Tanya Marie Luhrmann is a psychological anthropologist and a Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her work explores how people come to experience nonmaterial objects such as God as present and real, and how different understandings of the mind affect mental experience. She is the author, most recently, of When God Talks Back (Knopf, 2012), which The New York Times Book Review called “the most insightful study of evangelical religion in many years,” and of other books including Of Two Minds (Knopf, 2000), The Good Parsi (Harvard, 1996), and Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft (Harvard, 1989). Her latest project, supported by the SSRC’s New Directions in the Study of Prayer initiative, builds on and extends her research for When God Talks Back, taking her to India and Africa. On a recent rainy afternoon in Palo Alto, I spoke with Luhrmann about her work and its new directions.

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Steven Barrie-Anthony: In the final chapter of When God Talks Back, you argue that God for evangelicals is not a rejection of modernity but rather an expression of what it is to be modern. How is this the case?

Tanya Marie Luhrmann: I think that the two big characteristics of modernity are the availability of science, and pluralism. And these make the uncertainty of your own cognitive position much more available to you. So using the imagination to make God real helps to make God real. Doing this also has characteristics that we associate with postmodernity—the playfulness, the uncertainty, the sense that there is a there there but maybe we don’t really get to it directly. From what I know of early Christianity, the idea of seeing through a glass darkly was extremely salient in the first and second centuries, was less salient to a faith that was very confident, and is highly salient to modern people. It allows you to imagine God walking by your side. Are you just making that up or is it real in the world? C.S. Lewis is sure that God is real, but then, he’s also writing a novel about it. The availability of disbelief is a condition of modernity. You cannot but be aware that other people think differently—that they may disbelieve your belief. And the evangelical walking with God is a sort of suspension of disbelief, which is not really relevant unless disbelief is relevant.

SBA: And yet the evangelicals you study do not often turn away from their disbelief or doubt or skepticism; they are constantly returning to it.

TML: They don’t think of themselves as doubting God, but they are extremely articulate about how God is present through the human. They know that there are Catholics, Hindus, and Muslims, and it’s very difficult for a smart, university-educated person to say, “Hindus have culture, but we don’t, we have truth.” So you are committed to having truth, but you also have culture. You also know that if God is talking to you in your mind, first of all you have God. But at the same time, you are aware that you are mistaken some of the time. Holding both of these simultaneously is the modern predicament—the awareness of the uncertainty of your knowledge.

SBA: That’s fascinating. And it runs up against the typical critique of evangelicals, especially by Dawkins and the new atheists, that evangelicals are turning away from the modern predicament, away from ambiguity and rational discernment.

TML: Yes. And the new atheists are not exceptionally articulate about the limitations of human knowledge. These guys are just seeing a different beyond, a different more, whatever it is. It took me a while to recognize how sophisticated people were about belief. My own preconception was that belief was a proposition rather than an attitude. And I remember doing research for When God Talks Back and being in this prayer group with a bunch of women, and they were all so clear about their awareness of the possibility that they were wrong—not about whether God exists, but about whether God is present right here. So in fact as you bring God closer you become more aware that He might not be present. You allow yourself to tolerate the uncertainty, because the uncertainty is very clear. You give yourself the real literal text, but you interpret it in a way that makes it flexibly fictional even though it’s nonfiction. You are saying things like, “this is a love letter written to me,” but you’re sitting in a room with ten people, all of whom cognitively see the same text, but also believe that it is God’s specific, unique love letter written to each individual self.

SBA: I’m reminded here of how for Robert Orsi belief is less important than relationships. And for you as well, equating religion with belief seems inadequate.

TML: That’s right. It’s about attitude. Wilfred Cantwell Smith is my lens here. We think of belief as propositional, and of faith as an attitude, an orientation, a way of committing to a sense that the world is good despite all evidence to the contrary. So from that perspective, I resonate with faith. Belief is tough for me. Adopting the idea that the world is good despite evidence is almost an emotional attitude, a way of being in the world. The evangelicals are certainly strong on belief—but their practice is about changing faith.

SBA: A major form of the evangelical practice is kataphatic or “imagination rich” prayer. How does this prayer work in terms of altering the mind and helping evangelicals achieve an interactional relationship with God?

TML: It makes what is imagined in the mind more real. In kataphatic prayer you are saying that certain of your mental images are significant, and you are making these images more sensorially rich, you are allowing yourself to imagine them more vividly. The demand of religion is to teach you that the world as you know it is not the world as it is—and to teach you the capacity to see the world as it is, as something good. So you’ve got to make what is imagined real, and you’ve got to make it good. Kataphatic prayer helps you to do this. You are allowing yourself to live in a daydream, to walk with God, talk with God, hang out with Mary. And by treating the daydream not as ephemera but as something real in the world, it becomes a skill on which you can improve.

SBA: Thinking about religious experience in the language of daydreams and the like, how do you walk the line in your research between psychological reductionism where there is no such thing as God, and the reverse?

TML: Well, I think that if there is a God, then God speaks to us through our minds. So you need to accept and understand the psychology to understand the process. You can read When God Talks Back from different perspectives. From the purely secular angle, you might say that these people are just making it up, which demonstrates that it is all imagination. But from a religious angle, you might see the puzzle as: If God is always speaking, why doesn’t everybody hear? It’s really helpful to walk that line. I genuinely don’t think I have the right to pass judgment. And I don’t think that passing judgment is the point. Given that the question of ultimate reality is fundamentally undecideable, it’s more interesting to ask what we can know if we treat that seriously.

SBA: Readers persistently try to gauge your relationship to your evangelical subjects. Joan Acocella in her The New Yorker review of When God Talks Back observed that your attitude toward your subjects is “wavering,” difficult to pin down. Is this intentional?

TML: It is intentional. And I also probably do not have control over all of it. I think that the question of whether God is real is undecidable—but I still have a decision about it. I have a view. I struggle with the idea that there is this external ontology, but I have a lot of sympathy for the idea of faith. People do say things that are sort of ridiculous, and I cannot not hear those stories. I don’t tell a lot of those stories because I want readers to pay attention to these amazing experiences. But I also think that Joan Acocella struggled with the ambiguity of the anthropologist’s role. My duty as an anthropologist is first to understand. And as a journalist you are also trying first to understand—but judgment is much more part of the story that you’re telling. The Boston Globe called this “a curiously polite book.” And I mean, I do have a lot more to say about politics, but I didn’t want the book to be about politics because in my world it is such a powerful idea that their politics are wrong and therefore that these people are foolish. Of course, now I’m thinking that perhaps I should have included more on politics—but the book was so long already.

SBA: Non-evangelicals may view evangelical religion as weird, but politics often seem the bigger sticking point. Does introducing readers to evangelical religion absent politics allow outsiders to then begin approaching the politics in a way that is less divided?

TML: That is my hope. Since spending time in this world, I have come to understand how one could become so agitated about government programs.One of the things that is so striking about this world is that people imagine themselves in a relationship with God in which they are both changing.God is interacting with you, and you are becoming a better person, and your understanding of God is changing over time. There is a real aspirational quality to evangelical Republican politics. For many but not all evangelicals, this translates into the idea that government programs that encourage dependency are wrong: “We aren’t going to need entitlements. I’m not going to be an entitled person. It’s weak to want entitlements.” And now I have a much richer sense of how you could take that position. I still get driven up the wall; I find that my own political convictions are still as they were when I began. But I am less angry. When somebody says that we should cut welfare, at least I can appreciate more of where they are coming from.

SBA: Your project for the SSRC’s New Directions in the Study of Prayer initiative seems to emerge from and extend the research you did for When God Talks Back. You are looking at similar prayer practices, but comparatively across cultures that you view as having different “theories of mind”?

TML: Yes. I noticed two things from this book. First of all, the way people paid attention to their mental events changed their mental events. Giving significance fundamentally changed those experiences; the mental images felt sharper. And at the same time, there’s also something about the way people think about their minds. Americans think of thoughts as basically ephemeral, flighty, contradictory, and chaotic. And so in the American context what kataphatic prayer practice does is to teach people to take certain kinds of those thoughts very seriously. Now, when you look across the world, there are different conceptions of mind, different theories about the way that thoughts act on the world. And so I began to wonder: How would this affect the experience of God, the experience of prayer? I worked together with one of my postdocs looking at unusual spiritual experiences. One of these experiences was sleep paralysis or “night terrors,” a physiological experience where you are sort of awake but your body is sort of asleep, paralyzed. I talked to evangelicals in America, and something like 30 percent reported experiencing this, but it wasn’t a very rich category for them. Then my postdoc went to Thailand to research these experiences. Everybody in Thailand knew what sleep paralysis was, and they gave it a name. Two thirds had experienced it. And so it seemed to me that there was a story to tell. My hypothesis is that the way you pay attention to your mind and body probably shapes the experience of the mind and body.

SBA: You chose to extend your research on evangelical prayer in two places where you have also conducted research on schizophrenia—Accra, Ghana, and Chennai, India. What have you gathered so far about the operative theory of mind in each of these places?

TML: Very quickly and naïvely—part of the project is to become more confident about this—in West Africa, there is a sense that thought affects the world independent of the thinker. And so there seems to be this really powerful concern to scrub the mind clean. Negative thoughts are bad, and consequential. People are clear that prayer is about organizing the mind into the right position, about having the right thoughts and getting rid of negative thoughts. If you talk to Americans about talking to God, they’re hanging out with God, jumping with God, cuddling with God. And they have this idea that the mind is private, walled-off. Thoughts come and go. Their presumption, which even many psychologists share, is that it’s bad to ruminate about thoughts; that you make thoughts real by thinking about them. In Accra, evil is real, and it matters. And it is in part generated by the mind, so you have to clean out the mind. Thought is substantial; it’s not mere thought, it is more important than mere thought.

