​Well here it is, my December reading list. Being a holiday month, and the end of the year, I chose books that intrigued me on a deeply personal level. All are highly recommended.

The Worldly Philosophers by Robert L. Heilbroner
Philosophy has been an obsession for me ever since I read Plato's Republic in high school. If you were to ask for my favorite authors, philosophers like Charles Taylor, C.S. Pierce and Nancey Murphy would be high on the list.

Philosophy is intriguing, not for the answers it provides (answers are rare in philosophy), but for the way it sharpens the mind, helps us understand the framework through which we view the world, and aids us in asking better questions. If that sounds abstract, that's because philosophy is abstract (which makes it a lot of fun). But here's where The Worldly Philosophers by Robert Heilbroner is different than your standard philosophy textbook. Instead of focusing on standard philosophy topics like metaphysics (what is real?), epistemology (how do we know?), ethics (what should we do?), or logic (how should we think?), The Worldly Philosophers is concerned with a much more grounded subcategory of philosophy; economics. 

In point of fact, economics is not, strictly speaking, philosophy. It is rather a marriage between science and philosophy. Heilbroner calls the great economists worldly philosophers because they "sought to embrace in a scheme of philosophy the most worldly of all of man's activities-his for wealth."

Today we take for granted that economics is a discipline (even if we don't understand what it is), but this was not always the case. There was a time in history when humanity did not have a discipline devoted to predicting supply and demand. Instead, the survival of people groups was assured either by following tradition (do things the way your ancestors did them) or obeying authority (our rulers will whip us if we do not produce enough grain). It was only with the gradual development of the market system, in which individuals could pursue gains however they saw fit, that economics as a discipline became possible. 

In The Worldly Philosophers, Heilbroner us on an engaging and enlightening journey from ancient times to the present, tracing the development of economics. The most brilliant aspect of this book is its narrative form. Economics can be confusing, tiresome, or downright boring to those who do not have a general understanding of mathematics. This book tells the story of economics through the lives and contributions of great thinkers like Adam Smith, Parson Malthus, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen and John Maynard Keynes.

Whether you are a business owner looking to brush up on economic theory to stay competitive, or simply an interested consumer who is curious about the unseen forces driving everything from spending habits to international relations, The Worldly Philosophers is a must read!

Last time, I mentioned that to be secular is not to lose faith in God, or even to make ontological claims about God (if you're just joining, you may want to start reading here). Secularism is simply a lived statement of disenchantment: We no longer conceive of God as “outside” the universe in a primitive sense, dragging the sun through the sky with his chariot, nor “outside” in the sentimental sense, sitting on a golden throne in the sky looking down on us. Formerly mysterious and magical occurrences like freak weather patterns or catastrophic disease outbreaks are no longer attributed to magic or the supernatural, but rather to natural patterns of cause and effect.

In a letter dated June 8, 1944, Bonhoeffer put it this way:
The movement that began about the thirteenth century (I'm not going to get involved in any argument about the exact date) towards the autonomy of man (in which I should include the discovery of laws by which the world lives and deals with itself in science, social and political matters, art, ethics, and religion) has in our time reached an undoubted completion. Man has learnt to deal with himself in all questions of importance without recourse to the "working hypothesis" called "God." In questions of science, art, and ethics this has become an understood thing at which one now hardly dares to tilt. But for the last hundred years or so it has also become increasingly true of religious questions; it is becoming evident that everything gets along without "God"--and, in fact, just as well as before. As in the scientific field, so in human affairs generally, "God" is being pushed more and more out of life, losing more and more ground.

Human beings need purpose to survive. Sometimes survival is our purpose, but this is becoming rarer in the technology age. Once survival needs are met, we look for purpose in other places. This manifests itself in countless ways: the parent who finds purpose in raising a child, the student aiming at high grades and graduation day, the business man or woman seeking success, the politician working for re-election, the artist grappling with expression. ​

Purpose changes throughout our lives. You won't always be in school, your kids will move out, you'll retire or lose your job. These changes may cause you to lose your sense of purpose. Your world will be spinning. You'll feel anxious, you might even panic for a while until you find a new direction for your energy. This is normal.

