic energy from other sources.

We know a bit more about what is going on inside brains today than we did in James’s day because we have more reliable ways of locating and measuring the electric waves and magnetic fields noted above, the core media of the brain’s activity. For example, the best and most recent brain scanning equipment, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), measures the magnetic properties of oxygen molecules in the brain. It works because hemoglobin, the most important blood protein, changes its magnetic properties depending on how much oxygen it contains. The body delivers oxygen molecules to parts of the brain that need to do more work. So fMRI does not actually measure brain activity directly but rather blood flow in the brain (changes in oxygenation).

Instead of oxygen flow, another type of brain scan called Electroencephalography (EEG), measures electricity generated by the brain. While fMRI is good at scale (spatial dimension) it is not as good as EEG at time (temporal dimension); that is, fMRI technology is too slow to capture neural processes (because it measures them indirectly by blood flow). EEG, by contrast, captures electrical signals in real time. However, EEG is limited because it only captures electrical energy at the scalp—it does not reach deep into the brain.

So EEG captures the wave pattern of firing neurons. In popular understanding these are called brain waves, but scientists call them neural oscillations. The terminology is probably reflective of the fact that brain waves are associated with the unverified notion that such waves travel outside the brain (that is, between brains). By contrast neural oscillations only apply within brains.

The patterns researchers have found in humans are usually localized (meaning they take place at characteristic places in the brain) and tend to take place during certain types of activities. For example, delta waves are characteristic for adults in slow wave or non-REM sleep and in some attention tasks; theta waves are characteristic of encoding and retrieval in memory and inhibition; alpha waves are associated with focusing of attention. A rhythmic firing pattern of up to 4 Hz. (4 cycles per second) is a delta wave, then there are theta (4-8), alpha (8-13), mu (8-13), beta (13-30), and gamma (30-100) frequencies.

Recent theories suggest that the “neural correlates” of various conscious states are not particular neurons but rather these patterns or waves firing in synchrony. The excitement over the recent discovery of mirror neurons—a type of neuron that fires both when an action is observed and when an individual performs the same action—is that they suggest such synchrony of firing is not confined to individual heads. Brain waves might not move between brains but people may still share patterns of neural activity.

Such an idea was probably first proposed by Gerald Edelman who argued that the “dynamic core” of consciousness is synchronous firing occurring globally across many brain areas. Local waves become part of consciousness when integrated into that global synchrony. Gamma waves in particular have been a focus of attention in this regard.

So like James, Edleman’s is a holistic conception of consciousness, but grounded in neuroscience.

One’s perspective on consciousness, of course, is a politico-historical subject.

To be sure, James’s view is thoroughly modern. However, counter to a neo-liberal view of consciousness, James’s “downward” view suggests that the purpose of thought is not necessarily to help human beings transact or trade. Thought does not exist simply to help singular human beings get the best deal out of things. Indeed, James’s version figures brains as getting in the way of consciousness.

Catastrophic waves, electromagnetic allergies, and brain scans are part and parcel of the present moment when we are recognizing the dual nature of thought: its physical and “spiritual” nature. Our conception of consciousness should follow something like James’s model. A conscious self is physical, and yet not necessarily some kind of automated machine. Like my former student, such selves are deeply affected and implicated in the material world, identical to it, yet paradoxically outside it.

I am not someone who likes to shop. In the past, when a girlfriend has invited me out to a Saturday shopping spree as a “fun” recreational activity, I have let it be known that I would find ritual seppuku a more attractive alternative to spending the day in and out of crowded stores. However, when my family and I recently moved out of the city and bought a 1920s home in small lakeside village, none of our modern stuff looked right in it. For both environmental and economic reasons, I decided to explore the world of estate sales and the realm of “pre-owned” everything. I expected of course to find a lot of old junk, but I did not expect the intimacy with which I would sift through peoples’ lives, nor did I predict the kind of stories my fellow tribe of estate sale hunters and I would share related to powerful assemblies of personal objects.

What hidden treasures or promising insights lurk in the mundane spaces where we don’t expect to find spirituality and religion—in the dark drawers we stumble upon where we might otherwise never think to look? How do objects, too often dismissed as “secular” and thus irrelevant to our research, possess a kind of spiritual power in people’s lives that offers us qualitatively different insights into the worlds they make and occupy? With essays on everything from espresso to cell phones, Frequencies addresses precisely these questions, but to colleagues who do not embrace this kind of approach, it may well seem a bit, well… eccentric. As I began to comb through the drawers and closets of strangers’ homes, their bathrooms and basements, sideboards and sun porches, I was taken into worlds of eccentricity, and became fascinated by what, through either downsizing or death, was left behind, especially the attentive care to various collections. What objects held some sort of compelling power in people’s lives to the point of inspiring devotional practice, if only for a time?

Since beginning my journey through the world of the “pre-owned,” I have poured over table after table of Lladro figurines, decorative spoons from destinations all over the world, assortments of “museum-quality” commemorative plates, and jumbo-sized plastic Container Store crates of Beanie Babies. Then there are the linens—the mountains beyond mountains of linens. This is how I met “Wendy,” who collects hand-embroidered linens from American estate sales and then sells them on the internet to her customers, mostly in China. “You’re sending linens to China?” I ask. “Isn’t that like coals to Newcastle? Aren’t most of them made there?” She explains that Chinese ladies want fine Irish linens with the real lace and hand-embroidery—the kind that would be handed down in American families. A tablecloth she picks up at estate sale for $2, for instance, she can turn around and sell for $25. “Americans don’t want them because you have to iron the darn things, and who has the time?” She tells me that there’s also a good resale market in Asia for more sentimental and hokey embroidered linens (a little girl with an umbrella, sun flowers, kittens, etc.). “Here, we think those things are kind of cheesy and in bad taste, but in Asia they are just crazy for the little girl sitting on the polka-dotted mushroom, or teddy bears having a tea party. And, oh my God, the shamrocks! They love anything with embroidered shamrocks. It adds value.” While contemplating shamrock-embroidered linens with soy sauce stains, I ask about dry cleaning instead of hand-ironing and why that might not be an option. “Well, it is except that it’s expensive and we don’t use nice tablecloths anymore anyway. Most people get them out once a year but have even switched that to nylon or polyester. In Asia they will hand wash and iron them, or at least the person working in their house will do it for them.” I ask if she resells any of the linens within the U.S. or if it’s all mail order to Asia. Wendy says almost none of her linens go to buyers here and declares America to be pretty much a post-linen tablecloth nation, adding “We just don’t have big formal events anymore, so they pile up and sit in the closet.”

