These are my notes and quotes from Speaking of Faith by Krista Tippett. I wrote my key takeaways from the book for the subscribers of my Future of Conflict series.

Quotes from Speaking of Faith

Opening Quote (Rilke)

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
Then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
Go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like flame
And make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

(Rilke)

Chapter 1

Central question: Why are we all talking about religion?

Why is spirituality suddenly everywhere?

Basically pro-religion:

The great traditions have survived across millennia because they express insights that human beings have repeatedly found to be true. But they are containers for those insights—fashioned and carried forward by human beings, and therefore prone to every passion and frailty of the human condition.

Religions become entangled with human identity, and there is nothing more intimate and volatile than that, especially in an age of global transition like ours. Our sacred traditions should help us live more thoughtfully, generously, and hopefully with the tensions of our age. But to grasp that, we must look anew at the very nature of faith and at what it might really mean to take religion seriously in human life and in the world.

Looking for the Positive:

What most of us surely want, whether we are religious or not, is for the religious voice in our public life to be more constructive to reflect the capacity religion has to nourish lives and communities.

The essence of faith (like mediation and non-violent communication and good sales technique): Questions

Faith is as much about questions as it is about answers. It is possible to be a believer and a listener at the same time, to be both fervent and searching, to honor the truth of one’s own convictions and the mystery of the convictions of others.

Her thesis: religion can be more constructive — to nourish lives and communities —
if we accept it’s going to be here, and figure out under what conditions it can be constructive.

There are places in human experience that politics can not analyze or address, and they are among our raw, essential, heartbreaking, and life-giving realities.

Not a rejection of rationality, but understanding its’s limited scope:

The spiritual energy of our time as I’ve come to understand it, is not a rejection of the rational disciplines by which we’ve ordered our common life for many decades –law, politics, economics, science. It is, rather, a realization that these disciplines have a limited scope.

They can’t ask ultimate questions of morality and meaning. We can construct factual accounts and systems from DNA, gross national product, legal code, but they don’t begin to tell us how to order our astonishments, what matters in a life, what matters in death, how to love, how we can be of service to each other.

These are the kinds of questions religion arose to address and religious traditions are keepers of conversation across generations about them.

Claim: religious people have the best critique of religion

This book is an exploration of my sense that religious people and traditions themselves contain the most powerful critique and correctives we have against religions excesses.

Chapter 2

History of how Christianity’s relationship with Social Justice evolved.

In fact, until the early twentieth century, Protestant and evangelical were interchangeable terms. And biblically conservative Christians were as likely to be engaged in causes of social justice as of personal morality. In the 1920s in Oklahoma, Gospel preaching helped galvanize a short-lived but dramatic “farmer-labor” revolt against big business. During the same era, the northern Baptist Walter Rauschenbusch famously preached the “Social Gospel”—a fusion of piety, evangelism, and concern for the poor. The primary sin of American culture, as Rauschenbusch saw it, was not private moral transgression but collective selfishness. He developed his Christian socialist theology during a decade in New York’s “Hell’s Kitchen.” Though Rauschenbusch is largely forgotten in popular culture today, his analysis of the tensions between capitalism, justice, and social morality influenced Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Desmond Tutu.

But as the century progressed, a more theologically liberal Christianity picked up the mantle of social justice and defended it with critical biblical scholarship, altogether questioning the transcendent power of God. This specter, compounded by economic depression and war in the world, led conservative Protestants to begin to concentrate less on saving society and more on saving souls. Their time, like ours, was also marked by breathtaking technological advance that magnified both progress and danger. The new evangelicals concentrated on the personal moral sphere over which an individual could have control.

Krista’s religious journey:

I learned to trust in the an overriding sense behind the universe

Above I, I understood belovedness to be woven into the very fabric of life

What secular folk are missing in the rise of religion (particularly Protestantism) all over the world:

Erudite analysis, for all their merits, rarely take note of the power of a sense of belovedness as an antidote to fear.

