I found one of Tweed’s most useful insights to be the idea that there is an “American way of being religious,” or rather that the complexity and uniqueness of religion in America has led to modes of religious practice that feel distinctly American (191). His example, of course, is the building of national religious centers in the nation’s capital as religious practice. This form of religious practice has been accomplished by, to name a few, Catholics, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Jains, Muslims, and resulted in “Religion Row”—a ten-mile stretch on New Hampshire Avenue with dozens of religious centers. His explanation for this type of religious practice proceeds as follows: The first amendment religion clauses function as a legal sanction for religious diversity, which in turn has motivated faith communities to negotiate political power, construct denominational identity, and secure public visibility by building national churches in the Washington, D.C.

In thinking though my own work on religious arbitration, I find the identification of the negotiation of public space as religious practice to be particularly helpful. Just as the nation’s capital is a civic space being negotiated as religious practice, in the course of religious arbitration the civic space of the American courtroom is transformed, at least partially, into a space for religious practice. As I have mentioned before, religious arbitration is a growing trend in American religion where private religious tribunals adjudicate a dispute according to religious principles and then petition secular courts to enforce the decision. Scholars have struggled to categorize the nature of religious arbitration. On the one hand, arbitration is a civil mechanism used by secular and religious communities alike (similar to building public monuments). On the other hand, records of those who seek out religious arbitration seem to understand at least part of what they are doing as practicing religion, even though such practice eventually intersects with the courtroom.

However, following Tweed’s analysis of religious architecture in the capital, I think it is more productive to categorize religious arbitration as a distinctly American religious practice, required by a constitutional scheme whose claim of disestablishment requires faith traditions to compete with each other to assert religious identity in civic forums, albeit in creative, public ways.

by Johannes Kleiner

Keith Basso masterfully chronicles the Apache’s understanding of wisdom, in his seminal Wisdom sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache. Place names are used as tools to evoke vivid imaginations of stories and terrain in a person’s mind to teach them a lesson and eventually make them wise. The reference to well known places functions as hands-on memory aid: “‘Look at the mountain and think about it! It will help make you wise.'” (122) When recalling specific place names, imagination explodes in a form similar to intense daydreaming (cf. 89): “Western Apache place-names provide more than precise depictions of the sites to which the names refer. In addition, place-names implicitly identify positions for viewing these locations: optimal vantage points, so to speak, from which the sites can be observed, clearly and unmistakably, just as their names depict them.” (89) The listener is transported to different places in his/her surroundings and visually rooted in a particular spot—all in the creative realm of the mind.

Wisdom in Apache life is acquired by the knowledge of places and the stories (be they myths or real events) connected to them. Ultimately, wisdom aims at the avoidance of danger and is seen as an “instrument of survival.” (131). In this vein the storied places call to mind misfortunes, accidents, precarious situations, and socially as well as personally destructive behavior. But what all this instruction and learning really hinges on are well trained and cultivated skills of observation.

First of all, observation skills are needed to be able to recall the instructional tales. One needs to be acquainted with the places invoked in such an intimate and conscious way (let’s call it place-awareness) that mentioning a place-name can translate effortlessly into a mental stage. This requires an attentive familiarity with the lay of the land. The intended transportation of the individual to the places in the daydreaming of the mind relies on the fact that the person has been there before, paying particular attention to features of nature.

Second, the learner of Apache wisdom is called to closely observe the events in the story and figure out what the point of the story is. This is a creative exercise and sometimes quite mind bending, as Basso’s own journey to comprehend the complex meaning of speaking in names illustrates (cf. his ch. 3). What did the person in the story do wrong? What is the lesson to be learned here? Detail orientation and a grain of empathy serve the student best. This relational-awareness drives home the point of how to avoid danger and misfortune.

Third, wisdom is an exercise in continuous observation. On the one hand the stories teach what to be on the look-out for: indications of danger, suspect social behavior, unsafe places, etc. On the other hand the exercise of acquiring wisdom itself involves to be on the look for more and more stories and places to expand one’s own mental map. Awareness as way of life and way of—practical and social—survival itself.