In the wee hours of the morning, I have arrived three hours early at the door of a well-to-do woman in her late 90s who has recently passed away. It is a beautiful old home on a quiet hydrangea-lined lane of gracious Tudors and Georgians. I immediately make sure to get my name on “the list.” Turns out, I’m a latecomer. The hard-core hunters arrive at one and two in the morning at a promising sale site and start “the list.” They then sleep in their cars outside the house. When newcomers arrive, they must knock on car windows to find out who is guarding “the list.” The lore is that down in Chicago, anyone trying to “jump the list” gets shot by one of the dealers. Up here in the suburbs, you just get yelled at and shunned. No one ever lets you on the list ever again.

When the sale begins, entry numbers are given in order of who is on the list. Arriving only three hours in advance, I am number 27, but this still leaves a lot of waiting-around time to talk. Other hunters will ask you casually what you are looking for, and some of this chit-chat is “fishing” to see what kind of competition you are and whether they’ll have to hustle to beat you to an item. I have “newbie” written all over me, but I know enough to shrug and vaguely comment, “Oh, this and that . . . nothing in particular.” (In reality, I am b-lining for a 6×9 oriental rug that I suspect has been way under-valued.) I in turn ask the preppy blonde mom to my left what she is looking for. “Well, you can tell from the online photos that this lady just loved yellow, so that’s basically why I’m here. I think that shows, you know, a positive attitude—to fill your house with yellow. So, I knew her stuff would feel good in my house.” I end up buying two 1920s yellow formal living room chairs and an entire 1950s white wrought-iron sun porch dining set with six yellow cushions.

On my various estate sale hunts, I routinely come across family Bibles, Books of Common Prayer, marriage licenses, old birth certificates, confirmation certificates, and First Holy Communion certificates with related memorabilia—all for sale. This surprised me at first because these seemed like intimate heirloom items that even retirees or the deceased’s family members would retain. But, in fact, these items appear fairly incidental and unremarkable in the topography of the seller’s home when compared to other carefully tended collections. In one home I sifted through, I found a few styles of Seder plates and menorahs in the dining room, mingled together in boxes with other holiday effects. I then turned the corner into the husband’s study and found it covered wall-to-wall in chest-high pillars of meticulously stacked Playboy magazines. It was like walking through one of those corn mazes we have here in the Midwest; this was a bumper crop of T&A as far as the eye could see. I marveled at the time and dedication it must have taken to amass this collection over the decades—the sheer devotion it took to obtain and retain each and every month of each and every year and to maintain it all in chronological order. The estate sale ad had said “downsizing sale,” so I knew that the seller was not deceased. I asked the estate sale monitor who was dutifully guarding the carefully curated playmates how someone could possibly part with something that had clearly been a decades-long devotion, involving so much of his life. He laughed and said, “He was really broken up about it. They’re moving down to Florida and the wife said that ‘the girls’ just couldn’t come. No room! But I think he rescued some favorites. I’ve been finding some gaps here and there, and this is not a guy who would be okay with gaps.” He then held up one of the covers and mimicked the playmate’s pouty-lipped face to express sympathy with the poor guy who had to leave “his girls” in order to follow his wife obediently down to a life of gray-haired retirement.

A few months into my estate sale crawl, I discovered that when sales are advertised as being a “real dig” or even “a bit of a dig,” this is code that the seller has been a something of a pathological collector along the lines of cartoonist R. Crumb. The old term for this was “pathological hoarding,” but the new and supposedly less pejorative term is “obsessive-compulsive collecting disorder.” The proposed description and diagnosis for this disorder in the upcoming fifth revised edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) offers the following description: “Persistent difficulty discarding or parting with possessions, regardless of the value others may attribute to these possessions. This difficulty is due to strong urges to save items and/or distress associated with discarding. The symptoms result in the accumulation of a large number of possessions that fill up and clutter active living areas of the home or workplace to the extent that their intended use is no longer possible. If all living areas are uncluttered, it is only because of the interventions of third parties (e.g., family members, cleaners, authorities). The symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning (including maintaining a safe environment for self and others).” I will confess that when it turned out that two of the three estate sale “digs” I first encountered happened to be the homes of retired college professors (seriously), I became a bit more self-conscious about my own home and office. On the other hand, that’s what we do—dig, sift, and collect; dig, sift, and collect. It is much neater and cleaner to focus on the self-evident realm of the religious—the family Bibles, the confirmation certificates, the menorahs, and the statues of Mary with the baby Jesus. I can compartmentalize and organize those things more readily. I know where to put them.

But what about the carefully kept shrines of tittie magazines and the holy sepulchres of Hummels? Where do I put them and the stories of their devotees? And what of the passing away of shrines over time, as with one woman’s reliquary of 165 pairs of fancy gloves, or closets stacked high with dusty embroidered linens—a vestige of holidays once celebrated in a way that no longer makes sense to most Americans. What was sacred once is no longer as lives shift and change and objects get discarded altogether, or they change hands and take on new meanings in new homes. Cast-off shamrocks that have lost their power in the U.S. take on a new life and become coveted symbolic treasures in their migration to Beijing tables. If, as Ray Browne has argued, popular culture studies are the “new humanities,” then what can cast-offs and collections tell us about American spiritualities and the religious dimensions of an ever-changing consumer culture?

