Columbia University Press

The following post is by Marian Ronan, Research Professor of Catholic Studies at the Center for World Christianity at New York Theological Seminary (NYC) and the author of Tracing the Sign of the Cross: Sexuality, Mourning, and the Future of American Catholicism.

One response to the uproar over the University of Notre Dame’s invitation to President Obama as its commencement speaker this year is to argue that it isn’t a Catholic matter at all. For Hendrik Hertzberg, the real division is between social conservatives and the rest; for others, the outcry constitutes Republican mischief, since most of the complainers are former McCain supporters.

But there’s something about this brouhaha that sounds pretty Catholic. Remember Geraldine Ferraro? Remember threats to deny John Kerry communion? Remember American Catholics accusing their bishops of protecting pedophiles? If Americans in general are good at fighting over sex, we American Catholics are the champs.

But why? There are complex historical developments that underpin the Catholic culture wars. Basically, however, I would argue that for conservatives and liberals alike, fighting over sexuality and gender is a way to avoid mourning the enormous losses that the Catholic Church sustained in the modern period and that postimmigrant, white ethnic American Catholics have sustained since the 1960s.

For the conservatives, such losses include the triumph of liberal democracy, the loss of the Vatican territories, and the abdication of absolute Catholic truth that came with Vatican II. For liberals, these losses involve the brutal amputation of hopes for a democratic church by the brilliant tactical moves of Pope John Paul II.

I do not mean to suggest here that abortion is not a serious question or that the monarchical governance structure of the church is not deplorable. But there’s something about the enraged, repetitive nature of the blows and counter-blows in the Catholic culture wars that corresponds almost perfectly with the classic definition of the inability to mourn: a depressive stance from which little or no change is forthcoming. Indeed, the white Catholic Church in the United States is in as serious a decline as are the mainline Protestant denominations. Large numbers of Latino/a and other immigrant Catholics would seem to offset this. But as a Latina colleague observed recently, the next generation of immigrants will have their own decisions to make; the move to evangelicalism is already noteworthy. In the meantime, sixty-some bishops and more than 300,000 American Catholics are denouncing Notre Dame, and James Carroll, the archetypal liberal Catholic, retorts that they are all fundamentalists.

Surely we can do better.

Marian Ronan is the author of Tracing the Sign of the Cross: Sexuality, Mourning, and the Future of American Catholicism . This interview originally appeared in EqualwRites (EwR)

EwR: Can we begin by asking the significance of its title, Tracing the Sign of the Cross?

Marian Ronan: The title, Tracing the Sign of the Cross, refers to the centrality of the cross in the Christian faith, but also, in the white ethnic immigrant American Catholicism in which I and many other American Catholics have our roots. The word “tracing” calls to mind “making” the sign of the cross, but also suggests that in our time, that is, during the years since Vatican II, there has become something elusive about the cross, something demanding our attention now.

EwR: And the subtitle elaborates on that “something”?

MR: Yes. The subtitle: “Sexuality, Mourning, and the Future of American Catholicism” expands on this theme. “Mourning” is the word most obviously linked to the cross. But it also signifies the wider approach that I use in my book, a way of understanding human experience. According to this approach, engaging or working through loss is so painful that human beings (and groups) undertake all kinds of defenses to avoid it. They become enraged, they become depressed, they get stuck and repeat the same actions over and over. The cost of this “inability to mourn” is very high.

In line with this approach, I argue in Tracing the Sign of the Cross that at the beginning of the 1960s, white ethnic American Catholics were poised to achieve the idealized way of life our immigrant forebears had struggled to attain. Many of us were also convinced that with Vatican II the democratic vision of the church we had long favored was going to become dominant. Yet by the end of the decade, the “American dream” had exploded into social conflict and the Vatican was fighting our much anticipated liberalization of the church with increasing ferocity. Then came the economic downturn of the 1970s and the refusal of women’s ordination. Our losses were enormous.

