Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Blog

A Psychoanalytic Call for Peace Between Believers and Non-believers

by Robert Langs, M.D.

          Four highly visible and prominent authors (S. Harris, D. Dennett, R. Dawkins, and C. Hitchens) have recently penned books that attack religion as a sham and the belief in the existence of a transcendental God as more or less delusional. Believers have tended to respond by pointing out first, that God has a divine plan and acts in mysterious ways, and second, that these writers show considerable ignorance regarding, and misrepresentations of, religious beliefs. As suggested by Harold Bloom, the outcome of this rancorous debate is that only the already convinced are convinced.

          As a psychoanalyst who has developed a new, adaptation-centered paradigm of psychoanalysis and thus a new view of human life, I want to offer an olive branch to both sides of this conflict. It is based on the insight that coping with death and the three forms of death anxiety it evokes—predatory (the fear of being attacked or killed), predator (the guilt-ridden need for punishment by death for harming others), and existential (the fear of one’s personal mortality)—are the fundamental challenges for all of humankind. Uniquely, we meet these threats using two distinctive adaptive systems of the emotion-processing mind, one that is attached to conscious awareness and the other without such a link. The activities of this deep unconscious system are encoded in narratives such as dreams and daydreams. Comparing the reactions of these two systems to the same death-related events we find that conscious responses tend to be muted, infused with denial, and poorly thought out, while deep unconscious reactions tend to be brutally candid, exceedingly wise, and based on grim images of destruction, devastation, and horror.

          Relevant to the effort to make peace between believing and non-believing combatants, clinical observations of patients’ unconscious efforts to cope with traumatic incidents indicate that there are two basic types of individuals. The first group will consistently encode a series of grim themes that validly reflect the most forbidding meanings of a given trauma and its frightful impact on them. In contrast, the second group will either fail to remember a dream or will report a dream that is bland and without the terrifying imagery that one would expect in light of the trauma with which they are dealing. Both responses are ways of shutting off access to their always terrifying deep unconscious perceptions of the trauma at hand. Furthermore, the narrators will always generate strong themes in response to the least trauma and the non-narrators will always react with mild or absent imagery. There are, then, two very different, rather fixed, archetypal ways of coping unconsciously with the death anxieties aroused by a death-related trauma.

          We can apply these findings to believers and non-believers when it comes to the existence of a supernatural God. Both the belief and disbelief in a transcendental God are, at bottom, psychological ways of dealing with death and its attendant anxieties. Depending on how it is utilized, each approach may be either adaptive or dysfunctional. Each has been successful in bringing peace to many individuals and is responsible for peaceful respites for societies and nations. But each also has spawned madness, violence, and war. Given that a person's adaptive preferences, which are consciously and unconsciously motivated and sustained, tend to be almost set in stone, trying to change this preference is a pointless and generally unfeasible task. Extremely difficult and seldom feasible. This means that there are strong reasons to find ways to enhance the efforts of both secularists and those of faith to cope with their death anxieties, which in turn means that it is unwise and unnatural to try to disassemble belief systems related to the existence of God.

           There is, I think, a moral to this story. Both believers and non-believers ultimately are trying to cope with life and its relentless nemesis, death. Each group has, on the basis of many forces unknown to them, come up with an adaptive solution that is reflected in part in their thoughts about the existence of God. But surely, no one can or should tell another person how to go about resolving their death anxieties nor should they decide for them the role that religious beliefs should play in these efforts. One answer does not and cannot fit all. An individual's chosen mode of trying to cope with death anxiety should be respected and every effort made to improve its chances of success through insights into the needs that are satisfied by these convictions.

          Only a joining of forces based on a deep understanding of the positions of those on both sides of this debate and a combining of resources and understanding can help us to ameliorate the power, often evil and destructive, that death holds over our lives. A familiar phrase captures my message: United we conquer, divided we fall.

Robert Langs, M.D. is the author of 45 books on issues pertaining to human emotional life, including the recently published Beyond Yahweh and Jesus: Bringing Death’s Wisdom to Faith, Spirituality, and Psychoanalysis.