She lived in West and East Germany

No one starved in East Germany, but as a culture, as a state, it utterly lacked vitality. Marxism-Leninism was reverent with material need but reckless with the human longing for meaning, the hunger for beauty. So very unlike me, for whom the whole world was opening up, my East German friends lived without an anticipation of surprise or adventure in life. They lived without a deep experience of hope. And hope, like love, is one of life’s redeeming experiences. Hope, or its absence, shows on you.

I knew that just as worlds of human dignity flourished beneath the East’s surface of want, there were layers of human want beneath the surface of Western plenty that I was engaged in defending. Communism crushed many souls, but it ennobled others. Capitalism did the same, but with preferable, subtler devices.

Faith in the world

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in prison, 1944:

I’m still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith… I mean, living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes, and failures, experiences, and perplexities. In doing so we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God.

Elie Wiesel after talking to young Germans:

I had never before considered, that it could be as painful to be a child of those who ran the camps as a child of those who died in them.

Classic mediation insight! Everybody has pain.

Chapter 3

The source of religion:

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 our names for God are metaphor.

So this chapter is about how the questions of religion and science are compatible, in contrast to public debate on the matter.

Once again, soundbites and arguments completely miss the point that each of these ways of knowing has a role.

Ank says: The key is to understand clearly what the role is of each, so each can “stay in its lane”

Karen Armstrong was reading something and found a tool — the scientia of compassion:

And in this little footnote, the author said that you must not lead the discussion of a religious idea or the theology or personality, such as Mohammed without being able to find out what lay at the root of this – not to dismiss these ideas out of hand from a superior viewpoint of post-enlightenment, Western rationalism, but to divest yourself of that rationalistic outlook and enter the minds of these mystics and sages and poets, and keep on asking, “But why? But why?” And filling up with scholarly knowledge the background, until you come to the point where you can imagine yourself feeling the same, or believing the same as them, until basically the intellectual idea learns to reverberate with you personally.

Ank: BUT WHY BUY WHY!

The medium and domain of science and art/religion (can refer to Wilber on this):

We apprehend religious mystery and truth in words, and as often, perhaps, beyond them in the presence of beauty, and acts of kindness, in silence.

Silence:

Silence, embraced, stones with its presence, its pregnant reality – a reality that does not negate an argument, but puts them in their place.

On the Bible:

The Bible, as I read it now, is not a catalogue of absolute, as it’s champion, sometime imply. Nor is it a document of fantasy, as its critics charge. It is an ancient record of an ongoing encounter with God in the darkness, as well as the light of human experience.

Chapter 4

More Rilke:

People look for easy solutions, for the easiest way to the easy, but everything in nature grows and fights to grow and struggles at every cost and against all resistance to remain complete in itself and true to its fundamental nature… It is also good to love—love being difficult. Love is perhaps the most difficult task given to us, the most extreme, the final proof and test, the work for which all other work is only preparation.

Krista spends time with hospice patients. She realizes there’s no end to suffering. There’s nothing to fix. It’s not like a math problem or a vaccine whether there’s a right answer or even a destination. There’s just being present with the question. How much of our discord is like that?

Thomas Merton definition of Anxiety:

It is the fruit of unanswered questions. And there was a far worse, anxiety, a far worse insecurity, which comes from being afraid to ask the right questions – because there might turn out to have no answer. One of the moral diseases we communicate to one another in society, comes from cuddling together in the pale light of an insufficient answer to a question we are afraid to ask.

History of Catholic/Protestant strife:

And through the first half of the twentieth century, most small American towns had virtual walls of religious segregation—not just Catholic churches and Protestant churches but Catholic pharmacies and Protestant pharmacies. Not to mention Catholic schools, because in earlier times in our great republic, Protestant legislators—that is to say, majority mainstream Americans—forbade Catholics from teaching in public schools in the name of separation of church and state. Protestants were free citizens and democrats, the reasoning went, but Catholics would ineluctably be governed by the long hand of the Vatican. Meanwhile, within Protestantism itself across the centuries, other divisions flourished—byzantine and deep…Growing up in the 1950s, my mother was forbidden by her father to date the boy next door because he was Methodist.

