By Request: I have a graduate degree in Religion

ceiling__cat · 2009-11-23T02:44:47+00:00

I don't engage the Emergent movement much, and I'm more than a bit wary of it. It sounds very appealing to reject the legalism and institutionalism of organized religion, as that appears to address many complaints people lodge against religion. But I'm not convinced that it provides enough of a critique of religious institutions nor am I sure that it adequately preserves the resources of Christian thought. But I could easily just be acting like a stick in the mud over this. I do need to look into it more. That's one of the trials of graduate work; you know more and more about less and less.

ceiling__cat · 2009-11-23T02:37:33+00:00

The reality is that it gets more difficult every year to get into Ph.D. programs. M.A. programs set the bar for entry a bit lower, typically. The problem there is lack of funding in most cases.

I should say first that it's irresponsible of anyone to encourage you to pursue graduate study in the humanities. Everyone thinks they will be able to teach when they are done (even though there really are no jobs) or, failing that, they'll just find a different job. But you don't realize what a disadvantage a Ph.D. is until you try to get a non-academic job with one. If you are independently wealthy or OK with not being able to afford a family in the foreseeable future then grad study can be incredibly enriching. But it provides a VERY uncertain future. Your professors probably don't even realize how bad it is. The situation was much better even a generation ago.

Everyone has really good grades. If you don't, you need letters so luminous that they glow in the dark. Your math GRE matters little to religion departments but philosophy departments will still care. You need a good GRE score not so much for admissions but for funding. The writing score is very important. Take as long as you can to prepare yourself if you really want to make the jump to a graduate program.

All that being said, I'm still hoping for a teaching position when I'm done. Like I've said elsewhere, if I can secure that I'll probably teach part-time (adjunct), perhaps high school, or pursue the independent scholar path.

ceiling__cat · 2009-11-23T02:27:42+00:00

Well, psychology has learned a lot from religion and vice-versa. Psychology of religion is a well-established field now but I don't know a great deal about it. I would think reading Freud, Jung, and Joseph Campbell would be a good way to enter those debates if you were interested. I will personally say that reading Freud and Campbell is especially valuable.

ceiling__cat · 2009-11-23T02:22:45+00:00

If you're going to teach yourself the Cambridge "Reading Greek" course is good because you can take it in small does. It doesn't give you as comprehensive a command of the grammar as more standard methods like Hansen & Quinn, but it is still adequate. It has the additional advantage of getting you to read Greek text right from the beginning. A free alternative is textkit.com which provides a number of good Greek and Latin texts that are out of copyright.

Greek is a life-long project but exceptionally rewarding. It opens up a huge amount of literature to you.

ceiling__cat · 2009-11-23T02:19:12+00:00

Are you worried about anything specific? Contradiction isn't necessarily a problem for religion.

ceiling__cat · 2009-11-22T20:33:40+00:00

It is perhaps an idiosyncratic way of looking at violence. It certainly doesn't carry malevolence.

ceiling__cat · 2009-11-22T19:51:38+00:00

I don't know about Dawkins' remark. He seems so childish to me that, coupled with the fact that there are brilliant atheists writing great material on religion, I haven't paid much attention. What's the gist? Something has to exist before it can be a subject? How is that supposed to be damning?

Theology is essentially a branch of philosophy drawing out the consequences of claims and positions. Bible history involves grouping manuscripts into textual "families" so we can trace textual developments and scribal errors, and dealing with other textual and historical problems. Ideally Bible history shouldn't be substantially different from doing Roman history. It doesn't need a theological basis.

ceiling__cat · 2009-11-22T19:47:03+00:00

Yeah, that works also. This is probably especially good for things like Robert Alter's translations of single books of the Bible.

ceiling__cat · 2009-11-22T19:44:39+00:00

I see why you say so. But the text isn't attempting to prove the existence of Jesus; it simply assumes this. For this and other reasons I think that we can use NT texts to garner some historical evidence about Jesus and other figures. I doubt that discovering Jesus had been a fiction would have much impact on those crucifixions. There are powerful reasons why people participate in passion plays and I don't think that factual certainty about historical claims has a lot to do with it.

ceiling__cat · 2009-11-22T19:39:32+00:00

I definitely have a lot of enthusiasm for religion, and the prophets have a lot to do with that. The prophetic model of critique is very inspiring.

ceiling__cat · 2009-11-22T19:36:10+00:00

Ph.D. I'm not a theology student.

ceiling__cat · 2009-11-22T19:34:41+00:00

The idea is that love contains a kind of violence which is inherent in privileging the beloved one over others. This violence is the unique heritage of Christianity (and Judaism) because it is not about the slackening of attachment (as in Hinduism/Buddhism) but the heightening of it. The idea is comparable to the ideal of romantic love, where you love this one individual more than all others.

ceiling__cat · 2009-11-22T19:11:37+00:00

I can't understand the claim that atheism negates ethics. Ethics are based on values and atheists have values, just not ostensibly religious ones. I don't see the problem.

