by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
In Rome This Week, Seekers and Dwellers
“… with regards to faith, there are `seekers’ and `dwellers.‘”
That – in veteran Rome correspondent Cindy Wooden’s formulation – is one of the core ideas of Charles Taylor’s thought, set out in A Secular Age and elsewhere. And that is one of the ideas undergirding the discussion at the Gregorian University in Rome this week. Here it is, in brief:
The seekers – baptized Christians or not – continue to question. The dwellers have found a home in a church and may have a tendency to nest there so thoroughly that they seldom reach out to others and only accept those who believe exactly as they do.
The conversation, sponsored by the Pontifical Council for Culture, is an offshoot of the Courtyard of the Gentiles project, meant to engage Catholics in a sustained way with committed atheists and their dispositional kin. Conceived by Pope Benedict, the Courtyard was meant from the beginning to be an ongoing effort – and conversations like the one in Rome are strong evidence that it really is ongoing and not just another paper initiative from a Vatican dicastery.
Further evidence is that the strongest voices are not priests, but lay people: Taylor and my Georgetown colleague Jose Casanova, for whom the project is part of a career’s reflection on the “post-secular” situation. Wooden explains:
Jose Casanova, a professor of the sociology of religion at Georgetown University in Washington, said the international group of philosophers, theologians and sociologists present at the Rome conference started the “Faith in the Secular Age” project “with a sense of concern, a sense that the disjunctions (including between seekers and dwellers) were growing larger and there were no real avenues to address them within the church or between the church and outside the church.”
“We were concerned by what could be called a self-referential church that had been too concerned about what could be called a 'moral confessionalism’ in which being Catholic was defined by certain moral criteria more than criteria of dogma or belief in doctrine,” he said. Positions on “moral issues having to do with gender and sex” seemed to be how Catholics themselves and the outside world were defining who was and was not Catholic.
The election of Pope Francis has created new opportunities to discuss ways to overcome the splits and heal the rifts, he said.
“The big, big issue,” Taylor said, is how to “accompany the seekers without shocking the dwellers.”
That’s a big issue, no question. But it seems to me the bigger question is how credibly to set forth a sense of things that acknowledges how deeply we are, most of us, at once seekers and dwellers. And there’s no place where this is more obvious than in Rome – which, as seat of the church and site of pilgrimage, is held in common by the seekers and the dwellers.
Courtyard of the Common Good
The common good: the expression must have been uttered threescore and ten times in the sessions of the Courtyard of the Gentiles event at Georgetown yesterday: a panel discussion about the common good and politics and one about the common good and the arts, each followed by a pair of informal sessions in tents outside Healy Hall under the clear blue sky. But the effect was the opposite of repetitive; it led us to think – led me to think, at any rate – of the hidden dimensions of this term that is itself common.
The thrust of the politics session was that the sense of the common good is imperiled in Washington, a state of things that makes it all the more vital for non-state actors to affirm the existence of the common good and to urge, inspire, and organize people to strive for it together.
That’s obvious (or should be obvious). But what came clear to me for the first time – especially through the remarks of of the Cal-Berkeley sociocultural anthropologist Saba Mahmood – is the relationship between our idea of the common good and the state of the common goods in our society: schools, infrastructure, parks and public spaces, and other goods called “the commons” (nature, air and water, and so on). The relationship cuts two ways: as our sense of the common good diminishes, our common goods are privatized or allowed to atrophy; and as our involvement with those common goods diminishes in consequence, our sense of the common good is weakened further – because it is through shared experiences in schools, parks, public spaces and the like that the idea of the common good is cultivated.
The arts session was more confident about the common good, I am happy to say. Robert Pinsky gave a robust account of poetry as a common good still cherished in our society, claims about the end of literacy to the contrary. Alice McDermott explained that the distinct but uncluttered Catholic language of her work is the way her characters express their sense of the common good – an approach that finds a parallel in the work of Ayana Mathis, whose dozen protagonists in The Twelve Tribes of Hattie are bound together by family ties and common experience in the Pentecostal church. And Alan Lightman, schooled in hardheaded scientific justification, gave an account of the truths of art as truths that we recognize individually and personally – with the implication that what we call classics are works whose truths register not just individually and personally but in communities or across a society.
The effect of the day was to suggest that open discussion of ideas in forums such as the Courtyard event – which was free and open to the public and was attended by several hundred people – is itself a common good to be cherished rather than taken for granted.
