Category: Miscellaneous

In 2019, I attended the FAIR Mormon Conference in Provo, Utah. I stayed at the Marriott and walked across the street to the Utah Convention Center each morning. At noon and in the evening I walked the summer streets, looking for something enticing to eat and enjoying the energy of the small city. This year, the conference was virtual only, so I registered and attended online. I missed the focus which is easier to maintain when one is out of one’s house surrounded by tasks and unfinished projects, but my ability to see and hear the presentations was actually better online.

I’ve made brief summaries of some of the sessions. I’ve left out a few, not because they didn’t interest me so much as because the content was too complicated and sensitive for me to trust my severe abridgements. Sometimes the complex can be simplified only by falsifying it.

Taylor Halverson, “The Covenant Path in the Bible and the Book of Mormon”

It is by walking the covenant path that we fully walk with God. Professor Halverson discussed the promises God made in his covenant with Abraham and the obligations he asked of His people in return at the time of the Mosaic covenant (upon his keeping his promise to Abraham by freeing the Israelites from bondage in Egypt). Halverson pays close attention to word origins and the expanded meanings of such terms as faith, perfect, prosperity, affection, righteousness, friend and many others.

Professor Halverson then turned to the Book of Mormon, suggesting that it is a covenantal text and discussing what the means. It is built around the promise God made to Abraham regarding his descendants: those who keep my commandments will prosper in the land. Jesus repeats the Sermon on the Mount in the New World (with certain changes due to the different context) because this sermon lays out the covenantal obligations of followers of Christ.

Halverson offers us a typological reading of the Book of Mormon, which is the way the book itself suggests it should be read. This reading invites us to contemplate the meaning held in the large unfolding of events across decades and centuries.

Jeffrey Thayne, “The Apologetic Implications of the Truth Made Flesh”

When Christ said, “’I am the way, the truth, and the life’ (John 14:6) he asserted a quite different understanding of truth than is common in modern life. Modernists follow the Greek philosophers in seeing truth as a set of ideas, and this contrasts with the Jewish and then the Christian view of truth as a person, deity. All we can be sure of is what God has promised.

Truth seen in this way is dialogic and contextual. Whereas the Greeks believed that change was a defect, Christ updates our understanding of our covenant with the Lord when he extends the Mosaic commandments into more personal dimensions. The truth of God is seen in his activity and ministerings among people. Our stories preserve narrative continuity, but we know better than to reject living prophets in order to follow dead prophets.

Church teaching can change our practices and that’s okay. We fall into ideaolatry, the worship of our own ideas, when we allow ideas we have discovered or formulated to replace the living God. In the relational way of truth, we learn what is true in part by making and keeping covenants. Doctrine doesn’t walk with us or save us. Only Christ does that. Conversion is about more than doctrine–it’s about relationship and covenants. Quite often people who haven’t learned these truths ask the wrong questions.

Why did the church change? That may be like looking for the corner in a round room.

Bruce and Brian Dale, “Joseph Smith: The World’s Greatest Guesser (a Bayesian Statistical Analysis of Positive and Negative Correspondences between the Book of Mormon and The Maya, 9th Edition)

The Brothers Dale use statistical analysis to compare facts stated in the Book of Mormon with facts stated in Yale anthropologist Michael Coe’s The Maya. The session was a response to a claim made by Dr. Coe: “The picture of this hemisphere between 2,000 B.C. and A.D. 421 presented in the book (i.e., the Book of Mormon) has little to do with early Indian cultures.” They note that he had very little familiarity with the Book of Mormon, that he was “almost completely ignorant” of it having read it only once 45 years ago, and that his claim is simply not supported by the evidence provided in his own book.

Using Dr. Coe’s own book, Professor Dale found 131 correspondences, connections, congruences, parallels, similarities, instances of agreement, etc. between Coe’s own book and the Book of Mormon. “The cumulative weight of these correspondences, analyzed using Bayesian statistics,” they said, “provides overwhelming support for the historicity of the Book of Mormon as an authentic, factual record set in ancient Mesoamerica.

