The Faith Between Us

Prayers of an Atheist

2008-01-29T09:27:00.000-05:00

I wouldn't have expected it the day I dotted the last "i" of Faith, but Sunday morning I told a story about prayer to a group gathered for a book discussion at Trinity Episcopal Church in Concord, Mass., not a far drive from Peter's house in Cambridge. Before our presentation, the associate rector Nick Morris-Kliment offered a prayer -- something he seems expert at -- that put the group in the right mood; he asked for God's blessing on our talk, and hoped that our friendship might be somehow useful, a reflection of God's will for his community. A little embarrassing, 100% flattering, and, we hope, at least somewhat true. The rector, Tony Buquor, whose son was married by Peter in a civil ceremony that, he noted, was remarkably religious, introduced us just as kindly.

Before taking questions, and before I told my story about prayer, Peter and I read two short essays about our friendship and the process of writing the book. (These will soon appear on Jbooks.com.) I stumbled over myself for a moment -- blurting quickly, "ah, you'll excuse me for this" -- when I mentioned that seminary had seemed a terrible cockblock during my early days in New York. (This seemed less bad, somehow, than reading the phrase "handjobs on floors" from the book at a Lutheran church in Chicago a few months ago. I remain somewhat prudish, I guess.)

I forget exactly the question that brought my story to mind, but the moment it was asked, Peter turned to me and said, "Tell them about your prayers." So I did.

In Faith, I write, "[E]xcept when they come to mind involuntarily like all-time favorite pop songs, I've more or less stopped saying personal prayers. The transition's been slow. Since those early, comforting night improvising prayers that always began with "My dear Lord God" and ended with the affirmation "Amen" -- meaning basically "Yes, I believe You can do anything" -- I've run the gamut. ... Nowadays, though, the Father isn't there to listen to me silently meditate on the Lord's Prayer, and the Holy Mother doesn't intercede with her Son each time I call her to mind with a Hail Mary. I'd always really understood church petitions to be prayers for miracles. Now, outside of its context within a community able to act on it, a prayer asking God to care for the poor floats away unheard. Kept to myself, any prayer for the sick is just as ineffectual."

In a sense, this is just as true as ever. I still can't imagine praying for miracles. Yet, this, I've learned is a severely limited conception of personal prayer, and not at all what Peter ever means when he talks about his own devotional life as a theist.

So, finally, the story: About a month ago, near the end of research (if that's the right word, which it really isn't) for a new book project, I hit what I considered then to be a snag. Like "research," "snag" is certainly the wrong word, but for our sake here, imagine it as a really big, really painful snag, something really damaging. Consider it a heartbreaking snag. (I provided more details to the community at Trinity. I'm being less forthcoming here, for my own reasons. It's important to know, for our purposes, that I was heartbroken.)

What happens in my life when heartbreaking things happen -- when a dad dies, when a relationship ends, when I hit a snag -- is that I call Peter. (The book contains a moment when the reverse happens: Peter's heart is broken and he calls me. Why am I being so mysterious?) So that morning I did. He'd never heard me so crushed.

He knows very well -- better than anyone else -- that I've given up prayer. He knows very well how horribly it went the last time a friend recommended I pray. But he said it anyway: "Maybe you should pray about it. You know, at a moment like this, you really have to go into the belly of the beast." This is how Peter sounds when he really means something. And he never means that a miracle can happen, or even that God is looking out for me.

The belly of the beast, where we go when we pray, it turns out, is within me, within all of us. It's the unselfconscious place where, as they say, you turn your life -- your heartbreaks -- over to God. You stop being embarrassed and stop, if only for those meditative moments, being self-critical. It's the irrational place in us, where we feel. It's where we hope from. And probably also where we love from. This is not how I usually sound when I really mean something. But that advice was the best Peter had for me, and actually the very best in the world.

It's not easy to pray when you don't believe in God. Fortunately, from what Peter tells me, it's not easy to pray when you do, either. But it seems worth trying.

Listen, a New Year

2008-01-07T20:18:00.000-05:00

It's a new year. Peter and I have been back and forth from our respective hometowns to Vermont, where we discussed Faith with the congregation of the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Burlington. Thanks to all who attended. It was our real pleasure to meet you. We hope to continue the discussion.

On the way from Boston to Burlington, we listened to the new Radiohead album, In Rainbows, which, if you haven't heard it, is amazing. It creates in you what Peter calls in the book, and what we'll start talking about soon at Bustedhalo.com, the ache. On the way, we bought the latest Spin magazine and were dismayed to see that IR was not listed as their album of the year.

For those of you who haven't heard us talk about or read from Faith in person, we have this for you. On Sunday, November 18, we led a book discussion for a very large and enthusiastic audience at the historic Trinity Church Boston, which, if you haven't seen it, is amazing. Listen here.

