ReligionWise
ReligionWise
Spirituality and Philosophy - Tad Robinson
This episode welcomes back Tad Robinson, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy at Muhlenberg College.
In his recent work, Robinson has asked how reframing questions of religious activity as spiritual rather than religious might lead to different insight and understanding of prayer, meditation, and a variety of other practices. We also discuss the realities of teaching a new generation that is less connected to religious institutions as well as the philosophical implications of considering spiritual practice from a new angle.
Welcome to ReligionWise. I'm your host Chip Gruen. I'm very excited to welcome back a guest who we've had on the podcast previously, Dr. Tad Robinson, who is professor of philosophy here at Muhlenberg College, you might remember that he talked about the philosophy of religion in season one, episode four. If you didn't get a chance to listen to that episode, I invite you to go back and listen, not that it's necessary for this conversation, but can provide a little bit of context and additional information on the philosophy of religion more generally. The reason that he's back today, though, is that he, through his recent scholarship and teaching is reframing some of those questions from philosophy of religion, and considering them from a new angle. The central way he's doing this is thinking about these things as spiritual practice as thinking about spirituality rather than religion. And this is really important. And I think we teaching the liberal arts college get a front row view of this is that in the last few decades, the percentage of people who don't claim religious affiliation or religious identity in their matriculation materials has gone up dramatically from the mid single digits to about 40% of students entering. So the old cliche is that people will say that they are spiritual, but not religious. Dr. Robinson is taking that question seriously. And reframing a lot of the questions that he asks about religious belief and practice, along the lines of what we might think of as more individual, less institutional, less corporate structures. So for example, the practice of prayer, meditation, yoga, other things that people might do outside of a religious institution, and they just do on their own. And so the set of questions that he asks about those practices, is oftentimes very different than what we might think of when we think of questions, philosophy of religion questions from a traditional perspective. The other reason I find this topic really interesting, and I find Dr. Robinson to be a great interlocutor for me, is that being a religious studies professor who is influenced a lot by history of religions, sociological methods, anthropological methods, the questions that he asks are just fundamentally different. Now, religious studies as a field cast a very wide net, and can include a lot of different methods. But the kinds of questions that he asked and the kinds of analysis that he does just differs really radically from the kinds of things I think about with students in my classes, or in my own writing and research. The final note I want to make here is just a note of clarity, because this is audio only you might not pick up on the usage of a word. And that word is "nones," we refer to it quite a lot. And it's explained a little bit but I just want to make it really clear. When we refer to "nones" that is n o n e s, meaning those people who mark their religious affiliation as"none." This is a term that you see used in polling, in data collection, that people will mark "none" as, or wright "none" as a religious affiliation. And so they have sometimes been referred to as the "nones," which of course is in contrast to nuns, n u n s, the Catholic female religious individuals who live a life dedicated to God the"nones" n o n e s and the nuns n u n s are obviously very, very different and distinct from one another. So just that point of clarity as you listen to the episode. I hope you enjoy listening to episode as much as I've enjoyed thinking about it with Dr. Robinson. Tad Robinson, thanks for coming on ReligionWise.
Tad Robinson:Well thanks for having me.
Chip Gruen:So astute listeners will remember that you were on season one, episode four. And the title of that episode was philosophy of religion. And we talked about this subfield of philosophy, which is, of course, the context of your own professional work and the context of our conversation today, but in your recent research and course design, you're choosing to focus not on religion as the category of central concern, but instead on the word or on the category spirituality. Why did you choose to reframe the way that you consider belief and practice around that term spirituality instead of religion?
