The student who stabbed a community-college dean in Kansas City, Mo., on Tuesday was actually trying to kill the Missouri governor, who was scheduled to speak there, and was disappointed when he learned he had attacked the wrong man, according to The Kansas City Star.

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[F]aced with dwindling membership and blows to their church’s reputation caused by its intransigence concerning medical treatment, even for children with grave illnesses, Christian Science leaders have recently found a new tolerance for medical care. For more than a year, leaders say, they have been encouraging members to see a physician if they feel it is necessary.

The church generally believes that “sickness is the manifestation of a conflict between “correct” and “incorrect” thinking.” And the national spokesperson “does not believe in germs or the existence of illness”. Christian Science generally “forbids mixing medical care with Christian Science healing, which is a form of transcendental prayer intended to realign a patient’s soul with God.”

William James always comes to mind when I hear about the Church of Christian Science. He was a strong proponent of “healthy mindedness” and used its techniques himself.

Here’s an excerpt from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on James:

James sets out a central distinction of the book in early chapters on “The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness” and “The Sick Soul.” The healthy-minded religious person — Walt Whitman is one of James’s main examples — has a deep sense of “the goodness of life,” (V, 79) and a soul of “sky-blue tint” (V, 80). Healthy-mindedness can be involuntary, just natural to someone, but often comes in more willful forms. Liberal Christianity, for example, represents the triumph of a resolute devotion to healthy-mindedness over a morbid “old hell-fire theology” (V, 91). James also cites the “mind-cure movement” of Mary Baker Eddy, for whom “evil is simply a lie, and any one who mentions it is a liar” (V, 107). For “The Sick Soul,” in contrast, “radical evil gets its innings” (V, 163). No matter how secure one may feel, the sick soul finds that “[u]nsuspectedly from the bottom of every fountain of pleasure, as the old poet said, something bitter rises up: a touch of nausea, a falling dead of the delight, a whiff of melancholy….” These states are not simply unpleasant sensations, for they bring “a feeling of coming from a deeper region and often have an appalling convincingness” (V, 136).  James’s main examples are Leo Tolstoy’s “My Confession,” John Bunyan’s autobiography, and a report of terrifying “dread” — allegedly from a French correspondent but actually from James himself. Some sick souls never get well, while others recover or even triumph: these are the “twice-born.” In chapters on “The Divided Self, and the Process of Its Unification” and on “Conversion,” James discusses St. Augustine, Henry Alline, Bunyan, Tolstoy, and a range of popular evangelists, focusing on what he calls “the state of assurance” (V, 247) they achieve. Central to this state is “the loss of all the worry, the sense that all is ultimately well with one, the peace, the harmony, the willingness to be, even though the outer conditions should remain the same” (V, 248).

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But as the academic gods would have it, he started a blog about his cancer (scroll down to the end of the page to get the very first post of the blog). I haven’t read it in its entirety, but the beginning part tied in perfectly with the theme of this semester’s PHIL 500 class: Dying, Death, and Immortality. Here’s what struck me — it’s at the very top of this page:

And what about living?

Thinking about death led me fairly directly to thinking about living: “What am I going to do with the rest of my life?” is always a good question, but it does come up with a certain vivacity in the afterglow of a cancer diagnosis. My immediate and overriding objective in life, of course, is getting well. But what of the big picture? I don’t feel like defining my existence strictly by my particular medical adventures (and thanks to P+T for “adventure, not predicament.”) Although I am committed to full participation in getting well, as long as I have time and strength for other pursuits, I’m going to pursue them. But first, I needed to rethink my life’s course. I had used about half the fifteen minutes I had left until my friend arrived (remember — my thoughts of life and death took place in my hotel room between the moment I read the pathology report in email and the arrival of my friend for what had been planned as a night of cuisine and conversation in Paris.)

