going to church alone

new work in the times!!

I’m very happy to report that I have a new piece out today in the New York Times that’s called “What I am Looking for in Empty Churches.” In it, I’m thinking about how, in addition to regular church, I try to keep alive a sort of sideways habit of going to churches to be alone, and sort of let my mind wander in the ceiling.

I’m strongly convinced, as someone says in the film My Night at Maud’s, that real religion is not a morality or a moralism, but a mystery; and going to church specifically not to do anything, even to sort of quietly rebel, is one way I try to keep myself from the kind of distortions of this kind of thing with which we are all too familiar.¹

I’ve been thinking a lot about the trouble of maintaining this phenomenological moment this fall, on account of my incredibly lovely Metaphysics students this semester. On the syllabus, of course, are Aquinas’ proofs of God, lovely and even mathematical work, that for a time I’ve even taught in Intro, since the careful logic of the opening is so beautifully clear. But the way Aquinas ends each attempt is crucial: “and this all men think of as God.” In part, and I think he knows this, this is exactly wrong: most people don’t think of God as a kind of first efficient cause, and indeed, are somewhat alienated by the very idea. Aquinas can prove something. But what happens next, and what you think about it, is up to you.

Stressing this alienation, and the gap between what’s provable and what simply is not, was interestingly difficult this fall. My students are definitely among the “nones” that I briefly mention in the article, or on the way there, and it is striking how much they are justly annoyed at the weird things that have come across to them about religion.

What they seemed to have expected from me, teaching this text, was something at once utterly banal and utterly despotical. It was pretty clear they assumed we were never going to to be talking about the logical, but something a bit more like guilt, if guilt can be boring. The way they’d heard it before, was that Jesus was OBVIOUS, and if you didn't “believe” (a complicated mixture of complacency, self-evidence, sentimentality, and chutzpah), you were dumb, and morally suspect. On these grounds, religion is a knowledge, and the knowing is the strongarming yourself into it, for what seems to me, on the outside of this, the weirdest kind of reasons imaginable.

Yet if believing in something precisely not this would be an option, the students were not unintrigued—except that they feared belief itself had already become sour to the taste.

Anyway, it’s this kind of real unsoured not-knowing that I’m interested in, both in preserving for myself as a real place to inhabit; and what I hope to get better at speaking to as new semesters progress. Hope you enjoy the piece!

1. Phil Klay’s recent article about Evelyn Waugh speaks exactly to the tiredness of the culture war point.