And finally, for the record, I've been meaning to say something about an essay I read several weeks ago that a reasonably liberal friend of mine said made her "retroactively go back and vote for Bush, twice": Brian Goedde's piece "Staying Home," published in the Dec. 12 New York Times Magazine, which featured Mike Huckabee on the cover. I have to think that the NYTM needed something just as unsettling from the opposite side of the political spectrum near the back of the magazine, just for balance. The piece takes place on New Year's Eve, several years ago, and I guess my mentioning it here, in our first post of the new year, is appropriate.

A Believing Reader

2007-12-28T19:03:00.000-05:00

I have been back in the Midwest for Christmas, which is where I normally spend this time of year. By now, some of my old friends and relatives have read Faith, and some have liked it quite a lot. Others aren't sure what to make of me, the Catholic atheist. Still others, including some people very close to me, worry that I'm doomed. It is in that context – at home, worried about this book, surrounded by friends and family – that I reflect on growing up as a reader, and significantly, a believing reader.

Looking back, I see now that my belief in God, like a great many of my beliefs, was shaped by the fact that important people in my life, most notably my father, died when I was young. Once they’d died, God provided them a place to live forever. And from the Catholic services that accompanied these deaths, to the consolation dished out by friends and relatives – often literally by way of endless casseroles – everyone had told me that I could join them some day if I was good. So growing up I was good. I was well behaved. I prayed hard in church. I did my chores. And, perhaps most importantly, I did well in school. I lived believing that God had my life, and eventually my death, safely under his control.

In those days, there was little about God that was particularly amazing. While significantly better, for all its reality Heaven was hardly more of a miracle place than the local grocery store in the middle of my small town. Instructed in Bible stories in the same way I was taught about the American Revolution and the Civil War, I considered Moses and Jesus, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, as historical equals, heroes of the very same kind: liberators, great and valuable leaders, wise men. It mattered to me as a child that upon entering Heaven someday, I’d see my father and grandparents again, yes, but after those reunions I’d also be able to pay visits to all my childhood heroes. This all made sense to me. Good people who died went to the very same Heaven I would go to. God was there with Jesus at his right hand and people like my dad and Thomas Jefferson and the Challenger astronauts all rubbing elbows in the clouds. And while this may sound very fanciful now, I assure you it took no imagination at all back then.

It makes some sense, then, that while I read a lot as a child, I had few, if any, literary heroes. I never followed the Pevensie children through the wardrobe into Narnia or Frodo Baggins all the way to Mordor. Reading was, in one sense, just another thing that I could be good at. If reading made me smart, reading more made me smarter. For boys like me raised on Encyclopedia Brown and The Hardy Boys, reading expanded the mind in the same way a math problem did. In terms of problem solving, 2+2=4 is just as true as The Butler Did It. Yet, since I knew the difference between fiction and non-fiction, The Butler Did It could never be as important as Lincoln Freed the Slaves. And because God controlled it all, every other truth paled in comparison with the one Truth that Jesus Saves – just so long as we believed in him and were good.

I no longer believe in God, or certainly not in any way that I would have recognized as a child. Most of the people I grew up don’t even recognize it now. There is no more Heaven. God has no control over anything. God exists only in our imaginations, which is no little thing. As far as I can tell, it’s where God has always existed.

And in some ways, believing this affects my reading. For one, I’m hardly as voracious as I once was. Like most people I know, I tend to have a few books going at a time – right now, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, and Ted Kerasote’s Merle’s Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog – but with my growing obligations, it sometimes takes me a month on the subway to finish a novel. It’s not unheard of that I’ll go a week without cracking a book at all.

And while I still like Jesus way more than Frodo, nowadays they live in very much the same world. I’m not denying that Jesus walked and talked and was an important and radical teacher. Through the stories told about him, he remains for me that model of ethical living: Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. Turn the other cheek. Blessed are the poor. Judge not, lest you be judged. But he lives today, again, much like those literary heroes I ignored as a child, through the stories told about him.

And as for God, as I see it now, God is nothing – really nothing – but the demand that we live well in this life. And in the Gospels, it seems Jesus often knew this as well as anyone. You love your neighbor and your enemy in the here and now. You bless the poor for their sake. You write in the sand – as it was written Jesus did – to reveal to each of us our common humanity.

Christmas: The Jewish Kryptonite

2007-12-21T10:20:00.000-05:00

For a time, Christmas felt like a kind of kryptonite, in all its various colors and effects. Christmas carols, lights, Santa Claus, and even the inexplicable Stollen, produced in me various levels of discomfort, confusion, and even a little misplaced nostalgia. I grew up a very secular Jew, and while we acknowledged that Christmas had come and gone, like most Jews we basically kept our heads down until it was all over. I watched the surreal animated puppets in Santa Claus is Coming to Town with the same hunger that any child watched the annual television show that let him stay up late. I once even sat on Santa’s lap in the mall. But even then I knew I was only a visitor in a foreign land. Santa was a Christian, and his workshop didn’t employ any Jews.