I got a call late one Sunday night from an estate sale company letting me know that an antique library table I had put a low bid on never sold over the weekend, so my bid had won the item. I needed to pick it up immediately, as the house would be turned over to the new owners the following day. I arrived and picked up my prize table from the living room, and when I did, it left a dramatic pattern of the much-darker, much-older, presumably original floor finish it had been concealing beneath it. I was speculating on just how long this table had been sitting in the 90-plus-year-old woman’s home, when I realized that it rattled. Annoyed, I wondered what I had not seen in my initial inspection and worried about the drawer being broken. I brought the table home and when I took out the top drawer, I discovered the source of the rattle. At the very back of the drawer was what looked like a beautiful small hand-painted porcelain lady’s pillbox. When I opened it up, it turned out to be a small fancy matchbox instead. I tapped the antique gold-tipped matches into the palm of my hand and saw that there was a bit of folded paper lining the box. I opened it and read two words written on the slip of paper: “Yes. Promise.” In my romantic musings, I wondered if the box’s owner handed the little box to a suitor at a party to pass on this secret affirmative message (as in, “Yes. I’ll meet you. Promise.” Or, “Yes, I’ll marry you. Promise.”) or, perhaps this had been an issued mandate (“Yes. Take me away from all of this. Promise.”)

How many of us have shared the topics of our current research projects and heard the response, “But I thought you studied religion”? Scholars of religion must, and understandably so, appear at times to be compulsive collectors without rhyme or reason with our jumbled universe of sources creating a “bit of a dig.” Perhaps it is like being the R. Crumbs of Religious Studies. But, to paraphrase the DSM, “regardless of the value [the field] may attribute to these things,” and precisely because of the powerful meanings and stories people attach to them, these collections push our field to broaden, to move beyond the neatly-ordered Crate & Barrel versions that have conventionally defined our field to explore the recombinant culture of the estate sale. This kind of transgressive shift is always somewhat daunting. But it’s also exciting in the possibilities and yes, promise, it holds for reimaging what religion is, to naming it as the ultimate “remix culture.”

Of Coffee, Equations and the Scientific Sacred

I had just come from my undergraduate partial differential equations class and was in serious need of caffeine. We had completed our fourth straight day of lectures on the equations of a vibrating membrane. My head hurt and my hands where cramped from taking notes. Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) appear everywhere in mathematical physics. They provide scientists with the language to describe the evolution of collapsing clouds of interstellar gas, the nature of oscillating electromagnetic fields, and even the flow of traffic on a four-lane highway. By solving these equations in all their abstract glory the behavior of the real system can predicted, described, understood. It was very cool.

The going was tough though. Like constructing an invisible house of cards we had to spend the last few days building up a story based on theorems and postulates. Then, finally, we had enough background to really get started. The vibrating membrane was a general problem. The membrane could be a drumhead, the surface of a lake, or even the surface of a star. The professor taught us to use simple vibration patterns as a kind of grammar. He showed us how to add these simple patterns together and describe complex oscillations. Imagine, for example, the quick smack of a drumstick on a drum. Using what we had just learned we could, exactly and explicitly, describe every detail of the drumhead’s complex, evolving pattern of vibration by adding up lots of simple patterns.

I had filled up half a notebook with these four lectures. Now I was tired and needed a caffeine jolt. In the student cafeteria I got a Styrofoam cup, filled it up and the got in line to pay. In search of my wallet I put the cup down on an ice cream freezer. After extracting the needed $1.25, I reached for the cup and was stopped dead in my tracks. There it was, laid out with exquisite perfection, right in front of me.

The freezer was gently vibrating, set in motion by its small motor. Resting on the freezer, my coffee cup picked up these oscillations. On the coffee’s surface I saw the exact pattern I had just learned about in class. The ordered flow of the surface reflected florescent light from above revealing tiny circular ripples superimposed with crisscrossed radial stripes. The pattern was complex but ordered and stable. Ten minutes ago I had seen the exact same pattern represented as a long string of mathematical symbols or as a diagram drawn on graph paper. Now it was real. Now it was “true”. Suddenly the abstractions were alive for me. The mathematics was made manifest in motion. It was one of the most beautiful things I had seen or ever would see. There was a long moment before I was willing to exhale and get on my way. I had, in my way, just had encounter with the sacred character of human experience delivered to me through the prism of science.

Spirituality vs. The Sacred

“Spiritual But Not Religious” is the way many people describe themselves these days. It’s a term that drives a lot of others crazy. For those who happily describe themselves as religious, “Spiritual But Not Religious” can imply a dilution of faith and a rejection of the creed and doctrine which, for them, is an essential aspect of spiritual life.

Yet for people who happily describe themselves as atheist, “Spiritual But Not Religious” is a dodge—an attempt to get “the warm cozy feeling” of religious life without making the intellectual commitment to what they see as the central question: Does God exist?

Where should science lie on this spectrum of debate? Can someone still call themselves “spiritual” and hold fast to the principles of science?

Recently I participated in a Point of Inquiry podcast hosted by Chris Mooney that took on this question. I argued there (as I will here) that science is, indeed, an organic focus of the human sense of “spirit.” The key, of course, is that we must allow ourselves to adapt language to the living needs of those generations living now. But for me spirituality may not be the right word on which to focus this effort. The question is not one of science and spirituality but science and the sacred. For me thinking in terms of the sacred, or better yet what I call the sacred character of experience, provides a better frame for this discussion. As a practicing scientist (theoretical astrophysics), when I hear the word spiritual it leads to questions about the spirit as some kind of essence that lives above and beyond the world I study. If there is a spirit then I am forced to ask what is its origin and its dynamics—the same questions I would ask of any of the other “things” I have been trained to study. But turning to the sacred means a focus on experience and that changes the entire focus of the debate between science and “religion”.

First, lets deal with the oft-stated criticism that any attempt to adapt or enlarge language for new purposes represents nothing more than “invention.” If we are looking to avoid connotations of the supernatural—which I am—why try and use “sacred” to mean anything other than what people think it means: God. The answer is simple, even if there are a number of ways to reach it.