Tad Robinson:Yeah, I mean, I was thinking about this initially, primarily in terms of kind of meeting students where they were with respect to the course, philosophy of religion course. And, you know, one of the things I had noticed was that the term religion, you know, has, over the last few years in particular kind of come to connote a set of institutions or ideas about institutions and rules and things that students just weren't very interested in. And so I was sort of thinking about ways to kind of meet them where they were at. And so I thought, well, you know, students and the public at large, seem to see spirituality in much more positive terms, people are interested in spirituality, this is a term that kind of has a positive valence with people. And so I was thinking, Well, you know, what if I kind of reframed the course, with a different title, and maybe just change some of the terminology, and I think, initially, I was thinking I could teach a philosophy of religion course, titled are framed around spirituality. So that was the initial idea. You know, but when I made the decision to do that, and started really getting into the nitty gritty of like, okay, well, I'm gonna have to have a, you know, an account of kind of what spirituality is, in kind of general, and maybe how that differs a little bit from religion, as we frame it as I frame the course for students. You know, I started to realize, like, you know, that this framing affords some new opportunities for thinking about, you know, philosophical topics, right. And so, that was where I sort of started off. So once I started thinking about this, I thought, Okay, well, what, what is, what is spirituality, right? And obviously, this is a super complicated term, it means a million things to, to a million different people. And so I had to kind of circumscribe this a little bit. And so, as I was thinking about what spirituality is, or at least a way that operationalize it for the course, you know, I started thinking about well, okay, one, like, people use this term, you know, in a really general way. So however we think about spirituality, it's gotta be what I would call kind of transreligious, right. So it's got to be something that we can talk about, a Buddhist spirituality, and a new age spirituality, and maybe a secular spirituality, and a traditional, more sort of traditional kind of Western kinds of spirituality. So that was one kind of limitation. Another kind of limitation was, you know, had to do with the fact that, like, why do people care about spirituality? You know, my sense is that, you know, people are motivated to think about spirituality, you know, because there's some sort of problem, right, that, you know, they sort of sense that there's some sort of gap between, like the way the world is, and the way it could be or should be, right. And so I think that, that that's a sort of really general way of talking about an experience a lot of us have, probably a lot of the time, which is just to say, like, why are things this way? Or why did I do that? And not that or I wish I hadn't done that? Or, here's something I could do in the future, like, what am I going to have to do? So there's sort of this gap between the way the world is and the way it could or should be that I think we're constantly navigating. And that's, I think, a pretty deep element of the human condition, in a sense, right. So I think that that does connect well, with kind of why people will be looking towards spirituality or looking for spirituality. Kind of a third element that I was thinking about was, you know, how spirituality might differ from, you know, like a life hack, right? Or how spiritually might differ from like, an intervention like psychological intervention or clinical intervention, right? In the sense that like, yeah, people have lots of problems, right. And so, there's different ways of approaching those. So how does spirituality differ in these kinds of ways? And differ from these kinds of phenomena? And, you know, I think, you know, as I was thinking about it, and reading about this, we one of the things that spirituality seems to be, at least for many people, is about sort of fundamental changes to kind of who we are, right, and the way we understand things, right. So, you know, these aren't intended sort of short term fixes, right? You know, they're not intended to deal with what we might think was like pathological problems there. These are sort of, you know, efforts to deal with the world, you know, in light of kind of who we are, in some sense. And then sort of the last thing that was kind of driving me was this observation, like, spirituality is totally practical, right, that spirituality, you know, is sort of most sort of paradigmatically kind of exemplified in practices like prayer and meditation, and yoga, and, you know, fasting and all these kinds of things that we associate with kind of religious practice, I think. So, kind of taking all that into account. I was like, Okay, well, let's let's operationalize spirituality for the purposes of this course, you know, in terms of a positive effort. So what I ended up doing in terms of operationalizing, the term for the course. And my thinking, was to think about it this way, right? To think about spirituality as a practical orientation toward a more fulfilled and harmonious life. And sort of in a little more detail, the idea is to understand it as an orientation towards a life where somebody's actions and desires and understanding and priorities and emotions cohere not only with one another, but with the way the world is, and with those things that are recognized as substantively valuable within it.
Chip Gruen:Wow, that sounds like a philosophers defintiion.
Tad Robinson:Hey, you know...
Chip Gruen:So I want to follow up on this a little bit. Because you, I mean, if I'm understanding correctly, like on the one hand that there was almost a market driven approach to thinking about the course philosophy of religion, and as you said, meeting students where, where they're at. And so that demanded a sort of a categorical reconstruction of how you're approaching the course. But on the other hand, you are approaching, I think you'll agree is a somewhat similar body of material reframed from a different perspective. So I guess I want to get at your your strategy here. I mean, is that are the equal parts of those things? Is this about marketability? Or do you fundamentally see these beliefs and practices these approaches in a different way? As you have sought to reframe the category?
Tad Robinson:Yeah, I mean, I think both. And it was unexpected, that that the reframing this would have significant consequences for thinking about traditional topics and traditional philosophical questions. Right. So yeah, I mean, I think, you know, just to just to give a couple of examples, right? I mean, so on the one hand, I think that you can do a lot of what you might normally do in a traditional philosophy of religion course, in a course on philosophy and spirituality, or philosophy of spirituality. But I think that like those kind of traditional topics, you know, arguments for God's existence, for example, right, or problem of evil, right? These become not the primary questions, they don't become the first questions that come up, right? So. So if you're thinking about spirituality, and you're thinking about, like, you know, a person kind of trying to transform their lives in light of their their values, and, you know, what they regard to be true? The questions are human centered, as opposed to kind of, you know, universe centered or external centered. And so, you know, for example, you're gonna have to focus on Well, what is it that people do? Right? So, you know, what are these spiritual practices or spiritual exercises? And why do people do those things? Right, in particular, as opposed to something else? Right. And when you ask those kinds of questions, you know, issues of like, what the self is kind of come up automatically, because the question is, well, you know, you're transforming yourself, well, what is that? Right? And so, you know, looking back at the history of philosophy, you know, you see lots of different kinds of stories about what self transformation is, right? So, you know, to give a couple of examples, one you might think of self transformation is self discovery, right? So there's a lot of discussion in the contemporary world, right about like, finding the true self, where that is, like, Hey, your true self is there, you just kind of dig it out. Right. And another model, thinking about that is sort of self mastery. Right? So where the idea is that, hey, the individual is this disjointed, or multifaceted sort of being and then what we need to do, in order to master the self is kind of push aside, those parts of us that don't contribute to our well being or our flourishing, or aren't are inconsistent with our values? Right? There's another way of thinking about this transformation in terms of creation of the self, right? So where, hey, the self is not this pre existing thing like you make yourself right. So we see this in certain existentialist kinds of writers, but also with contemporary kinds of narrative identity and so on. So, you know, that's one kind of case. Another kind of case has to do with self knowledge, again, a traditional philosophical subject that goes back to Socrates. Right, but not something that typically comes up in a philosophy of religion course. So what does that mean? Well, you know, when it comes to self knowledge, one of the things that comes out, at least in a lot of discussions of spiritual practices, sort of how we don't know what's going on, inside of us, sometimes we don't know what we want, right? We don't know what we really value, right? And that part of this process of digging things out, you know, is coming to know the self, right? And that's it. There's an interesting kind of discussion there philosophically, because philosophers have for a long time, sort of taken self knowledge to be something pretty easy, right? But at least according to a lot of people writing on spiritual practices, for example, it's it's really not right. So there's an interesting philosophical question there that I think grows right out of these questions of, if we're gonna focus on spirituality. And there's some other steps that we can talk about, but that's just a couple of examples.