Over the years I took on more Jewish observance, and surprisingly my relationship to Christmas changed, even deepened. I looked forward to Christmas Eve and Christmas Day as moments to define myself against what I wasn’t. I sat in empty coffee shops, went to the movies with friends, and had Chinese food. The cold air and the deserted streets were glorious. I loved the lights in the trees and the darkened windows of the stores. Christmas meant lovely isolation and I felt deeply Jewish.

I would give my friends Christmas presents, but none of those people were really Christian. The obligation felt weird. If they didn’t believe Christ was really born on this day, why weren’t they all in Chinatown with me? My only devout Christian friend eschewed really owning anything. Whenever I gave him a gift he looked at it with the discomfort of a man struggling with a live fish He seemed to worry about it flopping on to the floor. I secretly hated his devout Christianity that was ruining Christmas. What else was I supposed to do for him on this day? There was no way I was going to eat Stollen.

Hanukkah, on the other hand, was always a letdown. The attempt to match Christmas in spirit seemed contrived. I would feel irritated when the local mall would put up the obligatory menorah next to the Christmas tree. I didn’t want Hanukkah to have to compete with Christmas. It couldn’t. What is winter without Christmas, without the blinking lights, without the giant plastic peppermint sticks covered in snow? Like this year, Hanukkah sometimes comes so early it doesn’t even feel like winter yet.

But then I married a gentile and everything changed.

My wife came from a family even more secular than my own. They never talk of God or Christ, and I have never heard them mention the Virgin Mary or the manger. But they celebrate with the fervor of postulants.

I grumbled my way through the first few years. I would read The Forward while they busied themselves with wrapping presents and keeping the fire going in the fireplace. I looked out of the corner of eye for any sign of a baby Jesus so I could leap up with an “Ah-Ha! I knew it!” Eventually Johnny Mathis and the smell of the tiny pine cones used in decorations got to me.

What finally undid me, however, was the joy they took in giving. Stockings stuffed to overflowing, the old family photos lovingly framed, just the right sweater, all the perfect books. I would have called it out as obsessive consumption and ugly consumerism, but they always had wonderful things for me. (On Hanukkah, my non-Jewish friends always gave me “Jewish” things, as if Hanukkah presents are supposed to be about Hanukkah.)

As I began to embrace Christmas as part of my wife’s tradition I realized that Hanukkah was also special for me as a Jew. It’s just a coincidence that Hanukkah and Christmas fall around the same time of the year. My mistake was thinking that since Hanukkah is really a minor Jewish holiday and didn’t have anything about it that was distinctly seasonal, it wasn’t worth making a big deal about it. But Hanukkah is a Jewish day, and it marks, like so many other Jewish holidays, the sheer fortitude of the Jewish people. Over and over again we survive. Our lights keep burning, even when they are not as nearly as bright as my neighbor’s giant automaton reindeer.

And so for the last few years, Hanukah has been another time to mark being Jewish. In my home, we don’t celebrate the two holidays together, but go by where land on the calendar. And secretly, I hope when I light the shamash and the first candle of the menorah that it will start to snow, and that it will be snowing all winter, especially when one year I take my family to Chinatown, and show them how Christmas is really done.

[Cross-posted at Jewcy]

Tonight's Event 12/13 Cancelled

2007-12-13T13:33:00.001-05:00

Due to inclement weather, the event tonight at the Cambridge Public Library has been canceled. We are hoping to reschedule for January. We will keep you posted.

Light those Lights: Update

2007-12-05T17:55:00.000-05:00

Just a quick update to say that Busted Halo posted their discussion with us today. They call us a "Spiritual Odd Couple." Thanks again to Bill McGarvey and Robert Siegel.

Light those Lights

2007-12-04T23:34:00.000-05:00

Peter and I read from the book this past weekend at The Church of the Ascension, NYC, in an event co-sponsored by the church and the NYU Episcopal chaplaincy. A handful of my students attended. I got some thumbs up. I discussed my facial tic -- technically, atypical trigeminal neuralgia -- which I think at least some of my students were dying to hear an explanation of. They've often looked at me funny after my face dances under the pressure of this untreatable neurological disorder. After the reading itself we held a small-group discussion with Fr. John Merz, the NYU chaplain. He seems like a very good, very smart priest.

One of my students approached me this afternoon after class. She'd enjoyed herself at the reading, and was happy her boyfriend had attended the event with her, as well. He'd commented after the reading and the small-group discussion that he hadn't ever encountered smart conversation about God. (The flattery is encouraging, but I'd say he needs to go to more churches, in general.)