Observations that lead to different ways of awareness are central in the life of a wise Western Apache. The wise person is ultimately the person aware of places and their stories and teachings. Put more clearly: the wise person is aware of the storied nature surrounding him or her. This insight is shared cross culturally and across the divide of time with many other conceptions of wisdom. In the Hebrew Bible wisdom is frequently conveyed through the close observation and awareness of nature and natural phenomena and what they tell the observer about life. For example, one only needs to consider the observation of the ant in Proverbs 6:6 or the observation of natural processes in Ecclesiastes 1:2-11. Wisdom teaching, constructed by humans, is (at least partially) rooted in the other-than-human world and human attentiveness to it.

Where do we root our wisdom today? In books, science, computers…? If we want to become wiser people, both, the Western Apache and the biblical tradition urge us to train our observation skills. But not just any observation skills! Especially those connected to nature and the other-than-human actors that fascinate us and draw our attention. When our surroundings and co-habitants become storied and instruct the aware observer, our relationship to our ecosystem changes. We value it more, because it teaches us. When we root wisdom in nature, through stories and analogies, nature becomes a resourceful and invaluable companion.

I suspect that we are much less likely to do harm to a landscape, an animate being, or to interrupt processes in an ecosystem from which we derive meaning for our own lives. Maybe it is high time to be re-inspired once more by the bible and the Apache to story nature and relate to it in an observant and highly aware way. This form of mutual and respectful human-nature relationship might be the beginning of the much needed change of mind for us in the age of climate change and natural degradation. Let’s explore how we can re-learn and cultivate this connection of wisdom to nature in our modern Western societies.

Is there a place where I am truly present?  Is there even one place that serves as teacher, as constant reminder, in a remotely similar way to the role places and place-names play in the Western Apache community?  After all, Basso beckons his readers to attend to places.  Actually, more than that, Basso challenges ethnographers and anthropologist to focus their attention and study place at least partly because experiences are situated in time and space.

Basso supports this call by offering his own ethnographic work with the Western Apache.  Specifically, in his chapter on “Speaking With Names,” he illustrates how the place-names themselves can evoke instruction and consolation all at once, simply by speaking the names of places.  The place-names invite the hearer to imagine the places, the images, and the narratives attached to the places without explicitly needing to condemn or rebuke the hearer.  This is all founded on a deep connection to the land, place-names that have been given, and narratives that continue to teach those who remember them, long after the actual event.  Place and language are intricately woven together, not just for the individual, but for the community as a whole.

While I am not part of a community that uses place and place-names to instruct and teach wisdom, one place of constant reflection, as I read Basso’s account, is the canopy of trees behind my house.  I step outside the kitchen to my favorite spot on the back deck as soon as the weather allows and take in the canopy as often as possible.  If it is early enough in the morning, light illuminates and dances upon and even changes the trees, telling its daily story with each sunrise.  Sometimes the leaves are rustling and other times they are still.  A woodpecker is particularly fond of one of the trees and spends its day pecking away as soon as it is warm enough for its return.

I have grown fond of the canopy in all of its expressions.  The bare branches seem to offer just as much insight and company as the vibrant colors of fall, not to mention the budding leaves of spring.  Sometimes I journal or read with the canopy’s company and other times I just sit and take it in.  The canopy teaches me lessons of letting go, lying fallow, and allowing new life to emerge even from what looks and feels like death.  The canopy reminds me that I am part of a living place that is much more than human.  The canopy is a place of steadiness and nurture when I am reeling or when I seem to have lost my way.

The canopy has been my companion as I fell in love underneath it, and as I tried to make sense of the love I found.  A bird has “taken liberties” from this canopy leaving me with a bit of a mess on my shirt, and I’ve been known to sit under an umbrella to avoid other showers (these a bit more welcome, at least.)  My partner and I have invited people into our lives around the table under the canopy.  Sometimes guests notice this great assortment of trees and other times they do not.  Either way, I feel like they are nurtured by it.

If there is any location in which my selfhood is intertwined with placehood (14) that is true under this canopy.  As I read Basso, I found myself asking, what story would these branches evoke?  What would it look like to have a community that learned from and held me accountable to the story of this place?  And yet, I am protected from the world as I sit under this canopy with a tall wooden privacy fence marking off the boundary of the property line.  This is far from a community place holding a narrative that all learn from and evoke as teacher and guide for living.  Perhaps it could be.  Perhaps the story from this canopy has more to offer than what is contained in private on this back deck.