Chip Gruen:So I want to get a sense, obviously, as you indicate a lot of the questions that you're digging into are questions that have backgrounds, philosophical backgrounds, right? There's reading there are thinkers there are people who have thought about these, though maybe not exactly in the context of philosophy of religion, right. So I'm curious about how much of of what you're doing, again, in both the paper you presented at the American Academy of Religion, and in this course redesign is a part of the contemporary trends in philosophy of religion, or is this Tad Robinson using the freedom of being a professor at a liberal arts college to do and formulate, and imagine the world in new and creative ways, apart from sort of major trends that are going on in the field?
Tad Robinson:You know, I think, you know, on the one hand, it is it is sort of, you know, a matter of me sort of trying to plow ahead and sort of find a new way of thinking, right. That said, I mean, there certainly, you know, I certainly had resources to draw on. Right. So, just to give a couple examples, Robert Solomon, who's a, you know, pretty well known philosopher, the University of Texas, you know, wrote a wrote a book called "Spirituality for the Skeptic," you know, back in the early 2000s, right, there's been a number of edited collections that have come out on on spirituality. You know, there's a recent book that we might talk about a little later by this philosopher named Terence Cuneo called "Ritualized Faith," right, which focuses on kind of liturgical practices in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Right. So there is a sort of, you know, burgeoning is maybe overt, overstating it right. But there is, I think, an interest in in an increasing interest in sort of thinking about spirituality, maybe not as opposed to religion or philosophy of religion, right. But, you know, in conjunction with, so, you know, yeah, there's that. And I've had the opportunity to draw on a lot of that material that said, right, the way that I'm thinking about this in terms of a transformation of models of the transformation of self, models of self knowledge, right, maybe thinking about philosophy of habit, for example, you know, these are, in some ways, stuff that I'm having to kind of come up with and dig out and reformulate and frame myself.
Chip Gruen:So I want to go back, I mean, and listeners of the podcast, will, will know that I am particularly interested in some of the things that you I won't say threw away, but some of the things that you dismissed as being principle to philosophy of religion, that you are defocusing...
Tad Robinson:Right.
Chip Gruen:...institutions, certain kinds of rules, or regulations, or structures, and religious studies as a field, you know, it's very heavily inst, influenced by sociology and anthropology that really center on those kinds of things.
Tad Robinson:Right.
Chip Gruen:So I want to, you know, maybe do a disciplinary contrast here......or just think about the ways in which you
Tad Robinson:Yeah. imagined some of those things that are traditionally in the field of religious studies of social institutions, social roles, determined identities, ethics, all of those sorts of things. And to see where you see this approach, overlapping or not overlapping? Or how, for example, a philosophy of spirituality would think about, say, hierarchy or structure, or those questions that you're sort of leaving aside for other disciplines or other courses. Yeah. I mean, you know, it is true, like focusing on spirituality, at least as I'm, as I'm thinking about it is focused on kind of individuals inner lives. Right. And so it is opposed, in some sense, or at least doesn't really necessarily draw on sort of sociological or political understandings of of humans, right. So that's, you know, that's, that's the case. Right? So just to give an example of how that might play out, right, I mean, so say, we want to think about meditate meditation, right? And so we're thinking, well, what are the philosophical questions about like meditative practices? Right? And so we might think about, like, Well, I mean, meditation, there's lots of manuals about meditation, right? There's lots of sort of, maybe rulebook is the wrong word, but you know, texts that suggest particular ways of meditating for particular kinds of reasons, a particular kind of times in particular kinds of goals, right? And so, you know, as a philosopher, we can kind of look at that we can also look at like, why, you know, to the extent that we have access to this, you know, why do individuals engage in this? What are individuals think they're doing when they're when they're doing this, right? So all of those are kind of, you know, starting with individual actions or sort of, you know, texts that sort of tell us about why an individual might want to do this, right from a sociological or anthropological perspective, we might say, Yeah, but Tad, like why people do things is not always clear to them, right? And we might sociologists, anthropologist might say, hey, the the sort of social forces, the external forces that are acting on a person, right, that's what's really driving their action, right, or their culture is really driving their action, like what they think they're doing, you know, inside their own minds is maybe not an accurate story about why they're doing what they're doing. Right. And I would just say like, you know, people are complicated, right? And so, hey, from, you know, from the perspective that I'm going to start with, right, we're going to start with like, what does what do these people think they're doing? Why are they doing it? As opposed to sort of a sociological or anthropological perspective that says, oh, you know, they're really, you know, they're really engaging in something else, right? Maybe they are, right? But we can certainly start with what what kinds of reasons they think they're, you know, are driving their action.