Every generation has the right, indeed the responsibility, to take the language it was given, listen to its resonances and use them for the purposes at hand. To do anything less would be to kill the language through atrophy. In a sense this is what scholar Elaine Pagels means when she talks about “creative misreading” of earlier texts in a religious tradition.

But there is another reason for turning to the “sacred” rather than the “spiritual” in a scientific age. It’s an old, old word whose roots are in Roman temple architecture. One meaning of “Sacer” is to be “set apart”. In Roman temples it meant the interior where visitors needed to be attentive to the needs of the gods. Outside the sacer you could do anything you wanted including selling walnuts or old 8-track tapes of the Commodores Greatest Hits. Inside however you were expected to pay attention to a different quality of experience.

The concept of attention in this context is key. Attention and the sacred always go together which is why 20th century scholars of religion like Mircea Eliade emphasized the sacred in their attempts to describe its vital role in the 50,000-year history of human culture.

For Eliade the sacred was an experience, it was the eruption of a certain kind of attention, a certain kind of position with respect to the world. The sacred often appears to us in the middle of our “profane” everyday activities. We are taking a walk in the park thinking about what we have to do tomorrow and—bam!—suddenly we see the breathtaking tangle of vines curling around a tree or the deep stillness of the robin sitting attentive on its branch. This shift in attention is exactly what happened to me that day in the cafeteria. I was just buying a cup of coffee but my experience was suddenly, radically transformed when my attention was shifted through the lens of the science I had just learned. The breathless excitement that overwhelmed me (and I had not even touched the coffee yet) came because I felt as though I was seeing the invisible superstructure of the world laid before me even in the most humble of objects. Science—specifically the mathematical physics of elastic surfaces—made that experience of the sacred possible.

Eliade’s point was that much of human history has been the attempt to cultivate such experiences, to draw them out and bring them closer. Their efficacy is why the best of our churches, temples and mosques harbor a profound quiet and stillness that even an atheist like me can feel. The construction of those buildings reflects not only awful power politics and all it entails, these temples also contain our ancient and ongoing attempt to evoke the sacred in the world. If they didn’t, the populations institutional religion so often sought to control would never have shown up. Eliade has rightfully been criticized for implying a universalism to all those experiences. There are differences between cultures and ages, and those differences are important. But as writers like Wendy Doniger in The Implied Spider has shown, difference need not force away unity. As a scientist I know the world always pushes back and our response to the world—including the sacred character of experience—is one way it pushes back into us.

Eliade even had a word for the experience I had that day: hierophany. This was his expression for the eruption of the sacred into our lives. Just as an epiphany can relate to ideas, a hierophany relates to experience—the experience of the sacred.

It is at this point that we can see the connection, and the usefulness, of the sacred to a world saturated with the fruits of science. For all its usefulness in developing technology, science is elementally a path to hierophany. The insight and all-embracing vision of life (and cosmos) so apparent though science is also gateway to the experience of the sacred.

It always has been.

From the Pythagorean Brotherhood’s contemplation of mathematical beauty to Kepler’s elation on finding the true geometric form of planetary motion, science has provided us with experiences of the world as sacred. It is an experience that is not reserved for scientists.

The fruits of science manifest in culture in many ways: from HST images to the narratives of life’s origin. These fruits are often presented in a way that is meant to explicitly invoke that “oceanic feeling,” as Freud would call it. From NOVA programs to IMAX movies, we are often given our culture’s pathway to experience the sacred through science. If we cannot immediately recognize that science plays this role as hierophanic pathway in culture it is only because we have been steeped in a polarization between fundamentalist religion and science for so long that we have been trained not to see it.

The reflexive rejection of words like sacred by many who reject institutional religion is misguided. It is, without a doubt, true that a great and real danger we face today is the rejection of science by religious literalism. But to ignore the essential aspect of being human in these experiences—called sacred by some and spiritual by others—is to miss the ancient resonance in these words. They are, in their essence, atoms of a poetry to which we have always responded.

In this remarkable historical moment we face existential challenges that demand an informed deployment of science. In response, the question before us becomes how to marshal the resonance in words like “sacred.” We will, without doubt, need its poetics as we build the next version of culture our evolution now demands. Science reveals an elemental poetry in the world that has always been experienced as a hierophany. That essentially aesthetic economy of form and relation must now be recognized for what it is and what it always has been—a gateway to the sacred character of our own, inmost experience.

“Always have a deep sense of connection to the past, a subversive memory that constitutes wind at your back. You are who you are because somebody loved you, somebody cared for you, somebody attended to you. Make sure that love flows through you, that’s what it means to keep love on the one.”
- Cornel West and Bootsy Collins, “Freedumb,” The Funk Capital of the World (2011)

Sometime in 1886 a woman named Myrtle Fillmore attended a lecture by the Christian Science practitioner Eugene B. Weeks. Myrtle suffered from numerous physical infirmities, including tuberculosis and incessant hemorrhoids, and it was in part these maladies that brought her to Weeks’ lecture. Her husband Charles, a Kansas City real estate man, left the event unimpressed, but Myrtle was inspired by this affirmation: “I am a child of God and so I do not inherit illness.” After several months of prayer and repetition of that affirmation, Myrtle believed that she had healed herself of her afflictions. She used a new form of knowledge to recreate her relationship with the divine and, consequentially, to recreate her relationship with her body. Scholars of American religion now usually call that knowledge “New Thought.”

Eventually Myrtle convinced Charles of what she had learned. He would then use the techniques to heal himself of the long-term effects of a childhood hip and leg injury. Together with Myrtle, he would begin a healing practice, treating people in the Kansas City area with their New Thought techniques. By 1890, Charles’ real estate business had begun to decline, and their healing practice had experienced some success. They decided to publish a magazine, first titled Modern Thought but soon becoming Unity Magazine, and with that act of print culture they inaugurated what would soon be known as the Unity School of Christianity. Unity claimed, at least in its early years, that individuals possessed spiritual union with the divine if and when they possessed physical well-being in the material world. It became Myrtle and Charles Fillmore’s mission to create and propagate a community focused on such a union. And their mission worked, as prayer groups begat churches, which begat associations, which begat the denominational structure that Unity operates by today.