If Christian’s can get to peace to with each other, eventually they will stop hating other religions?

So religion has always been a volatile aspect of human life, even in the land of the free and the brave—because it has always been a container for more than itself. It has always become intertwined with that fraught human experience of identity. But progress is possible. As we agonize over interreligious hostility in the early twenty-first-century world, we might take note of the general rapprochement that has eventually taken hold between different kinds of Christians.

Narrative theology

(aka first person approach)

Her way of getting to God by talking about the presence of God in that person’s life:

I inherited the notion that everyone has relevant observations to make about the nature of God and ultimate things – that the raw material of our lives is stuff of which we construct our sensibility of meaning and purpose in this life, of how the divine intersects or interacts with our lives, of what it means to be human.

There is a profound difference between hearing someone say this is the truth, and hearing someone say this is my truth.

I could never again dismiss one of those predictions of my conversation partners wholesale, because it now carried the integrity of a particular life, a particular voice.

Islam and Fundamentalism

I made a blog post out of these quotes on their own.

On how Islam is particularly NOT suited to people (like Islamic extremists) pulling out quotes to prove their point:

Here is the most important point Muslims have pressed home to me: the Qur’an is not meant to be read as words on a page and merely intellectually appropriated. The Qur’an is aurally and inwardly digested. The word Qur’an means “recitation,” but even that word is inadequate. The Qur’an’s intrinsic beauty forms an essential part of its mystery and its message.

Wielding isolated Bible verses to make a point—”proof-texting”—is an irritating but well-worn practice in the part of the Christian world in which I grew up. It is a new phenomenon in Islam. After 9/11, non-Muslims couldn’t know the strangeness and violence in the act of ripping and pronouncing verses of the Qur’an out of context.

The importance of creating space and grasping the whole of a religious tradition, not demonizing it:

I don’t examine the great virtues of Islam in order to excuse cancers that have grown at its heart in our time, such as terrorist and sectarian violence and a virulent anti-Semitism. But in order to imagine a future in which those malignancies are not definitive, we must see Islam in the sweep of its history and theology.

Eboo Patel on why we create opportunities for young people to feel powerful:

Young people want to impact the world. They want their footprint on Earth, and they’re going to do it somehow. And if the only way that they get a chance to do that is by destroying things, then we shouldn’t be surprised if that’s the path they take.

So when people say to me, “Oh, Eboo, you know, you run this sweet little organization called the Interfaith Youth Core, and you do such nice things, you bring kids together,”

I say, “Yeah, you know, there’s another youth organization out there. It’s called Al Qaeda, and Al Qaeda’s been built over the past twenty-five years with lots of money and with lots of strategy and with lots of ideas of how you recruit young people and get them to think that this is the best way they can impact the world.

And finally! The missing link between religious extremism, white supremacy, gang violence, and life coaching.

(aka the modern roots of fundamentalism)

From the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, before fundamentalism had become a household word, the religious historian Martin Marty directed a groundbreaking study of fundamentalisms in twenty-three religions around the world.

Fundamentalism is never “old-time religion,” he says. It is a modern phenomenon—by which he, as a historian, means roughly the last two hundred years.

It is always reactive, born when there is an assault on values that people have and are uncertain about. And around the world in our time, he says, people are having trouble with identity—what do I believe, whom do I trust, who trusts me?

And what to about extremism? For me this applies to white supremacy or gangbanging just as well as religious fundamentalism:

As the specter of the fundamentalist religious identity of Al Qaeda has come to overshadow international affairs and identities, Marty has this advice:

Don’t lump the faithful and fundamentalists together in any tradition.
Don’t demonize any group of religious people as an enemy.