Chip Gruen:So let me give you a critique, I'll see how you how you how you think about this, because one of the directions that you seem to be going seems to be heavily influenced by psychology, psychology of religion, and I wonder how much that work is influencing what you're thinking and how you're thinking it. Because if we're thinking about how people's internal processes are working, or how they think that they're working on themselves, like, those seem to be psychological questions. So that's part one. And part two, I will, I will often say to my students, I have the privilege of teaching my theory and method in the study of religion, this coming term, and when we get to the psychology of religion section, one of the critiques I offer to them after we've gone through and, and thought about some of these thinkers, is that the only way we can get to the inner workings of somebody, a spiritual or religious person talking about their their own practice is in fact, the talking about it, right? The formulating it, the the self reporting that is done. And the case I always try to make for my students is that that is a public act in itself, right? Like how one constructs the story of what they're doing, or the narrative of their own spiritual practice is itself a performative thing that gets you a little bit away from psychology and more into maybe anthropology or sociology.
Tad Robinson:Um hmm, yeah.
Chip Gruen:So So tell me about the confluences that you have with psychology, and how you would respond to that idea of sort of the public performance of the stories that people tell.
Tad Robinson:Yeah, I mean, I would say that it's like, the approach that I'm I'm pursuing is sort of like a psychological approach to religion in the sense that it's focused on the individual, right, as opposed to sort of a larger group, and that it's focused on kind of the inner kind of life. Right, you know, it's not psychological in the sense that it's not an empir... you know, not engaging empirical methods, right. at all, but yeah, there's certainly an overlap. And some of the topics that I, you know, I'll be taking up are certainly what we would call in philosophy, moral psychology, right? So, questions of compassion and gratitude, and so on. So, you know, there is there is an overlap and in some way, you know, that said, Right, I mean, with respect to the sort of point about, you know, creating, creating one's sort of inner life by telling the story about it. I mean, I think that, that actually is something that comes out in thinking about habits and self transformation. Right? So, one of the one of the things that is sort of philosophy 101 is sort of Aristotle's account of the virtues Right? And how, how you, you how you become brave, right? And so Aristotle story about how you become brave is not that, like you decide to become brave and start thinking brave thoughts. Right? It's like, you start acting like brave people act, right. And by acting like brave people act, you become brave, and you take on the beliefs and dispositions of someone who is courageous, right, by acting like courageous people do, right? So one of the sort of storylines that we kind of get, and I think this is a real tension among philosophers, and I think a lot of people is this sort of dynamic between inner and outer, right? Or sort of Aristotle's sort of theory, the virtues, and other people have picked us up in varieties, a variety of ways, right? Is to say, like, hey, to change the inner, you need to change the outer first, right? And so, you know, we don't always sort of think about things that way, we sort of sometimes think like, well, I want to be different, I should just sort of change, change my, my inside, right, I need to change my beliefs, I need to change my dispositions and, and sort of the recognition that Aristotle has right is to say, You can't do that directly, right, you can only change the inside by changing the outside, in certain kinds of ways, right. And so I think, like your point about, like, telling the story, in some ways as an example of that, right, and there's lots of examples like that. So there's a sort of famous example of John Stuart Mill in his autobiography. So it tells a story about this mental breakdown he has, and he sort of comes to this this conclusion. He says, like, I just realized, like, you can't just make yourself happy, right? Like you have to do, you can't focus on hap... you can't try to be happy, right? You have to try to do something else. And happiness is sort of a sort of byproduct, right? of pursuing the right kinds of things. Right. And so I think that that that idea of sort of, is related, right, where if you want to do certain kinds of things, specifically things related to your inner life, right and changing kind of who you are, you can't decide to do those, you can't aim to do that. Right, you have to do something else. And as the byproduct, those changes will happen. Right. So, yeah, I mean, I think, you know, the example you're talking about is precisely one of those. But I don't think everything's like that. But I think lots of cases when it comes to spirituality are.