The Fillmores were also especially able to align their emerging Protestant community with market forces, and to that end they quickly institutionalized their healing experiences in order to have the widest reach possible. The magazine started as a sort of Reader’s Digest of the New Thought movement. In their thought the Fillmores incorporated many early-twentieth century Protestant practices and norms, including prayer meetings, educational facilities, and a focus on the Bible as a source of religious authority. As the movement continued to develop, other people involved with Unity created a ministers’ association to authorize ministerial licensure and standardize the movement’s teachings. Other early bodily practices, such as vegetarianism and (briefly and obliquely) sexual abstinence, focused practitioners on recreating the material body as a spiritual body. While Unity was not unique in any of its recommendations, its fusion of metaphysical ideas and Protestant practices was. Myrtle and Charles Fillmore were American spiritual seekers who recognized and appreciated their past, their culture, and the role of community in authenticating experience.

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James insisted that the individual’s feelings were the root of religion and that the tenets, rituals, and institutions of religion were but later additions that could only echo the true experience. For James, the real religious experience is ineffable, noetic, transient, and passive, all characteristics that could only be verified by the individual claiming the experience. What is fascinating about Unity is the way that it connected individual rituals with community contexts, how it conjoined the priesthood of all believers with a highly individuated metaphysics. In some sense, Unity sought to institutionalize the kinds of experiences so celebrated in James’ diagnosis of the healthy-minded.

The making of community is to me a fascinating and complicated element of any description of spirituality. Do contemporary American spiritual seekers enact spirituality by forming communities? I think one can make a convincing argument that the various new paradigm communities foster a contemporary American spirituality not unlike the Fillmores. Unitarian Universalists and liberal Mennonites qualify as spiritual seekers who are concerned with their communities and their relationships with the surrounding culture. In fact, I suspect that many of the members of more conventional religious groups would insist upon the very spiritual nature of their religious lives. Courtney Bender’s The New Metaphysicals (2010) demonstrates how even those seekers who most disavow institutional life do so on the premise of previous institutional conceptions and organizational structures.

The popular understanding of American spirituality is the claim that the authentic discovery of one’s relationship with the larger world is a project entirely undertaken by an autonomous individual who freely chooses any philosophy or practice that seems to fit their particular life journey. For many spiritual seekers—those religious “nones” who confuse sociological survey—community itself is anathema to authentic religious experience. One need only observe the continuing use of the extremely problematic concept of “brainwashing” in reference to religious communities with which a person disagrees to understand the extent to which Americans believe that authentic religious experience can only be had or adjudicated by an individual independent of social pressure or community ritual. Spirituality is a proxy for our vision of who we wish to be, and today autonomy seems to be the superior ambition. Yet even as this is so, communities do perpetuate themselves, on terms not merely religious but also spiritual.

Today, Unity churches might house Protestant-style Sunday services, complete with choirs and sermons, Buddhist meditation groups, self-help practices, youth groups, community service initiatives, singles’ nights, and ad hoc discussion groups on any number of spiritual topics, frequently all under the same roof and under the auspices of a trained and licensed Unity minister. A sophisticated web site allows individuals to explore Unity on their own, while also presenting opportunities for community interactions. For most Unity adherents, the spiritual life is one of seeking and exploration, but one done under the aegis of a community of faith.

At ten years of age I walked onto a large, grassy field at Colorado State University where the kids in my summer camp were already playing. A few of them recognized me from previous years and ran up to greet me. Strangely, they did not say, “Hello, how are you?” Rather, they opened our summer with a direct inquiry that challenged my coolness: “Have you seen Star Wars yet?!”

It always sucks to be the last one in on something, and I had to confess that I had no idea what they were talking about. My friends began to explain how there were lasers and spaceships and a really bad guy named “Death Invader” or some such. Before long, one of the camp leaders came over and he too began excitedly trying to explain the film to me. It sounded like the strangest, most mysterious, magical thing I could imagine.

I immediately went home and convinced my mother of the dire magnitude of the situation. By the time I actually saw the movie a few days later, I had the key names memorized, and had a working familiarity with the “death star” space station and something about a “life saver” laser sword. I learned this without McDonalds franchising. Now, thirtysomething years later my six-year-old daughter has her own plastic light saber, a Clone Wars lunchbox, and a Lego® Echo Base Station. She can also talk a good Wookie. All this knowledge even though she’s never seen any of the films. We’ve become so much more efficient at acquiring our mythologies in the thirty-five years since the original.

The Auratic Galactic

Star Wars proves that Walter Benjamin might have been wrong when he argued that the aura of art withers when artworks are mass reproduced. Benjamin’s idea was that artworks (particularly those before photography and film) could possess a presence that was seemingly natural despite its socially constructed setting. There’s only one Mona Lisa, only one leaning tower of Pisa, and people travel to bask in the particular space and time of their highly charged presence. For Benjamin, the power of this locatable “authenticity” was not so much intrinsic to a unique artwork, but was created through collective, social feeling. This was often evoked through ritual, pulling viewers toward that feeling from great distances.

Film was supposed to change all that, as feature films would arrive “at a theater near you.” The unique, authentic appearance of the work of art was dispersed across theaters, throughout time and space, and thus an aura could not surround one singular, unique, separate work. The journey was now proximate, and mass distributed. What authenticity was there in that?

Films like Star Wars confirm that some semblance of an aura is alive and well in this dispersed, postmodern, postindustrial world. These films tell us something too about our ongoing desire for the sacred mysteries and ritualistic events that, increasingly, have been fulfilled by mass media for masses of people. Here, even when a film is shown and watched in theaters around the world (i.e., there is no “one” Star Wars) an aura has been established around some seemingly single work of art, at least one that many people can collectively discuss. Each of us hundred million or so who have seen the original or sequel Star Wars films in our own places and times, respond, react, and register our own likes and dislikes across continents and generations.

