ReligionWise

Place, Values, and Public Life – Thomas Tweed

• Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding • Season 5 • Episode 12

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Place is not only a backdrop to religious life but, as Thomas Tweed's work argues, a way of understanding religion itself. Our conversation with him considers how people make and inhabit places, the values that surface within community gatherings, and the loss of shared spaces in contemporary life. Tweed also discusses his recent history book, Religion in the Lands That Became America. 

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Chip Gruen:

Welcome to ReligionWise. I'm your host Chip Gruen. Today's guest, Thomas Tweed, holds a joint appointment in American Studies and History at the University of Notre Dame. Further, he was the founding director of the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion at Notre Dame as well. There are two big reasons why I really wanted to have Tom on ReligionWise related to one another, but not identical. The first is that his work, his research, is really interested in space and place. So, in a series of books, including Crossing and Dwelling, another entitled Our Lady of the Exile, which deals with the Cuban shrine in Miami, and then his newest book, Religion in the Lands That Became America. He really highlights the importance of place, not just as a backdrop or a context for religion, but really instrumental in understanding how religion works, how it functions, that place ends up becoming, you know, a crowbar into understanding systems of meaning more generally. In fact, his book Crossing and Dwelling is subtitled that it is a theory of religion in itself, which hinges on the idea of the importance of space and place. The other reason that I was really interested in having him on was that he was the American Academy of Religion, which is the flagship guild, if you will, or professional organization for scholars who study religion. He was the president of that organization a number of years ago, and I had the pleasure of hearing his keynote address at the annual meetings of the AAR. And I was-I don't know-spellbound might be too strong a word, but I was really impressed with what he laid out there and what he chose to do with those remarks, and it really hinged on the idea of values, because as you might imagine, in the academic study of religion, you might have people who are interested in grounding their values in their own religious community, their own religious commitments, their own religious identity, and others who see the study of religion as not totally disassociated with religious identity, but something different. That something that is done like a political science studies politics doesn't mean they're a politician. The same might go for religion. That just because someone studies religion doesn't make them a religious person or want to ground their values in religious identity or or a religious community, and he did a really good job of thinking about that problem and making the case that whether religious or not, whether in the academy or not, we all have values that we can name and that we can talk about, and that that's a really good starting point for thinking about our our mission, our goals as both scholars, as researchers, as educators, as teachers, and those values may not necessarily be devotional or confessional. What might be that we use evidence to make claims, or that we cite research that has been done before us, that we value debate and conflicting opinions, and those sorts of things are values, even though they're not rooted in religious identity, so their values in sort of a different key. And I was so impressed with this when I teach my theory and method for the study of religion class. This has been required reading for those students ever since, because I think it really lays the groundwork for who are we when we are studying religion? What are the goals of that? Where are there conflicts of that, and how does it help us understand religion in the world? So, in this conversation, we think about that. We think about the idea of of putting those values out, but we also think about the role of space and place, not only in religion but also as something that has changed and potentially degraded over the last few decades, as third spaces or those spaces that are not work and home have become sometimes less available, less well funded, less present in our communities, places like libraries and playgrounds, and things that used to be much more central to the identity of a location, and places where you could run into people who are not yourself, right? Who are who might have differences of identity than than you do. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Tom Tweed. I really appreciated how personable and personal he was in this conversation. I hope you enjoy. Tom Tweed, welcome to ReligionWise.

Thomas Tweed:

Thanks so much. It's great to be here.

Chip Gruen:

So to get us started, I would like to help our listeners place you. You hold a joint appointment in the Department of American Studies and the Department of History at the University of Notre Dame, and among many other things that you've done at Notre Dame, you are the founding director of the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion back when it was founded in its early days. Can you tell us a little bit about that work and and what drew you to it?

Thomas Tweed:

Yeah, I was I was drawn to the Ansari Institute because for I think for two reasons. The first one is the Ansari family, who are Muslim, were inspiring to support an interfaith institute at a Catholic university seemed really touching. That was the first reason. The second is, from the start, I've been I thought interfaith understanding has been a kind of a central moral concern of mine. Although I didn't always talk about it, but that's how I even got into the business. This might be too long a story to start with, but I was teaching world religions in 1980 to high school students, and I took I went for a Buddhist Studies Institute, and the the teacher Robert Thurman invited Professor Nagatomi from Harvard to give an evening lecture, and during that he he told a story about when he was in Japan during World War II. The short version is I won't honor it well here, but is that he was riding on a train. He heard a missionary say that the atomic bomb was God's just was God's kind of just punishment of the heathen, and I teared up, and I resolved at that point that maybe I should go get a Ph.D. and maybe we can sort of do something to decrease interfaith hostility. So that's sort of behind the thinking about the Ansari Institute as well.