Chip Gruen:Okay. So if we take that example, again, of, you know, the story that people tell about their own inner lives, right as being something that is sort of discoverable. And we can use as a basis for thinking in a number of different ways. It's interesting to me to think about to return to our student population. And I think that we can extrapolate out a little bit from our student population to think about Gen Z, obviously, we teach people mostly who are the 18 to 22 year old set, though, not exclusively, that their thinking on a lot of these questions is different than it was say, when we were 18 to 22 year old years old, or when boomers or the silent generation or the greatest generation were 18 to 22 year old, years old. And I've made a little bit of a study of this just looking at the demographic trends of the matriculation data when our students come in that when we came to Muhlenberg that the story was that the population was a third Jewish and a third Catholic, and a third of kind of everything else, which is, I don't know, not the way that we think about religious diversity these days. But that was always the story that was told. And now if you look at that demographic information, something like 40% don't affiliate at all, you know, and we could talk about, you know, where those people would have been 20 years ago, or whatever. But that this, I think that this phenomenon of the"nones," the no religious affiliation, which we could talk about as being connected to or not connected to institutions and rules. But that these people, it's not as if they don't think about the larger questions of meaning, and the good life, and all of those sorts of things. But I'm just, I'm curious to get your thoughts, you know, on, on this population that we have a lot of contact with, and here not so much from a marketing perspective. But, you know, how are humans, at least humans, you know, that we that we encounter in a northeastern liberal arts college, changing the way that they tell those personal narratives about meaning and order and identity, and how does that connect to this reframing that you're doing?
Tad Robinson:Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, the way that, you know, sociologists, others would talk about this as the rise of the "nones," right. So, you know, this change in the way that the American or the North American or the Western kind of populations are thinking about religion, You know, I think that that does play a role here. Right. So in saying, you know, as we were starting off and saying that, you know, students have sort of started to think about religion in sort of ways that I wouldn't have when I was, you know, 20 or 30, or 40. You know, I think that that does have to do with this shift that's contributing to "nones," right. So yeah, I think that's, that's relevant. And, you know, I think you're also exactly right to say like, simply because an individual isa "none" right. And so no longer, you know, identifies themselves with a specific, you know, religious label, right. Like, that doesn't mean that all of a sudden, like the kinds of questions that, you know, people who traditionally we would call religious right, have or or, or thinking about, right, they don't lose those, right. I mean, I think there are certainly some people out there that, you know, are totally uninterested, right, who might count as a "none." Right, but I think a lot of "nones," n o n e right, a lot of "nones" you know, really do have these same kinds of questions about like, you know, what's, you know, what's my place in the universe? Right, you know, how do I fit in? How do I understand suffering? And, you know, how should I live? And what's good, right? I think all of these questions are pretty, pretty common. And simply because one no longer identifies with a particular category. It's not like these questions disappear. So yeah, I mean, I think, you know, people are as hungry as they always have for these to think about these kinds of things. They're just thinking about them, yeah, under different different kinds of labels or in different kinds of ways.
Chip Gruen:It's kind of interesting coming into this conversation I didn't think that these things were connected at all, but I guess I'm just going through the catalog of courses. I'm teaching this term but the other course I'm teaching is religion and popular culture. And one of the premises of that course, is that just because people are not, or may not necessarily be traditional religious, doesn't mean that They're not thinking about those questions. And believe it or not Taylor Swift or, you know, the the latest limited series on HBO can contribute to people's feelings or exploration about the purpose of life or what the good life is, or any number of other questions.
Tad Robinson:Right.
Chip Gruen:You know, that may have been met traditionally in religious institutions or by religious leadership. So it seems like we are kind of chewing on different sides of the same bone here a little bit.
Tad Robinson:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the thing that I think is, I guess I've sort of reframing kind of what I'm doing in courses and rethinking about kind of what the goal is, right? is, you know, there are 1000s of years of people's reflections on these big questions, which I think that, you know, a student, right, who sees themselves as a"none" or, you know, doesn't identify with logician might miss out on the opportunity to explore, right, because they associate the term religion right with, with solely institutions or solely rules, and so on. Right. And so I think I think that spirituality like the term spirituality presents an opportunity, right to connect people with questions to some of history's you know, great kind of thinkers, right about these difficult questions. So, I mean, yeah, I mean, the hunger for these to think about these questions is still there, you know, people's thoughts about them are still there. Right. You know, I think spirituality that moniker is one way of trying to bring bring those two things together from it from a pedagogical point of view.
Chip Gruen:Yeah, so you, you use the terms in your research and teaching nondoxastic. And or secular, I think, to try to capture some of this. And I think I mean, I will say, nondoxastic is a new one for me, I don't think I've seen that in print before. But secular, certainly people will be familiar with. How, I mean, what do these terms mean for you in the work that you're doing? And how are they relevant towards asking, asking some of these questions, in particular secular, because that word is used a lot and loosely and sometimes pejoratively, in sort of mainstream discourse?
