Читать книгу The Logic of Intersubjectivity - Darren M. Slade - Страница 5

In 1980, I was an idealistic young graduate student studying philosophical literature. I had become intrigued with the interplay of literature, philosophy, and theology, especially in twentieth century writers like Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Walker Percy.

I wrote a Masters thesis on Percy, Southern gentleman and author of novels like The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, The Second Coming, and Love in the Ruins, along with the seminal essay collection, The Message in the Bottle.

My thesis director, Dr. Lewis A. Lawson, was Percy’s literary confidant, and he was kind enough to forward questions of mine to Dr. Percy and arrange a personal meeting. When I completed my research, Dr. Lawson sent my completed thesis to the novelist. To my surprise, Dr. Percy replied with a handwritten letter. He complimented my writing style, expressed hopes that I would continue writing (“rotten a profession though it may be”), and said it was the best thesis, masters or doctoral, that he had read on his work. He added six words that meant a great deal to me: “I don’t recall your being wrong.”

Although the ink has faded to near illegibility, that letter, now framed, is among my most prized possessions today, almost forty years later.

I now find myself writing a similar response to Darren M. Slade’s new book on my body of work. As Dr. Percy did for me, I want to commend Darren for his writing style and urge him to forge ahead in the difficult professions of original research and writing in the zones of religion, philosophy, and culture.

I had the privilege of meeting and being interviewed by Darren during his research process, and he sent a few inquiries by email at various points along the way as well. He impressed me on many levels: the sincere curiosity behind his questions, the lack of a predetermined set of conclusions, the clarity of his writing, and the connection between his research and his own spiritual and intellectual growth. I gladly granted him permission to use these conversations and any other relevant material of mine in this book.

Darren decided to examine my work from the standpoint of philosophy of religion, and to that end, he examined my formally published work along with supplemental writings, sermons, lectures, interviews, blog posts, and more. He considered my thought in relation to both my biography and my literary and theological influences. Through the course of our conversations, he frequently asked me to alert him if I felt he had been factually inaccurate or unfair in any way.

I don’t recall his being wrong.

Not only that, but I learned a lot about myself from Darren’s book. I was surprised, for example, how early I expressed some ideas that I didn’t think I articulated until much later. Even some of my most “radical” thoughts, it turns out, had actually been present from the beginning.

This insight has helped me better understand one of the ways religious communities, like other social groupings, resist change and suppress dissent. By putting older gatekeepers in charge as guardians of the tradition, certifying their power to marginalize and silence younger voices, communities teach younger voices to fear, to play it safe, and to distrust their own experience, discomfort, questions, and insight. As a result, by the time younger voices gain the courage to speak and the credibility to be listened to, they often have been domesticated, suppressing, rejecting, or forgetting much if not all of their own unique insight. If the Psalmist prayed, “Remember not the sins of my youth,” religious communities often teach their adherents to pray, “Help me not remember the questions and insights of my youth.” The social and spiritual architecture of religious communities is, in this way, perfectly designed to keep the old men in power and the young (both men and women) in compliance.

Reading this book helped me realize afresh how easily that could have happened to me, and it leaves me with a fresh sense of gratitude that, to some degree at least, it didn’t.

I take pleasure in hoping that the current generation of young thinkers will find encouragement in Darren’s book to respect the value of tradition while also respecting their own emerging instincts as the newest members of that tradition.

That pleasure is all the more intense knowing that Darren’s religious background was similar to my own. The fact that a young scholar like Darren could undertake the research that led to this book while he was a graduate student at a fundamentalist university speaks to the foment of this moment in the Christian community.

When I wrote my thesis on Walker Percy back in my twenties, it was not simply an academic exercise for me. It was also personal, as I was grappling with whether and how a young man raised fundamentalist could hold on to Christian faith in a culture tipping from a modern into a postmodern paradigm. Percy’s example of what might be called Christian existentialism provided me resources for a way forward, out of the framework of fundamentalism but not out of a framework of faith, meaning, and purpose.

Similarly, I think you’ll have the sense as you read this book that Darren’s research was personal as well as academic, just as your reading of this book likely is.

Over these forty years, the dangers of fundamentalism have become more and more apparent across religious traditions. Readers of Darren’s generation can’t help but see how the world’s largest religion, which is currently experiencing a global fundamentalist resurgence, can easily become either one the most destructive forces in the world, or one of the most creative and regenerative. Left to the powerful men of the older generation (and their loyalist sons), it almost certainly will become the former.

That’s what makes voices like Darren’s so important.

Every reader who engages with Darren’s book wakes up each day in a world of acute challenges, from catastrophic climate change to a resurgence of vicious white supremacy and kleptocratic demagoguery, from obscene economic inequality to appalling religious corruption, from the proliferation of weapons (courtesy of the military industrial complex) to the proliferation of propaganda (courtesy of the corporate media complex).

In this world, the “old time religion” with its old-time version of good news makes less and less sense, especially in those religious sectors that have failed to face and learn from their history of complicity with slavery, colonialism, environmental plunder, greed, oppression, and corruption.

It is increasingly hard to deny that the old-time religion and theology in which both Dr. Slade and I were raised greased our civilizational slide into this existential predicament. I shudder to think that its worst days and deeds may still be in the future.

Some of us dare to hope that a creative new theological vision could help us find a path through and out of the mess we’re in, especially with the help of a new generation of clear-thinking scholars and insightful writers like Darren Slade.

It is to them that I especially commend this book, along with a call (echoing Bob Dylan) to stay “forever young.”

Brian D. McLaren

Marco Island, FL