Science and Religion: Toward Common Ground

By Edward F. Kelly   

        Conflicts between science and religion have erupted intermittently since the first stirrings of modern science over four centuries ago, and the past year has witnessed searing new attacks on religion by Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and other defenders of Enlightenment rationalism. Critics like these clearly regard themselves, like science itself, as marshalling the intellectual virtues of reason and objectivity against retreating forces of irrational authority and superstition. In their view science has conclusively demonstrated that we human beings are nothing but complicated biological machines. Everything we are and do is in principle explainable in terms of our biology, chemistry, and physics. Mind and consciousness are generated by—or in some mysterious way identical with—neurophysiological processes occurring in brains. Mental causation, volition, and the “self” are illusions, by-products of the grinding of our neural machinery. And because we are entirely the product of this machinery, we are necessarily extinguished, totally and finally, by the death and dissolution of our bodies. To think anything different is to abandon centuries of cumulative scientific progress and revert to the primitive supernaturalist beliefs of bygone times. Period, end of story.

          In reality things are less clear-cut and much more interesting. My intent here is not to side with the institutionalized religions against science. All seem imperfect human creations, and I do not adhere personally to any. But I do believe that real understanding of human nature will be achieved only by expanding current scientific orthodoxy in directions broadly compatible with the central impulse of religion as characterized by the great American psychologist and philosopher William James in his classic Varieties of Religious Experience, and I further believe that the primary obstacles to doing so reside within science itself.

      The word “fundamentalism” probably evokes for most of us only images of bomb-wielding Islamic terrorists and other examples of religious extremism, but fundamentalism exists within science as well. When scientific opinion hardens into dogma it becomes scientism, which is essentially a secular faith and no longer science. Galileo was persecuted by the Inquisition, but in modern times the main opposition to new scientific ideas has derived not from religious orthodoxies but from other scientists for whom contemporary opinion established the limits of the possible.

      Consider in this light the question of post-mortem survival. The notion that aspects of mind and personality survive bodily death is central to the world’s great religions yet scorned as impossible by present-day establishment science. But few participants in this contentious debate have any inkling that there exists a large scientific literature collectively suggesting that at least some of us, under largely unknown conditions and for some unknown period of time, do in fact survive. The primary threat to this interpretation, ironically, has nothing to do with the quality of the evidence—problems of fraud, credulity, errors of observation or memory, and the like—but with the difficulty of excluding non-survivalist interpretations based solely upon supernormal (“psi”-based or parapsychological) processes involving living persons. The voluminous evidence for such processes includes both spontaneous cases and experimental studies, and in my opinion has long since passed the threshold where competent persons who take the trouble to study it in depth and with an open mind will routinely conclude that these things exist as facts of nature. Indeed, future generations of historians, philosophers, and sociologists will undoubtedly make a good living trying to understand why it took so long for scientists in general to accept this conclusion.

      Either horn of this interpretive dilemma — survival or psi — is lethal to current materialist orthodoxy, which undoubtedly helps explain the hostility of its advocates to both. But many other psychological phenomena pose similarly difficult challenges to conventional ways of thinking. Conditions such as cardiac arrest and general anesthesia, for example, abolish brain conditions regarded by most neurophysiologists as necessary for full consciousness, yet thousands of patients have reported extraordinarily vivid, life-transforming experiences that occurred under these circumstances. Even the most fundamental aspects of everyday mental life including memory, volition, and the qualitative “feels” of consciousness remain unexplained. Everything points, I believe, to the need for an enlarged scientific psychology that can accommodate “transpersonal” or spiritual aspects of human nature without loss of rigor.

      There are more things under Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in today’s mainstream materialist philosophy, and huge questions that so far have been addressed primarily by the world’s great religions are to some degree accessible to the methods of science. There is middle ground between science and the religions as presently constituted, and noisy partisans on both sides ought to know this! As William James himself declared in A Pluralistic Universe, his last book, “Let empiricism once become associated with religion, as hitherto, through some strange misunderstanding, it has been associated with irreligion, and I believe that a new era of religion as well as philosophy will be ready to begin.”

Edward F. Kelly is a Research Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He is also the lead author of Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century.

Evangelical-Jewish Relations

By Alan Mittleman

A group of 34 evangelical leaders recently sent President Bush a letter indicating their support for a Palestinian state. Both sides, they claim, “have legitimate rights stretching back for millennia to the lands of Israel/Palestine,” according to an article in the International Herald Tribune (July 29, 2007). Such a declaration would, of course, be unremarkable had it come from a liberal, mainline Protestant body. Coming from the evangelical world, however, makes it noteworthy. The evangelical community has been stalwart in its support for Israel, as well as in its suspicion toward the Palestinians. The signers of this letter, however, claim that the public face of evangelicalism, as a staunchly pro-Israel community, does not do justice to the inner diversity of the community. According to one evangelical leader, Rev. Joel Hunter, most of the community should not be considered Christian Zionists but is “really open” and seeks “justice for both parties.”