Tad Robinson:Yeah. Right. So, you know, by nondoxastic, right, just, you know, doxa means believe, right? So we're just talking about kind of nonbelief. Right. And so, in using that term, what I want to get at is the idea that, you know, a person might engage in certain kinds of spiritual exercises without, you know, a substantive, systematic body of belief about the nature of the universe and so on. Right. You know, and the same with with secularity, right, in the sense, I, you know, I'm sort of using that term in a simplified way, just to mean, hey, you know, engaging in these practices in a way that does not presuppose, you know, any kind of specific version of the good, or of the nature of reality or anything, right. So, what I want to capture is simply the idea that, you know, people might be in this place, right, where they notice in their lives a gap between the way things are and the way they could or should be, and they sort of, you know, in intuitively, perhaps even right, sort of try to take some steps, right to to bridge that gap, and sort of, you know, make steps towards self transformation, right? You know, that I think people can totally legitimately do that right, without having any larger body or a very specific body of outside belief. So that's what I'm trying to trying to get and kind of get at, right. Because in my experience, and I think this, this comes out in some of the research on "nones," right, it's the, you know, there are people who are just fundamentally suspicious of any kind of universal claims about the world, right? Or who are not interested in investigating those, right, yet, at the same time, right, might be interested in exploring sort of spiritual practices or spiritual exercises. And so like, I think that's a really important group of people to make sure that we're talking to and thinking about, you know, and so that that's sort of the root of that kind of language.
Chip Gruen:So let me give you an example to kind of flesh this out. Like we might imagine somebody who participates in a yoga regimen, right? Is a very staunchly interested in the practice of yoga and goes and does this all the time.
Tad Robinson:Right.
Chip Gruen:But might then also call themselves an atheist.
Tad Robinson:Right.
Chip Gruen:Right? And so that, on the one hand, that would be a spiritual practice that is doing something that in the words that you've used as transformation of the self or self discovery or what have you...
Tad Robinson:Right.
Chip Gruen:But on the other hand, is not tied to anything that I would call a cosmological presence out there somewhere.
Tad Robinson:Right. Yeah, and I think I mean, so So I think some people would say, Well, you know, that's not spirituality. Right. That's health. Right. You know, that's, and I think that that's a that's an open question. Right. So one of the things I think it's really important not to do, you know, when we start reframing things is to, is to answer questions before we've asked them, right, or to answer questions by fiat, by definition. Right. And so when thinking about spiritually, like, is that, is that a form of spirituality? Yeah, I mean, I think that that's an open question. So I was just reading something yesterday where an author was, you know, considering like, Hey, could you, you know, could you engage in yoga? Right, without, and sort of experience certain kinds of transformation without there being some sort of, you know, background story at work of the Divine? Right. I think that that's, I mean, that's an interesting argument. It's an interesting article, and, you know, I think it's interesting question, and I think it's something that we have to have on the table. Right. So are there? You know, are there atheist spiritualities? You know, I think that, you know, the answer is probably yes. Right. And I think that's something that we need to think about lots of authors will make the Sam Harris is one of these sort of, you know, debunkers, and atheists who will nonetheless make the case for an atheist kind of spirituality. You know, and I think that's, that's interesting. I think that's something that, you know, we need to think more about.
Chip Gruen:It's also interesting, I mean, in my field where this conversation would naturally go, and you may choose to chime in on this or not, is that when you get the divorcing of the practice of the ritual, from that narrative, that this very often can become what what people will call appropriation, right, which will sort of lay at the feet of, you know, late capitalist...
Tad Robinson:Right.
Chip Gruen:...you know, colonial enterprise, right, that is sort of taking things divorcing them from their cultural context, and using them for their own for their own devices, which I would say, if what you're thinking about is efficacy, really is not part of this question. Right. If you're thinking about efficacy, or, or the narratives that people tell themselves, right, but that, then that's that is to go back to other terminology, more political and social kind of question than it is philosophical question.
Tad Robinson:Yeah. I mean, I think I think that there's that that that seems right. I mean, I was just reading something the other day called an article called "McMindfulness," which is was just kind of getting to this point. Right. You know, and I don't know, I mean, I do think that there's a philosophical angle on it, right, in the sense that you might wonder about, like, well, what are the ethics of appropriation here? Right. But yeah, I think in general, you know, there is this is a different kind of question. You know, that maybe would be more more naturally fits in, in kind of religion studies or elsewhere. But, yeah, I mean, I think it's really, it's a really interesting question. I think you can ask that more broadly. Right. I mean, there are ask the question about the separation between the practice and the underlying kind of theory behind it. Right. So there, there isn't in philosophy, a sort of small literature on, you know, prayer without belief, right? Like, could you pray to God if you didn't believe that God exists? Right? Or if you're agnostic, right. And, you know, I think I'm trying to think if this is true, but I think in all of the literature that I'm aware of the answer is yes. Right? The argument is to say like, yeah, it seems weird, but there's no conceptual obstacle here, right? In fact, at least a couple of authors who argue like, in certain kinds of cases, atheists should pray to God, right. So the idea being that like, in a case, where, you know, say a loved one is in a dangerous health situation or something you like, you're a pout, you're powerless to do anything, right? And you're atheist, like, the argument is to say, like, hey, it costs you nothing, right? To ask for help, even if you think this help, is not there, right. Like, you know, you ought to pursue all av, all possible avenues towards helping your child for example, right. And if this is an avenue, that helps, then you should engage in it. So I'm not saying I endorsed that argument. But I do think that it's kind of an interesting, interesting kind of argument. And that's one way that some of this the issue that you're raising kind of cause has come up in some of the philosophical literature,
Chip Gruen:It seems to me like these are these are not new questions or not new realizations. I mean, as you're talking about this, one of the things that springs to mind is people like stealing the host from, you know, a Eucharistic service and using it for their own devices for magic or whatever. It's like yeah, if you really believe that has the power that the Church says it does, you probably wouldn't be stealing it. You know, but but, you know, but again, divorcing it from one kind of narrative and inserting it into another is something that we've seen, or all the magic magical tablets and, and things that are dug up from the ancient world, they're calling on Gods, certainly these people are not adherent to whether they believe, quote, unquote, in them or not as sort of a different question.
