Columbia University Press

The Immanent Frame, a blog on secularism, religion, and the public sphere hosted on the Social Science Research Council’s site, recently asked some of its contributors what they had read and liked over the summer. It is a great list and we were glad to see that a couple of contributors identified Kip Kosek’s award-winning book Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern Democracy, including Tracy Fessenden, who also recommended the forthcoming book After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagement, edited by Courtney Bender and Pamela E. Klassen.

Also recommending the book is aforementioned Pamela Klassen, who writes:

“Kosek’s book tells the story of a “radical religious vanguard” of liberal Protestant pacifists in the United States between the two world wars. A mix of theologians, clergy, and lay activists, the Fellowship of Reconciliation forwarded a sophisticated political and religious critique of state violence that was informed as much by their interpretation of Jesus as by Gandhian satyagraha. Kosek’s attention to the uses of ritual in the movement, and the Fellowship’s influence on later versions of civil disobedience offers an important corrective to overly intellectualized portrayals of Protestant political dissent.”

In an article in Tablet about Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the former Lubavichter leader of the Chabad movement, Adam Kirsch discusses Eliot Wolfson’s new book Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson.

Kirsch, who calls Wolfson’s book “a brilliant new study of the Rebbe’s mystical thought,” looks at Schneerson’s continuing presence in the Chabad movement, evident in Youtube videos and the high esteem many continue to hold him. Claims by many of his followers that he was the Messiah continue to give Chabad a prominence in the Jewish world out of proportion to its actual membership.

However, Schneerson’s own claims about his being the Messiah are ambiguous. Wolfson, as Kirsch points out, “bases his book on the hypothesis that Schneerson not only didn’t think he was the Messiah, he didn’t even believe the Messiah was coming at all.”

We are pleased to announce that the American Academy of Religion named Joseph Kip Kosek’s Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy was named the Best First Book in the History of Religions prize.

For more on the book you can watch a video of Kosek discussing the book at the Library of Congress, a review from Religion in American History, read Kip Kosek’s post on the CUP blog The Power of Nonviolence, or read the book’s introduction.

Here is an excerpt from the book on Richard Gregg, an important figure in the history of the non-violent movement in the United States:

Everyone admires nonviolence when it remains safely in the past, but it looks a little too exotic, too effete, and perhaps even too religious to be much help in our present moment. Does nonviolence really have anything to offer amid the violent crises exploding around the world today? Seventy-five years ago, an American pacifist named Richard Gregg confronted an essentially similar question. His 1934 book The Power of Non-Violence was the first substantial attempt by an American to imagine nonviolence as a formidable strategy in the modern world, not simply as a virtuous allegiance to high-minded ideals. Many years after its initial publication, Martin Luther King, Jr. read The Power of Non-Violence and brought its central ideas into the nascent civil rights movement. King frequently cited the book as one of his most important intellectual influences, alongside the writings of Mohandas Gandhi and Henry David Thoreau. Gregg forced King, as he forces us, to realize that nonviolence is not merely admirable or historically interesting, but fundamentally necessary.

With seemingly everyone in the world weighing in on Tiger Woods, we thought we would add a new perspective via Mark Hulsether, professor of Religious Studies and American Studies at the University of Tennessee and author of Religion, Culture and Politics in the Twentieth Century United States.

In a piece recently written for Religion Dispatches, Hulsether explores Tiger Woods’s recent public apology through the perspective of a religious studies scholar. Upon being asked by a reporter to comment on Woods’s public apology, Hulsether wondered about what is meant by “public,” and whether there might be several publics to whom these types of confessions are addressed. Hulsether writes:

I’m not sure what to make of the idea that there is a stable discourse community (“civic/secular society”) in relation to which Woods can safely be understood to be speaking. Or, if there is any such “we,” constituting a community in front of which Woods was repenting, then I get confused about who “we” are, exactly. Are “we” the public to which the golf industry sells things?… Are “we” some broad and amorphous public (all English speakers who watch television?) or a narrower subset that [Brit] Hume seemed to be addressing when he pressed Woods to repent in Christian rather than Buddhist ways?

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Recently, Jane Smith, the author of the second edition of Islam in America sat down with Paul Harvey of Religion in American History to discuss the book.