As evidence that I’ve been thinking for some time about Kierkegaard’s prescription that “life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced,” I doodled the image below at age 17 in 1964, during Professor Deegan’s religion course at Reed. He had Hodgkin’s disease and prohibited smoking in class, which irritated me at the time.

So, please visit his cancer blog as well as his other one. I’ve put off discussing the touchy-feely stuff I’ve been going through since the class started. Seeing his blog has given me a little courage to begin doing so.

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Sherkat, a professor of sociology at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, no longer has to worry about arguing for the key role of religion as a social force. As a new study has found, there has been a significant increase over the last 25 or so years not only in the quantity of work done by sociologists on religion, but also in how religion is treated in those studies. No longer is it assumed to be only a reflection of some other socioeconomic trend, but increasingly it is treated as the factor that may be central to understanding a given group of people.

When Sherkat published a paper in the 1990′s this was the response he received:

He remembers one telling him “this is garbage” for citing Weber’s views on the significance of religious values. “It can’t be religion” driving human behavior, the scholar told the then un-tenured Sherkat. “It’s got to be something else that caused the religion.”

Big change! Read the article from Inside Higher Ed here.

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There is a collective dimension to this: all the early Christians experienced the same thing. Like alien abductees, the first Christians had a shattering experience in common. This brought them together. But this experience was not an institution.” – Paul Zahl, Grace in Practice: A Theology of Everyday Life.

Watch Zahl speak about this book:

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I receive monthly greetings from a Benedictine abbot, Abbot Philip. He’s the Abbot of Christ in the Desert in New Mexico. They were the site of a Discovery Channel show in 2006.

I wrote and asked his permission to quote his recent letter. He said yes! I explained to him that much of his letter reminded me of what we’ve been reading in Schleiermacher’s On Religion. Here’s Abbot Philip’s letter and my comments.

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Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession

The first two chapters are precious, in the best sense of the word. It recalls a kind of religious devotion and sensibility that is not at all a part of my religious vocabulary. Yet I can appreciate the palpable reality of her childhood faith. What’s interesting to me is that this period of her life was what she called “preliterate”. While I don’t remember not being able to read, Rice has memories of a rich inner and outer life unadulterated by the text.

She admits being a lousy reader in school and through college. (That was a surprising factoid!) But perhaps for the novelist or creative writer the development of one’s own vocabulary used to interface with the world outside and within is a part of what makes great writers. I’m just guessing.

Rice beautifully juxtaposes the menagerie of nature with the riotous panoply of sights, sounds, and smells from the pre-Vatican II liturgies. I’ve yet to attend one but now that Benedict has more or less given a full-voiced imprimatur, more and more parishes are going back to this earlier form of worship. Certainly Rice has made me temper my Protestant rejecting anything as “worship” which the participant can neither pronounce nor understand. Temper, not abandon.

I think part of the difference here is the reliance on “the Book”, the texts, the lyrics of the hymns. That was the main focus of my childhood religious experience. Rice reached the Divine through the phenomena of mostly non-literate sign and symbols of the Divine. Reading Schleiermacher again while picking up this Rice memoir has made me take a step back to realize the spiritual efficacy of this non-literate path. I say “efficacy” only because of the impact these experiences apparently had on Rice. In this Jamesean sense, it certainly “worked” for her. It had an indelible impact on her even though she spent more decades away from the faith that within it. Or perhaps, as Schleiermacher might conjecture, she simply was unaware of the Infinite even as it, or some sense of it, never left her.

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A.A. Long wrote, “Margaret Graver’s book [‘Stoicism and Emotion’] expertly demolishes the widespread belief that ancient Stoicism was a philosophy that advocated repression of every feeling we call an emotion. With admirable clarity she gives an in-depth analysis of how the Stoics assessed emotional health and pathology, and of why, while taking such emotions as anger and fear to be always irrational and culpable, they held that human perfection requires joy and love.” How would you introduce the actual Stoic view of emotions, versus the “widespread belief” about them, to undergraduate students?

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