Yet for reasons that I explore in Tracing, many American Catholics did not engage and work through those losses. Instead, we—conservatives and liberals alike—threw ourselves into the Catholic culture wars. Central to this development was the decision on the part of the episcopacy and the Vatican to shift the center of the Catholic faith from doctrine to sex and gender prohibition, a shift that contradicted what many of us had come to believe about the church. In truth, the Vatican had been focusing more and more on abortion and contraception since its massive losses in the liberal democratic revolutions of the nineteenth century. But after Vatican II, the gloves came off. Sexual prohibition replaced doctrine as the heart of the Catholic faith, and although the governance structure after Vatican II remained monarchical, so that we still have little or no impact on what the bishops and the Vatican do, many of us have spent much of our lives fighting against it. And let me be clear, I include myself in this “we.” We believed this was the right thing to do, but it also protected us from mourning our enormous losses.

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The Buddha Diaries recently reviewed Alan Wallace’s Mind in the Balance: Meditation in Science, Buddhism, and Christianity.

Here’s a brief excerpt from the review:

Exploring, first, the long history of religious meditation practice in both East and West from its ancient origins, Wallace then turns his attention to the attempts of scientists and philosophers, in more recent centuries, to describe the workings of the mind through the lens of a rational, empirical methodology—attempts that have consistently run up against the rocks of the seemingly impenetrable subjective/objective divide.

The main body of his book is devoted to Wallace’s own attempt to break through that obstacle, in a series of alternating chapters that “balance” theory and practice in ever-deepening and more carefully refined stages of awareness, awareness of awareness, and observing the awareness of awareness. Following him along with his work is akin to watching the most skilled of surgeons with his scalpel, separating out intricate tissues and pausing to examine each of them under the microscope of consciousness. It’s fascinating, intense, and infinitely detailed mind-work.

Mark C. Taylor’s recent New York Times Op-ed, End the University as We Know It continues to be one of the most popular stories on the NYT Web site and has been widely discussed on the Internet. (The University of Chicago Press blog has a good summary of some of the reactions to the piece.)

We are pleased and fortunate to be publishing Mark Taylor’s forthcoming book Field Notes from Elsewhere: Reflections on Living and Dying (due in October). Well-known for his works of philosophy and religion, Field Notes from Elsewhere is a more personal work borne out of his near-death experience with cancer. The book combines philosophical and theological reflection with photographs and personal narrative to examine mortality, human frailty, and the ways in which we confront death.

In reviewing the book, Paul Auster writes:

“Mark C. Taylor’s Field Notes from Elsewhere is 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. To the best of my knowledge, it is a work without precedent.”

“Every bishop and priest in the Catholic Church should sit down and read this remarkable book.”

So begins a review from The Tablet of Ian Linden’s Global Catholicism: Pluralism and Renewal in a World Church. The Tablet, which is Britain’s most important Catholic publication, goes on to say:

“Ian Linden has quietly demolished canards levelled against those who believe that the reforming work of the Second Vatican Council is not yet complete. Instead of imagining that life beyond the Council is ever upwards and onwards, he takes as seriously as Pope Benedict the ever-lurking reality of sin.”

The review highlights Linden’s focus on how the Church has both failed and succeeded in realizing the vision of the Second Vatican Council throughout the Catholic world. Despite the failings of the Church leadership, Linden argues for the possibility of a more relevant and invigorated papacy:

“While women Religious were standing on the front line of Catholic witness and laywomen, in the absence of priests, were running parishes, the Vatican closed eyes and ears to such resources and preferred on such matters as sex and marriage the views of its old all-male club. It is not surprising that many faithful Catholics quietly make a detour around an organisation which seems no longer “fit for purpose”. This is understandable but, in the end, sad. Here is a great opportunity for the papacy to shake itself free from its shackles, to become what it was always meant to be, the rock of support for front-line troops and the strong band of love, which can hold this glorious variety together.”

As Mark Hulsether, author of Religion, Culture and Politics in the Twentieth Century United States, notes in his recent piece in Religion Dispatches, “End Times believers consider Barack Obama as a serious contender for the Antichrist.”