According to their analysis using the Bayesian Method, the probability that the Book of Mormon is not an authentic text vanishingly small. “When we assign the weakest Bayes Factor (0.5) to all the positive correspondences, the likelihood that the Book of Mormon is a fake is less than 1 in a thousand, billion, billion, billion, billion.

Though they did not set out to answer the question of the geographical setting of the Book of Mormon, they argue that any other plausible setting/explanation must provide equivalent or greater supporting evidence than we have presented here. “Any other plausible explanation must
consider and weight both positive and negative evidence.”
“Thou shalt not be a cherry picker,” Dale concluded.

Valerie Hudson, “The First Political Order and the Ppriesthood”

There are two divine powers in our universe. These two divine powers were meant to be joined in the new and everlasting covenant of marriage, enabling even greater power than that wielded alone. The power of the divine masculine, the power held and wielded by our Heavenly Father: this is what we call the priesthood. The power of the divine feminine, the power held and wielded by our Heavenly Mother: this is the priestesshood, though we have been reluctant to name it as such until recently

Hudson began by discussing what she called the “first political order,” which is the sexual political order established between men. This order decides the nature of society. Will men and women stand before each other as equals, or as superior and inferior? Will decisions for the group be made by one, or both? Will conflicts be resolved peacefully or by force and domination?

What you do to your women,

you do to your nation.

She argued that “governance by extended male kin networks” has led to unfortunate outcomes—instability, violence, terror, corruption, autocracy—because it proceeds from the nature of male/female relations, the first political order. What you do to your women you do to your nation. She cited extensive evidence from the Minerva Initiative (DoD) grant, 2014-2018 which she worked on. Researchers studied 9 dimensions of nation-state outcomes, using stringent bar for significance (p<.001):

1. Political Stability and Governance
2. Security and Conflict
3. Economic Performance
4. Economic Rentierism
5. Health and Wellbeing
6. Demographic Security
7. Education of the Population
8. Social Progress
9. Environmental Protection

After examing dozens of variables, they found that nations that disempowered women had

• 3.53 times the chance of having a government that is more autocratic, less effective, and more corrupt
• 1.5 the chance of being unstable and violent
• 1.28 times the chance of experiencing terrorism
• 1.40 times the chance of the country being poor and in economic decline
• 1.50 the chance of having a low GDP per capita
• 1.55 times the chance of having low environmental quality
• 1.80 times the chance of scoring worse on the Global Hunger Index

With that background, she turned to a discussion of women in the church. She began by pointing out that “there is a First Political Order of Heaven, too, and the degree to which we emulate that Order here on earth determines in large measure the degree of blessings our society will enjoy (or forfeit): We have a Heavenly Father and a Heavenly Mother. They are different, but we know they stand before each other as equals. We know they love each other, and are sealed together in the new and everlasting covenant of marriage.

She cited several General Authorities to support these claims:
Elder L. Tom Perry’s description of the ideal earthly marriage describes our Parents’ marriage: “There is not a president and vice president in a family. We have co-presidents working together eternally for the good of their family … They are on equal footing. They plan and organize the affairs of the family jointly and unanimously as they move forward.”

We are created in Their Image and we are meant to emulate the pattern of Their Lives, including to become a spouse and a parent, and to live that equal partnership that They live. Elder M. Russell Ballard said that “Men and women are equal in God’s eyes and in the eyes of the Church.”

She noted that our understanding is increasing in this area and that “our language is adapting to this understanding. It was,” she said, “inherent in everything Joseph Smith taught.”

President Dallin H. Oaks: “[P]riesthood ordinances and priesthood authority pertain to women as well as men.”

Elder M. Russell Ballard: “When men and women go to the temple, they are both endowed with the same power, which by definition is priesthood power.’

President Russell M. Nelson: “If you are endowed but not currently married to a man who bears the priesthood and someone says ‘Tm sorry you don’t have the priesthood in your home,” please understand that that statement is incorrect. . . You have received and made sacred covenants with God in His temple. From those covenants flows an endowment of His priesthood power upon you”

She observed that “the exercise of priesthood in mortality is the apprenticeship whereby men grow into Heavenly Fatherhood,” and adds that “the exercise of priestesshood in mortality is the apprenticeship whereby women grow into Heavenly Motherhood.”