The pastors and leaders behind this initiative—who are identified with the growing progressive wing of the evangelical world—intend their message to be heard by Muslims, as well. The letter is being translated into Arabic and sent to Muslims abroad to offset the image of American evangelicals as lock-step followers of maximalist Zionism. 

This display of internal diversity within evangelicalism suggests the healthy dissent of a community come of age. Just as some evangelicals have taken a “liberal” line on the environment, the war in Iraq, or the use of torture, so too here, complicating the public image of the community is not a bad thing. Anyone who supports pluralism and the free exchange of ideas might welcome this intramural dialogue. Although I very much reject their argument—do Palestinian Arabs really have claims reaching back millennia? Millennia? lands of Israel/Palestine?—I recognize their need to make it based on their understanding of the biblical imperative of justice.

Let us be clear, however, this group does not represent a majority. It represents, at best, a vocal minority. Drawing on several surveys of evangelical opinion from 1994-2005, the political scientist John Green finds that in the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians 56% of evangelicals sympathized more with Israel as opposed to 6%, who sympathized more with the Palestinians. (38% had no opinion.) Forty one percent of the general public, by comparison, sympathized with Israel; 13% with the Palestinians; 46% had no opinion. Majority evangelical backing for Israel both internally and comparatively is striking. When asked why they sympathized with Israel, 84% said it was because “God gave Israel to the Jews.” It would be hard to read the Bible without coming to this conclusion, especially if one hews to a non-suspicious approach to the text.

These leaders do not speak for the majority. At best, they speak for the 38% who have no opinion and the 6% whose sympathies lie with the Palestinians. Perhaps more probing into the evangelical majority would reveal nuances, hesitations, or gradations of support for Israel. For my part, I am thankful that the majority stands behind Israel. I do not want evangelicals to support Israel naively or credulously; I want them to support Israel —warts and all—intelligently and with full recognition of the fundamental justice of its cause. 

Alan Mittleman is Director of the Louis Finkelstein Institute for Religious and Social Studies and Professor of Jewish Philosophy at The Jewish Theological Seminary.  His latest book Uneasy Allies? Evangelical and Jewish Relations , co-edited with Byron R. Johnson and Nancy Isserman, will be published by Lexington Books this month.

Democrats Getting Religion, but Doing It the Wrong Way

by Mark Ellingsen

Good to see the Democrats are finally getting religion, according to Time Magazine (in its July 23 cover story). But if the account is accurate, Democratic leadership and the first-tier Presidential candidates are doing it the wrong way, making the same mistakes that the Right has in manipulating religion for its political purposes. The Time article also doesn't have the whole story. Typical of most media accounts, along with its 'experts' it concentrates only on Evangelical voters, when in fact a coalition of a mainline Protestants, African-American Christians, and Catholics far outnumbers Evangelical voters by 2.5 to 1.

Here's the deal: Republicans have succeeded in getting the religious vote by linking their policies to Puritan dispositions (those of the Mayflower Pilgrims) which have dominated religious life and the way in which most religious Americans of influence view religion. Among these Puritan dispositions, inherited from the movement's origins in 17th-century England include high standards of conservative individual morality, openness to the free-market and aversion towards the poor, as well as the belief that Christian values should directly impact society. By simply speaking of religious values shaping their politics and even implying that the values of faith should impact American society, the old Puritan-like way of the Right, the Democrats not only run the risk of losing their secular and Jewish base as well as of being dismissed by the secular media for violating First Amendment suppositions. More seriously, using such Puritan-like rhetoric just plays into the conservative strategies of developing legislation that favors a free-market, individual accountability approach. It will be heard that way by the public and implemented that way by most American political leaders, because, immersed as they are in Puritan dispositions, most Americans hear religious rhetoric as values to foster individual accountability and the free market. The new Democratic version of religion will just undergird the Neo-Conservatism which has influenced American politics since the Reagan era.