The Obama-as-Antichrist rhetoric got a further hearing when Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, co-authors of the Left Behind series, discussed it on the Rachel Maddow show. While the authors backed away from suggesting that Obama himself was the Antichrist and even conceded that he “might be a closet Christian,” LaHaye and Jenkins view Obama’s “socialist” policies as prophetic of the End of Times:

LaHaye repeatedly returned to the dual claim that prophetic scenarios foretell a stage of socialism in which “government controls everything”—redistributing wealth from the haves to the have-nots—and that Obama is such a socialist working for such a world. His key argument was that Obama’s policies suggest that prophecies are falling into place. In other words, Obama is playing his part as a key leader of the bad guys even if he’s not the Antichrist himself.

Hulsether concludes the article by speculating on the Rush Limbaugh-like position LaHaye puts himself in by hoping for the worst:

Maddow did a nice job of pressing LaHaye about whether he looked forward to his scenario of doom (at least for unraptured people)—a vision somewhat akin to Rush Limbaugh’s desire for Obama to fail, but in this case intensified by religious emotion. LaHaye seemed unsure how to frame his response—how much to stress that he hoped for the sake of the country that his bleaker scenarios would not unfold, as opposed to hoping based on his theology that they would unfold.

Perhaps his uncertainty holds out a small thread of optimism for citizens who, like our president, “might be closet Christians” or unlikely candidates for rapture. If LaHaye continues to be slightly embarrassed spinning his theories in public, most likely because he fears how they will appear in the light of rational public inquiry, this cannot be entirely good news for the “Obama as Antichrist” discourse, even when it scores a prominent spot on prime-time television.

A while ago we posted here part 1 of an interview with Alan Wallace, author of the recently published book, Mind in the Balance: Meditation in Science, Buddhism, and Christianity. Today, we are posting part 2 of the video series. For the entire video discussion visit the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies Youtube channel.

We’ve also recently published a previous B. Alan Wallace book, Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge, in paperback.

The following is a post from Olivier Roy, author of The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East. This post originally appeared on the UC Berkeley website Blue Sky: New Ideas for the Obama Administration.

The Obama administration must not try to speak to something called the “Muslim world.” It does not exist!To offer a dialogue with the Muslim world is precisely to play on the narrative of Osama bin Laden: the world is divided into two parts, the “West” and the “Muslims.” This narrative allows bin Laden to cast himself as the best protector of such a virtual Muslim world.

From Gaza to India, most of the conflicts where Muslims are involved have nothing to do with Islam. Hamas represents Palestinian nationalism under a thin Islamic garb. In Iraq, factions are competing over land and power, not Islamic law. The Bombay attacks stemmed from the conflict between India and Pakistan, fueled by the Pakistani army.

Moreover, Muslims in the West want to be considered first as Western citizens, not as the bridge-head of a foreign influence. Speaking of a Muslim world means pointing to “our” Muslims as foreigners. By addressing the “Muslim world,” do we mean to suggest that the West is defined by Christianity or by secularism?

President Obama cannot speak as the head of the Christian world. But to present the rule of law and human rights as typically Western secular values gives credence to authoritarian Arab leaders and Muslim conservative clerics, who are happy to present these values as “foreign.”

If President Obama tries to open an official dialogue with them, he will effectively define these leaders as representative of the “Muslim world,” thus pre-empting any change. Our policy must recognize the diversity of Islamic people, not assuming a monolithic world.

Olivier Roy is Visiting Professor of Political Science and author of “The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East,” (Columbia University Press, 2008).

While the weather in New York City seems to be returning to more February-like temperatures, the fact that our Spring 2009 books are shipping out to store is perhaps a sign that Spring is just around the corner.

We had meant to put this up earlier but you can download our Spring 2009 catalog to find out about all the forthcoming titles from Columbia University Press.