In heaven, our Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother are both equally powerful, but one holds the keys and power of Fatherhood and one holds the keys and power of Motherhood. Married in the new and everlasting covenant of marriage, the joining of Their powers enables the Great Plan of Happiness for Their Children.

Women’s priestesshood is not given them by men or mediated by men, for the power of the divine feminine is endless and eternal in its own right. This suggests that the greater light and knowledge we seek about the priestesshood may have to come directly from Mother to daughters.

Kerry Muhlestein, “Egyptian Papers and the Translation of the Book of Abraham: What Careful Applications of the Evidence Can and Cannot Tell Us”

People like simple explanations. For some questions, though, all simple explanations are wrong. Some things are in fact very complicated. Kerry Muhlestein, former associate chair of the Department of Ancient Scripture at Brigham Young University, examined false claims about the origins of the Book of Abraham. He discussed the provenance of the papyri that Joseph Smith had access to and translated, as well as what Joseph Smith and other eye witness reported about the translation process. A major part of his presentation was taking down claims made by Jerald Tanner in 1966 and repeated many times since. The scroll that Tanner claimed was the “source” of the Book of Abraham was not, and the textual record clearly shows that it was not. The issue is important because the Book of Abraham has tied as the number 1 reason people leave the church.

Most of the sesseion was spent with Muhlestein taking the audience through a painstaking analysis of an Egyptian alphabet and grammar begun by Joseph Smith making comparisons with it to both the papyrii that we still have (some were destroyed in the Chicago Fire) as well as with the manuscript of the Book of Abraham. This allowed him to state definitively that several theories people have advanced were NOT true.

This led to a rich discussion about the complicated relationship between revelation and translation. Everyone with first-hand knowledge of Joseph’s process emphasizes the role played be revelation, but what we can know of the historical events is very complicated. Anyone who offers a simple explanation is being deceptive.

The last question Dr. Muhlestein was asked: “Do you believe the Book of Abraham is true?” Answer: “Yes. Absolutely.”

Some forms of modesty are quite natural—a sense of boundaries and of privacy that should be respected. But pride also comes naturally—a sort of competitiveness or desire for attention or power.

“Why should anyone care how someone else dresses?” asked Ebba, an exchange student from Sweden with a broad smile and a guileless charm. She was the first to speak up when my high school journalism students—all girls—began discussing whether to write an editorial on the school’s dress code, which they thought was no longer being enforced.  I had invited a mini-debate to get a sense of the group’s views of the issue.  In an earlier piece of writing, Ebba had said  “Some days the walk from the front door of the school to my locker feels like the longest walk ever, with all the eyes staring at me.” She had the self-consciousness typical of high school girls.

“It doesn’t make any sense that girls should have to cover up their whole bodies just because guys are animals,” added another junior—a girl who gave considerable attention to looking good. Several people talked over each other, and in the mild tumult a Christian girl, wearing jeans and a bulky sweater, with somewhat shaggy hair covering much of her face, offered that  each person influences others people and that a girl should be discreet in their dress. “That’s bull!” came a quick rejoinder from an angular-faced girl who tended to become strident in any conversation that touched on gender. “Rape culture,” she said dismissively. “You’re blaming  the way girls dress to excuse bad behavior by males.” And so it went.

Before the young feminist could continue,” I suggested that one likely reason the dress code was being played down was that the community was divided over the question, and it was hard for politically-governed bureaucracies to take stands on issues that were controversial. What’s a community leader to do when there really is no community?

