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The fourth great awakening of the last 25 years led many to religion, but a religion that let you have your full secular suburban life at the same time. Evangelicals and Centrist Orthodox Judaism was in. Catholics did not become clergy and modern Orthodox Jews did not read the sections of the Miktav Mieliyahu against the bourgeois life. (Except for the more philosophic sections on free will).

But this year’s valedictorian at Harvard has decided to become a nun and advocates the religious vocation. Will she lead others in all faiths in the same path? Will there be a new American sense of vocation unlike the suburban models?And what effect will her exemplar play for Ivy educated Jews? I spoke at the Harvard Hillel a few years ago and there was a joint Catholic Newman society dinner with the Orthodox minyan. They shared common religious values. One of the Catholics had even listened to my revelation class online. Will she be the new Thomas Merton, or at least William F Bukelley, to influence people?

She has a nice snappy interview where she defends her decision. She notes the role her HS English teacher played as an example of synthesis and mentions that it was good that she learned the anti-religious arguments as part of her HS curriculum. (There is still the ongoing debate about the need to include Biblical criticism and arguments against religion in a Yeshiva day school curriculum, but she sees the inclusion as positive.) Is she an alternative to the Centrist Orthodox condemnation of Harvard and the ivys? This dread created alarmist warning against Harvard a few years ago which helped foster the culture of what one critic of the document called “fearful Orthodoxy.”

God and Woman at Harvard
A 2010 summa cum laude heads to a convent.

Don’t tell Mary Anne Marks the Catholic Church is an oppressive, misogynistic disaster. She knows better. And she’s got a Harvard degree, too.
Miss Marks, a native of Queens, N.Y., graduated from Harvard University this past semester with an undergraduate degree in classics and English, delivering her commencement address in Latin. This fall, she begins a new life, discerning her future consecrated to Christ as a Catholic religious sister with the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist, in Ann Arbor, Mich.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: You are a Harvard graduate. Aren’t you surrendering all the possibilities that entails by entering a convent?

MARY ANNE MARKS: Yes, if one doesn’t see becoming a well-educated, intellectually alive nun as one of the possibilities.

LOPEZ: Your call was not a sudden one. You explained to a Harvard publication that you’ve “always thought about being a nun.” You grew up in Queens at the turn of the 21st century. How would you ever think of such a thing?

MARKS: Religious life is an institution thriving in our time and in our nation; go figure.

LOPEZ: Is the countercultural nature of your call important? Especially now, in this culture, in your generation?

MARKS: Absolutely. Religious are called to witness by their life and garb to supernatural realities: God’s existence, His immeasurable love for each person, and the fact that our duty and happiness lie in returning His love. This witness becomes increasingly important as a culture’s materialism and corresponding distaste for the supernatural increase.

LOPEZ: Was there anything at Dominican Academy that especially helped your spiritual growth and discernment?

MARKS: My English teacher, Mrs. Gunset, and her daily example of faith, joy, and charity inspired and encouraged me.

It is a tragic irony that Dominican Academy also helped my spiritual growth by laying before me in religion classes from the lips of my own teachers many classic arguments for relativism and Biblical fallibility. When I encountered these same ideas in college, I was prepared, because I had worked through counterarguments with my parents at home in high school.

LOPEZ: What are some of the most notable or revealing things that adults — maybe especially faculty — have said to you once they became aware of your vocational plans?

MARKS: Two of my professors told me they had siblings who had entered religious life. Another, a kind but thoroughly unsentimental professor who had been very encouraging of my intention to apply to graduate school, ended our discussion of my change of plans by opening her arms and declaring quietly, “I am going to give you a hug, because this is a big decision, and I admire you for it.” When I remarked to yet another professor on the many positive responses from faculty, he replied that he wasn’t surprised that academics could appreciate the appeal of a life of contemplation and of single-minded pursuit of a spiritual goal.

LOPEZ: Are you happy?

MARKS: Yes.

LOPEZ: For all those, younger and older than you, who are in pursuit of happiness or have given up on it: What is it and how do you hold onto it?
MARKS: Happiness is the sense of peace and joy that stems from knowledge of and union with the One Who created us and Who loves us infinitely. We will attain it fully in heaven, but we can achieve it to a significant extent beforehand by battling our desire to remain independent of God, ignoring the voices that label religion boring and unnecessary, and better acquainting ourselves with Truth through study and prayer.

— Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online.

