Month: August 2010

Defining spirituality can be "like shoveling fog" but the Immanent Frame examines a resurgent group: the Spiritual But Not Religious. Is the religious right the cause?

The extent to which eschewing traditional religious teachings and practices has become “cool” in the present era is in part a legacy of the 1960s (when being countercultural became oddly de rigueur in certain circles), as well as a disorganized but palpable backlash against the moral absolutism of the religious Right…

How might SBNR individuals translate their belief systems, values, and practices into political attitudes and behaviors? I would like to posit several working hypotheses on this front, but first I wish to echo Joel Robbins’s assertion that the “metaphysicals” about whom Bender writes “understand their social lives in non-social terms.” We must approach the study of SBNR Americans with the understanding that (for the most part) they forego participation in the most common mode of social interaction in the United States: conventional religious worship. Thus, they voluntarily absent themselves from the social networks fostered in and by congregations and hence fail to receive the politically charged messages that many clergy deliver. This lack of connectedness, combined with the evident desire of SBNR persons to forge their own way in the world, outside of the rigid social and cultural boundaries that traditional religion tends to erect, suggests to me that SBNR Americans are unlikely to have any semblance of a clear or systematic political agenda.

That sounds about right to me. And it is the politicization of organized religion that has caused so many who are interested in the spiritual to abandon it. Because that politicization is mainly on the right, many of the SBNRs come off as liberal/liberaltarian in their views.

One thing worth noting: this is not new in American faith. Mysticism and individualism were core to the founders of this magazine. What, after all, was Emerson but a SBNR?

A reader writes:

Gingrich seems determined to drag Saudi intolerance into the debate over the Cordoba Center.  I’ll bite.  Three years ago, I was studying in Israel and took a trip to Beirut to see the city for myself.  There I encountered the Magen Avraham Synogogue in Wadi Abu Jamil, a neighborhood that used to be the Jewish Quarter in Beirut.  The synagogue was dilapidated and decrepit.  Plants grew through the floor and the building looked as if it were about to fall apart.
 
Recently, with Hezbollah approval, what remains of the Lebanese Jewish community and several outside sources have begun a restoration project.  You can read about the project here and here.  You can follow it on facebook here.  If even Hezbollah allows a synagogue to be built in Beirut, maybe Gingrich should lay off the mosque in lower Manhattan.  Surely that’s not too high a standard.

 But how many primary voters would it win over?

Bainbridge mulls it. More here.

Bourg Bruche, France, 3.19 pm

Bookslut reviews Sex At Dawn. A criticism:

Mute the power-of-biology stuff … If our current sexual behavior is culturally flexible, as you rightly note, it cannot also be “powerless against our prehistoric predilections.” To ask, “If the nuclear triad is so deeply embedded in our nature, why are fewer and fewer of us choosing to live that way?” makes as little sense as to ask why, if meat-eating and hunting marked our past, more and more of us are choosing to do neither now.   

William Eamon provides a history:

Early modern curiosity was insatiable, never content with a single experience or object. Whereas Augustine linked curiosity to sensual lust and human depravity, Renaissance natural philosophers saw it as being driven by wonder and the engine of discovery.

We've been over this ground before.

(Hat tip: Morbid Anatomy)

Scott Adams shares his view of stress:

My theory is that stress is a universal constant. If you have less of it at any given moment, then other people must be taking on more to balance things out. For example, let's say you go on vacation. While you're on the beach, your coworkers are trying to handle their own workload plus the projects you left behind. You haven't reduced stress; you've simply transferred it to your coworkers. And if you work alone, as I do, you can frontload your stress to get ahead of deadlines, but you can't reduce the total amount.

And what if your deadline is always 20 minutes away? Have a great week off, Patrick.

The Prop 8 ruling prompts Ayelet Waldman to describe her summer reading:

I reread another book, A Happy Marriage, by Rafael Yglesias. (father, incidentally, of Matthew). This book, published last year, is a devastating and beautiful novel about a long marriage, one that goes through periods of great passion, and periods when it seems love is gone. The novel is structured around the dying and death of the wife, Margaret, from cancer, and is told from the point of view of the husband. We see these two when they are impossibly young, in their very early 20s, and decades later, when he cares for her as she dies.

I have been very lucky in my marriage, and in my husband, but this book taught me about loyalty and love, about what can happen to a marriage, and what it means to commit through the ebbing and recurring of passion. In fact, I think I'll start recommending this book to friends who confide in me an urge to end their marriages. It's a beautiful example of how love can bloom again, even if you're absolutely convinced that your marriage has become a desiccated husk. Like I said, I've been very lucky, but I can imagine that there might come a time when I need such inspiration, and I'm grateful to Yglesias for providing it.

(Video via Serwer)

Lake Crescent, Washington, 5.58 pm