A Sociable God
Coleman, John A.
en age does arrive, prepared for, on the one hand, by master-builder Jackson Mead's massive bridge to the sky and, on the other, by mayor Praeger dePinto's deistic nostrums delivered to...
...those of living with nature and of discovering God in the details (mastered by both Lake and Mattara) are two which lead to a justified faith: a theology of eternal love...
...I do not much care for Wilber's intellectual heroes: Loevinger, Kohlberg, and Chomsky...
...It's easy to take pleasure in her lyric ing into the world of the pre-conscious...
...They multiply by proliferating analogies, references to each other, movement...
...I admit to serious ambivalence about Wilber's attempt, in this book, to correlate transpersonal psychology with sociology of religion...
...More information is available by calling (212) 8,55-6390...
...Vedanta/Buddhist sociology of religion A SOCIABLE SOD Ken Wilber McGraw Hill, $12.95, 160 pp...
...Author, The Cry of the People March 25 JOAN DeLOURDES LEONARD, CSJ Judge, Diocesan Tribunal of the Rockville Centre Diocese April 1 WILLIAM SLOANE COFFIN Senior Minister, The Riverside Church April B EDWARD BRAXTON Theologian, Author, The Wisdom Community April 15 JOHN TRACY ELLIS Historian...
...Because of his evolutionary biases, Wilber sees "secularization," rather idiosyncratically, as a stage-specific rung on a ladder leading, it would seem inevitably, to transpersonal consciousness...
...Nor have I ever thought that there really is such a thing as Aldous Huxley's philosophia perennis to which Wilber consistently appeals...
...Strangely, although I profoundly disagree with his fundamental intellectual moves, I found the book intriguing, challenging to my Western assumptions in sociology of religion and, in places, very illuminating...
...In this second move, Commonweal: 154 against cultural relativity, hermeneutics raises the truth question and challenges one's own horizon of meaning...
...What would he make of Paul Ricoeur's project of a second naivete, i.e...
...and the causal (the God-identity of the sages...
...We can, indeed, "pass over" to other cultures and world views and feel relatively at home there...
...Amy Clampitt begins and sustains The Kingfisher as a rhapsodist (in its root meaning of one who stitches together) but she's apparently turning to poetry drawn directly out of parent/childhood experience which is serious and therefore seeks a plainer, higher style than her descriptive poems...
...announce I.ENTEN VESPERS " . . . But The Lord Looks Into The Heart'" -I Samuel 16:8 March 11 GERARD SLOYAN Professor, Department of Religion, Temple University March 1B PENNY LERNOUX Journalist, Latin American Affairs, NCR...
...Tile rlN|FISliER Amy Clampitt Knopf, $6.95, 148 pp...
...Wilber's project of developing a nonreductionist transcendental sociology of religion utilizes sociological structuralfunctionalist analysis while rejecting its reductionist tendencies...
...Wilber forgets that the project of hermeneutics involves more than "passing over to another world of meaning in empathy" within the closed hermeneutical circle...
...On the other hand, I am deeply suspicious of the main theoretical premises of this work: (1) a reliance on a development structuralist scheme which postulates invariant ahistorical and transcultural "deep structures" and (2) an evolutionary perspective which sketches a movement from the pre-rational through the rational on its way to the trans-rational (as if these are not always mixed) and (3) a hierarchical "tree" of levels of analysis wherein the higher level encompasses, yet surpasses, lower levels...
...the profane...
...Hermeneutics has no teeth...
...Archaic forms of myth must be transcended before the subtler transpersonal consciousness is reached...
...Similarly, he appeals to hermeneutics but objects to what he sees as the intrinsic danger in hermeneutics, i.e., the theoretical absolutizing of cultural relativity...
...By relying on Vedanta and Buddhist concepts, Ken Wilber's brief introduction to a transcendental sociology of religion corrects this Western Christian bias...
...It convinced me, more than ever, of just how much conventional Western sociology of religion has been tied to concepts (e.g., the sacred vs...
...HE CATHEDRAL BASILICA OF ST...
...Thus, Wilber's useful distinction between the authenticity and legitimacy of religions, his taxonomy of nine quite divergent definitions of religion, his recognition that every "level" of religion allows inauthentic distorted expressions, and his project of devising a non-reductionist sociology of reli.gion won me to the book...
...Much of Wilber's criticism of hermeneutics, in this discussion, is directed against the sociology of Robert Bellah...
...I think he fundamentally misinterprets Bellah's work...
...Curiously, for one who invokes the work of Jurgen Habermas, Wilber sees little of the shadow-side of modern bureaucratic technical rationality...
...Bernard Lonergan distinguishes between bright ideas (interesting speculative hypotheses) and good ideas (hypotheses grounded in careful evidence...
...Helprin's magnanimous message of hope and affirmation--this is an old-fashioned novel of ideas-provides a welcome tonic for our weary time, an antidote to fashionable despair...
