I am not someone who likes to shop. In the past, when a girlfriend has invited me out to a Saturday shopping spree as a “fun” recreational activity, I have let it be known that I would find ritual seppuku a more attractive alternative to spending the day in and out of crowded stores. However, when my family and I recently moved out of the city and bought a 1920s home in small lakeside village, none of our modern stuff looked right in it. For both environmental and economic reasons, I decided to explore the world of estate sales and the realm of “pre-owned” everything. I expected of course to find a lot of old junk, but I did not expect the intimacy with which I would sift through peoples’ lives, nor did I predict the kind of stories my fellow tribe of estate sale hunters and I would share related to powerful assemblies of personal objects.

What hidden treasures or promising insights lurk in the mundane spaces where we don’t expect to find spirituality and religion—in the dark drawers we stumble upon where we might otherwise never think to look? How do objects, too often dismissed as “secular” and thus irrelevant to our research, possess a kind of spiritual power in people’s lives that offers us qualitatively different insights into the worlds they make and occupy? With essays on everything from espresso to cell phones, Frequencies addresses precisely these questions, but to colleagues who do not embrace this kind of approach, it may well seem a bit, well… eccentric. As I began to comb through the drawers and closets of strangers’ homes, their bathrooms and basements, sideboards and sun porches, I was taken into worlds of eccentricity, and became fascinated by what, through either downsizing or death, was left behind, especially the attentive care to various collections. What objects held some sort of compelling power in people’s lives to the point of inspiring devotional practice, if only for a time?

Since beginning my journey through the world of the “pre-owned,” I have poured over table after table of Lladro figurines, decorative spoons from destinations all over the world, assortments of “museum-quality” commemorative plates, and jumbo-sized plastic Container Store crates of Beanie Babies. Then there are the linens—the mountains beyond mountains of linens. This is how I met “Wendy,” who collects hand-embroidered linens from American estate sales and then sells them on the internet to her customers, mostly in China. “You’re sending linens to China?” I ask. “Isn’t that like coals to Newcastle? Aren’t most of them made there?” She explains that Chinese ladies want fine Irish linens with the real lace and hand-embroidery—the kind that would be handed down in American families. A tablecloth she picks up at estate sale for $2, for instance, she can turn around and sell for $25. “Americans don’t want them because you have to iron the darn things, and who has the time?” She tells me that there’s also a good resale market in Asia for more sentimental and hokey embroidered linens (a little girl with an umbrella, sun flowers, kittens, etc.). “Here, we think those things are kind of cheesy and in bad taste, but in Asia they are just crazy for the little girl sitting on the polka-dotted mushroom, or teddy bears having a tea party. And, oh my God, the shamrocks! They love anything with embroidered shamrocks. It adds value.” While contemplating shamrock-embroidered linens with soy sauce stains, I ask about dry cleaning instead of hand-ironing and why that might not be an option. “Well, it is except that it’s expensive and we don’t use nice tablecloths anymore anyway. Most people get them out once a year but have even switched that to nylon or polyester. In Asia they will hand wash and iron them, or at least the person working in their house will do it for them.” I ask if she resells any of the linens within the U.S. or if it’s all mail order to Asia. Wendy says almost none of her linens go to buyers here and declares America to be pretty much a post-linen tablecloth nation, adding “We just don’t have big formal events anymore, so they pile up and sit in the closet.”

In the wee hours of the morning, I have arrived three hours early at the door of a well-to-do woman in her late 90s who has recently passed away. It is a beautiful old home on a quiet hydrangea-lined lane of gracious Tudors and Georgians. I immediately make sure to get my name on “the list.” Turns out, I’m a latecomer. The hard-core hunters arrive at one and two in the morning at a promising sale site and start “the list.” They then sleep in their cars outside the house. When newcomers arrive, they must knock on car windows to find out who is guarding “the list.” The lore is that down in Chicago, anyone trying to “jump the list” gets shot by one of the dealers. Up here in the suburbs, you just get yelled at and shunned. No one ever lets you on the list ever again.

When the sale begins, entry numbers are given in order of who is on the list. Arriving only three hours in advance, I am number 27, but this still leaves a lot of waiting-around time to talk. Other hunters will ask you casually what you are looking for, and some of this chit-chat is “fishing” to see what kind of competition you are and whether they’ll have to hustle to beat you to an item. I have “newbie” written all over me, but I know enough to shrug and vaguely comment, “Oh, this and that . . . nothing in particular.” (In reality, I am b-lining for a 6×9 oriental rug that I suspect has been way under-valued.) I in turn ask the preppy blonde mom to my left what she is looking for. “Well, you can tell from the online photos that this lady just loved yellow, so that’s basically why I’m here. I think that shows, you know, a positive attitude—to fill your house with yellow. So, I knew her stuff would feel good in my house.” I end up buying two 1920s yellow formal living room chairs and an entire 1950s white wrought-iron sun porch dining set with six yellow cushions.

Photograph by Gina Bailey

On my various estate sale hunts, I routinely come across family Bibles, Books of Common Prayer, marriage licenses, old birth certificates, confirmation certificates, and First Holy Communion certificates with related memorabilia—all for sale. This surprised me at first because these seemed like intimate heirloom items that even retirees or the deceased’s family members would retain. But, in fact, these items appear fairly incidental and unremarkable in the topography of the seller’s home when compared to other carefully tended collections. In one home I sifted through, I found a few styles of Seder plates and menorahs in the dining room, mingled together in boxes with other holiday effects. I then turned the corner into the husband’s study and found it covered wall-to-wall in chest-high pillars of meticulously stacked Playboy magazines. It was like walking through one of those corn mazes we have here in the Midwest; this was a bumper crop of T&A as far as the eye could see. I marveled at the time and dedication it must have taken to amass this collection over the decades—the sheer devotion it took to obtain and retain each and every month of each and every year and to maintain it all in chronological order. The estate sale ad had said “downsizing sale,” so I knew that the seller was not deceased. I asked the estate sale monitor who was dutifully guarding the carefully curated playmates how someone could possibly part with something that had clearly been a decades-long devotion, involving so much of his life. He laughed and said, “He was really broken up about it. They’re moving down to Florida and the wife said that ‘the girls’ just couldn’t come. No room! But I think he rescued some favorites. I’ve been finding some gaps here and there, and this is not a guy who would be okay with gaps.” He then held up one of the covers and mimicked the playmate’s pouty-lipped face to express sympathy with the poor guy who had to leave “his girls” in order to follow his wife obediently down to a life of gray-haired retirement.

