Looking Both Ways Before Crossing

Throughout the last half of this course, I have come to realize that what interests me about writing is exactly what frustrates me about it: the struggle to communicate exactly what I mean. Keeping this in mind, I found reading over some of my previous blogs this week revealing. I can remember exactly how I felt or what specific thought I was trying to convey when I revisit particular sentences. How these feelings or thoughts are manifested in my language interests me. How these feelings or thoughts fail to be adequately communicated frustrates me.

Emily’s right--I have been thinking a lot about language. The majority of my entries revolve around linguistic issues (particularly forms of expression), and it has been both exciting and affirming for me to be able to discern this recurring theme in my thought. What makes such a difference to me is being able to see this concern with language as a genuine and fruitful interest of mine instead of just an annoying habit that I picked up as an English student. It is important for me to be able to know this—it gives me a more detailed view of who I am becoming as an academic and continues to help me in more readily identifying what I am looking to contribute.

In paying closer attention to language as a subject of study, I have also become increasingly aware of the ways in which I use it to express myself. At the beginning of term, Prof. Garrett noted that our blogs were to be about the depth of our thinking and not about the proficiency of our spelling and grammar. To foreground quality of thought in this way challenged me—not because I have been trying to avoid deep thinking, but because of the ways I have equated its expression with big words and complex sentence structure. A few of the authors that we have read this term only increase my awareness of the extent to which this bias is ridiculous and in need of modification. For me, Wendy Doniger, Debora K. Shuger and Caroline Walker Bynum all immediately come to mind. I have been engaged by their quality of thought and the way that each employs accessible languages in frequently conversational styles to meaningfully communicate intricate arguments. Being able to identify the kinds of scholarship that I positively respond to as a reader has motivated me to understand and work on how I want to “academically” write about what interests me. These weekly blogs have given me the space to diligently experiment with and continue to cultivate this kind of writing.

Having five individuals read and comment on my blog every week has also been a significant encouragement. Thank you Emily, James, Jessy, Rebekah and Prof. Garrett for holding me accountable to this task because knowing that I was writing something that would be read by all of you really made me think critically and sensitively through some issues that I might not have otherwise taken the time to ponder, let alone tried to write intelligibly about. Getting to read your blogs and discuss things further as a class was also so instructive—both in how valuable a multiplicity of perspectives on one topic can be and how important it is to admit that there is a multiplicity of valuable perspectives! I feel that these two points have been among the most difficult things that I have had to come to terms with in our course, and when I say, “difficult” and “come to terms with,” I don’t mean in a theoretical sense, I mean in a practical sense.

I am still trying to work out how my “belief” in these two points will practically affect my work. I know that it will inevitably give rise to a number of questions. I know that it will not necessarily do away with the possibility that some perspectives are more valid than others. But I wonder how, in such instances, will I come to know which one is more valid? Right now, I’m thinking about this in the context of my current thoughts on the relationship between neurobiology and religious (or mystical) experience. The languages of the scientist and the languages of the mystic are really diverse, as independent categories and when held in relation to each other. I think that both are valuable but are they equally so? What do we make of the mystic’s inability to “rationally” (or psychologically) account for his or her experiences in neurobiological terms? What do we think when a scientist is unable to adequately address religious experience as anything but a form of biological determinism? Is there a hierarchical relationship between these two discourses? Can one know/accept the answer to this question independent of one’s own belief? How will I engage with these questions in a way that respects the value of a multiplicity of valuable perspectives? I am still working on this and am slowly beginning to think about how one can learn to be okay with uncertainty or mystery and how this uncertainty or mystery might be legitimately fruitful.

I wonder how my approach to these questions would have been different if our course had been organized in terms of categories like, “Anthropology,” “Sociology” and “Psychology.” Would I even be thinking about the same kinds of questions? I wonder. I might ultimately have learned more about what these individual disciplines think of Religion and the methods that each uses to arrive at these viewpoints, but when it was all over, would I have known more about Religious Studies or simply more about “Psychology,” “Sociology” and “Anthropology”?

I like how our class was organized because of how it introduced me to the field in broad and specific ways simultaneously. Categories like, “Emotion,” “Tradition,” and “Text” exposed me to methods/theories used in the field while illustrating how these very methods/theories are often in and of themselves treated as subjects of study. I think that this might have contributed to my understanding of language as not only a method/theory with which to approach Religion and Religious Studies but also as a subject of study itself within these broader fields. I am not sure to what extent I would have made this connection amidst a host of “___ologies” and for me, even this alone has been of such value.