SBA: And in Chennai?

TML: In Chennai, thought is much more transactional. You are in some ways made as a person through interactions with other people. I haven’t yet figured out how this works religiously. But it’s clear from talking with people with schizophrenia that other people show up in your mind. Your relatives tell you what to do, they give you all these commands, good commands—You should do this, or don’t do this, or clean up, do chores, and so forth. There’s an interactive quality. It’s as if other people have the right to know what’s in your mind, or they do know what’s in your mind. So that’s very different.

SBA: What is the central hypothesis that you’re testing?

TML: That different local theories of mind change the experience of spiritual experiences, of God. I anticipate that people in these different locales will report differently their audible experiences of God, the presence of God, mystical experiences, out of body experiences. That people will talk very differently about prayer, about this daydream-like conversation with God. That there will be a shift in the topography of mental experience.

SBA: I wonder how your own spiritual or magical experiences have shifted your perspective or your desire to do a particular kind of work? You wrote an essay for Frequencies about an experience you had while doing your dissertation research on practitioners of magic in Britain—

TML: I had what I would call a hallucination. I was reading a book about a priestess of Avalon, and there was a lot about druids. And I woke up early in the morning and looked out the window—on the second story—and there were six druids standing there. I saw them. Then I did a double take, and they vanished. But the perceptual experience was a kind of veridical sensory experience. And that really impressed me. It wasn’t the only unusual experience I had while hanging out in that world, but it was the most vivid one. And it persuaded me that this was not about acquiring discourse. I was coming of age in the linguistic turn in anthropology, which focused on the way people used language, how they used and acquired words, the narratives they used, rather than talking about the psychological experiences that their words might represent. There was a shift against psychological experiences. And this was also at the dawning of cognitive science. If I were to describe what I went in looking for, back then—although I didn’t have the words then to describe it—I would say that I went into the world of magic looking for prototypes and schemas and heuristics and narratives and ways in which people cognitively organize their ways of understanding themselves so that they come to experience magic as working. But as it turned out, this was not about heuristics. This was something quite different. And that has altered the course of my intellectual life. I became really interested in training, and the way that spiritual and prayer practices change mental experience.

SBA: How do you think that coming from this position affects your ability—or whatever word you want to use—to yourself have experience while you do this research, and how do you think it colors your interpretation of that experience? Is it less real for you?

TML: I’ve sort of allowed my imaginative experience to become more real. I feel like I have given myself a little bit more freedom as a result of doing this research. But I am not right up there in the high absorption world. I am certainly not somebody through whom words march of their own accord. Really good novelists feel the story move through them, they don’t feel that they are in control of the story—the story happens to them. So, I’m impressed by the capacity to change mental habits, but I am also impressed by how difficult it is. I was part of a prayer group for a couple of years, and I enjoyed the prayer experience a great deal. I would not say that I am now an active pray-er. But I do give myself more freedom to pause and engage in the garden. It’s not as if I have created my own spiritual discipline. When I was doing the experimental work for When God Talks Back, I created a couple of these spiritual discipline tracks that I would use for myself and try to get caught up in the experience. I’m not doing that currently. I probably should.

SBA: You have written that walking and talking with God is “a process through which the loneliest of conscious creatures can come to experience themselves as awash with love.” Does this translate into addressing or beginning to heal late modern or postmodern alienation and anomie, or all the rifts and impoverishments that somebody like Robert Putnam talks about?

TML: I think so. There’s a lot of pushback against Putnam’s data, but I think that there is enough support to feel confident about it. God works as a social relationship in people’s emotional worlds; they hold God as what you might call a “self-object.” We know that when you pop people into a brain scanner and ask them to talk to God, the part of the brain that lights up is the same part of the brain that lights up when you have them talk to their friends or when you engage them in social activity. And I have done quantitative work that shows that the more strongly people affirm the statement, “I feel God’s love for me directly,” the more their loneliness and their stress decrease. So, does this God arise because of increased loneliness? That’s a stronger question. But I’m certainly persuaded that intimacy with God decreases loneliness.

SBA: I wonder if there are any social effects? If all of us were to begin walking and talking with God, would we enter a world that is just as disconnected socially but is experienced as far less lonely, or would that somehow translate into concrete person-to-person connectedness?

TML: In the church it certainly translates. If you go to one of these evangelical churches, one of the things happening is that you are creating very strong social bonds. A third to half of the church, depending of course on the church, meets together in small house groups. And those groups are powerful social engines. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a piece arguing that membership in the small group was the most powerful predictor of whether people donated money to a church. We at least know that people who are able to imagine God and to have a relationship with God also show up as more empathic, and my guess is that the more able you are to represent God, the more able you are to represent other people. That’s probably socially conscribed—you are probably imagining people in your group rather than other people around the world. This is one way of thinking about different kinds of political stories. People are often struck by the fact that I’m arguing that you can increase your empathy as you increase your relationship with God—but it doesn’t necessarily increase your commitment to social justice politics. What happens if somebody is by themselves and does these prayer practices, do they become more connected to other people? I don’t know. The kind of Dalai Lama-driven, Richard Davidson, Zen Buddhism-is-good-for-you approach would say “yes.” But we do not have that kind of data on kataphatic prayer practices.

SBA: Perhaps this falls under a lack of data, but what do you think about a connection between kataphatic prayer and ethics? I’m thinking of Jeffrey Kripal’s argument that there is no necessary connection between monistic mystical experience and ethics. Do you see ethical frameworks emerging from kataphatic prayer?

TML: I think that the more you feel loved, the more loving you become. We know this from human psychology. There is probably a certain amount of variation in what counts as the person to whom you become more loving. Being able to use your imagination is a content-free activity; you can use your imagination in various ways. If you are using your imagination in a Christian setting, and you’re doing Christian kataphatic prayer, you do more strongly connect to the Jesus of the gospels. Of course, there’s a lot of ethical variation in what that means to people. There probably is a story of increasing your empathy and compassion and concern, and again that’s the Richard Davidson story. But I think it is up for grabs toward whom you increase your compassion. It’s not obvious to me that just because you engage in spiritual practices, that you feel more compassion toward somebody who is not like you.

Part of this transition is cultural. As Professor Pally pointed out, it is not only a generational shift that naturally declares independence from traditional religious reactions (especially paternalistic ones). The transition is for others a distancing from the institutionalism of the church and the inelasticity of a movement that began as personally charitable but has become dogmatically xenophobic.

The greater part of this change, however, is a generic return to the original agenda of Christ. As the world becomes more complex and less predictable, we are seeing a “back to basics” trend. It is an expansion beyond a preoccupation with the more recent monitoring of sexual matters, to a more ‘whole life’ helpfulness. It is the turn from accusation to compassion, and it is much in keeping with the priorities and example of Jesus. His focus on helping the most vulnerable is also our concern. Thus more and more evangelicals are expanding the definition of pro-life. They are including in a pro-life framework concern with poverty, environmental pollution, AIDS treatment, and more. And issues like abortion are being expanded from focusing on only “in utero” concerns—increasing numbers of evangelicals now see prevention of unwanted pregnancy and support for needy expectant mothers as pro-life.

More evangelicals simply want to live our lives according to our spiritual values—unselfishness, other-centeredness, non-presumptuousness—so that when people see “our good works, they will give glory to our Father in heaven.”

Lastly, practically all sustainable change is relationally based. In an increasingly connected world, an increasing number of evangelicals are developing a broader range of relationships, both interfaith and inter-lifestyle. These make us think twice before we declare those who have different values as adversaries. As we “love our neighbor,” we want to cooperate in ways that express our own values while allowing others to express their own.

Professor Pally has established a masterful and nuanced summary of the change in the evangelical political voice. I hope that we will continue the dialogue.

Over the past decade, scholarly inquiry into contemporary religion has moved from an understanding of religion as waning in the face of ongoing secularization toward a focus on the mutual constitution and interaction of religious and secular that underpins both the ideology of secularism and modern religiosity. This has produced pathbreaking research into the dynamics of religious transformation and generated deeper insights into the relation between religion and modernity. Importantly, these insights yield a new theoretical standpoint that transcends secularist ideologies according to which religion is bound to disappear—or at least to retreat into the private sphere—yet at the same time makes these ideologies subject to investigation. The fact that public debates about the so-called resurgence of religion often affirm the fault lines between “religious” and “secular” positions testifies to the fruitfulness of this new standpoint.

However, as outlined by Courtney Bender and Ann Taves in the introduction to this volume, framing our inquiries within the religious-secular binary may cause us to overlook ideas and practices that emerge in relation to this binary and yet are not fully contained by it. This volume calls for a broader framework through which these ideas and practices may come into view. Of key concern here is the puzzling field of spirits and spirituality. Placing emphasis on spirits or spirituality invokes quite different sets of practices and notions of personhood that each require detailed historical and ethnographic study. Still, it makes sense to bring spirits and spirituality together under the banner of the “spiritual,” provided this is not taken as “a resting point” (or as a fixed “third category”), but rather as a “beginning place” for fresh inquiry into the paradoxes and contradictions of the religious-secular-spiritual nexus (see also Bender and Taves, introduction, this volume). Paying attention to the “spiritual,” as the contributions to this volume show, challenges a view of modernity as disenchanted and thus as opposed to past or distant cultures that are “still” enchanted.