The second edition explores some of the changes that have occurred since 9/11, including shifting views of Islam in America and “the many ways in which Muslims have moved from the private to the public arena in America as they have tried to show that Islam is not a religion of violence.” She also discusses how Muslims have adapted their religion to American life. Despite the majority of Muslims living peacefully as Americans, Smith does worry that “that America itself has become a breeding ground for certain kinds of violent expressions of Islam” and that is “a development that should not be ignored.”

One of the final questions, Paul Harvey asks is about the future of Islam in America. Smith responds:

Most indicators are that Islam will continue to grow in American soil, though not at the rate sometimes projected. Factors such as immigration, revitalization of urban communities, and conversion will certainly play a role. Demonization of Islam most probably will continue as a result of many different factors, including the politics of fear. But I don’t see that fear-mongering will threaten the continued existence, and growth, of the religion here. Efforts currently being put forth by many American Muslims to demonstrate their commitment to being full members of American society, with pride in their country, are paying off in terms of greater understanding and acceptance of the faith despite isolated threats. Americans in general struggle with what it means to be a multi-faith society, and Muslims struggle to define what a distinctive American Islam might really look like. But it seems clear that Islam is here to stay, and that “Blessed Ramadan” will probably come to sound as familiar as “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Hanukkah.”

Mixed Multitudes, a blog on MyJewishLearning, has posted an interview with Elliot Wolfson, most recently the author of Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson.

In the interview Wolfson answers questions about Jewish mysticism and philosophy and the relationship between the two. Here are some excerpts from the interview:

How do you define Jewish mysticism and Jewish philosophy? What’s the relationship between them?

Both Jewish mysticism and Jewish philosophy are complex and multifaceted phenomena that cannot be easily defined. In general terms, however, we could demarcate mysticism as an intensified path (encompassing both ritual and knowledge) that facilitates the individual’s communion with or direct experience of what is considered in a particular cultural context to be ultimate reality, whereas philosophy is the pursuit of knowledge and truth about the world and the human through the mediated exercise of reason and logical argument (even irrationality is examined philosophically through the prism of the rational).

Moses of Burgos, a kabbalist active in the second half of the 13th century, famously said that the kabbalists stand on the head of the philosophers. This statement underscores the intricate relationship between the two worldviews, marking the point of their convergence and divergence. In my own scholarly practice, I have elicited mystical elements from philosophical works and philosophical insights from mystical sources.

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On his Beliefnet blog, Dr. Norris Chumley gives a glowing review to Mark C. Taylor’s new book Field Notes from Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living, calling it a “must read,” and Taylor “a mix of philosopher, metaphysician, and medical theologian.”

He praises Taylor for his original and moving perspectives on what it is like to face death and what it means to recover from a life-threatening disease. Chumley writes,

Taylor finds himself in the category of survivor, yet reinvents the term into an entirely new reality. He fully lives the fragile existence between finitude and infinitude that is our predicament. We cannot escape death, yet we cannot fully live without embracing it; we cannot not live if we choose to live and that brings us to a mystery which is never fully solved. Taylor firmly, resolutely, chooses life.

In concluding his review, Chumley writes,

A lot of this book [is] satisfying in a strange and unexpected way…. Filled with haunting memories of those gone, chased with bitter pills of our limitations and eventual demise, there are glimmers of hope and happiness to be found. Taylor is aware of the challenges he’s placed in front of the reader. “Happy eras, we are told, are the blank pages of history, and so it would seem – of books. Perhaps it is because it takes more courage to write about happiness than unhappiness.” He points us to his favorite joyous writer, Nietzsche who is himself in a desperate mode. “Intense unhappiness becomes bearable by imagining that things might be otherwise elsewhere. The writer must write this elsewhere to get through the night and the darker the night, the better the writing.”

It is in this “elsewhere,” as the title leads, this vivid point of real and unreal playing together, where, or rather elsewhere, that Mark C. Taylor both uncomfortably and comfortably resides.

Recently, Religion Dispatches interviewed Anna Peterson about her new book, Everyday Ethics and Social Change: The Education of Desire.

Here is the beginning of that interview:

Q: What inspired you to write Everyday Ethics and Social Change? What sparked your interest?

