Hi Nort,

Don't worry about intellectual trespassing. We are all guilty. However, one should not be afraid to speak one's own language and toot one's own horn. God talk should not frighten anyone. We are all translators and interpreters, and able to extract whatever meaning we can from speach for ourselves. We all try to make the world ours. It is part of the process or incorporation or embodiment, or making the word flesh as Christians would say, yes? (Now I am crossing into unknown territory!) The difference between the scientific and religious worldview as I see it is one of perspective: the former is outside looking in and the latter is inside looking out. Is there a middle position? I don't know. There are limits to both perspectives. Science tries to understand the world objectively which comes up against our own subjectivity. On the other hand, religion tries to incorporate the world into the subjective realm, which comes up against the limits of our own humanity and understanding. Maybe being in between is what it means to be human, between heaven and earth. I do have plans to visit Boston and would swing by New Haven. I am finalizing them at the moment and will let you know soon.

Tad

Hi Tad,

Happy New Year! First, apologies for presuming to know what social scientists are thinking and doing these days. I do have an interest in the field and have taken several courses in anthropology and psychology when at university many years ago. However, I do have the bad habit of setting up straw dogs and instead need to stick to my own area of expertise. Nevertheless, having said that I do feel that this cross-disciplinary dialogue is intriguing and to put myself in an other's shoes is not entirely bad. Please correct me when I do over step. The reading in today's service was from Paul's Letter to the Ephesians on adoption. Paul's message is that we are all adopted by God as God's heirs and children. We are all one big family and are all descendants of the First Patriarchs. The Bible is our family history. It is a wonderful way to look at the world and challenges us to be open to everyone around us. We are all kin, brothers and sisters in Christ. One can push this to include all of life and introduce and ecological understanding of family and oneness with God the Creator. Kinship was the great discovery of anthropology and it is a great metaphor for social relationships in general. The religious impulse is to extend this kinship as far and wide as possible; to include the other. There is a lovely passage from Genesis about when Abraham welcomes strangers into his home. The passage opens with the statement that "The Lord appeared to Abraham" and Abraham calls the strangers, "Lord." Strangers can be feared or welcomed. They can be angels and messengers of God. God is present in those chance encounters with the other, present in the gap between strangers. This is one reason why travelling can be so exhilarating. Opposites do attract. God and love is everywhere!

Nort

Hi Nort,

Anthropology does try and make connections between things which it understands as culture. Culture refers to both these connections and the totality of those connections. The totality or sum is greater than the parts in creating an ethos which is intuited on some level by individuals and helps form them. There is a strong emotional component of this ethos which you are right in saying that it goes largely overlooked. However it is not all left on the editing room floor. Any good ethnography is going to describe at some point the emotional life of a people, however we do not as of yet have the theoretical tools to pick up on those clues and make something out of it. Feelings are messy as you say, not something you can pick up with a pair of forceps. It is more like reading the patterns or trails of subatomic particles in a cloud chamber. The first step anthropologists have taken is trying to identify and classify emotions, which is still not an exact science. Anthropologists cannot agree if types of emotions are universal or particular to place and time, that is biological or cultural. The answer is both. The more interesting problem for me is understanding the act of investigation as a dialogical process creating a common emotional field across which people from two cultures can communicate. Anthropology is as much about creating hybrid cultures as it is about describing and analyzing existing cultures. This is my understanding of the social science application of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. All we can really hope to understand is the relationship and that is where trust and feelings come in.

Tad

Hi Tad,

Good to hear from you. Congratulations on the move to Temple. I recall something in the making, but was not sure if it actually happened. Temple will be a good spot for you. I think Edna might eventually decide on Bryn Mawr, although nothing is final yet. She has applied to some other schools, too. If it is Bryn Mawr, I will definitely let you know. It would be nice to see you more regularly. You have set yourself a real challenge to focus on love as a subject in the social sciences. It is a subject hard to define and nail down, that is, to be objective about. It seeps across the very self-other and subject-object divide on which science is constructed. It would be the social science equivalent of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in which the observer and observed mutually affect each other. Of course we know that this mutual affection has been going on in the field all along, especially anthropology, even though scholars have pretended otherwise, leaving those moments on the editing room floor when it comes to producing the final document. We have to own up to our feelings and admit that they count every bit as much as rational discourse. Religion understands the connection between things, and that this love is central to religious discourse and practice, even though when it comes to actual practice, we adherents fall short. You mentioned coming this way before next Fall. Any time in mind? Of course you are welcome to stay here with us.

Nort

It has been nearly a year since Tad and Nort had their last conversation. The recent exchange of Christmas cards prompted this latest correspondence. It has been the nature of their relationship to experience long dormant periods interrupted by a sudden chattery flurry, like a breaching whale, exchanging fresh or ripened ideas, what they had discussed in the past incubating as each takes in what the other has said and what they themselves articulated, incorporating it into their transformed beings, helping each other to evolve in their thought.


Hi Nort,

Holiday greetings! Thank you for your card and family update. Glad to hear the children are doing well. Congratulations to Edna for getting into Bryn Mawr early action. She will love it there I am sure! It is a beautiful campus and close to Philly. You did get my change of address notice and know that I am now living there and teaching at Temple, so, you have a place to stay here whenever you want to visit her. It would be great to see you again. I will probably be swinging your way before the Fall. Since we last talked I have been working on a paper on violence in East Africa. It has been a challenge because it is not my area of expertise, however the agency I was working for received a grant to model it on a computer. I am trying to put some cultural flesh on the basic agent-based modeling programming. What I am really trying to do is to bring in affect, which I believe underlies much of culture. Some anthropologists have written about affective economies, of which kinship is a clear example, so I am not too far out in left field. However my conscience is forcing me to be more explicit and actually use the word love! This is where science and humanities cross lines and I am being somewhat timid in my approach. A good anthropological and theological conversation with you on the topic would help!

Peace,
Tad

Hi Nort,

Perhaps you are right. I have set myself an impossible task of trying to find a unified field theory of the social sciences matching the two realms of feeling and reason--the subjective and objective--your fire and rose. They may never meet, except in us. Perhaps then we are the unifying theory and only in love do we ever enter that unified realm! If anthropologists were true to their call, they would go native and become a person of the culture they study, only then would they truly come to know that culture. It is our personhood that counts. That is the fullest expression of our culture and humanity, you would say God. It is time to speak in parables and rhyme!

Tad

Hi Tad,
I detect a conundrum! We both agree that feelings are an important and necessary component of social life, but hard to "capture" and measure. They lack the substance of the material world. How then do you make your case? How do you develop a science of feelings? Do you want to even try? It would seem you would have to start afresh every time to reinvigorate words. It is a similar problem with biblical interpretation which tries to enthuse the text and a challenge to any preacher who tries to open up scripture and bring life to the text. Perhaps you should be a preacher or poet instead of a scientist. I cannot think of a way out for you at the moment! Good luck!
Nort