An Illustrative Story
Four Ways of Looking at the Abrahamic Story
In his prelude to Fear and Trembling, the Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard reimagines the story of Abraham and the binding of Isaac in four different ways. He uses these wonderful stories as a starting point for his idea of a "leap of faith."
SoundSeen
Slideshow
"Life in the Dzanga Clearing"
Researchers at the Elephant Listening Project assembled a dozen of their favorite images taken during their time in central Africa. See what Katy Payne describes as "Grand Central Station for elephants."
SoundSeen
Slideshow
"Working for Peace in Foreign Lands"
View on-the-ground images of Douglas Johnston's travels for diplomatic relations. His work has taken him to faraway places, including Pakistan, Sudan, and Iran. View some of the people and places he's seen over the years as he's tried to find another way to peace.
Featured Poem
"Walking Meditation with Thich Nhat Hanh"
Several months ago, one of our producers happened upon Tess Gallagher's delightful book of poems, Dear Ghosts, and discovered a poem about her experience with Brother Thây. She elegantly puts into verse her experience of practicing mindfulness while at Deer Park Monastery.
Last Week's Transcript
Words matter. Read the online transcript of last week's program with author Bruce Feiler as he recounts the story of three faiths in "Children of Abraham." Free for you to read online, at your leisure.
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» Children of Abraham
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» Diplomacy and Religion in the 21st Century
» The Biology of the Spirit
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This week on public radio's conversation about religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas:
Pagans Ancient and Modern
Adrian Ivakhiv, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Vermont, has studied how Pagan ideas are woven together with Western popular culture and mainstream religion. Ivakhiv has also traced ancient Pagan roots now being revived in Western Europe and in post-Soviet politics. He describes a fascinating connection between magic and meaning, and between sacred landscapes and what he calls "global homesickness."
This is an encore presentation of a program last broadcast in March 2006.
Recovering the Layers of Original Depth and Humanity
In its original sense, the word "Pagan" simply referred to country dwellers or peasants. Then, as Christianity spread rapidly in the urban areas of the Roman Empire, "Pagan" became a negative term for those too backward to embrace monotheistic faith. Today, Paganism and Neopaganism are umbrella terms for a vast array of loosely affiliated, new religious movements that revive ancient polytheistic ideas of Europe and the Middle East. There are an estimated one to three million self-described Pagans worldwide. But there is some overlap between these traditions and New Age spirituality, a range of practices that may touch as many as 20 percent of the U.S. population.
For a long while, I did not know how to approach this vast and loosely affiliated spectrum of beliefs. Adrian Ivakhiv gave me a way in. He is a young Ukrainian-Canadian scholar, an ecologist, and an ethnographer of religion — which means, he explains, that he does not dismiss any religious impulses without first understanding them. Where Paganism is concerned, he also has a personal sense of the pull of these ancient traditions, which have appeared in new garb in contemporary lives. At a young age, he was drawn to a defining impulse of Pagan traditions — their strong emphasis on the natural world and a sense of place. Ivakhiv had begun a love affair with nature that would lead to a career in environmental studies. And he was filled with curiosity about the sacred place of his ancestry, Ukraine. But that part of the world was closed to him until the Soviet era ended in 1989.
So Ivakhiv traveled instead to other parts of the world revered as sacred — such as the raw rugged west coast of Ireland and Glastonbury in southern England, where the legends of Camelot swirl amid lush countryside and mysterious ruins. There, and later in Eastern Europe, he became aware of how thinly Christian tradition was overlaid upon ancient ways of marking time and meaning with the cycles and symbols of the natural world. He realized that aspects of his parent's Eastern-rite, Catholic faith — ritual, light, song, and symbol — were in part manifestations of this layering of history and tradition. They were hints of how, from the beginning, the fundamentals of monotheistic faith mingled with Pagan insights and practices drawn from everyday human life close to the land.
As it turns out, it is not difficult to find Pagan impulses alive even in "old-time religion" once you open your eyes and ears to them. There are some wonderful "radio moments" in this hour — where sound works better than words. Adrian Ivakhiv describes his time spent with gypsies and wandering theatrical companies in rural Poland, where troops of actors create song and story with religious and Pagan overtones drawn from ordinary life. And we play an old LP record of the late J.R.R. Tolkien — an eminent British Catholic writer — speaking Elvish, a language from his Lord of the Rings saga. The recently cinematized Lord of the Rings, like the Narnia Chronicles of C.S. Lewis, creatively (and respectably) mingles Christian symbols of good and evil with supernatural imagery straight from Pagan mythology.
Indeed, as Ivakhiv points out, there is a fine line between the mystery and awe that Western religious traditions sanctify and the notion of magic that is nurtured in Pagan and New Age spiritualities. He speaks of how we commonly collect and cherish objects as relics of the past or of those we have loved: a lock of hair, a photo, memorabilia. We experience in them a capacity to impart presence, to evoke familiarity in unknown spaces, to summon memories and emotions. Music has an effect on many of us that one might call "magical," Ivakhiv points out; and isn't the brain itself — which we now know to be the alchemical center of the memories and emotions that music can evoke — a magical organ?
There is a slippery slope to all of this, Ivakhiv freely concedes. Once a person stops believing in general sources of accepted wisdom, it can become possible to believe in everything, without discernment and wisdom. My friend Roberta Bondi, who was a voice on our program on prayer, has quipped — aptly I think — that in our time there is such a thing as "spiritual promiscuity." And when Adrian Ivakhiv was eventually able to travel to Eastern Europe, he uncovered a dark side to the Pagan resurgence in that part of the world. There he found a return to nature that defiantly rejected modernity, and embraced a xenophobic — even racist — view of personal and ethnic identity.
Adrian Ivakhiv suggests provocatively, nevertheless, that the connection between identity and ecology could open other, more generous possibilities in modern lives. He wonders what would happen if human beings cultivated a stronger sense of shared reverence for the places in which we live — reverence for the land we inhabit, not simply for our nation. Might that ground us in a shared identity that could transcend the ethnic battle lines that divide so many shared spaces in this world?
I leave this program with the intriguing notion that a 21st-century Pagan revival might, ironically, help Christianity — and Christian-influenced cultures like ours — recover layers of original depth and humanity. Thanks to all those who suggested that this would be an interesting area to explore.
Krista Recommends Listening To:
Mortal City
by Dar Williams
I love Dar Williams' song, "The Christians and the Pagans," that warmly echoes some of the themes in this program and brings them to life in the sung story of a modern American family. A section is heard in the show this week. Also, hear and read the text of an eminently respectable British hymn, "Jerusalem," that takes the mingled Christian/Pagan lore of Glastonbury as a backdrop. There is a slide show on the Web site this week, too, of natural landscapes — Glastonbury, Sedona, and Slavic countries — that Adrian Ivakhiv describes as places of modern Pagan and Christian pilgrimage.
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