Category Archives: Religion

Sam Gill’s discussion of Religion and the Study of Religion.

Enhancing in the Fat Present

Posted on by
Reply

Paleoethnographer André Leroi-Gourhan understood the hand as the first tool; I prefer to think of the finger as claiming that honor. The first intentional point of a finger, both phylogenetic and ontogenetic, is a gesture that directs the eye beyond the physical body to an object “there” that aligns with the finger “here.” The act creates a copresence with the implication of enhancing and awakening—identification in separation. The finger prosthetically extends the body beyond its physical limits into the world coincident with bringing the world into the body; the loop that characterizes all gesture richly understood. Leroi-Gourhan saw the hand as a fundamental tool enabling the externalization of memory, the origination of symbols and writing and enumeration—the beginning of the digital age—eventuating in touch pads, handhelds, gestural controlled technology, and wearables that, assimilated with the skin, enhances by gesture and touch the entire body. What Leroi-Gourhan understood, recognized by Jacque Derrida’s and Bernard Stiegler’s attention to his work, was that this prosthetic extension of the body into the production of graphics is an enhancement that does not reject physicality and body even in these body-transcending actions. Sociologist Marcel Mauss recognized the inevitable cultural, historical, and psychological shaping of all gestures and that these “techniques of body” serve to mark cultural, historical, individual identity. Gesture accomplishes the seeming impossibility of transcending the physical realized by means of the body’s capacity for living-movement. Continue reading →

Religion Writer

Posted on by
Reply

The study of religion is bound in the often uncomfortable tension between opposing positions and forces.  It seems we would need to know what religion is in order to study religions, yet how do we know what religion is without encountering religions.  How do we state what we know about religion without predisposing these definitional and categorical statements toward specific “prototypical” religions?  Indeed, I think it is fair to say that the current study of religion is based heavily on Christianity being the prototype, yet tacitly so.  Religion, in perhaps the most common sense experience, is loaded with non-language experiential bodily phenomena, yet the study of religion seems tightly bound, almost exclusively so, to language phenomena (scripture, philosophy, doctrine, description, history, and other academic studies).  Academic methods, including academic writing conventions, demand objectivity and scorn subjectivity and feeling and emotion.  Academic methods are restricted to the mind and ignore and discount the body.  Yet, extensive research during the last half century has increasingly supported the position that conceptual and propositional thought, even reason itself, is based in subconscious sensorimotor patterns, schema, and meanings. Continue reading →

A Horse is an Automobile without Wheels

Posted on by
Reply

September 8, 2012

In memory of Kenneth Morrison

Thirty years ago I published a book titled Beyond “the Primitive:” the Religions of Nonliterate Peoples (1982) that was intended to establish some less biased position or stance from which to appreciate and understand folks living in small-scale cultures, tribal or, what was for some time called “traditional,” peoples.  While studying at the University of Chicago, I found that much of the heritage of the academic study of religion was established in the study of what was called “primitive” people and in those days there was only a nascent awareness of the inappropriateness of this term.  It was the primitives that told us how religions got started in the process of human cultural development and the issue was variously framed in evolutionist terms (in which case magic preceded the rise of religion) or essentialist terms (in which religion, being essentially inseparable from divine creation, existed in the earliest of times found in “primitive” cultures evidenced by the presence of a “high god”).  In a fascinatingly illogical position contemporary people who live in small cultures were considered to represent these ancient people, the people “of the beginning.”  My teacher, Mircea Eliade, perhaps the most influential religion scholar of the twentieth century, was a major proponent of this approach, constructing his influential understanding of religion, one still present in popular understandings, by exemplary studies of “primitive people,” especially the aboriginal people of Australia.  Decades later my book Storytracking: Texts, Stories, and Histories in Central Australia (1998) attempted to place this approach in a constructive and comprehensible context (or history) if a critical one as well. Continue reading →

I Don’t Want to be a Mystic!

