(Note: If you’re wondering how this weekend’s retreat went, I’m working on a report – this post is kind of a warm-up. In the meantime, read Rik’s reflections on it.)
Is naturalist or humanist spirituality an oxymoron?
Tom Flynn seems to think so. And since he happens to be the new director of the Council for Secular Humanism, his opinion is of some moment.
In the latest edition of the Council’s “Secular Humanism Online News”, responding to an article on secularism in The American Spectator, he writes:
[Christopher] Orlet seems to find sincere, full-bore irreligiosity – the absence of any sense of a supra-natural aspect to life – almost incomprehensible, something there’s barely even a label for. Actually there are a couple of perfectly good labels for people who abstain from religion and spirituality. I’ve used one already: “scientific naturalist.” For another, I look no farther than my business card: “secular humanist.”
The way I read this passage, it seems he is equating “full-bore irreligiosity” with “[abstention] from religion and spirituality,” thereby suggesting spirituality is necessarily religious, or at least supernaturalistic.
But is it?
This is rather like the question of whether you can be a religious atheist. Both “religion” and “spirituality” are associated with supernaturalism, and yet both have their godless proponents who want to see the terms reclaimed – for example, Felix Adler (founder of the religion Ethical Culture) and André Comte-Sponville (author of The Little Atheist Book of Spirituality).
I disagree with the first quest. It seems quixotic to say the least, and I’m not sure the word “religion” is worth reclaiming even if it were possible – it has negative connotations even for many religious people. But I agree with the second.
Because “spirituality” seems like a truly useful collective term for one’s emotional, social, ethical, and even cognitive functioning as subjectively experienced. At the retreat on nontheism among Quakers this weekend, the most common description of spirituality was “connection” – feeling connected to other people and to the natural environment, along with being attentive to the present moment. I see nothing objectively mysterious or supernatural about any of these things, as mysterious as they might feel subjectively.
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And yet – one should use the word sparingly.
To quote James Riemermann again, writing on a different but related subject, “the word feels so terribly imprecise, and I can almost always find better ways to express myself.” If you’re about to say “spiritual” but you really just mean “ethical” or “emotional,” why not be specific?
A: Because often they kind of suck, to paraphrase an excerpt from a new pamphlet just sent out in the QuakerYouth newsletter:
It can be tempting to look at the absence of young faces in our meeting houses and blame it on the ‘digital age’ or on young people needing ‘something more lively.’ However, I would like to hold up the possibility that people coming into Quaker meetings are not looking for a certain prevailing skin phenotype or age presence, but for the Spirit to be evident in the lives of the Friends who are there. I believe that they, like me, ache to have a spiritual community where they feel truly seen, truly held, and deeply challenged. (From Coming into Friendship as a Gift by Christina Van Regenmorter)
It can be tempting to look at the absence of young faces in our meeting houses and blame it on the ‘digital age’ or on young people needing ‘something more lively.’ However, I would like to hold up the possibility that people coming into Quaker meetings are not looking for a certain prevailing skin phenotype or age presence, but for the Spirit to be evident in the lives of the Friends who are there. I believe that they, like me, ache to have a spiritual community where they feel truly seen, truly held, and deeply challenged.
(From Coming into Friendship as a Gift by Christina Van Regenmorter)
“Friend speaks my mind,” as we say.
So I get it — FGC is like a bigger version of yearly meeting.
I had the pleasure of meeting Chris M. of Quaker blogging fame for the first time, as well as Karen Street. Chris has a list of other bloggers here, though Micah Bales is the only other one on the list I’ve talked to. (I’ve also seen Kody, and will probably see Staśa this afternoon. Update: Also ran into Peterson the day after his plenary performance, and had the pleasure of meeting Robin, Liz, and Jeanne.)
Nontheist Friends events, including my and Robin Alpern’s interest group “Theist and Nontheist Friends in Conversation,” are going very well — attendance is significantly up from last year, they tell me, and the energy is very clear.
In addition to our previously scheduled events, this afternoon there’s one billed as “The Great Theist-Nontheist Conversational Smackdown of 2008″ between Chuck Fager and David Boulton, which I will try to record and post here. (Apparently it was a last-minute idea of Chuck’s.)
The interest group on nontheistic Quakerism I facilitated at the aforementioned young adult Quaker conference went rather well – a report may be coming on the Nontheist Friends website. (I posted one to the email list, but would want to edit it down a bit.)
Both the interest group and the conference generally changed something for me, and I find a new sense of commitment to the Quaker experiment.
I first started attending Quaker meetings back in 2002 at North Shore Friends Meeting in Beverly, Mass., and officially became a member a few years later. I’ve been living in the city for two years now, and in the past few weeks finally decided I really really felt right about transferring membership to Friends Meeting at Cambridge. I just sent North Shore a long letter of transfer, which is found under the cut.
