Second week of class: theory and practice

Things to be working on for this week:

• Representation of religious diversity in the media -- what issues are involved?
• What did people notice in looking at the news?
  
• What does this say about the theoretical issues that come up in Yearley, Paden, Proudfoot, Boyer? Is there an implicit way of conceptualizing religious difference? What about religion tout court?
  
• What kind of follow-up on such a discussion might be most effective?
  
  
• Principles of "fieldwork" (i.e., interviewing, observing the environment; public and private manifestations of religion)
• A walking tour (or maybe "exploration" would be a better word) of the area near UC, maybe Sunday?
• In-class and out-of-class interviewing
• Looking for manifestations of (1) majority religions (mostly these are obvious, but not always), (2) non-majority religions, (3) "non-religion" religions (i.e. "civil religious" symbols and quasi-ritual objects)
  
  
• Responses to Yearley and other readings

There's a significant problem with Yearley's conceptual framework, namely, the idea of a "legitimate religious good." What the hell does that mean? He never defines it, so far as I can tell. Certainly, he is being responsible and conscientious in his use of definitions, carefully laying out the characteristic themes that belong to his definition of "modernity," and so forth. That's all good. But what exactly is a "religious good"? -- and more problematically, what makes such a religious good either legitimate or illegitimate? Presumably a "good" is something that someone desires or postulates as a goal -- e.g. an ascetic life for a Christian monk, harmony for a Taoist, etc. But "legitimate"? I'll have to think about this some more.

Part of what I find particularly valuable about Yearley is that he gently steers his reader away from the "let a thousand flowers bloom" way of thinking about religious diversity. The fact that I, as a tolerant, open-minded person of the twenty-first century, encounter a religious Other and am able somehow to appreciate his or her way of life as valid, valuable, and on some level true is a good thing, but it doesn't just end there, with that warm, fuzzy, I'm-OK-you're-OK feeling that gives me. I also have to acknowledge, if I'm honest, that certain things about other people's religions may appeal to me but that I can't have them -- that they will never be a part of my life. No matter how much I fall in love with them, I can't ever expect fully to live out the ideals of upaya (skillful means) or of Gelassenheit (mystical resignation) since those are products of utterly foreign ways of living and thinking. This means that a relentlessly honest encounter with other religious traditions has to bring me up short by confronting me with my own limited and flawed perspective, which, if you're serious about it, has to hurt a little. No postmodern spiritual marketplace can quite eliminate this.

Yearley also reminds me of the conclusion to DeLillo's White Noise when he writes that "I wanted the religious goods expressed in the Sokkurum Buddha to exist, and even to be incarnated by many people, and yet did not want the people I cared about most to possess them." I also wonder whether I am thinking of quite the same thing that he is, in that there are certainly times I would like to possess "religious goods" that I most likely never will have full access to.

Yearley refers repeatedly to the Sokkurum Buddha. Here are four images gathered from around the web. Click on the thumbnail for a larger version, or on the arrows to flip through the images one by one.

• Working through some of the ideas that came up in the first full discussion (Lahiri's story) and figuring out why, according to the blog entries I've looked at, apparently everyone but Klaus was repulsed by the Lee poems. (Why do I like them so much? What kind of sick f**k am I, anyhow?) Gabrielle referred to being "disgusted" by the "vivid descriptions of eating people" (which doesn't seem quite fair to me -- to me, there are suggestions and metaphors, not "vivid descriptions") and Mohsin apparently agreed.
  
  A comple of people in Wednesday's discussion -- I don't reliably remember who -- remarked that Sanjeev "accepts Christianity" by the end of "This Blessed House." Alex was one of these people, I know, because he retracted the idea on his most recent blog post. He then went on to make some interesting comments about how, on the other hand, Twinkle accepts Christianity but possibly "with amusement." This raises the question of what it means to "accept" a religious belief, since of course there are lots of Christians who would probably object to describing the bemused way that Twinkle collects Christian knick-knacks and objets-d'art as "accepting" their religion. But then Alex goes on to distinguish between "accepting" and "believing in" a religion -- a distinction that we might want to probe a little in class.
  

That's all I've got for now. Will come back to this tomorrow sometime. Peace.