Posted on by
Reply

July 26, 2012

Sam Gill

for Meghan Zibby

It was a pause that left a trace really, just one of those moments that sometimes surprise us when, in the midst of reading, a word speaks emotional volumes to us even when we aren’t altogether all that sure that we know why or even what the word means.  This time, in the midst of reading a novel, the word was “mystic” and it was used to identify a man who in his maturity was handling a situation with confidence and grace and wisdom and wonder and enthusiasm and charm.  Another character, his official superior, quietly watching him in awe identified him as a mystic.  Never mind that this guy was a Jesuit priest, the word struck me powerfully and personally.  At this point in my life (why have I waited so long?) I’m eager to cultivate qualities that will allow me to live with grace and quiet (hmm? maybe not) confidence, giving of myself in such a way that is delicate and genuine and generous.  I’ve been musing about how to go about doing this when at my age (seems this is more a concern to me than I thought) there is such a draw to grief and loss and regret and depression if not also moments of pure desperation.  I’ve been thinking of it as an age or stage of life thing, but when I give it a little more thought I can’t really see why it should be anything other than a life thing. Continue reading →

That Little Thing

Posted on by

Completing my undergraduate major requirements in mathematics before I was a senior, I had grown impatient with mathematics largely because it seemed to me at the time so isolating from people.  I was utterly naïve of course and had become a math major simply because my mom told me to do so believing, why I have no idea, that with a degree in mathematics I’d surely get a good (meaning well-paying) job.  I took a course in business administration from Professor Larry Jones.  He was a tall clean-cut pipe-smoking intellectual-looking man.  On one assignment I was asked to indicate what I would do in a particular business situation and the situation was extensively described.  I wrote my paper on the many reasons I was sure that I would never have gotten myself into that situation in the first place and would thus not have to deal with the thorny problems clearly present in the situation.  He gave me a “D.”  I was not, however, discouraged because I caught a glimpse of a sea change that was at that moment taking place—this was the mid-‘60s—a shift from a behaviorist perspective to methods of quantitative analysis supported by the introduction of computers into the business environment.  I realized that with my background in mathematics I was rather well placed to put this to use in the business environment.

Entering a graduate degree program in business I found myself positioned with the right stuff at the right time.  Professor Jones had landed a senior administrative position for the Coleman Company—he would later become president of the company (and would later run for governor of the state)—and he was not so put off by my performance as to recognize that I might have something to offer even if I could be counted on to argue with premises.  I was hired in a research position at the Coleman Company, I somehow landed a position teaching a class in the Business School at Wichita State University on quantitative methods, and I was a full time graduate student.  I enjoyed many privileges and opportunities in these interrelated capacities, even though I was a bit busy.  Financial and business success seemed completely assured.  All was smooth sailing I felt and I totally loved everything I was doing.

We never know what comes next in life, what little thing might happen on any day that will alter the course of our lives, or so it would seem anyway.  As I had been impressed by Professor Larry Jones and did all I could to learn and be inspired by him, I admired even more Professor Harry Corbin.  He had been a young president of Wichita University, a municipally based school when I entered in 1960, and in the early ‘60s he ushered through the Kansas State Legislature the necessary measures to have the university accepted into the state system of higher education under the new name of Wichita State University.  As an undergraduate student leader in numerous capacities I had had many opportunities to observe President Corbin in action.  He too was a tall handsome reserved quietly powerful clearly brilliant man.  He seemed to me the very epitome of an academic.  Once the school had been accepted into the state system, Corbin gave up his presidency and returned to his research and teaching.  He had studied political science at the University of Chicago and was deeply interested in religion.

During my graduate studies in business, I learned that Professor Corbin was teaching a course on world religions.  I knew it was likely similar to history and I was concerned about that since the only “C” grade I had ever gotten was in a world history course.  Still, I truly wanted the experience of being in a class taught by Professor Corbin.  My business advisor allowed me to take the course, most likely because Corbin was so respected that it would be unacceptable to suggest that his course would not contribute to any student’s work.

So there it was.  That little thing.  A course that didn’t fit my program, taken for personal reasons.  Once the course started, it didn’t take long.  I have often described the experience I had in that course as like discovering a door theretofore unknown to me that when opened revealed the enormity of a world I didn’t even know existed.  Small town Kansas education is not all that worldly, for sure, nor are studies in mathematics and business even in a state university.  But here it was … an enormous rich complex confounding luscious world of peoples in era after era and culture upon culture.  That little thing had suddenly turned into one of almost unfathomable dimension.

