One of my favorite podcasts is NPR's radio program Speaking of Faith, described as a conversation about "religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas." Each episode the host, Krista Tippett, interviews scholars and practitioners from a stunning variety of religious backgrounds - evangelicals, Muslims, atheist humanists, Mormons, Catholics, Buddhists, Jews, even a Haitian Vodou priest with a PhD. The diversity is great, and Tippett is deliberate about letting each person tell their story and their experiences rather than trying to steer the conversation into the hot button issues or religious controversies. Her stated goal is to "expose virtue", to allow the good in religion to come out and become normative, rather than constantly focusing on all the negative things that religion can also produce, as our mainstream media typically does.

Recently I also read Tippett’s personal memoir from the show, also titled Speaking of Faith: Why Religion Matters and How to Talk About It. More than just a distillation of her numerous interviews, it is also a narrative of her personal faith journey, from her conservative evangelical roots, through an apathetic secularism, to a renewed embrace of a wider, more intellectually honest and diverse faith - a faith that includes both mystery and reason. A faith that is layered, complex and multi-faceted. For instance, she opens her third chapter, "Rethinking Religious Truth" with these words:

I've come to understand religious texts and traditions as keepers of truths more openhearted and realistic than many of the arguments against them and the practices in their orbit. We have to think about truth and about knowledge itself differently - the insides and edges of words and ideas, the richness of their forms - to understand the nature of religion and the work of theology, the human attempt to pin God, however fleetingly, down to earth. In many ways, religion comes from the same place in us that art comes from. The language of the human heart is poetry. Music is a language of the spirit. The metier of religious ideas is parable, verse, and story. All of our names for God are metaphor - necessary license, approximation, and analogy. Our sacred texts burn with that knowledge and dare us to use all of our faculties of intelligence and experience and creativity. But we forget this; our fact-and argument-obsessed culture is deaf to it, blind to it.

This is an approach to faith that resonates deeply with me. In fact, I have found that listening to Speaking of Faith (and reading the book) has rescued and renewed my faith. In my regular online dialogues with atheists it can be easy for me to get so lost in the arguments that I forget why religion makes so much sense to me in the first place. As C.S. Lewis has said "A doctrine never seems dimmer to me than when I have just successfully defended it." Tippett's work helps me to remember the beauty and logic which has drawn me to faith in the first place, regardless even of who she's talking to or what religion they represent. What she does is remind me that there is a wildness and complexity and depth to life that religious beliefs attempts to express. She reminds me that there is more than just wishful thinking in religion and spirituality, that there is in fact wisdom and truth and a grasping after the inexpressible yet ultimate reality (or as Peter Rollins puts it "that of which we cannot speak is the one thing about whom and to whom we must never stop speaking".)

Tippett also reminds me to have humility when approaching those whose beliefs differ from my own - to listen and learn and seek to understand the truth of their experience. I find that when I do that, I find more that I have in common with them than what divides us. Through Speaking of faith (the program and the book) I have been encouraged and strengthened in my Christian faith by Jewish rabbis, agnostics, scientists, and Vodou witch-doctors as well as Christians from a wide spectrum of traditions. What it reminds me of is the bigness of God, that he will not be contained merely to the small set of people who believe and worship like me, but rather that he is at work all throughout the world, revealing bits of his truth to all kinds of people.

At any rate, I highly recommend both reading the book and listening to the radio program. Your faith will be better for it. (And even if you don't have a faith of your own, you will still be enriched by exposing yourself to so many diverse viewpoints on the topic.)

Labels: book reviews, Speaking of Faith

Most of you will have heard the Serenity Prayer at least once or twice. It's the one Alcoholics Anonymous uses:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

What many of you probably don't know is that it was written by the highly influential 20th Century American theologian Rienhold Niebuhr. I was listening to a Speaking of Faith podcast on Niebuhr today while mowing the lawn and was surprised to learn that this simple prayer was actually an encapsulation of Niebuhr's whole approach to Christian involvement in politics and social justice. Niebuhr was a "Christian Realist" when it came to how we ought to engage in the world, which means, in the words of his biographer Richard Wightman Fox, "He exhorted his readers and listeners to take responsibility for their world while warning them against the temptation to try to perfect it." Niebuhr realized that while action for social justice was good and necessary, even the best of people will end up doing a certain amount of evil in the process of attempting to do good. In other words, we can never get it completely right, but that doesn't mean we should just give up and do nothing. The important thing is to stay engaged, but to do it in a self-critical way, to always be on guard against self-righteousness and fanaticism.

What I also find fascinating is this idea that the Serenity Prayer is originally about social justice. The basic idea is that engaging in social action requires us to do what we can, but to also be realistic about what we cannot to - to not overestimate our own efficaciousness or come at it with a naive optimism that believes we ourselves can solve every problem or bring heaven on earth. I find that this is a good reminder and an important balance to find, especially for those of us who have begun to see the kingdom of God as a present reality and something which we are trying to put into practice in the here and now. Even as we do so, it is important to remain humble about our limitations as flawed and finite human beings, and remember that ultimately it is God, not us, that establishes his own kingdom. We simply have the privilege of contributing our small part to it if we are willing.

Labels: Speaking of Faith, theology