I was inspired, or motivated, by a desire to bring utopianism—a theme that I have been interested in for a long time—close to home. My previous book Seeds of the Kingdom (Oxford, 2005) compared two different kinds of intentional agrarian communities: those of the Amish in the Midwestern United States, and of progressive Catholic refugees in rural El Salvador.

While writing that book, I thought a lot about the relevance of those intensely Christian, explicitly utopian groups for “mainstream” people in the U.S.—who are much more religiously diverse, urban, and consumerist than the Amish or the Salvadorans I studied. I do think that those people have a lot to teach us, but I wanted to explore the possibility of a utopianism with clearer connections to the everyday life of “ordinary” North Americans.

What I find fascinating about utopianism, especially as a theme in social ethics and social movements, is its intrinsic radicalness. But utopianism seems, by definition, to be disconnected from everyday life. Putting those two themes together—utopias and everyday life—seemed a way to talk about the potentially radical dimensions of our ordinary practices and values.

Q: What’s the most important take-home message for readers?

That ethics is not disconnected from ordinary activities. This means a couple of things. First, almost nothing we do is “value neutral.” We can’t separate out the times we are acting “morally,” and the rest of our lives. Second, it means that ethics are not something constructed or articulated in the abstract and then applied, in a top-down fashion, to concrete circumstances. Rather, ethics are created in and through ordinary practices. This means we ought to think more carefully, perhaps, about the ethics we enact (or don’t) on a daily basis. In the end, I think, movements for social change seek to transform everyday life so it becomes safer, less oppressive, and more joyful for more people (and other creatures). So it makes sense that the roots of a radical ethic for social change can be found in the best parts of our everyday lives.

This relates to the social role of religion. Religion has often provided this “second language,” as Robert Bellah and his colleagues call it, as an alternative way of thinking about big questions. In a society that is both religiously pluralistic and secular, it is important to look for alternative sources of this second language.

Paul Auster calls Mark Taylor’s Field Notes from Elsewhere: Reflections and Living Dying “an intoxicating whirl of a book, an engine of thought and feeling that touches on everything that counts most to us: living and dying, families, faith, friendship, and the quest to ground oneself in the real.” Auster continues, “To the best of my knowledge, it is a work without precedent.”

In the book, Taylor recounts being diagnosed with cancer, his morning-to-evening experience with sickness and convalescence, mingling humor and hope with a deep exploration of human frailty and, conversely, resilience. Taylor combines theological and philosophical reflection as he examines the meaning of mortality, sacrifice, solitude, and abandonment, along with a host of other issues, in light of modern ways of dying.

Taylor talks about the book in this interview and below is an excerpt from Taylor on melancholy:

There is a melancholy of things complete that arrives unexpectedly. Fulfillment does not fulfill, and the end so eagerly anticipated proves disappointingly empty. The deal is closed, the book finished, the class graduated, the career complete, and it is finally time for celebration. When family and friends gather, there is, however, an uninvited guest. Melancholy disrupts the moment—the person in its grip can never be fully present. While others are immersed in the moment, the vision of the melancholic is split, his consciousness always double. The most profound melancholy is invisible to the eyes of others. The melancholic spirit travels incognito—while seeming to be absorbed in the moment, he floats above, watching from without, knowing the moment will pass and uncertain it will ever arrive again. In melancholy the present is never fully present but always already past—even before it arrives. This trace of this impending past is most haunting in precisely those moments that are supposed to be complete.

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The following is an interview with Mark Taylor, author of Field Notes from Elsewhere: Reflections on Living and Dying and professor of religion and chair of the Department of Religion at Columbia University.

Question:  The book begins with an incredibly traumatic series of events unfolding in your life. Tell us a little about what happened to you and how you came to write the book Field Notes from Elsewhere as a result.
 
Mark Taylor:  I had been thinking about writing a book that combined personal narratives with philosophical and theological reflection for many years. The issues about which I teach and write are often very abstract but are significant because of the ways in which they illuminate specific experiences we all undergo. I knew that this kind of writing would be different from anything I had done before and realized that the only possible research is life itself.
 