Chip Gruen:

So you mentioned it that this is a Muslim family starting this institute at a Catholic university. Can you talk a little bit about that context and about how maybe that affects the the work that you do?

Thomas Tweed:

Yeah, I I've taught at three other universities, all of them wonderful: University of Miami, University of North Carolina, and University of Texas. And I I'm I'm Catholic, which I would just say at other places I'm a person of faith, and then students would guess every day somebody would come up and say Presbyterian or something. But I think the advantage of Notre Dame for some conversations, or a lot of them, and I feel have more freedom of expression here than I I felt at some of the other places I I taught, is that my values align with all that, and and there's a real intentional commitment to make sure we don't get too narrow, too parochial, and we embrace conversations across all kinds of lines, right, left, Christian, non-Christian. So I felt really supported by lots of folks at Notre Dame, and in fact, it was the former president of Notre Dame who used to work out with Mr, Doctor Ansari, and was part of. I'm sure they must have talked about this. So I just think it's a place that takes seriously conversation, and the the the solution to fragmentation and conflict is more talk, not less. So it was it was an easy place to do that, I thought.

Chip Gruen:

Well, it's hard it's hard to imagine in in our context right now that you could give higher praise to an institution, so that's that's great. So I want to turn to the idea that really will be at the center of our conversation, which is place. So when I was thinking and brainstorming of ideas for ReligionWise episodes, as we'll talk, I mean this has become part of the public conversation about place, or in in a lot of cases, the absence of place. But why I thought about you is that you have this excellent book, Crossing and Dwelling, where you describe that project as not only exploration of the role of place, but as a theory of religion, and so I think that's a really big claim that you can build a theory of religion around place and how people make and live in places. So, for a listener who tends to think of religion most most as a matter of of belief or doctrine, can you open up that idea of place for us, the expansiveness of that, and and why it matters so much?

Thomas Tweed:

Sure. Yeah, it is kind of audacious, and to be honest, I wasn't sure if it if it did have application. We'll talk about that more maybe. But but for me, and certainly the the piety I saw at the shrine wasn't just about beliefs; it was about feeling as well as thinking, rituals, artifacts, architecture. In the Very Short Introduction to Religion that I published in 2020 with Oxford, I talk about eight modes of religious expression. So for me, it's about lots of things, telling stories, imagining things, being moral. It isn't just about belief. I think some traditions have focused on belief more than others. But the first thing is we have to sort of see all the things that are going on in religion, and then place matters for me, for a really simple way that religion orients devotees in time and in place, it works as I say in that book, like a watch and compass. And I thought I would just put an image, a photograph of of a Muslim watch and compass, which is literally designed to show you which direction is Mecca and what time is it, so so Muslims know when to pray. But I thought you know religions like that, and so that's part of what we're doing. Religion situates us in place. In there, I sort of sit. I'm thinking like, where does it situate you? And my argument was, it situates you in the body, the home, the homeland, and the cosmos. So that's it. Kind of gets big and more abstract there. But when you're praying toward Mecca five times a day, all places are not the same, and wherever you are, and if you go to hotel rooms in the Muslim world, you can look in the corner and you'll see you always know where Mecca is. So I think religion does that for all all the traditions I know.

Chip Gruen:

So the shrine that you mentioned and some of the work I'm assuming is happening, or you're getting to know this community from the universe, when your time at the University of Miami is among Cuban exiles, and you document this not only in Crossing and Dwelling, but in Our Lady of the Exile, where you also describe this community, but that this is sort of the fieldwork that grounds a lot of your understanding and example of space and place. All as you as you say, right? You can bring in. I mean, particular for your theory of religion, where this is applicable in other places. So, thinking about your field work there, when did you know that you that what you saw there was more generally applicable rather than a specific single community, I mean, I like to tell my students we always have to be grounded in you know in in particularity. But part of what we do as scholars is we think about when that is you know more generally applicable than than just the case in point.