His point, though, is well taken, and largely motivated the conversation we reproduce in the book. The loud religious talk these days doesn't seem so smart. It's good to lean back in a room and hear a collection of nineteen-year-olds -- some religious, some not -- talk with a priest who seems, while perhaps better versed in the possibilities of what God may or may not be, no more sure about of the answers.

Happy Hanukkah. Light those lights. And thanks to the Velveteen Rabbi, rabbinic student Rachel Barenblat, for her kind words about Faith.

And look for our discussion with Bill McGarvey and Robert Anthony Siegel at Busted Halo, coming soon.

A Loss for Words

2007-11-24T17:44:00.000-05:00

We had an interesting time recently at Harvard Hillel. We were invited to do a reading and discussion. Originally the event was going to be co-sponsored by the Harvard Catholic students group. We were told they pulled out when, after reading the book, they were disappointed to read that Scott refers to himself as an atheist. Even though he is a practicing Catholic, they could not lend their name to something that, at least on the surface, was wholly opposed to core Catholic theology, namely a belief in the Resurrection and a belief in the miracles. But we were pleasantly surprised to see a number of Catholic students, as well as a one a priest, were there at the event.

During the discussion, Scott and I spoke of the value of religious language, but explained that while language is one of the most important aspects of religion, it can also function as the most dangerous. Often the vessel replaces the thing it was trying to contain. A young man in the front row asked if we believed that one could be transformed by belief, specifically belief in ideas that are understood by the language. He said that religious language only has meaning for him because he believes in what the words say. This is what makes him a Catholic. Scott tried to explain that all he has is what his experience has taught him, and that experience has taught him to understand these words as metaphor, and nothing else.

Now this is where Scott and I start to separate. While like Scott I believe these words are metaphorical, I also believe there is some referent to which these words refer. Scott does not believe in any referent, except that which we construct with ethics. We tried our best to explain this, but the fellow had such a pained look on his face. He was disappointed that we wanted to talk about God and religion, but mistrusted any words we might use. This is where religious discussion can begin to break down. No amount of interfaith nicety can bridge what ultimately becomes division of words. And I understand. Belief is rooted in the language we use. But isn't it possible to agree that no matter how closely words might apprehend an ultimate reality, there is no word that can ever name it perfectly?

Faith in Chicago

2007-11-13T12:56:00.000-05:00

I returned home last night from a trip to Chicago's Ebenezer Lutheran Church, where I presented a chapter from Faith about how, as a seventeen-year-old, I wanted to be a Catholic priest. My parents talked me out of it: "It's such a lonely life," they said. That was all it took.

I was warmly received at Ebenezer, to say the least. The church itself is labyrinthine, and a different parishioner led me from place to place to place. (That I mentioned this hospitality made the pastor, Rev. Carla Thompson Powell, very pleased.) Worship was led by a jazz band. The first lesson was read in Swahili. The church, like mine, welcomes believers of all stripes: young, old, black, white, gay, straight. Etc. Etc. Many thanks to them for the invitation and for trying to claim me as one of their own. For my part, I responded to a question about my ambivalence regarding Catholicism by once again quoting Karen Armstrong, calling myself a "Freelance Monotheist." Both Peter and I look forward to returning to Ebenezer at the end of January.

Before leaving Monday I had breakfast with Eboo Patel, whose book Acts of Faith chronicles his growth as a moderate Muslim and his work as founder of the Interfaith Youth Core, which is what it seems to be by the name -- an organization that brings young people of different faiths together to organize and engage in service projects. For IFYC, as for me an Peter, belief itself seems irrelevant; what matters is practice. Eboo recently wrote about us at the Washington Post/Newsweek "On Faith" blog. He gets to the heart of our book, and the heart of the conversation he and I had yesterday, with this: "Most of us understand faith as a conversation with God, but it is also very much a conversation with others – and in a world where people from different backgrounds are in more frequent and intense interaction than ever before, it is often a conversation between people of different faiths."

Thank you, Chicago.

Faith in Public

2007-11-05T19:09:00.000-05:00

We had our first events for the book this weekend, the first at my church, St. Francis Xavier, where several parishioners and a few students of mine listened to me read the introduction to Faith. We end that piece -- the only dual-authored section of the book -- with this thought about the conversation that the book creates as we alternate stories back and forth:

"Our hope is that in sharing this conversation, in appearing in public as faithful friends, we might also begin to hear other stories and participate in other conversations of belief, disbelief, hope, doubt, and the eternal desire to learn and do the will of God. We still long to find and please God. And we know were better off trying to do this together."

In that spirit, one guy from Xavier asked a few questions after I finished reading, wondering whether the age-old conflicts between Jews and Christians come up in the book (no, they don't), and how we deal with atheists. Peter and I have come down pretty hard on who in the book we call "vehemently secular atheists," but the fact of the matter is that, as I've said before, I am one, which is just what I told the guy. My priest nodded approvingly from the back.