Contemporary schools are rarely community schools. They are more due-process bureaucracies, semi-organized knots of competing special interests—unions, professional associations, foundations, various levels and institutions of government, parents’ associations.  A simple decision  might require a principal to review several overlapping decision-making processes: is this a matter of statute, or of board policy, or of a grant requirement, or of collective bargaining? Many school leaders seek their identities in the recognition of peers rather than as members of the town or neighborhood where the school is geographically located. Such managers often have larger fish to fry than contemplating Erin’s spandex. One makes a name for oneself by being a skillful manager, which includes  minimizing waves. The path to success is not straight but it’s quite narrow in places. There’s no need to be a moral leader, which historically has been a path to getting stoned. And doesn’t “moral leader” sound quaint and judgmental?

I wasn’t surprised these teenagers held the usual positions on modesty. Social media’s not great about facts or evidence, but it’s rife with opinions.  I noted that the loudest opinions were those taken by those students who thought social norms in general were pig-headed. Such is the world that we now live in. In the end, the kids decided not to write about the dress code.

Dress codes have always been a touchy issue. My wife’s father disagreed with the local principal who banned girls wearing pants—even girls who walked to school in subzero temperatures. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing new going on. The extent to which we have lost a common culture may be new. Some people are bothered by tarted up teenagers, while others agree with the advice given by one of my students: “If you’ve got it, flaunt it.”  To enforce a dress code, authorities  need to be able to explain the basis of their rules, but fewer and fewer know how to do this in a society where people do not share fundamental assumptions. They are more in their comfort zone urging young people to have pride—which has become uncontroversial—than they are discussing modesty.

On issues where we don’t share fundamental assumptions, nobody on one side of the chasm is likely to persuade anyone on the other side. Why, then, argue? I don’t imagine that I have anything to say about modesty that will settle the argument, but there are other reasons for speaking.  Sometimes, the purpose of discussion is to remind oneself of neglected aspects of life. Sometimes, it is to encourage kindred spirits who might feel they are the only ones who feel as they do. We make communities by gathering in a shared vision, and this requires talk–making the vision clear and finding each other.  Sometimes, we find those whose vision of the good life neighbors our own, giving it depth and stability. In such moments, persuading opponents hardly enters our minds. They aren’t here to be straightened out by us, and we have other things to do, such as reminding ourselves of insights and feelings that, in heightened moments, we have realized but that in the clatter of the passing tumult we have let go dark, like books we forgot we were reading.

Choice, Part 2

The end is for choice to replace truth as the cultural standard.

The choice regime is a land of illusion, but well-funded illusion with lots of support from the authorities. The governing committees can proclaim that there is no biological basis for maintaining distinctions between the sexes, marriage can be redefined, and appeals to any authority beyond the experts who set the policies is derided as extreme. We desire no durable standard for choice other than what we want, and talk of what we ought to want is tasteless and deranged. If a little boy wants to be a little girl, those who would stand against him using the girls restroom and locker room are opposed to diversity and democracy.

The choice regime will weigh in on the side of the individual’s right to self-creation, and if this is a problem for others–say the little girls who do not want a boy in the restroom–they need to overcome their bigotry and evolve. Those who favor dissolving traditional morality with a regime founded on authenticity and choice may waver as each new frontier comes into view–and there will always be a frontier–but they will evolve just as they did on same-sex marriage, unwed mothers, no-fault divorce and the rest.

Guilt and shame must be dissolved. One can see the process readily in the Anthony Weiner drama. Ordinary common-sense–not to mention principle-based reason–suggests Weiner is something of a fool. His adolescent eagerness to will a contradiction–he wants to indulge his horniness whenever the impulse moves him and he wants to be taken seriously and be given grownup responsibilities. Tracy Clark-Flory at Salon offers us help in thinking about this correctly. “Why does it matter?” she asks. “Of course, it probably matters to Huma Abedin, the mother of his child (that is, assuming that they have an agreement of monogamy, and that their definition of monogamy includes refraining from sexting with others)”–that is, if he and his wife have chosen to think that fidelity is important to a marriage. “But why should we care?”