When new installments of the Star Wars series have been released, thousands of people in all corners of the globe have set up camp for days at a time outside the box office waiting for tickets to go on sale, dressing in appropriate costumes, and speaking in intergalactic lingo to their fellow fans camped out alongside them, and basically having a good time in their neo-rituals. Others plan for Star Wars theme weddings and bar mitzvoth (like Mark Zuckerberg). And when the 2001 Australian national census resulted in 70,000+ people marking “Jedi” as their religion, Chris Brennan, director of the Star Wars Appreciation Society of Australia, responded, “This was a way for people to say, ‘I want to be part of a movie universe I love so much.’” Fans declare their allegiance to an alternate reality, one posited to be in contradistinction to mechanically reproducible office cubicles, mortgage installments, and traffic commutes. The mass distribution of Star Wars does nothing to diminish its aura—if anything, it offers a new terrain to diagnose the sacred and profane of their postindustrial lives.

Mythical Mashup

The “camp” where the Star Wars aura began for me in the summer of ’77 was really a two-week babysitter as our parents attended talks and sessions as part of “staff training.” This was the annual gathering of Campus Crusade for Christ staff members from around the world. In other words, my primal cinematic experience occurred in the midst of a bastion of a budding brand of evangelicalism, just then filtering across the country. Many of these evangelicals had been to the conservative-Christianity-meets-pop-culture event called Explo ’72. Many of them were interested in the “born-again” Democrat Jimmy Carter, then in office, but had yet to fall under the spell of thespian-evangelical trickster, Ronald Reagan.

Nobody seemed to care much about the potential theo-politics of Star Wars. Only a few seemed to identify usable theology in it. Some deployed the film to repeat Christian-sounding messages (The Force is God), or to capitalize on the mythic parallels between Obi-Wan and John the Baptist, Luke Skywalker and Christ, Darth Vader and Satan. Even the original movie posters displayed a distinctly Renaissance Christian iconography with Luke and cruciform light saber forming the apex of the triune-triangle, Leia as Mary, the droids in a Johannine stance, and Vader pervades the background in a Fatherly role.

There’s something about Star Wars that triggers a variety of religious experiences, from sci-fi eager adolescent male to warrior evangelical. In part, this is because it participates in the ongoing process of remythologizing, or what I’ve elsewhere called a mythical mashup. Myths only last if they are retold and acted out through ritual, updated for a new day and age. An old story is mixed with a few other old stories as it is retold, repackaged, and repurposed, resulting in something both familiar but also brand new.

George Lucas and his film participate in such mythical mashings. At first look, Star Wars seemed wholly new even as we quickly recognize the elements of the story: damsel in distress, a young hero-to-be whose family is killed, wise elder, and some talkative sidekicks. Lucas right away gets the nuances of myth right, starting with the opening epigraph: “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away . . . ” which conjures up the ambiguous setting of so many lasting stories, of “Once upon a time, in an enchanted forest,” and “In the beginning . . .” All such stories, when well told, give us the time and place setting, but are likewise not so clear about it all: how long, exactly, is “a long time ago”? Ten thousand years? Or, maybe just ten minutes if you’re my daughter in the car running errands. At the same time, Lucas pushed the technology and computer-generated imagery in unheard of new ways, but he also continually came back to the decidedly low-tech: farmers in a desert clime, a jazz bar, meeting up with traveling merchants, and the interaction with other seemingly carbon-based life forms. A good myth has gotta be out of this world just as it is graspable in the here and now. There is a delicate balance of push and pull between familiar and strange that stands at the heart of good stories, and thus good myths.

In turn, the new mashup then takes its place within cultural tradition, becoming part of the mythical storehouse that we collectively cull from in the ongoing religious processes of world making. That the Star Wars films have become so firmly embedded in the U.S. mythological fabric is evident in a variety of venues. With the emergence of The Phantom Menace (“Episode I”) in 1999, the conservative Christian publication The World ran a cover story and follow up essays looking slightly askew at the “spirituality” of George Lucas, and the relations of the films to political, cultural, and religious life today. Meanwhile, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum ran an exhibition, “Star Wars: The Magic of Myth,” confirming the importance of inspiring hero myths as a subject of cultural science. In its displays, the Smithsonian tracked how the Star Wars films have been able to construct origin stories for young aspiring astronauts, space travelers, and the like. Along the way, books by respectable publishers bear titles like: Star Wars and Philosophy, The Dharma of Star Wars, The Tao of Star Wars, Star Wars Jesus: A Spiritual Commentary on the Reality of the Force, and The Gospel According to Star Wars. Cultural, religious, and philosophical works have drawn on the power of the films to make connections with the lives of people in the here and now.

One example makes the point particularly clear. Sal Paolantonio’s book, How Football Explains America, discusses how that sport creates a uniquely United States mythology. Quarterbacks, the ESPN correspondent says, are heroes in the classical sense. But rather than using, say, Perseus or Heracles as points of comparison, he says quarterbacks are heroes because they are like Luke Skywalker. Thirty years ago some critics and scholars were at pains to show how Luke Skywalker embodied the hero myth. Now, Luke Skywalker simply becomes a hero. Popular culture has become mythic certitude. The aura has become incorporated.

To this day, I can talk with people roughly my age and we can recount where we were (and thus, say something about who we were) on the summer of Star Wars, thirty-five years ago now. A twinkle emerges in our eyes as we talk about “our firsts” with regard the film, a remembrance of things past: the fresh sounds of swooshing light sabers, the bright colored laser beams, James Earl Jones’ voice as Darth Vader, Leia’s hair buns, a young Harrison Ford’s cheeky rejoinders. It is a civil mythology for a civil religious culture.

I lied to a dying man, although I meant every word. It’s a strange thing, to say you intend to do something that you don’t really intend to do, yet feeling as though the words themselves are embraced in such uncompromised truth that they actually exceed their indexical meaning. If there is spirituality in promises, prayers, and praise, can there also be spirituality in the excellence of the lie?

