Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

This, the Sunday described in the headline, is a good time, if I judge rightly, to contemplate the grave danger in confusing religious piety with political/patriotic feelings. I'm not making a constitutional point -- let's not argue about what the phrase "establishment of religion" meant to Madison, Mason, and that old powdered-wig-wearing crowd. (If I die a martyr to the US, will I be greeted in paradise by a crowd of Virginians?) My point, rather, is theological. I believe whole-heartedly that the universe isn't just a bunch of material/mechanical coming and going. Life is more than matter and mind is more than life and the whole of the cosmos is more than its parts -- that More is what we revere as God. Precisely because I believe this, I find it baffling and disheartening when people try to hijack spirituality for nationalism. On this first Sunday after Independence Day, let us recall the first book of Samuel, chapter 8, with its stern warning ag...

A friend recently asked me, as a Jamesian, about spirituality. She wrote, quite perceptively, that spirituality "is one of those words that everyone uses but likely means something different by it.    Lack of precision about this term causes difficulties in discussing matters of the mind, soul, consciousness, and the like." I replied: ------------------------------------------------------  I doubt that James often used the term, surely not in the loose way in which it is used today as an all-embracing New-Agey thing.   I think I know what you have in mind though, and what in James answers to it. He was of the opinion that the human spirit was at its best if it had come through a storm, if you will. Not only coming through a storm, but internalizing it to a degree, keeping some of the storminess inside you -- that, to James, was key to psychic health, to what one might well call spirituality. Not the effort to live only u...

This year, as it happens, America's Independence Day fell in mid week. This, the following Sunday, is a good time, if I judge rightly, to contemplate the grave danger in confusing religious piety with political/patriotic feelings. I'm not making a constitutional point -- let's not argue about what the phrase "establishment of religion" meant to Madison, Mason, and that old powdered-wig-wearing crowd. (If I die a martyr to the US, will I be greeted in paradise by a crowd of Virginians?) My point, rather, is theological. I believe whole-heartedly that the universe isn't just a bunch of material/mechanical coming and going. Life is more than matter and mind is more than life and the whole of the cosmos is more than its parts -- that More is what we revere as God. Precisely because I believe this, I find it baffling and disheartening when people try to hijack spirituality for nationalism. On this first Sunday after Independence Day, let us recall th...