Such a view of enchantment as bound to erode with modernity underpins not only the by now much critiqued paradigm of secularization but is also lingering on, albeit less explicitly, in more recent studies. Charles Taylor’s seminal work A Secular Age (2007), which has played a key role in reframing the contemporary study of religion, is a case in point. Taylor has noted that religion in modern societies is subject to transformation rather than simply “vanishing,” or “returning” after a period of repression. In other words—and here Taylor’s perspective resonates with Talal Asad’s position outlined in Formations of the Secular (2003)—secularization and disenchantment transform modern religion instead of abolishing it. Not only does Taylor use secularization and disenchantment interchangeably, thereby linking the privatization of religion to the decrease of spirits, he also suggests a development from belief in spirits, which he associates with premodern, enchanted societies, to a quest for spirituality in the secular, disenchanted age. My reason for invoking Taylor’s work is that it explicates a quite widely shared, yet to some extent problematic, perspective. Seeking to unpack and rethink the relations between secular, religious, and spiritual—the central concern of this volume—this chapter will critically address the association of secularization and disenchantment, and the idea of a progressive transition from a concern with spirits to a concern with spirituality, by bringing in some complicating materials from my long-term anthropological research in Ghana.

In his introduction, Taylor quotes an example from my book Translating the Devil (1999): the case of Celestine who is accompanied by a stranger, who, it turns out, is only visible to her, not to her mother, and whom she later identifies as the Akan spirit Sowlui whose priestess she becomes. Taylor presents this case as a “contemporary example” that illustrates a condition of lived experience in which spirits are still an immediate reality—an experience that has eroded in our modern civilization. Taylor’s interpretation of this case raises intriguing questions. While I certainly agree that in the setting I described the visible, material world is held to be linked with, and manipulated by, the invisible realm of spirits, I have difficulties with a view of contemporary Africa as bearing resemblance to the still enchanted prereformation period (that is, before 1500), for this implies a temporalization of other cultures and, as Johannes Fabian put it, a denial of coevalness. That is why many anthropologists today feel uneasy about invoking contemporary cultural forms as “windows to the past.” Certainly, in the case of Ghana, as will be pointed out in more detail below, we encounter a modern secular state that witnessed, after the turn to democracy and the liberalization and commercialization of the hitherto state-owned media in 1992, the emergence of a heavily pentecostalized public sphere in which much emphasis is placed on spirits. Spirits, it appears, elude confinement to the category of religion and appear in all kinds of settings, including politics, economics, and entertainment. Spirits, in other words, are not just there, as signs of a traditional past, but reproduced under modern conditions.

The point is that we have to explore, in a historical perspective, how African cosmologies of the relation between spirits and the physical world intersect, in complex ways, with the evangelizing work by Western mission societies, the introduction of the modern (colonial) and postcolonial state, and its transformation in our current age. In a somewhat later publication, Taylor himself questions his earlier perspective propounded in A Secular Age and makes some “hesitant comments about developments outside the West, or on a global scale,” asking, “What is the West, after all? What are its limits?” Discussing the globalization of certain Western forms, such as missionary Christianity, he also refers to my historical-ethnographic exploration of missionary affirmations of the existence of a spirit world in Translating the Devil and submits that the Christian reenchantment of old gods may not be simply a “transition phenomenon,” thus questioning his earlier suggestion of a linear move from ancient regime to modernity that entails secularization and disenchantment. He ends his piece with a pertinent question: “Are all regions of the world fated to head towards the predicament of Western modernity, with a disenchanted world, a strong sense of a self-sufficient immanent order, and a staunchly buffered identity?”

I think that recent anthropological work suggests that this question must be answered in the negative, while at the same time we need to take into account the actual spread and impact of Western forms in areas such as Ghana. The key question is how to develop a more encompassing framework for understanding the relation between secular and religious and, by implication, “public religion,” that acknowledges historical and cultural specificity and difference yet, at the same time, accounts for actual Western influences, albeit by “provincializing Europe.” This is the concern of this chapter. Instigated by Taylor’s invocation of the case of Celestine as an instance of a still enchanted world—which he defines as “the world of spirits, demons, and moral forces which our ancestors lived in”—I will probe into the complicated relation between spirits, religion, and the secular. My aim is to show how in the Ghanaian setting we encounter a process that may well be described as secularization (provided we do not mean by this the vanishing of religion, but its reconfiguration in the setting of [post]colonial modernity) and the concomitant constitution of modern religion as a separate category, which, however, intersects with the category of “spirits” and “the spiritual,” and hence enchantment, rather than disenchantment. As I will show, the category of spirits cannot be reduced to a timeless, primordial substratum in African cosmologies, but is subject to being framed and remediated by missions and contemporary Pentecostal media. On the whole, by calling attention to spirits I seek to call into question the association of secularization and disenchantment and to think through the implications of the resilience, and even proliferation, of spirits for our understanding of contemporary religion in a global perspective.

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HK: Now, if you don’t mind, I will commit a crime against my health. [Takes out a pack of cigarettes, lights one up, and begins smoking.] I only smoke once a week—despite the fact that I had been in Nicotine Anonymous when I was living in California. I went to four different groups and even gave up smoking, but I learnt a lot about religion there, too, or better, the instrumentalization of religion as an  American way of systematically applying belief to control one’s life-conduct.

JB: Last year, The Immanent Frame co-produced a sort of compendium on uses of the word spirituality, and one of the contributors wrote about another 12-step program, Alcoholics Anonymous.

KH: One of the essential points is that spirituality is self-empowerment, as Winfried Gebhardt puts it. It is not self-sacralization in the Durkheimian sense. It is a means to autonomously administer transcendence on a personal level and yet, at the same time, to permit transcendence to happen. That is the point of spirituality. Spirituality is not simply a matter of instrumentalization and subjectivation; rather, the subject accepts an other without it having to be a specific other, a personal other. It doesn’t have to be specific, but it has to be something the self can relate to.

JB: But the self occupies the central point in spirituality?

HK: Heelas uses the term self-religion. But I think this Durkheimian notion that it is about self-sacralization, that the spiritual plays a self-referential role, ultimately misses the essence of the spiritual. The spiritual has to refer to the subject, the subject has to be experienced, it must be in relation. But it retains the character of religiosity because it exceeds the subject and relates to an other. I am not talking about “the Other,” because that insinuates the Levinasian understanding. The other I am referring to must not have a personal structure, it is, in a sense, the anything related to, anything intentionality can refer to, or, what is meant by Luckmann’s notion of transcending.  Even in 12-step programs and in the most abstract esoteric teachings we find something that is experienced as exceeding the subject. That is transcendence in the phenomenological sense. That is why I find the concept of self-religion—which suggests that the self is only concerned with the self—misguided. Again, the point of spirituality is that the subject experiences itself in surpassing itself. That is a trait of religiosity, of transcending. Transcending remains an essential feature of spirituality.

It is not just an instrument of subjectivation, as the Foucauldians believe; it’s not about producing closed selves. Intentionality remains, even when it comes to nothing. In the case of popular forms of spirituality the referent is often empty. One can only suspect that it relates to something. But there has to be a reference to something else (etwas anderes), and that’s what sets spirituality apart. It cannot simply be reduced to consumption or the like.

JB: Perhaps this is a good point to address your book on popular religion. In the book, you argue that spirituality has become the dominant social form of religion.

HK: I argue two things. The first is that religion is becoming popular. That’s actually a general sociological thesis, and I find the concept of the theoretical discussion about the popular very unsatisfying. I’m still working on it, but I think that the concept of the popular refers to a broad phenomenon that we can describe in sociology of knowledge terms as the destructuring of knowledge (Entstrukturierung von Wissen). What we take to be religious changes as religious knowledge becomes universally accessible and ceases to be delimitable. The substantialist understanding that religion in itself can be distinguished is challenged. That’s what the popular refers to.

Boundaries between scientific knowledge and religious knowledge aren’t dissolved, but they are blurred. You can see that very clearly with New Age or creationism. The boundaries between specialized areas of knowledge are cancelled out to the extent that knowledge in these areas no longer needs to be tied to clearly marked experts. This social de-structuring of knowledge is a phenomenon that is not unique to religion. It is taking place in many areas, including the sciences and particularly in the arts since the 1960s. The popular refers to this kind of situation, where in principle all knowledge becomes generally accessible and can be appropriated by—again, in principle—anyone. I have to stress, however, that this understanding of the popular differs from the way it is used in cultural studies. It doesn’t refer to knowledge that is popular in counterdistinction to hegemonic knowledge. The popular encompasses that which was hegemonic. Thus, these days, the Berlin Philharmonic goes pop, as does the pope coming to visit.

JB: So religion becoming popular does not mean it is democratized?

HK: No. Universal accessibility makes it possible that everyone can appropriate knowledge individually and in the manner they see fit. That’s where the term “seeker” used to come in—Winfried Gebhardt speaks of “spiritual ramblers.” It’s an old theme, but the seeker is just a social figure that speaks to our reality in which religious knowledge and religious action orientation are widely accessible and the boundaries of what counts or doesn’t count as religious are no longer clearly marked.

I think all so-called “fundamentalist” movements are counter-movements to this reality. They seek to re-establish boundaries around what is to be understood as religion, to make the distinction from the popular clear. This distinction can remain ambivalent so that groups can respond to the market while declaring, “We are somehow different.” That way groups can attract people while at the same drawing boundaries.

