virtues

February 26, 2013

Sensory Spirituality: Prayer as Transformative Practice in Eastern Christianity

Co-Principal Investigators include Jeffers Engelhardt, Angie HeoJeanne Kormina , Vlad Naumescu, Daria Dubovka, and Simion Pop.

What does it take to pray well, and how does a regular practice of prayer help remake the devotee into a person who has this ability? Our research team asks how prayer skills are linked to wider ethical ideas of human thriving in the Eastern Christian churches, where spiritual transformation through disciplined, embodied practice has long been considered a key purpose of religious engagement. Prayer in these traditions involves a range of sensory registers, whose interplay we investigate through ethnographic research at sites in Russia and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, India, and North America, within Orthodox churches of Byzantine derivation as well as Coptic and Syriac branches.

By sensory registers, we mean the role of various senses (sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste) and sensory stimuli (images, tactile objects, music, the spoken word, food and drink, the smell of incense, the wetness of holy water, the bodily sensations of standing, kneeling, and bowing during prayer) in human attempts to establish contact with the divine. Departing from approaches that take prayer as either a purely mental activity or a matter of unreflected performance, our research demonstrates that prayer is a practice of drawing closer to non-human forces that calls upon and trains the full range of human senses, involving musical, visual, verbal and gestural expression.

Each team member has anthropological training, but brings additional expertise in such fields as ethnomusicology (Jeffers Engelhardt), theology (Angie Heo, Simion Pop), studies of new religious movements (Jeanne Kormina, Daria Dubovka), history (Sonja Luehrmann), and developmental psychology (Vlad Naumescu). Drawing on anthropological work that emphasizes the role of publicly circulating media in training and orienting the human sensorium, the research team investigates how various sensory registers support and reinforce one another in order to move devotees toward the theological ideal of theosis (becoming god-like). Each team member focuses on a particular sensory register: Engelhardt works on sound and musicality within majority Orthodox Christian countries and in the North American diaspora; Heo investigates the use visual images and imaginaries by Coptic Christians in Egypt; Luehrmann focuses on the relationship of written and recited prayer texts among Orthodox lay people in Russia; Naumescu and Pop study the use of gesture, bodily postures, and disciplines such as fasting among Syriac Christians in India and in the Romanian Orthodox Church; and Kormina and Dubovka consider the range of sensory impressions associated with pilgrimage and the veneration of saints in Russia.

We link individual field sites into a comparative, multi-sited endeavor through the use of joint interview and observational protocols and by collecting objects and media samples for other team members. The team will meet for a field workshop in Romania in June 2013 and for a writing seminar in Vancouver in August 2014. The outcome will be a jointly authored book on Sensory Registers in Eastern Christian Prayer.

February 26, 2013

From Surviving to Thriving: Religion, Spirituality, and Prayer among Adults Sexually Abused as Children by Priests

Co-Principal Investigator is Terence Mckiernan.