Though my work and study and teaching were all exciting, the success I experienced in all of them was perhaps the greatest wedge to the need for change.  In the research capacity I enjoyed at Coleman I was centrally involved in replacing groups of working people with computer applications.  I saw upper level executives forced into early retirement because they couldn’t adjust to the tsunami of computer technology.  My satisfaction with a job well done, with my role in facilitating the march of technology, was tempered by my experience of the human costs I observed on people being displaced and outmoded.  As my power and accomplishments grew, so did my doubts and concerns.

Somehow I got the idea that I would benefit from a brief sabbatical from business to reflect and regroup.  I sensed that the timing was crucial, because I could feel that I was quickly approaching a point of no return.  My superiors at the Coleman Company were sympathetic to the idea, so I set about considering what I might do for a while to beneficially fill a leave of absence.  This took me to Professor Harry Corbin.  And this is actually the part of the story I want most to tell.

I met him in the office he had occupied as university president, retained I’m sure as a way of honoring his considerable contributions.  It was handsome and elegant and simply made one feel important to be in.  I explained my situation to him and asked his suggestions.  Corbin said, “Well, I’ve studied off and on for decades at the University of Chicago.  Might you consider that?”  I very clearly remember asking, “Oh, do they have a university in Chicago?”  He assured me that they did and that it might be worthy of my consideration.  Since I had studied world religions with him, I thought that might be fun to continue those studies and asked if that would be possible there.  He indicated it was and referred me to the Divinity School.  The story gets better, or perhaps worse.

Knowing not a thing about it, I contacted the Divinity School and asked for an application for admission.  I received it and filled it out and sent it back.  I was informed that I’d need to take an entrance exam and that they had their own exam which would be sent to Wichita State where it would be administered to me.  I remember taking the exam, but absolutely nothing about it.  This whole thing was premised on my firm belief that I’d be there just a few months.  I was then notified that I had been accepted to the Divinity School and was asked what field I wished to study.  I wrote back to ask them what fields I might choose among.  They sent me a list and I really didn’t recognize much of anything on the list so I selected “Christian Theology.”  They wrote back indicating that that field had filled, but might I be interested in a field called the “History of Religions?”  Even with my concerns about studying history, I knew it really didn’t matter, short termer as I was planning to be, so I responded, “sure.”  And that is how I entered the University of Chicago and a profession that is still unfolding over more than forty years.

My Great Awakening

Posted on by

for Alex Perry

I’d been sitting across the desk from him for what seemed an eternity.  He was hunched over my paper commenting on every one of the dozens of red notations he had written there.  We were still on the first page.  Jonathan Smith, “You describe Dwight L. Moody as ‘infamous’.  Do you have any idea what that word means (not waiting for me to answer)?  You should never every use that word to describe such a figure as Moody.”  Why didn’t I just get up and leave?  I had slid down in my seat to the point I was about to fall onto the floor … well this was perhaps more the description of my self-esteem than my physical body.

It had all started just a little over a week before.  I’d conferred with another professor in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago where I was a new student.  How I got there is another story, but needless to say, with an undergraduate degree in mathematics and a graduate degree in business administration and only one religion course on my transcript, this was not a place where I felt at home.  I was a floundering homeless academic living under an overpass, a high speed highway travelled by my classmates who all had graduate degrees in religion or history or language.  This professor had asked me if I’d yet worked with Professor Smith.  Learning that I had not he directed me, seemed a command actually, to contact Professor Smith to arrange to work with him.

Dutiful and responsible if nothing else in this graduate program, I mustered my courage and made an appointment to meet with him.  When I walked into his office he seemed barely to notice me, but eventually asked my business.  I told him that I had been referred to him by another professor and I was there because of that.  “Hmmm,” he said looking at me quizzically, “so why would you be the sort of person I’d want to work with?”  Oh wooo!   I had no answer whatsoever for that question.  I can’t even remember what I did, but it surely was little more than to stand there with a dumb look on my face.  Finally, he said, “Well okay then.  Write me a paper and leave it next week.”  I muttered some sort of agreement and left.