My second argument is that, in popular religion, the subject appears as an actor. So a kind of a double subjectivation does in fact take place. On the one hand, the subject is, as systems theory or discourse theory believes, produced by being addressed through communication, and constructed according to the forms of communication—be it at least the possibility to make choices; on the other hand, the subject is constituted as a resource which makes, at least, a difference in communication by making one’s own experiences (and thus being transcendent to society). The thematic alignment of popular religion with the subject is responsible for the fact that spirituality is becoming the social form of religion. I prefer the notion of subjectivation to individualization because individualization would mean that what is at stake is a person’s uniqueness or, perhaps, isolation. We are dealing with a society that uses subjects as points of contact (Ansprechpartner). Thus, in the case of the eventization of religion, the goal of religious spirituality often is the community itself—or rather, the experience of community. This shift from community to the experience of community, that is, subjectivity. What one desires isn’t community, but the experience of community. This is a development we have been able to observe in the German Church Congresses (Kirchentage) since the 1970s. People don’t attend to be in a community; they go in order to experience community. That’s also what the instrumentalization of religion is based on. Self-governing religion requires the self to govern the connection with the other, and to define and identify itself as subject in connection with the other.

One of the unique characteristics of religious movements is the emphasis on the experience of the self. What phenomenologists have been saying all along is has now become a historical reality. What counts as evidence of the religious—even in traditions that foreground dogma—is now a phenomenon of experience, and this experience doesn’t have to be individual, but in the best case it is authentic, as one’s own experience (which, due to communities and communication, may be and often is quite the same as the experience of others).

JB: It sounds to me like you are describing a historical development. How would you compare today’s religious movements with the revivalist movements of the nineteenth century, for instance? They also placed a strong emphasis on experience.

HK: Yes, but these movements always emerged in areas already marked as religious, so what counts as religious was already unambiguously marked. What sets these current movements apart from others is the becoming-unbounded (Entgrenzung) of religiosity. Spirituality was already a part of these earlier movements. What’s new isn’t religious experience—religious experience has long been a topic—but that the experience itself, the capacity to experience something, has become the criterion for religiosity, rather than religiosity being a given and experience coming second. That’s the difference from Billy Graham, for instance: In his rallies, there were clear prescriptions of what may be experienced as religious. The point of spiritualization is that the criterion for religiosity is your subjective experience. You can experiment with a variety of things—even things that are formally not religious—and then you take your experience of those things, whatever you feel to be transcendence, as the criterion, regardless whether it is marked as religious or not.

I don’t want to exaggerate the rupture. Religious experience is perennial, and subjectivity always plays a role. But the fact that subjectivity becomes the decisive criterion of what is perceived as religious, and isn’t just brought into religion, that is the decisive difference. You don’t have to be integrated into a religious cosmos (Weltbild), you only have to transcend subjectivity. That is what minimally constitutes the religious or the spiritual. You don’t call it religious because it is fixed to a specific religious system of symbols or social structures of specialized religious organizations. Imagine a spiritual Marxist—Marxists of the nineteenth century were religious in the sense that they believed in utopia. (The same argument could be made about nationalists.) But if you were to find that they don’t believe in something—namely utopia—and are therefore religious, but that they want to transcend the totality and experience utopia for the sake of experiencing it, then they would be spiritual in the modern sense, as it were. For this to happen, a subjectivation has to occur that doesn’t need to sacralize the individual, but that relates to the subject. That is a pretty recent development, but it certainly isn’t without precedent. The combination of popularity and subjectivation is certainly unique.

JB: Do you think the subject seeking spiritual experience could eventually become fatigued?

HK: Do you mean, could the wave run its course?

JB: On the one hand, spirituality bears this promise of healing and regeneration, but if subjective experience becomes an end in itself, can that lead to a fatigue of being a subject?

HK: Well, it doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. The subject doesn’t necessarily expend energy. It is also not a search for meaning. The subject still gets a payoff from religiosity. The question is whether the subject can be placed into this spiritualization on a permanent basis, which raises the question whether there are other orientations the subject could assume. Meaningful orientation towards transcendence (sinnhafte Transzendenzorientierung) is a defining characteristic of human existence. Are there any structures that could enable collective orientations—such as neo-nationalisms, new utopian movements and the like—that could step in? Islamic movements are a good example. In contrast to the global popular Islam described by Olivier Roy, which is also based on subjectivation, could we imagine collectivist movements stepping in to take its place? Structural conditions would have to be fundamentally transformed. My thesis is that these religious movements don’t just function as religious movements, but that you have to view them in the context of a social development in which what we used to call individualization has been furthered into subjectivation. If the structural conditions for this development were to disappear or change—I don’t know whether we have to assume a different orientation in Southeast Asia, China, and elsewhere—then such new orientations are imaginable. But you would have to reconstruct society in order to do that.

For instance, you would have to change the fact that we are called on as decision-makers from the age of nine months onwards. Parents turn toddlers into decision-makers on a lot of questions. We are decision-makers in the market, we are administrators of our entire life, etc. The subject is always the addressee of society. That would have to be reversed.

Some in the spiritual movement are trying just that, and they are trying to create artificial collectivizations in the shape of communities. Some political movements attempt this as well. The internet movement in some sense is a collectivist movement, but it doesn’t seem to create any particularly strong new forms of social structures (aside from “communities” in inverted commas). Be that as it may, basically you would have to change the social-structural preconditions—for instance, liberalism’s market model, or the model on which our systems of communication are based. If the computer people had formed collective groups, and not “personal” computers that address individual users, things would have run a different course, but everything is running in this direction.

I want to elaborate on the background again. What I’m describing is connected to the entire setup. I do not regard it as a development specific to the religious realm. On the contrary: religion is just a part—presumably a fairly advanced part—of a broader social development. In a way, religion forms the vanguard of a development that will eventually affect science as well and that has been going on in the art world for a long time. In art, however, the development has been ambivalent: we have seen the closure of institutions, but this has been happening on the background of a full dissolution of boundaries. Those developments are also parts of a development affecting society as a whole.

JB: If we can no longer clearly distinguish between religious and secular forms of communication or knowledge, does it follow that we have become “postsecular”?

HK: The issue of postsecularity depends on whether we can assume a clear division in the past. I tend to agree, but then I’m not a historian. What I hear from the historians as an objection—Keith Thomas, for example—is that we have reason to doubt the narrative of clear-cut modernization. It may well have been an ideal-typical construction.

My first research project (for my PhD) was on dowsing and the development of occult physics. What’s interesting is that at the same time that religion was losing its power to offer interpretations of natural phenomena, it wasn’t simply replaced by science. Instead, we saw the development of all kinds of hybrid forms—Mesmerism, occult physics, parapsychology—that do not merely blunder through the nineteenth century but immediately arose as mass phenomena. In Germany, Goethe, Hegel and many members of the educated bourgeoisie took an interest. In England and the United States, parapsychology became a popular movement among the working class. There was also the English movement of spiritism, and much more. Like I said, I’m no historian, but I would change the narrative along those lines. These hybrid forms attest to one of the great insights of Berger and Luckmann. They claimed that religious knowledge is not substantially separate from other forms of knowledge. Thus, when authority over religion is lost, others can step in.

Postsecularization insinuates this narrative of a clean break as a matter of fact. I find this doubtful, even if I can’t put it to the test historically. My research on dowsing led me to first doubt Max Weber. It’s the reason I’m not a Weberian, because in his eyes, dowsing would clearly be an act of magic (Zauberwerk). I was conducting ethnographic research, but I also studied the institutional development, and to my surprise I found that, at the same time that theological dissertations on dowsing (which condemned the practice) stopped appearing, physicists started attending to it. The practice spread to the middle class and it urbanized. It did not die out. The practice is modernized along with modernization. I think that’s a development we can observe in a whole host of movements. Psychologism seems to fit the bill, as does Mesmerism and the adoption of its therapeutic techniques. I simply don’t believe the narrative of secularism. I believe it is based on the flawed premise that there are substantial differences between religion and other things.

JB: So, to paraphrase Bruno Latour, we could say that we have never been secular. At least not in a pure form.

HK: Probably not. I find it astonishing—to me, it is one of the greatest puzzles to this day—how the natural sciences were finally able to kick out alchemy and astrology. Particularly the Royal Academy. Apparently they were able, after all, to draw sharp boundaries between the empiricism of empirics and the empiricism of alchemy. I still find that to be a very interesting question because it is the last remnant of a potential substantialism of knowledge.

At the same time we probably have to stress that secularism undoubtedly plays the role of the dominant ideology of modernity juxtaposing “rationality” to the irrational or “religious”. Even if secularization must not have been realized, secularism has been the dominant ideology of modernity and modernization. It is what helped to define rationality. Without this ideology, modernization would not have happened. In a sense, rationality is the faith of modernity, and although—or because—I assume that rationality is not opposed to religion and transcendence, this faith is, I guess, also what I still believe in.

This paper also highlights methods and orientations that we believe are germane to the concerns and questions that motivated our recent project on spirituality, public life, and politics in America, but that also extend beyond them. It draws into relief the space that has been opened up by recent analyses of spirituality and identifies the new questions and problems that are taking shape as a result. These novel directions in scholarship offer challenging and potentially powerful new ways of understanding the role of both spirituality and religion in shaping American civic and political life. The methods highlighted below do not treat either spirituality or religion as core or stable identities or qualities, nor do they assume that “spirituality” is in some way to be contrasted or opposed to “religion” (as in the formula “spiritual-not-religious”). Indeed, they do not operate on the presumption that “spirituality” necessarily holds any particular categorical relation whatsoever to “religion” (cf. Bender 2007; Taves and Bender 2012; Ammerman 2011). Instead, we propose a robust investigation of the historical and contextual specificities of those relations, such as they are enacted in scholarship and in the world. What these methods provide, accordingly, are ways of illuminating the relationships that develop—within particular political, civic, and other settings—between “religious” and “spiritual” identities, discourses, and concepts.

