The hardcover third edition of A Course in Miracles is bound in navy blue rexine with embossed gold lettering. No author is listed on the front cover or the spine, no compilers, no editors. Instead, under the title are simply listed the contents that make up the Combined Volume—Preface, Text, Workbook for Students, Manual for Teachers, Clarification of Terms and Supplements—and centered at the bottom of the cover, the publisher: the Foundation for Inner Peace. This text, ‘scribed’ by Columbia psychologist Helen Schucman from a channeled inner voice that she attributed to Jesus and published in 1975, resembles nothing so much as a combination of college textbook and Gideon’s Bible, works whose authority is often materially inscribed in their packaging and presentation: leather binding, pages with gold trim, distinctive typography. A yellow sticker is affixed to the front proclaiming this volume as “The only COMPLETE Course ad authorized by its scribe & published by its original publisher.”

But there are other versions of A Course in Miracles: an ‘urtext’ that consists mostly of unedited transcriptions of the divine messages dictated to Schucman, a version of the Course given to the son of Edgar Cayce and deposited in the archives of the Association for Research and Enlightenment, and another, curious version typed and bound in six black thesis binders that was photocopied and circulated in the summer of 1975. This latter version was described in testimony given by co-founder of the Foundation for Inner Peace Judith Skutch Whitson during a case involving copyright infringement on the Course. Skutch Whitson stated that she permitted the xeroxing, “and it seemed very right that people would pass it along, copy it over and copy it over, until finally people’s copies were getting so light that they couldn’t see them anymore.” This promiscuous sharing did seem appropriate for a book that encouraged its readers to experience the plenary nature of existence by giving in the name of the Holy Spirit, by recognizing that, “to spirit getting is meaningless and giving is all,” and that in giving, “all of it is still yours although all of it has been given away.” This expansive and emphatically optimistic understanding of the world is a guiding idea throughout the text, underpinning a spiritual process by which the individual ego is overcome and a complete and fulfilling union with God can be accomplished.

This unofficial photocopied version was circulated before publication as a means to generate interest in a project that had theretofore been kept secret by Schucman and her co-editor William Thetford. On a trip to San Francisco, Skutch Whitson put copies in the hands of a number of people interested in new methods and modes of spiritual practice, including Dr. Edgar Mitchell, founder of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, researchers at the Stanford Research Institute who were working on parapsychological research and the limits of human potentiality, and others across the Bay area. These figures represented nodes in a distributed network of spiritual practitioners, people who could potentially turn A Course in Miracles from a tentative experiment in channeled authorship into a canonical text of contemporary spirituality.

Separated by roughly thirty years, these two contrasting versions of A Course in Miracles—one professionally bound, elegant in design, authenticated by the original publisher and the other incomplete, passed from hand-to-hand, repeatedly copied—indicate two alternate visions of spirituality and the nature of contemporary religious organization. The first vouchsafes its religious legitimacy through rigorously controlled and highly centralized publication practices; the other generates its own organic authority by circulating in a non-centralized and informal network of readers, its movement constituting the very relationships that make up an interconnected spiritual community. The tension between these two visions—a tension between dissemination and control—has played out in the recent history of A Course in Miracles. Indeed, copyright litigation over different versions of the text has not only circumscribed the horizon of spiritual practices but also shaped the contours of the communities in which those practices take place.

In 1999, the Foundation for Inner Peace filed a copyright complaint against the New Christian Church of Full Endeavor whose Endeavor Academy was printing an adapted version of the Course as part of their core curriculum. Endeavor’s defense during the ensuing trial asserted that the Foundation’s copyright was invalid and the text had entered the public domain. They argued that the work was ineligible for copyright protection due to its divine authorship, as Schucman had been specifically instructed by Jesus to keep her name as author off public records. They also claimed the plaintiffs’ assertion of copyright constituted an infringement on their freedom of religion and that the publication and use of the text was permissible as fair use. All of the aforementioned defenses along with eight other arguments were dismissed save one: prior publication. Endeavor Academy successfully determined that un-copyrighted manuscripts—the ones circulated by Skutch Whitson in San Francisco in 1975—had been generally distributed before publication, thus nullifying the later filing for copyright. Had the Foundation for Inner Peace demonstrated that they distributed the book to a limited and select group of people, then distribution would not have qualified as prior publication and the copyright would still have been legitimate. Instead, in the summary decision on the case the presiding judge wrote, “The Court is unable to see in this picture any definitely selected individuals or any limited, ascertained group or class to whom the communication was restricted…An interest in spiritual experience fails to define a class adequately.”

