Journal of
VOLUME 5 | ISSUE 1
GLOBAL CATHOLICISM WINTER 2021
CATHOLICS & CULTURES Scholarship for the Pedagogy of Global Catholicism
ARTICLES
• Mathew N. Schmalz / Introducing Catholics & Cultures: Ethnography, Encyclopedia, Cyborg • Mara Brecht / A Widened Angle of View: Teaching Theology and Racial Embodiment • Laura Elder / Focus on the Busy Intersections of Culture and Cultural Change • Anita Houck / Ritual among the Scilohtac: Global Catholicism, the Nacirema, and Interfaith Studies • Marc Roscoe Loustau / Teaching Sexuality on the Catholics & Cultures Website: A Refreshing Turn toward the Longue Durée • Hillary Kaell / The Value of Online Resources: Reflections on Teaching an Introduction to Global Christianity • Stephanie M. Wong / Catholics & Cultures: A Panoramic View in Search of Greater Understanding • Thomas M. Landy / Catholics & Cultures as an Act of Improvisation: A Response
Photo by Thomas M. Landy
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M AT H E W N . S C H M A L Z
Introducing Catholics & Cultures: Ethnography, Encyclopedia, Cyborg
Mathew N. Schmalz is Founding Editor of the Journal of Global Catholicism and Professor of Religious Studies at the College of the Holy Cross. He received his B.A. from Amherst College and his Ph.D. in the history of religions from the University of Chicago. He has published more than fifty articles and essays that engage global Catholicism (particularly in South Asia), Catholic theology and spirituality, Mormonism, and The Watchtower movement. He is co-editor of Engaging South Asian Religions: Boundaries, Appropriations, and Resistances (SUNY, 2012, with Peter Gottschalk) and author of Mercy Matters: Opening Yourself to the Life Changing Gift (OSV, 2016). Schmalz has also written more than one hundred opinion pieces that have appeared in On Faith, Crux, The Huffington Post and in the print editions of The Washington Post, Commonweal Magazine, US Catholic, The National Catholic Reporter, the Providence Journal, and the Telegram & Gazette. He has provided expert commentary to USA Today, The New York Times, ABC's Good Morning America, NPR, CNBC, Hardball with Chris Matthews, and U.S. News & World Report, among others.
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Mathew N. Schmalz | 3
OVERVIEWING CATHOLICS & CULTURES
A
project developed by Thomas M. Landy as part of the mission of the Rev. Michael C. McFarland, S. J. Center for Religion, Ethics and
Culture at the College of the Holy Cross, Catholics & Cultures explores
what Pope Francis has called the “dialects of the Global Church.” Coming online in 2015 and now with more than two million lifetime page views and nearly one
million users, the Catholics & Cultures website presents a unique platform for
scholarship and pedagogy relating to lived Catholicism. As of this writing (December 2020), the site has full entries, photo essays, and digital videos connected
with six continents and thirty countries, ranging from Argentina to Ukraine. Ad-
ditionally, Catholics & Cultures has its own YouTube channel with 177 videos documenting aspects of Catholic life throughout the world. The site has been ac-
cessed from 233 countries, with the top three countries for users being the U.S., the Philippines, and India.
VOLUME 5 ISSUE 1 | WINTER 2021
The Catholics & Cultures home page found at catholicsandcultures.org.
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Introducing Catholics & Cultures: Ethnography, Encyclopedia, Cyborg
The articles included in this special edition of the Journal of Global Catholicism
examine the pedagogical and scholarly implications of the Catholics & Cultures site. But before introducing the individual pieces contained in this issue, some introductory reflections are in order to set Catholics & Cultures within its broader academic context. The Catholics & Cultures project is both classificatory and
comparative: it organizes cases studies or vignettes of lived Catholicism and pro-
vides a framework for comparing Catholic practices across cultures. While it is the first Catholic resource of its kind on the World Wide Web, the site intellectually
reaches back to draw upon methods long part of comparative scholarly study. But through its use of layered and interlinked text, image, and video, the Catholics &
Cultures site also opens up new possibilities for exploring—and reimagining—the
dynamic play of unity and diversity in Catholicism as lived and experienced by Catholics throughout the world.