We launched the book at Good World, a Swedish restaurant and bar on Orchard Street, New York City. Rosie Schaap, whom I've recently called incomparable (which she proved last night), hosted the event and prepared the soundtrack for the evening: Neutral Milk Hotel, Billy Bragg, Okkervil River, and the Beach Boys, mainly. I read a chapter from the book called "The Virgin." Peter read one called "The Prayer Book." Both of us mentioned vibrators at least once.

Thank you to everyone who came to the event, especially our editor Kathy Belden and our agent Jennifer Joel. (And of course our families and friends.) It was more than we'd hoped it would be.

The Faith Release

2007-10-28T21:04:00.000-04:00

The Faith Between Us has been spotted in bookstores! (By one of us. The other spent the weekend learning how hunt big game.) Faith: It's out. We'd love to hear from you about it.

One of us found three big boxes of books in his recycling the other day. The boxes were soaked. The books are fine. Those books will be with us at our first two appearances next weekend. We'll sign them for you if you'd like.

Those appearances:

Sunday 11/4 - New York, NY
St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church, Mary Chapel
12:30 p.m.
Reading and book signing following the 11:30 Mass
30 West 16th Street

And our Book Release Party
Sunday 11/4 - New York, NY
5 p.m.
Good World Bar and Grill
Part of the Good Words @ Good World reading series
3 Orchard Street

Introduce yourselves.

Why I am a Catholic

2007-10-16T21:51:00.003-04:00

I've just finished reading Garry Wills's forthcoming book What the Gospels Meant, part of a series that includes What Paul Meant and What Jesus Meant. I've only seen the latest one. Wills marches through the four Christian Gospels, holding the hand of the late New Testament scholar Raymond Brown, who, like several of my favorite theologians, taught at Union Theological Seminary, although years before I ever arrived there. (I should say, though, that the professors whose classes I took at Union were mainly excellent. The book owes a lot to what they taught me.)

A Catholic himself, Wills introduces his meditation -- a quick, enjoyable read -- by reinforcing a concept about the Gospels that can't be repeated enough: "They are not historically true as that term would be understood today. They are not history at all, as our history is practiced. They do not draw on firsthand testimony or documents. They do not use archives -- for instance, court records for the trial of Jesus, birth records for his genealogy, or chronological markers for his time line" (emphasis mine).

Wills does his own translations from the Greek, and from his mouth, the Gospels sound less familiar than I was expecting. Here's the Lord's Prayer from Luke, for instance:

Father! your title be honored,
your reign arrive,
our meal to come,
grant us this day,
and dismiss our sins
since we have dismissed all our debtors,
and bring us not to the Breaking Point.

In his chapter on Luke, Wills quotes the famous parable of the Prodigal Son, a story that I write about in Faith when considering my own Christian inheritance. The inheritance appears in the book -- and on my arm -- as tattoo showing my father's and my stepfather's initials; both good Catholics, they died when I was five and twenty-five, respectively. In explanation, I write:

"In the end, learning my inheritance through the early deaths of my fathers makes my life of faith all the more urgent. So I've gotten my tattoo. It burned a little. I have my father's initials -- FJK and PAB -- set in sharp, black ink on my right shoulder. And it reminds me to live. Rather than suggesting permanence, tattoos prove our impermanence, our scarrability, the softness of our skin, the always vulnerable, yet desperately held line between the quick and the dead. Believing that the Christian inheritance is a worldly one, while also knowing that a cab may not stop as I pass on my bike, or that I too may get cancer any day now, I am obliged to live and love as fully as possible."

Lately, for some reason, I've been doubting the Christian part of this inheritance. Told over and over that unless I look forward to the otherworldly inheritance I face -- that is, eternal life -- I'm not much of a Christian, and shouldn't call myself one, I've questioned myself: Is it important that I claim a Christian inheritance or identity, even as an atheist? What would the woman sharing the Sign of Peace with me during Mass think of me if she knew I had no hope, nor really any need, for the afterlife?

Reading Wills's book was reassuring. His unfamiliar translations made me see the Gospels -- and what they meant (and continue to mean) -- in a new light. The parable of the Prodigal Son makes sense to me. It speaks to me. And in a sense, I speak it. Atheist or no, I speak as a Christian and think like one.

Addicted to the Godhead

2007-10-01T16:10:00.000-04:00

I have been spending a lot of time reading about the history of entheogens , what are more commonly referred to as psychedelics. Much of the literature I have encountered is by those who have taken the drugs (also a term considered by many to be derogatory when referring to the sacred plants) and there is tendency to begin the discussion by making the claim that entheogens are not addictive and should not be classed with the opiates, particularly in regard to the law. It is true that psychedelics are not generally believed to be physically addicting, but what I can't get any clarity on is whether or not those who are deeply involved in the thinking about Psilocybin and DMT believe that one can become addicted to the experience. Can the desire for mystical transport become compulsive? Can that ache to experience God in this way lead to a discontent with the mundane that in turn leads to an even more obsessive quest for the transcendent?