The question the court raised was a serious one and one that carries repercussions for the ways in which we conceive of organizations that arise around the self-conscious practice of spirituality. At what point does a distributed network of interested individuals cohere into an apprehensible group of like-minded followers, a united community of believers? For the many Americans who claim to be spiritual but not religious, how do they imagine their spiritual allegiances, their relationship to religious experience, their consumption of sacred texts? Are their actions simply tactics deployed in the service of individual self-improvement, self-exploration and therapy, or are they understood as being part of a shared set of practices among a community of like-minded seekers? The issue with A Course in Miracles was that the early version of the text was not distributed to a predetermined group precisely because its circulation in the early stages of its existence was serving to constitute the group itself. The movement of the text between hands constituted the very mechanism by which a network of individuals could be linked together, who could then become visible to themselves as a unified community of followers.

Ironically, both the assertion of property rights used to prohibit infringement and the free distribution of copies of an earlier manuscript were practiced by the Foundation for Inner Peace at different times in its publication history. What the courts saw as mutually exclusive and self-negating modes of distribution, the Foundation may have seen as mutually enforcing and supplementary methods of dissemination. The Foundation claimed that they copyrighted the work only so that it might be distributed more broadly and they could more effectively satisfy growing demand in the text. But the later recourse to intellectual property law by the Foundation in order to assert control over a revelation came across as disingenuous to many, including the court. The presiding judge wrote, “The decision to copyright and thereby to control and profit by the distribution of the Course was made after the distribution of the xerox copies described above…The mystical experience reported by Wapnick and Skutch Whitson [co-founders of the Foundation and stewards of A Course in Miracles appointed by Schucman and Thetford] was converted by Skutch Whitson into a property right.”

In response to their subsequent loss of copyright, many at the Foundation felt the need to explain their failed legal maneuvers. Joseph Jesseph, member of the Foundation for A Course in Miracles, wrote in his publishing history of the text, “There are some who still feel that true spiritual works such as A Course in Miracles hardly need the mundane protection of copyright,” a right that he described as being associated with and affirming precisely the same ‘ego framework’ that the text was working so hard to undo as the cause of many personal problems. But he provided the following apologia:

The Foundation—with regard to the fiduciary responsibility given to it—trusts in the fact that when Jesus directed Helen [Schucman] to perfect the copyright in A Course in Miracles, he intended that the Course be protected by copyright limitations within the ego framework. In effect, this ensures that the Course will remain intact and exactly as it was given, so that it will never be diluted, distorted, or changed.

Jesseph thus presented a rationale that described the use of copyright as a necessary compromise with human law put in the service of divine warrant. Instead of explaining the foundation’s use of intellectual property rights as simply being in the service of economic and distributional efficiencies, Jesseph instead described it as a mechanism for the maintenance of a divinely sanctioned message. The content of A Course in Miracles was susceptible to distortion, alteration and misinterpretation by the corrupting practices of those outside the Foundation’s networks of circulation, thus legal recourse to prevent such distortion was an entirely appropriate, even spiritually motivated strategy.

Jesseph’s justification does not conform to dominant understandings of copyright in the United States that usually depend either on a rationale grounded in the protection of the moral rights of [ostensibly human] authors or economic incentives designed to promote the production of creative goods. Nevertheless, he resurrected a sublimated theme within the law regarding intellectual property as intimately tied to questions of propriety. Foundation co-founder Kenneth Wapnick extended this logic even further in his statements after the case, describing the reading of current public domain versions of the Course (the urtext or the Cayce version) as a moral violation of the privacy of Schucman and Thetford, akin to listening in on a private conversation conducted between the scribes and Jesus and not yet reshaped into an official document destined for public consumption.

So what are we to make of the role of intellectual property as a determinant of the nature and role of a spiritual text within a religious organization? For those who inhabit non-traditional, unchurched types of spiritual community, communities whose coherence lies not in a centralized space like the church but instead in the realm of literary works and other forms of shared religious media, intellectual property law may provide a uniquely effective means to reestablish a measure of control. By providing legal tools capable of administering the texts by which intrinsically ephemeral beliefs and practices are mediated, intellectual property law can help to establish official works and stabilize their religiously approved meaning while also permitting the patrol of the very channels of distribution that move those beliefs and practices between members of a newly articulated community. For those organizations that still market spirituality but distance themselves from traditional forms of religion, they may look to new mechanisms to assert a measure of authority and control over their product. And as the physical, sacred property of the church becomes less central to contemporary practice, so may the intangible and ephemeral, yet equally sacred intellectual property move to take its place.