The key to correct thinking is to get the focus off character:

We might tell ourselves that this reveals something relevant about Weiner’s character — his absurd ego or penchant for risk-taking, perhaps. But are these not also qualities that might make him a good politician? Have we not seen similar characteristics in Bill Clinton, John Edwards and so many other talented-but-philandering politicos? I can’t help but think that we are disturbed by his lack of sexual control not because it is relevant to his job but because it reminds us of the ways that we sometimes feel overpowered by sex.

Turn the attention away from Weiner and focus it back on whoever presumes to judge. Weiner did nothing wrong. Mention that John Edwards was “talented” but ignore the thought that he was dishonest, greedy, manipulative and cruel–somehow wasn’t his talent comprised of all his qualities? What are the motives of those who come to judgment, anyway? It’s okay to focus on talent and intelligence–the elite is elite for reasons–but not on character. People who bring up character are probably hypocrites: “We could act indignant about the fact that he hasn’t been forthcoming about aspects of his intimate life. But why not instead be angry that we live in a country that requires him to be dishonest about his struggles with monogamy in order to maintain his career?”

See? It’s not so much that he’s a fool as that he’s a victim–a victim of hypocrisy. And the real point is that if we don’t dissolve the old structures of guilt and shame, none us will escape suffering. Nonjudgmentalism (at least about sex) is a pact–it lets us all off the hook:

Well, let ye who is without embarrassing sexts cast the first stone. (Side-note: I read some of Weiner’s messages out loud to my partner, guffawing after each — until he jogged my memory about a few that I had sent to him in the early days of our relationship and I proceeded to shut the hell up forever on that topic.)

The old way to resolve guilt was through repentance and change. In the choice regime, it is the standard that is seen as the problem. It is forbidden to forbid. It’s a short step from this–dismissing old notions of goodness–to hating goodness itself. A good person restores the standard of judgment–and thus our guilt. People who attack people like Weiner, or Bill Clinton, are the problem. It is they who must be attacked.

To understand character as ordered desire–as the sort of wisdom that will, for example, abstain from a donut in order to preserve health–was not long ago the basis of our culture. The natural man is a tangled flux of disordered desires, living amid the perpetual crisis that surrounds the impulsive and improvident.

Those attracted to realms of truth–ordered desires amid enduring realities–are likely to repair the barn door before the storm, to plant the corn in season, to withdraw savings to handle emergencies, and to sit at peace under his fig tree watching the grandchildren play. It’s not possible for such people to reason with advocates for the choice regime. Their reason works by seeking truth–insights into enduring realities–but in the choice regime, desire is the main truth.

Language is taken as a self-referential performance circling the reality of desire. The discourse of cable talk shows is emblematic of the age. Guests rationalize and justify, frame and reframe, construct and reconstruct–but the goal is creation of a version that might justify a position. It is rarely communion.

Wendell Berry observed that the best way to judge intelligence might be the degree of order that surrounds one. Let’s turn to that insight next.

. . . When God
answers it is not as God would answer if men could
make Him. He stands in the circle around the fire, takes
His turn, tells a story. It isn’t loud. No one
has to believe It.
(“Letter to Reeve from the lobby of the Grand Hyatt”)

Both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and now Harvard have issued reports finding decreases in the number of students choosing majors in the humanities. So now we have the sober discussions. The humanities professors suggest the problem isn’t really that people aren’t taking their classes–it’s that they get less pay, less status and less palatial digs than their colleagues in the sciences.

David Brooks, who makes his living by attracting an audience rather than by claiming a sinecure, speaks more to the point. He says people have turned away from the humanities because humanities professors are no longer very interesting. “The humanities turned from an inward to an outward focus,” he said. The focus is no longer on “truth, beauty, and goodness;” the emphasis is now on “race, class, and gender.” It takes a special sort of person to sign up for classes in political ideology taught by an English professor, and there don’t appear to be many such people.

I know that he’s right, in a general way, though I don’t know with much specificity what goes on in the hundreds of literature classes that are out there. I have hung around the profession of English teachers enough to know that there’s a ferocious sort of intellectualizing about literature, proof texting to support this or that theory, which is often quite political. Scholarly types are fond of the classifying and naming that lead to extensive jargon. They seem less comfortable with the language of communion, which I take to be the heartland of the greatest literature–Cervantes, Proust, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare.