Tad Robinson:I mean, in some ways, it does kind of mirror right? This conversation about like the term religion, right? So is religion, you know, something that's always good, right? Or is religion something like, Hey, just a descriptive category and there could be like good categories of religion or bad categories or religion? Right, I think we can ask the same questions about spirituality, right, where we might say, like a spiritual, I just described something that people do, right, that's focused on their inner lives, right, and their efforts to sort of transform themselves, but like, could there be, you know, ways of doing that, that are harmful to others, or harmful to the self? Right, that don't meet the ends that individual set for themselves? Like, that seems reasonable to me to say, right. So I mean, I guess one other note on this, I mean, you know, it's not like there aren't criticisms of certain kinds of spirituality out there, like in various religious traditions. So, you know, just reading something the other day about extreme fasting, right, where, you know, in the two hundreds and three hundreds, right, so the early, early years of sort of the Christian church, right, there's this question, like, there's all these aesthetics kind of going out, and engaging in these extreme practices. And so the kind of question comes up for Vodius and some of these other people like, well, you know, like, how much is too much, right. And so, you know, one of the arguments that kind of comes out during this period is to say, well, like, to the extent that you're undermining your ability to kind of focus your attention on God, right? Like you're fasting is not serving its purposes. And what's kind of interesting is, you see exactly that same objection, right? In Buddhist discourses, right? Like, what counts for what counts is sort of going too far when it comes to your spiritual practices. So I give that just as an example of kind of, you know, I guess what we might think of as like, intra religious kind of objections to certain kinds of spiritual exercises.
Chip Gruen:Is the class spirituality and philosophy, a replacement for or an augmentation to your traditional philosophy of religion course? Could you imagine a world in which both of these in your in your rotation? Because they're doing things in a way, that's different enough? Right, that they're getting at different philosophical questions?
Tad Robinson:I wouldn't have said that, at the beginning of this process, but I would now I mean, you know, one of the things that, you know, I think you learn as a teacher, you know, is that good philosophical questions come out of concrete experiences. And, you know, I think that framing things in terms of spirituality foregrounds, kind of, like the things that people do. Right. And I think that everybody in the class, you know, will have had some exposure to like things people do, to kind of, you know, make themselves who they want to be in some respect, right, in, in the ways that I'm thinking about spirituality, at least. And so I think that, like, it'll be a fruitful conversation. But I think that like a second step out of that, right, it's like, Okay, so we've talked about spirituality, all of a sudden, at that point, you might be interested in say, like, Well, yeah, but why? What kind of grounds do we have for believing that there is any kind of transcendent reality? Right, like, I think that focusing on what we do raises that question, in a sort of much more concrete way than just kind of asking it in the first place. And so I think that, you know, some of the traditional kind of philosophical questions that come up philosophy of religion, like grow really naturally out of a substantive discussion of spirituality in a way that I hadn't expected. Right. So, you know, in this course, we certainly won't talk about arguments for the existence of God in the same way into the same degree and the same depth that we would in a traditional philosophy of religion course. But I do expect that at least some students will be interested in those in a way that they wouldn't have been otherwise, after having, you know, thought about, you know, thought about spirituality. So I don't know. I mean, I think, I think that goes for other traditional questions of religious diversity, you know, problems of evil, problems of religious knowledge and so on. I think that those kinds of questions, maybe will have more force, right, for students at the end of a class on the philosophy of spirituality. So I don't know, we'll see if that's right. But that's that's kind of what I'm the way that I've been thinking about it now.
Chip Gruen:So, you know, sort of as we get towards conclusion here, one of the questions that I mean, sort of guides my work at the Institute and is the central question of ReligionWise, is thinking about enhancing the conversation of religion in public life, right. That is one of my premises that we don't generally do a very good job of talking about religious belief and practice, particularly as it it gets beyond our own although I would say that we don't do a very good job of talking about that either. But if we were to move beyond the academy, right? So you in the rarefied air of your own scholarship and talking to your groups of students, you know, you deal with these questions. Do you feel like if we could somehow wave a wand, right, and change the ways that categories are understood at the public policy level, or the governmental level, or just in the public conversation about religion and spirituality? If we could reframe that conversation along these lines? I mean, A, would that be a good thing? And B, you know, what, what might that gain for us if we're looking for a more sophisticated conversation of belief and practice in our world?