There are eight of us tonight at the Tarot School. We’re sitting around a long, brown conference table in a small, grayish white room. The class meets weekly on Monday nights, on the sixteenth floor of a nondescript office building, on Seventh Avenue in New York City. “How will the court case come out?” a woman in her late forties wants to know. “Will it resolve well for me, or I am going to have to pay?” Those sitting around the table stare at her intently, thinking about her question, despite not knowing much more about her situation than what little she has told us. She and an unidentified man are locked in an ambiguous case where she stands to make a considerable amount of money. The case has been dragging; she is tired and would like the entire issue to be resolved so that she can move on with her life. “Okay,” Wald, the co-owner of the school, says, moving us toward the “reading practice” portion of the three-hour class, “who would like to read for Jill? You’re all accomplished readers, some with more knowledge than others, but all of you can answer this question given what you know about Tarot. Who wants to try it? Sara? Sara… why don’t you read the cards for Jill?”

Silence as Sara looks to Wald and then to Ruth Ann, the other co-owner of the school and Wald’s wife, and she smiles a bit shyly, to convince herself that she is up to the task. “Okay, let’s see what they say.” Sara “clears” her cards of negative energies by waving her hand over the pile and then picks them up to shuffle her deck (being the “Universal Waite,” which is an updating of the popular Rider-Waite-Smith deck, which is often abbreviated as the Rider-Waite, thus erasing the authorship of the woman who illustrated the cards, Pamela Coleman Smith). Shuffling the cards deliberately, Sara then lays the deck face down in front of Jill. “Please cut the deck into two piles using your left hand,” she asks. Jill does this, and as she does Sara explains that she will do a spread with two columns—the left column will be the “yes” column, representing the expansive forces that are working toward a positive resolution for Jill, and the right column will be the “no” column, representing restriction or the challenges that may be in the way of such a resolution.

I note to myself that this seems like a pragmatic way to hedge the divinatory challenge of “yes or no” that Jill is posing. Although many people at the school describe themselves as “intuitive” or report receiving unexpected “psychic hits” during the card readings, no one likes to be tested by a strict yes-or-no question.

I feel the pressure of the question and wonder how Sara is feeling about the reading.

A successful reading hinges on the ability to be, as Wald likes to say, “a master of your own ship,” which means someone who is in charge of the reading, who can integrate themselves into the reading, and who can tune in to the message the cards are sending. The mastery here comes in learning to choose your words properly but also putting the person receiving the reading at ease.

“Okay, let’s see what the cards say,” says Sara. “Let’s do the ‘yes’ column first,” she says as she flips over the card. “The Three of Pentacles, oh, a good sign. Now, for the ‘no.’” “The Nine of Wands. Okay.” “Well, the pentacles here seem like a very good sign that you will receive some money or that the case will go in your favor,” Sara says, as she points to the image on the card of three individuals consulting one another within the walls of a cathedral. “This card suggests there may still be some negotiation necessary, and perhaps you won’t receive as much money as you might hope for.” Jill smiles and nods her head. “The three is also known as the Lord of Material Works,” Sara says referring to the card’s esoteric title, which are additional attributes that the Golden Dawn associated with the cards in the late 1880s. “This seems to suggest that the business of the case will be handled smoothly and, ultimately, everything will come together.” In the “no” column, however, stands a card depicting a man with a bandage around his head, bruised and leaning against a single wand, in front of a wall of eight other wands. Sara says, “well, in the other column, there is some work to be done or something that you still might have to fight for. I don’t think you can rest just yet, or perhaps you feel like you have been fighting forever, and this might mean making one last push.”

Jill looks around the room as the rest of us are staring at her two cards, putting our own versions of the story together. Sara says, “Ultimately, the case resolves, but you may need to draw on the Lord of Great Strength of the nine. There may be more proceedings, paperwork, a hassle, but since this is a nine, it’s pretty far down on the Tree of Life, so you’re almost there. The final stop would be the ten, but you’re not there yet,” Sara says and gestures around the room. “What do the rest of you think?” One by one, the rest of us offer our interpretations. Jill nods, listening and thanking us. Wald asks, “did this answer your question or help you to feel better about the situation?” “Yes,” Jill says, “because I’m going to try to remember the three and not focus too much on the nine. But sometimes it’s just funny how the cards reflect back to you what you already feel is going on. I had a feeling this is what they would say.”