In my own research, I have grown frustrated and impatient at times with the lack of religious voices offering support for different expressions of gender and more specifically for same-sex marriage in the Proposition 8 debate.  While I understand the challenges, I am troubled nonetheless.  And then I recall the canopy that has been my own teacher, under which I am still sitting on the back deck protected from the world around me.  It has been a long slow journey to accept self, accept love, and accept the support that loved ones have offered.  Might I at least share what I have learned?  While impatience and frustration have been helpful as they unsettle me and press me forward, I’m reminded often when I sit under this canopy that this journey has taken time.  How might I offer grace, while prodding and pressing to claim religious language in the same-sex marriage debate?

Basso’s work with the Western Apache challenges me to attend to place in ways that press beyond my prior conceptions.  Specifically, I am challenged to begin with myself and examine places in my own life in addition to determining how I might heed Basso’s plea for ethnographic attention to place in my own research.

When I first scanned the title of Loyal Jones’ 1999 study Faith and Meaning in the Southern Uplands, I balked. As a sometime student of cultural geography and an erstwhile devotee of the Terry G. Jordan school of material culture studies, the object of Jones’ preposition was hard to digest. “The Southern Uplands?” I thought, “What he means is ‘the Upland South.’” But that is not what he means at all. Caviling as the distinction may be, it makes a difference for Jones—a difference that he intimates in his introduction, and which bears, however implicitly, on his method throughout the text. In Jones’ rejection of the “missionary imperative,” and in his insistence on texturing his presentation of Appalachian religion with disjunctive and at times agonistic theological claims, we should hear a resistance to the reification of his region (think, for just one recurring example, of the way Jones distinguishes theological orientations as more or less “Calvinist” or “Arminian”): “Not the Upland South,” he seems to say, edging away from that monolithic singularity, “but the Southern Uplands,” a bricolage (9).

For a study penned at the close of the twentieth century, Faith and Meaning in the Southern Uplands is a curious text. Though Jones abjures superfluous “interpretation”—preferring instead to simply present “what is already abundantly clear” in the statements of the dozens of Upland people we encounter in the text—he nevertheless employs a stark hermeneutic that shifts our gaze away from the daily lives and material worlds of the Southern Uplands. In contrast to a prevailing trend in religious studies—which since the 1980’s has concerned itself much more with practice, or what people do, than with doctrine, or what people believe—Jones dissects Upland faith into classic theological categories. We hear much about grace, theodicy (through the menacing figure of the Devil), theological anthropology, and even a few excurses on Trinitarian theology. Not until the final full chapter do we move into the standard fare of “lived religion”: prayer practices, rural hymnody, testimony as a social (rather than purely theological) phenomenon.

With Jones’ rejection of the so-called missionary imperative comes a corollary rejection of the anthropological gaze. I won’t elaborate here on the historical link between missionary enterprise and the rise of anthropological thought, but suffice it to say that many 18^th and 19^th century colonial missionaries became proto-anthropologists and many more provided the data for budding anthropological inquiry in their respective metropoles. With his focus on theology and doctrine, Jones rehabilitates a methodological paradigm that has lately been neglected—and sometimes, more disturbingly, dismissed—in religious studies. If religious studies has, as John Gager pointed out when he lectured to Emory undergraduates earlier this month, been characterized by a movement from “theo-logy” to “anthropo-logy,” then Jones has brought us around that turn and back again. In rehabilitating Upland theologies as coherent expressions of doctrine—doctrine that can fit within the kind of accepted theological categories that any divinity student might recognize—Loyal Jones resists the religious and cultural “othering” of Upland peoples that has been so long perpetrated by the anthropological gaze. But I wonder if, in abandoning the social-anthropological gaze and its prevailing emphasis on practice, this text has not simply reinforced the othering power of that gaze. Indeed, Jones rehabilitates the theology of the Southern Uplands, laying bare its internal debates and impressive doctrinal variegation. But this appeal to theology comes at the expense of the anthropological discourse he abandons.

