Showing posts with label michael altman's posts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label michael altman's posts. Show all posts

William James and the Divorce Between Science and Religion

Wednesday, June 30, 2010 7:55 AM History's World
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By Michael J. Altman
William James has always interested me because I've often wondered why his brand of knowledge production never took off.
Jonathan Rée has a great piece on William James that I found thanks to Ralph E. Luker.  As a whole, the article is a thoughtful review of James' life and work, including his interest in religion and science.  Below is my favorite paragraph of the article but I suggest you read it in full.
James was not unsympathetic to religion, and on occasion he was prepared to call himself a Christian, though in a thoroughly secular and untheological sense. His abiding intellectual passion was a love of open-mindedness and a corresponding distrust of dogmatism and metaphysics. We should never forget, he said, that all our opinions – even our “most assured conclusions” – are “liable to modification in the course of future experience”. But he warned against allowing a distrust of dogmatic metaphysics to harden into a metaphysical dogma of its own, as seemed to be happening with some of the evangelising atheists of his day. He admired the evolutionary biologist T H Huxley and the mathematician C K Clifford, for example, but when they used the idea of “science” as a stick to beat religion with they were in danger of behaving like high priests of a new religion – “the religion of scientificism” – and defending it with the same intolerant zealotry as any old-style religious fanatic. Knowledge, for James, was not so much the pre-existing premise of human inquiry as a hoped-for future product, and science was more like a tissue of fortuitous insights than a monolith of solid fact. We would not have much chance of stumbling into truth if we let ourselves get too anxious about falling into error, and the first rule of an unillusioned epistemology should simply be: Relax! “Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things,” James wrote: “in a world where we are certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness.”
I've always found James compelling as a figure in American history because he lived and worked at the edge of an era where science and religion still saw each other as friends and companions in knowledge.  James died in 1910, and by the 1920s and 30s "truth" would be split between "empirical science" and "religion."  James is a figure that is worth revisiting and rethinking in the midst of many current cultural debates.  It's worth at least considering his "pragmatic, pluralist, empiricist approach to truth – what some would call his humanism."
Cross posted here.

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Religion Reporting as Therapy? MIchael Altman's Religion Roundup

Sunday, June 20, 2010 4:21 PM History's World
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Paul Harvey


A quick followup to our new contributor Michael Altman's post yesterday on discussions about the religion of Nikki Haley in South Carolina:

Michael has started a new "religion in the news" roundup for Religion Dispatches; the first entry, "Religion Reporting as Therapy?", can be found here, and Michael approaches the task with wit and a capacious taking in of religion the press and in public life. It should be fun to follow this in the upcoming months.

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Constructing Religion in the SC Governor's Race

Saturday, June 19, 2010 10:45 AM History's World
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By Michael J. Altman


This is a cross-post from my nameless other blog.

For me, religion will always be constructed in South Carolina.  As an undergraduate at the College of Charleston I became fascinated with the category or "religion" and began the long road toward a career studying it.  Now, I look back to the Palmetto state again and see the ways the current race for governor is reconstructing Christianity and religion.  Peter Hambly has written a great piece probing into the role Nikki Haley's religious identity is playing in the race.  In the wake of being slurred a "raghead" by state senator Jake Knotts, Haley has pushed into a primary runoff that many believe she will win.

Haley is a second generation Indian-American whose parents are Sikh, who self-identifies as a Christian, grew up in South Carolina, and even picked up a Southern accent along the way.  It's the tension between all of these layers of her identity that is beginning to draw curiosity and interest.  As Hambly notes, Haley attends both Methodist and Sikh services, especially with her parents and extended family.  This inter-religious practice is leaving some evangelicals in South Carolina uneasy:
Ray Popham, pastor of Oasis Church International in Aiken, said Haley's religion is a "big topic" among his congregants, who have posted notes about her religion on Facebook and have lately approached  him for advice about the governor's race.
 "She claims to be a Christian but also attends a Sikh temple and was married in a Sikh ceremony, so a lot of people can't figure how you can claim both," Popham told CNN. "I think she needs to be straight      up with people, if she is both. If she believes that you can be both, then she should say that up front."
Tony Beam, the interim pastor of Mount Creek Baptist church in Greenville, hosts a radio show called "Christian Worldview Today." He recently posed a question to his listeners: Is Nikki Haley being           honest about her faith?
Beam said several callers were not sure if Haley had completely abandoned her Sikh beliefs.
What immediately jumps out to me in the midst of this kerfuffle is that there are various understandings of what counts as religion and as Christianity flying around.  For most conservative evangelicals their religious identity centers around belief.  The belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus is what makes one a Christian.  Yes, there are other things that make one an evangelical Christian but they tend to center around correct belief.  It's all about orthodoxy.  But what about other religious cultures?  This focus on right belief--on an orthodox religion--doesn't translate across cultures.  The Sikhism of Nikki Haley's family is more about orthopraxy.  That is, it is about correct practice.  You do things because they are what you do.  To be Sikh is to do the things a Sikh does first and foremost.

Indian religions have sometimes struggled to adapt to an American religious landscape that emphasizes meaning and belief over ritual and practice.  As a white guy visiting Hindu temples in North Carolina I've often noticed how practitioners there felt the need to try and explain their religious practices to me, mostly through references to Christian symbols and meanings, when such explanations wouldn't happen in India.

I really have no interest in deciding whether or not Haley is a good Methodist or a good Sikh, or whether she's religious at all.  What these questions about Haley's religiosity point out, however, is the ways our public definitions of religion are generally shallow and Christian at bottom.  They are about what one believes first, and what one does only matters insofar as it can be grounded in doctrine or explanation.  The problem with focusing on right belief is that you can never be sure.  It is impossible to really know what someone believes and so there are always anxieties and questions of authenticity.  That's what lies behind much of this discussion of Haley's religion.  Is she authentic?  I don't know nor do I think that it is an important question.   I'm more interested in what gets lost in translation between Anglo-American Christian notions of orthodoxy and Indian forms of orthopraxy.

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