Three years ago, I went into septic shock as the result of a biopsy for cancer. I also suffer from diabetes, which complicates everything. Septic shock is caused by a severe infection in the blood and is fatal in 50-75% of the cases. My case was especially bad. I taught a class on Derrida’s The Gift of Death at noon and by 7:00 that evening was on the verge of death. I was in the intensive care unit for five days, stayed in the hospital for another five days, and then on intravenous antibiotics for five weeks. Six months later, I underwent surgery for cancer. It was quite a trip! One never really recovers from such experiences, but in the months following surgery, I felt I had done enough research and it was time to begin writing.
 
Q:  This book is structured differently than other memoirs. How does the structure of the book interact with the writing?

MT:  I did not want to write a traditional narrative. Life is not a story but is episodic—brief periods of continuity are punctuated by unexpected disruptions. I envision the book less as a memoir than as a diary or book of hours. It is also a photo album with more than 120 images. The interrelation of text and image is carefully calibrated. There are fifty-two chapters or sections, which are divided into AM and PM entries. The book begins with dawn and ends with sunset. Each section is a brief meditation on a single topic—Light, Nights, Pleasure, Money, Disease, Hope, Vocation, Ordinary . . . My hope is that people will read these meditations slowly and will ponder these issues in their own lives.

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Thomas Berry’s The Sacred Universe: Earth, Spirituality, and Religion in the Twenty-first Century is now available. The excitement and interest about a new work from Berry is of course tempered by the sadness of his death earlier this summer. Mary Evelyn Tucker, who edited The Sacred Universe, wrote a very moving tribute to Berry upon the occasion of his death in yes! magazine.

Tucker, a colleague and friend for more than four decades, describes Berry’s professional accomplishments, including being director of the Riverdale Center of Religious Research and being a co-founder of the Asian Thought and Religion Seminar at Columbia. She also writes about his remarkable personal and intellectual attributes and the inspiration he provided to others. Here is a brief excerpt from Tucker’s piece:

With Thomas another future is possible for the Earth community, and he empowers us to engage in the great work of imagining that future. In a time saturated with false promises and misplaced hopes amidst ecological destruction and economic unraveling, his steady evocation of an emerging Ecozoic era ignites human energy in vibrant and unexpected ways.

Thomas, in his brown corduroy coat, year after year while teaching at Fordham University and beyond, called us into the vast sweep of evolutionary dynamics. He lit up our imagination with a story of universe emergence from star birth and galaxy formation to life on Earth.

But there was more. Thomas wove us into the story—seeing us as beings who are biologically and historically grounded. He understood us as arising out of an immense journey of Earth and universe. He helped us to see our connections from the microcosm to the macrocosm, from the great flaring forth to the beauty of flowers and seeds, fish and birds. Thomas’ enduring appreciation for the communion of subjects in this process is something that has profoundly reshaped our minds and hearts.

Interest in Dana Evan Kaplan’s Contemporary American Judaism: Transformation and Renewal evidenced most recently by Adam Kirsch’s review in Tablet.

In the review Kirsch cites Kaplan’s discussion of the persistence and in some cases growth of Orthodox Judaism, seen in such examples as a local 7-Eleven offering kosher Slurpees, alongside the many creative ways in which Judaism has been reinvented in recent years. Integrating personal and new age spirituality, music, and traditions from other religions are just some of the ways in which Judaism has morphed to fill the spiritual needs of American Jews.

Kirsch concludes by focusing on what Kaplan sees as the potentially growing rift between Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews and what it might mean for American Judaism:

At the same time, Kaplan does not gloss over what he calls, in one section heading, “the deteriorating relationship between the Orthodox and non-Orthodox.” The key issue here is the decision by the Reform movement, in 1983, to allow patrilineal descent—that is, to consider the child of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother to be Jewish. This quite clearly contradicts millennia of Jewish practice, and no Orthodox authority was willing to accept it. The result, Kaplan writes, is that “substantial and growing numbers of American Jews” are not considered Jewish at all by Orthodox criteria—including those of the rabbinate in Israel. The implications of this for the future of American Jewry, and for the America-Israel relationship, are potentially explosive. “The United Jewish Appeal,” Kaplan notes, “stopped using their slogan ‘We Are One’ because it no longer represented reality.” Yet this is not necessarily a reason for panic. Contemporary American Judaism itself points the way to a future where Judaism itself is no longer one, but many and diverse—and none the less Jewish for that.