Full Version Here

The current issue of Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory has a nice online review summary of the new book by Richard Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to God after God.
Kearney is a specialist in the post-secular return to religion in Continental philosophy. He is someone whom I always read and never actually quote since his best function is to let you know what people are thinking and what is said at conferences. He is good at spotting trends, seeing convergences and somehow places the ideas of Yale, Chicago, the Sorbonne, and Oxford under one roof. He lets one see how Levinas, Ricoeur, Kristeva, and Caputo are received in the literature. His prior works include The God Who May Be and Strangers, Gods, and Monsters.

In this new book, Kearney discusses how people return to religion after modernity with a neologism of Anatheism. His model for this return is hospitality- a theme of Levinas, Derrida, and especially Ricoeur. One can get terminology from Kearney to explain much of the modern turn to Zohar mediation, or Rav Nachman.

The seven page summary review by the reviewer John Burkley is especially lucid and detailed. Below are some excerpts.

Richard Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to God after God. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. $29.50

Anatheism is a fresh attempt to reconceive the possibility of the sacred for the 21st century, seeking a way, as the subtitle suggests, of “returning to God after God.”

So what is anatheism? Kearney describes it variously as a movement, a paradigm, an invitation, a wager, a drama; a position between, before, and beyond the division of theism and atheism; “another word for another way of seeking and sounding the things we consider sacred but can never fully fathom or prove” (p.3).
Yet it bids adieu to the God of metaphysics and traditional religion whose surname has long been “Almighty” taking seriously the critical and iconoclastic force of atheism.

Thus, anatheism works back from the experience of God-loss toward a genuine renewal of the sacred to recover forward a second, more mature faith. While insisting that anatheism is “nothing particularly new” (p.7), it seems to be of particular moment in this age where the gods have withdrawn. “Ana” – seeking ‘after’ (toward) God ‘after’ (subsequent to) the death of God.
Anatheism–seeking a rebirth of faith after the loss of faith.

The thematic core of Anatheism: Returning to God after God is the encounter with the Stranger and the event of hospitality/hostility. In this basket Kearney’s places all his eggs. While official theologies and the popular religious imagination typically emphasize stories of creation, salvation, miracles, power, or final judgment as inaugural solicitations of faith, Kearney takes up the neglected figure of the Stranger.

Abraham’s visitation by three desert strangers… an uninvited Stranger appears; in each case there is a moment of disorientation, perplexity, fear, perhaps trauma is not too strong a word; in each case the addressee must decide for or against the Stranger; in each case the host’s
welcoming of the Stranger opens from the Stranger a gesture for the promise of life, That, clumsily expressed, is the central dynamic of Anatheism, which “begins and ends with the epiphany of the divine in the face of the stranger (p. 149).

Mediation of these oppositions proceeds by way of five aspects of the anatheistic wager. One might call them interpretive attitudes or hermeneutical predispositions -imagination, humor, commitment, discernment, and hospitality–each crisply defined.

In each case, however, a reversal occurs… In the utter absence of a powerful and saving God a realization can occur that for God to be ‘we’ have to host ‘Him’, save ‘Him; if God is estranged and a stranger to this world ‘His’ coming depends our welcome.

Glossing on Ricoeur, Kearney writes, “The word of existence –which affirms the goodness of being in spite of its multiple estrangements….must be regrasped and reinstated.” The ambition of anatheism is “to disclose a site where the freedom of our will is rooted in a listening to a ‘word’ of which one is neither source nor master” (p.75).

The second half of the book (Interlude and Postlude) details the third moment of Anatheism: sacramental transformations in the everyday, mostly in secular scenes, specifically, at the levels of lived experience (Merleau- Ponty, Kristiva), literary imagination (Joyce, Proust, Woolf), and ethical-political praxis (Day, Vanier, Gandhi). Kearney puts on display a tapestry of anatheist or proto-anatheistic instances of mediation, acts of transformation, epiphanies where the secular and sacred mutually beckon and inform each other. Readers will find their own favorite and more illuminating examples.

The sacred for Kearney is “in the world but not of the world” (p.152). Hence the preference for the figure of the Stranger over a disembodied, otherworldly traditional Omni-God, and over the rather abstract and well worn master concept of postmodernism –‘the Other’.

He draws liberally on Ricoeur’s model of translation or “linguistic hospitality” defined as “the act of inhabiting the word of the Other paralleled by the act of receiving of the Other into one’s own home, one’s own dwelling.”2 Translation admits of no reduction of one language to another or to a third master language, but preserves the strangeness of the other while opening the host language to unthought possibilities.

Full review here

Any thoughts about applying anatheism to the post-secualrism all around us?
Any post-secular religious experience that you can think of that produces disorientation and perplexity?
Most important, how will the image of Abraham greeting the the visitor change religion as it replaces the sacrifice of Isaac imagery used by modernists?