Robert Putnam at the Kennedy Center: “Their Kids Are Our Kids”
The United States today is a segregated place – segregated by class – and is at risk of becoming a caste society where the most important factor for young people is the social standing of their parents.
That’s the grim conclusion with which Robert Putnam opened the Courtyard of the Gentiles event at the Kennedy Center. Putnam, known for Bowling Alone (about the thinning of American social life) and American Grace (about the perdurance of religious belief in America) is at work on a book – part social science and part documentary storytelling – about young people in America, who can be broken down into “haves” and “have-nots” based on class more than at any time in our history.
This spoke pointedly to the theme of the event – Faith, Culture, and the Common Good – for as Pope Francis has stressed to great effect, it is the daily work of people of religious belief to affirm that a common good still exists: that we are members of one another, who are called to care for others, even and especially those usually typed strangers, and to see all of us as bound together in a common human family.
With the Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, a native of Milan, in the front row, Putnam made some light remarks in Italian before beginning his hourlong talk, which blended data with vivid recollections of his boyhood in Port Clinton, Ohio, on Lake Erie – a town not unlike the Shillington, Pennsylvania, of John Updike’s boyhood. Then, Port Clinton was a town without an obvious sense of class; now, it is a town strictly divided between the wealthy people who live on the lake and the poor people who live inland.
What divided Port Clinton – and America as a whole? As Putnam set it out, class in America is now defined especially by education, with people with college degrees living one kind of life and those without living another. Segregated into two groups residentially, in the workplace, in marriage and social life, we have a “shriveled sense of `we'” that is then the root cause of a broad swath of social problems: unemployment, crime, shattered families, and the like.
What should be done about it? That’s a question for the coming days – but the answer must begin with the communal recognition that “their kids are our kids,” which Putnam delivered in front of a slide showing the smiling pope, who might have said the same thing.
Courting Conversation
In the Catholic milieu, such as it is, it’s not too often you get to do something distinctly new, and as a rule I think most of us are all right with that: we like working variations on themes developed by our great precedessors, pursuing lines of “creative fidelity” and so forth.
But the event taking place at Georgetown and environs the rest of this week is something distinctly new – and that is what makes it exciting.
What it’s called, formally, is the Courtyard of the Gentiles – after a space in Jerusalem, described in the Acts of the Apostles, where open religious discussion took place. What it is, less formally, is a dialogue about religious belief, initiated by Pope Benedict and carried forward by Pope Francis, that includes members of the different faith traditions and also people of no religion at all.
This latter part is what’s new. Since the Second Vatican Council the Catholic Church has had formal dialogue with a whole range of other Christian congregations, with Jews and Judaism, with Islam variously expressed, and so on. But only in the past few years – through Courtyard events in a dozen cities – have people of no formal religious belief been regarded as partners in dialogue.
And just in time – because the dialogue that is playing out in the streets and classrooms and broadcast studios in America is between belief and unbelief, between the notion of religious traditions as rich and sustaining and the notion of religious traditions as stifling and noxious. It’s not dialogue at all.
This week, the Courtyard comes to Washington – organized jointly by Georgetown, the Archdiocese of Washington, and the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture and its dynamic president, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi. The event carries the (very American) title “Faith, Culture, and the Common Good.” Robert Putnam of Harvard – author of Bowling Alone and American Grace – will give the keynote address. Taleb Kweli of Brooklyn will headline an event organized around “Hip-Hop and the Spirit” at the Kennedy Center. Cokie Roberts will lead a discussion about politics, E.J. Dionne an exchange among members of Congress and a discussion of religion and the media. I’ll moderate a discussion on religious questions with literary writers: the poet Robert Pinsky, the novelists Alice McDermott and Ayana Mathis, and MIT’s Alan Lightman, who is expert in physics and literature alike.
Flannery O'Connor’s voice will be heard, too – through a standout dramatic presentation of her great story “Everything That Rises Must Converge” given by Karin Coonrod’s acclaimed troupe La Compagnia de'Colombari.
Dialogue is the official word for what this conference is about. But I am betting that what we hear is more like a conversation with many voices.
A few months ago I characterized Pope Francis as essentially a conversationalist: engaged one-to-one with his conversation partner, eager to listen, willing to follow a line of thought where it goes, open to making it up fresh each time rather than sticking to prepared remarks.
So in our conversations the “Francis Factor” will be in the house, too.
I’ll post pieces about the event here through to the weekend.