A reflection inspired by Loyal Jones’ Faith and Meaning in the Southern Uplands

How can we best understand the people of the Southern Uplands, without our preconceptions and prejudices take over? Loyal Jones’ answer is to let the people of the region speak for themselves, through their writing, interviews and, not least, their music! Jones notes: “The words of songs always tell us the basic theology of the
people,”(p. 181) and “those who wish to understand religion in the mountains must listen carefully to the hymns for their layers of meaning and observe and talk with the singers, so as to perceive their feelings and sentiments.” (p. 200). I suspect that music is not only one place among others to find the real Southern Uplands, but maybe THE place to do so. Music, much more than sermons and writing, touches people’s minds and hearts, while also engaging their bodies (by movement, resonance, and other embodiments of song) (cf. the account in Jones, 193). This holistic engagement reveals multiple layers of meaning and gives insights into a people’s soul.

These points are driven home for me week after week at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic
Church here in Atlanta. The oldest African American Catholic parish in the city, OLL prides itself for its excellent music ministry featuring the best that African American Catholic music has to offer. The music combines an amazing sensitivity to the biblical texts it is based on (or the traditional texts of the Catholic liturgy respectively) with traditional African American rhythms and rhetorical figures. In this, the music inculturates theology. The African American experience is cross-fertilized with the Catholic experience and achieves one major feat: it makes room—creates a place—for the distinct African American culture within the still mainly Euro-centric Catholic Church.

Before the second Vatican Council (1962-65) enabled a more open approach to different cultural elements in the setting of the mass, African American Catholics often
had to choose between culturally sensitive and nourishing Sunday services and their Catholic denomination. It was not uncommon that African Americans would attend protestant services just for the music and the connection to their roots. A meaningful place for their religious experience was inextricably connected to music as place maker, music as integral part of their spiritual geography.

In the aftermath of the Council, the African American priest and composer Clarence
Joseph Rufus Rivers, quickly accompanied by a wide range of African American
composers such as Rawn Harbor, created culturally sensitive and meaningful
music that ever since has enriched the Catholic Church and made it a more
welcoming place of worship. This music encapsulates the history and theological
perspectives of African Americans and actualizes and inculturates both time and
time again.

The experience of the Southern Uplands is none of finding a place, where there was
none, but music plays the same role of communicating a culture, a theology more effectively than words alone could. And that is the great potential of the music: it provides an avenue into better understanding an appreciating a people and their cultural heritage. The Songs are always culturally particular, but at the same time they are hybrids of different influences that convey a complex history. But above all, music is universally accessible to human beings and thus a great teaching and appreciation tool.

My experience in the Bay Area and now at Our Lady of Lourdes led me to adopt African
American music and worship practices as my own primary form of worship. The power of the music is what drew me in, but it is also what intensified my interest in learning more about African American culture and history in general. After reading Loyal Jones’ book, another, more effective, and more appropriate way to learn about and appreciate the religiosity of the Southern Uplands is to listen to the music, both sacred and profane, originating from there and let it touch and inspire us (together with the stories and personalities of the musicians). In the study of American Religions–in the attempt to place American Religions–I am more and more convinced that we need to consider music as a (and in some cases even the primary) place where meaning resides and where appreciation and learning happens.

An Ambivalent Case for Consumerism as Religious Style

Thrive, cities! Bring your freight, bring your shows, ample and sufficient rivers!
Expand, being than which none else is perhaps more spiritual!
Keep your places, objects than which none else is more lasting!

—Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”

A picture of God from the Gospel of Promethea.

There is a way of conceiving the twenty-first century city as an invading, colonizing god. Although the categories of urban and rural contradicted each other in the popular imagination for at least three hundred years, the categories themselves were internally incoherent: the city representing both progress and regression, plutocracy and indigence, glamor and depravity; its opposite the pure, nostalgic vision of what we wished we were before we had memory, a chthonic place where social connections are strong commitments to community, but also one that is ignorant, silenceable, disconnected. What continued (and continues) to distinguish the urban and the rural from one another is access. When I lived in Newark—which you might not be aware is the same public transit time to Union Square as Carroll Gardens, and twenty minutes faster to NY Penn Station—I had access to the cuisines of every country if not region in Eastern Asia, to readings by writers as diverse as Junot Diaz, Roxane Gay, Billy Collins, and Suzanne Collins, to just about any training possible, to a billion things more than this.

Ahoy.