A few months into my estate sale crawl, I discovered that when sales are advertised as being a “real dig” or even “a bit of a dig,” this is code that the seller has been a something of a pathological collector along the lines of cartoonist R. Crumb. The old term for this was “pathological hoarding,” but the new and supposedly less pejorative term is “obsessive-compulsive collecting disorder.” The proposed description and diagnosis for this disorder in the upcoming fifth revised edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) offers the following description: “Persistent difficulty discarding or parting with possessions, regardless of the value others may attribute to these possessions. This difficulty is due to strong urges to save items and/or distress associated with discarding. The symptoms result in the accumulation of a large number of possessions that fill up and clutter active living areas of the home or workplace to the extent that their intended use is no longer possible. If all living areas are uncluttered, it is only because of the interventions of third parties (e.g., family members, cleaners, authorities). The symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning (including maintaining a safe environment for self and others).” I will confess that when it turned out that two of the three estate sale “digs” I first encountered happened to be the homes of retired college professors (seriously), I became a bit more self-conscious about my own home and office. On the other hand, that’s what we do—dig, sift, and collect; dig, sift, and collect. It is much neater and cleaner to focus on the self-evident realm of the religious—the family Bibles, the confirmation certificates, the menorahs, and the statues of Mary with the baby Jesus. I can compartmentalize and organize those things more readily. I know where to put them.

But what about the carefully kept shrines of tittie magazines and the holy sepulchres of Hummels? Where do I put them and the stories of their devotees? And what of the passing away of shrines over time, as with one woman’s reliquary of 165 pairs of fancy gloves, or closets stacked high with dusty embroidered linens—a vestige of holidays once celebrated in a way that no longer makes sense to most Americans. What was sacred once is no longer as lives shift and change and objects get discarded altogether, or they change hands and take on new meanings in new homes. Cast-off shamrocks that have lost their power in the U.S. take on a new life and become coveted symbolic treasures in their migration to Beijing tables. If, as Ray Browne has argued, popular culture studies are the “new humanities,” then what can cast-offs and collections tell us about American spiritualities and the religious dimensions of an ever-changing consumer culture?

I got a call late one Sunday night from an estate sale company letting me know that an antique library table I had put a low bid on never sold over the weekend, so my bid had won the item. I needed to pick it up immediately, as the house would be turned over to the new owners the following day. I arrived and picked up my prize table from the living room, and when I did, it left a dramatic pattern of the much-darker, much-older, presumably original floor finish it had been concealing beneath it. I was speculating on just how long this table had been sitting in the 90-plus-year-old woman’s home, when I realized that it rattled. Annoyed, I wondered what I had not seen in my initial inspection and worried about the drawer being broken. I brought the table home and when I took out the top drawer, I discovered the source of the rattle. At the very back of the drawer was what looked like a beautiful small hand-painted porcelain lady’s pillbox. When I opened it up, it turned out to be a small fancy matchbox instead. I tapped the antique gold-tipped matches into the palm of my hand and saw that there was a bit of folded paper lining the box. I opened it and read two words written on the slip of paper: “Yes. Promise.” In my romantic musings, I wondered if the box’s owner handed the little box to a suitor at a party to pass on this secret affirmative message (as in, “Yes. I’ll meet you. Promise.” Or, “Yes, I’ll marry you. Promise.”) or, perhaps this had been an issued mandate (“Yes. Take me away from all of this. Promise.”)

How many of us have shared the topics of our current research projects and heard the response, “But I thought you studied religion”? Scholars of religion must, and understandably so, appear at times to be compulsive collectors without rhyme or reason with our jumbled universe of sources creating a “bit of a dig.” Perhaps it is like being the R. Crumbs of Religious Studies. But, to paraphrase the DSM, “regardless of the value [the field] may attribute to these things,” and precisely because of the powerful meanings and stories people attach to them, these collections push our field to broaden, to move beyond the neatly-ordered Crate & Barrel versions that have conventionally defined our field to explore the recombinant culture of the estate sale. This kind of transgressive shift is always somewhat daunting. But it’s also exciting in the possibilities and yes, promise, it holds for reimaging what religion is, to naming it as the ultimate “remix culture.”

Of Coffee, Equations and the Scientific Sacred

I had just come from my undergraduate partial differential equations class and was in serious need of caffeine. We had completed our fourth straight day of lectures on the equations of a vibrating membrane. My head hurt and my hands where cramped from taking notes. Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) appear everywhere in mathematical physics. They provide scientists with the language to describe the evolution of collapsing clouds of interstellar gas, the nature of oscillating electromagnetic fields, and even the flow of traffic on a four-lane highway. By solving these equations in all their abstract glory the behavior of the real system can predicted, described, understood. It was very cool.

The going was tough though. Like constructing an invisible house of cards we had to spend the last few days building up a story based on theorems and postulates. Then, finally, we had enough background to really get started. The vibrating membrane was a general problem. The membrane could be a drumhead, the surface of a lake, or even the surface of a star. The professor taught us to use simple vibration patterns as a kind of grammar. He showed us how to add these simple patterns together and describe complex oscillations. Imagine, for example, the quick smack of a drumstick on a drum. Using what we had just learned we could, exactly and explicitly, describe every detail of the drumhead’s complex, evolving pattern of vibration by adding up lots of simple patterns.

I had filled up half a notebook with these four lectures. Now I was tired and needed a caffeine jolt. In the student cafeteria I got a Styrofoam cup, filled it up and the got in line to pay. In search of my wallet I put the cup down on an ice cream freezer. After extracting the needed $1.25, I reached for the cup and was stopped dead in my tracks. There it was, laid out with exquisite perfection, right in front of me.

The freezer was gently vibrating, set in motion by its small motor. Resting on the freezer, my coffee cup picked up these oscillations. On the coffee’s surface I saw the exact pattern I had just learned about in class. The ordered flow of the surface reflected florescent light from above revealing tiny circular ripples superimposed with crisscrossed radial stripes. The pattern was complex but ordered and stable. Ten minutes ago I had seen the exact same pattern represented as a long string of mathematical symbols or as a diagram drawn on graph paper. Now it was real. Now it was “true”. Suddenly the abstractions were alive for me. The mathematics was made manifest in motion. It was one of the most beautiful things I had seen or ever would see. There was a long moment before I was willing to exhale and get on my way. I had, in my way, just had encounter with the sacred character of human experience delivered to me through the prism of science.

Spirituality vs. The Sacred

“Spiritual But Not Religious” is the way many people describe themselves these days. It’s a term that drives a lot of others crazy. For those who happily describe themselves as religious, “Spiritual But Not Religious” can imply a dilution of faith and a rejection of the creed and doctrine which, for them, is an essential aspect of spiritual life.