I had known Phil for barely over a year, while doing ethnographic research with evangelicals in Knoxville, Tennessee. We became close friends, despite a four-decade generation gap and even wider cultural differences. I was a New York academic with an agenda; a secular Jew sojourning in the lives of church folk. Phil was a committed Christian, with a lifelong dedication to his church and a passion for ministries of evangelization. He was an endearingly calm, quick-witted Tennessean, and an ebullient father and grandfather. When I met him, he was already fighting for his life.

The lymphoma that eventually killed him was gaining ground, and Phil was undergoing a series of chemo treatments at a local hospital. He had a steady, seemingly endless stream of visitors; family, friends, coworkers. On the afternoon I visited he was uncharacteristically alone, but characteristically upbeat and talkative. As I approached his bed he sat up and smiled, barely showing a hint of fatigue or concern. “This sucks,” I said, gesturing at the wires, tubes, and monitors that surrounded him but clearly referring to something more. He tilted his head back and laughed. “Yeah, it does kinda suck,” he said, still smiling, “Thank you! You’re the first person to come out and say it since I’ve been here.”

We talked for several minutes, perhaps an hour, mostly about news and gossip in the community. We talked about my research, which Phil supported by helping me make contacts among local pastors and churchgoers and putting a little friendly pressure on those who never invited me to their Bible study groups. I used to joke with Phil that he was like “my personal mob boss” in the church. On more than one occasion he turned the table, calling me his “personal rabbi.” It was novelty that drew us to friendship in the first place; it was a shared sense of humor that kept us there.

As I prepared to leave Phil’s bedside that afternoon my heart was heavy and my hands turned cold. I knew what I was about to say. I didn’t plan it ahead of time, but I could see it coming and chose not to stand in its way. In my relations with people who were part of my research, I never wanted to feel like I misled or deceived anyone. But this instant just felt different. It called for something novel.

“I’ll pray for you.”

I said it.

Phil stared back stunned. In those fleeting seconds I imagine he was both shocked and pleased: There was hope for me yet. He was never the kind of guy to be smug or self-congratulatory about such a thought. There was undoubtedly a part of Phil that reveled in my words, but he was far too mature in character, and in his faith, to have settled on a triumphal reading of our exchange, as though my spiritual indifference was finally conquered and that was that.

And what of my character? I lied. I told someone that I would do something for him that I could not do. I didn’t plan to set aside time to petition God on Phil’s behalf, or “lift him up” as evangelicals say, at least not in any way consistent in form or content with the prayer practices of the faithful. Perhaps I should have simply said, “I’ll keep you in my thoughts, Phil”? Why even invite the pretense of religiosity? Was I so eager to make Phil happy? Did I think my words, my simple unexpected words, could actually save him?

The fact is, by telling Phil that I would pray for him I spoke something of an indirect truth. My sincerity rested not in the content of the statement but rather the sentiment that inspired it. It was a sentiment that called out to be expressed in prefabricated words, conveyed in what for me were new wineskins (to put it biblically). I wanted to enter a new level of social exchange, to give him an inalienable gift, however disquieting and self-alienating it may have felt. I wanted him to know that I cared about him that much.

In this sense I was perhaps more like Phil and his churchgoing friends than I had ever been before. Prayer is an act of private supplication and public worship, but that is not all it is. Prayer is an artifact of value, something given and received. It can circulate among friends and strangers like currency, sometimes in the form of an act, often in the form of a promise. “I’ll pray for you.” The words invoke piety, but they also signify sociality. They cannot be empty words. They have the power to create bonds, to forge narratives of belonging, to convey or reciprocate emotions. I suspect I’m not the first person to say those words without meaning them in a literal sense. There are many self-aware evangelicals, for example, who could probably admit to neglecting promised prayers at one point or another in their lives, either by failing to make time or forgetting altogether. But that’s not my main point. That’s not really the point at all.

I am often asked if I was ever moved spiritually during my fieldwork, whether I experienced a “God moment” akin to that famously described by Susan Harding, when she suddenly found herself interpellated by the conversionist discourse of her fundamentalist-Baptist interlocutors. Of course, such questions usually rely on assumptions as various as they are loaded, with regard to what exactly constitutes a “spiritual” experience. Nonetheless, on most occasions I feel obliged to respond in the negative. While I certainly experienced profound revelatory episodes, uncanny coincidences, and flashes of emotion with visceral intensity that I could have internalized in a spiritual idiom, I rarely felt inclined or compelled to do so. This response may be well received by certain scholars who would applaud me for holding my ground, for not allowing myself to “cross a line” from an intellectual position posited to be secular to the faith of my subjects. But that would be a misguided conclusion, misguided in that it presumes that the line between belief and disbelief (or better yet, between those who pray and mean it and those who don’t pray at all) is the only line there is to be crossed.

The reality is that there are many lines that can be crossed when an avowedly non-spiritual person interacts with “people of faith,” and not all of them have to do with spirituality as conventionally understood. Lines of sociality—that is, the terms of when and how we perform our relational affinities with other people—make up an intrinsic part of what it means to be evangelical. For all their individualist rhetoric, evangelicals are often intensely social people, who celebrate and affirm their interpersonal bonds with routine diligence. Negotiating those lines offers a different point of entry into the realm of evangelical spirituality, a moral disposition that, among other things, relies on the richly paradoxical claim of privileging “relationships over religion.”

So while I may not have flirted with conviction in theological terms, I explored a space of indeterminacy that in my experience was no less implicating. When I “lied” to Phil about praying for him I did not separate myself from his religious world, as one might critically accuse me of doing, so much as adopt a communicative cue derived from a mode of religious sociality in which stated affections, expectations, and courtesies—indeed, words themselves—provide the channels through which “authentic” spirituality is made to appear real and tangible.