Thomas Tweed:

Yeah, I wasn't I wasn't sure it was broadly applicable at every point, I mean, I finished the book that was based on turning to Cuban exiles and using participant observation and interviews, as well as archival and printed records, because most of the archives had been lost in a flood. I sort of had to do that, and I was as interested in the present as the past. So, so but at the time I was doing it, I didn't have any notion that I would write a theory of religion. It was really only when I began to make sense of it in later years, and at the one of the last annual festivals, I remember thinking, you know, all the basic theories of religion just don't make sense of what I'm seeing here. They just don't help, and so and as as I put that away a little bit, I began to think more and more about what a theory, what religion is, and how we're how the other accounts are sort of lacking. So I wasn't sure. Theory is a kind of an invitation. You say to the reader, consider this, Does this help? If not, toss it. If so, okay, adapt it or use it. And the warm response to the book, which is quite, I mean, surprising to me. You know, makes me think some people did find it useful. What I found, where I really got there, was Cuban exiles helped me see the importance of emotion and of place. So I talked to more than 300. I interviewed more than 300 Cubans at the shrine, and they were sad that they were there in Miami and not back on the island. I mean, that came up in almost every conversation. I don't know how many times somebody teared up, even wept, and I thought, well, I don't. I've never thought about here and there before. I have to, I have to think about. I've seen people in Protestant churches, in charis...in Pentecostal things, in in lots of play, in lots of worship spaces, weeping, joyful-I thought emotion was part of it, but they really convinced me. But they also showed me that place was important. They taught me that displacement is as important as emplacement. In other words, the itinerancy of life is as important as kind of place making, a build that what I would what I called crossing and and dwelling eventually. So I thought, well, what if we put place and displacement at the center of things? What would a what would we say about how religion what religion is and how it functions?

Chip Gruen:

Yeah, and it's interesting. I mean, being somebody who studies ancient Christianity, you know the the ways in which you know the discourses that you know that that are present there. Even if people are not sort of physically, literally in exile, the yearning for another place, right, a homeland or fatherland or the kingdom of heaven, or whatever, it can be literally or or metaphorically, right? The that crossing and dwelling works in in a lot of different ways.

Thomas Tweed:

Yeah, yeah.

Chip Gruen:

So I want to put place on hold for just a second. We'll come back to it, but I want to turn to another part of your work that has really stayed with me, and I think that these two things together will help us in our next part of our conversation. But you served as the president of the American Academy of Religion a number of years ago, and I was in the room for that presidential address, and it really has always stuck with me. And as I was telling you offline, I've made it required reading when I teach theory and method for the study of religion, but your argument, at least you know the part of it that that really has always stayed with me and and that I like to emphasize to my students was about values. That all of us, religious or not, act out of values that are sometimes explicit and are sometimes implicit, and that we would do well to recognize them and think about them and own up to the fact that we have them. Can you walk us through a little bit why you felt that was really important at the time? Why it was important for an AAR, American Academy of Religion audience, and why that conversation of values was something that you really wanted to put at the center of of your time as president of that organization.

Thomas Tweed:

Sure. There's two kinds of presidential addresses for learned societies I think. One is just do stuff about your own work, and if they elected you president, they must not hate what you do. So just talk about what you're going to do next. The second one is a kind of institution building one, and that's what I picked. I sort of looked around the American Academy of Religion, and and it could it would have been true in in history or English or lots of other fields, and I saw a lot of fragmentation. I saw it in the academy, I saw it on campus, and I saw it beyond campus. And the problem wasn't conflict. I'm comfortable with conflict, but there isn't really conflict because no one's actually talking to one another. There's no sense of what we agree about and don't agree about. So I began the first my first board meeting, and I just said let's focus on that. And I asked the staff of the AAR and members to sort of talk about what do you value, what's what's ultimately most important to you, and it was really kind of warmly accepted, which I didn't know how it would be. I began with a plea, I'm going to make mistakes, intentional and not intentional. Please forgive me. And some one of the members of the board began with, "You mean even if you meant to do it?" and which was good. And I said,"Yeah" And people were generous about that because it was kind of a weird thing to do. So I thought everybody working for the whole organization. We should all talk about what do we value, and that that might help with a number of divides, including between theology and religious studies, between those writing from and for religious traditions, in other words, and those who are trying to take a distance, some put themselves at some distance from that, and align with one or the other disciplines. I thought they were all enacting values, epistemic ones about how you know, moral ones about what's right, and even esthetic ones about what's beautiful, meaning and how they wrote and what they decided to do. So I I thought let's it's sort of like don't make me come down there. I'm getting to parent talk, but I thought I was trying to sort of overcome the fragmentation, and and actually I'm I'm happy to have people disagree, but you're not even talking to each other. So that's what I that's what I was mainly want to do, and something I did in the classroom often. That's kind of a I'm also in peace studies, that that comes from from colleagues in peace studies at Georgetown when we were dealing really delicate issues, and everybody who teaches about religion has those moments. I would encourage everyone. They're all breaking into learning groups, and I've done this in some lecture rooms too. Is turn to somebody and tell them what's at stake for you on this issue. What's at stake for you on this issue, and then once you've got it personal and you have to talk about yourself, the conversation opens a little bit, and so I thought that kind of foregrounding of values might help the institution and put a few bridges up.

