Rethinking Religion

Is the increasing commercialization of art an effect of the widening scope of finance markets? Is contemporary art dying at the hands of capitalism? And how can we refuse the impulse to bring art down to its lowest common denominator – money?

While forcing us to address these troubling questions, Mark C. Taylor’s newest book, Refiguring the Spiritual: Bueys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy, brings critical analysis to bear on art’s decaying place in the world today.

The structure and development of financial markets and the art market mirror each other. As art becomes a progressively abstract play of non-referential signs, so increasingly abstract financial instruments become an autonomous sphere of circulation whose end is nothing other than itself. When the overall economy moves from industrial and consumer capitalism to finance capitalism, art undergoes parallel changes. There are three stages in this process: the commodification of art, the corporatization of art, and the financialization of art.”

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By Cara Singer

A response to a public conversation with Jennifer Egan on February 7, 2012. 

When Jennifer Egan was pushed to think about religion in her novels, as moderator Willing Davidson led her to do last Tuesday evening, she located it soundly in the technological. Despite Davidson’s reading of stigmata, spiritual searches, and a messianic figure in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, Egan insisted she wasn’t actively thinking of religion. “Overt religious inquiry” had been part of her earlier novel, The Invisible Circus, in which the protagonist searches for her dead sister, Faith, an archetype of 1960s transcendence. Now she has a certain distaste for the obviousness of a search for “Faith.”

What really fascinates her is the seeming universality of longing for transcendence. This yearning, she said, “ricochets through modern life through media.” Facebook—the same network she described as resembling a Soviet-style apartment in which everyone occupies an insipid space that is vulnerable to sweeping changes beyond their control—may also, in her mind, be a response to a spiritual urge. She went on to ask, “Is there a spiritual aspect to the intensity with which we crave connection?” And I wondered, what makes this connectivity spiritual for Egan?

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By Rachel Hurn

A response to a public conversation with Jennifer Egan on February 7, 2012. 

Jennifer Egan does not write about herself. She divulged this to a crowd of one hundred last Tuesday night. “Personal writing has to matter in a larger way,” she explained. “It has to matter to the reader.” One audience member raised his hand—“So the nonfiction pieces you’ve written for the New Yorker didn’t matter?” A chuckle fanned through the crowd, and Willing Davidson, fiction editor of the magazine and moderator of the evening’s discussion, flashed a smile. “I am always thrilled to write for the New Yorker,” Egan said, “but if writing necessarily meant writing about myself, then I’d rather do something else.”

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The New York Times’ Room For Debate featured a discussion on the future of black church activism, organized by Josef Sorett in cooperation with IRCPL:

Many argue that activism within black churches has declined (if not disappeared) since the days ofthe Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But last month, on his birthday, a group of African American faith leaders called for Americans to “Occupy theDream” with protests at Federal Reserve banks. If black churches are renewing their tradition of activism in this post-civil rights era, what are the most pressing issues for them to address?

Read commentary by Josef Sorett, Leslie D. Callahan, Dianne D. Glave, Fredrick C. Harris, Barbara D. Savage, and Obery Hendricks.

By Max Perry Mueller

A response to the conference Mormonism and American Politics on February 3-4, 2012. 

On the fifteenth floor in a Columbia University building overlooking a majestic New York City skyline, some of the most well-known scholars of Mormonism—and me—gathered to present papers on the role of Mormonism and American politics during this so-called “Mormon Moment.” Professors and students from Columbia and other NYC-area universities, a handful of LDS missionaries, and reps from local and international news outlets, braved unreliable elevators to bring the large lecture hall to capacity on both days of the conference.

In the fog of post-conference exhaustion—and sitting in JFK waiting for the long flight back to Zion—my head swims in as many questions as it does answers. And for the better, I think. For at the intersection of religion and politics, capital “T” truths (like those that might be shared at a testimony meeting) are hard to come by. But let me offer eleven tentative takeaways from the conference:

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By Jana Riess

A response to the conference Mormonism and American Politics on February 3-4, 2012. 

We know that Mitt Romney is running for President, but he’s by no means the first Mormon to do so. In fact, the tradition extends all the way to 1844, when Mormon founder Joseph Smith ran. At Columbia University’s conference on Mormonism and American politics, historian Richard Bushman said that far from having a fully fleshed-out platform, Smith ran primarily as a protest candidate.

In one sense Smith’s very candidacy was ironic. He and other early Mormons believed that the end of the world was coming imminently, so why would earthly governments matter at all?

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