One of the first books from our Spring 2009 catalog now available is Mind in the Balance: Meditation in Science, Buddhism and Christianity, by Alan Wallace. Here is the first part of a discussion with Alan Wallace about his book. For the entire discussion visit the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Youtube channel:

In a past post, Columbia University Press authors Bruce Hoffman and Ami Pedazhur looked at the geopolitical and security issues raised by the Mumbai attacks. In his article Excommunicating Dead Terrorists, Leor Halevi, author of Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society, explores the religious issues relating to the burial of the slain terrorists.

As Halevi points out the Muslim Council of India asked that the dead terrorists be denied burial in India’s largest graveyards since their acts went against the principles of Islam. Halevi explores the various possibilities of what to the with the bodies, including sending them back to Pakistan, a modified burial ceremony, or to cremate the bodies and spread their ashes over international waters as Israel did after executing Adolf Eichmann in 1962.

Halevi argues that this last method is the best, writing:

Cremation would neither shame the bodies of dead terrorists, nor haunt the minds of would-be terrorists, as powerfully as would a symbolic inversion of standard Muslim rites. But it would convey an effective, reasonable and humanistic message to the world: that a Muslim who commits terrorism dies excommunicated, as an infidel.

“McCain’s apparent hypocrisy when he mouths religious rhetoric is also fascinating. And we could say something similar about Ronald Reagan. Both of the Clintons, and of course also Jimmy Carter, are far more serious and thoughtful about religion than either Reagan or McCain, yet often our common wisdom screens this out.”—Mark Hulsether

The following is an interview with Mark Hulsether, author of Religion, Culture, and Politics in the Twentieth-Century United States.

Q: Your book came out at a good time to throw light on the religious politics of the 2008 election. Did you plan it that way?

Mark Hulsether: I wish! This book was a long time coming; it was supposed to be finished for the 2004 election. But it worked out all right; elections with interesting religious-political dynamics come along all the time. It seems like only yesterday when the media frenzy was about conservative Catholic bishops trying to keep John Kerry from taking communion. In 2000 conservative religious folks were still in an uproar about Bill Clinton lying about sex, and George W. Bush was making a hard sell about Jesus saving him from drug abuse problems and ordaining him to be a global leader.

Of course this year’s election had fascinating religious dimensions—especially for anyone who knows the history of bad blood between John McCain and the Christian Right, the forms of Pentecostalism that shaped Sarah Palin’s worldview, intersections between end-times prophecy and conservative stances toward Israel, and many other such things. Barack Obama’s Chicago church is very interesting. Parts of its family tree reach back to the Puritans, parts to the invisible institution under slavery, and parts to Reinhold Niebuhr’s branch of German Calvinism. The “United” in Trinity United Church of Christ has to do with a merger between the main branch of New England Puritans (those who did not become Unitarians) and German Calvinist churches—with a few predominantly black congregations inspired by traditions like Martin Luther King, Jrs.’ sprinkled in.

McCain’s apparent hypocrisy when he mouths religious rhetoric is also fascinating. And we could say something similar about Ronald Reagan. Both of the Clintons, and of course also Jimmy Carter, are far more serious and thoughtful about religion than either Reagan or McCain, yet often our common wisdom screens this out.

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The following post is by Peter Heehs, author of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo

How do you write about a man who is known to some as a politician, to others as a poet and critic, to still others as a philosopher, and to a not inconsiderable number as an incarnation of God? This is one of the problems a biographer of Sri Aurobindo (Aurobindo Ghose, 1872-1950) has to face. Known in the West mostly to specialized audiences (people interested in South Asian history, literature, philosophy, and spirituality), Aurobindo is renowned in his native India as one of the most outstanding, and most many-sided men of the twentieth century. This has not prevented his legacy from being bitterly disputed.