In a wide ranging interview with Paul Harvey on the blog Religion in American History Dana Eric Kaplan, author of Contemporary American Judaism: Transformation and Renewal, considers a range of issues from the impact of intermarriage to the meaning of Jack Abramoff’s black hat (was he trying to elicit the support of Orthodox Jews?)

One of the issues confronting organized religion in the United States is the increasing penchant for individual to embark upon personal spiritual quests that do not necessarily conform to traditional beliefs. As Kaplan suggests, Judaism is particularly vulnerable to this trend:

Individualized spirituality threatens institutional religion because if people can find spiritual meaning on their own, then they don’t need organized religion. American Judaism is particularly vulnerable because Judaism is so interconnected with Jewish peoplehood and also because Judaism is such a small religious group in terms of numbers. If every American Jew went on their spiritual search without regard to ancestral tradition or community influence, that would mark the end of organized Jewish religion in the United States. But that has not happened….Some of those dissatisfied with what they believe to be the lack of spirituality in Judaism may switch religions entirely but many others may seek to find alternative sources of spiritual wisdom that they can bring back with them to the synagogue.

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Speaking of titles (see below), the excellent blog Religion in American History has been looking at two books with the same title: Acts of Conscience. More precisely, there has been essays about Columbia’s Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy, by Kip Kosek and Steven Taylor’s Acts of Conscience: World War II, Mental Institutions, and Religious Objectors, published by Syracuse University Press.

Both books examine the history of radical pacifism in the United States. In his review of Steven Taylor’s Acts of Conscience, Kip Kosek describes the book’s recounting of how conscientious objectors during World War II became advocates for the mentally ill and what it might say about religion and institutional settings such as hospitals, prisons, asylums, etc.

In his essay on Kip Kosek’s Acts of Conscience, Paul Harvey draws on the book to explore the history of Christian non-violence in twentieth-century America from the Richard Gregg and the Fellowship of Reconciliation to Martin Luther King. Harvey quotes a particularly powerful passage from Kosek’s book:

Christian nonviolence succeeded by developing sophisticated public spectacles in the service of ambitious moral demands. . . . The Journey of Reconciliation, the sociodramas, the King-Smiley bus ride–all were feats of existential courage, all were religious rituals, and all were shrewd attempts to gain political power by securing the sympathy of spectators. To focus solely on the act of personal religious faith is to succumb to a sentimental belief in individual saintliness. To focus solely on the spectacular act performed for media audiences is to turn a tin ear to the real power of religious belief in the modern world. Christian nonviolent acts were . . . simultaneously spiritual and strategic.

The following is an interview with Seth Kunin, author of Juggling Identities: Identity and Authenticity among the Crypto-Jews.

Seth Kunin will be discussing the book tomorrow at 7 p.m. at the Jewish Community Center in Albuquerque.

Q: What is crypto-Judaism?

Seth Kunin: Crypto-Jews are individuals who claim to be descended from Jews who were forcibly (and nonforcibly) converted to Catholicism in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Spain and Portugal. Descendants of these converts are said to have dispersed to many corners of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires. In the latter half of the twentieth century (though there were some earlier discussions) crypto-Jewish communities and individuals have been found or come forward. These communities have been characterized by narratives of Jewish identity or origin and by practices interpreted as having come from earlier Jewish traditions. Although much of the discussion has focused on New Mexico, individuals claiming this identity and history are found throughout the Spanish and Portuguese diasporas (and indeed, in Spain and Portugal as well). The historical and religious authenticity of these communities and individuals has led to significant debate in academic, popular, and religious circles.

Q: What is special about crypto-Jewish identity, and what does it tell us about wider issues of identity?

SK: Unlike many presentations of crypto-Judaism in the popular press that depict crypto-Jews as a lost community of Jews who possess a very simple Jewish identity and wish to return to the community, this book argues that crypto-Judaism is a highly complex set of identities. Crypto-Judaism is the product of a complex history in which individual families and individuals within those families preserved and interpreted an idiosyncratic set of elements from Jewish culture and identity. It also became more complex as crypto-Jews took on aspects of Catholic and other Christian identities and elements from Native Americans and other ethnic groups present in the American Southwest. Each crypto-Jew is thus an amalgam of many different identities, ethnicities, and histories—with crypto-Jewish identities emerging from this complex tapestry.