For those who do not know:
Rabbi Abadi, renowned Posek, was sent at age 19 by the Chazon Ish to study in Lakewood, NJ, under the famed Rabbi Aaron Kotler. A few years after the passing of Rabbi Kotler, Rabbi Abadi became the Posek in Lakewood. And now his sons run a website Kashrut.org to answer questions- mainly of kashrut.

This past week he held four question and answer sessions in a Sephardi shtibl -Teaneck Sephardic Center/Lev Haim here in town. The turnout was surprisingly low. Mainly the Syrians of the minyan and a few old time Lakewood people. Either it was because of the poor publicity- I only found out an hour before Shababt. Or that it was not sponsored by one of the main shuls in town, or people really preferred to hear the second-tier Hesder Ram who was in town or it had no wider community support.

It was entirely q and a format but Rav Abadi managed to work-in or mention most of the pesak from the new second volume of his shut. People did not seem to know who he was. There was a clear discontent with his answers in both directions- whether lenient or strict. He told the women that they must pray 3x a day and one had a sense that they were going to go back to their own rabbis to have it reset as once a day. One Israeli of likely Moroccan descent who did not like any of this pesak – proclaimed out loud that he picks and chooses based on what he hears and finds. When Rav Abadie said that he does not allow any warming of a dry item on Shabbat even to return it to a warming tray (contra Rav Yosef), there was a clear turning away indicating that people where not going to listen.

In a conversation with a physician, Rav Abadi said that if the Talmud says that we can distinguish between blood and blood then it must be medically possible. The doctor was asking that between Rav Moshe and Rav Walenberg who both assume that there is no difference in blood and was cut off by the Rav who said of course we should be able to test.

Rav Abadi advocated his short version of Birkat Hamazon with a story under his breath about how Deal, NJ never used to say berakhot and how he got them to say it through his short version.

I was taken by his heavy Ashkenazi accent and then turned around when his citations of Mehaber were in Israeli Sefardi pronunciation.

I sat next to someone who had studied in Lakewood over twenty years ago and had remembered Rav Abadi as a caring and approachable soul. I also heard about how this former bachur went from his yeshiva life , to putting away his hat, and was now wearing a yellow sports shirt for Shabbat aft.

As a side point, someone asked about one of the less reliable hasgahahs on Manhattan restaurants. Rav Abadi obviously knew the person and deflected the question and refused to answer it. But it was interesting that in the period of deflecting hesitation over other 6 people called out that it was a Conservative rabbi so it was unreliable. Actually the rabbi in question went to all the right Ultra-Orthodox schools in Brooklyn, lived a Yeshivish life in Brooklyn, and is still Yeshivish. But it is interesting that anything that is outside the bounds of [Teaneck] Orthodox practice is called Conservative. The name serves as a demarcation of outside the lines “we wont even consider the hasgahah.” A form of assur or harem. It has nothing to do with the Conservative movement itself. The word functions like the word Gnostic in early Church writings or Papist in the mouth of Protestants.

No one in the room seemed to know of the website.

A forthcoming graphic novel about an 11 year old Orthodox girl who is a troll slayer.

The artist based his knowledge of Hasidic girl life on Liz Harris, Holy Days; Hella Winston, Unchosen: the hidden lives of Hasidic rebels; Ayala Feder, Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn; Stephanie Levine, Mystics, Mavericks, and Merrymakers: An Intimate Journey among Hasidic Girls.

The second reviewer here has a nice typology of three approaches to religion in fantasy literature. (1) Make it the point of the book like Narnia (2) Invent a fantasy religion (3) Ignore it. This book offers a fourth way – have the characters be religious but not make it the message of the story. This might actually resonate with the way people see themselves.

Spunky, strong-willed, eleven-year-old Mirka Hirschberg isn’t interested in knitting lessons from her step-mother, or how-to-find-a-husband advice from her sister, or you-better-not warnings from her brother. There’s only one thing she does want: to fight dragons!

Granted, no dragons have been breathing fire around Hereville, the Orthodox Jewish community where Mirka lives, but that doesn’t stop the plucky girl from honing her skills. She… boldly accepts a challenge from a mysterious witch, a challenge that could bring Mirka her heart’s desire: a dragon-slaying sword! All she has to do is find – and outwit – the giant troll who’s got it!

Fruma is Mirka’s stepmother. Even though Fruma is has the longest nose of anyone in Hereville, she’s not an evil stepmother. But she loves an argument! When she’s not making Mirka clean or set the table or learn how to knit, Fruma makes Mirka argue over every little thing.

