"Teflon spirituality"

My friend and colleague Rami Shapiro, the Rabbi, is walking the pluralistic walk many of us typically only talk. "Today I am a Hindu," he proclaims.


I'm a different variety of pluralist myself, claiming no firm anchorage in any of the historically dominant theological or spiritual traditions but happy to take truth wherever it can be found and put to work. And I'm also eager to find the spiritual core of atheism, humanism, naturalism, and whatever other names or labels people march under, though a bit dubious as to the "truth is one" thesis. That is, I don't think it's one yet, but I agree that unity-in-plurality is a worthy aspiration.


Rami: The Rig Veda’s teaching that “Truth is one, different people call it by different names,” frees me from both abandoning names and having allegiance to them. But being a Jew is all about names, especially The Name, and taking that Name very seriously. Yet I just can’t do so. I love languages, I love names, but I never mistake the menu for meal, the name for that toward which it points, and it is the meal I desire.

Judaism is my primary menu. It is the system of names I go to first and most often. But primary does not mean exclusive, and I find value in many names and many systems. And while I do love to explore the differences and incompatibilities between systems in an academic setting, in my personal life they all point me to the same reality, the nameless “—“ that is both the One and the Many.

So today I become a Hindu, but this label adheres no more tightly than any other. In the end I practice a Teflon spirituality allowing me to mix lots of ingredients without worrying that any will stick.


Me: That's one small step for a man (of whatever wisdom tradition), one exemplary leap for cosmopolitanism. Good going, Rami!

Mountain philosophy

While Carolina is still on my mind, I note that William James also visited the area we've just returned from. In 1891 he climbed Mount Mitchell and called it "the most beautiful forest walk (only five hours) I ever made." Robert Richardson notes that he also climbed Roan Mountain and Grandfather Mountain, and on the same trip encountered the mountaineers who inspired his own favorite essay "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings." The moral of that story is that others see the world differently than we do, and it's ok that they do.

That's pluralism, by the way, closely related to cosmopolitanism. More on the precise nature of their relation as soon as I figure out how to say it. Or point to it.

Cosmos

Obama's and Appiah's cosmopolitanism...

Kwame Anthony Appiah's excellent 2006 book of the same name was in my holiday reading stack, a perfect complement to James's Pluralistic Universe. Interesting to note that Appiah, like Obama the son of an African father and western mother (from England, not Kansas), had nothing to say about Obama three years ago. Another measure of how startlingly sudden was our pragmatist-in-chief's arrival onto the world scene.