It will take a new/old way of doing religion in politics. The heritages of the African-American, Lutheran, and Catholic churches offer a way to go. Until the Reagan era these three branches of American religion voted Democratic, and at least the first of them still do. What is different? In part it relates to the historically ethnic character of these bodies, a sense that their faith was about all the members of these churches so that politics rooted in these traditions was aimed at upbuilding the community, not just individuals. Also, especially in the case of Lutherans and Catholics, as well as the heritage of the Civil Rights Movement, faith was brought to bear on politics, not so much by appealing to distinct Christian principles, but by appealing to the common morality shared by all human beings and embodied in America's founding documents. Such an approach will appeal to a broad constituency of Americans, will not alienate the Democrats secular base. It will also lead to a progressive politics, because study of the way traditional Christianity has interpreted humanity's common morality (expressed in the final Commands of the Ten Commandments) reveal that the most ancient versions of these faiths believe we kill and steal if we are not helping our neighbors with the basic necessities of life.

This is how the Democrats need to get religion. It will help them keep the good will of a broad constituency, and allow religious claims to be heard as supporting a progressive politics. And if the Democrats combined this with a strategy of building a mainline Protestant, Catholic, Black church coalition, the voice of religious conservatives who could not buy into progressive politics for whatever reason would not matter much (as the numbers of religious conservatives are small compared to this coalition).

Mark Ellingsen is an active speaker at seminaries, churches, and conferences where he is sought out as an expert and spirited champion of authentic Christian faith and politics. Ellingsen is associate professor at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta. His new book When Did Jesus Become Republican?: Rescuing Our Country and Our Values from the Right is publishing this month.

 

Afrocentrism’s Nineteenth-Century Roots

By Jacqueline Bacon                  

As my experience as a historian and critic of the press has taught me repeatedly, the so-called "mainstream" media frequently misunderstand and misrepresent African-American culture and history. A recent example is the claim by some in the press that Barack Obama's membership in the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr.'s Trinity United Church of Christ, which espouses an Afrocentric view of history and Christianity, is somehow cause for concern or criticism. Clearly implied is the subtext that Afrocentrism--which, defined broadly, represents an intellectual approach to history that emphasizes the central contributions of African peoples to world civilizations and attempts to correct Eurocentric perspectives which have ignored the origins of inventions and philosophical developments in Africa--is somehow beyond the cultural pale, "too radical," undertheorized, or faddish.

These mischaracterizations are easily disproved by returning to various historical texts written by African Americans, from the eighteenth century to the present, which demonstrate that what we now call Afrocentrism is part of a longstanding, well-established, and philosophically rich tradition. Consider, for example, Freedom's Journal, the first African-American newspaper, published in New York from 1827 to 1829 and distributed nationally and internationally. Editors Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm, as well as various contributors to the newspaper, offered readers an Afrocentric historical perspective. Articles published in Freedom's Journal explored the origins of various arts, agriculture and other sciences, and formal education in ancient Egypt; argued that the denial of the Africanness of the ancient Egyptians was incorrect and motivated by racism; and located the establishment of the first major city, government, and police force in Ethiopia.

Offerings such as an excerpt from the work of Haitian scholar Pomp?e Valentin, Baron de Vastey, which Russwurm reprinted in Freedom's Journal in 1829, argued that the revered Greek and Roman civilizations, valued as the originators of "Western" philosophy, were built on African foundations and indebted to Africa for their major tenets and innovations; the Greeks, in fact, "were in a state of the grossest ignorance and barbarity . . . till civilized by colonies from Egypt." The Judeo-Christian tradition, too, was traced back to Africa in Freedom's Journal; articles explored Moses' education in Egypt and noted the vibrancy of the early church in Africa.

Given this rich historical context, it is inaccurate and unfortunate that Afrocentrism is repeatedly represented in contemporary media as threatening, un-American, and incompatible with Christianity. Freedom's Journal's readers were devoted Christians, deeply committed to the United States, and dedicated to pushing the nation to live up to its (unrealized) democratic ideals. They also affirmed the value and resonance of the perspective that we now call Afrocentrism in their views of history and in their faith. Far from being divisive, this perspective may be the key to national and international reconciliation, part of a global reevaluation of the past that will help us make a future not of oppression and exploitation but of liberation and affirmation.

Jacqueline Bacon, a writer and scholar, is the author of Freedom's Journal: The First African-American Newspaper. You can also visit her website at http://www.jacquelinebacon.com.