But why, first of all, is this subject a significant one? And why does it appear especially pertinent at precisely the present moment? To begin with, growing numbers of “religious nones,” that is, people who have limited or no religious affiliation yet still claim to believe in some kind of divinity, signal an unprecedented shift in the American religious landscape (Hout and Fischer 2002), and many scholars who have sought to understand this phenomenon have indicated that something like “spirituality” might capture an important aspect of their outlook, if not their “identity” (Vargas 2012; Lim, MacGregor, and Putnam 2012; Baker and Smith 2009). We, for our part, certainly agree that this is a socially significant shift. Yet we also note that much of the interpretation and ensuing discussion about the “religious nones” draws upon and continues to assert uninvestigated understandings of religion and spirituality, where we would argue that the shifts underway should elicit some reconsideration of the terms that are deployed to analyze and interpret this allegedly “new” phenomenon.

Social scientists frequently juxtapose spirituality to religion and identify the former by way of what it lacks in comparison to the latter. In particular, spirituality would appear to lack institutions, authority structures, community, and even history—all of which are considered integral to religion, such as it is widely understood today. Congregational identity, membership, and attendance are key markers for studies of Americans’ religious convictions, and the congregation, therefore, is taken to be an especially important, if not the definitive, site for the political and social mobilization of religious Americans. Against this backdrop, the rising number of “religious nones” (as well as shifts in congregational styles [see Chaves 2009]) emerge not only as new empirical facts but, insofar as their presence is measured against a norm of voluntary participation, also appear to engender a certain anxiety on the part of the scholars who study them (e.g., Olson 2010; Putnam and Campbell 2010). Though “religious nones” may be believers, they appear to lack the kinds of social connectivity that are recognizable to scholars, and that the latter have deemed essential to voluntary political participation. Insofar as spirituality emerges as a term associated with such individuals—and one that seems to sound the alarms about the problems of individualism—it appears as either the weak cousin or the crazy uncle of the norm that continues (or that should continue) to endure (see, e.g., Bellah et al. 1985), or as the spark of regeneration and the movement toward a “new” social order (e.g., York 1995).

Rather than take sides in the debate over the political possibilities of spirituality, we have decided to take a closer look at the way in which it has been framed and mobilized. We observe, for example, that social scientific definitions of religion have been and remain tightly interwoven with ideals of civic participation, putative and legally enforced distinctions between private and public life, the historical development of voluntarism, and discourses of individual and collective rights. “Spirituality,” in this respect, is often used to mark religious forms that do not ostensibly align with these norms. In other words, it is used to designate what are perceived to be extra-social or anti-social modes of religion, which in turn reinforces norms of both sociality and political mobilization. It is fair to note that this use of “spirituality” also carries some positive associations, however: some of those who take on a spiritual identity, it is said, are actively choosing to opt-out of political and institutional-religious interactions, in favor of something that they imagine to be more real, more personal, or more authentic than what they understand by religion—or, for that matter, by politics.

By focusing our attention on the emergence of various uses of “spirituality” and the intersections between its scholarly and public acceptations, we are orienting our investigation toward the relational work that religion and spirituality do in shaping our perception of individual, religious, and political possibilities. We might then ask, for example, how the continued preponderance of an academic discourse on American religion that enshrines voluntarism, religious freedom, and civic participation as essential (and essentially American) virtues determines our view of the spectrum of possibilities for political action. If as a result of closer attention to the phenomenon of spirituality scholars are able to view “religion” and its intersections with American politics in more complex ways than those sustained by the conventional lore centered on congregational life and voluntarism, the payoff would be significant..

Spirituality, we also note, is challenging to study, not so much because it lacks definition (or a relational counterpart, like “religion,” to make it meaningful), but because it suffers from an excess of definitions, each of which shapes a particular set of discourses and empirical investigations into various social phenomena. Scholars and journalists, religious and secular people, clergy and laymen, and even politicians invoke spirituality in numerous ways. For example, some identify it as a component of religion (whence people can be both “spiritual and religious”), which implies a contrast between the two, though it may also suggest that the former is an underlying, universal element that religious communities or individuals draw upon or are inspired by (e.g., Berger 1979). Closely related are descriptive uses that frame “spirituality” in terms either of emotions or of an ethically developed habitus that may operate both within and outside of formal institutional frameworks (Stanczak 2006; Roof 1993, 1999). Spirituality is also a term that some philosophers have used to gesture toward an unarticulated “more” (e.g., C. Taylor 2007; Connolly 2005a), and in such cases it takes on the connotation of something relatively inchoate or undefined, yet present and powerful in human life. Others have defined it in a less favorable fashion, conceiving of it as a post-religious and narcissistic drive to self-improvement, in contradistinction to religion, which (unlike spirituality) is able to intervene significantly in matters of the commons (Carrette and King 2004; Ehrenreich 2009; see Mitchell 2010 for a critique). Spirituality’s apparent ubiquity and its multiple meanings, but also its oft supposed “self-evidence,” make it difficult to employ with precision either as a descriptive term or as the index of a particular type of subject. Sometimes this fuzziness makes spirituality seem weak and limited in its effects, while at other times this same fuzziness lends it a sheen of pervasive and untapped power. Even those who appear to endorse or embrace this or that articulation of spirituality give vent to such concerns (e.g., E. McAlister 2010; van der Veer 2009; Connolly 2010). In short, the efflorescence of spirituality—its multiple concurrent uses and interpretations—makes it difficult to identify what spirituality is or to classify the people who identify themselves through it, let alone to understand its effects.

Much of the “problem” of analyzing spirituality in the social sciences emerges from and reflects the perpetually unresolved business of defining and understanding religion. But the question of whether spirituality is categorically distinct from, somehow connected to, or merely a weak mirror of “religion” bespeaks, above all, the sclerotic scholarly and “religious” framing and boundary-marking that, whether for strategic or analytical purposes, distinguishes the category of religion from some things while associating it with others—in ways often belied by empirical observation (Bender 2012a). We do not believe that investigations of spirituality will settle the definitional issues that continue to shape social scientific discourse about it, and we do not plan in this paper to offer a definition of what spirituality “is” or what it “does.” Rather, having observed that recent work on spirituality has paid very little attention to its history (either as a term of scholarly investigation or as a set of experiences in the world), to the relationships that it connotes (between itself and religion, as well as other things to which it is or may be compared), or to the broader landscape in which the arguments about spirituality and politics take on relevance and force, we advance an approach that demands that these problems be placed front and center in any analysis, in such a way that new studies of spirituality (and religion) maintain the critical and analytical depth that is called for in this moment of apparent religious change.

Read the full SSRC Working Paper “Mapping a Field: Why and How to Study Spirituality” (pdf).

“It resists classification…”

Language is a funny thing. Take my epigraph, for example: three words from the fourth paragraph of Frequencies’ project statement. I find these three words interesting—worth re-reading, even un-reading, rather than just reading—because of the contradiction that they carry along with them; for they unsay what it is that we think they just said.

Like I said, language is a funny thing.

To begin this project of un-reading, I start offstage, before the meaning takes place, and note that the removal of these words from a larger context is signaled by those three dots which, when read as a unit, indicate that something is not just passively missing but omitted (as its Greek root, ἔλλειψις , makes plain)—i.e., this notation leaves a trace of the agency, the choice, of the one who has done the extraction. For, much like the verbs “remove” or “omit,” it makes evident that a strategic operation has taken place; what’s more, the 66s and 99s that frame the text inform readers that the removal had surgical precision, for they allow them to conclude that this is precisely how it is in the absent original—“Go, find it, and compare for yourself,” they challenge. “But see here now?” they simultaneously ask, “Something new is happening, right before your eyes.”

Ellipsis and quotation marks—marks by which writers make admissions to readers (akin to Bruce Lincoln’s sense, in the epilogue to his Theorizing Myth, of how footnotes “show your work”) and by which readers are reminded that writers fabricate their texts (they don’t just happen by themselves, after all), doing so by inserting their own uninvited interests into other people’s prior situations, making texts of other contexts, thereby interrupting someone else’s work and putting to new use just this one piece of a past. And it is precisely by such an interruption that meaning is created—“This here thing is related to that thing there, but they are not the same.” Texts re-signified by their extraction from there and their insertion here; old contexts erased (yet hinted at). Nothing stands alone, unaccountable.

Our punctuation marks mark our punctuations.

When I consider the form of the text above, that’s what I come up with. This structure, evidenced but also produced by the punctuation, makes the text’s history profoundly apparent, the specified limits and the edges are there to see, and the manner in which meaning-making takes place—as a staged series of past and present relationships among interchangeable parts—remains. “I am doing something here,” these marks say, in the voice of the writer, “Watch closely.” Because of the punctuation (in both senses of the term: a marking and an interruption), the reader can’t erase the agency of the writer—the historically-situated chooser, Roland Barthes’s scriptor, the one who has set the table for the reader—any more than readers can erase the sign that there was once another place setting at which these words and other readers once sat next to each other, accompanied by no trailing dots, framed by no 66s and 99s. Yet the original is hardly original, of course, for it made reference to, deferred to, its own absent ancestors. Turtles—texts/contexts—all the way down.

 *  *  *

But let’s begin again and ask what happens if I read, instead of un-read, those words—i.e., take for granted the setting in which this language game is played, authorize its rules as inevitable and natural, thereby seeing (or better, not seeing) the spot at which I, as a reader, have been seated as invisible and limitless: Then what do I make of these three words? What if I see them as having no context? What if I drop my attention to the work being done by the quotation marks and ellipsis and, instead, hear the words speak directly to me, much like being captivated by the wit of the dummy instead of the person so successfully throwing the voice? Well, now there apparently is a thing, an “it” we’ll call it, that, like that animated dummy, has an agency of its own (for, we are told, it resists classification); by means of its own huffing and puffing, the absent signifier that goes by its pronoun defies being classed, has no context, and cannot be controlled. Its rugged individualism prevents anything from getting not just too close but close at all, with no one and no thing occupying a neighboring space.