In Jewish Week

2007-09-20T07:15:00.000-04:00

Last week, a sometime collaborator of mine, Rabbi Leon A. Morris, executive director of the Skirball Center for Adult Jewish Learning in New York City, participated in an op-ed conversation in the The Jewish Week. He and Rabbi Evan Moffic, assistant rabbi at Chicago Sinai Congregation, debate contemporary Reform Jewish observance. At issue is whether Reform Jews who take on more traditional practice are doing so through an "informed choice" or simply pursuing flawed attempts to feel authentically Jewish.

Peter's Blessing

2007-09-16T16:55:00.000-04:00

While we talk basically every day, Peter and I don't see each other very often. He lives in Cambridge, Mass.; I live in Brooklyn, N.Y. (Once the book arrives in November, though, we'll be traveling together a lot for promotional readings and talks. We'll keep you posted on those events.)

He and his wife, Amy, invited me for Rosh Hashanah on Thursday, and so, I made the trip. Amtrak was terrible, and I arrived to the new year's dinner a little later than I'd hoped -- right into the middle of a party. They'd invited several other friends, most of whom have kids, so I was tackled at the door (this was Peter's son, Sam), and welcomed with my first ever bite of gefilte fish.

There to celebrate my first Jewish New Year, as a Catholic -- and for a long time, a vegan -- I could note a whole variety of things that struck me about the huge spread, the conversations, the mayhem: Peter's always wanted me to try his mother's chicken soup; that was the first course, as delicious as it was simple (carrots, matzo balls, chicken, broth). Hebrew spoken by an Israeli (in attendance) is more enchanting and mysterious than when Peter, raised in the Boston suburbs, has his hand at it. And brisket is just as good the second day, when served for Shabbat.

It was the blessing before the meal, though, that impressed me most. Raised with the traditional Catholic prayer before meals -- Bless us, Oh Lord, and these thy gifts, which we are about to receive from thy bounty, through Christ, Our Lord. Amen -- I wasn't sure what to expect when Peter quieted the room and asked for our attention. It had the feel, at first, of a typical, even secular, new year's wish -- that we might put behind us the failures and disappointments of the previous year and make resolutions looking forward. There was very little "God" in what Peter had prepared to say.

Knowing well, though, that many of us are not ready to put our current disappointments and failures behind us -- in other words, life doesn't always fall in line with the Jewish calendar, and there is still work to be done -- Peter went on to suggest that our New Year's resolution might be to look with new eyes at our current situations (good or bad), and use the holiday as a moment to reflect on what else can be done.

Happy new year. Keep at it.

A Prayer Book for Atheists

2007-09-12T13:01:00.000-04:00

The Jewish Reform Movement is publishing its new prayer book, the Mishkan T'filah. Not quite in time for the High Holidays, but it will be available soon. There hasn't been a new siddur from the Reform Movement since 1975, called The Gates of Prayer. The new book is a departure from in that it seeks to engage not only non-Jews (given the rate of interfaith marriages), but also those that don't even believe in God. A prayer book for atheists? What are they doing praying anyway?

Recently Scott and I wrote an essay in which we argue that belief is not a necessary component to a religious life, and in fact, oftentimes literal belief in any one conception of God can be a dangerous thing. What isn't made clear in this essay, but does come through in The Faith Between Us, is that while Scott is an atheist I am a theist. And despite all the years of working on the book, talking about it with friends and family, there are still those that are surprised, and maybe even a little disheartened to know that about me.

And so I think the Reform movement has the right idea. This kind of prayer book suggests that belief is sometimes simply a way of speaking about the world, a language that we use to try and apprehend the ineffable. And so the language of prayer must also be able to stretch and make room for all the different ways we construct our dialogue with, yes, holiness.

L'Shana Tova.

To the Revealers and Buddha-Killers

2007-09-07T21:11:00.000-04:00

Kicking around as I sometimes do, checking in on the websites of friends and colleagues, I returned this morning to the religion and media site The Revealer, which may still be operated under the auspices New York University (my new employer), but which has a new approach and mission. Jeff Sharlet, the friend and colleague who runs the site (and now seems to be working alone), writes:

"Things have changed: I've too many debts to other writers now to be a brawler, and, yes, I've a better understanding of how hard it is to produce even bad work, and when a major media outlet churns out a truly awful story about religion, I just don't have enough love in me to offer any comment deeper than 'what horseshit.'"

He's also posted a "Help Wanted" ad on the site, and I speak from experience when I say that writing for the Revealer -- working with Jeff (who is usually extremely busy) -- has always been completely rewarding.

