Reviews for Lost in Wonder, Love, and Praise

The average rating for Lost in Wonder, Love, and Praise based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-01-01 00:00:00 Anuar Iberahim Unequal Fictions I like academic social science, especially when it confirms my prejudices. But even my prejudices are unsatisfied by erudition which takes itself far too seriously to be taken seriously by anyone else. Ritual and Its Consequences , for example, plays right into my intellectual hobbyhorse: that the Christian concept of faith (or as the book euphemistically prefers: 'sincerity') is a spiritual and social virus which should be recognised for what it is. But I don't buy it. I am constitutionally sympathetic to the authors' claim that ritual, that is, collective symbolic action, has been hijacked by religious fundamentalists thereby distorting the important role of ritual in public life. Their conclusion is that we need to rescue ritual from its religious connotations and that: "Only through a reengagement with ritual as a constitutive aspect of the human project will it be possible to negotiate the emergent realities of our present century." The book distinguishes two types of ritual (actually it defines 'ritual' in opposition to 'sincerity,' a confusing distinction which I will simplify to 'good' and 'bad' ritual). Good ritual is that which 'frames' (a verb which I take to mean 'culturally defines') group action as a sort of collective aspiration. That is, good ritual implies action 'as if' something were true about the world. So, for example, periodic voting in a democracy is an important ritual of solidarity even though one's individual vote is of insignificance to the progress of democracy. We vote 'as if' it matters not because it does. Bad ritual, on the other hand, is undertaken not 'as if' the world were a certain way but 'as is', that is to say the world as it really exists according to the participants in it. This, the authors claim, is ritual in "the mode of sincerity," by which they mean the participants believe that something other than what they are doing together is being demonstrated, created or affirmed. The classic example of this is the Augustinian conception of the Christian Eucharist in which the collective actions of a priest and his congregation are the visible symbol of an ontological transformation of themselves and bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. In short, good ritual is that which enhances communal commitment and solidarity toward an ideal. Bad ritual is that which relies upon and presumes firm belief in the existence of some reality beyond what can be seen. In other words, bad ritual involves faith while good ritual implies a sort of benign or good-willed cynicism: "Sincere views are focused not on the creation of an ''as if'' or a shared subjunctive universe of human being in the world. Instead, they project an ''as is'' vision of what often becomes a totalistic, unambiguous vision of reality ''as it really is.'.. They appear in the arrogance of what are termed fundamentalist religious beliefs." This is a preposterous thesis. Firstly because any given ritual contains both true believers and those who are just along for the ride. There are indeed fanatic democrats who take it as a quasi-religious duty to vote and consider those who don't as political heretics. And there are Christians, including Catholics, who have little faith (or knowledge) in dogmatic concerns yet show up at Mass or other services as a matter of tribal feeling. The central problem with the distinction between good and bad ritual however is the idea that motives for participants are relevant at all. According to the authors' logic the ceremonial of the Roman circus, including its ritual slaughter, is of a superior sort to that of an infant's baptism, the former involving no sincerity at all, and the latter demanding a modicum of sincerity by the officiant, parents, god parents and other witnesses. Rather than refuting each of the detailed propositions presented in the book, I think it more efficient to refer to a piece of superior fiction written a quarter century before their work: Terry Pratchett's Small Gods. In Small Gods , the Great God Om finds himself in an unbearable position - that of an upended tortoise - a direct consequence of a paucity of faithful followers. While the country of Omnia is nominally devoted to him, he has only one sincere believer, a desert monk who rights the god from his inverted and humiliating position and feeds him lettuce. Meanwhile, the Omnian leaders cynically use religious ritual to maintain national unity during their invasion of neighbouring countries. As the Romans knew well, a little ritual slaughter is always good for morale. The Great God Om goes about using his single acolyte to recover the hearts and minds of the population who have been mislead by politicians and clergy. I doubt that the four academics who co-authored Ritual and Its Consequences read Pratchett's book. If they had they might not have published. Pratchett embarrasses them in absentia , as it were, by demonstrating the silliness of their thesis: that ritual engaged in as a matter of faith is particularly dangerous and inferior to ritual engaged in as 'framing for action'. Pratchett even describes a neighbouring country to Omnia full of similar intellectuals who make a living from saying similarly dumb things. Not all fictions are equal. In general I find literary ones superior to those of the social sciences.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-03-08 00:00:00 Jaime L Snyder Great book. Super helpful analysis on what our culture is missing by denigrating the role of ritual in our lives and communities. Sincerity's logical end, in the absence of ritual, is the total autonomy of the individual to the exclusion of the community. We need shared social space and our culture's prioritization of individual expressions of sincerity preempts our ability to connect across differences. This also affects our art, architecture, and music. Sincerity and individual expression are important, but they cannot be all-important. Ritual helps to connect us to the past as well as to our present community and permits us to connect with future generations as well. Well worth the time.