Some historians and politicians see him as one of the forerunners of Mahatma Gandhi, others as a precursor of today’s aggressive Hindu nationalists. Admirers of his writings see his epic in iambic pentameter as the harbinger of a new kind of poetry, but most contemporary poets and critics dismiss it as a throwback to the Victorian era. The opinions of amateur and professional philosophers are polarized along the same lines. There is general agreement among students of religion that Aurobindo was a remarkable mystic, but few are willing to swallow the claim of some of his followers that he was an avatar, like Krishna, Chaitanya or Christ.

In The Lives of Sri Aurobindo I made Aurobindo’s many-sidedness the foundation of the structure of the book. Each of the five parts deals with one of his “lives”: the family man, the scholar, the revolutionary, the yogi and philosopher, and the spiritual guide. The first three go together pretty well, since the conventions of literary and political biography are similar. The writer is expected to present the significant events of a notable life in a chronological narrative, supporting the story with a scholarly apparatus based on primary sources. It was easy for me to do this when I wrote about Aurobindo’s life in politics. Discussing his role at the Surat Congress of 1907, for example, I was able to draw on government files, police reports, newspaper stories, Aurobindo’s reminiscences, and the reminiscences of others in English, Bengali, and Gujarati. But what was I to do with the information that a few days after the Congress, Aurobindo sat with a guru who taught him a meditation technique, and that, as Aurobindo later put it, “In three days – really in one, my mind became full of an eternal silence” – by which he meant the mental stillness and freedom from ego known as Nirvana.

It certainly is legitimate to cite Aurobindo’s own statements about this and other inner experiences. But personal reminiscences don’t count for much in scholarly biographies unless they are backed up by objective data and analysis. But what sort of objective data was I to look for? (Nobody knew what was going on in Aurobindo’s head.) If I wanted to discuss this inner event, did I have to switch (in mid stream) from the conventions of scholarly biography to the conventions of spiritual biography, that is, hagiography? Or could I get beyond the conventions of both genres?

Hagiography in its original sense, writing about the lives of saints, has been practiced since the first century CE (the Gospels, the Buddhacarita). What distinguishes the hagiographic from the critical approach is not that hagiographers are sympathetic to their subjects, but that they base their accounts on unverifiable assumptions that are likely to be accepted only by members of the discursive community that they belong to. Few modern non-Catholic readers are likely to take seriously the claims of Angelo Pastrovicchi that Joseph of Cupertino could fly. On the other hand, Pastrovicchi’s eighteenth-century work remains a vital source for any anyone wishing to write about the Italian saint. A scholar may reject levitation as inconsistent with what we know about gravity but still accept that Joseph had visions, as Pastrovicchi claims.

Aurobindo spent the last forty years of his life immersed in the practice of yoga. He wrote about his yogic experiences in a diary, the Record of Yoga, and in letters to his followers. Are these the sort of sources that a scholarly biographer can cite? It certainly would be uncritical to accept at face value all that Aurobindo wrote about his inner life; but it would be a different sort of negligence to refuse to consider accounts of inner experience a priori grounds, or to explain them away according to the assumptions of one or another social-scientific orthodoxy.

I think that William James had the right approach to this sort of material. “One cannot criticize the vision of a mystic,” he wrote in “A Pluralistic Mystic,” “one can but pass it by, or else accept it as having some amount of evidential weight.” I couldn’t simply close my eyes to Aurobindo’s accounts of his mystical experiences, so I accepted them as evidence of a vivid, if sometimes enigmatic inner life. I wonder however whether James got it right when he said we “cannot criticize the vision of a mystic.” Many spiritual traditions – the Catholic Christian and Tibetan Buddhist, for example – recognize a distinction between true and misleading visions. I don’t have the necessary discernment to criticize Aurobindo’s visions as visions; but I recognize – as Aurobindo himself did – that inner visions and experiences are open to different interpretations.

