Religion

Studied Responses: Reactions to bin Laden’s Death

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment
Image: CNN Belief Blog

In the moments, hours, and days following the announcement of Osama bin Laden’s death I was repeatedly struck by the amount of attention paid to the manner in which Americans were responding to his death.  Almost immediately I began to pick up notes of concerned introspection about the response (e.g., the jubilant crowds gathered at the White House and Ground Zero), and what ought to be the appropriate response.

This introspection appears to have been most pronounced within religious circles.  At Christianity Today, Sarah Pulliam Bailey gathered together Tweets from a number of evangelical Christian leaders and bloggers addressing the question, “How should Christians respond to Osama bin Laden’s death?”  A sizable comment thread formed below the post.  At the religion and media web site, Get Religion, in a post titled “Churches respond to Osama’s death,” we get another round of links to church leaders writing about the appropriate response to the killing of bin Laden.

The topic, however, was also prominent in the more mainstream media.  NPR, for example, ran a short piece titled “Is It Wrong to Celebrate Bin Laden’s Death” and another piece focused on bin Laden’s death titled “Is Celebrating Death Appropriate?”  In the former story we get the following odd piece of reflection:

Laura Cunningham, a 22-year-old Manhattan reveler — gripping a Budweiser in her hand and sitting atop the shoulders of a friend — was part of the crowd at ground zero in the wee hours Monday. As people around her chanted “U-S-A,” Cunningham was struck by the emotional response. She told New York Observer: “It’s weird to celebrate someone’s death. It’s not exactly what we’re here to celebrate, but it’s wonderful that people are happy.”

I say “odd,” because it is not clear that this young lady knew what or why she was celebrating.  “But it’s wonderful that people are happy”?  What?

The NY Times also ran a story titled, “Celebrating a Death: Ugly, Maybe, but Only Human.”  And, finally, in case you are interested, Noam Chomsky would also like you to know about his reaction to Osama’s death, although I imagine you can guess.  Additionally, at CNN’s Belief Blog, you can read “Survey:  Most Americans say its wrong to celebrate bin Laden’s death,” and Stephen Prothero’s reflections on the aforementioned survey.  You get the idea.

So all of this strikes me as rather interesting.  For one thing, I can’t really imagine this sort of self-awareness permeating the responses of previous generations to historical events of this sort.  Of course, this may be because this event is sui generis, although I doubt that is quite right.  It seems rather another instance of the self-reflexiveness and self-reference that has become a characteristic of our society.  I might push this further by noting that this post just adds another layer, another mirror, as I reflect on the reflections.  My usual explanation for this hypertrophied self-awareness is the collapse of taken-for-granted social structures and customs and the correlated rise of the liberated, spontaneous self.  The spontaneous self as it turns out is not that spontaneous; rather it is performed.  Performance is studied and aware of itself; conscious of its every response.  Naturally then, we are asking at the cultural level whether our “spontaneous” celebrations were appropriate.  Did we play this part right?

This posture seems to me to lack a certain degree of integrity, in the sense that our way of being in the world is not integrated; very little comes naturally, our actions all feel rather artificial.  Perhaps especially at those times when we most wish we could just be fully in the moment, we rather feel a certain anxiety about feeling the right way — are we feeling the way we are supposed to be feeling, etc.  However, the integrated self is also somewhat opaque to itself; it is capable of acting literally without thought, and thus perhaps thoughtlessly.

I’ll resist the temptation to provide a concluding paragraph that wraps things up neatly with a fresh insight.  More of an aspiration than a temptation, I suppose, if the insight just isn’t there.

iSpirituality: Religous Apps and Spiritual Practices

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

Religious apps for the iPhone and iPad have been in the news lately.  In “Religion on Your iPhone?”, Lisa Fernandez discusses a variety of apps created for Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists.  The Apple app store is, if nothing else, an apparently ecumenical space.  Among the various religious apps, however, “Confession: A Roman Catholic App” has probably received the most attention and a good deal of it seemingly misguided.  The folks at Get Religion have broken down some of the misleading news stories related to the app and the Catholic League collected a few of the offending headlines including:

• “Can’t Make it to Confession? There’s an App for That”
• “Catholic Church Approves Confession by iPhone”
• “Bless Me iPhone for I Have Sinned”
• “Catholic Church Endorses App for Sinning iPhone Users”
• “Forgiveness via iPhone: Church Approves Confession App”
• “New, Church-Approved iPhone Offers Confession On the Go”
• “Confess Your Sins to a Phone in Catholic Church Endorsed App”
• “Catholics Can Now Confess Using iPhone App”

Bottom line: the app is intended to help prepare for confession and is not intended to substitute for face-to-face confession.  There is no virtual priest, and there is no virtual absolution.  As Terry Mattingly put it at Get Religion,

This app is actually a combination between a personal diary and the “examination of conscience” booklets and tracts that Catholic and Orthodox Christians have carried in their pockets, wallets and purses for generations.