Lee Siegel thinks it will be a good thing when literature is no longer taught at the universities. Literature, he points out, is a relatively new discipline at the college level:

Literature did not even become part of the university curriculum until the end of the 19th century. Before that, what came to be called the humanities consisted of learning Greek and Latin, while the Bible was studied in church as the necessary other half of a full education. No one ever thought of teaching novels, stories, poems or plays in a formal course of study. They were part of the leisure of everyday life.

It would be different if the study of literature really was used to cultivate “empathy, curiosity, aesthetic taste and moral refinement,” he says, but the reality is quite otherwise. The real work of modernist literature and the professors who teach it is moral subversion. Even worse, he suggests, is the widespread poor teaching that turns the sublime into toil and drudgery.

Great literature remains vital, but it does not need to be taught in a classroom. “Literature is too sacred to be taught. It needs only to be read,” he says. I think he’s moving in the right direction when he turns to the sacred:

The literary classics are a haven for that part of us that broods over mortal bewilderments, over suffering and death and fleeting happiness. They are a refuge for our secret self that wishes to contemplate the precious singularity of our physical world, that seeks out the expression of feelings too prismatic for rational articulation. They are places of quiet, useless stillness in a world that despises any activity that is not profitable or productive.

Rosanna Warren acknowledges that the humanities are alive and well in places other than universities, but warns nonetheless that if we do not support the humanities in the universities, we face another dark age:

Our civilization may now be so coarsened that we will eliminate the humanities from our schools, and we will train citizens only for technical skills which give them no sense of what they are living for, or why. But if that happens, the humanities will continue to flow elsewhere, into unofficial forums, and people will flow with them to satisfy their needs for song and story, for explanation, for the drama of seeking and making sense. The unofficial academy will become the real academy where the arts and philosophy and history survive. And where we try to remember what it is to be fully human. But in that case, we shall also have suffered a massive loss, and it remains a serious question whether a democratic society could survive such a collapse in values, and the quest for values. That quest, ever renewed, is the province of the humanities, and it is at risk.

I wish I believed that–that something so important was happening at the academy. But honestly, this strikes me as begging the question. The question, for me, is precisely what it means to be “fully human” and whether the ideas that have come to dominate universities are true enough that that their passing would indeed be a crisis–at least for anyone but the professors. R. V. Young argues that what the various theories that are prevalent in English departments today usually have in common is nihilism. The secular ideologies that have been ascendent throughout my life have no place for modes of being that, by my lights, are central to being fully human. Human beings, I think, in postmodern universities are too often lost in meaninglessness, trying to construct identities out of the flotsam of intellectualized fragmentation. What I’m not sure about is how deep and pervasive those ideas are in actual classrooms.

A couple of months ago, the Bowdoin Report was released by the National Association of Scholars. It tried to compose a picture of what is actually being taught in the humanities.

According to Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield’s assessment of the report, what is actually taught–at least at Bowdoin–is, as Brooks suggested, mostly political correctness:

Topical courses are featured in programs called “Studies,” such as Gender and Women’s Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies (separate from the preceding), Environmental Studies, and Africana Studies, that were founded explicitly as political advocacy for their constituents. But also Asian Studies and Latin American Studies, with apparently neutral names, are now concerned mainly with repudiating Western colonialism—long after its demise one would think. The various Studies, but also regular departments, have stimulated other developments in the curriculum—the cross-listing of courses given by one department in another department and the new emphasis on interdisciplinary study. Both have the purpose of making specialty courses seem more general than they are, and both try to endow the idiosyncratic, parochial, even trivial subject-matter of topical courses with the universality of science. The report sums up the Bowdoin curriculum of equal courses as having a certain “flatness” and tending toward “entropy,” where faculty and students share the undemanding practice of self-expression, and the uninterest in teaching of the former joins with the uninterest in learning of the latter.

Political correctness, Mansfield suggests, “with its present-minded exactness, its not quite selfless objectivity, and its esoteric jargon is science for non-scientists.”