I don’t know why I chose to write on Dwight L. Moody and late nineteenth early twentieth century revivalism, but that’s what I choose.  I’m guessing the paper was 12 to 15 pages long.  I dropped it off the next week and made an appointment to meet with Smith in a couple days to get his response.

That response was, as I have described, nothing short of a bludgeoning.  I felt humiliated and stupid and grilled and belittled and hammered and embarrassed … just to begin the list of my feelings.  However, I sat there and listened and took notes and tried to keep from crying.  Certainly in this fog of emotions I was experiencing there were some thoughts of what I might do with my life given this state of failure.  Yet, then a voice, Smith’s voice, that now seemed so very faint and far away somehow penetrated my awareness.  As he stood up extending me the paper he said, “Not a bad paper really.  Revise it and have it back here next week.”

As I found my way outside of his office I experienced the strangest sequence of changes and awakenings.  Did he just say, “Not a bad paper?”  Did he just ask me to revise it and get it back to him?  Surely this means that he hasn’t sent me away for good, drummed me out.  He wants a revision!  Oh my god, it wasn’t that bad!  As I walked along it suddenly dawned on me that I had just had my first real learning experience.  This man thought enough of my work to take it deadly serious down to my every choice of words.  It mattered to him what I wrote and mattered in the greatest detail.

It was a moment of awakening and transformation.  To have someone take my work seriously enough to give it the full measure of criticism in service to my learning, my education, was something I’d never experienced before in this way.  It was my first true learning experience and I knew that from that day forward I would take myself as seriously as had Smith.  He had somehow seen something in me I hadn’t seen in myself and that isn’t the way it should be.  Not only did this experience set the course of my education, it set the course of my career as an educator.

Thoughts on Considering New CU Religion Programs

Posted on by

Not since Gutenberg has a revolution in media impacted the world as greatly as e-media are today.  Although invented in the fifteenth century it took many decades for the impact of typography to be widely felt, yet it is clear looking back that the world changed in fundamental ways as a result of this change in media.  Today e-media are developing so rapidly that we experience a barrage of change approaching chaos.  Alvin Toffler’s publication of Future Shock just 40 years ago (a major book when I was in graduate school) described as “shock” the popular experience of rapid change, the future seemingly slamming into the present.  Yet, compared with today we surely think of the ‘70s as a rather lazy decade.  Here are some statistics that suggest something not only of the order of change in the present world, but also of the measure by which it is being accepted and incorporated in lifestyles the world over.  The number of songs available on iTunes in 2007 was 3.5 million; today there are 6 million plus 65,000 podcasts, 10,000 music videos, 20,000 audiobooks, and 500 movies.  In 2007 Wikipedia had 4 million entries; today there are over 16 million.  Facebook was not significant in 2007; today Facebook has half a billion (yes, 500 million) active users and includes 900 million objects.  YouTube had 6.1 million videos in 2007; today there are 120 million.  In a mere 3 years Wikipedia has grown 400%; YouTube 2000%; and Facebook at an incomprehensible rate.

Over a decade ago our religion colleague Mark Taylor wrote, “We are living in a moment of unprecedented complexity, when things are changing faster than our ability to comprehend them.”  And he brought this message directly to higher education:  “The same information and telematic technologies responsible for the shift from an industrial to a postindustrial economy are bringing higher education to a tipping point where unprecedented change becomes unavoidable.”  His analysis is interesting, yet almost amusing or endearing when one reflects that at the time of his writing, Taylor had never heard of Facebook, or iTunes, or Wikipedia (launched in 2001), or YouTube, or texting, or social networking.  Taylor also noted the enormous resistance he experienced among academics to even consider the impact of the inevitable; a position I’m guessing has not changed at all.