Chip Gruen:

Just to push on something you said, I mean, and this is a little inside baseball, but hopefully our listeners will forgive me for it, but you mentioned the difference between those theological conversations and those conversations that see themselves as more at a distance. I mean, what's sometimes referred to as the dispassionate third-party perspective on understanding religion as a force in the world, and so that ends up being one of the splits that we see, right? Is the smaller descriptive academic conversation about religion and a larger, more publicly engaged conversation. And you've used the word also about interfaith, right? Which sometimes some people disavow, and I've been known to disavow it myself in some corners of the work I do, and some people embrace it. And I guess I should say I've learned to embrace it in some corners of what I do as well. But can you talk a little bit about that dynamic? I mean, that's certainly one of the challenges of talking across difference. I mean, we think about organizations like the American Academy of Religion, it's like difference can be Christian, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, but it can also be sort of theological ways of knowing and and other ways of knowing as well.

Thomas Tweed:

Yeah, absolutely, and I I think the the president of the American Academy of Religion and the organization really needs to work carefully with the Society of Biblical Literature, in my judgment. And so, part of it, I was aware, and we were in constant conversation about that. You know, what unites across those fields and those learned societies, and how do we think about that? You make a really good point there about what language to use interfaith. I remember a moment, one of the things I thought we should do in terms of values was write write public statements about kind of moral issues based on the values we said we cared about. One of them was, for the first time, having a kind of research ethics document, and I remember, and so I got a big bulky committee of people who completely don't agree, which is the best kind of committee. And then I remember, and then we did two public sessions about it, and invited everybody to comment. They could comment online. They could come to the session. Somebody came to the session, and I we had we had been toying with saying that research should not only not harm people, but it should be for the common good. And someone from the audience who is aligned on the religious studies side and would say that theology is kind of the foe, said, "What is the common good? What do you mean by the common good?" And so the conversation went went went that way, and we actually took out the phrase common good, and we just said, "Don't harm people." But yeah, I I I think that that that people just disrespect kinds of work scholarship that's not their own, and it's it's a kind of arrogance, and you see it on both sides of that. And I read widely, as some of people looked at my footnotes in my books will see, and so I I was initially perplexed. Like, well, what do you mean? You you have similar values. You would tie different things, but so I I just wanted to get everybody in the same room to appreciate both descriptive academic conversation and other kinds of conversation that that moved across the disciplines with across the disciplines of the university and across specializations in the American Academy.

Chip Gruen:

Okay, so here I want to make a little turn because we've got two bodies of material on the on the table right now. On the one hand, we have that conversation about place and the importance of place, as you talked about in in Crossing and Dwelling. And on the other hand, thinking about values, thinking about talking across difference, both disciplinary disciplinary difference and then also identity difference. I think is is implied here as well, so I want to bring those back together to think about the contemporary moment because where place has really started to bubble up in the current conversation is kind of a mourning, or people are starting to recognize, and I think this was happening already, but then was supercharged with the pandemic, the loss of what, what, or sometimes referred to as third places, right? So not your work, not your vocation, but also not your domestic space, not your home. So, cafes, churches, barber shops, like whatever the case may be. In my family, I like to point out that there's a history of Lodge membership, you know, my my great uncle was the the head of the governor of the Lions Club in Kentucky. Like that was a big orienting factor for his life. But those things, at least in my, I'm a Gen Xer, and my generation are sort of slipping away. Not to mention the other, the other sort of more casual things. Again, the barber shops and so forth, that that and and church attendance down, and at least in some parts of particularly liberal Protestantism. And we could think about other other places as well as well. But I want to get your take on the loss here of place of central places, or I mean, maybe maybe you see an upswing of that now since the pandemic, but it seems to have at least for now be on the on the decline. And then also that it's you know cultural commentators are commenting on the symptoms that come with that loss of disengagement, of loneliness, of disassociation with larger cultural groups. So you've spent decades thinking about how place works. So when you look at the public conversation, what do you make of it? And do you see a way forward for us?