Maybe I’m deceiving myself. Maybe I’ve done little more than try to resolve an ethical lapse with an intellectual conceit, a half-truth at best. Or maybe, as opposed to centuries of Christian teachings insistent on transparency and objective sincerity in religious language (as Webb Keane has described), there are parallel, unspoken values attached to the art of well-intentioned words. Maybe Phil really knew what I really meant, and if he were still alive would understand why the memory of that afternoon both exhilarates and haunts me. Maybe I’m praying for him right now.

The author is a doppelganger. Even better on the screen, lit up, big-time circulating word-wide, worldwide, s-i-m-u-l-t-a-n-e-o-u-s-l-y m-a-n-i-f-e-s-t-i-n-g. Illusion of coherence, this: neat and tidy on the screen, a well reasoned argument.

I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world, and I remember Nadja.

Nadja, four-times removed: 1. Somebody—which is to say, some body, allegedly—female in Paris, purportedly mad, institutionalized, the object of Surrealist André Breton’s obsession; 2. the main character in Breton’s 1928 novel Nadja, and by that fact immortalized, big-time circulating, simultaneously manifesting; 3. the ghost that haunted (in bodily time) or haunts (in doppelganger time) André Breton—either in Paris, or in the novel, or both—after he breaks off their 10-day rendezvous because Breton can not live with the thought of her as some body; 4. an introductory trope to this reflection (on automatic writing) that took on a life of its own the moment I began to yawp over the roofs of the world.

Qui suis-je?

Who am I?

Who wrote that?

Breton—transfixed by Nadja’s stream-of-consciousness, allegedly irrational, thought-words/thought-worlds—as the opening sentence of Nadja—and now “I”, coming to here underneath this blinking cursor that no longer exists as you read about it now on the big screen lit up (once upon a time, which is to say before time as we now experience it, I could have written on the page—which is to say, on the way to nowhere in particular, or everywhere in general, but here we are now, whatever this might mean, exactly.)

Good question, this qui suis-je. And might we not add as well, où? Where are we, exactly, now, anyway, tossed about, swaying side-to-side, undulating in the midst of this chaotic sea of words, electronic information, simultaneously glowing gigabytes, white hot, magic discourse, published or perished or polished or not?

Here are our thoughts, voyagers’ thoughts,
Here not the land, firm land, alone appears, may then by them be said,
The sky o’erarches here, we feel the undulating deck beneath our feet,
We feel the long pulsation, ebb and flow of endless motion,
The tones of unseen mystery, the vague and vast suggestions of the
briny world, the liquid-flowing syllables,
The perfume, the faint creaking of the cordage, the melancholy rhythm,
The boundless vista and the horizon far and dim are all here,
And this is ocean’s poem.

But where was I? Breton likened his own fascination with Nadja to Dr. Theodore Flournoy’s infatuation with Hélène Smith (née Catherine-Elise Muller), that automatic writer (and Surrealist darling, and Spiritualist medium, and later Christian visionary) who left her body in flights to Mars, bringing back the Martian language to Earth, speaking to Flournoy in Martian, writing down the alphabet of Mars for scholars to ponder.

And who wrote that?

The psychologist Flournoy wrote about Smith and her Martian travels in his Des Indes à la Planete Mars—“From India to the Planet Mars”—published in 1900. No automatic writer he, Flournoy shielded us all from Smith’s madness by explaining the visions—i-n-f-a-n-t-i-l-e r-e-g-r-e-s-s-i-o-n—mercifully providing an illusion of coherence, which is to say a reason, for all of the babble. Thanks to Smith’s own magic, the wily Flournoy entered into the stream-of-printed-consciousness as a rational doppelganger-subject.

Cease now the endless flow of motion!

But it is far too late for that. The automatic writing has been mushrooming, fragmenting, overwhelming, and recombining for a very long time now. I remember John Ballou Newbrough, who in 1880 saw a strange light envelop his hands as he held them over a manual typewriter. The next thing he knew, a manuscript began to write itself. It was Oahspe: a New Bible in the Words of Jehovah and his Angel Embassadors [sic]. (A Sacred History of the Dominions of the Higher and Lower Heavens of the Earth for the Past Twenty-Four Thousand Years, together with a Synopsis of the Cosmogony of the Universe; the Creation of Planets; the Creation of Man; the Unseen Worlds; the Labor and Glory of Gods and Goddesses in the Etherean Heavens; with the New Commandments of Jehovah to Man of the present Day. With Revelations from the Second Resurrection, Formed in Words in the Thirty Third Year of the Kosmon Era.) I remember Andrew Jackson Davis, who in 1845 lapsed into mesmeric trance at the hands of his operator S.S. Lyons. Two years later, the paradigmatic made-in-America metaphysical text appeared in print, “by and through” Davis. It was entitled The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind (In Three Parts. Part First. Any theory, hypothesis, philosophy, sect, creed, or institution, that fears investigation, openly manifests its own error. Part Second. Reason is a flower of the spirit, and its fragrance is liberty and knowledge. Part Third. When distributive justice pervades the social world, virtue and morality will bloom with an immortal beauty: while the Sun of Righteousness will arise in the horizon of universal industry, and shed its genial rays over all the fields of peace, plenty, and HUMAN HAPPINESS!) I remember the Admiral of the Ocean Sea and the pre-1492 oikoumene cosmic-world-map before it exploded, supernova-like, into a multitude of worlds. I remember Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg and the Word before it erupted, Vesuvius-like, into a googolplex of words.

I write, “I.” Scribo ergo sum: the only way to be, coherently, worldwide, amid this raging molten meltdown.

You vapors, I think I have risen with you, moved away to distant
continents, and fallen down there, for reasons,
I think I have blown with you you winds;
You waters I have finger’d every shore with you,
I have run through what any river or strait of the globe has run through,
I have taken my stand on the bases of peninsulas and on the high
embedded rocks…

Neat and tidy on the screen, some semblance of form still remains, which is to say this glowing white rectangle, this body of yours slouched in a chair, my body nowhere to be found in this doppelganger-ether-ghost, automatic-Martian-author-voice, simultaneously-manifesting, which is to say, now is as good as any time to break from the stream, the other doppelgangers notwithstanding, and may automatic writing be praised forevermore.