I learned at The Revealer that another religion site Peter and I have both contributed to has been resurrected, this time with a new look. Peter Manseau, who with Sharlet wrote the book Killing the Buddha: A Heritic's Bible, has begun keeping up the website of the same name, KtB.

Manseau writes:

"Killing the Buddha insists that if religion matters at all it matters enough to be taken to task. We believe it’s high time for a new canon to be created, and that the Web is just the place to collect it. We refuse to accept the internet as a world wide shopping mall. We know intuitively it can be a sort of Talmudic cathedral, a tool of transcendence made of words. We’re here to build it. If the end result looks more like Babel than the City of God, so be it. Babel, after all, came close."

Here's to the Buddha-killers. Welcome back, guys.

More On Unbracketed Belief

2007-09-05T10:37:00.000-04:00

Before Monday, I'd never read the Stephen Prothero essay that Peter mentioned on this blog, although I had read the book that Prothero was busy promoting -- American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon -- when questions like "Which Jesus is your favorite Jesus?" got him thinking about the trouble with Religious Studies departments. (Prothero's favorite Jesus, by the way, is the one celebrated in many African American churches, Jesus as "black Moses.") My life in at Union Seminary is a fairly distant memory these days. Although I recall "bracketing" my belief quite a lot while in class. And I think Prothero's complaint, like Peter's about Harvard Div., is a good one: academic Religious Studies departments are not good places to talk about faith. But then, where are those good places? Where are those safe places?

Prothero's essay gets at that, too. Admittedly, I find his reflections a little naive and nostalgic, not to mention still college-centric. And with all we busy people have going on these days -- families, jobs, lesson plans and books to write -- how do we find the time, or an outrageously caffeinated assemblage for this:

"When I was in college, a group of students gathered regularly a bit after midnight and argued, often for hours, about politics, economics, and religion. It was an eclectic crew. We had Marxists, liberals, conservatives, an atheist, a Jew, a born-again Christian, and a conservative and a liberal Catholic. We went at one another, no holds barred, consigning our friends to heaven and hell, calling Christianity (Marxism as well) an opiate of the masses, and otherwise making all manner of outrageous judgments about the world and ourselves. As far as I know, none of us was hurt by any of the provocation. And I learned more about myself (and real friendship) in those sessions than I did in all my college courses combined."

For Prothero, like for us, understanding faithfulness is ultimately not about college or caffeine, Marx or Christ or Muhammad. It's been about friendship; one that can handle doubt and questioning, silences, bad church-going, and, as Peter said, even my atheism.

Funny, though, that in an essay about the virtue of unbracketed faith, Prothero still brackets this most important thing: "(and real friendship)."

Belief Unbracketed

2007-09-03T15:07:00.000-04:00

Scott starts teaching this week, a course similiar to one that I taught for many years at Simmons College; a freshman expository writing course that uses texts relating to religion and cultural studies. One of the challenges that I faced in the classroom was how to not only be objective and allow all the students their own beliefs , but also how to not let my own beliefs bleed through in my teaching. And yet, I still struggle with whether or not this is an appropriate response in a religion class. When I was a student at Harvard Divinity School, there was very little discussion in the classroom about individual belief, which is as it should be in a scholarly discussion of religion. And yet, at the same time, there was always a sense of something lacking. There was a point at which engagement with texts and ideas had to hit a wall, as we were all afraid to let our own religious views actually come to the surface.

In a compelling essay for the Harvard Divinty Bulletin, "Belief Unbracketed:
A Case for the Religion Scholar to Reveal More of Where He or She Is Coming From," by Stephen Prothero, the BU professor writes that "More than any other idea, Edmund Husserl's notion of bracketing, or epochē (from the Greek for "holding back"), has defined Religious Studies as a discipline. What do folks like me do? We enter empathetically into the worlds of religious people in an attempt to understand the believers who inhabit them. We set aside questions of cause and effect, good and bad. We check our world views at the door."

But Prothero, in a critique of Robert Orsi's idea that religion scholars need to "suspend the ethical" argues that we should take the risk to tear down the wall that sperates the scholar from her subject: "In homage to Husserl, Orsi, Chidester, and all the ghosts of Religious Studies past, let us continue to suspend the ethical and understand with empathy. Let us delight in difference and tear down the barriers between ourselves and our subjects. But then also tear down this barrier: the barrier against our own judgments. If we really want to resuscitate religion as a moral enterprise, make bracketing a temporary strategy rather than an eternal imperative."

It will be interesting to see how Scott confronts religiosity in his own course, particularly as an atheist, but also a religious Catholic.

Our Dorothy Days

2007-08-28T10:36:00.000-04:00

In this Sunday's New York Times Book Review, Darcey Steinke reviews Mary Gordon's Circling My Mother: A Memoir, what seems like another really excellent book by a really excellent Catholic writer. In the review, Steinke, the daughter of a Lutheran minister, reminisces about the days when priests were not just respected, but revered. A time, frankly, when American Catholicism seemed to have something to offer to America. In literature, AC gave us Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy; in politics, the Kennedys; in Hollywood, the convert Gary Cooper; and in the world of service, reform, and activism, two more converts, Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day.