Thomas Tweed:

I'm always thinking about this, Chip, and and I some days I do better job than other days. We'll see how it goes today. But but I intentionally have spoken to lots of different audiences and try to do the same kind of things, trying to reach out. But my my my general conclusion is like, do we? Is there a way forward? Is there something we can do about it? Well, how do we confront loneliness? And anybody who's been who's in the classroom with Gen Z and younger students, anybody who's been through the pandemic, they all quickly say that they're they're lonely, that mental health problems worry them, and so on. So, so I I would say it's just we don't have we don't have connection is what I would say. But I think there's there's a couple of things we can do to to sort of at least limit the isolation, and we should try to do it more. One is is your great idea to think about third spaces. I think we should support and visit third spaces where people gather. I would add parks, bookstores to the list. There's a lot of other ones, and when I think about the U.S. I'm trying to think, where is the one place where I might meet someone who is not me, doesn't look like me, doesn't think like me? I think it might be sports arenas. So if if if somebody tells me they're giving up the church or the mosque or the synagogue, but they're going to go to an NFL game on Sunday, I'm thinking, okay, well, they'll at least get connection. So I think some third spaces need to be restored, and it might take support, like support the local bookstore cafe, or make sure you renovate that park or something. Spaces where people can gather, and maybe there's ways to even make sports arenas these kind of third spaces. I think the other thing that worries me is online behavior, which worries everybody I think. One of the arguments I made in an earlier book was that the promise of the computer age, which was founded in part on a kind of utopian technological vision, basically made people made things better and made things worse. And so, I think part of what's happened in the last decade or more is is the fragmentation that's coming. And I think what we can do to to combat that, and this is an idea, look in search of a programmer, but encourage ways to create a democratic media commons, like an online platform where where we can meet without fear, coercion, and I would add without advertising if possible, and discuss the issues of the day. I said this at one, maybe it was during the pandemic. It might have even been during the pandemic, and it was a session about religion and media, and and one fine scholar of of Sikhism and India said, actually, we're working on that, and I thought, "Whoa!" But he he was telling me and us that there's some efforts to try to find another kind of online platform where you wouldn't feel coerced. They're not the algorithms are not going to propel you into some space or block you from another one. I think we just we just need something like that. There isn't a common as in Boston Commons or something, or Independence Square down downtown in Philadelphia. There isn't. We just don't have common spaces, and we need them online and offline. Including, we need to find ways where we can find some place to be together and think through things. I don't know what that is, and I think the other one, the more these are all things that I do, I I worry about and push personally. The other thing I do, which might be sound silly and too personal, but I think you can just try to make one meaningful interpersonal connection every day, as long as you feel safe. In some places, you don't want to talk to anybody, and you're we're all right. You just keep your eyes down and go. But if you feel feel safe, I think even a three minute exchange while waiting in line at Walmart, where you speak honestly, can make yourself better and make the world better. So I was standing in Walmart recently, buying things for my grandson and other people, and two behind me was somebody who was having trouble standing, as I was at the time. I had a cane at the moment, and I just said something to him, and he asked me what's hurting me, and I asked him what's hurting him. My wife has meanwhile paid for everything, and she's out like, what is wrong with him? And she said, "What were you doing?" And my thought was, I was making a connection. So I think it was a very short exchange. But I think that if you can take the risk to actually reach out to people, and you have to say true things about yourself. Yeah, I gave up on that. I'm trying this other med. Yeah, I tried that, and and it might be nothing at all. But I think a life well led has interpersonal connections, and we might want to try to do that regularly.

Chip Gruen:

So I want to connect that back for a minute back to Crossing and Dwelling, right? Because that that took place in a particular community, and so one might think in response, you know, about this communicating across difference, you know, that well, in a religious community, and I want to talk about talk about some of the things that happened in the pandemic in a second about religious communities, but in a religious community, there's a certain amount that is that is shared in common, right? That you sort of self-select, you know, religious ideas, although those aren't uniform, certainly shared rituals, but you're crossing other kinds of difference, right? Age difference, people outside your own family or your own group, and I wonder, you know, even if we're thinking about the park, right? The chances are that if you're at the park, if you're at the playground of the park, you're among other people who have young children, right? Or if you're at the barber shop, you know, very often those are divided ethnically around different types of hair, or if you're at the sports stadium, as you mentioned, there's a particular allegiance around a particular team, or at least the the sport in question. Can we talk a little bit about about similarity and difference here, right? Because something that is totally foreign, right? Is very hard to get your hands on. So even your person that you talked to at Walmart, like you had something in common physically with them, right? That allowed for that that bridge building. What is the relationship between those two things, right? Between similarity and difference, and when we think about the decline in some kinds of social and community organizations. We're thinking about dissolving the bonds of something that was once similar. I don't know. I hope that makes sense, right? That there's there's something complicated. I think going on there.

