Christianity — you’re soaking in it!
by Alex
A new piece of mine, “Christianity — you’re soaking in it!”:http://insidehighered.com/views/2006/11/02/golub is now up at Inside Higher Ed. Let he who has ears hear.
A new piece of mine, “Christianity — you’re soaking in it!”:http://insidehighered.com/views/2006/11/02/golub is now up at Inside Higher Ed. Let he who has ears hear.
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I’m really irritated that I didn’t know that Pentecost was Shavuot. Mea culpa.
Love it! Love especially that we do basically the same lecture in entirely different contexts. Though I’m sure you do a much better job at it. And I would imagine that you can’t literally hear — as I do — the critical faculties in your students shut down and power off the minute they figure out that you’re going to discuss Christianity from an academic perspective.
Alex, do you ever get folks like myself who are completely devoid of faith? Just curious. IBM
I get a lot of students who are devoid of faith for different reasons. Some were not raised religious. Some were raised in a very minimalist household which thinks that Christmas is just ‘American’ and not Christian — for them that exercise helps them figure out what exactly counts as ‘culture’ and ‘religion’ (another classical topic). What I find surprising is how few of my students ‘fess up to using their college years to revolt against their Christian, heteronormative childhoods and look for new identities. My impression — which is entirely impressionistic — is that the kind of identity experimentation my students do tend more towards an awakening or return to religion rather than reacting against it. That was certainly not what I was expecting to find.
Awakening or return to religion may be a station on the road to becoming an anthropologist. In my own case, being a smart-ass kid raised in a pious Lutheran home set off a search for meaning that led through philosophy to anthropology and a dissertation on Daoist magic. The undergraduate years included a lot of theology (Barth, Tillich) as well as philosophy of science (Ayer, Quine, Hempel, etc.). In those days I would have dearly loved to take your course.
It has been a long time since I have been a Christian, a Catholic precisely. However, I have that background. (My first secular education was boot camp.)
My primary education was unabashedly Catholic. Geography toured the world always with notation to Catholic communities everywhere. The frame circumstances of the fiction in our readers were Catholic. Nonetheless, before high school I had a clear knowledge of Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism and to a lesser extent, Islam.( It’s weakness was animism, or however one can classify indigenous pre-literate beliefs. That was casually dismissed as devil worship.) I can recognize now the knowledge of other literate religious traditions I was given was, at a simpler level, quite accurate. It isn’t as if they didn’t take a stand. They laid into the caste system of Hinduism because it was wrong. They communicated a profound admiration for Gandhi because he was right.
Most importantly, they did not gloss over the existence of evil. I knew, in explicit detail, most of what I now know about the racialist Nazi death camps by the time I was twelve. Further, with the sexuality of some of the sins deleted, I got a pretty good schooling in the evils of many of the popes. One sixth grade teacher told us that largely wars occur to protect and increase the wealth of the wealthy. A consistent note to the ‘do not set false gods before me’ phrase in the first of the ten commandments was that for us that temptation would be Money. They were straightforward about how feast days were chosen, frequently because they paralleled pagan rituals at those dates. That sixth grade nun remains the single best teacher I have ever known. I think it is meaningful that the second best teacher I have ever known was a rabbi.
Okay, this meanders a bit, but I have an educated awareness of religions as things of consciousness and decision. Indeed it was a principal that the real sin of thoughtless actions are in that they are thoughtless. Okay, I am a liturgy junkie of a sort, too. The greatest music I say, as well as most of the greatest structural and plastic arts were formed by Christians for Christian purposes. (I think the pinnacle of Western Civilization is the passage in Bach’s Mass in B-minor, ‘and on earth peace, good will towards men’ as performed by the Robert Shaw Chorale and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.) Being a post-Christian, the things I most treasure are those artifacts and some of its cultural structures, like the university. But these are, to the religion itself, epiphenomenal. What is important is ‘is it true?’
So I’m coming from an almost medieval, which is to say rational awareness and one that would count the social sciences as drivel, seeing behaviour as meaningless or, rather, as merely animal; and seeing decisions and actions as what is meaningful. This is pretty much the attitude of higher religions.
Anyway, I’d like to take the course. Anthropology is something I respect, but I’m inclined to think it antithetical to and possibly incapable of addressing Religion.
I’ve written more than I intended but you’re someone that I’d find a further correspondence with on these matters interesting.
Alex, Henry Nelson here. Congratulations. Marriage, a real job. Good luck with Mr Dawkin. You will need it. But then I never doubted your courage.
Henry