Tad Robinson:Yeah, that seems like a really hard question. So, I mean, just a couple thoughts. I mean, on the one hand, I totally agree that public discourse about religion in the United States is, is poor. It's really not done very well. And, you know, one of the things that I sort of think sometimes it's like, if an alien came down and only watched kind of, like, popular media, and that was everything they learned about religion, they would assume that pretty much like they're in the United States, there are, you know, evangelical Christians, and they're Roman Catholics. And that's, that's, that covers everybody. Right. Like, and there's sort of the other maybe, right. But I think, you know, that's certainly not the case. Right, in the in the interests of people in those groups themselves are not unified in any case. So yeah, I mean, I, I totally agree that discourse is not well done. You know, is spirituality, a term that might be useful? I don't know. Because I think that that term is already so broad. You know, one of the there's a really great book on on the sort of history of the term spirituality, by Lucy Bregman, it's called "The Ecology of Spirituality." It came out in 2014, I think, and, you know, one of the things she documents in there, it's like, as of the, you know, early 2000s, she kind of went back and tried to find, like, how this term has been used since the 80s. And she identifies, you know, 92 different versions of this term, at work in sort of healthcare discourses, right, in business discourses, in religious discourses, and recreation discourse. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's a term that gets used in lots of different ways. So it's, that's a long way of saying, like, I'm not sure that that's the term that's going to improve public discourse, or make it clear, you know, with the addition of the term, make, you know, make things better, maybe, right. I mean, I actually think I think"none" is pretty good. I mean, I would have never said that, like, the first time I read the word "none" I thought that was kind of a ridiculous way to categorize things. But, you know, having, you know, read some of the sociological work trying to capture that term, I don't know, I've kind of come around to thinking like, you know, it does capture something important that I think, you know, might improve discourse, you know, in what kinds of ways I mean, you know, I think one of the one of the problems is the kind of homogenation in the sense that, like, when we put a category on a group, right, then we can kind of talk about that group as if they were the same with respect to politics, or the same with respect to, you know, other other categories we might be interested in. And so, I mean, having having more categories, and being able to split things up, maybe is helpful to speak to the diversity of religious life in the United States and elsewhere. But, yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's, it's a hard question. I don't know. That's a couple of thoughts.
Chip Gruen:Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, I see, particularly because this is sort of some of the most public of discourse about religion happens in, in political and policy circles. And, and it, it looks like there is a recognition that the way that we do it isn't good, but the answers aren't good, either. I mean, going back 20 or 30 years, you see people replacing the term religion with faith-based, right, which is, you know, in all kinds of ways problematic about about, you know, being being built by people who are coming usually from Protestant Christian circles and have a particular idea about what that means. And so it's, you know, people trying to be more inclusive using that term. You know, it's just just always been a little bit laughable. So I think maybe if there's a silver lining, there's a recognition that we don't do this well, right. And maybe there's a desire to, to do it better. So I want to end up with a question I often end up with, which is, you know, what am I missing here? Right, like, I have my particular perspective, I live in my own skin and see the world from my from my training and in my own experiences. What am I missing about philosophy, religion, spirituality that would really, you know, help our listeners understand what you're after where you're going with, with the moves that you're making?
Tad Robinson:Yeah, I mean, you know what one thing that I would just add, you know, at the end that I didn't get a chance to say earlier, right, it was the sort of thinking about some of the some of the things that become highlighted or come to the fore when you sort of think about spirituality as opposed to religion. And one of the things that I was really surprised by was the sort of focus on desire, right? So like, desire is something that philosophers have had a ton to, say of, to say about over the years. And it's something that, you know, people who engage in spiritual exercise, have a ton to say about too, but I haven't seen those two literature's kind of come together at all right? So, you know, when you think about, you know, Buddhist practices, right, one of the, you know, it's not just Buddhist practices, but, you know, practices based on the Upanishads and so on. Right, you see this concern about attachment? Right? And, and so I think that there's a sort of deep cross cultural focus on the problems of desire, right, and overcoming it or taming it, or getting rid of it. That I think I just haven't seen a lot of, of connection to the philosophical literature. I mean, this is an old issue, right? I mean, Plato is really, really concerned about desire, for example, right? And so are philosophers up through the ages. So, you know, I think that that's one one place that I was really surprised to discover a real gap between sort of, we might think, sort of spiritual literatures, and sort of philosophical literatures that I think there's a fruitful opportunity to bring together so that's one thing that I kind of would add on to to our at the end of our conversation.
Chip Gruen:All right, well, Tad Robinson, thank you so much for coming on ReligionWise. As always, it's been super fun.
Tad Robinson:Yeah, thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
Chip Gruen:This has been ReligionWise, a podcast produced by the Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding of Muhlenberg College. ReligionWise is produced and directed by Christine Flicker. For more information about additional programming, or to make an inquiry about a speaking engagement, please visit our website at religionandculture.com. There you'll find our contact information, links to other programming and have the opportunity to support the work of the Institute. Please subscribe to ReligionWise wherever you get your podcasts. We look forward to seeing you next time.