(continue reading…)
All three above-the-fold cover stories in the NYT Science Times this week hit on different aspects of what’s becoming a major interest of mine – the interface between the harder sciences and more right-brained aspects of being human.
The main article is about mindfulness meditation being used in therapy. I find this interesting, but the article points out that the science supporting whether it is beneficial is pretty thin at this point, and there’s a risk of it becoming a fad.
Next is an article about a new curriculum at Binghamton University (NY) aimed at putting the sciences and humanities in dialogue. I was not encouraged by the inane statement by one of the creators that “There are more similarities than differences between the humanities and the sciences,” but otherwise it looks very good.
But perhaps most intriguing was an article on a woman who is marketing a placebo for parents to give to their children when all else fails (continue reading…)
It was with some trepidation that I suggested on one of xJane’s posts that Obama actually embodies certain desirable “feminine” qualities more than Clinton does, though we might agree that he has an unfair advantage considering that the culture makes it easier for him to do so.
I half expected someone (not necessarily xJane) to give me the third degree, but instead, she linked to a another post where she makes essentially the same point. And now we have Clinton’s former spiritual advisor chiming in:
Ironically, Clinton’s problem today, Houston said, may be that Obama has given better voice to that new pattern of possibility — that he embodies a more female, inclusive approach to problem-solving, while Clinton has become mired in proving herself capable of emulating the male model, which requires combat and the demonization of enemies. [...] Woodward wrote that Houston tried to steer Clinton away from her “warrior mode” and “the need to have enemies who could symbolically be singled out to embody the opposition.” “It’s a shame the warfare model is still there,” Houston said. “If she could have moved to the next level, she would be the next president.”
Ironically, Clinton’s problem today, Houston said, may be that Obama has given better voice to that new pattern of possibility — that he embodies a more female, inclusive approach to problem-solving, while Clinton has become mired in proving herself capable of emulating the male model, which requires combat and the demonization of enemies.
[...]
Woodward wrote that Houston tried to steer Clinton away from her “warrior mode” and “the need to have enemies who could symbolically be singled out to embody the opposition.”
“It’s a shame the warfare model is still there,” Houston said. “If she could have moved to the next level, she would be the next president.”
I don’t meant to pile on Hillary, but I find the whole phenomenon interesting.
I’m not sure about the last claim. I suspect she would’ve won the primary but lost the general that way, unless she pulled a classic primary/general pivot, acting macho only after she got the nomination. But then instead of people forwarding around scandalous videos of Rev. Wright, this summer they’d be forwarding scandalous videos of Hillary talking about her feelings
At the 5 pm Quaker meeting in Cambridge, the person deputized to close things out invited people to share any thoughts/etc. they had during the meeting that did not rise to the level of a message. Notable first because that isn’t generally done at the 5 pm, unless I’ve been missing it — perhaps just her taking some healthy (and un-Quakerly!) executive initiative.
But also notable because she gave it a specific name: “afterthoughts,” saying the word deliberately, as in, “An afterthought is when…” rather than merely conversationally (e.g. “does anyone have any afterthoughts or things they’d like to say?”). I’m sure that’s nothing new in itself, but given that this isn’t a widely formalized practice, it’s interesting to note how it’s done in different places…
If there are any Quakers reading, do they do that in your meeting? What is it called?
A new Pew survey on religion in America was released yesterday.
The most interesting finding to me is the “Unaffiliated” group, which makes up 16.1 percent of the total adult population. About a third of those are at least somewhat religious, just not any religion in particular, leaving the nonreligious total at 10.3 percent — 1.6 atheist, 2.4 agnostic, and 6.3 just plain secular. A quick read might suggest that the whole 16.1 percent is nonreligious, so I want to emphasize the more accurate 10.3 percent figure.
[Update: I generally love the think tank Center for Inquiry, so I was slightly disappointed to see them eliding "unaffiliated" with "non-religious" this press release.]
Breaking it down by percentage, apparently about 16 percent of the nonreligious in the U.S. identify as atheist, 23 percent as agnostic, and 61 percent as secular. I suppose this might inform the debate about whether people should identify as atheists or not.
Unaffiliated is also the fastest-growing group: only 7.3 percent of the population says they were unaffiliated as a child, meaning it’s more than doubled in the past generation, despite not having a very high retention rate (many people raised unaffiliated later become religious), and the unaffiliated are disproportionately young.
The 16.1 percent figure basically confirms the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), which found 14.3 percent of the U.S. population identifying as nonreligious, as well as 16 percent having a secular outlook. (The two groups probably mostly overlapped.)
Other points of interest:
I read a story once about a famous Chinese musician who was visiting the West, and was taken to a concert hall to hear the finest in European classical music. After the concert, he was asked what piece he liked the best.
– The first one, he said.
– You mean the Beethoven? his hosts asked, humming a few bars of the first piece.
– No, he said, the one before that.
Eventually, they realized he meant the period when the musicians were tuning their instruments.
Something similar happened to me at the conference I went to last weekend. (continue reading…)