Yet for people who happily describe themselves as atheist, “Spiritual But Not Religious” is a dodge—an attempt to get “the warm cozy feeling” of religious life without making the intellectual commitment to what they see as the central question: Does God exist?

Where should science lie on this spectrum of debate? Can someone still call themselves “spiritual” and hold fast to the principles of science?

Recently I participated in a Point of Inquiry podcast hosted by Chris Mooney that took on this question. I argued there (as I will here) that science is, indeed, an organic focus of the human sense of “spirit.” The key, of course, is that we must allow ourselves to adapt language to the living needs of those generations living now. But for me spirituality may not be the right word on which to focus this effort. The question is not one of science and spirituality but science and the sacred. For me thinking in terms of the sacred, or better yet what I call the sacred character of experience, provides a better frame for this discussion. As a practicing scientist (theoretical astrophysics), when I hear the word spiritual it leads to questions about the spirit as some kind of essence that lives above and beyond the world I study. If there is a spirit then I am forced to ask what is its origin and its dynamics—the same questions I would ask of any of the other “things” I have been trained to study. But turning to the sacred means a focus on experience and that changes the entire focus of the debate between science and “religion”.

First, lets deal with the oft-stated criticism that any attempt to adapt or enlarge language for new purposes represents nothing more than “invention.” If we are looking to avoid connotations of the supernatural—which I am—why try and use “sacred” to mean anything other than what people think it means: God. The answer is simple, even if there are a number of ways to reach it.

Every generation has the right, indeed the responsibility, to take the language it was given, listen to its resonances and use them for the purposes at hand. To do anything less would be to kill the language through atrophy. In a sense this is what scholar Elaine Pagels means when she talks about “creative misreading” of earlier texts in a religious tradition.

But there is another reason for turning to the “sacred” rather than the “spiritual” in a scientific age. It’s an old, old word whose roots are in Roman temple architecture. One meaning of “Sacer” is to be “set apart”. In Roman temples it meant the interior where visitors needed to be attentive to the needs of the gods. Outside the sacer you could do anything you wanted including selling walnuts or old 8-track tapes of the Commodores Greatest Hits. Inside however you were expected to pay attention to a different quality of experience.

The concept of attention in this context is key. Attention and the sacred always go together which is why 20th century scholars of religion like Mircea Eliade emphasized the sacred in their attempts to describe its vital role in the 50,000-year history of human culture.

For Eliade the sacred was an experience, it was the eruption of a certain kind of attention, a certain kind of position with respect to the world. The sacred often appears to us in the middle of our “profane” everyday activities. We are taking a walk in the park thinking about what we have to do tomorrow and—bam!—suddenly we see the breathtaking tangle of vines curling around a tree or the deep stillness of the robin sitting attentive on its branch. This shift in attention is exactly what happened to me that day in the cafeteria. I was just buying a cup of coffee but my experience was suddenly, radically transformed when my attention was shifted through the lens of the science I had just learned. The breathless excitement that overwhelmed me (and I had not even touched the coffee yet) came because I felt as though I was seeing the invisible superstructure of the world laid before me even in the most humble of objects. Science—specifically the mathematical physics of elastic surfaces—made that experience of the sacred possible.

Eliade’s point was that much of human history has been the attempt to cultivate such experiences, to draw them out and bring them closer. Their efficacy is why the best of our churches, temples and mosques harbor a profound quiet and stillness that even an atheist like me can feel. The construction of those buildings reflects not only awful power politics and all it entails, these temples also contain our ancient and ongoing attempt to evoke the sacred in the world. If they didn’t, the populations institutional religion so often sought to control would never have shown up. Eliade has rightfully been criticized for implying a universalism to all those experiences. There are differences between cultures and ages, and those differences are important. But as writers like Wendy Doniger in The Implied Spider has shown, difference need not force away unity. As a scientist I know the world always pushes back and our response to the world—including the sacred character of experience—is one way it pushes back into us.

Eliade even had a word for the experience I had that day: hierophany. This was his expression for the eruption of the sacred into our lives. Just as an epiphany can relate to ideas, a hierophany relates to experience—the experience of the sacred.

It is at this point that we can see the connection, and the usefulness, of the sacred to a world saturated with the fruits of science. For all its usefulness in developing technology, science is elementally a path to hierophany. The insight and all-embracing vision of life (and cosmos) so apparent though science is also gateway to the experience of the sacred.

It always has been.

From the Pythagorean Brotherhood’s contemplation of mathematical beauty to Kepler’s elation on finding the true geometric form of planetary motion, science has provided us with experiences of the world as sacred. It is an experience that is not reserved for scientists.

The fruits of science manifest in culture in many ways: from HST images to the narratives of life’s origin. These fruits are often presented in a way that is meant to explicitly invoke that “oceanic feeling,” as Freud would call it. From NOVA programs to IMAX movies, we are often given our culture’s pathway to experience the sacred through science. If we cannot immediately recognize that science plays this role as hierophanic pathway in culture it is only because we have been steeped in a polarization between fundamentalist religion and science for so long that we have been trained not to see it.

The reflexive rejection of words like sacred by many who reject institutional religion is misguided. It is, without a doubt, true that a great and real danger we face today is the rejection of science by religious literalism. But to ignore the essential aspect of being human in these experiences—called sacred by some and spiritual by others—is to miss the ancient resonance in these words. They are, in their essence, atoms of a poetry to which we have always responded.

In this remarkable historical moment we face existential challenges that demand an informed deployment of science. In response, the question before us becomes how to marshal the resonance in words like “sacred.” We will, without doubt, need its poetics as we build the next version of culture our evolution now demands. Science reveals an elemental poetry in the world that has always been experienced as a hierophany. That essentially aesthetic economy of form and relation must now be recognized for what it is and what it always has been—a gateway to the sacred character of our own, inmost experience.

The most important item on my agenda when traveling home to “the old country” is scheduling some time with a German stylist. Not only do these visits keep me up-to-date in terms of hairstyles but they allow me to immerse myself in a wealth of “lifestyle,” “fashion,” and “wellness” magazines. Amica, Die Bunte, and Meine Freundin, to name just a few, provide a wealth of information for how their primarily-female audience can lead fuller lives. As a scholar of religion, I was thus tickled when, beginning in the 2000s, a new feature appeared alongside the usual advice on dieting, exercise, work-life-balance, and sex: spirituality.

Amica, for example, states that spirituality is not a word that refers to the allegedly dubious practices of card reading or palmistry but one that expresses a “feeling of faith beyond all religions.” This source of energy “between mind and matter” points to a dimension of our lives that, if we cultivate it, can lead to more contentment and freedom. Thus, in Amica, I can find not only the “Sex-Check” to discern whether I am more prone to wild or romantic erotic encounters but also the “Enlightenment-Check.” This test allows me to measure how far I have advanced on the path to developing my “true spiritual being.”