I went to the university on the G.I. Bill after Vietnam. I remember well the eros of learning, the hunger for insight that, I was sure, was in those great books. It was there, and what others loved I have loved, and they have taught me how. I would wish for young people today something of the communion that lay at the heart of my university education.

Such communion lies in the direction of the sacred. Northrop Frye characterized literature as “man’s revelation to man”–someone else described it as one person’s inside talking to another person’s inside. It has relatively little to do with the specialized jargon that has grown up around it at the universities–through precise words are useful if they don’t become the point and thus a distraction. To be fully human, as universities seem to understand it, is to be an intellect. Intellectualizing creates a distance that takes us out of the immanent. I hear much talk about critical thinking among English teachers–and while I’m all in favor of critical thinking, literature is about critical thinking in somewhat the way making love is about motor skills.

It’s possible to view and teach Priam’s speech to Achilles in his tent as an illustration of rhetorical technique. That’s quite different from knowing it as a moment of communion–between two souls but also between them both and an order coming into view in the cosmos, a formative power that is prior to and more fundamental than the gods. Priam in his sorrow has learned to see that order, and through the power of the word reveals that order to Achilles, who, thank heaven, is not a deconstructionist. Achilles stands with Priam before a right way to be. It follows that Achilles desires to bring his conduct into harmony with that right way, with things are they really are. Through literature, we can learn what they have learned. Is this what Rosanna Warren has in mind when she talks about learning to be fully human, which for my tribe is to be with others within the immanence of a divine order?

I suspect the university literature experience tends to feel right mainly for people who belong to the same tribe as the professors. How we construe things is something we learn. The Greeks somewhat reconstrued their cosmos in part through centuries of reading Homer, creating a context that made Socrates possible. It wasn’t long ago that many literature teachers viewed their work as part of that construal. Some still do. But for most, Darwin and Freud and Marx have had more influence–and the divine order has been replaced by a universe that has no meaning except what we construct. More recently, thinkers such as Derrida and Foucault have sowed skepticism about any real possibility of communion through the word.

I do think the postmodernists have seen something true about the cosmos, though as through a glass darkly. What we make of the world is shaped by the narrative environment in which our minds took form. The implications of this can lead us to real trouble–we can lose the ability to communicate and to form a world together. Our society can fragment into factions that neither see nor hear one another. James K. A. Smith explores this is some depth, from a Christian point of view, in Imagining the Kingdom.

If we are asked what to do about urban education, for example, a host of emotions drawn from the stories we have experienced will shape our opinion before we even get to thinking about it. We will understand the question, usually, as our tribe ‘s stories have contextualized it.

The situation as perceived already comes loaded (or not) with a call upon me. The call I feel in such a situation, even if it is experienced as “obvious,” can be radically different for someone who has had different affective “training.” So in the case of urban public schools, one person will immediately and “obviously” see the situation as calling for discipline—for policies that are meant to fight the laziness that characterizes the “culture of poverty” while exercising “stewardship” of public resources. Another person will “just see” the dynamics of disenfranchisement and the systemic oppression that generates such an oppression, feeling a call to take up the work of individual empowerment and systemic policy change. Any “facts” will already be seen in light of the affective background each brings to the situation.

Instead, we should say that we have a “feel” for the world that is informed by stories that dispose us to inhabit the world as either a bounteous but broken gift of the gracious Creator or a closed system of scarcity and competition; and as a result, either I will just “naturally” be disposed to see others as neighbors, as image-bearers of God, whose very faces call to me in a way that is transcendent, or I will have a “take” on others as competitors, threats, impositions on my autonomy.

That affective, emotional “background” is also part of the dispositions or tendencies that I bring to such a context. I’m not only primed to see the situation in a certain way, based on this emotional context; I’m also already inclined or disposed to act in a certain way—not as the result of a decision but as a sort of “natural” tendency given the inclinations that I’ve acquired, the habits that already prime me to “lean” in certain directions.