When I began law school in 2008, both evangelicalism and law school attendance were on the rise in the United States. Though these trends generally got covered in different corners of the newspaper, I came to suspect a secret connection. A year or two at a fine American law school can leave the most hard-bitten among us longing for rebirth. St. Paul once wrote: “For I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died.” It will come as no surprise to even the most unbiblical law student that Paul was once an attorney himself. Law school can cramp, as stilted policy discussions and four-hour exams chock full of outlandish narratives of wrongdoing seem unequal to the pleasures and pain of being human. Who we are gets buried beneath what we do. Pressed upon by prescribed forms, the doubtful legal journeyman or woman longs to break on through, to speak in tongues, to be born again.

Thanks to Paul, law students can rely on a strong precedent should they have a change of heart. If my generation seems to have a particular passion for law school, that may disguise a deeper passion for conversion. Late-night dive-bar conversations with dissatisfied summer associates are never fully consigned to hopelessness. In the complaints of the soon-to-be-professional, there always remains a glimmer of expectancy: Perhaps I will be transformed. Perhaps the law is not the final form my life will take—it may only be the shaping flame. Such a wayfarer takes the bar and trusts in grace.

Betting on epiphany is an old American tradition. From the one-time minister Ralph Waldo Emerson, to the tortured academic Thomas Kelly, to the mercurial insurance man Wallace Stevens, some of our greatest voices have used the grayscale world of professionalism as the background for their kaleidoscopic experiments with the spirit. Yet there is something cartoonish about turning the black-letter law-book into a springboard toward the Ultimate.

William Stringfellow, a great American lawyer and theologian, offered plenty of ammunition to the spiritually-dissatisfied law student. Yet he also criticized the flight from reality that frequently accompanies frustration with legal drudgery. On the one hand, his descriptions of his alma mater were unrelenting: “Initiation into the legal profession, as it is played out at a place like the Harvard Law School, is … elaborately mythologized, asserts an aura of tradition, and retains a reputation for civility. All of these insinuate that this process is benign, though, both empirically and in principle, it is demonic.” On the other hand, as much as Stringfellow condemned the cult of success and power he found at law school, he was also unimpressed by quick-and-dirty spiritual evasions. “Contemporary spirituality,” he explained, could only offer cheap escape from the here-and-now, not an alternative response to the human complexity with which legal systems must struggle. Where both legal education and contemporary spirituality went wrong, in his mind, was their idolization of personal efficacy at the expense of the true effectiveness of the Word of God.

Stringfellow was a Rhode Islander, and true to that state’s noble birth, he lived his own religion. He was an early adopter of the civil rights revolution; in the late 1940s, he sat down with some black students at a lunch counter in as-yet-desegregated Maine. After graduating from Bates College on a scholarship, he studied in London and briefly joined the Army. Stringfellow often said that by the time he enrolled in Harvard Law School, he knew he would never have a profession, only a vocation: to live in accord with the Word.

Throughout his life, Stringfellow contrasted “legal” advocacy with “biblical” advocacy, and “contemporary” spirituality with “biblical” spirituality. Biblical advocacy and biblical spirituality were really one and the same thing—a form of politics that recognized God as the only legitimate actor on the world stage. This form of politics was anathema both to the law school of Stringfellow’s youth and the modern spiritualisms he saw gaining in popularity all around him, from yoga to televangelism. What both realms had in common was their commitment to personal prowess through self-discipline. Where the law student was most exacting, where the modern spiritualist was most dedicated to “self-denial,” Stringfellow saw only “a matter of self-indulgence, a vainglorious idea.”

After Harvard, Stringfellow followed the Word of God to East Harlem, where he offered his legal services to penniless tenants and sex offenders, among other citizens of Babylon. Amidst the black-and-white 1950s, Stringfellow, a closeted gay man, made a lonely home for himself in a gray space beyond the margins of polite society. In 1962, however, Stringfellow met the love of his life, the poet Anthony Towne, and they moved into an apartment on West 79th Street. Stringfellow continued his legal work on the behalf of the urban poor, even as he extended his advocacy to the underground culture of gay New York.

However much the law provided an arena in which to intercede in the suffering of others, Stringfellow continued to find it a stumbling block. Legal advocacy was forever bound up within an “adversary system, with all its implications of competitiveness, aggression, facetious games, debater’s craft, and winning per se.” Late in his life, Stringfellow wrote, “I continue to be haunted by the ironic impression that I may have to renounce being a lawyer the better to be an advocate.”