When I first encountered spirituality in these magazines, I suspected that its arrival in German stylist salons finally proved Max Weber right. After all, the intense individualization of “spirituality” could be understood as a prime example for the privatization and commoditization of religion in modernity. In secular societies, one could say, religion becomes so profoundly privatized and disconnected from its traditional contexts that its remnants appear open for individual and market manipulation in the form of “spirituality,” a point Jeremy Carrette and Richard King explored in their Selling Spirituality: the Silent Takeover of Religion. A prime location for the new commodity “spirituality” is the market of self-improvement products, as witnessed not only by my lifestyle magazines but also by the flurry of offerings for the “spirituality for managers,” breathing techniques for teachers, and the like. I will become a better me through developing my spiritual self. And Amica helps me to see how far I’ve come and how far I still have to go. As the new dimension of human flourishing, the spiritual makeover is promised and facilitated by a market product, namely the magazine and the places for its consumption, like my stylist’s salon. As I am waiting for my body’s transformation I can muse on the improvement of my spirit as well.

But becoming a better self is not to be understood as a private Emersonian imperative. And the workings of religion in modern societies and states are more complex than a simple privatization paradigm would make it seem. Precisely as a market commodity in the service of self-transformation, the discourse of spirituality subtly relates to ideals of citizenship, particularly in the context of makeover culture. How and where we do our shopping—or invest in transforming our homes, bodies, and spirits—determines our access to social capital. As Brenda R. Weber’s Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity showed, the ideas of self-improvement and self-transcendence are an integral part of North Atlantic cultural enfranchisement.

But let me return to my magazines. Meine Freundin Wellfit ran an article in 2009 about four women who successfully transformed their lives. The piece begins: “Finding spirituality. Loving your body again. Being free, finally.” The first portrait describes a woman who, after outwardly fulfilling work in international politics, moves to a “Tibetan-Buddhist” monastery to live and study. She founds a charity in support of “little monks,” teaches English, and helps out at the hospital. “I am happy every day to have found the life that fits me,” she says, summarizing her transformation. The second portrait presents to us a nurse who lost weight with the help of Weight Watchers, Pilates, and a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella, while the third is of a former successful lawyer who finds love with a goat-herder in an Alpine village. The last portrait tells the story of a woman who, as the child of “Turkish guest-workers,” had to break radically with her controlling parents to be freely herself and find romantic love where she wishes.

In German folk-ethnology as Chantal Munch and her colleagues Marion Gemende and Steffi Weber-Unger Rotino demonstrated in Eva ist emanzipiert, Mehmet ist ein Macho, the non-German Turkish other is profoundly linked with a sexually-restrictive Islam. It seems clear that the image of a controlling Turkish family evokes a vision of negative religion. In fact, since the 1970s, it has been a trope in German discourse about immigration to contrast the “emancipated” German against patriarchal migrant sexuality. Thus, it would be highly unlikely to find in magazines like Meine Freundin a testimony of a teacher who, based on her “spirituality,” for example, began piously wearing a veil in her classroom. Instead, in subtly playing on the trope of allegedly “traditional Islamic migrant sexuality” this portrait re-inscribes the boundary between German and migrant culture. Moving from the later to former requires a radical break with traditional (read: Islamic) origins.

For the article in Meine Freudin, spirituality is not only a central ingredient of the politics of the makeover. Rather, it also plays a subtle role in differentiating socially acceptable religion that enhances a positive transformation (Tibetan Buddhism) from unacceptable religion (the Islam of the “Turkish-guest workers”). In both functions, “spirituality” contributes to sending clear signals about what we need to do in order to be transformed into good Germans. In other words, attention to “spirituality” teaches us that the privatization of religion is only one move in its intricate dance with the modern state and society. Privatized religion’s contribution to the policing of citizenship via market forces is the other.

Waiting my turn at the stylist and reading about spiritual transformation and emancipation in Amica and Meine Freundin, I wonder: How will a woman who works in or frequents this salon, and who is also a daughter of Turkish immigrants, receive this story of emancipated sexuality? What will the other middle-class customers make of it? It seems clear to me that we who linger at the salon learn not only about the latest fashion but also take home an important lesson about what it takes to “integrate” oneself into what German newspapers call the “majority society.” Spirituality will make you free and help you become, at last, a “true” German.

I understand spirituality as the contemplative and introspective process of answering the ultimate questions of meaning, purpose, and identity. According to this perspective, everyone is spiritual insomuch as everyone is deeply invested in the ultimate questions in their lives. The search for meaning and purpose not only defines us as humans, but also differentiates us as individuals, and I believe that our spiritual lives are intimately and intricately intertwined with our human identities. In this regard, I agree with the French theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who emphasized the primacy of spirituality for humans—“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

As the dean of religious life at the University of Southern California, I oversee many programs, events, and opportunities exploring religious and spiritual life on campus. I often ask university students what they think the difference is between religion and spirituality, and most of the time, their answers focus on the notion that religion is for communities while spirituality is for individuals. My favorite response was from a computer science student, who likened religion and spirituality to close-source and open-source software systems, respectively.

Among this generation of university students, often called the millennial generation, many self-identify as “spiritual but not religious.” According to studies and polls, the millennial generation is less interested in traditional liturgy and religious dogma, and more interested in community service and spiritual exploration. They are also the first generation of students in American history to state consistently that finding meaning and purpose is a personal aspiration and a primary career goal, an approach that brings together the spiritual and the professional in their lives.

Accordingly, we have oriented the Office of Religious Life at the University of Southern California around “meaning” as opposed to “God.” As a result, we engage with our entire university community and not just those who self-identify as religious. We have also developed initiatives around spirituality and sports, spirituality and science, and spirituality and the arts. These combinations have enabled us to have conversations about the ultimate questions across many disciplines and university domains. Our shift recognizes the generational change in how Americans construct and imagine spirituality in their lives, and our programming specifically focuses on convening the unique spiritual and scholarly resources on our campus and in our city.

From feng shui to holistic medicine, from aromatherapy candles to yoga weekends, from Christian mystics to New Age gurus, spirituality is big business. We now see the introduction of modes of spirituality into educational curricula, bereavement and addiction counseling, psychotherapy and nursing. Spirituality as a cultural trope has also been appropriated by corporate bodies and management consultants to promote efficiency, to extend markets and to maintain a leading edge in a fast-moving information economy. Spirituality is celebrated by those who are disillusioned by traditional institutional religions and seen as a force for wholeness, healing and inner transformation. In this sense spirituality is often taken to denote the positive aspects of the ancient religious traditions, unencumbered by the ‘dead hand’ of the church, and yet something which provides a liberation and solace in an otherwise meaningless world. However, is this “feel good” term always what it is advertised to be?

