The Ambiguity of (Religious) Practice, Part 3

Part one is here, and part two is here. I gave some examples of the ambiguity of (religious) practice in earlier posts, and a recent series of articles in the New York Times on abusive prison practices put me in mind of this as well. (See articles here, here, here, and here.) It is important to use “religious practice” in a nuanced way when working on/with painful and destructive practices. It will not help to fall back into a bifurcated option of either reactively defending religions against all negative practices, or of simplistically blaming religion for the perpetuation of or indifference to practices that it can hardly reverse on its own.
I have found that adopting an intention for nuance and care for a layered approach is a prerequisite for working in the classroom (and in my writing) with the ambiguity of (religious) practice. (Not that it guarantees clarity or ease or success.) At the same time, it is important not to shy away from linking negative social practices to the operative religio-spiritual-secular ideologies at work in a culture. This is so whether looking at negative practices “within” religion (abusive or shaming practices, for example) or in the larger society (violence toward detainees or prisoners, in my earlier examples). That is why I still take an approach that I articulated in my book Witness to Dispossession (Orbis, 2008), understanding “spirituality” (or for that matter, its partner terms, “religion” and “secularity”) not only to be a warm, positive, empowering term, but as an ambiguous concept-experience-discourse. Spirituality, I argued there, is not only what lived experience (or its students) favor as building up the term with positive associations (meditation, reading, discernment, nature-mysticism), but should also be understood as what its invocation allows to take place. In other words, spirituality/religion/secularity in both invocation and formation make certain practices appear but also work to de-link themselves from other practices.
More on this and teaching in the next post.
Tom Beaudoin, Hastings-on-Hudson