Not only are e-media creating unprecedented change, so also are global economic forces.  It is becoming increasingly clear and widely accepted that rather than a “V” shaped recession (a decline followed by a rise) or even a double bounce “W” shaped recession, the more likely letter to describe this economic situation is “L” in which the decline, once it reaches bottom, does not bounce back to previous levels, but rather remains flat for quite an extended period.  Housing, financial reform, health care, global warming, wars and conflict, the growing divide between wealthy and poor, and the hostile polarized political climate—all experienced widely in the world—seem to support the “L” shape in economic patterning.

As a result of these major influences on society and the world it is highly unlikely, perhaps even not all that desirable, for the university to simply return to what has been so familiar since Kant set forth the principles on which the modern university took shape and has pretty much persisted without major change for over 200 years.   Virtually all futurists indicate the high likelihood of major structural changes in a system that is prohibitively costly to operate and that has become almost totally dependent on funds from state and federal governments, business and industry, and charitable donors.  It is increasingly clear that this system cannot continue long to persist without fundamental change.

I think that the recent decline of newspapers offers a parallel that might be applicable to the inevitable revolution (though few are ready yet to acknowledge this) of the presently structured campus-based university.  Consider a few possibilities.  Let’s say that university faculty begin to package their courses as on-line courses and they begin to shift their work from a single campus base of operation to a world-wide audience.  Of course, on-line courses are already quite common and have been for at least 15 years.  It is thus only an incremental step before on-line delivery becomes the principal method rather than a supplement to classroom delivery.  For-profit universities are developing on the basis of e-delivery of much of education  Let’s say that state legislatures continue to be financially stressed as they have been now for some years.  It doesn’t seem that the end of state government financial stress is yet in sight and the structural changes being presently made are changing most universities in fundamental ways (ways that may well be beneficial).  Let’s say that family income available for higher education continues to be in short supply so that an increasing percentage of families shop for lower priced, yet still high quality, education for their children.  There is currently an explosion in enrollment at community colleges, evidence that this trend is well under way.  Let’s say that studies begin to show that for most students for many courses they take, their goals of education can be effectively met by on-line courses.  If faculty are not limited to a single institution, the very finest faculty in the country and world in any subject could produce the bulk of the on-line courses.  Who wouldn’t prefer to learn from the finest in the world, even if via e-media?  There is further advantage in that such courses are available to learners inexpensively and accessible at any time from any location.  Perhaps these studies will show that students may benefit from one semester residence for every two years of traditional campus based learning (face to face learning will long be valued), with the rest being done effectively at home or while working or performing community service or even traveling.  Should students spend but 25% to 50% of their educational time on campus, the economies of operating physical university plants could be greatly reduced.  Campus colonies (as Thomas Frey has suggested) will develop to use some of this unused space enabling a learning while working community led by faculty and non-university professionals directed towards a work/learn environment that actually creates products, performs services, and so forth incorporating learning as an essential dimension.  The strong interdependence of the sciences and business and defense already demonstrate the success of this model.  In this context, small liberal arts colleges might persist in which the best of faculty and students can research, learn, engage totally independent of immediate needs, retaining some small pockets of the classical understandings of higher education that have already given way as universities have become producers of workers.

It seems clear that the tipping point conditions for fundamental change have already been met, yet the surprising conservatism of university educators will fend off the inevitable impacts as long as possible, perhaps to disastrous results.  The point really is not to despair and read the situation pessimistically, but rather to see that in any situation of change there is great opportunity.

As the Religious Studies faculty begin discussions about the development of new programs it would seem that these factors may be relevant.  It would seem foolhardy to initiate any new program at this time without some careful investigations and considerations.  Minimally these would be:

  • What is the likely future of higher education and the impact this changing context will have on considered programs?
  • What is the future of the study of religion particularly in the context of the likely changes in higher education?
  • What are the motivations, goals, desires, contributions held by CU religion faculty for any proposed programs?

I am unaware that the CU religion faculty has made any effort to look at the future of higher education and its potential impact on the study of religion.  This is why I provided the few sketchy paragraphs at the beginning.  With Jonathan Smith we initiated a discussion of the future of the study of religion over the next 40 years.  I understand that Greg was pursuing the publication of Smith’s lecture.  To my knowledge no one on the religion faculty has otherwise engaged any further consideration of what Smith presented?  I have reshaped the writing course to consider these issues and both of my spring course offerings are directly developed in response to Smith’s lecture.  Of course, while Smith may be in many ways the most important person to chart the future of the study of religion, his resistance to any technological innovations makes him perhaps the least insightful in these areas.