There is great diversity whenever large numbers of human beings are involved. Do all that you can to help them show their varieties and make it easier for them to be diverse.

Make it easier for moderates in all of these movements to be moderates.

In my language: Make it easier for them to escape the clutches of the conflict entrepreneurs.

As much as we want to, we cannot and should ignore religion:

The reasoned and moderate Muslim center will not be secular, nor will the Christian, Hindu, Mormon, or Jewish center. Developing eyes and ears for moderation does not mean denying the importance of religion in human life. It means inviting and enabling the devout to bring the best of their tradition to bear in the world.

and how ignoring moderates killed the Oslo peace process:

They helped me see anew why we in the West need to learn to bracket religion in rather than out of our view of the world. My Palestinian and Israeli conversation partners these past years, good people all, don’t agree on much. But they have told me with one voice that the Oslo peace process failed in part because it attempted to bracket out religious instincts on all sides of the conflict. This only succeeded in marginalizing moderate religious voices.

Religious extremists insert themselves into the process in the Holy Land and elsewhere whether they are invited or not. To regret and ignore the volatile role of religion in the contemporary world will get us nowhere

And finally, Krista quotes De Toqueville on how religious feelings, outside of the political process, were once essential in the USA:

Religion in America takes no part in the government of society, but it must be regarded as the first of their political institutions. I do not know whether all Americans have a sincere, faith and religion, for who can search the human heart? But I am certain they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of Republican institutions. This opinion is not peculiar to a class of citizens or to a party, but it belongs to the whole nation into every rank of society.

Chapter 5: Exposing Virtue

Religious truth, flattened out, becomes an especially blunt instrument when it enters the political theater of debates and power place – a weapon with the same transcendent power religion has to inflame hearts, to infuse life, and death with meaning.

Difference between spirituality and religion:

A rabbi, Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, gave me the best illustration I know of the difference between spirituality and religion. On Mount Sinai, she says, something extraordinary happened to Moses. He had a direct encounter with God. This was a spiritual experience. The Ten Commandments were the container for that experience. They are religion.

I find this example wonderful because it gets precisely at the wrong way religion is often taught, and the way it enters politics through words and positions.

South Africa Truth and Reconciliation Process:

I’ve spoken with architects of South Africa’s process of truth and reconciliation. They do not claim to have accomplished collective redemption. Their country continues to struggle with the everyday difficulty of the human condition and with manifold legacies of a century of structural brutality.

Among the hardest truths they acknowledged was the paradox described in Genesis—how incestuously pain and pleasure, vice and virtue, mingle in every human life. They called black activists to account for crimes in the name of liberation as well as the white leaders of the old apartheid regime for crimes in the name of control. They sought to avoid the irony of every successful revolution: victims of oppression all too easily become perpetrators themselves. They engendered clarity on this fact as a source of preventive vigilance.

South Africa’s new leaders also relearned the ancient lesson of the importance of time. Truth can be told in an instant, forgiveness can be offered spontaneously, but reconciliation is the work of lifetimes and generations. Toward that, they did what they could in the here and now. They planted risky, constructive, edifying seeds for their society to move forward on a different footing. They gave common people as well as new leaders and former villains accessible resources for moral reckoning.

Moral values in politics:

Eyes and ears to see beauty, to attend to poverty, to seek justice these strong, recurrent biblical themes are often missing from our public discussions about “moral values.” But I know from my life of conversation that they are tended in countless lives.

Chapter 6

Personal losses and integration:

My divorce and my depression are losses. I must know and feel and integrate. They make me a better interviewer and human being, more present to the world and it’s hardest realities.

Beautiful quote from Neibuhr:

Nothing that is worth doing, can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true, or beautiful, or good, makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however, virtuous, could be accomplished alone; therefore, we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe, as it is from our own standpoint; therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.

And finally, the true meaning of humility is about wonder!