The study, however, has also revealed the complex nature of identity in a larger sense. We often assume that individuals and communities have an identity that is relatively fixed. This book suggests that identity is actually much more fluid. Identity is the product of dialogue and interaction—as individuals move into different social contexts, their identities and their expression of them change both consciously and unconsciously. This type of fluidity is sometimes seen as part of postmodern identity.

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In The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (now available in paper), Charles Hirschkind explores how a popular Islamic media form—the cassette sermon—has profoundly transformed the political geography of the Middle East over the last three decades. The following is an interview with Hirschkind. For more on the book, you can also listen to a sermon or read an excerpt from the book.

Question: Islamic cassette media have been associated with Muslim fundamentalism and extremism ever since the 1979 revolution in Iran, when Ayatollah Khomeini’s recorded missives played a key role in the mobilizations leading up to the overthrow of the shah. Haven’t cassettes always served as a vehicle of militancy and subversion in the Middle East?

Charles Hirschkind: Although cassette-recorded sermons have been used as a recruitment tool by Islamic militants on some occasions, the vast majority of those who listen to this media are ordinary Muslims, men and women who hold regular jobs, who send their kids to public schools, who worry about the future of their communities. For these people, sermon tapes are not an instrument of radical mobilization but a way to acquire the religious knowledge and sensibilities that help one to live and act ethically in a rapidly changing social and political world. Most of the preachers who produce these tapes combine this emphasis on the ethical with a discussion of contemporary political issues that bear on the lives of Muslims, the two woven together in a format that is both entertaining and educational. While the political content of such tapes will often include criticisms of Middle Eastern regimes for failing to implement democratic political rights, and of the United States for imposing a political and economic straitjacket on the region, the context of these arguments is not militancy but a movement focused on an inquiry into the conditions (political, moral, economic) that enable an ethical form of collective life.

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In the following interview Dana Kaplan discusses his new book Contemporary American Judaism: Transformation and Renewal.

In the book, Kaplan focuses on the creative responses to contemporary spiritual trends that have made a Jewish religious renaissance possible. He argues that American Jewish denominational structure is weakening at the same time that religious experimentation is rising, leading to innovative approaches that are supplanting existing institutions.

Question: Is your book a comprehensive look at all aspects of American Judaism?

Dana Evan Kaplan: Yes and no. I cover a tremendous amount of territory, which was a great opportunity to learn about many aspects of American Judaism that I knew relatively little about. But the book is not intended to be an encyclopedia of contemporary American Judaism. The primary focus is on how American Judaism has changed since 1945 and especially since the 1970s. The material that I present is intended to help readers understand what has happened over the past few decades.

My subject is primarily the American Judaism that was and is practiced by the “mainstream” Jewish community. As a result of this focus, I talk very little about Haredi Judaism, what used to be referred to as “ultra-Orthodox” Judaism. The book discusses two particular segments of Haredi Judaism at length—Chabad-Lubavitch and the baal teshuva movement. The reason for this was that both of these subgroups have had a tremendous impact on the broader Jewish community.

Q: What is the central argument in the book?

DEK.: I argue that American Jews, like other Americans, have become much more interested in personal spirituality, and this has transformed American Judaism. Until the end of World War II, religion was seen as an ascribed part of identity rather than an achieved status. It was ascribed because, like one’s race, it was seen as being immutable. In 1955 a Gallup poll found that only one in twenty five Americans had switched religions. But, by the mid-1980s, American society had changed dramatically. There are many reasons for this shift, including changing social mores, geographic mobility, globalization, and so forth. As American Jews began to search for existential meaning, the organizations and institutions began to feel more and more pressure to respond to that need.

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In the following video, Stephen Phillips discusses his new book Yoga, Karma, Rebirth: A Brief History and Philosophy.

For more on the book, you can also read an interview with Stephen Phillips or read an excerpt from the book.

Forward magazine recently reviewed Dana Evan Kaplan’s forthcoming Contemporary American Judaism: Transformation and Renewal.