Thomas Tweed:

No, I think I think that's right. And there's always kind of difference and almost never uniformity. It doesn't mean we don't have some shared values and even some, maybe even some shared experiences, mostly hidden because we don't actually talk to each other. Across class lines, thinking about gender or race or sexuality, folks don't have friends who are not like them. Is what I I worry about too much. I sometimes actually I I go to church, I go to mass, and I sometimes will go to one that I think people don't agree with me on issues, just to make sure that I can hear and experience other ways of thinking about things. But there's always differences, and if you don't acknowledge that, nobody nobody buys it anyways. That's obvious. In fact, I organized Our Lady the Exile, the book about the Cuban shrine, in terms of contested meanings and shared meanings. So I I went to town with all the ways in which those folks were really different. What did I hear differences about? Less on gender, and I I was so surprised by this, because in in Cuba, many told me men didn't go to church; they stayed outside. But at the shrine, they did, and I think it was about the political spin on it, I'm not sure. But on racial things, so Cubans of African heritage who come from the Oriente or the one one part of the island were much more inclined to think about racial differences, and were much more inclined to say we had racial problems back on the island. I remember one conversation I was the university's representative to a kind of after a public disruption, they called it a riot. Let's get together and talk. So I was in some group with almost everybody of 10 people, and I remember some some white Cuban from Havana saying we had no race problem back in the island, and I could see the face of of the of the Black Cuban from Oriente, and I sort of I just said I wasn't I don't think I was facilitating it. Maybe I was. I just looked at him and I said, "You're not so sure about that." And then they had differences. So I think there's lots of lines of differences, and we have to we don't we don't pretend that we don't have differences, and everybody doesn't come together in some space to say we want one single new world faith or something. I'm distinctively and particularly Catholic, and some of what I would say would really annoy you and everybody else, and some of what you would say would really annoy me and everybody else, but that's we should be fully ourselves. But what I'm asking is, can't we just find some ways that there are some shared values, whatever they are? That's the and and my strategy for that in thinking about public life now and and other things. I've been going around the country the last year, year and a half, talking about my new book and talking about other things. And I was really consumed with the 250th anniversary of America, which we are celebrating. And so my basic pitch at all those very diverse audiences was, why don't we talk more about the shared value terms in our founding political documents, like the Declaration, which talks about the pursuit of happiness, the preamble of the Constitution, which talks about the general welfare, and then sort of say what do those phrases mean to you? And if you like a different phrase, and that would of course be true, folks on the right don't don't talk about justice or equality. They want to talk about freedom, and they want to interpret happiness in private ways. And the other folks want to sort of talk about the common good and other kinds of things. So that's all fine with me, but we surely share those value terms as Americans. So that's been my pitch lately. So it isn't to say my goal is not to have people silenced in a mystical joy that we're all the same. My aim was just to let's just clarify where we agree and where we don't, and maybe some of the agreement can be the basis for thinking about everything from what you're going to do tomorrow to public policy.

Chip Gruen:

So I want to come back to your most recent book, Religion in the Lands That Became America. But before we do that, I want to sort of hit one more place where the idea of of space and values sort of intersected. So, in my adult life, just to editorialize for a minute, there have been two things I think, well, a lot more than two, but at least two things that have really surprised me. One was when the Yankee organization in New York City tore down old Yankee Stadium, right? Famously, the house that Ruth built, and I remember just being absolutely flabbergasted by that. Like that, this is a historic place, right? And for the organization of whom its history tells is the one to tear it down for the purposes of luxury suites. Well, maybe that tells you a lot more, right, than than they intended, but then the other one is during the pandemic when houses of worship were essentially shuttered for public health reasons. Knowing a little bit about the history of our country and the founding values of that ideas, even not even about religion, but about rights of assembly, just absolutely shocked, right? But we had two sets of conflicting values here that I think that we're only starting to understand how those conflicted with one another, right? And and how they seem totally natural to different people. The ideas of public health and safety, and you know common concern on the one hand, and the idea of freedom and religious liberty on on the other. I wonder, you know, since this is, I think, the place where where space and values have collided most recently, most directly. I wonder how you thought about that, and and maybe how you thought about it at the time, and how you've come to understand it over the last last five years or so.

