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revdorothyl at 06:23pm on 17/02/2006
revdorothyl at 06:23pm on 17/02/2006I've been meaning to update my LJ for the past week, having been completely blown away (in the good sense) by attending a concert performance of the Soweto Gospel Choir last Friday night.
We'd been covering the book of Judges (as well as the rest of the "Former Prophets" of the Hebrew Bible) in my class earlier that week, and I had been telling the students about how the noun form of "judge" is pretty much reserved for God in the book of Judges, while everyone else is just someone who is chosen to "judge" (verb form) Israel for a time. In other words, God is the only one who is a Judge, and everyone else is just called to 'do some judging', I told my students. Similarly, I suggested, in the books of Samuel and Kings, perhaps we could say that while God is Israel's King, Saul and David and the rest are just people who are chosen to 'do some kinging'? For some reason, the word "kinging" (when not applied to a game of checkers) drew a laugh from my students.
However, as I sat in a fairly good seat in Langford Auditorium last Friday night, watching the members of the Soweto Gospel Choir in their brilliantly colored garb moving and leaping and dancing and pounding drums and clapping in complicated rhythms, all the while singing gospel and traditional and protest songs in Zulu and Xhosa and Sotho and English and Afrikaans, and in multi-part harmony so complex and tightly woven that my poorly trained musical ear couldn't begin to separate one part from another . . . [pause to draw breath]. Well, as I sat and clapped and swayed and jumped to my feet and applauded during that performance and the multiple encores with which they rewarded our refusal to leave the auditorium, it occurred to me that I was in the middle of a crash course in the meaning of the verb "to church".
I'm not talking about "churching" in the sense of performing a ritual to re-admit a woman who's recently been through childbirth back into the public worship of a Catholic church (yes, one of my Roman Catholic professors in seminary told us she'd actually been "churched" after the birth of her first child, before her growing feminist consciousness brought the implications about ritual impurity and women's reproductive systems into unpleasant focus for her).
Rather, I'm talking about something so vibrant and alive and so hooked into the best of what a church/synagogue/temple (etc.) does that only a verb can possibly describe it. There was some seriously high quality and high potency "Churching" going on in that auditorium, as songs in languages most of us never knew, from a distant continent most of us had never actually visited (though a large part of the audience was of African descent), reached out and drew us altogether with the singers and musicians and dancers, to shed tears over the brutalities and inhumanities of the past and squarely face the desperate needs of the present, and rejoice in hopes for a more joyful and possibility-rich tomorrow.
There was communitas in plenty, by the time that final encore was ended and we in the audience realized that our dancing and clapping and shouting would not elicit another song. And then, to complete my Presbyterian sense of "what it is to 'do church'", there was even an offering collected afterwards, as members of the choir waited in the lobby to accept donations for the AIDS orphan charity they sponsor (Nkosi's Haven Vukani).
If you get the chance to attend a concert by the Soweto Gospel Choir, on this concert tour or in the future, I heartily urge you to do so. It's a "shaken-and-stirred" kind of experience, in the best possible sense.
Then, this past Tuesday, I attend the first of four "Templeton Research Lectures" by Sociology professor Rodney Stark, with the somewhat daunting series title of "Neglect and Dedication: The Dynamics of Ancient Religious Markets". Admittedly, that title wouldn't have grabbed me, either, if I hadn't -- just for curiosity's sake -- read the little blurb on Stark's "Market Approach to Understanding Religion" that was included with the first press release. His "supply and demand" approach to talking about 6000 years of religious history actually seemed sort of relevant, given my own research interest in what people want from their religious communities and where they can turn if those communities can't or won't meet their needs.
The way Stark explained it (so that a large audience interested in religion and especially the academic study of religion, but not necessarily fluent in "sociology-speak", could understand) was that the "Market Approach to Religious Phenomena" emphasizes the activities of religious organizations, giving more weight to analyzing religious supply rather than religious demand, or religious 'needs'. The idea is that religious demand is fairly constant over time and across cultures -- it doesn't really shift or evolve -- but that what leads to major changes in religious participation or religious interest is the variety and energy of the available religious supply.
His argument seems to be that when a heretofore dominant religious institution or collection of institutions is suddenly challenged or displaced or marginalized, it's not because the people have suddenly discovered some new religious need or hunger that was never there before, but rather that a) the religious establishment had changed over time, had ceased to supply adequate sustenance to its market share, and/or b)some new supplier had done a better job of meeting consumer demands. The question then becomes not, "what changed in human development or psychology to bring about a radical shift in religious observance in such-and-such a country during such-and-such a century", for example, but rather, "what caused the religious establishment of that country in that century to be unable to hold on to its market share, to cease to meet the needs of its people or to be unable to compete with new alternatives?"
The other side of Stark's argument is that, because people do differ the world over in their religious tastes (on a spectrum from intense to lax, or from otherworldly to worldly, etc.), all religious markets consist of niche markets, and no one standardized 'product' can adequately serve all niches. Religious pluralism, he argues, is the natural state, but it is emphatically not the usual state, to date. What is usual in most of Western history, at least, is artificial monopolies on religious supply.
I'm not sure I buy into all this, or that it makes much of a difference for my own research (I guess that I've pretty much assumed all along that, to the extent that Buffy fandom functions as an alternative to or adjunct to some more recognizable religious community, it does so because other institutions have been unable or unwilling to provide adequate emotional and inspirational sustenance, rather than because some new taste or nutritional need has suddenly evolved in the human psyche).
However, as a pastor, and not just a scholar and fan, I can't help but be interested in what makes for an overflow crowd in worship at congregation "X", while just around the corner at congregation "Y" the sanctuary is almost empty, and why some people show up to the Buffy "supper table" just a little bit peckish, while others are ravenously hungry and on the edge of malnutrition.
