The art of the religious life: Strategies for sustaining religious commitment.

摘要

This is a work about the art of the religious life and about how certain strategies for sustaining religious commitment are illustrative of this art. Part I argues for the strategy of religion as anthropological necessity, a category that I derive from the work of Mordecai Kaplan. This strategy helps one see the religious life as rationally intelligible. In the first chapter, I show how Kaplan's work points to religion as anthropological necessity. In the second chapter, following Kaplan's lead, I explore some representative thinkers from the field of religious anthropology to get a more finely nuanced conception of religion as anthropological necessity. In Chapter 3, I return to Kaplan and critique his work based upon the field of religious anthropology.; Moving beyond Kaplan, I turn to Abraham Joshua Heschel, who understood that an experience does not have to be primarily rational for it to be worth sustaining. One needs a strategy for sustaining religious commitment which makes the religious life affectionally intelligible. This strategy, the religious life as artful experience, emerged for me out of the work of Heschel. In the first chapter of Part II (Chapter 5), I argue that the affections are crucial to the religious life, and that the affective life can best be articulated through non-discursive forms. In Chapter 6, I look closely at the work of Heschel. The art of the religious life is suggested by Heschel but not revealed concretely. I turn in Part III, therefore, to an analysis of depictions of the religious life. One of these depictions can be found within this dissertation itself (Chapters 4, 7, 8, and 10). I take the unusual step of including four chapters of phenomenological depiction of my own religious life because in order to make the second strategy fully intelligible, one must employ forms which are most conducive to artful experience--forms of a nondiscursive nature. In the last part of this dissertation, I thus use my own writing as basis for a comparison of depictions of the finely detailed art of the religious life.