Thomas Tweed:

Yeah, those are great examples. The stadium one and the pandemic one. I think both are are an example examples of conflicting values, mostly un unexpressed conflicting values, meaning not discussed and agreed upon. I guess on the stadium issue, I guess I would say there's I think there's ways to respect tradition and support innovation. So I'd keep the old stadium and build on it, repurpose it for the for something else that was good for the community. I it made me think. One of the things I noticed about this, the first thing is that our first source of disagreement is I'm a Phillies fan, and I don't really, I wasn't as troubled by the tearing down of the old Yankee Stadium. They won too many pennants. We don't need to mourn for any of that.

Chip Gruen:

Well, as a Reds fan, I I need to sort of insert in here that we're the oldest baseball team in the you know in in the country. So I'm also disturbed by the Reds don't have the first game of the season every year like they used to. But but that's a different conversation.

Thomas Tweed:

I see. No, so you are actually taking the high ground and thinking about tradition. So that's my bad, but but I but I I I was actually at the last game played at Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia, and and then took home a relic, a small piece of the right field wall. But if if he would ask me now, what would I do? I would have said I would say renovate the old ballpark. Now they wanted to move them all downtown, do something else, but I I wonder if there aren't ways to to get people in a room and think about how do we respect the tradition of that great stadium or that great space, and also adapt it, innovate, in new ways that meets the the needs of the community today, and so I see it that way. And I think the pandemic reminded us of lots of things, including the dangers of isolation and the importance of what I was talking about before about embodied connections, and that's sort of what what I think everybody learned when when I was teaching during the pandemic and after it, and I asked a lot of people, so what did you learn about it? A lot of it comes down to that, is that we have to be reminded that too much isolation is not good, and we really need face to face, body to body connections, including in places of worship, and all the research about survey research about religion shows that people who who are regular attenders and go to a place of worship report higher levels of happiness are healthier, and so on and so forth. I'm not sure if it couldn't be Cincinnati's. I'm trying to remember the name of the stadium.

Chip Gruen:

That which which one? There's right now it's Great American Ballpark. Before that was Riverfront Stadium.

Thomas Tweed:

Yeah, let's do the Great American Ballpark. Yeah, yeah. So I'm. I'm not sure you couldn't go, even though it isn't a Phillies, that you would go to Great American Ballpark, and you might not have, might not find ways to overcome isolation and make some kind of connections that would almost be as good as going to the mosque, the synagogue, or the church. And there's one study of this in Britain where folks were actually trying to figure out, do you get the same level of connection, or the same public health values, and so on? But that's what I learned about isolation and connection. But but I've actually taught the pandemic by in classes by having them read newspaper articles about the flu pandemic during World War One, their universal response is, "This sounds like it was written yesterday." Because the same kinds of issues came up about the tension between somebody's perceived understanding of public health and the and the common good, and somebody's the aspiration for personal individual freedom, and the freedom to worship, the same kind of things came up across the country in in in really surprising ways. And we've just, as a historian, I'm I'm more I'm really attuned to those a little bit more maybe, but I thought this is happening again and it's much worse. But I think the pandemic did split things apart, and it hasn't really recovered.

Chip Gruen:

And and I just want to underscore something that I hear you saying that that is central to the way that I teach as well. That might surprise listeners a little bit is that some of the same issues and the collision of values can happen in places that we would imagine as secular, right? Like you know the stadium example, which is why I brought it up. And with regard to ideas of of religion and worship spaces, that these are these are sorts of human human cultural ways of working through these things, and there's not a huge distinction between those things that we imagine as religious and those things we imagine are not.

Thomas Tweed:

Yeah, that's right. I mean, everybody has values, and there's surveys differ a little bit about a bunch of folks are atheists, agnostics, even hostile to religion. But there's many more who are re-engaging, re-enchanting the world, interested in occult traditions, people who go to traditional religions, or who are spiritual but not religious. There's a whole range of folks today. They all have values, and they all they all care more about some things than others. But there just aren't the spaces where we meet and can talk about that. There were some spaces people didn't talk in the '50s at the peak of what most people think of as a kind of consensus culture, where those who disagreed were either brought before Congress or they just kept to themselves as much as they could. But I think so. There isn't, there's lot, not always a place where people can talk honestly. But I feel like we've lost the ability to talk back and forth, and I think we can't be afraid of conflict as long as it doesn't turn violent. There are boundaries, and and and disagree.