You may also want to take a look at Maureen Dowd’s rather snarky take on the Confession app in her NY Times column, “Forgive Me, Father, For I Have Linked.”

Click image to see WSJ video report

The Wall Street Journal has also recently posted a video report on religious apps:  “From apps that let you tweet Bible verses to those that help you face Mecca or pray the right Hebrew blessings with the right foods, some of the pious are embracing mobile technology.”  The story follows the usual pattern:  new thing > positive reaction to new thing > negative reaction to new thing > conclusion offering moderating position.  Concerns, voiced mainly by a Christian pastor, include the danger of disengaging from the face-to-face community and misdirecting the focus of religious experience onto the device and away from God.

Professor Rachel Wagner, author of the forthcoming “Godwired: Religion, Ritual and Virtual Reality,” also appears in the report and frames the issue as a struggle between relevance to contemporary culture and faithfulness to ancient traditions.  She suggests that what is at issue is the degree of interactivity with the ritual or practice that the apps allow.  As she puts it, “Those religious groups that want to stay true to their traditions are going to allow less wiggle room.”  It’s not entirely clear from the segment what exactly Wagner means by interactivity, but I suspect she has in view the flexibility of the rituals.  In other words, interactivity implies that ancient rituals may be reshaped by their re-presentation in new media.

Putting the issue this way recalls Paul Connerton’s thesis in How Societies Remember.  In Connerton’s analysis,

Both commemorative ceremonies and bodily practices therefore contain a measure of insurance against the process of cumulative questioning entailed in all discursive practices.  This is the source of their importance and persistence as mnemonic systems.  Every group, then, will entrust to bodily automatisms the values and categories which they are most anxious to conserve.  They will know how well the past can be kept in mind by a habitual memory sedimented in the body.

In other words, embodied practices or rituals represent the most durable mode of remembering.  This is in part because they are less likely to be questioned and altered than knowledge encoded in spoken or written texts.  The core of a tradition’s identity then is wrapped up in its rituals and embodied practices; changes to the rituals and practices effect changes to collective memory and identity.

Consider, for example, that while the Reformation clearly involved the reformulation of key doctrines, it also restructured the embodied rituals of Catholic practice and re-ordered the material conditions of worship.  Bodily habits such as crossing oneself and material conditions such as the architecture of churches changed as much as doctrinal standards.  I suspect one could argue convincingly that for laymen and women, the changes in embodied practice and material conditions of worship were more significant than abstract doctrinal reformulations.

Anecdotally, I vividly recall some years ago being in a certain Protestant context and witnessing a young boy being pulled up rather brusquely from a kneeling posture during prayer with the very straightforward admonition, “We don’t do that here!”  It apparently smacked of Catholicism.  A particular vision of the faith was thereby inculcated by regulating the body.

With this in mind, then, the most interesting thing about religious apps may not be their content, but the way that they insert themselves into the embodied experience of worship and religious practice.  This may occur through the use of a cell phone to access the apps during worship.  (Remember how easy it is to spot someone who is being attentive to their cell phones by simply observing their posture.)  It may also occur through the way an app repackages a ritual or practice for digital mediation, perhaps abstracting bodily elements while preserving more mental components.  In either case, religious apps are likely leave their mark by subtly reshaping the way the body engages in worship and spiritual practice.

Is Sport a Religion?, Part Two

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

More thoughts on the intersection of sport and the sacred from Religion Dispatches.

In “Can We Take the Religion of Soccer Seriously?” Gary Laderman explores the parameters of what may be properly called sacred, particularly in the context of how religion is covered in “the new media landscape.”

