Author: Andrew Sullivan

Roger Scruton nominates opera, hailing it as “not so much a representation of human life as a redemption of it. For dramatic music can rescue our feelings from their randomness, and vindicate our immortal longings in the face of chaos and decay”:

The complaint was already made in Monteverdi’s Venice that singing detracts from the realism of the stage. The verismo of Verdi was a response to this complaint, an attempt to tie the melodic moment to the particular person in a believable situation — and no one can doubt his success in this. But Wagner had another and more persuasive response to those who dismissed his operas as mere fairytales. By lifting everything — character, setting, emotion and gesture — into the imagined space of music, he believed, we achieve another and higher kind of realism. Words and music develop together, and the purpose of both is drama.

Opera conceived as a sequence of arias, loosely joined by recitative, thereafter disappeared. Even Italian composers quietly adopted the Wagnerian ideal, so that by the time of Puccini it was universally accepted that operas should be through-composed, each act working towards its climax by largely musical means, with the musical material constantly reworked in accordance with the logic of the drama. …

Many people have an opera buried within them: so at least I believe. For the inner life is essentially operatic. It sings to itself in many voices, and we strive in our dreams and meditations to bring those voices into line, to turn discord to concord, and conflict to resolution. Precisely because the characters in opera sing their passions, we sense that these passions are really cosmic forces, whose scope is far greater than the mere individuals who represent them. Through opera our inner life is summoned from hidden regions and resolved before us on the stage.

(Video: Overture of Verdi’s La Traviata performed at The Royal Opera House in London in 1994)

Mark Joseph Stern warns religious parents, “All that talk of snake-inspired subterfuge, planet-cleansing floods, and apocalyptic horsemen might hamper kids’ ability to differentiate between fantasy and reality – or even to think critically”:

That’s the implication of two recent studies published in Cognitive Science in which researchers attempted to gauge perceptions of reality in religious and secular children. (The religious children were all from Christian families, from a variety of denominations.)

In one study, the researchers read realistic stories and fantasy tales to the kids. Some of the fantasy tales featured familiar biblical events – like the parting of the Red Sea – but with non-biblical characters. (In the retelling of the Red Sea story, Moses was called John.) Others featured non-biblical but clearly magical events – the parting of a mountain, for instance—as well as non-biblical characters. … Every child believed that the protagonist of the realistic stories was a real person. But when asked about the stories featuring biblically inspired or non-biblical but magical events, the children disagreed. Children raised with religion thought the protagonists of the miraculous stories were real people, and they seemed to interpret the narratives – both biblical and magical – as true accounts.

Luke Malone throws cold water on Stern’s interpretation of the studies:

[Study author Kathleen Corriveau] stresses that this needn’t be seen as strictly negative. “In no way should the findings of this study point to any sort of deficit in one group or the other,” she says. “Indeed, in some instances, the ability to suspend disbelief could be viewed as a benefit. For example, when exposed to counterintuitive phenomena—such as modern physics—a suspension of disbelief might assist in learning.”

Eliyahu Federman adds, “This study proves a benefit of religion, not a detriment, because research shows how imaginative and fictional thinking, fantasy play, aid in the cognitive development of children. Raising children with fantastical religious tales is not bad after all.” Meanwhile, Brandon Ambrosino looks at the findings in light of Justin L. Barrett’s book Born Believers, which argues that “kids are born with a tendency toward thinking that there is some sort of supernatural agent behind this order”:

Or, as he put it to me over the phone, “children have a number of natural dispositions to religious beliefs of various sorts.” And while he believes that these dispositions can “certainly be overridden by certain kinds of cultural and educational environments,” he thinks the research shows that a child’s cognitive “playing field is tilted toward religious beliefs.”

A new study out this month, however, pushes against Barrett’s conclusion. Published in the July issue of Cognitive Science, the article presents findings that seem to show that children’s beliefs in the supernatural are the result of their education. Further, argue the researchers, “exposure to religious ideas has a powerful impact on children’s differentiation between reality and fiction.” In other words, said Kathleen Corriveau, one of the study’s co-authors, the study found that childhood exposure to religious ideas may influence children’s “conception of what could actually happen.” She also told me her research suggests that Barrett’s Born Believers thesis is wrong — that children don’t possess an “innate bias” toward religious belief.

In her new book, Belief without Borders: Inside the Minds of the Spiritual but not Religious, Linda A. Mercadante attempts to find out. Kristin Aune runs down the essentials of “SBNRs”:

[Mercadante] explores their thoughts on transcendence, human nature, community and afterlife and finds that they don’t believe in an interventionist or personal God (if “God” exists, they think God is part of creation, not separate from it). As for human nature, they don’t see themselves as sinners needing salvation, but as “inherently good” selves needing freedom and choice so that their “purity, even divinity” can shine.

This focus on the self affects their view of community. “Many interviewees did much more than just ‘question authority’,” Mercadante says. “Instead, they relocated it within, relativized it to each person, and detached it from any particular spirituality community.” Some belonged to recovery groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous, but none had a longstanding affiliation with a spiritual community. This makes it hard for them to sustain shared group beliefs or behaviour, and Mercadante thinks it impedes their ability to benefit society.

On life after death, SBNRs share ground with Hindu beliefs, reflecting what Colin Campbell calls “the Easternization of the West”. Most believe in reincarnation and “karma, endless opportunities, inevitable progress, expanding consciousness, and the very American ideal of free will and personal choice”. Their optimism is clear: reincarnations will be better, not worse, than their previous life. Actions have consequences, but only positive ones.

In a recent column on the subject, Mark Oppenheimer depicts Mercadante as pushing back against claims that SBNR thinking leans shallow and unserious, noting that “she makes the case that spiritual people can be quite deep theologically” (NYT):

An ordained Presbyterian minister whose father was Catholic and whose mother was Jewish, Dr. Mercadante went through a spiritual but not religious period of her own — although she now attends a Mennonite church. For her project, she … found that these spiritual people also thought about death, the afterlife and other profound subjects.

For example, “they reject heaven and hell, but they do believe in an afterlife,” Dr. Mercadante said recently. “In some ways, they would fit O.K. in a progressive Christian context.” Because they dislike institutions, the spiritual but not religious also recoil from the deities such institutions are built around. “They may like Jesus, he might be their guru, he might be one of their many bodhisattvas, but Jesus as God is not on their radar screen,” Dr. Mercadante said.

While she was writing the book in 2012, Mercadante gave an interview in which she addressed the role of stereotypes involved in these discussions:

I think it does come, in part, from portrayals of conservative Christianity in the media, as some kind of hegemonic, monolithic authority. This whole thing is fraught with stereotypes. Most people don’t take the time to listen to each other, to ask questions. There are terrible misconceptions on both sides, as to what Christians are, and what SBNRs are. SBNRs see “religion” as the external structure and the dogma, whereas “spirituality” is the individual’s personal experiences of transcendence. That definition really is not an accurate portrayal of religion or of spirituality. Nevertheless, the majority of my interviewees insist that spirituality is the personal center and quest for an individual, whereas religion is something external, rule-ridden and institutional. In their thinking, religion is nothing more than a dispensable shell.