I’ve received a lot useful feedback on my recent talk, “White History Month,” that I gave at my institutional home, Wabash College. (You can view the talk here via the college’s YouTube channel.) Much of the feedback has given me new things to think about, but there is one limit to the talk that I had in mind when I wrote, although I have yet to address it explicitly until now.
Since the talk was given in a non-religious setting and focused on—and critical of—secular, modern ways of living, I used the term ‘celebration’ in a very particular way. This “way” excluded the rich and deep sense that other meanings of the term might imply, in particular those informed by religious celebrations.
In other words, the term ‘celebration’ must make a distinction between its secular and its religious meaning. In the secular sense of the term, ‘celebration’ carries no sense of solemnity or reverence.
In my talk, I asserted that we ought to stop celebrating history and start to study it. What I find in religious—and especially Catholic—celebration is that the Word is studied as a part of the celebration. In short, religious celebration enables use to do both: celebrate and study. But this uses the terms in a very particular way; a way that is mostly foreign to secular langugage.
This clarification is interesting to me because, if we follow it closely, we may find that many so-called religious ‘celebrations’ are actually quite secular or that some secular ‘celebrations’ are very religious. This would force us to face the question of what we mean by the terms ‘religious’ and ‘secular.’
A task for another day.
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