Religious analysis was Pynchon and fascism

[Paul Mackin]

On Sat, 2003-05-31 at 10:16, Michael Joseph wrote: 
> On 31 May 2003, Paul Mackin wrote:
> >
> > Is there such a thing as religious analysis?
> 
> There are several kinds of religous analysis, Paul Mackin, though I am
> understanding analysis more broadly than Paul Nightingale. The simplest I
> think is a basic kind of anthropology, the preliminary analysis of the
> texts of a culture for recognizable religious content. A more complex kind
> of religious analysis practiced in religious studies (not theology)
> involves an examination of texts, even those of one's own culture, even
> texts central to the Western Rationalist Tradition, for religious content,
> for markers of the sacred, of a belief or beliefs or structure of belief
> whose value is reinforced by mythical rather than by rational means. Since
> we cannot be content to know a work of literature only in terms of its
> mechanics or the historical conditions that made it possible, our
> commitment to exegesis obligates us to see what in a text is "revelatory
> of the real mode of human being in the world," what matters, what are the
> underlying ideals, what is the authoritative vision operating within the
> text, what moves and stirs us as readers, as human beings--regardless of
> whether we locate this text in the place of the author, in the sensations
> and ideas we form reading the text or in our own creative/critical
> responses to those sensations and ideas. To this degree, I think religious
> analysis forms a part of if indeed it does not underwrite nearly every
> kind of critical investigation. The most fascinating aspect of it, or
> perhaps one of . . . is its invisibility.



Good stuff. The religious content in "texts central to the Western
Rationalist Tradition" interests me. If allegiance to values "reinforced
by mythical rather than by rational means" is enough to qualify as
religious I find some expressions of postmodernism as religious or quasi
religious, which amounts to the same thing.  I'm thinking of the
crumbling of intellectual grounding and how it is seen not only as
disturbing and confusing but as liberating and empowering to groups that
heretofore were shut out of the the universal order of things. This
sounds to me like a not-at-all-invisible invoking of the religious
notion that we are all God's children and are brothers, etc. etc. and
our dignity as such requires that we be equally important parts of the
Universal System. Diversity and all that, which I'm not against, but
it's a value hardly based on any rational foundations that I know of.
Since there are no rational foundations anyway.

P.