Hi Tad,

Have you read the work of Charles Long? He is a religious historian who critiques the whole "science of religion" methodology shaped by Western ideals of rationality and objectivity, which he feels blinds us from appreciating our humanity in all its fullness and diversity. We would both agree that science is tone deaf to feelings, which are a major component of religion. Science is ultimately reductive, flattening life to the one dimension of the rational. The holy is not something you can know rationally, but only know as feeling! Long asks where is the human center, that locus of revealed knowledge and reality? Before the modern era that locus was the ceremonial center of the city. In the modern era it was the self-centered consciousness. In the postmodern era, he suggests looking at every and each instance of the sacred experience, no matter how peripheral or slight. I would say that the sacred is God centered, which is everywhere. There is no privileged place, whether in the world or in the human consciousness. We navigate the realm of the sacred by our feelings and it is only something we can do in community, in relationship with others. God is in the relationship. There is a tripartite relationship between self, other and God. Without a belief in the Sacred, there can be no full appreciation of our humanity.

Nort