So generating good, just, virtuous action is not merely a matter of disseminating the relevant rules or principles; it is more fundamentally dependent upon training affect—training people to “see situations in the right way.” That, it turns out, requires training their emotions to be primed to take in and evaluate situations well. Our emotional perceptual apparatus (which I’m linking to “the imagination”) is significantly “trained” by narrative.

The crucial issue with teaching literature comes down to what the teachers make of literature. Whether or it matters to us whether literature remains in the schools will be strongly influenced by whether we think professors make of the world and of humans what we make of them. Also, we don’t really know the answer. The reports don’t have that sort of resolution.

The long, slow march of secular ideology through the humanities has coincided with my life of teaching and writing. The nation is more divided now than at any time in my life over fundamental questions. What is true, I think, is that how classrooms repeatedly construe literary texts will, for most students, become the meaning of literature. If, in classroom after classroom, literature is construed as expressions of one’s sex or race or social class or ethnic tribe, students might accurately be said to be on a quite different planet than students who learned in classrooms where literature is experienced as moments of communion between kindred souls amid shared creation.

Do I mean “on quite a different planet” literally or figuratively? No. I mean it holistically, the way I think Christ meant “this is my body.”

Adam S. Miller follows Bruno Latour in arguing that the field of religion is immanence while the discipline of science is transcendence. According to Latour:

When the debate between science and religion is staged, adjectives are almost exactly reversed: it is of science that one should say that it reaches the invisible world of the beyond, that she is spiritual, miraculous, soul-lifting, uplifting. And it is religion that should be qualified as local, objective, visible, mundane, unmiraculous, repetitive, obstinate, sturdy.

Miller says that “where science reveals transcendent objects by correcting for our myopia, religion reveals immanent objects by correcting for our hyperopia.” That’s often correct, in my experience.

I believe it was also Plato’s experience. As told by Plato, Socrates’ “Allegory of the Cave” has always made sense to me as an illustration of how the philosophic intellect works in science. Gravity is invisible to the senses, though its effects can be seen. One can pose experiments and collect data, reorganizing what is seen until gravity becomes visible not to the eye but to the intellect. One can turn one’s vision to the movement of celestial objects, seeing at last the transcendent force that orders the night sky.

But it is when Socrates speaks of his daimon that he is bringing up religion. Of that, he says little, because he cannot through reason make the intimate and immediate experience of his communion available to a public. He leaves little doubt, though, that his truest knowledge is of divine eros and that this knowledge is arrived at through intimate communion. In the Symposium Socrates tells us that he knows nothing but the things of eros. He expands this claim in the Theages, “I always say, you know, that I happen, so to speak, to know nothing except a certain small subject of learning, the things of eros. As regards this subject of learning, I claim to be more clever than any human beings living previously or now.”

A great mystery of Plato is that he is adamant in his Seventh Letter that he has never been explicit in writing about the things about which he is serious. “There is no writing of mine about these things, nor will there ever be,” he said. “For it is in no way a spoken thing like other lessons.” He adds that trying to write about the serious things wouild not be good for people “except for some few who are able to learn by themselves with a little guidance.”

This strange silence has led to great argument about what to make of the “serious things” and Plato’s claims of silence about them. James Rhodes summarizes the story in Eros, Wisdom, and Silence. Schleiermacher claimed that Plato wanted to lead his readers into the foothills of the truth, where they might glimpse the spiritual reality for themselves. Leo Strauss, most notoriously, revived the esoteric arguments that Plato intentionally deceived his readers and kept his profound secrets away from the many. Voegelin suggested that Socratic language respresented “experiences of transcendence” that language could refer to only symbolically. Paul Friedländer argued that the “ineffability of the highest Platonic vision” is symbolized by “the irony of Socratic ignorance.” He says he knows nothing.

The most vivid knowledge, in my experience, occurs through direct perception during periods of intense communion. We can talk about such experiences, but only people who recognize that they have had such experiences themselves take such conversation seriously. Religious practices try to renew such experiences. This is far removed from theology, which is a sort of philosophy–the sort of thing Plato and Socrates did talk about.