Capitalist spiritualities involve the subordination and exploitation of religious themes and motifs to promote an individualist or corporate-oriented pursuit of profit for its own sake. They have emerged in response to the rise of global finance capitalism, the shift to post-Fordist modes of production and the growing cultural influence of transnational corporations and neoliberal models of governance. Like the individualist or consumerist spiritualities of the 1960s and 1970s upon which such trends have developed, they tend to be ‘de-traditionalized’ and syncretic in nature. Use whatever you like, as long as it works. As the postmodern spiritualities of globalization and new information technologies these trends mirror the deregulation of economic markets and the easy transfer of electronic data across national boundaries. Unlike the individualist spiritualities of the Sixties and Seventies however, such trends remain institutionally embedded and represent an uncritical assimilation of business values into their rationale. What characterizes such trends is a subtle shift beyond an exclusive emphasis upon the individual self and towards a concern with making the individual employee/consumer function as effectively as possible for the benefit of corporate organizations and the global economy.

Many scholars have suggested that what we have seen emerge in the last few decades of the twentieth century is something new, which has been variously described as “New Age capitalism,” “millennial capitalism,” or, as David Loy has written, “the most successful religion of all time … the religion of the market.” Yet, in many respects the ‘free market’ values embodied in these ascriptions are not particularly new. In 1944 Karl Polanyi traced similar tensions and issues to the Industrial Revolution. However, the intersection of such an ideology with the collapse of Soviet communism, the rise of globalization, the proliferation of new communications technologies, and the possibility of mass advertising saturation through corporate-owned media outlets have moved the free-market agenda onto an unprecedented scale. However one chooses to characterize these developments they now offer a significant challenge to the indigenous civilizations and ancient cultures of the world that they are in the process of colonizing, strip-mining and transforming. Harvey Cox describes the long historical arc of markets and their relation to religion in this passage:

Since the earliest stages of human history, of course, there have been bazaars, rialtos and trading posts—all markets. But The Market was never God, because there were other centers of value and meaning, other “gods”. The Market operated within a plethora of other institutions that restrained it. As Karl Polanyi has demonstrated in his classic work The Great Transformation, only in the past two centuries has The Market risen above these demigods and chthonic spirits to become today’s First Cause.

It is in this particular market moment that we consider the meaning of the term spirituality. For historians, the term “spiritualité” seems to have first emerged in seventeenth century France (as did its close relation–“la mystique”) where it was associated with the devout or contemplative life in general and it is from this word that we derive the modern English term “spirituality.” By this time, the Protestant Reformation, with its emphasis upon the individual’s unmediated relationship to God and the importance of an interior faith had created a climate within European Christianity which allowed the first steps towards the privatization of religion to occur. Thus, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, influenced by figures such as Madame Guyon (1648-1717), a new sensibility began to emerge which specifically associated spiritualité with the interior life of the individual soul.

The development of the modern notion of spirituality as an interiorized experience was inflected in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the European colonial encounter with Asia and the growing influence of the science of psychology as an authoritative discourse of the human condition. There have been countervailing trends that associated “spirituality” with the struggle for social justice. Yet the predominant trend has been to see the “spiritual” as a discourse associated with the private, individual self.

By the second half of the twentieth-century, religion had entered the marketplace of human choice and experimentation, resulting of course in the development of that eclectic and amorphous phenomenon known today as ‘the New Age.” All of these factors have had a profound impact upon the reception of Asian religious traditions and philosophies in the western world where they have overwhelmingly been translated into introspective and otherworldly spiritualities concerned primarily with the achievement of individual enlightenment with little in the way of a social conscience or orientation to change the world in which that individual lives. Indeed, for someone like Paul Heelas, this individualistic focus means that the New Age movement can best be characterized as a loose network of “self-religions” or “spiritualities of the self.” We might call this process the individualization of religion.

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It is often recognized that, since the Enlightenment, organized religion has been subjected to an erosion of its social authority with the rise of scientific rationalism, humanism and modern, liberal democratic models of the nation-state (a process often called secularization). In modern western societies, to varying degrees, this has usually manifested itself as the relegation of “the religious” to the private sphere. What has not been sufficiently appreciated by contemporary social theorists however is that the later stages of this process have become intimately intertwined with the global spread of corporate capitalism. We can describe both of these trends as the privatization of religion, but in two distinct senses.

In the first instance, the European Enlightenment led to an increased tendency to exclude religious discourse from the public domain of politics, economics and science. In the main this was achieved by representing ‘the religious’ primarily in terms of individual choice, beliefs, and private states of mind. For philosophers such as John Locke and Immanuel Kant, it was important to demarcate the precise domain in which religion should be located, in order to preserve the secular space of liberal political governance from the conflicts, intolerance and violence arising from the conflict between competing religious ideologies and groups within European societies. Religion in this context becomes a matter of personal assent to a set of beliefs, a matter of the private state of mind or personal orientation of the individual citizen in the terms set out for it by modern (i.e. Enlightenment-inspired) liberalism. A consequence of this approach is that, in different ways and variegated forms, religion has been formally separated from the business of statecraft in contemporary Northern European societies (though with different inflections and degrees of smoothness).

In the late twentieth century, however, there has been a second form of privatization, and this has been largely ignored in the sociological literature on the subject. This trend partially builds upon the previous process, but also has important discontinuities with it. It is linked to the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, the end of the Cold War and the global emergence of a triumphalist form of corporate-oriented capitalism, intent on spreading its influence across the globe. The second privatization that this cultural phenomenon represents partially builds upon the previous individualization of religion, but also has important discontinuities with it. Generally speaking, it can be characterized as a wholesale commodification of religion that is the selling off of religious buildings, ideas, and claims to authenticity in primary service to profit.

In the context of this unprecedented cultural bombardment of information, images, and advertising through the various mass media we are witnessing a wholesale commodification of our varied cultural histories and traditions. The practices, texts, and belief-systems of ancient traditions are now routinely exploited for their cultural capital with the purpose of increasing consumption and corporate profit. Much of the conceptual work for achieving this is carried out by the modern concept of spirituality. Marketing the spiritual allows companies and their consumers to pay lip service to the rich and historically significant religions of the world whilst at the same time distancing themselves from any engagement with the specific world-views and forms of life that they represent. Religion is re-branded as “spirituality” and the net result is the vigorous promotion of the ideology of capitalism. This emerging phenomenon is what Jeremy Carrette and I have coined “capitalist spirituality.”