Full version here

“Yet another troll-fighting 11-year-old Orthodox Jewish girl,” says the byline. Well seriously. How was I supposed to pass that up?
Mirka has a dream, but it’s not the kind of thing that gets a lot of support. More than anything else in the entire world she wants to fight dragons. The problem? She’s eleven, a girl, and she lives in the Jewish Orthodox town of Hereville.
Think about children’s fantasy novels and religion for a moment. Religion in fantasies for kids tends to skew one of three ways. You can incorporate it and make it the entire point of the novel (Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, the Narnia books of C.S. Lewis, or Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time series which is technically science fiction anyway). You can make up an entirely new religion of your own (as in the novels of Frances Hardinge, Tamora Pierce, Megan Whalen Turner, etc.). Or you just sorta forget about it. Remember, in the Harry Potter novels there may be churches and Christmas, but when wizards marry there’s only a vague representative of some unnamed religion presiding. And children’s graphic novels are in such an infant phase at this point that religion never even comes up half the time.
So Hereville is remarkable right off the bat because it isn’t afraid. It says, “Yeah, I’m gonna incorporate religion into this book. Heck, I’m even gonna TEACH about the religion of Orthodox Jews while I’m at it.”
From the different ways girls can be rebellious, pious, or popular in their near identical school clothes to Shabbos to what the three braids of the khale represent (truth, peace, and justice), it’s all in there without ever sounding like you’re being taught something. The religion is integral to the story and you wouldn’t want it any other way.

Full Version Here

I was visiting a city elsewhere in the US.

A secular studies principal in an American haredi yeshiva stated that he just got on facebook. His former students are all friending him. He mentioned that one of the students from a few years ago said that he was the only one of his former teacher he friended and he hated the rabbis. I asked him how many of the graduates are still frum? He said give or take about half. So returning to this student.
He told a story of how the rebbe argued with the student and shouted at the student that the rebbe was right and the student was wrong. The principal said that these rebbes have no sense of the need to appreciate the student or to help him mature. I asked why is that?
Answer – They do not act as proper parent who gives the child a chance to rebel and mature. Rather, they themselves are immature and have to argue that they are correct. The rebbe sees yiddishkeit as a truth not a path to grow into. The Rebbe is himself narcissistic and concerned with his own self-perception and insecurities. A mature ninth grade teacher knows to let the kid argue, these rabbeim don’t.
Me- So why are you there?
Him–I care about the kids.

Conversation with Sefardi pulpit rabbi with Sfardi Smikhah from Israel. Him- there are a lot of arguing about all these new things about women. I see constant shouting in papers, blogs, and especially the RCA private list serve. I don’t understand it. It is like these people have no idea what they should do or react. They keep asking how should we react? Do we need to react?
Him cont-They are rabbis, don’t they know already what they do? Why are they asking now? Don’t they have a sense of what a rabbi is and supposed to do? Why do these these topic change anything in their lives? And why are they looking to list seves for answers? I know what my job is and I do it. Are they lost about their jobs or identities?

There is an upcoming conference that will discuss “Big Tent Christianity.” In the 1980’s and 1990’s everyone loved boxes. People fit themselves into boxes and they fit others into boxes. Now there is a feeling of lots of lines crossed and that there can be a big tent religion again like in the1950’s. Lines between denominations are more fluid. In addition, mystic and rationalist, social activist, and those who want a return to the medieval or are more vision centered than denominational now feel they dont like the institutional boundaries. If there was a Conference on “Big Tent Judaism,” would people come? probably

Who would speak? Not those who are branded by a specific slice of the pie. Who is cross denominational? The Left side of Orthodoxy is clearly labeled as narrow and denominational. Who are the boundary crossers? How many are Rabbis? How many Academics? How many psychologists or journalists?

Limmud -NY attracts pluralists of all denominations – How would a big tent conference be different? Is there interest in creating a big tent and taking down walls? Or will Jews be against it and will only do it 4-5 years after the Evangelicals, Catholics, and Mainliners change? So is this the jewish trend for a decade from now?

Apparently, the next big thing on the agenda for some in the movement is a conference that will be held in Raleigh, NC on September 8-9, 2010, called “Big Tent Christianity.”
There’s a new ethos emerging. It’s a Christian identity that hasn’t fully discovered itself yet, but knows it doesn’t fit in a lot of the standard categories…
…What happens if you’re a fundamentalist who starts asking questions, or an Evangelical who is tired of having to defend yourself from a fractious right flank, or a mainliner who dreams of a faith that is more mission-driven than institution-bound, or a Catholic who has more affinity with St. Francis and Mother Teresa than Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly, or an Eastern Orthodox who wants to share their ancient treasures and receive gifts from other newer traditions too?

