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{"id":17633,"date":"2015-10-13T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-10-13T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=2458"},"modified":"2015-10-13T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2015-10-13T00:00:00","slug":"ritual-and-spontaneity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2015\/10\/ritual-and-spontaneity\/","title":{"rendered":"Ritual and Spontaneity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n<\/head>

Lori Branch\u2019s dense and illuminating\u00a0Rituals of Spontaneity<\/a> attempts to explain this sea-change in Christian history. She describes the rise of a \u201cspirituality of spontaneity\u201d that was both a\u00a0symptom of religious imagination under pressure of epistemological and economic discourse yet contained \u00a0resistances to this secularization (87). According to Branch, religion\u00a0misunderstands itself in modernity because \u201cit thinks of itself as defensible only as a system of knowledge, doctrines, and rules.\u201d It misunderstands itself when it conforms to the demands of the system of economic and empirical rationality.<\/p>\n

The sacred\/secular dichotomy of modernity is one of the accommodations to the reigning ideology of modernity. Early modernity separates sacred and secular \u201cbecause of the problems the simple abstraction of a discrete religious sphere solves.\u201d Producing a religious sphere in opposition to the secular allows \u201cacquisitive capitalism to flourish,\u201d and it answers to the early modern need and desire for a realm of calculation and interest \u201cfree of ambiguity, doubt, and the radical responsibility of each act and belief.\u201d It answers, in short, to the same needs that drove Descartes to the cogito<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Bunyan looms large in Branch\u2019s narrative, since his struggles point to the ambiguities of of the sacred-secular divide. Though Bunyan\u2019s religious rhetoric is infused with market analogies, he is most<\/em> comforted when God does something that is whole inscrutable by market rules:\u00a0\u201csomething in Bunyan\u2019s own spirituality testifies to that which is inarticulaable in the ideology of salvation-as-exchange: the hope and desire for relation to the sacred other as something besides a subject-object, buying-and-selling, for conversation that is not being scrutinized as proof, for prayer that is not about getting something\u201d (88-89).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Bunyan\u2019s faith is\u00a0enmeshed in economic epistemology, but he is resistant. He retains a hope for love and relation outside exchange, a relation that made it possible to pray.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"