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We do not need Karl Marx or Max Weber to tell us that those traditions classified as ‘religions’ in the modern consciousness have always been bound up with economics and more generally with modes of exchange. However, a fundamental ground shift has taken place in North American and British cultural politics in the last twenty years, one specifically tied to the deregulation of the markets by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, and this is changing the relationship of cultural forms to the market. At the beginning of the twenty-first century what it means to be human has been increasingly influenced by a discourse of rational choice, game theory, and the notion of homo economicus. The language of the market, of competition, consumption, of built-in obsolence and auditing has exerted an influence upon more and more dimensions of life in capitalist societies. Passengers, hospital patients, students become customers, citizens become consumers, and employees become “human resources.”

How has this general cultural shift affected the realm of “the religious”? With the emergence of capitalist forms of spirituality we are seeing a shift in relation to the ethico-cultural space traditionally inhabited by ‘the religions’ in terms of its increasing subordination to a particular economic ideology. Entering public institutions that provide education, health-care and professional expertise within society as a whole, the ideologies of consumerism and business enterprise are now infiltrating more and more aspects of our lives. The result of this shift has been a curtailment of the social and ethical concerns associated with religious traditions and communities and the subordination of “the religious” and the ethical to the realm of economics, which is now rapidly replacing science (just as science replaced theology in a previous era), as the dominant mode of authoritative discourse within society. Capitalism and consumerism have become, for many today, a powerful life-orienting ideology—a new world religion, and “spirituality” is at the frontline of the missionary activity to spread this religion and its impoverished view of the human around the globe.

I once crawled on all fours on an auditorium stage where John Cage sat. That’s an odd confession but an apt image to begin thinking about what we mean by the word “spirituality” or—a more productive task—to begin thinking about which part of speech it is. Is “spirituality” a noun? A verb? Something else?

That spring night in 1991 at Miami’s Subtropics Music Festival, Cage had just finished an hour and a half performance of what he called “spoken music.” He had patiently—if guardedly—answered my question about Buddhism’s influence on his work, an issue he’d addressed before in print and at the podium. Yes, he said again, he owed a debt to Buddhism, though he wasn’t sure he’d say he’s Buddhist. After the Q&A that Friday night, three young music students and I—then an assistant professor of religion—asked if we could see the score. In response, the seventy-nine year old Cage quickly and generously dropped it on the stage. The pages fanned out across the smooth surface. As Cage sat nearby on stage after the performance, we then crawled around to reassemble the text and eagerly started reading to learn more about what had just happened in that auditorium.

What had happened prior to my onstage crawling was not immediately clear. Even afterward, some who spent their life thinking about the arts were not sure. The Miami Herald’s experienced music critic James Roos affirmatively answered his own question, “Was Cage putting us on?” The reviewer described how the influential composer had “sat on stage with ‘score’ propped on a music stand, slowly turning pages and drawing unintelligible sounds into a microphone adjusted at mouth level: Ouh … uhh … prawem … pshr … duh-suht.” Then followed, the reporter observed, “several minutes of silence, as the rapt audience waited breathlessly for this next meaningless syllable to emerge: Sipp …utt …pooot …rrrr.” That account also accurately recorded the audience’s response. We heard “isolated interruptions” (including “purposely jangled keys”) and “after an hour or so went by, there were giggles here and there in the audience, mingled with coughs and the shufflings of listeners squirming in their chairs. Little by little, they began exiting…” At the end of my row, a gray-haired man gently elbowed a woman next to him. He then extended his arms with upturned palms to silently pose a question—what’s going on? A few minutes later that couple exited the concert hall in a huff. As they did, she said aloud what many others were thinking: “This is ridiculous.”

Was it? The Herald critic sided with those who had concluded the performance was a “hoax,” but he granted that for some audience members “this Cage ‘concert’ may have been a near-religious new music experience.” The critic’s adjectival phrase (“near-religious”) was interesting since, as Cage had acknowledged, religious texts and practices had shaped his understanding of the arts, including music, dance, poetry, and visual art. As we stage crawlers learned, the performance that night was an excruciatingly slow-paced recitation of a single passage from the writings of Henry David Thoreau, whose work had been a source of inspiration for Cage since 1967.

Even decades earlier Cage had encountered baffled and infuriated audiences, as with those at New York City’s Artist’s Club who attended the performance of his 1949 “Lecture on Nothing.” That piece repeated the rhythmic structure he had used in his innovative musical compositions of the time, including Sonatas and Interludes. It began “I am here.” Then, after the first of many patterned pauses, it continued “and there is nothing to say.” Part of the lecture’s structure came from the repetition—he said it fourteen times—of the refrain “If anyone is sleepy let him go to sleep.” That lecture was not universally embraced, as Cage recalled:

Jeanne Reynal stood up part way through, screamed, and then said, while I continued speaking, ‘John, I dearly love you, but I can’t bear another minute.’ She then walked out. Later, during the question period, I gave one of six previously prepared answers regardless of the question asked. This was a reflection of my engagement in Zen.

Cage continued to claim Zen’s influence. His introduction to Zen had come in a 1936 lecture by Nancy Wilson Ross on “Dada and Zen Buddhism.” He was very impressed, Cage recalled, because both cultural forms seemed to champion “experience and the irrational rather than…logic and understanding.” He later attended D.T. Suzuki’s lectures at Columbia University and even visited that Zen Buddhist popularizer in Japan.

Cage and many other American artists and intellectuals of his generation selectively and creatively appropriated the “Buddhism” that circulated so widely in books, magazines, television, and museums to meet their own needs. That piety— especially what I call Suzuki Zen—could meet varied needs because it had been removed from its institutional context (the discipline of the monastery and the authority of the priest) and from its ritual forms (the rigors of seated meditation and the aims of kōan practice). Liberated from the constraints of precedent, Buddhism could become almost anything in the transnational flow of representations. It was an almost blank slate onto which Americans, including Cage, could inscribe their own desires. And Cage became one of the primary conduits of this aestheticized Zen that emphasized the value of the ordinary and cherished spontaneity, experience, humor, and freedom. It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t “authentic” according to someone else’s standard; it doesn’t matter that the Zen he enacted wasn’t exactly what a practitioner at a Kyoto temple might have encountered. It only mattered that it resonated with American intellectuals’ concern to challenge the predominant expressions of Christianity and the presuppositions of post-war culture.

In that cultural context—and still now—what Cage accomplished was to prompt useful questions, as he’d done in his 1949 and 1991 performances. The outraged questions assumed varied forms but most were more or less articulate versions of the urgently gestured inquiry I witnessed at the Miami event: What’s going on? In artistic circles, by generating that question Cage extended the boundaries of what constituted “art” to include the giggles, shuffling, coughs, and jangled keys we heard that night in Miami.