I think some folks – not all, of course – who know they don’t fit in with these established spaces are seeking a more expansive and open space – to think and dream together, pray and worship together, serve and reach out together. The “big tent” image works beautifully for this because it evokes both the American revivalist phenomenon of the Pentecostal tent meeting and the more “liberal” sense of hospitality and welcome.
Is Emerging moving toward a “new ecumenical movement”? Is that the next step? And how “Big” is this “Big Tent”?
full version here

In the same entry- there is a question- What is happening to the emergent Christians who broke from the Evangelicals? Answer- some are becoming liberal, others are returning to their Orthodox base, and some are actually still trying for new expansive visions.

“Some emerging Christians will become mainline liberals (or progressives as many prefer to be called now), some will retreat a bit by assuming their old seats in evangelical churches, and others will continue to impact the evangelical movement in a missional or expansive, robust gospel direction.”

On Thursday, 9 Elul (August 19), there will be an assembly in Yeshivat Har Etzion to note the shloshim of the passing of Rav Amital zt”l.

The speakers will include Rav Lichtenstein, President Shimon Peres, Rav Medan, “Moshko”, Prof. Bar Asher, and Rav Yehuda Gilad.

The proceedings will be broadcast live over the internet on the Yahadut” page of YNET –

http://www.ynet.co.il/home/0,7340,L-4403,00.html

beginning at 7:00 PM Israel time (12:00 noon, NY time).

Who is the Stranger today?
This weeks’ dvar Torah from Uri l’Tzedek offers us a return to the universalism of Hermann Cohen. Paam, once upon a time Herman Cnohen was an accepted part of a Rabbinic education, Mosad Harav Kook kashered him up and translated him, Akiva Simon and Harold Fisch debated which verses to use for Jewish universalism and Rav Soloveitchik did his degree on him. (And we get chief rabbis Sacks quoting him without citation.)

Samuel Fleischacker a professor at the University of Illinois offers us an expanded definition that seeks to overcome ethnocentrism. Hermann Cohen taught that we should judge a person’s ethics by how we relate to the economically and socially downtrodden. It is easy to pride ourselves on our ethic of helping our own community and building one’s own enclave. But what of those not part of the community, especially those who work for us or we live among?

Parshat Eikev by Samuel Fleischacker

In practice this means, for Jews in Israel, seeing God in the Palestinians, and for Jews here in America, seeing God in the Latina/os and other immigrants who work in our restaurants and stores and homes.
The God of gods… stands with all these people against their oppressors just as He stood with us in Egypt, cares for them as He does for us, and is ready to deliver them, as he does col adam, from one who is stronger than them, even when that stronger person is a Jew.
We were not delivered from Egypt to set up another ethnocentric system that oppresses outsiders. We were delivered, instead, precisely to spread the message that the true God cares for all humanity (that is how we become a “holy nation”). And that requires that we understand “love the stranger” broadly and richly: not just in legal terms but in the expansive terms that allow us to mirror God’s own love, and help bring about God’s own justice.
Full Version Here

Please continue to think about the last post “Quarreling with Orthodoxy” on what would be in a book to respond to post-orthodoxy and how would you address the problems. The Evangelicals in their discussions are showing that you wont solve the problems through more paternalistic liberalism or apologetics. The Evangelicals are showing in their struggles that one needs to properly name the problem, and then not to fix things with a repair kit but to offer a new vision combined with a return to basics.
A recent attempt for liberal tolerance for the issues in the community is last week’s Statement on Principles on Homosexuality. It was certainly needed to alleviate the suicide, depression, and self-hatred caused by a community that demands a single social aspiration and complete internalization of an external rule.

However, here is a new blog by two Orthodox women, both straight, grappling with the statements. I do not agree with many of their points. I am more catholic in many senses and do not think solutions will come via identity politics. But they raise the issues about liberal tolerance, hence they apply named themselves Accidental Radical.
I do know that whenever I am engaged in interfaith encounters and the other side starts with a declaration that we are all in the image of God and hence they would never do anything Anti-Semitic, then I know there will be no discussion of past Antisemitic acts, nor any plans to educate the laity, nor any apology, nor any commitments for the future since they already respect all humans.

Accidental radical
Blogger #1- Svara

My instinct is to answer a resounding no. But I have certainly felt that contradiction at times, this time being no exception.
I have many questions and no answers. But I will continue to grapple with these questions. Because I do not believe halakha offers us simple answers. But I do believe it has answers. And if those answers contradict my “(independent) moral instincts,” perhaps that is G-d’s way of telling me that I have not yet found the correct answers. And so we must continue to seek
For the Full Version- see here