And in the wake of two near deadly goring incidents, Jeremy Biles’ “Sacred Bull” gives a fascinating account of bull fighting’s “sacred appeal” in Spanish culture concluding with intriguing reflections on beauty, violence, tragedy, and the sacred.

Some Dim Dazzling Trick of Grace

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 2 Comments
Image: AFP

Unintentionally, yesterday’s post on sport as religion dovetailed suggestively with the preceding one, “Distracted from distraction by distraction.”  In that post I had continued a series of reflections on Nicholas Carr’s analysis of the Internet’s impact on our brains in his latest book, The Shallows combining a brief rejoinder to a strand of criticism frequently directed at Carr with strikingly apropos lines from T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.”  Distraction was the recurring theme.  The Internet according to Carr habituates our mind to perpetual distraction, and in the long run our ability to think deeply and creatively suffers.  Eliot already laments a culture of distraction in the mid-20th century and seems to be describing us with eerie foresight.

Whether or not we finally judge sport to be a kind of religion, it is certainly a distraction; more precisely, it is a diversion.  As one comment noted, perhaps a bit harshly, it is escapist entertainment diverting us from ordinary life.  Sports may be more than this, and I will suggest that it is, but it is at least this.  And as our embrace of Internet-empowered distraction also demonstrates, we love to be distracted and we crave diversion.  We can hardly stand it if we are without either distraction or diversion for more than a few moments at a time.  We complain incessantly about our busyness, but were it all to stop we would hardly know what to do with ourselves.

This is not, however, a new problem.  Although the condition may now be intensified and heightened, it has been with us at least since the 17th century, and almost certainly before then.  It was in the 17th century that Blaise Pascal began assembling a series of notes on scraps of paper in preparation for a book he never wrote.  When he died at the age of 39 he left behind hundreds of barely organized notes which were later collected and published under the French title Pensees, or thoughts.  Pascal is today remembered, if at all, either for his law of fluid pressure or an argument for God’s existence known as Pascal’s Wager.  Neither quite does justice to the depth of his insight into what it is now unfashionable to call the human condition.

Pascal knew that we needed our diversions and distractions and that without them we would be miserable.  His description of the younger generation sounds wholly contemporary:

Anyone who does not see the vanity of the world is very vain himself.  So who does not see it, apart from young people whose lives are all noise, diversions, and thoughts for the future?  But take away their diversion and you will see them bored to extinction.  Then they feel their nullity without recognizing it, for nothing could be more wretched than to be intolerably depressed as soon as one is reduced to introspection with no means of diversion.

But Pascal is not merely an old crank berating a younger generation he fails to understand.  Pascal applies the same analysis indiscriminately.  Young or old, rich or poor, male or female — for Pascal it just comes with being human.  “If our condition were truly happy,” he explains, “we should not need to divert ourselves from thinking about it.”  As things stand, however,

Being unable to cure death, wretchedness, and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things …. What people want is not the easy peaceful life that allows us to think of our unhappy condition, nor the dangers of war, nor the burdens of office, but the agitation that takes our mind off it and diverts us.  That is why we prefer the hunt to the capture.

We need distractions and diversions to keep us from contemplating our true condition, frail and mortal as it is.  For this reason we cannot stand to be alone with our own thoughts and seek to fill every moment with distraction.  Pascal’s view is admittedly rather grim even as it resonates with our experience.  Yet, Pascal knew there was more than this to the human condition.  There was also love and passion, knowledge and creativity, wonder and courage.  Pascal knew this and he insisted that we recognize both the glory and the misery of humanity:

Let man now judge his own worth, let him love himself, for there is within him a nature capable of good; but that is no reason for him to love the vileness within himself.  Let him despise himself because this capacity remains unfilled; but that is no reason for him to despise this natural capacity.  Let him both hate and love himself; he has within him the capacity for knowing truth and being happy, but he possesses no truth which is either abiding or satisfactory.

Pascal insists that we reckon with all that is good and all that is bad in us.  It is our awareness of the possibility of goodness, however, which heightens our misery.  And, yet again, it is our awareness of our misery that is part of our glory.  In the end Pascal believed that “God alone is man’s true good” and Christ the “via veritas.”  With St. Augustine, whose influence permeates Pascal’s thought, he would have prayed, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.”  Perhaps this is why at times spirituality and the language of worship suffuses our most prominent and powerful diversions.