For scholars of religion, remembering Cage helps in other ways. It reminds us that any adequate analysis of contemporary piety will need to do more than count adherents. We have to assess the hard-to-measure cultural impact of representations and practices. Sometimes sheer numbers of new Americans have prompted change, as with the transformations produced by the migration of Roman Catholics in the nineteenth century. In other cases, as with U.S. Buddhism after 1945, cultural influence has been disproportionate to numbers. So whatever “spirituality” is, it has less to do with the number of people in the pews—or on the zafus—and more to do with media flows, as with the circulation of Cage’s Zen through print culture, performance spaces, and intellectual conversation.

Finally, remembering Cage also helps us to answer the question I posed at the start: which part of speech is the word “spirituality”? It’s not a noun, it’s not a something. It’s not even a nothing. Or a preposition, a relational plank bridging a this and a that. It’s more like a verb, an action, a doing. It’s something done. Yet what’s done is the act of asking a question. Most of all, Cage helps us notice, “spirituality” is an interrogative. It’s a placeholder for a series of productive but unanswerable questions, just as the term “art” is. Where is art? Not where you think, Cage proposed. In a similar way, “spirituality” initiates an inquiry: What is the religious? When is the religious? Where is the religious? The term offers only tentative and negating responses: not what you think, not when you think, not where you think. The category marks the boundary between the prescribed and the practiced, between the churches and everyplace else, between scheduled rituals and everyday life. The incomplete responses that the interrogative prompts serve as a useful starting place for inquiries into what people value most in contemporary America. But maybe even those nay-saying non-answers are too final and fixed for the complexity that the term interrogates. Perhaps when someone asks what “spirituality” is we should just borrow the first of the six scripted rejoinders Cage repeated to his annoyed audience that night in 1949: “That is a very good question. I should not want to spoil it with an answer.”

“I wouldn’t say I’m a spiritual person.” This from a man I’d phoned as my expert witness on spirituality, Ray, a pastor I’d grown to adore and admire during my stint undercover at his church. “I don’t even like to say I’m religious.”

Well, great. When I’d emailed to see if Ray had any free time to tell me what spirituality was, he had kicked me a definition that lit up a rope of lights to the David Foster Wallace Kenyon College commencement address I so loved, and that connection had made me think he’d have answers.

The Kenyon address seemed to offer the antidote to the alienations of modern experience represented in such delectable detail in Wallace’s books—our love affairs with screens, the cognitive dissonance we construct to live with the senseless nightmares of existence: our appetites, pouring ceaselessly into the unfillable emptiness inside; the irrepressible feeling that we’re forever alone. The Kenyon address said, leverage up on something greater than yourself to meet those forces with a beam of compassion.

“What is spirituality?” Ray had written to me. “In short, the non-physical. Being spiritual means living for something larger than yourself.”

The echo there revived the hopeful feeling I’d had writing In the Land of Believers—that evangelical Christians and the rest of us were more the same than different.

But on the phone, Ray resisted talking to me about spirituality. Christianity, he told me, was “more like a relationship. Like the one I have with my wife. It’s a commitment to Jesus Christ. It doesn’t mean I get everything that I want. There’s certainly been a lot of days and a lot of heartache, but I tell you I don’t know how people live without it, all alone. He never promises to take me out of pain, but He does promise to go with me.”

God’s thereness and its relation to spirituality—perhaps I’m the last person who should try cracking this stuff. I don’t believe in any supernatural-type situation, no kind god with soft hands or angry god with whirling hair, no presence, no powerful witch with the face of a spider, no pulsing orb that knows our secrets and accepts us still, and even after two years undercover at Jerry Falwell’s church I still don’t even know what anyone means by spirituality. Once, when I rolled my eyes at his friendly invitation to watch a Christmas movie starring Nicholas Cage, my stepdad told me I wasn’t a spiritual person. What was that supposed to mean? That I was a snob? I talked too much? Couldn’t experience mindless pleasure? Was I a cynic? A bad hugger?

When people tell me they are spiritual, first I think of healing crystals and astral charts, a lock of white hair tied to the end of a stick, drum circles and dreamcatchers, the cosmic juice between us all, man, synchronicity as a sign of some kind of, like, churning force!

Shaking off the stardust, I turn to thinking that the Spiritual Person probably has cobbled together a set of private beliefs they don’t really feel like explaining. After one of my best friends almost died in a car accident, he custom designed a personal program based on the Beatitudes, Buddhism, and Emerson. It verges on genius, and it is a spirituality. Religion is a form you sign; spirituality is ideas. But if we each get to decide what spirituality means, what the freak is spirituality?

See how terrible I am at this? Spirituality is one of those annoyingly flexible words like freedom, a blankness that invites our self-centered definition to scribble itself all over the big dry erase board of its name.

In Andre Comte-Sponville’s excellent morsel of meditation, The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, he writes that “we are finite beings that open onto infinity.” That’s better. Let me request that you suppress the word spirituality for two seconds, and instead invite you to open onto the ethereal atmosphere between us, weather, vibes, the forever stuff, our flickering understanding of what connects us, and what connects us all to eternity. Sometimes it’s there, locking us into all the life around us, calling us to unbind the narrow corset of our own needs and serve the world with compassion, to transcend, to tap into what Wallace called the “mystical oneness”; sometimes it’s just us with our one aging slab of flesh and our bag of snack carrots and the flat screen in front of us.

Two questions: what does that unreliable connection thing do for us? And does a person need a higher power to stabilize it?

As far as I can tell, the main reason for finding a practice whereby you can refresh your connection to the forever stuff is that it sustains us in the bad places, and it helps us be resiliently our best compassionate selves, no matter what the circumstances. I struggle with this! Sometimes I feel downright selfish! Sometimes, when a person asks for a bite of my granola bar, this evil little voice inside says, What about ME?

The practice: I’m not about to throw down and say that religious people are any better at knifing their inner troll than the rest of us, but I can say that most of the people I’ve known who can levitate over their rolling moods and be the person they believe they ought to be practice religion. Ray was this way. He held out the same warm hand to everyone, always. When I told him I’d lied to him about being a Christian so that I could write a book about his church he was shocked, asked a few questions, sipped his soda, and forgave me. Maybe he could tell me about spirituality. Maybe he was the most spiritual person I’d ever known.

According to him, he wasn’t. But could he tell me—what was a spiritual person?

“A spiritual person is the searcher, the pioneer looking for the land of milk and honey. I’ve found the land of milk and honey, but I do have responsibility there. It’s hard! I’m not a robot. But when you’re committed, it’s easy to forgive. It’s easy to do the right thing.”