​Book Review: The Myth of Religious Violence
by William Cavanaugh
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)
 
In The Myth of Religious Violence, William Cavanaugh argues that the concept of religion as a transhistorical and transcultural entity distinct from secular social features like politics is a mythic construct, not rooted in reality (3). As such, the notion that one can distinguish between violence motivated by religion and violence driven by other cultural, political and social motives is patently false. This is a careful, philosophical book, in which the author takes time to define his terms and explain exactly what his argument is and is not, using more examples than will interest most readers in the cause of being thorough (7).

Cavanaugh’s stated goal in writing The Myth of Religious Violence is to show that the distinction between the categories “religious” and “secular” is a false, western, modernist construction that only came into existence with the rise of the secular nation-state (3). Prior to this, religion and governance comingled so that it never occurred to declare violence either religious or non-religious. These categories had not yet been teased apart. By identifying violence with religion, westerners are able construe reality in their favor, creating a false sense of distance between “safe” secular institutions and “dangerous” religious institutions. Yet the ideologies and institutions deemed “secular” can be just as irrational and absolutist as those that are termed religious (6).
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To prove this thesis, Cavanaugh examines the motives behind the modern separation between politics and religion, showing that the violence occurring in religious communities has the same political and economic motivators as the violence that occurs among political and non-religious institutions. In fact, Cavanaugh goes so far as to say that since it is impossible to distinguish between religious and non-religious violence, the very notion of religious violence is a myth. Cavanaugh replaces this myth with a more nuanced and deeply rooted theory that violence arises from the socio-political, or “theopolitical” aims of various people groups (230). He achieves this through the following four steps.
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First, Cavanaugh explains the roots of the myth and shows how three common arguments used to defend the link between religion and violence fail (17). These arguments claim that religion causes violence because it is absolutist, divisive, and insufficiently rational (18). Cavanaugh engages nine thinkers who promote these arguments, carefully defeating each in order to make his case. Drawing on the likes of John Hick, Martin Marty, and Richard Wentz, Cavanaugh shows that the distinction between religious and secular violence is based on faulty a priori logic. To refer to religious violence, one must first assume that religious violence can be distinguished from violence arising from other sources. Cavanaugh maintains that this task is impossible. For example, the twentieth century debate over flag burning in the United States was understood as a secular conflict, yet was rife with language presenting the flag as a sacred totem that should not be desecrated. These secular claims are identical to the claims religious adherents make about their sacred objects (55). Despite the supposedly secular status, patriotism and the belief in the righteousness of one’s own national cause often results in the same absolutist, divisive and irrational behaviors blamed on religion. Cavanaugh’s purpose in this example is not to show the similarities between religious and secular violence, but to show that the evidence does not substantiate a distinction between religious and secular violence. Rather, the roots of violence are the same regardless of whether a conflict is termed religious or secular (56).

Cavanaugh’s second step is to explain the invention of religion as a transhistorical, transcultural entity. He wants to show that attempts to differentiate between the religious and the secular are based on false distinctions. To do this, he deconstructs essentialist definitions of religion, whether they take substantivist (religion is defined as awareness of the Transcendent) or functionalist (religion is that which includes certain practices) approaches (58). Cavanaugh points out that all such approaches fundamentally fail because there is no universally recognizable “essence of religion” (58). It is, in fact, “a constructed category” that only exists when used diametrically in opposition to the term “secular” (58). Moreover, the defining characteristics used by leading scholars of religion are simply arbitrary (59). Cavanaugh asks why certain configurations of power lead to denoting some things as religions, that in other circumstances are not considered religions. For example, Confucianism is often defined as a religion by Westerners, but its Eastern adherents regard it as irreligious (119). This leads to an appropriate question: “what practices and shifts in power occur when religion is so construed?” One such power shift is the validation of the nation state. When religion is considered to be categorically different than secular institutions, a negative bias is created against religion and secular institutions are then presented as unquestionably neutral and thus worthy of allegiance in a way that religion is not. Thus religion becomes “part of the legitimating mythology of the modern liberal state” (122). It is not a transcultural, transhistorical entity in and of itself.

