Perspective
Improvisations in the Key of Life
Cover illustration by Jason Holley. Cover design by Point Five Design.
By Wendy McDowell
What I relish most about my role as an editor are the unexpected congruences, connections, and conversations that materialize as an issue of the Bulletin is coming together. I’ve come to understand that a magazine is a living thing; as long as you cultivate authors with original ideas and beautiful writing styles, their pieces will end up talking to one another quite on their own!
When an issue consociates and resonates like a full-voiced choir (as this one does), I will think, “This must be what it’s like for a music producer when they get to work with brilliant musicians on an album that becomes more than the sum of its parts.”1 Yet I am reluctant to say too much about it, preferring to get out of the way and trusting that you, our Bulletin readers, will discover your own unique moments of frisson.
So, I will simply highlight some of the debates and dilemmas discussed here, but leave it up to you to find the multiple paths of connection (or, if you like, “coincidence”) in the issue.2 Here’s one hint if you like scavenger hunts: Look not only for dovetailing themes and concerns, but for shared intellectual and literary genealogies.3
Michael D. Jackson’s pragmatic take on the “science vs. religion debate” sets a tone for the entire issue. Living among the Kuranko of northern Sierra Leone and other traditional societies has led him to conclude that human beings everywhere employ both “magical” (religious) and “practical” (scientific) methods, thus “making life more thinkable, and . . . manageable, under trying conditions.”
Other authors are equally interested in “lived religion” as they take on timely issues: the paralyzing polarization “ripping American society apart” (Austin Bogues); the “pressing political situation and violence” faced by trans*gender people (Nicole Malte Collins); the ongoing “violent repression, eradication, and forgetfulness of black life” (Biko Mandela Gray); the history of debates about reparations for slavery “burdened with undue emphasis on the individual based on American exceptionalism and racial uplift ideology” (Terrence L. Johnson); and the decimation of species of vultures “putting the ritual of sky burials . . . at risk of extinction” (Toby Cox).
We feel ourselves to be at a tipping point—Raymond Carr calls it “a new threshold moment”—with extinction scenarios before us on a global scale (whether through climate disaster or war), unrelenting violence, and, at home, “a constant onslaught of finger pointing, with every side blaming the others for the ills of the nation.”
The message in multiple essays is that familiar frameworks, theories, and practices are no longer working to address these concerns (if they ever did “work”). Discussing his new book, Matthew Ichihashi Potts emphasizes “a recognition that the form of forgiveness that we have presumed to be the only form of forgiveness in the Christian West is one that is highly gendered and racialized,” and Gray challenges the very enterprise of theodicy (past and present), saying, “when it comes to blackness and black people, theodicy is a futile and brutal enterprise.”
Inspired by Carr’s extended metaphor of musicality and theological language, I would say that the authors here are searching for a new key, calling us to a “radical dynamism” as they model the kinds of improvisation needed to meet the stark realities of our time.
Inspired by Carr’s extended metaphor of musicality and theological language, I would say that the authors here are searching for a new key, calling us to a “radical dynamism” as they model the kinds of improvisation needed to meet the stark realities of our time. Some provide “real world” improvisations forged by people of faith under difficult conditions. Collins shares “interesting . . . cases of trans* folks finding new faith traditions, perhaps converting at or around the same time they transition genders (or leave gender altogether).” Cox reveals how “Zoroastrian communities in India are trying to preserve the ritual of sky burials by installing vulture aviaries or using solar panels to direct sunlight and heat to speed up the decomposition process,” while Zoroastrians in diaspora are adapting their practices.
Others focus on our need to break with preestablished patterns of thought. Two authors encourage us to imagine the nonhuman world differently: Natalia Schwien Scott points to the “reciprocity, ritual, and communion with a nonhuman” we can experience with trees and plants, and Susan Lanzoni shows how Emerson “vegetized the human.”
Carr draws on Thelonious Monk’s methods of “playing in the music” and “hear[ing] the light” to encourage us to “generate new categories” and “nurture new forms of human freedom that participate in the rhythm of divine life.” In Monk’s aesthetic, he writes, “one can . . . encounter the whole religious world and arguably come to terms with a new form of theology that takes seriously our theological and religious differences.”
Likewise, Bogues asks: “What would it mean to employ a political theology of apokatastasis and abandon the hegemonic political theology of Armageddon? Would it mean more truth and reconciliation, as opposed to the nihilistic rhetoric, cancel culture, and fiery jeremiads we are accustomed to?”
Johnson proposes we change the “framing discourse” on reparations. He explains, “When we suspend moral inquiry to focus on citizenship and human rights, the discourse shifts to the law, social structures, the Constitution, and crimes against victims.”
Gray argues it’s time to eschew our public theodicy with its false narratives of progress. Instead of “moving on,” he writes, “we must sit with those who have been silenced. We need to dwell with those who appear only to disappear.” Potts also calls for patiently sitting with trauma and pain and for “a willingness to let go of the urgency and haste to arrive at reconciliation.”
Given these authors’ emphasis on staying with human (and nonhuman) beings in their most difficult, grief-stricken conditions, the word that comes to mind is courage. Their brave quests for new intellectual frameworks and a new political imaginary never lose sight of real life and real lives, particularly lives that have been harmed.
As Potts puts it: “If there is going to be a way forward, it will be through recovery with the wound. I think this is true on a political scale. The future will depend on the degree to which we can reckon with our history.”
Notes:
- So many albums could serve as examples, but my personal top five includes Kind of Blue (Miles Davis), Horses (Patti Smith), The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (Lauryn Hill), The Rise and Fall of Ziggie Stardust . . . (David Bowie), and Songs in the Key of Life (Stevie Wonder)—which seems to stay in my #1 spot, while other choices shift around.
- However, after you read Maria Cecilia Holt’s prismatic approach to coincidences through readings of Thomas Hardy, Michael D. Jackson, and her own family history, the word will take on a deeper, more existential meaning.
- There are also a few explicit acknowledgments of HDS mentors who have shaped the inquiries of their students: Kimberley C. Patton inspired Austin Bogues to think more deeply about the book of Revelation, Richard Niebuhr introduced Susan Lanzoni to Emerson’s essays, and poet Adrie Kusserow and Maria Cecilia Holt both studied with Michael D. Jackson.
Wendy McDowell is editor in chief of the Bulletin.
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