I propose to study the religious/spiritual histories of adult Catholic survivors of clerical sexual abuse with a view toward understanding the role of prayer in their efforts to reclaim their lives from destruction and alienation. The most disastrous consequences of abuse included a radically diminished self-image; persistent feelings of shame; a perceived loss of agency; a corrosive and objectless anger; pervasive anxiety; self-abuse (with drugs, alcohol, violence, and destructive sexuality); relational failure and social isolation. The project explores the extent to which prayer and praying played a role in restoring survivors to themselves and to their worlds (in the process remaking both themselves and the world). What makes these questions so vexed in this context is that the abuse of children by priests was always religious in nature. Survivors were profoundly hurt in that area of their lives from which they might have drawn the deepest sustenance. Prayer and praying contributed to survivors’ flourishing, but this often entailed great internal struggle with God (in the various forms God assumed for survivors over time), with their inherited and embodied Catholic imaginary, and with their circle of significant relationships (on earth and in heaven). Survivors first needed to restore a capacity for praying that had been effectively taken from them by their abuse. They invented or improvised new hybrid ways of praying to replace the ones lost to abuse, sometimes by reworking childhood prayer practices, but just as often looking beyond Catholicism to spiritual sources available on the wider American religious landscape. Survivors prayed in communities of survivors, with prayer serving to organize and empower a counterpublic that prayed together while seeking justice and recognition from other Catholics and from the church, creating a prayerful practice of redress. The project approaches prayer in its full polyvalence, including prayers that are retributive and condemnatory. I am in the process of establishing a network of contacts among survivors in Chicago and around the country, among those who remain in some relation to Catholicism and those who have more or less rejected it. I will establish field sites in four dioceses with the help of Victim Advocates, a diocesan office mandated in 2002 by the American bishops, as I work with survivors in Chicago and nearby cities who are for the most part unaffiliated with the church. Initial conversations with survivors will be by telephone, e-mail, and Skype (if they are outside of Chicago), in person locally, and I will work from a list of questions prepared with the assistance of survivors as a starting point. I will follow these with more open-ended conversations in person, which will be recorded (and eventually transcribed by a bonded transcription service). The focus throughout will be on survivors’ evolving life stories, with special attention to their prayer practices over time, their relationship to the ways of praying they inherited and those they have chosen or created as adults, in order to understand prayer’s contribution to the restoration of their confidence, happiness, relationships, and social and moral connectedness. The project looks at lived prayer practices in a religiously perverse context, in which the resources and figures victims may have called on for help were turned against them. Nonreductively it takes praying as the medium by which people engage supernatural figures and realities they understand to be really real and efficacious. The broader impact of the project is that given the number of survivors, the social consequences of the deep and lasting pain of abuse, the impact of the crisis on Catholicism and on the reputation of institutional religion, the project addresses matters of wide-reaching public import.

February 26, 2013

Neighborhood Mystics: Contemplative Prayer and Ethical Subjectivity in Contemporary Chabad

“Neighborhood Mystics” will be the first interdisciplinary (ethnographic and textual-historical) study of contemplative practice within a dynamic Jewish mystical movement known as Chabad Hasidism. Chabad was founded more than 200 years ago in White Russia through the promotion of specialized practices including contemplative prayer and study (hitbonenut, tefillah ba’avodah) in the context of a close fellowship of pietists. Unlike other Hasidic groups in Eastern Europe who emphasized the training and excitation of the emotions and ecstatic prayer, early Chabad leaders taught that personal transformation should begin with the cognitive faculties known as “wisdom, understanding and knowledge,” whose Hebrew acronym constitutes the name of the movement. Contemplation was said to inculcate virtues like self-abnegation (bittul), giving of oneself (Ibergegebnkeit) and equanimity (hishtavut). Together, these amount to no less than a distinctive form of ethical subjectivity that informs not just prayer or contemplation but everyday life. Today, Chabad has grown into an important global network of “emissaries” or shluchim that can be found on college campuses, suburban “Chabad Houses” and centers of business and tourism around the globe. The adaptation of contemplative practice, including prayer, to these popular contexts deserves analysis. Moreover, I will investigate the relationship between contemporary religious practices and emerging forms of political subjectivity that include wide ranging political activism on church-state issues, contested messianism, and theologies of social solidarity. Though much has been published on the textual history of Chabad theology and a smaller social science literature has recently emerged, my study seeks for the first time to relate classical texts and their interpretations to vernacular religion and lived experience among Chabad devotees and fellow travelers. To that end I am engaged in systematic study of Chabad theoretical and contemplative literature as well as conducting interviews and participant observation in a variety of settings: local “Chabad Houses” in several different cities in North America and Israel, annual events like the “Emissaries’ Convention,” and visits to a variety of educational institutions. Unlike a classical text scholar who is interested in the discovery of new manuscripts and their critical evaluation, I will be exploring the hermeneutic strategies and textual practices of Chabad insiders—contemplative sacred study and prayer cannot be easily separated in this setting. My comparative agenda includes attention to the burgeoning ethnography of religious experience and vernacular religion in Christian and Muslim settings and the growing contemplative science/contemplative practice literature that has emerged in contemporary Buddhist studies.