...John A. Coleman I N HIS recent volume, Religion in Sociological Perspective, the British sociologist of religion Bryan Wilson notes that "the fundamental concepts of the sociology of religion have, since the subject's very beginnings, been heavily indebted to Christian theology, and their applicability to the religions of the nonChristian world has always been problematic...
...On one hand, this volume includes perceptive insights, analytic acuity and genuine wisdom in places...
...What many, following Weber, argue is ironically a descent into hell, Wilber sees as an inevitable step toward mystic breakthrough...
...Jorie Graham grew up in Italy...
...For hermeneutics, all religions are meaningful...
...Instead we are encouraged to enter the flux of time, contoured as it is by a variety of worldly arts...
...a rational and trans-rational appropriation of myth, a conscious enterNo unearned garden EROSION Jorie Grahm Princeton University Press, $6.95, 83 pp...
...Saint James is located in the Downtown Business Section of Brooklyn, immediate to crossing the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges...
...Faculty, The Catholic University of America Sunday Afternoons at 4 P.M...
...Light-pierced expresses the ecstasy even as it puts out the point of view...
...Some, however, can be truer than others...
...Of course, insight, understanding, even truth claims are possible...
...The Cove" ends: a curtain wall just frescoed indigo, so immense a hue, a blue of such majesty it can't be looked at, at whose apex there pulses, even in daylight, a lighthouse, lightpierced like a needle's eye...
...Few Christian readers, I surmise, will be persuaded, despite appeals to a logic of deep ,structure, of his argument, against R.C...
...Wilber is something of a guru in transpersonal psychology...
...Perhaps as a Westerner, I am unable to appreciate the monism of Hindu thought...
...In this, Wilber mistakenly thinks that hermeneutics must maintain, without remainder, that all religions are true, "a stance that precludes any sort of sustained critical appraisal...
...The heart of the book contains a development scheme of nine levels of knowing (a symptomatic term...
...from the subconscious or pre-rational through the rational to the super-conscious or transpersonal...
...I believe the trend of rationalization per se is necessary, desirable, appropriate, phase-specific and evolutionary...
...Wilber postulates three levels of transpersonal knowing: the psychic (yogic nature or cosmic consciousness...
...descriptions...
...Rosemury Deen A SIMPLE introductory contrast between these poets: Amy Clampitt, the older woman, was brought up in Iowa...
...9 March 1984:155...
...But claims for trans-cultural languages, concepts or "deep structures" have always struck me as either culturebound imperialisms (as in persistent neo-Kantian schemes in ethics and history of religions) or terribly thin abstractions...
...Readers will have to judge for themselves whether Wilber's "deep structures" are not, when unmasked, really Vedanta or Buddhist structures, not so "deep" after all but culture-bound...
...church-sect typology) of Western Christian provenance...
...From the beginning, Wilber never claims for his book more than that it represents a schema of bright ideas...
...It also entails passing back in challenge to one's own initial world of meaning...
...Lines packed with gorgeous sounds, language, images, seem to rush or tumble forward in continuous movement...
...Editor-in-chief of Re-Vision Journal, he is also the author of some six earlier books which are, probably, better introductions to his passionate interest in transpersonal psychology than this brief attempt to correlate that psychology with sociology of religion, a field he has merely delved into...
...I think that all we ever have, as starting point, is history, hermeneutics, the conflict of interpretations, and culturebound concepts, affects and artifacts...
...But Helprin's apocalypse delivers neither Bunyan's celestial city nor Marx's classless utopia...
...en age does arrive, prepared for, on the one hand, by master-builder Jackson Mead's massive bridge to the sky and, on the other, by mayor Praeger dePinto's deistic nostrums delivered to the populace...
...Apophatic (image-less) forms of mysticism are always preferred to the way of images, with no serious attention to the pitfalls and possibilities in each...
...In any event, his earlier books such as The Atman Project or Up From Eden are carefully read and widely regarded by contemporary seekers of spirituality outside the Christian churches...
...The Cove," the first poem in the book, begins this way:"Inside the snug house, blue wilioware/plates go round the dado, cross-stitch/ domesticates the guest room . . . . '" Things activate, and they override point of view...
...When she retains the writing habits of the rhapsodist, this turn isn't easy for Miss Clampitt...
...The ending knots the threads of the beginning: snug house and stitch are tied to lighthouse and needle...
...Light and eye are there, but you can see how point of view disappears--indeed, the blue "can't be looked at...
...The Cathedral is on Jay Street near Ttllary...
...the subtle (the God-communion of the saints...
...Few will also be convinced by his fundamental reduction of myth to the pre-rational level...
...I am not at all convinced that he succeeds in generating a sociology of religion without its own set of problems of applicability, this time to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam...
...Again showing his Vedanta-Buddhist starting point, Wilber nowhere makes room for authentic bhakti or devotional religion...
...JAMES ill sponsorship with SISTERS OF SAINT ]OSEPH, Brentwood, N.Y...
...Zaehner, that monistic mystical experience is "higher" than theistic mysticism...
Vol. 111 • March 1984 • No. 5