Because I grew up in a town with a mighty 3000+ population and because other cities I’ve lived in include Chicago and Paris, maintaining this access is something very important to me. In Robert Orsi’s introduction to Gods of the City, he reminds people like me that the type of atomized, privileged access to knowledge, culture, and power I desire does not characterize the experience of all city-dwellers. Nevertheless, he also recognizes that the city is not quite as simple as a collection of people who can be divided into privileged/underprivileged, oppressor/oppressed. Rather, people live at the interstices. They believe, but only in negotiation with one thing or another, internalizing and navigating a host of social, historical, personal, cultural, and economic forces that form a palimpsest of imaginary topographies.

So, Orsi’s talking about religion here. That metaphysical concepts become mapped out onto existing grids in the city. That there is no essentialist religious identity that is impermeable and discreet and expresses itself identically regardless of place. I would have to agree with this. But when he defines urban religion (“what comes from the dynamic engagement of religious traditions… with specific features of the industrial and post-industrial cityscapes and with the social conditions of city life” (43)), I wonder if “urban religion” might not be the way one practices religion, the way one believes today.

When a small town, (heterodox) Catholic boy such as myself moves to a city, he has options for faith practice. There’s the Portugeuese parish where the English mass features an extensive homily on why one should bury their parents in a Catholic rather than cremate them. There’s the Italian American parish whose homilies have been translated word for word from the Glen Beck radio hour into Liturgical American English (LAE). There’s a parish run by women priests who were ordained secretly somewhere in the Black Forest by a rogue bishop, where the thirteen parishioners contribute to the homily. There’s also a kung fu school, which features sophisticated training in kicking ass, manipulating qi, fong soi (his sigung is Cantonese), healing practices, and a three-week-long celebration of Chinese New Year with full dragon and lion regalia. There’s also the Thelema lodge on Long Island, the Park51 community center, evangelical Korean teenagers who stop people in the occult section of the Barnes and Noble in Clifton, New Jersey.

The boy chose this.

This is to say nothing about other religious sites such as Midtown Comics, Madison Square Garden, and the headquarters for HBO.

I may be into some serious syncretism, some chaos magic, but I feel that this is not dissimilar to the way religion is practiced elsewhere, practiced the way one practices a commodity, which is to say to use it, adapt it, even as it conforms one’s will back into the model of late capital, the consumerist, infotextual system we are all part of. Take, for instance, the Catholicism of my hometown. It is disconnected physically from the metropole, right? Well it also is one that performs its expression through the lens of  charismatic practices that can trace its genealogy from some church somebody coming into contact with other practices—such as the ones found in some Pentecostal denominations—and remixing them. Even locally, there are places of grace that defy both the force of the romantic sublime and the weight of the old homes of eldritch saints and gods. I remember a local business leader who came to speak at my church when I was twelve or so who told the story of meeting Mary at the shipyard he owned amidst stacks of pipes and whatever industrial stuff. Soon, there was an old man who had a mystical cross in his window. Then, a donut-shop owner organized a trip to Conyers for the “last” apparition of Mary.

The 1998 Virgin Mary Farewell Tour.

People in Chauvin not only take their religion very seriously albeit sentimentally, but they also create it from fragments of imaginary pasts, negotiating official Catholicism with mystical pieties that come as much from Hollywood as they do from feast days. They put crawfish on the St. Joseph’s day altar, pulling in New Orleans, Italian Catholic culture and eliding its genealogy, adapting and transforming it. Their children move away and argue with them on issues of faith and politics having all become cynical with the church and heretical in faith. They, the parents and the children, often negotiate their ethics and beliefs through the television and the Internet. And even as the small town case is often the example used to prove the difference of urban things, now it is increasingly hard to peel back the layers of the religious, political, and cultural maps to find a Chauvin that is not already a part of the city, even as access to luxury goods and training are still a good bit of highway away.

One must contend with the fact that religious practice is not (and never could have been) separate from the world. And worse still, it is marketable and often practical. But for me, one who wants to be hollowed out, to be a body without organs, for to better be absorbed (to better absorb) the big, Lacanian Other who is always incomplete and multitudinous (like me, a little o, singing with the voice of Saint Walt: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes”), this is a relief, a blessing. Orsi points toward the right place where this happens: the cracks, the moments of contradiction and confrontation between place and ideology, culture and politics, body and body.