Virgilio Elizondo Named Top Catholic Theologian

The Catholic Theological Society of America, a venerable association of leading theologians in the United States, whose membership includes the outspoken Rev. Charles Curran, named Rev. Virgilio Elizondo of the University of Notre Dame its 2007 John Courtney Murray Award Winner for his distinguished work in theology. R&L proudly publishes several works by Fr. Elizondo, including The Treasure of Guadalupe (2006), A God of Incredible Surprises (2004), and Way of the Cross (2002).

The CTSA's commendation for Fr. Elizondo reads as follows:

* John Courtney Murray Award 2007:
Virgilio Elizondo *

The person who will receive the John Courtney Murray award tonight embodies many of the contending forces and identities that characterize our world today, and he does so with grace and humor. One commentator has described our honoree as someone committed to the basic message “that God cherishes, esteems, values, respects, treasures, forgives, and loves every one of us.” Another has described this person as bringing out the best in others, but our colleague would be more inclined to say that the first proclamation of the Gospel occurs when we are willing to learn from everyone, even the most inconspicuous of people.

Our honoree has reported that as a child, “the parish was the only institution where we felt fully at home” and yet today seems “at home” in a variety of nations and cultures.

Our colleague has written on topics as diverse as poverty, preaching, modern culture and Christian faith, creativity, ritual, and catechesis. He served twenty years on the editorial board of Concilium. Among the places he has taught are UC Santa Barbara, Union Seminary, Boston College, and the Claremont School of Theology.

He studied on three continents, doing his doctoral work at the Institut Catholique in Paris. He has served as faculty member, director of religious education, academic dean, and president. He has received several honorary doctorates and has been honored with awards from various universities, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, and the National Federation of Priests Councils.

His stature has been recognized beyond academe. He has appeared on the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour and Ted Koppel’s Nightline. Time magazine recognized him as one of the leading spiritual innovators in the US. In addition, I would venture to guess that he is the only member of the CTSA who has had a city plaza named in his honor.

When our honoree decided to enter the seminary, he didn’t even have to leave his home parish. In fact, although he is an internationally renowned author and speaker, he has lived in the same neighborhood most of his life. Like the Israelites of old, our honoree is no individualist: his theological vision is fundamentally shaped by his belonging to a people, a minority culture in the United States. And of course, it is precisely those who know multiple cultures who can show us how to break down the divisive barriers between peoples.

His own experience of straddling boundaries has given him great empathy for those who must struggle to live in the present without feeling torn apart (or as he puts it, without feeling “disintegrated”) in their encounters with marginalization and injustice. For him, this very search for meaning is decisive to the experience of faith and the proclamation of the Gospel. And yet in spite of the injustices, he has also said that “the totality of life is reflected in celebration . . . which is not an escape from the world of problems but a bringing of the whole day into the recognition that life is a gift. Life is to be lived, appreciated, and celebrated.”

Our honoree tonight was born in 1935, was ordained a diocesan priest in 1963, and served as the rector of the Cathedral for twelve years. He has spoken often of the two conquests that the indigenous peoples of the region have endured: the Spanish conquest of a continent and a half and the U.S. conquest of what is now the Southwest. Thus it is out of the experience of this history that he founded a series of liturgical rituals, including the re-enactment at Christmas of the journey of Mary and Joseph, with the couple being turned away at city hall, the courthouse, and hotels, before finding shelter at the cathedral.
Our honoree founded the Mexican American Cultural Center in 1972 and was its first president. He was the executive producer, chief liturgist, and frequent celebrant of the only internationally televised live Mass in the Americas. His books include The Human Quest: A Search for Meaning through Life and Death; A God of Incredible Surprises: Jesus of Galilee; Galilean Journey: The Mexican-American Promise; Guadalupe: Mother of the New Creation; and Way of the Cross: The Passion of Christ in the Americas. He is currently Professor of Pastoral and Hispanic Theology at the University of Notre Dame.

This colleague of ours is widely recognized in the religious and academic world as “the father of U.S. Latino religious thought.” He has not only written extensively in this field but has been a mentor and even a father figure for many of our colleagues in Hispanic, Latino, and Latina theology. In fact, the highest award given by ACHTUS, the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States is named in his honor. But he has also helped innumerable of us Anglos in the North to understand the insights that arise from Hispanic faith and theology in the South

For all these reasons, the Catholic Theological Society of America tonight presents the John Courtney Murray Award, its highest honor for distinguished achievement in theology, to Fr. Virgilio Elizondo.