What about the assertion that Aurobindo was an avatar? I can’t say that the question interests me very much. Aurobindo never claimed the distinction for himself, and I don’t think anyone alive is in a position to say one way or the other. The Aurobindo that interests me is the one who turned from a life of hectic action to a life of contemplation, but was able, during his forty-year retirement, to write a shelf full of books on philosophy, political theory, and textual criticism, along with thousands of letters and, yes, that epic in iambic pentameter. People will continue to differ about the significance of his work, but its very mass is there for all to see. His life as a yogi and spiritual leader is more difficult to quantify, but it certainly will not be forgotten soon. I tried to do justice to all sides of this versatile man, but to do so I had to be unconventional in more ways than one.

Peter Heehs, co-founder of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives, and author of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo is traveling to the East Coast to talk about Sri Aurobindo and his new biography of the famed Indian yogi and philosopher. You can catch Peter Heehs at one of the following events:

June 26, 2008, 6:00 PM
NY Open Center Room 2A
83 Spring Street
New York, NY 10012

July 1, 2008, 7:30 PM
Garland of Letters Bookstore
527 South Street
Philadelphia, PA 19147

For more events with Columbia University Press authors.

Over the next few weeks we hope to have a series of posts highlighting titles from our Animal Studies list. Yesterday, the list’s editor Wendy Lochner wrote about her interest in the field and in recent days we’ve had three Animal Studies books hit the shelves: Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation, by Gary Francione, Philosophy and Animal Life, by Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking, and Cary Wolfe, and Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida, by Matthew Calarco.

We also recently published A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics. One the book’s editors, Paul Waldau, recently wrote an essay for The Dallas Morning News. The essay begins with a discussion of the media attention surrounding the Chihuahua who joined in the daily prayers at a Buddhist temple in Japan. Waldau then considers the continuing fascination individuals and scholars have had regarding the relationship between animals and religion. Here is an excerpt from his essay “Religion and Other Animals”:

The debate over whether or not our animal neighbors can be “religious” is but one issue in the growing field of religion and animals. In the last decade, the field has also illuminated the significant roles played by religious traditions in our learning about and treatment of other living beings….This scholarly work emerges into a context where humans’ attitudes toward our cousin animals are more multifaceted than ever. At times, some humans seem driven by a refusal to inquire about the nonhuman lives within and near their communities. This refusal is evident in food practices, where many encounter animals most frequently. At the same time, more households in the United States today have companion animals than have children. Polls consistently indicate that an astonishing number of people–in some cases more than ninety-nine percent–hold their dog or cat to be a “family member.”

Communities of faith are among the institutions that are most responsive to the complex connections between humans and other animals. One increasingly finds that contemporary religious communities have reinstituted the ancient practice known often as “blessing of the animals.” Some communities of faith are quite creative in recognizing the pastoral value of concerns for their members’ interactions with nonhumans–some offer worship services in which believers can bring their nonhuman companions, and others provide grief counseling when a nonhuman family member dies.

Theologian Thomas Berry suggests, “We cannot be truly ourselves in any adequate manner without all our companion beings throughout the earth. The larger community constitutes our greater self.” Growing awareness of “religion and animals,” both scholarly and practical, opens the door to a fundamental question faced by people of divergent faiths–who will humans acknowledge as constitutive of their greater selves?

We continue with our series of postings on books relating to National Women’s History Month with today’s look at women’s religious history. I’ve chosen one book to represent each of the four major religious traditions, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.

We begin with a look at a woman who attained great status in Tibet as a religious leader, as chronicled in Hildegard Diemberger’s book, When a Woman Becomes a Religious Dynasty: The Samding Dorje Phagmo of Tibet. The book is built around a translation of the first biography of Chokyi Dronma, recorded by her disciples in the wake of her death in the fifteenth century. It was believed that the princess Chokyi Dronma was reincarnated after her death and her spiritual successors in Tibet hold the title of Samding Dorje Phagmo. The account reveals an extraordinary phenomenon: although it had been believed that women in Tibet were not allowed to obtain full ordination equivalent to monks, Chokyi Dronma not only persuaded one of the highest spiritual teachers of her era to give her full ordination but also established orders for other women practitioners and became so revered that she was officially recognized as one of two principal spiritual heirs to her main master. (more…)