Richard Bushman, Robert Orsi, and Mormonism's "Abundant History"

Christopher Jones

(cross-posted at Juvenile Instructor)

Over at the website for Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, the editors have posted a discussion (moderated by Susanna Morrill, associate professor of religious studies at Lewis and Clark College) between noted historians and scholars of religion Richard Lyman Bushman and Robert Orsi. Bushman and Orsi reflect on the potential Orsi's approach to "supernatural presence" and "abundant events" in modern Catholicism holds for scholars of Mormonism.

The conversation between these two seasoned scholars, which touches on the relationship between the scholar and her subjects, how to make sense of revelatory visions and the writing of the Book of Mormon, and the vocabulary used to describe such occurrences, deserves to be read in its entirety, but I'm including a brief excerpt below:

Richard: You also speak of the routes of influence radiating from such events. That’s a nice way of putting it; the word “routes” suggests an approach to what happens in consequence. Where do the abundant events lead? But it occurs to me that some of the responses of the Marian groups, which taken together could be thought of as a morphology of an abundant event, take a different form in the case of Joseph Smith. Rather than the abundant event dissolving the boundaries of subjectivity and establishing intimacies, in Joseph Smith’s case it leads to structure and organization. The people who are converted take on priesthood offices and go on missions; they have council meetings. As the influence radiates still further, you get minutes of the meetings and letters and all the paraphernalia of organization. I thought it would be interesting to talk about how events that are so similar at the core lead in different directions in the aftermath.

Robert: I appreciate the difference. I was thinking about that concept as I read the very powerful final chapter of Rough Stone Rolling, in which the people left behind at Nauvoo after Joseph’s murder continued to work on building the temple, though they knew they weren’t going to be using it after it was done because they would be leaving Nauvoo. It seemed to me that we needed some word to get at what happens between Max Weber’s idea of initial charismatic leadership of a new religion and its eventual institutionalization. It seems as if something else is going on there, almost as if the stones themselves were charismatic–the stones of this sacred building that would otherwise signify the routinization of Mormonism. So I take your point. It does lead in different directions, which might have to do with the specific peculiarities of modern Catholicism and modern Mormonism. I was struck by–as you want to put it–the radiation outwards of Joseph’s spirit and his vision through the organization.

Go here to read the rest of the interview.

The Neuroscience of Religious Experience: An Interview with Patrick McNamara

Randall Stephens

In The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902) William James explored the physiological dimensions of religion. Why did nitrous oxide and ether "stimulate the mystical consciousness in an extraordinary degree"? (378) Why did epileptics have similar, euphoric religious experiences? What was the connection between the brain and the numinous?

In his typical around-the-barn style James observed:

The subliminal region, whatever else it may be, is at any rate a place now admitted by psychologists to exist for the accumulation of vestiges of sensible experience (whether inattentively or attentively registered), and for their elaboration according to ordinary psychological or logical laws into results that end by attaining such a "tension" that they may at times enter consciousness with something like a burst. It thus is "scientific" to interpret all otherwise unaccountable invasive alterations of consciousness as results of the tension of subliminal memories reaching the bursting-point. But candor obliges me to confess that there are occasional bursts into consciousness of results of which it is not easy to demonstrate any prolonged subconscious incubation. . . . The case of Mr. Bradley, that of M. Ratisbonne, possibly that of Colonel Gardiner, possibly that of Saint Paul, might not be so easily explained in this simple way. The result, then, would have to be ascribed either to a merely physiological nerve storm, a "discharging lesion" like that of epilepsy; or, in case

it were useful and rational, as in the two latter cases named, to some more mystical or theological hypothesis. I make this remark in order that the reader may realize that the subject is really complex.

Neuroscientists are now directly studying what James was groping at in the dark. One of those scientists is Patrick McNamara (Director of the Evolutionary Neurobehavior Laboratory in the Department of Neurology at the BU School of Medicine). He has worked on "developing an evolutionary approach to problems of brain and behavior and currently is studying the evolution of the frontal lobes, the evolution of the two mammalian sleep states (REM and NREM) and the evolution of religion in human cultures."

McNamara is also the author of The Neuroscience of Religious Experience (Cambridge University Press, 2009). "For billions of people the world over," he writes, "religious experiences and beliefs influence who they marry, how they rear their children, whom they spend time with, and how they comport themselves in dally life. It may well be that we
would not be as we find ourselves in the twenty-first century if our ancestors had not been intensely religious for most of the 'life' of our species." McNamara thinks its the perfect time to develop a "real science of religion," aided by breakthroughs in "anthropologic, cognitive, and neuroscientific studies

of the manifold features of religious experiences and in evolutionary approaches to religious experiences and behaviors" (ix)

I met up with McNamara at his office at Boston Medical Center about eight months ago. In the two-part interview embedded here I ask him about recent developments in neuroscience and pose questions about how the biological sciences can inform religious studies and, even, religious history.

I'm not sure how easy it will be to bridge the divide between the hard sciences and the humanities. (Charges of reductionism, functionalism, and the like will probably continue to be bandied about.) It reminds me of how C. P. Snow famously summed up the gap in his 1959 The Two Cultures: "Literary intellectuals at one pole--at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension-sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. They have a curious distorted image of each other. Their attitudes are so different that, even on the level of emotion, they can't find much common ground."

That gap may still be wide. But I find the conversation going on among neuroscientists like McNamara and some religious studies scholars (not so much historians, I think) a fascinating one. Humanists should pay far more attention to what's going on over on the other side of the campus. And, vice versa.