Today, sex scandals, outmoded approaches to birth control and abortion, and, says Steinke, a lack of writers with the religious imagination and literary command of Merton or O'Connor (except, perhaps, Gordon), have diminished AC. (And while I agree that AC has diminished, for my sake, and the sake of a few other Catholic writers I like, I hope she's wrong on the last point.)

Steinke is not alone these days in seeing something unique, and even inspiring, in the less-tarnished age of AC (I can't in good conscience, or good faith, talk of a golden age). And of all the figures she mentions in the Gordon review, Dorothy Day continues to define the religious impulse to serve. Lately, though, while progressive Catholic apologists (myself included) are faced with the task of shaping up the church from within and/or deciding what it might mean to call oneself a Catholic while opposing many of the Church's official positions (e.g., on birth control, abortion, women clergy, etc., etc.), Day is cropping up as an inspiration to the religious apologies of non-Catholics.

Like Day, who founded the Catholic Worker, both Sara Miles, a convert to the Episcopal church, and Eboo Patel, an American Muslim of Indian descent, have begun organizing people in the spirit of service; and like Day, in Take this Bread (Miles) and Acts of Faith (Patel), both have written elegantly about their work. While I've always loved Dorothy Day -- she's shaped my approach to religious writing more than perhaps anyone else -- temperamentally I'm not an organizer. Unlikely inheritors of the Catholic Worker, non-Catholics Miles and Patel are. And, in this, they share a faith.

Welcome

2007-08-26T12:55:00.000-04:00

Welcome to The Faith Between Us dot-com! This will be our first, slightly longwinded, blog post. We hope you enjoy it.

Before we really begin, though, a little history...

Several years ago, when Peter’s wife, Amy, was pregnant with their son, Sam, and Scott was finishing divinity school, we met. We were both writing a lot for online magazines (esp. this one) and small literary journals. Scott was even publishing one. Liking what the other had to say (er, write), we began corresponding and soon became friends.

As new friends do, we talked about music and books and relationships, our families and our backgrounds. Peter had recently become a birder and was taking very slowly to Stephen Malkmus’s first solo release after Pavement broke up. Scott was working on a novel about poor children and, time and time again, failing with women.

Privately, though, Peter was spending afternoons searching for the perfect Jewish prayer book; Scott was teaching the Catholic catechism at his local church. Peter and Amy were beginning to celebrate Shabbat as a family; Scott’s obsession with religious discipline shaped his eating and his sex life and manifested itself in a facial tic. Nervous to be known as believers, we kept quiet. Neither of us said a word. At least not right away...

Slowly it happened, though. Growing more comfortable with each other and asking each other more questions, each of us decided to let things slip.

“What is it you love about birds, Peter?”
“They’re part of creation that fascinates me, blows me away!”

“What are you reading these days, Scott?”
“I can’t put down Dorothy Day’s Long Loneliness. It’s amazing.”

“Why did you go to divinity school, Scott?”
“Probably the same reason you did: to see what belief really means.”

“What was it like when your mother died, Peter?”
“As if God had torn the roof off!”

Finally:
“Do you believe in God?”
“Um, yes.”
“Yeah, me too. Sort of.”

Our book, The Faith Between Us (Bloomsbury, Nov.), is our “coming out” story. It shows how, through our friendship, we've come to have faith in God's creation, which to us means a faith in the world. Placed side by side, with essays alternating one after another, our individual stories are meant to interact, to carry on a conversation of faith like the ones we've had since that day we both, with trepidation, admitted to believing in God.

With the book, we hope to have captured some of the literary beauty and wonder of the religious language we love. The essays draw on entire lives of faith, from our first encounters with God to the ongoing struggles we still face together today, and explore our dealings with love, loss, drugs, sex, food, music—even our neuroses and neuralgias.

We've been telling each other these stories for years now. Our hope is that starting this blog, in appearing in public as faithful friends, we might begin to hear other stories – your stories – and, through our “comments” section, carry on more conversations about belief, disbelief, hope, doubt, and the longing to find the meaning of God.

We’ll use this blog to introduce themes we take up in the book; to talk about articles we read, people we meet, songs we hear, and events we attend; and to share our thoughts about what it might mean to believe.

In his “Foreword” to Faith, Freakonomics author Stephen J. Dubner asks:

“Where are all the sincere, wise, good-hearted people who live each day in quiet pursuit of answers (or perhaps questions) as to how we should live on earth, and to what measure that life should include some sort of God?”

Without taking ourselves too seriously, we hope that this blog can be one of the places where sincere, good-hearted people can gather. We hope you’ll join us.