“I can’t quite put it into words” presupposes just such an it, haunting our dreams before language gives it shape.

But if knowledge is said to be the result of the way we organize the world, the way we group things together to arrive at our judgments of similar or different, more or less, near or far—Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species—then this dearly distant Cousin It remains forever aloof, all covered in hair and a hat, infinitely removed, and thus an utterly unknowable mystery—just as the vague pronoun-of-a-name suggests. After all, “the rejection of classificatory interest is, at the same time, a rejection of thought” (as Jonathan Z. Smith reminds us in the concluding sentence to his essay “Classification” in The Guide to the Study of Religion).

One reader but two readings of a project statement (though one is an un-reading, really): one results in the trace of history, while the other is shrouded in mystery. But only one is good to think with.

*  *  *

So just what is Frequencies about then? At the level of reading, its task is to document something that defies knowledge—“spirituality” being the noun formerly known as it. The object of this online archive therefore defies language, since language is nothing but classed specificity—for good or ill, a rock is not a pebble, neither is it a stone and hardly a boulder. For whatever reason, these things matter to us and the way we sort the matter that matters is found in the specifics of language. “Over there” is the unspecified region where we ask someone to put—we wouldn’t even say “place,” since we don’t much care—something of little or no consequence. But an item that defies placement, defies relationships of similarity or difference inasmuch as it apparently occupies (of its own volition) a class of its own, is in a space where there are no relations and thus no consequences—a space beyond all places we could possibly set at all dining tables in all possible worlds. It is a space of fantasy, outside of history and thus apart from language (whatever sense it makes to phrase a claim like that within language and within this historical moment; like I said, language is a funny thing).

What is clear is that the results of my reading and un-reading are rather uneasy partners. For on the one hand, we have framed three words and three dots that show the work, that stand for the happenstance, always changing relationship between text and context, writer and reader—how each are always the other too. Meaning historicized. No text stands alone. Yet on the other, we have three words, alone, referring to no writer, no reader, but to the absent, incomparable noun that apparently moves under its own steam. A stand-alone text. Sui generis religion by another name.

A contradiction presents itself (or is presented by another?).

For when the reading is judged from the vantage point of the un-reading—and meaning historicized, I would argue, is the only vantage point to be had for those who name themselves historians—then the writer of the project statement (for there is always a writer, right?) is implicated in an effort to hide footprints, to sweep clear the evidence, and to leave the scene of the accidents of history. For, much like the passive voice, having set the reader’s table with the words of his or her choosing, such a writer then makes a dash for the exit, erasing all evidence of the choices he or she has made, leaving the reader to assume that the table was set by itself. And thus we arrive at a situation comparable to the old dine and dash, a situation where our choices appear free of cost—but only if we get away with it.

Three words—“It resists classification”—followed either by three dots or a dash. Between these two options we have a contradiction in styles at the very heart of Frequencies. Is our object of study incomparable or infinitely comparable?

*  *  *

To be fair, the entire paragraph (one of six, in fact) from which I excised those three words that became my epigraph reads as follows:

Frequencies seeks to commence a genealogy of spirituality. This project approaches spirituality as a cultural technology, as a diverse reverberation, as a frequency in the ether of experience. We begin in a moment when novelists wonder about the divine, psychological counselors advertise as spiritual advisers, and scholars seek to capture spirituality’s ephemeral nature through survey research. Spirituality abounds, even as it is unclear what it is. Whatever it is, it seems hard to capture. Spirituality takes hold beneath the skin and permeates below the radar of statistical surveys. It resists classification even as it classifies its evaluators and its believers as subjects of its sway. Frequencies will focus this profusion into an epic anthology of wide-ranging analysis.

A genealogy of the discursive object “spirituality” is, for me, far different from a genealogy of spirituality—they cannot sit easily beside each other, at the same table. Suggesting that claims of spirituality, in fact the very use of the term itself, is a cultural technology—a technique, used by someone, a technician perhaps, that does something within culture, within history, I gather—is far from seeing spirituality itself as such a technology. But reading the paragraph I am unsure which we are talking about. I fear that what the site might understand as a productive ambiguity, capable of attracting a multiplicity of views, or layers (to stick with the notion of genealogy), is, for me, a paralyzing cacophony. The trouble? In genealogy the pronouns and the nouns alike—things like justice or marriage or gender or civility or self—refer back to historical practices, habits, institutions, ways of organizing, and the agents who made (and, yes, were made by) these contingent structures. Yet in this paragraph, the source of the Nile too often seems to be the ungenealogized—the un-un-read—noun spirituality; like a rumored and alluring Big Foot marching through the woods, looking back at us, coming in and out of focus, the fabricated object is our target, and not the situated discourse that brought us to the edge of the woods and made us look.

And so, reading that project statement, staring at all those trees, those posts, and thereby missing the structure that the un-reading sees as managing the profusion, visitors to the site likely assume that all of Frequencies’ parts naturally and comfortably fit together—a searchable crazy quilt whose busy mosaic hints at a transcendent whole that’s bigger and thus more significant than the sum of its parts. Only in this way would we assume that (to name but three entries) Martin Marty’s interest in the “most sustaining and inspiring elements of what we can call post-modern spirituality…” and Lee Gilmore’s use of language to point toward some unspeakable thing (“that mysterious ‘more’—an ineffable sense of something larger than ourselves”) could somehow inhabit the same space as Gabriel Levy’s entry, in which Frequencies’ main noun appears in ironic quotation marks and, dare I say, reduced to waves. Only by occupying some god’s eye vantage point, where the omniscient narrator sees into the hearts of all those blind monks, groping around that poor elephant, would we think that these three entries had something in common—instead of seeing the former two as data for the third. To rephrase: that we would likely never assume that assorted mediations and lamentations on, say, this or that sense of justice, would appear side-by-side with a genealogical analysis of the discourse on justice itself, yet freely assume such a comfortable fit when it comes to this thing called spirituality is, I think, the problem that requires attention. For, with my earlier reading and un-reading in mind, “a digital compendium in which the ideals of spiritual self-expression and individual flourishing are held in tension with the historicity of those conceits”—to quote from the opening to the project statement’s fifth paragraph—is  one where the tension is so great as to shatter the archive itself. After all, a house divided against itself cannot stand.

Three words. Three dots. Three examples.

A dash. A tension. A contradiction.

Three dots and a dash is, of course, Morse code for the letter V, and V—as every Beethoven fan knows, as does any World War II history buff—also stands for Victory; to have it both ways, to hold both a reading and an un-reading in the space of one epic anthology, would indeed be a victory—a victory over making choices and living with consequences, a victory over History, even Death (“Where is thy sting now, eh? For this very critique will be posted at the same site as its object!”). But the historian in me can’t imagine such a totalized scenario, in which we can have our cake and critique it too—leaving a trace of agency and choice while simultaneously obscuring both. No, we have to choose, and live with the consequences.

*  *  *

“Scott for gods sake write and write truly no matter who or what it hurts but do not make these silly compromises.”—Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald (May 28, 1934)

Victory for those unwilling to compromise, those with an eye toward the situation, cognizant of the inevitability of choice, aware that “ineffable” is a word like any other and that “the big picture” is every little picture’s fantasy, is therefore not three dots and a dash; instead, it’s three dots or a dash—either we live with the historicity or make a mad dash off the stage of context, of consequence, of accountability. That’s the choice—between the satisfying (but false) closure of Beethoven’s long fourth note or the utter indeterminacy (and thus possibility) of his first three—his three dots, his ellipsis—followed by not just a rest or a pause, but a silence of who knows what length…

leaving us not sure whether to applaud or…

I wonder, however, about two things. One is about form and one is about content.

1. The question about form: Is this a genealogy?
2. The question about content: What are the avenues of spirituality that the project maps?

With respect to the question about form, I wonder just what kind of genealogy the project traces, and if genealogy is the right word for the project at hand. The collection reads more like a buckshot of spirituality. Or a scatter graph of spirituality. It is—and maybe this is appropriate—too broad, too idiosyncratic, too peculiar, too diffuse to tell us anything at all about spirituality, except that those are the terms on which it makes itself clear to us. I could have written my essay about any number of things (to limit it to just record albums, I could have written about Radiohead’s Kid A or Coltrane’s Live in Europe 1964 or the seminal praise and worship recording: 1971’s The Everlastin’ Living Jesus Music Concert). If spirituality is really as vast, encompassing, and peculiarly populated as all that, then I’m not sure a genealogy is useful. Or even possible. It might be interesting, as the contributions here certainly are, but it doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about spirituality as a singular phenomenon or as an aspiration or as a very real element of people’s lives.

Certainly, the general leaning of the project is toward the spiritual-secular, anyhow. But, if you’re really going to trace the genealogy of this thing, we might want to include more avowedly “religious” voices here too. Not because they have a monopoly on the stuff, but because those of us who are secularists might yet be able to learn a thing or two from our counterparts who occupy other pews. One might conclude that religion and spirituality ought to be joined at the hip or that they represent separate phenomena or maybe that they were separated at birth, but however you genealogize, they are certainly related. It’s one thing to hear spiritual overtones in books or people, historical events or concepts of our choosing, but it might be something else entirely when one attempts to square the spiritual with the theological.