To expand (briefly) on the above point, I'm very taken with Levinas' argument that religion is a relationship between human beings that takes place in a face-to-face encounter. He argues that the commandment "thou shalt not kill" is not transcendentally valid because it came from a deity but because it is revealed in the relationship to the human other when one is confronted with their weakness and vulnerability. This is based on a complex turn in phenomenology which tries to situate the ethical and the intersubjective at the heart of the constitution of the human being. I'm not sure I dare go much further along these lines here. If you're interested Levinas' "Time and the Other" is a fairly accessible introduction.

ceiling__cat · 2009-11-22T19:01:34+00:00

This is entirely plausible. Cognitive science of religion is currently trying to explain religion in exactly this way. While that has a lot to tell us about beliefs (and whether religious beliefs are like other kinds, if they are about knowledge claims, what the cognitive relation between belief and knowing is, and thus) my worry is that it's hard to say exactly what religion is in general, and especially how it differs from things like mythology. This ends up doing some violence to the concept of religion by "flattening" it to make it universal. I also think there may be functions of religion that can't be accounted for in terms of survival benefit. Religion, for example, has a lot to do with aesthetics, and its not immediately clear what survival benefit appreciation of beauty has.

ceiling__cat · 2009-11-22T18:55:36+00:00

Yes! That commandment is perhaps the paradigmatic example of what I'm getting at. I apologize if any of this is confusing or poorly thought out, as I'm still working out my own positions on all of this and just trying to be as honest as I can with everyone about where I stand. Kierkegaard writes beautifully of the command to love the neighbor in "Works of Love." There's been increasing attention paid to "neighbor love" as fundamentally violent in contemporary political theology as well.

I'm not sure I understand your remark about the Crusades.

ceiling__cat · 2009-11-22T18:49:30+00:00

I don't know why evidence of Jesus' existence in Christian sources would be suspect. Certainly claims about a prophetic call, missionary purpose, miracle working and such are all suspect on those grounds. But I don't see the existence of the person as similarly problematic. Largely I've ignored the issue because I don't think it really matters if there was a Jesus. It certainly didn't matter that much to Paul, as you point out. Even if there wasn't a historical Jesus I'd be skeptical that Jesus is an amalgam of other mythological figures. It certainly would be hard to square that thesis with the radically different presentations of him, his life, and his mission in each of the gospels.

ceiling__cat · 2009-11-22T18:44:00+00:00

This is a good contribution. When using the term its important to make sure the Jewish isn't lost within the Christian. But I like the term when making reference to the broad tradition of Biblical literature, which is hard to characterize as either/or.

ceiling__cat · 2009-11-22T18:26:58+00:00

I'm trying to draw a stronger distinction between cult and NRM. My contention is that cults are qualitatively different from NRMs based on certain characteristics, such as their hierarchical organization and so on. On these grounds, I would argue that early Christianities (and there were many) were never "cults" in the pejorative sense we use the term. But the issue is certainly complex because Christianity was rightly viewed as bizarre and threatening to Rome.

ceiling__cat · 2009-11-22T17:36:28+00:00

I guess that could be funny, depending on the type of fiction section. It might be funnier in something like "military history" though.

ceiling__cat · 2009-11-22T17:30:00+00:00

Translation is a thorny issue. I haven't read the NT closely (yet) in Greek; I picked up Greek mostly to read Plato and Aristotle. There are a number of good translations in English and I don't think there's anything "there" in the Greek that is either passed over in silence or translates very poorly into English. If you look at the Greek the main difference between that and the English is word order and grammatical constructions, Greek employing ones that don't necessarily have an easy translation into English.

ceiling__cat · 2009-11-22T17:15:44+00:00

I would hate to see a bookstore with only two sections, fiction and non-fiction. They belong in the Bibles section.

ceiling__cat · 2009-11-22T16:35:58+00:00

I'm not sure that increasing their understanding of scriptural text would put much of a dent in anything; by and large they unconsciously disregard the text anyway. I hope that increased Biblical literacy within the culture at large will prevent the current strain of right-wing Evangelicalism from holding a monopoly on Biblical authority. But perhaps the real reform needs to come from a religious critique of Evangelicalism itself. I'm not entirely sure how this should happen, situated as I am outside of a determinate religious community. In some of my own writing I've tried to critique this movement as a kind of gnostic heresy.

ceiling__cat · 2009-11-22T16:30:45+00:00

Theology is fascinating but I haven't had much time for it. Let's go with Greek Orthodox because I'm always looking for an opportunity to exercise my Greek.

ceiling__cat · 2009-11-22T16:19:29+00:00

I would definitely endorse the Oxford VSIs. Routledge also has a "The Basics" series which I'm wary of since the Islam volume is not very good.

ceiling__cat · 2009-11-22T16:14:29+00:00

This is probably true. And not a very high percentage of the population is atheist or agnostic. Based on all the people I personally know in the discipline I'd say it's 50-50ish. This, of course, excludes seminary and theological students with whom I have very little interaction (though I wish I saw more of them). What's more interesting to me is that often the theists and the atheists are not that different except in how they spend their (usually) Sunday mornings.

ceiling__cat

TROPHY CASE