First Course

Tad and Nort order their dinner and a bottle of wine.


You implied in your Email last summer a career move. Is this true? It seems we are both at crossroads, which landed us in China working with a Christian Chinese NGO. I was looking for the cross-cultural encounter and you a religious one.

Whatever one means by "religious;" Is it an encounter with God? I suppose my venture into anthropology had been a step in that direction. An encounter with a cultural other is a first step towards the encounter with the absolute other, or God. The academy derailed that ultimate pursuit giving me only so many lens to work with and I was unable to fashion my own. I remember my first few weeks in Taiwan carrying out my fieldwork, how overwhelmed I was with the life I saw before me, thinking how impossible it was going to be to carve out of it some theoretical insight that would not detract from the meaning of the whole experience. Ethnographic fieldwork is a fascinating enterprise in a way, being so immersed in the object of study. You are not just seeing, but feeling as well, and yet those feelings become left on the editing room floor, so to speak, they are not part of the analytic scientific language we use. We consider feelings as primordial or derivative, in other words, secondary and therefore largely irrelevant. Yet it is our feelings as much as our reason that makes us human!

Maybe this is what has brought you back to the church, your need to acknowledge your feelings. Religion more than anything else is about feelings! I was stuck by what a colleague told me one day about Facebook. He said it was "managed empathy." How true, I thought. In fact, one could say the same about religion in general, it is "managed empathy."

Yes, and kinship, that great discovery of anthropology, is "managed empathy," as well. You are onto something!

The church talks about love. It is central to the Christian worldview and practice, albeit we are as poor at expressing, feeling, and acting on it as anyone else. Christianity is all about how to tap into and manage this flow of love, ultimately coming from God. There is an economy of love, which is entirely separate from that other economy of money and the marketplace, although the two economies are often confused. Love and our emotions are also a realm apart from the objective world of science. For me, there is no contest between science and religion, because they focus on two separate and distinct realms of reality.

Until "the rose and flame are one," that is! This wine is excellent. How are you enjoying the calamari?

Very good. Better than usual. I have never tried the goat cheese and arugula salad. Is it good?