Religious Liturgy and the Wholly Other

In the Zhuangzi, how can Zhuangzi possibly know that the fish are happy? To know what it is like to be a bat, a person must be a bat. This is not to say that we disagree with bats. Sonar represents the “sheer otherness” of a bat. In Christianity, how does eternal joy and bliss differ from happiness? Happiness is not a theological concept. There are different kinds of experience, and it follows that they have different kinds of truth-claims. To treat every such claim as the same kind of thing is premised on conflating domains of human experience that are qualitatively different. I contend that the domain of religion is both distinct and unique. Our ordinary ways of describing the world and even ourselves are not well-suited to our endeavors in the domain of religion.

The full essay is at "Religious Liturgy and the Wholly Other."

Hinduism Applied to Business

Applying a religion such as Hinduism to business is laudatory. Undercutting any benefits of doing so, however, is the advocation of religious principles that are so unrealistic in the business world that they undercut the credibility of the project itself. John D. Rockefeller was a Baptist who taught Sunday school at his church even as he pushed competitors out of business who refused to be bought out by Rockefeller’s refining monopoly, Standard Oil Company. To be sure, after retiring, he gave away about half of his $800 million (1913 dollars), but he did not claim that his personal generosity justified his earlier restraint of trade as a monopolist. Rather, he claimed to be more of a “Christ figure” as a monopolist than he was next as a philanthropist. In my study on Rockefeller, I concluded that he was delusional, yet to some extent well-intended, given the destructive competition that was ravaging small businesses in the refining industry during the 1860s. Rockefeller thought of his giant as saving the otherwise presumably drowning competitors, but Jesus in the Gospels does not drown people who are unwilling to be converted. Clearly, the application of religion to business can be abused, including in being much too idealistic, even utopian, and in being used to justify egregious economic tactics and even greed itself.

The full essay is at "Hinduism Applied to Business."

Faith Seeking Understanding: On Religious Experience

On October 24, 2024, Pope Francis released his encyclical, Dilexit Nos (“He Loved Us), on the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In the letter, he recounts “Saint Gertrude of Helfta, a Cisterian nun, tells of a time in prayer when she reclined her head on the heart of Christ and heard it beating.”[1] She wondered why the Gospel of John does not describe a similar spiritual experience, and concluded that “the sweet sound of those heartbeats has been reserved for modern times, so that, hearing them, our aging and lukewarm world may be renewed in the love of Christ.”[2] The pope concludes in the letter that this might hold for our times too. I contend that Gertrud’s spirituality can speak to the current modern age, in which that of Gertrud—the thirteenth century—hardly seems modern, but not in terms of focusing on Jesus’ resurrected heart; instead, Gertrud can point us beyond the limits of marital-union imagery with Jesus to experience that transcends the use of imagery that may say more about us and our world than that which transcends even the limits of the human imagination. Turning to the criticisms of Gertrud’s spirituality (and intelligence) by Thomas Merton and William James, I intend to salvage Gertrud in order to uncover her spiritual maturity.

The full essay is at "Faith Seeking Understanding."

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1. Pope Francis, Dilexit Nos, October 24, 2024, para. 98.
2. Ibid.

Love as God Loves Us: Embodying Inconvenient Compassion

I contend that compassion is an automatic byproduct of having shut out the outside world for a time to experience transcendence in its religious sense (i.e., reaching beyond the limits of human conception, perception, and emotion). Such experience as prayer, for example, or meditation can result in a heightened sensitivity in perceiving the world, including things and other people who are in proximity. Such sensitivity where other people are being perceived can illicit compassion to them. It is the bracketing experience itself, away from our daily life, rather than what is being prayed about or meditated on that triggers the generalized sensitivity and thus the enhanced readiness or inclination to feel compassion where it applies. I submit furthermore that with some beliefs regarding how God in the Abrahamic religions views us creatures in Creation, we mere mortals can assume to some degree the perspective that, given how God is depicted in scriptures, God would or does have in watching us in our own little worlds.

The full essay is at "Love as God Loves Us."

Differences between Two Living Popes White-Washed in Fake News

People in glass houses should not throw stones. Or, the person who is without sin casts the first stone. Lastly, a house divided cannot stand, at least in the long run. Yet houses are so rarely as fundamentally divided as the one in which I grew up. Regarding religious institutions, theological differences can be allowed to blow up into major, life-threatening disputes, or papered over by sins of omission pertaining to just how deep a fissure goes. Conflicts, in other words, can be exacerbated or mollified, depending on the temperaments.

On February 7, 2018, Joe Ratzinger, a former pope of the Roman Catholic Church, wrote a letter pertaining to a multi-volume book on the then-current pope’s theology. Reading from the letter at the book’s presentation the next month, Dario Vigano, the prefect of the Vatican’s communications office, said that Benedict, the  former pope, confirmed that Francis, the current pope, had a solid theological and philosophical training and that the book showed the “interior continuity” between the two papacies.[1] This “left the impression that the 91-year-old retired pope had read the [book] and l endorsed it, when in fact he hadn’t.” The retired pope had not read the book!

The full essay is at "Two Living Popes White-Washed."

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1. Nicole Winfield, “Vatican Bows to Pressure, Releases Retired Pope’s Letter,” Religion News Service, March 18, 2018.

Liturgical Vestments as Doorways into the Divine: On the Importance of Transcendence

In the Book of Genesis, God makes garments of skin for Adam and Eve and clothes them. Gianfranco Ravasi, a Roman Catholic Cardinal and de facto cultural minister of the Vatican, reflected on the meaning of liturgical vestments while he was in New York with prominent designers to preview the upcoming exhibit, “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That fashion could point to the transcendent would seem to go against the ostensibly fundamental  dichotomy between the superficial and the significant.  The religious quest can be understood in such terms as transcending the image to the underlying ineffable mystery that must characterize the transcendent.

The full essay is at "Liturgical Vestments as Doorways."

Is Humanism a Religion?

Is Humanism a religion?  I contend that Humanism does not qualify, but it is compatible with religious experience. Beginning with how religion was defined in ancient times, I argue that the element or aspect of transcendence is vital. I then look at whether transcendence is and could be in Humanism.

The full essay is at "Humanism"