Augustine and Pascal in turn both helped shape the thought of Walker Percy, a 20th century Roman Catholic novelist.  Percy blended Pascalian insight with a touch of existentialism in his best known novel The Moviegoer (1960) in which the main character, Binx Bolling, finds himself on a search.  “What is the nature of the search? you ask.”

Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me; so simple that it is easily overlooked.  The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life …. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.  Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

Near the middle of the novel throughout which Bolling has been amassing clues he thinks are somehow related to the search, he despairs:

… when I awake, I awake in the grip of everydayness.  Everydayness is the enemy.  No search is possible.  Perhaps there was a time when everydayness was not too strong and one could break its grip by brute strength.  Now nothing breaks it — but disaster.

However, through a rather tortured relationship with a very broken young woman named Kate whom he has come to love, Binx begins to see grace in the ordinary.  Near the very end of the novel, while he and Kate are sitting at a service station discussing marriage and the worries that still fill Kate’s mind, Binx notices a man coming out of a church.  It is Ash Wednesday.  Binx watches while the man sits in his car looking down at something on the seat beside him.  The man’s presence puzzles Binx:

It is impossible to say why he is here.  Is it part and parcel of the complex business of coming up in the world?  Or is it because he believes that God himself is present here at the corner of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants?  Or is he here for both reasons:  through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming for the one and receiving the other as God’s own importunate bonus?  It is impossible to say.

If sport diverts us from ordinary life, what do we make of it?  Is it as Pascal would have it a mere distraction which facilitates our unwillingness to acknowledge our true condition?  Or, taking a cue from Percy, might it be a rupture of the “everydayness,” the ordinariness of our lives that may awaken us to the possibility of the search?  My sense is that they are both right; each is a possibility.  Sports can be merely a distraction conducive to living in bad faith in denial of the truth of our situation.  It is odd, however, that something very much like a spiritual or religious aura so often surrounds sport.  Maybe it is because bursts of grace and beauty appear suddenly and unexpectedly even in the midst of our diversions to remind us that we ought to be searching for their source.  Maybe it is because “through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming for the one” we receive “the other as God’s own importunate bonus?”

It is impossible to say.

Is Sport a Religion?

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 65 Comments

I can’t imagine that this is a new observation, but according to Nigel Barber at The Human Beast,

Psychologists are closing in on the conclusion that sport has many of the same effects on spectators as religion does. Here is Daniel Wann [2001], a leading sport psychologist at Murray State University, and his co-authors: “The similarities between sport fandom and organized religion are striking. Consider the vocabulary associated with both: faith, devotion, worship, ritual, dedication, sacrifice, commitment, spirit, prayer, suffering, festival, and celebration.”

So, is sport a religion?  The answer to that question could only be resolved, if at all, after some haggling over what one means by “sport” and “religion.”  In any case, there is something compelling about the comparison.  Myself, I’m inclined to think that there is something mystical and quasi-spiritual about baseball, but I can see how, especially this month, others might be more inclined to see adumbrations of the holy in World Cup Soccer (Football, Futbol, whatever).  As it turns out, meditations on the spirituality of soccer abound.

At the TimesOnline, Matthew Syed explores the psychological benefits of belief for players in “The Players with God on Their Side.” He concludes,

… if Ali [the boxer] is praying to Allah and Edwards [a triple jumper] to Jehovah, and if these two men believe in contradictory theologies, and if both are reaping benefits, it must be the belief itself, not its truth, that matters. These insights explain, I think, at least in part, the pervasiveness of religion at this World Cup. It is less a matter of theology than psychology. Belief in God can give an athlete, a team, a crucial edge in the cauldron of competition, where success and failure are measured in fractions.

Preston Davis at Religion Dispatches explores “Soccer and the Sublime in the Shadow of Apartheid” eloquently reflecting on the themes of grace, incarnation, beauty, and justice.  He soberly reflects on what the game can and cannot do, concluding that World Cup soccer,

like religion, possesses a beauty that humanizes. It does not whitewash tragedy but it does provide transcendence from it, and at its best meaning-making for it. It mysteriously wields us together and separates us all at once. We place our hopes in the efforts of 11 men on a pitch, competing against an opposing 11, and in the end we are thankful just to be a part of the experience.

If you’re interested in this sort of thing, each essay contains enough links to keep you busy for the better part of the morning.