As for CU faculty motivations to develop new programs, the one I have heard most persistently is that “the dean told us so.”  I’m guessing then that self-preservation is among the most basic and fundamental motivations for program expansion.  As the only department in the college without a PhD we seem vulnerable to elimination and we know that we have recently been short-listed in the administration’s budget cutting considerations.  The question is, would we be in any safer position as the newest, smallest, least credentialed PhD program on campus than we currently are without a PhD?  If self-preservation is a major motivator, are there not a number of other strategies that might better secure our future?  I think, for example, of creating a number of courses that focus on considering the central and essential role of religion in the world today.  I recall that Walter Capps drew 1,000 students to his course on Vietnam at UCSB.   It is clear that religion plays a decisive and central role in almost every area of conflict and concern in the world today.  To create a series of courses taught to large numbers of students would, I would think, almost certainly assure our future.  E-media are inevitable innovations in the future university.  The humanities are the last to appreciate the potential values of these areas.  However, it is totally possible.  Our program in the mid-1990s called TheStrip was many years ahead of the times in e-media terms and yet has not been followed by anything else.  One thing is quite clear and that is that religion is a sensuous-rich aspect of life.  Until now this aspect of religion has been relegated to coffee table books and films.  It is clear, even if we acknowledge several of Smith’s predictions, that incorporating experience, the senses, etc will almost certainly be persistent areas of expansion in the study of religion over the next 40 years; these pair well with e-media and the e-delivery of courses.  Aggressive innovations in this area would, I think, also assure the department’s security in the university as well as offer engaging creative challenges for faculty and students.  These actions would not only more strongly assure our future, they would also contribute to the developing future of the study of religion and the university.  For my taste and interest, I’d be most interested in seriously engaging in futurist studies of the university and the study of religion and taking bold actions as leaders and innovators in that future.

It is perhaps worth a moment to indicate some reservations I have about creating a more or less standard PhD program in religion at CU.  Foremost, I strongly believe that the era of faculty simply cloning themselves in the next generation is simply over.  Next, I’m concerned about the faculty credentials for the program and the impact of this situation on the program.  Should we not count (and last spring I was painfully made aware that at the moment we are largely bean counters where research is concerned) the book publications of Rodney, Ira, and me (which total somewhere in the area of 25 to 30 books), the number of books published by the balance of the faculty to my knowledge is rather small (I know of 2, but there may be more).  Can an active PhD faculty even begin to argue for high research stature and credibility when the book publication count is so low?  Would any of our current faculty choose to attend a program whose faculty had so few publications?  Next concern, students.  My sense is that a CU PhD program would draw large numbers of students.  Basically many of our current MA students that don’t get accepted to other PhD programs will want to continue at CU for a PhD.  Frankly it is easier to live on student loans than on unemployment especially when you haven’t been employed.  On the other hand, I think it would be rare indeed to attract to CU a top-notch student in any field.  How could CU religion PhD program possibly compete with long-established programs with highly accomplished faculty.  Thus, our faculty will be working with potentially quite a number of students, but, my question is, are these the students you want to be working with at this level?  Is this the best most creative use of your time and energies?  Finally, I have very serious ethical issues about producing PhDs from a fledgling program in an already over-crowded academic field knowing that their chances are small to none of getting an academic job of any kind.  Placement records are important and public.

In my view, it is not appealing to be identified with and to experience the struggles of perhaps the weakest PhD program in the college and perhaps the weakest PhD program in the international arena of the study of religion.  I should think there are far more interesting, creative, innovative, engaging, fun (and even secure) ways of doing our jobs.

BBM Vol. 2 The Meaning of the Body

Posted on by

[podcast]https://sam-gill.com/mypodcast/samgill2.mp3[/podcast]

BBM Vol. 3 Tradition and Change: Memory and Neuroplasty

Posted on by

[podcast]https://sam-gill.com/mypodcast/BBMv3MP3.mp3[/podcast]