Biblical spirituality demanded both self-sacrificing involvement with the world and an avoidance of the world’s emphasis on achievement, efficacy, and power, an emphasis particularly acute in the courtroom. Perhaps to ease the “relentless tension” between the words of the law and the Word of God, Stringfellow and Towne moved from the city to Block Island. While their departure from urban life may have looked to some like a flight from trouble, Stringfellow and Towne saw their new home, which they named “Eschaton,” as another station on the apocalyptic road. Far from the secular center of things, Stringfellow and Towne used Eschaton’s isolation to engage in new forms of biblical politics.

In 1970, they sheltered the Catholic poet and war-resister Daniel Berrigan. Two years earlier, along with eight others, Berrigan had entered a selective service office in Catonsville, Maryland and burned over three hundred draft cards with homemade napalm. Following his conviction for destruction of government property and interference with the draft, he went on the lam, denying the authority of the court to convict or imprison him. After a months-long search, the FBI arrested him at Eschaton.

Subsequent to the arrest, the government kept watch over Stringfellow and Towne’s modest island home and interrogated Stringfellow several times. During one interview, an FBI agent confronted Stringfellow with Chapter 13 of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, which Christians frequently interpret as a command to obey legal authority. At the time, Stringfellow was at work on a book—Conscience & Obedience—that would challenge this standard reading of Paul. The agent apparently got an earful. Stringfellow explained that Romans must be read in concert with the Book of Revelation, which pictures the demonic growth and final destruction of all worldly authority. Authority, Stringfellow assured the G-man, must only be obeyed to the extent that it cooperates with the Word of God.

Stringfellow returned to this story several times in his writing; he clearly felt it was a moment when he had struck the right balance between biblical and legal advocacy—speaking the Word of God to a government official. This strange balance, standing both inside and outside the law, speaking to one authority on behalf of another, was Stringfellow’s vision of authentic spiritual practice.

Currently, I am neither representing poor tenants nor sheltering fugitive war-resisters. Reading Stringfellow has in some ways been an escape for me, a hopeful daydream. His life is a hero’s journey. In law school, courtrooms, hospitals, churches, city streets, Stringfellow challenged authorities unmoored from God’s simplifying command. He once performed an exorcism of Richard Nixon on the Washington Mall. Behind my fascination with this crusading and converted lawyer lurks the question that occupies many law students: What am I doing here?

The fear, and the thrill, that something you are doing right now could be the first step of a glorious, or at least fulfilling, journey, puts a spring in the law school student’s step. Ever- expectant, my gait marries reaching for a prize and ducking a blow. Stringfellow’s way of dealing with this domination of the present by the future was in his account of ceaseless work of the Word of God. There are no ladders to climb, no lesser authorities to appease. As long as you recognize the presence of the Word of God the only thing to do is obey its command. Such higher obedience can be a spiritual and a legal decision, influencing one’s lawyerly practice as much as one’s inner life.

A new movement called “religious lawyering” is looking to bring something like Stringfellow’s biblical outlook to the halls of law schools and governments nationwide. The trans-denominational movement emerged in the 1990s, and there are now several professional organizations (such as the Christian Legal Society and the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists) and institutes at Pepperdine and Fordham Law Schools devoted to integrating individual faith with legal practice. No longer does Paul need to leave his career behind. Religious lawyers, however, are not missionaries; they do not seek to propagate religious observance through their legal work. Rather, they hope to bring the moral sensitivity they cherish in their faith traditions to the complex human relationships that structure their professional lives. In the words of one of the movement’s eloquent defenders, the law professor Robert Vischer, “The concrete differences religious lawyering will make will tend to involve relational differences—i.e., seeing the client not simply as a source of predetermined legal instructions, but as a fellow human faced with circumstances brimming with moral significance.”

Though Stringfellow would have applauded this emphasis on the richness of human relationship, he might have questioned the relative ease with which some religious lawyers propose to negotiate the competing sovereignties of God, the state, and the marketplace. Stringfellow was anxious enough about the conflict between biblical and earthly advocacy when representing poor tenants. The religious lawyer’s search for God’s blessing in most any legal arena—whether corporate boardroom or prosecutor’s office—is probably a more liberal one than Stringfellow’s demanding Christ could allow.

Despite their differences, both Stringfellow’s biblical advocate and today’s religious lawyer come into the legal world ready to obey the Word. Their struggle to reconcile faith with worldly practice is one thing. The struggle to hear the Word to begin with is quite another. It would have been great if I could have gotten the major soul-searching out of the way before entering law school. Although a legal education can serve the young crusader well, it is better at inducing spiritual crises than resolving them.