Can I extrapolate from this? Can I make an evangelical Christian’s version of spirituality approximate an atheist’s? I’ll try: maybe we can say that spirituality is the system we design to make doing the right thing feel easy.

Vern: What does it look like?

Davis: Well, like nothing actually.

Vern: I can look at the lake and our Chicago skyline while I walk. Isn’t that enough?

Davis: I’m glad I ran into you. My four-year old heard someone mention the spiritual and asked me what it was, I mean what it is.

Vern: Tell him it’s the wind through the trees.

Davis: I don’t think he’s going to buy that.

Vern: You’re a lawyer, you should be able to come up with something persuasive.

Davis: You would think so, but he just doesn’t let it go with my vague declarations. It’s like he can smell uncertainty.

Vern: What did you try?

Davis: Something about the trinity…

Vern: And you didn’t get very far?

Davis: Then I tried something about a state of mind…

Vern: I’m not sure that this was just a communication problem.

Davis: I know, that’s why I’m glad I ran into you.

Vern: I’m no guru.

Davis: Still, you get paid to think.

Vern: Let’s start there, then.

Davis: Where?

Vern: Getting paid. No, with thinking. And let’s walk. [pause] What do you think spirit, or spirituality, is?

Davis: Some kind of awareness of the ineffable, I suppose. Spirit can’t be known, spirituality is our awareness of something that can’t be known.

Vern: That’s a funny thing to say. It sounds like an inability, something mute.

Davis: I mean, if you could communicate it, it wouldn’t be what it is. There wouldn’t be any point to the word spirit if it were some object like any other.

Vern: But if we’re talking about it, we aim to understand. There are limits to what we can understand, but we can talk about these limits, and experiment with them. So you think spirituality is a kind of consciousness, something in you?

Davis: It’s like we’re the access point, but there should be something outside us that stands against us but speaks to us.

Vern: I mean, you can always point beyond yourself. There’s the horizon, right there, beyond which I cannot see. You say, I’m not the one, there’s something bigger than me, bigger than any one of us. But you’re just negating something, most likely yourself. You’re judging, doing something, not receiving.

Davis: But the spiritual is different. We already know Michigan is out there. But we don’t know what’s beyond us, the material.

Vern: Okay, that’s our opposite then. We might define the spiritual against the material. That’s one of the main lines in history. Turn against the material, fasting and abstaining, mortifying the flesh and all that. There’s the worry though that you’re actually obsessed with the material in trying to escape from it. But I don’t suppose you have much sympathy with the anti-body, self-flagellation idea, do you?

Davis: I wouldn’t teach it to my kids, anyway.

Vern: How about the Great Father idea, then, if you’re so worried about the little ones?

Davis: They already have a father. And a mother. Let’s not go there.

Vern: So you want the wonder, the mystery, the awe, and you also want to say something memorable, without too much double-talk. Let’s take a step back. How do you say anything about anything?

Davis: Uh-oh.

Vern: You asked for it. And I mean it.

Davis: I was looking for something that could appear on Elmo, not a seminar on semantics.

Vern: That’s a cop-out. Go back to what you said about materiality. You said it because you need some kind of limit or wall. Your kids know this—if it’s not a square, not a circle, it’s a triangle. Everything is a contrast, or a negation. That’s how you mean anything.

Davis: What?! I see things that are ugly, like the Borg Warner building on South Michigan. I don’t need anything else to see it, or to say what I mean.

Vern: That’s a comparative judgment. Of course you’re contrasting it at some level. I can always ask why you made this or that judgment, and the content of your answer negates some other possible contents.

Davis: Even if it is a judgment, I don’t have to deliberate. It’s more like a conviction, an intuition.

Vern: You can’t appeal to brute feeling. That’s just to refuse the question. To me that refusal would be the denial of the spiritual.

Davis: So spirituality is just a willingness to answer why? Or do you have to do it well?

Vern: I’m not talking about something subjective.

Davis: A refusal is something done by a subject.

Vern: It’s not just you who reasons, though. There’s reason all around you.

Davis: Reason? We were talking about spirituality. When did you change the subject?

Vern: I didn’t. That’s what I’ve been getting at. They’re the same.

Davis: Reason and spirit? Rationality and spirituality? Another pair of opposites, if you ask me, or anybody else.

Vern: Why? Since you don’t know what spirit is, it must be reason that’s confusing you. It’s nothing mysterious.

Davis: I know, that’s exactly what I’m worried about. It’s cold, exact, hygienic.

Vern: That sounds like formal logic, not reason. It’s not mathematical, or even like your LSAT games.

Davis: What is it then?

Vern: No, how not what. When you say something follows from something else, you’re reasoning.

Davis: Who says “follows from”? Even lawyers don’t talk like that.

Vern: You don’t literally have to say those two words to do what they say.

Davis: But where’s the power, the force?

Vern: It’s in us. Where else would it be?

Davis: Sometimes, Vern, you want to interrupt aggression with reason, logic.

Vern: That’s interesting. In my business, we’re often accused of masking power plays with reason, assuming reason is something other than power when it is just used to hide the real interests behind it. So I’m surprised, though I guess I shouldn’t be, that you want more power than I’m giving you with the word.

Davis: At least give me something I understand—a binding law.

Vern: God-given, you mean?

Davis: That would be a good start. But you don’t have to put it like that. Something like addition, or mathematical proof, that people can’t deny without being called insane.

Vern: That works in math class, but it’s not much good off campus. And anyway, spirit can’t be clean-cut, or the kind of force that’s one-way. If everything worked by mathematical equations, the meaning might go missing.

Davis: All right, go back to Church, then. Whatever definition we give would have to at least cover those worshippers.

Vern: Some of them, anyway.

Davis: Well, what do they have to do with reason?

Vern: Don’t think of them as just bowing to an idol.

Davis: Who says I was?

Vern: Well, the preacher in the pulpit is giving reasons, revealing reason. The stories you hear in Sunday school tell of reasons.

Davis: It’s more about ethics… and love is not reason or some sort of negation.

Vern: There wouldn’t be jealousy if love wasn’t a negation.

Davis: But I’m pretty sure jealousy is a sin. Think Jesus, love of your neighbor.

Vern: No one has ever loved everyone. Our ethics have to be more personal, even if we do believe in the incarnation.

Davis: I suppose you’re going to tell me that self-sacrifice is just another opposition? That even if we think we are going against reason, it’s still got us cornered.

Vern: Here I stand. I can do no other, nothing else. I negate every other option. That’s an ethics of reason.

Davis: And God?

Vern: The last reason.

Davis: That’s it?

Vern: No. That’s it. What more do you want?

Davis: I don’t know. Should it matter what I want?