To be sure, squaring the religious with the theological won’t answer the genealogical question, and I don’t mean to suggest that we might find a genealogical answer to spirituality’s questions by looking to religion. Instead, I hope that my invitation might open the investigation even further—beyond the boundaries of social secular culture and curios. If we’re going to lead this conversation with such loose reins, the discussion might benefit from looking or listening to voices from religion—where spirituality seems so genealogically related, but so difficult to find.

With respect to question number 2, I keep coming back to something I read in a New Yorker article a few years back. It was a profile of David Simon, co-creator of HBO’s The Wire and now, Treme. Simon’s brother, explaining their Jewish upbringing in Baltimore, observed that they felt traditional, but not religious. This spoke to me, growing up in an observant-ish Jewish household where we were steeped in ritual, but certainly not in spirituality. If God were to have shown up on some occasion or another, my mom would have set God a place at the table and asked if He or She had any food allergies.

Traditional but not religious. Simon was talking about avoiding pork or performing ritual, but without the trappings or limitations of religion. It’s a powerful inversion of the preference for things “spiritual but not religious” that has become a refrain of postwar American religious preferences. The taste for the spiritual over the properly religious (whatever that is) has become a nearly orthodox, practically fundamentalist statement of faith for both Baby Boomers and those who study them.

Somehow, opting for spirituality over religion seems to create opportunities that religion closes off. Spirituality seems to suggest syncretisms and recombinations and possibility, while religion appears to offer little more than dogma, discipline, and the routine denials of the syncretisms that we all kind of already know are there.

And so, we have spirituality manifest in everything from pubic hair to Mark Twain’s Palestine with a freedom and writerly panache absent from the literature of most houses of worship. This, I think is a good thing, but moving so fully toward the spiritual and leaving the religious behind seems to accept too readily the overtones of the “spiritual but not religious” chorus. What about David Simon’s formulation of being traditional but not religious? What about being religious and not spiritual? Surely there’s something beneficial, helpful, even redemptive in those recombinations—even if we don’t call them “spiritual.” But the decision to avoid connecting one’s affinity for certain behaviors to something called “religion” seems questionable. As my friend and teacher Steven M. Cohen once said, “God is too important to leave to the religious.”

Surely there are other ways into and through the currents of transcendence, depth, and meaning-making that don’t approach religion and spirituality as an oppositional pair, or that don’t privilege spirituality as religion’s younger, hipper, cooler sibling. According to the implicit logic of Baby-Boomer religious tastes (as articulated by those who don’t define themselves as religious, of course), and by the framing of Frequencies, we might want to sleep with spirituality, but we want to avoid waking up with religion.

My two questions—about the genealogical nature of this enterprise and about the other avenues that spirituality might take—led me back, almost inevitably, to a single concern: the separation of religion from spirituality. The multiplicity of voices and phenomena captured in the essays, the multiple frequencies and resonances of the broader project, the dualities of form and structure, have led me back to the singularity of my question. And what more could I expect from an investigation of spirituality than that?

Because it signals that such extraordinary events are also part of real history; that they too deserve our attention, remembrance, and analysis; that they are not simply a function of cranks and frauds. The New Hampshire road sign is jarring precisely to the extent that it brings the impossible into conjunction with the utterly solid and banal—all that metal, all that paint, and all authorized by the official Seal of the State of New Hampshire. With its appearance, American history suddenly becomes much more interesting, more alive, and way weirder. I am delighted not because I am persuaded or convinced by the factuality of the sign’s iron presence or the matter-of-factness of its words, or, for that matter, because I “believe” anything at all (I don’t believe in belief). I am delighted because the sign functions as a historical marker, that is, as a recognition that something strange and uncanny happened there, on that same road, a little over fifty years ago.

Something.

As I read through the posts of Frequencies again, I am reminded of the impossible road sign up there in New Hampshire. Each post, after all, similarly functions as a sign that strange and uncanny things happen all the time to all sorts of people—automatic writing and poetic visionary experience, light sabers and mythical mashups, religious openings through sex and LSD, a new revelation channeled to a professional psychologist (at Columbia no less), six druids standing against an ethnographer’s window above a London street, and on and on and on. Really, we could do this for decades, no? Taken together, the entries make an utter mockery of any simple notion of religion. As if there were any. What there so obviously are, of course, are people. And people are different, really, really different.

Ah, you say, this is because of our postmodern, post-industrial, post-capitalist, or post-something-or-other culture. But no one who has taken a close and serious look at, say, the history of Hinduism or early Christianity can possibly believe that one. It seems much more likely that this is what religion is anywhere we look, if only we would look—a New Age marketplace, a mythical mashup, a collection of “wild facts,” as William James called psychical and mystical phenomena, or of wild talents, as Charles Fort called paranormal powers (“wild” being the key qualifier here). Sometimes a tradition is able to gather together a few of these wild facts and talents, shape them into something useful through myth, ritual, and art, and hold it all together for a time. But only for a time.

I suspect this most basic of observations—that things are wild and plural everywhere and everywhen we look—is also the most basic reason “the spiritual” is so resisted in conservative and traditional circles, be they religious, political, or academic. Basically, the category is code for “It’s way more complicated, and way simpler, than that.”

On the complicated side, the category is subversive to religious identity itself, any religious identity. And God only knows what it could do to our flatland histories, as if kings, presidents, nation-states, and religious institutions capture what really goes on in human history. I listen to the news each morning on the radio and think, “Really? This is really what I am supposed to identify as ‘what happened yesterday’ to all those billions of people? Really?” It’s all just completely ridiculous. There are other histories, much more important hidden histories that we have only begun to note and trace.

On the simpler side, it is not all wild buzzing and blooming, nor is it all hidden. Not at all. Indeed, these Frequencies posts reminded me again that scholars of religion know far more than we are often willing to admit, even if this “far more” is usually implicit and seldom, if ever, rendered explicit. We know, for example, that religious identity is constructed, like every other aspect of the ego. We know that religions are historical phenomena, constructed again by enough social, political, linguistic, cognitive, and biological processes to make anyone’s head spin. And—and here is the Big Simple One—we know that, wherever and whenever they are found, all religious experience shares one indubitable universal ground: human nature. So it’s all different, and it’s all the same. That is really complicated, and that is really simple. Can we hold these two in balance now?

Finding a thing means finding a problem, a hook, an angle. Is this what we look for when we look for the spiritual? Or is this collection more accurately seen as an opportunity for a fairly small group of (mostly) scholars to flex just a bit, to entertain a different style or genre for a weekend dalliance? We seek scholarly effervescence with and through the investment in projects like these, with their promised new formats and genres. Some authors are perplexed to find or not find “the spiritual,” while others are (sometimes frustratingly) un-perplexed. Some seek to close the distance between subject and object and context, others to widen it, each approach proclaiming itself a felt register of something called “spiritual,” where the most minute detail becomes luminescent or, alternately, very nearly lost in the vastness of things.

To make this observation, though, is not to find in these writings the conceit that anything non-institutional that “smells” spiritual is fodder for rumination. But nonetheless, there is some interesting signifying with the terms archive and genealogy. The boundedness of an archive suggestively contrasts with the openness of this project, while the Nietzschean/Foucauldian resonance of genealogy is largely absent from these considerations. Frequencies also describes itself as “collaborative,” even though it seems more accurately to be an anthology of individual reflections that might constitute a family tree of styles, subjects, and angles all wrestling with a related thicket of questions. These efforts generate a varied offspring that only occasionally wrangle with officialdom (traditions, boundaries, etymologies).

What, then, is preserved or can be read among these outpourings from a hundred authors? First and foremost, the authors preserve themselves by foregrounding their own presence in their considerations. Littered through the contributions are scholarly self-locations of the sort that is de rigueur in the humanities: an academic tell whereby we establish authenticity and methodological non-causality by performing an experiential collusion with those we study. Omri Elisha says “I’ll pray for you.” Susan Harding returns to Thomas Road, and finds there the “spiritual” practice of ethnography (that gives one “entry into another reality”). Yet these normalized practices of religious studies are paired alongside a different kind of self-location, functioning in many ways more like a journal entry. Many entries focus on a personal remembrance of moments of intense sensation or aesthetic piety: this band, novel, painting, landscape, exchange, or drug changed my life. Many are captivating and marvelously written, miles away from the kind of dull re-enchantment parable one might encounter in scholarship or Sunday papers’ magazines. And while many entries here cannot refrain, also predictably, from referring to the author’s current research (perhaps this is our own form of prostration to a cosmos which would swallow up yet another chunk of text read by a tiny cloister), I found so many others quite arresting, especially Chip Callahan’s musings on highway travel, Finbarr Curtis’s piece on his father’s death, Vietnam, and the American dream, and Julie Byrne’s gorgeous “Saint February” (among the many I could possibly name).

A second impulse moving through these wavelengths is the lure of new objects. What is it (if indeed there is an “it”) that connects Allan Chumak, the Burning Man, fast food chicken, iPhones, espresso, LSD and dope, automatic writing, pubic hair, and Avatar? What imagined properties does the adjective “spiritual” possess, enabling us to recognize something common to Alcoholics Anonymous, yoga, Philip K. Dick, school retreats, companion animals, German women’s magazines, and Neutral Milk Hotel? Perhaps we might think not of substance, locable object, or essence but instead, digesting these offerings, consider whether the “spiritual” archived here is this very impulse to locate the new and escape the confines of the recognizable. While there are still plenty of texts here (some, like the Whole Earth Catalog, we might have expected and others, like John Lardas Modern’s obsession with the DeLillo corpus, less anticipated in an index of things “spiritual”), what is more common is a focus on the investment of meaning in objects and lifestyles.