Chip Gruen:

So I would be remiss if I let you go without talking about your most recent book, Religion in the Lands That Became America. So the scope of this is is enormous. It runs from prehistory to the present, and it tackles a lot of the-I mean-the history of the lands that became America. That's a great way of saying it. Through this idea of natural and built environments, which of course flows very neatly from your previous work on on space and place. Can you tell us just a little bit about this project and about what led you to it?

Thomas Tweed:

Yeah, at one point I wasn't sure if I was going to write this book or the theory book, and a colleague convinced me to write the theory book first. I always thought after the the Miami experience, I thought place and displacement they sort of work as themes, and they tell to tell a different kind of story. What would that story be? I have no idea. I mean, I just thought that might work better. But the the real origin of of the story, in some ways, is that I thought the usual, the standard stories of American religion, meaning the common textbook story and the most famous ones, the most widely read and recognized ones, were telling kind of stories that were a little bit narrower than I thought we we might do. Meaning, they focused only on theology, on ideas, and on churches, which left out what's not in the churches, and what's not among elites and in pulpits and ideas. So I thought we had to find ways of framing all those expressions of religion that I meant, and we needed to look for religion inside and outside of worship spaces, and we needed to think more broadly about the wider landscape and how it's changed over time. I didn't know how to do that. In other words, what I was doing is refining my understanding of place making or dwelling, and then I ran into a theory from biology, but basically said that inheritance isn't just genetic; it's also cultural and it's environmental, meaning we inherit a natural and built environment. And I thought that was the key to reframing things. So by thinking about the long history of the natural and built environment, I think it helps us see some things that we didn't see before, and I certainly didn't see before in the standard stories. It reminds us that religion has sometimes made things better and sometimes made things worse. To to put to say it bluntly, I find that most most accounts pick one of those two. Either religion is horrible and it never does anything good, or religion's really really great. You should join too. And as an historian, just trying to get it right, it didn't seem like it was doing both things. The other thing it mentioned, I think it sort of illumined that kind of lens, illumined for me, was that some places on the landscape have become so socially, ecologically, and spiritually stressed that they're almost unsustainable. I was thinking of rice plantations in South Carolina, where the mortality rate was extraordinarily high, and for the enslaved it was so little freedom, and even for the even it was the planters too who died young. There's just some kinds of sites, landscapes, locales, and and it's also factory towns can be like this. Are so stressed that they're almost unsustainable, and it's really hard to to have to sort of encourage individual, communal, and environmental flourishing. I think that the final thing that that approach of thinking about the built and natural environment to me brought home was that each generation inherits a lived world, but then they go on to modify it and bequeath it to the next generation. So for me, it also implicitly reminds us of our obligations to future generations, and and I think that's another useful thing about it. I find among young people and college age. Today, that's a really important thing for many of them, that we, meaning my generation, have not really left things in such great shape. So I think it reminded me a kind of transgenerational duties in some way. So those are some of the things that I that

Chip Gruen:

So I want to be mindful and respectful of your that I think that kind of story reveals that the other ones kind of obscure. time. This has been a great conversation. I really appreciate you joining us here. But I always like to finish with the question, What am I leaving out? What am I not asking Tom Tweed that I should? What is the thing that is really important, either about your work or the current state of affairs or the way forward that we should all really be thinking about?

Thomas Tweed:

Well, I can't think of anything. This has been spectacular. Great questions, really helpful conversation. My my instinct would be to turn it back on you, and you to tell me some things, and then the listeners would be sort of befuddled by the end about who whose podcast is this? So I won't do that. But I think I've said all that I need to say, and way too much. Somebody else can step in because, after all, I mean, we each of us being just us should just say what we what we can see from where we stand, and that's what I've tried to do.

Chip Gruen:

Well, thank you very much for your time. Once again, I just want to express my gratitude not only for your time today but for your work. It has influenced every generation of, or I should say, every classroom full of students I've had, both directly and indirectly. So, Tom Tweed, thank you so much for coming on.

Thomas Tweed:

Thanks for inviting me.

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.