We'd been covering the book of Judges (as well as the rest of the "Former Prophets" of the Hebrew Bible) in my class earlier that week, and I had been telling the students about how the noun form of "judge" is pretty much reserved for God in the book of Judges, while everyone else is just someone who is chosen to "judge" (verb form) Israel for a time. In other words, God is the only one who is a Judge, and everyone else is just called to 'do some judging', I told my students. Similarly, I suggested, in the books of Samuel and Kings, perhaps we could say that while God is Israel's King, Saul and David and the rest are just people who are chosen to 'do some kinging'? For some reason, the word "kinging" (when not applied to a game of checkers) drew a laugh from my students.
However, as I sat in a fairly good seat in Langford Auditorium last Friday night, watching the members of the Soweto Gospel Choir in their brilliantly colored garb moving and leaping and dancing and pounding drums and clapping in complicated rhythms, all the while singing gospel and traditional and protest songs in Zulu and Xhosa and Sotho and English and Afrikaans, and in multi-part harmony so complex and tightly woven that my poorly trained musical ear couldn't begin to separate one part from another . . . [pause to draw breath]. Well, as I sat and clapped and swayed and jumped to my feet and applauded during that performance and the multiple encores with which they rewarded our refusal to leave the auditorium, it occurred to me that I was in the middle of a crash course in the meaning of the verb "to church".
I'm not talking about "churching" in the sense of performing a ritual to re-admit a woman who's recently been through childbirth back into the public worship of a Catholic church (yes, one of my Roman Catholic professors in seminary told us she'd actually been "churched" after the birth of her first child, before her growing feminist consciousness brought the implications about ritual impurity and women's reproductive systems into unpleasant focus for her).
Rather, I'm talking about something so vibrant and alive and so hooked into the best of what a church/synagogue/temple (etc.) does that only a verb can possibly describe it. There was some seriously high quality and high potency "Churching" going on in that auditorium, as songs in languages most of us never knew, from a distant continent most of us had never actually visited (though a large part of the audience was of African descent), reached out and drew us altogether with the singers and musicians and dancers, to shed tears over the brutalities and inhumanities of the past and squarely face the desperate needs of the present, and rejoice in hopes for a more joyful and possibility-rich tomorrow.
There was communitas in plenty, by the time that final encore was ended and we in the audience realized that our dancing and clapping and shouting would not elicit another song. And then, to complete my Presbyterian sense of "what it is to 'do church'", there was even an offering collected afterwards, as members of the choir waited in the lobby to accept donations for the AIDS orphan charity they sponsor (Nkosi's Haven Vukani).
If you get the chance to attend a concert by the Soweto Gospel Choir, on this concert tour or in the future, I heartily urge you to do so. It's a "shaken-and-stirred" kind of experience, in the best possible sense.
Then, this past Tuesday, I attend the first of four "Templeton Research Lectures" by Sociology professor Rodney Stark, with the somewhat daunting series title of "Neglect and Dedication: The Dynamics of Ancient Religious Markets". Admittedly, that title wouldn't have grabbed me, either, if I hadn't -- just for curiosity's sake -- read the little blurb on Stark's "Market Approach to Understanding Religion" that was included with the first press release. His "supply and demand" approach to talking about 6000 years of religious history actually seemed sort of relevant, given my own research interest in what people want from their religious communities and where they can turn if those communities can't or won't meet their needs.
The way Stark explained it (so that a large audience interested in religion and especially the academic study of religion, but not necessarily fluent in "sociology-speak", could understand) was that the "Market Approach to Religious Phenomena" emphasizes the activities of religious organizations, giving more weight to analyzing religious supply rather than religious demand, or religious 'needs'. The idea is that religious demand is fairly constant over time and across cultures -- it doesn't really shift or evolve -- but that what leads to major changes in religious participation or religious interest is the variety and energy of the available religious supply.
His argument seems to be that when a heretofore dominant religious institution or collection of institutions is suddenly challenged or displaced or marginalized, it's not because the people have suddenly discovered some new religious need or hunger that was never there before, but rather that a) the religious establishment had changed over time, had ceased to supply adequate sustenance to its market share, and/or b)some new supplier had done a better job of meeting consumer demands. The question then becomes not, "what changed in human development or psychology to bring about a radical shift in religious observance in such-and-such a country during such-and-such a century", for example, but rather, "what caused the religious establishment of that country in that century to be unable to hold on to its market share, to cease to meet the needs of its people or to be unable to compete with new alternatives?"
The other side of Stark's argument is that, because people do differ the world over in their religious tastes (on a spectrum from intense to lax, or from otherworldly to worldly, etc.), all religious markets consist of niche markets, and no one standardized 'product' can adequately serve all niches. Religious pluralism, he argues, is the natural state, but it is emphatically not the usual state, to date. What is usual in most of Western history, at least, is artificial monopolies on religious supply.
I'm not sure I buy into all this, or that it makes much of a difference for my own research (I guess that I've pretty much assumed all along that, to the extent that Buffy fandom functions as an alternative to or adjunct to some more recognizable religious community, it does so because other institutions have been unable or unwilling to provide adequate emotional and inspirational sustenance, rather than because some new taste or nutritional need has suddenly evolved in the human psyche).
However, as a pastor, and not just a scholar and fan, I can't help but be interested in what makes for an overflow crowd in worship at congregation "X", while just around the corner at congregation "Y" the sanctuary is almost empty, and why some people show up to the Buffy "supper table" just a little bit peckish, while others are ravenously hungry and on the edge of malnutrition.
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