Third, Cavanaugh examines what he calls the wars of religion myth (120). The term “wars of religion” applies to a number of conflicts between Catholics and Lutherans following the Protestant Reformation. Proponents of the wars of religion term claim that these were conflicts between two branches of Christianity, and therefore were religiously motivated. Cavanaugh points out that the truth is much more complicated. During these conflicts, Catholics often killed other Catholics, Lutherans other Lutherans, and so on (11). As such, the roots of violence included not only religious affiliation, but also political, economic, and social factors, and it is unclear how these factors should be weighted.
The rise of the nation state is commonly posed as the necessary triumph of secular policing institutions that made peace between warring religious factions in 16th and 17th century Europe. Cavanaugh argues that this presentation of the raw elements of history serves primarily as a myth legitimizing the use of force by nation-states (124). But the transfer of power from the church to the state did not result in a more peaceful Europe; it simply changed what people were willing to commit violence for (12).

Rather than presenting the “religious wars” as secular, as other scholars have attempted to do, Cavanaugh argues that they were the origin of the religious/secular distinction and thus the source of the myth of religious violence (124). To make this case he draws on Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, as well as current historiography and political theory to explain how these wars came to be presented this way. Additionally, he notes that it is impossible to separate the religious goals of violence from political, economical, or social goals.  In fact, it was often the attempt to achieve political or state power that caused much of the violence of the so-called “religious wars” (177). Therefore the religious wars do not promote the myth of religious violence, but in fact, are a primary source of the myth.

Fourth and finally, Cavanaugh looks to the uses of the religious myth. Using a wide range of historical and contemporary resources, he shows how the myth of religious violence has served to both justify and overlook atrocities performed in the name of nation states (228).  “Religious beliefs do not lurk essentially unchanged underneath historical circumstances, waiting to unleash their destructive power on the world” (229). This is because no transcultural, transhistorical and essentialist religion exists. In a telling example, Cavanaugh points out that it was the CIA , invoking military action against Russia during the Cold War, that reawakened the concept of jihad. Prior to U.S. action in 1979, jihad had been dormant for close to four hundred years (230).

In using the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, Cavanaugh is again reinforcing that religious and nonreligious action cannot be separated. Instead, he prefers the term “theopolitical,” and notes that all violence is best understood this way (230). In order to understand violence holistically, Cavanaugh proposes a test: “Under what conditions do certain beliefs and practices – jihad, the ‘invisible hand’ of the market the sacrificial atonement of Christ, the role of the United States as worldwide liberator – turn violent?” (8). When we neglect this question, we fail to understand the nuances and complexities of the forces that shape history and create violence.
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Cautious readers would do well to recognize Cavanaugh’s catholic faith as a powerful motivator in this project, for it is possible that his faith could predetermine his supposition that the religious/secular divide is an artificial construct. That being noted, his argument is strongly supported, easy to follow, and well organized. A professor of theology at DePaul University in Chicago, Cavanaugh also holds a law degree and has spent a portion of his career working for the Center for Human and Civil Rights at Notre Dame University. This unique constellation of experiences confirms Cavanaugh’s capability to undertake this bold project that challenges popular assumptions about the connections between religion and violence. ​

In a recent episode of On Being, Krista Tippett noted that, "Soundtracks, for some of us, become the music of our church." Where churches, temples and mosques function as communal gathering places to reflect and be transformed through encounters with the divine, to those who have ears to hear, the theater is a place where inspired storytelling experiences become vehicles for the Transcendent.