But what does the move outside of conventional objects of study portend? Does a redirected attention impel us to the dazzling, the quirky, the hip, or does it provoke new questions that might be formulated when reliable contexts and connections are absent? Does the authorial attempt to locate the new—that overtone you hadn’t heard before, that detail tucked in the corner of the canvas—represent our own search for authenticity, paralleling the search for the real, the élan of connectedness, the ontological authority of either roots or rootlessness? Yet though it might be reasonable to think these questions alongside Frequencies, it’s also reasonable to wonder what is not a potential topic. The coffee I drink has been written about (though not craft beer). The music I listen to has not been written about (though other tunes have). The academic questions I pursue resound in this expanding discursive universe of secular/spiritual studies too. So perhaps it is the very superabundance of the category that is this archive’s most salient feature.

What really compels me, though, is the problem and possibility of medium and genre. If something about the “spiritual” recedes continually despite the urgent use of authorial radar, perhaps we might think less about shared properties and connections and more about common breakdowns of signification. David Morgan writes about the “aura” of the spiritual. Jeremy Kessler meditates on “secret connections” between things. We read about unseen networks of the uncanny, paradoxes, and aporiae. Amidst such ruptures and breakdowns of signification, some of these pieces flirt with new forms and new genres.

There are poems, literary recreations, a lovely Top Ten list, and a healthy variety of photos and graphemes. But still I wonder why there isn’t even greater playfulness and abandonment of customary authorial gestures. Why, to put it bluntly, has nobody played around more mischievously (but also perhaps literally) with the notions of frequency and resonance in pursuit of the “spiritual”? After all, as Nancy Levene so cogently writes, this very project amounts to chasing an impossibility, exploring the tensile relation between thinking about something while simultaneously trying to experience it.

So what would happen if, instead of looking to a different kind of writing that would provide release for the author and diversion for the reader, we thought seriously about the vibratory, circulatory dimensions of this project and dove headlong into the possibilities of this format. Perhaps a second 100 might avoid words altogether. Let there be sculpture, sound, and dance. Let there be video, collage, and cooking.

Duke Ellington once responded to an Icelandic student’s overly serious question about “art music” by reaching into his pocket and unwrapping a pork chop he’d stashed there. This is a gesture that does what words cannot. And something about the “spiritual,” with no stable referent available to us, invites us to think about improvisation. What if we were to propose only in sound, not trying to recreate its sensualism through our words or document its structure but to offer sound and nothing more? Is such confidence in sound’s power, or submission to its inevitable disappearance, the spiritual?

Keith Rowe spins the radio dial alongside his tabletop guitar and, amidst a swirl of noise, he stops on “Bang a Gong (Get It On).” These echoes within echoes, scramblings of signals and receivers, seem as evocative of something I would call “spiritual” as any combination of words could be. Does the abundance and everywhereness of “spirituality” create a kind of discursive overdrive, a distortion of the signal (referent)? What are the means by which we amplify, creating feedback and ghost tones, exulting in their release while at the same time craving their capture in the drive of a lone medium (whether sound or image or word)? The spiritual aspirant becomes a no-input mixing board, a resonating wire, a struck membrane through which such questions project.

These speculations of course are themselves analogical and rhetorical, and hence trapped in the very thing I aim to question. But playing with that is partly the point and possibility, and one inspired by the richness of these contributions. Note how Thomas Tweed’s piece on John Cage focuses on the composer’s sense that a good question shouldn’t be spoiled by an answer. Of course Cage probably had in mind Charles Ives’s “The Unanswered Question,” and what a fitting resonance that is. Like Ives’s weird vernacular juxtapositions and declamations, these entries jar the senses and scramble convention, evoking in the process their own sources and limits. But these limits, these limits, there’s something to them. Ives: “Many sounds that we are used to do not bother us, and for that reason are we not too easily inclined to call them beautiful?” “Spirituality” may be a category unable to escape its over-determination, no matter the beauty or sizzle an author intends. But in the very “ugliness” of its inevitable frames we might find the questions that bother us.

In The New Metaphysicals, Courtney Bender notes that defining spirituality is “like shoveling fog.” Indeed, a subject as intensely personal as spirituality tends to be subject to as many definitions as it has practitioners or adherents. And as Leigh Schmidt and other historians have shown, spirituality has appeared in myriad forms and meant many different things over many generations. Despite its resistance to concrete definition and operationalization, in its broadest sense the rubric “spirituality” has remained a decidedly steady component of the human condition. Thus “genealogy” seems an especially appropriate approach to Lofton and Modern’s effort to elucidate what spirituality is (and is not). Like any family tree, today’s manifestations of spirituality and its historical antecedents reach far and wide. Spirituality’s DNA also sometimes expresses itself in unexpected ways. As anyone who has tried to unearth information about his or her forebears can attest, much can be learned from discovering—or even from searching unsuccessfully—for the branches of a family tree.

I also have been struck by the cleverness of Lofton and Modern’s self-presentation as “curators” of Frequencies, rather than editors or coordinators or some other boring, bureaucratic term. “Curate” is, of course, both a verb and a noun. Thus, Lofton and Modern have curated an art exhibition of sorts (in both content and form, with visual art accompanying each entry)—but even more profoundly, they have acted as curates, taking on responsibility for the care of souls. (I cannot resist noting that the World English Dictionary also lists “assistant barman” as an alternate definition of the noun “curate.”) Because spirituality embodies something so human and alive, it is eminently sensible that Frequencies should be presented in a soulful, considerate, and caretaking manner. In a meaningful sense, freq.uenci.es is akin to ancestry.com.

Lofton and Modern received contributions from observers ranging from senior academics to DJ Spooky. Their invitation called for “fragments in a dynamic, large-scale portrait” and was accompanied by a rather comprehensive list of potential topics. It is noteworthy in the context of genealogy that the contributors to Frequencies often chose to write about topics that diverged from the list provided by the curators, much like one often is surprised by discoveries about long-forgotten ancestors. I suspect that Frequencies offered similar surprises (and delights) to Lofton and Modern as their “large-scale portrait” developed. Frequencies is richer and truer because of the tremendous latitude afforded to its contributors; spirituality’s real family tree has been allowed to take shape.

Several entries are especially resonant (referencing another term carefully chosen by Lofton and Modern) with the notion of spirituality as profoundly connected with various understandings of family. Elijah Siegler’s entry titled “Automation” refers several times to the fact that unlike other academic subjects, “the word spirituality fills [him] with anxiety.” For me, this observation reflects all the worries so many people have about dealing with immediate family members, because, like studying spirituality, doing so often is fraught with complication. (I must note that Siegler’s hilarious book-title generator is well worth investigating as well.)  Darren Grem’s lamentation on the “Chicken Sandwich,” as purveyed by the popular fast-food chain Chick-fil-A, emphasizes the very particularist (evangelical Protestant) spirituality underlying a highly profitable business. Chick-fil-A is so profitable that it retains a longstanding policy  of closing on Sunday, a “decision [that] was as much practical as spiritual…. (A)ll franchised Chick-fil-A Operators and their Restaurant employees should have an opportunity to … spend time with family [emphasis mine] and friends.” In sharp contrast with the moral questions inherent in selling chicken sandwiches are Michael Gilmour’s observations about “Companion Animals.” As I write this with one of my feline family members asleep on my desk, Gilmour’s concluding remark resonates especially strongly: “For the nineteenth-century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, all living things reveal the creator God, with each kingfisher and dragonfly—and let us add each companion animal—offering a glimpse of the divine.” And then there is Chip Callahan’s rendering of the “Highway,” that wonderful conduit of family road trips and maker of lifelong memories. In Callahan’s case, “In the summer of 1978 … my whole family packed into an Itasca motorhome and spent six weeks driving a loop around the country…. I was ten years old, and the trip … was discovery on multiple levels…. It was history and myth come alive as we drove, walked, and slept in places we’d [only] heard and read about.”

Family ties are bound up with a lifetime’s worth of anxieties, love, and memories—and with the loss thereof. So too spirituality is inextricable from how we deal with loss. Such themes appear again and again in Frequencies. We hear from Wendy Cadge about “Spiritual Care Services” in hospitals, whose “efforts are premised on the belief that everyone has some sense of spirituality that … chaplains can tap into and work with in their interactions with patients and their families [emphasis mine].” Sarah McFarland Taylor evokes the inherent sadness of an “Estate Sale,” at which she “did not expect the intimacy with which [she] would sift through peoples’ lives.” Various contributors to Frequencies grapple with the tension between spirituality and material items, but no one can deny the fact that the physical detritus of everyday life carries special meaning to the descendents of those who owned it—whether we want to preserve such items, sell them, or destroy them. Laura Marris offers two evocative poems under the heading “Loss,” both of which clearly allude both to loved ones and to the self in days gone by. The passage of a family member of a different sort is a theme of Pamela Klassen’s observations about Max Weber’s grave. Weber is a member of our collective academic family tree rather than our biological ones, and Klassen invites us to consider the memorial to him as well as the inherent spirituality of cemeteries in general.

In short, Frequencies goes a long way toward creating the “large-scale portrait” of spirituality that Lofton and Modern set out to assemble. The portrait is not defined by clean lines, but by a mixture of images and ideas. It is messy and surprising in a good way, as is any family tree. And for some reason Frequencies reminds me of one of my favorite moments in film: the closing scene of “A River Runs Through It.” This scene is glorious visually, musically, and spiritually, especially because it evokes the deeply personal complexity and pain of humans’ love for family. In the words of author and fly-fisher Norman Maclean, for whom a river is like the trunk of a family tree:

In the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise. Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.