In his book Kaplan notes the many ways in American Judaism has changed even in the span of the post-war era as the conventional denominational structure and ethnic identification gave way to a multiplicity of practices and meanings association with Judaism. From the review:

Kaplan shows how Jewish ethnic feeling, preserved temporarily through Holocaust remembrance and pride in the State of Israel, has eroded among younger American Jews. The traditional taboo on intermarriage — the ultimate tool for maintaining individuals within group boundaries — is today hardly encountered outside Orthodox circles. Jews, whether intermarried or not, tend to relate to things Jewish on their own terms: A Jewish practice or Jewish involvement will be taken on only if it has personal meaning for the individual, and, conversely, a cause or avocation with no Jewish roots will be portrayed as Jewish if Jews develop an enthusiasm for it.

Kaplan, who has seen much as a pulpit rabbi in several communities, skillfully portrays the wide variety of untraditional, often idiosyncratic, ways of “doing Jewish.” In his book, we encounter not only the expected Jewish feminists and gay rights activists, but also the Eco-Kosher Project, which reinterprets the Jewish dietary laws as ways to defend the environment; Hebrew tattooers, who identify Jewishly by tattooing themselves (a sin, according to biblical law) with Hebrew letters; bar/bat mitzvahs where the Torah scroll is taken out of the ark and, rather than read, simply handed, to parents and grandchild from grandparents and then returned to the ark; the celebration of Chrismukkah, an amalgam of Christmas and Hanukkah for intermarried families; a “Bring Your Pets” Sabbath prayer session, and Yom Kippur services featuring yoga, “a disco breakfast” and “creative dance.”

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15.8 million people in America now practice yoga according to a recent survey done by Yoga Journal. Most of us are familiar with the mats, the apparel, and basic asanas (such as Downward Facing Dog or the Corpse Pose) but yoga has a rich heritage beyond classes at the gym.

The newly published Yoga, Karma, and Rebirth: A Brief History and Philosophy by Stephen Phillips presents the philosophy of yoga for modern audiences. In the interview below Stephen Phillips shares the philosophy behind the practice and explains his knowledge of yoga.

For those in and around Austin, Texas there will be a special event held to celebrate the book this Friday, May 22nd at Breath & Body Yoga from 4-8 PM. The evening’s activities will include a mantra lesson with the author, an all levels vinyasa yoga lesson, as well as a book signing and reception.

Question: How does traditional yoga philosophy relate to current yoga practice?

Stephen Phillips: Traditional Yoga Shastra is not just a collection of “how-to” books about Downward Dog, Pranayama, meditation, and other practices but also provides a framework for understanding the practices and the experiences to which they lead. Yoga philosophy helps us have confidence in our own capabilities and defends the testimony of our expert teachers. Also, the teachers who have given us the practices—Patanjali, for example—have in many cases explained their importance in philosophic terms and provided psychological ideas to guide advanced practices in particular. All yoga teachers in fact comprehend important theses of Yoga philosophy and psychology, which help them understand the practices holistically and to talk about them in their classes.

Q: What do you have to say about the peculiar psychological concepts found in traditional yoga teachings? Do you think there are such things as “sheaths” or koshas and chakras?

SP: Yoga is a kind a training, of the body, life, and mind, and like being trained in gardening, you need first of all to find a good teacher (who herself had a good teacher and so on) and try to understand, usually by doing. So for example, when your teacher tells you to watch your energy flow in Corpse Pose, shavasana, you don’t sit up and ask for an explanation of “energy flow” but rather without thought, in your own self-monitoring consciousness, pay attention to a kind of disembodied current, traditionally called prana, flowing from your head to your toes. This only happens, we are told by yogic authorities, when you are thoroughly relaxed. So it won’t help to try too hard or even think about what is supposed to happen. It’s a matter of internal perception when certain conditions are met.

Lots of yogic phenomena involve becoming aware of things, indeed parts of ourselves, about which formerly we were unaware. The traditional psychological concepts that are used to talk about these things are terms of art. Gardening has its own, as do wine-tasting and music. In the course of training and practice, our attitude should be trust, so far as any beliefs are concerned. Of course, when we sit down to do philosophy, some very interesting questions arise about these terms, the experiences that motivate them, and the theories that interpret them. There is a rich inheritance of Yoga philosophy on this that the book explores. But I have some things of my own to say too, particularly concerning science and the somewhat different frameworks of different yoga lineages.

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