ORGANIZATION AND AESTHETICS The last decade has seen an expansion of resources on the World Wide Web for the academic study of religion. For example, there is the World Religions and Spirituality Project, an initiative headed by David G. Bromley at Virginia Commonwealth University. For the study of new religions in particular, there is
the work of Dr. Massimo Introvigne and the web resources provided by Centro studi sulle nuove religioni (CESNUR). There are also numerous sites, such as that
hosted by the Wabash Center, which provide pedagogical resources and support for
scholars through the medium of cyberspace. Against this background, what initially distinguishes Thomas Landy’s work in the Catholics & Cultures site is not only
that it is focused exclusively on Catholicism but that it draws more extensively on the resources provided by the World Wide Web to complement static text and im-
age idioms of presentation. While more might be done in the future to draw upon Virtual Reality technologies to develop a more immersive experience, one of the most salutary aspects of the Catholics & Cultures site is the layered combination
text, image, and video that facilitates fuller appreciation of the cultural context for Catholic practice.
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Mathew N. Schmalz | 5
Given how fraught the study of Catholicism can be, a particularly valuable aspect of the Catholics & Cultures site is that its textual contributions and glosses
actually avoid explicitly addressing some of the broader debates about the nature of “Catholic.” For example, users will find no mention of the debate over whether
Catholicism is a normative category or a descriptive one.1 Instead, the Catholics & Cultures site connects with its users by immediately delving into an exploration of
Catholic life in situ. The site’s entries record and frame the actions of people—not
all of whom are baptized Catholics—in ways that do not impede users in their efforts to survey and appreciate lived Catholic practice. A different presentational
approach, such as one that immediately situates Catholic phenomena in relation to official institutional or discursive spaces, might divert attention away from lived
Catholicism on the ground and toward elements that are usually associated with Catholicism as a putatively seamless, unchanging, whole. Nonetheless, the categories structuring the site do constitute a rather conventional list of features of Catholicism such as “feast and holy days,” “practices and values,” and “Catholics by
country.” In giving content to these basic organizational categories, the Catholics
& Cultures site relies upon two old and familiar scholarly traditions: ethnography and encyclopedia.
For historians of religion, the classic explication of the traditions of ethnography
and encyclopedia is Jonathan Z. Smith’s 1971 article, “Adde Parvum Parvo Mag-
nus Acervus Erit.”2 In his discussion, Smith explores various methodologies of comparison and critiques comparative scholarly techniques that rely upon simple
binary opposition. With regard to the ethnographic tradition, Smith traces its origins back to the fragments of Xenophanes in the 5th century B.C. that described 1
2
Understanding the category “Catholic” as normative would inevitably lead to an evaluation of whether certain practices conform to doctrines and canons of the magisterium. By contrast, a descriptive approach would see Catholicism as a collection interrelated clusters of practices and ideas relating to the Church more broadly as a community. For example, a Venn diagram would embody elements more closely related to the “descriptive” approach. Jonathan Z. Smith, “Adde Parvum Parvo Magnus Acervus Erit,” History of Religions 11, no. 1 (August 1971): 67-90, https://doi.org/10.1086/462642. See also Jonathan Z. Smith, “Adde Parvum Parvo Magnus Acervus Erit,” in Map Is Not Territory, ed. Jonathan Z. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 240-264. Page citations in this essay will be from the Map Is Not Territory edition.
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Introducing Catholics & Cultures: Ethnography, Encyclopedia, Cyborg
the Ethiopians. In times past, ethnographic comparisons usually took the form of
travelogues that privileged the traveler’s eye. This idiom, according to Smith, still influences modern day anthropological ethnographies and can be perceived in their
often idiosyncratic organizational apparatus as well as in their tolerance for figurative or self-indulgent reflections.3
Obviously, the collection and collation of data for Catholics & Cultures relies upon
Thomas Landy’s keen observations. And the content of the site is overwhelmingly ethnographic, drawing as it does from case studies of ritual, feasts, and other aspects of lived Catholic practice. But unlike ethnographies of times past, the site’s vernacular is not accented by the personal tone and cadences of a travelogue author
surveying the diverse Catholic cultures of the world. Instead, the site focuses on the presentation of synchronic data with some background information and statistics
added to introduce specific countries, rituals, and feasts. The site is also unlike contemporary academic ethnographies, since it does not include self-referential medi-
tations on the ethnographer’s gaze and explications of how that gaze includes and inevitably excludes particular phenomena. This lack of meta-discourse, it should be
noted, represents a judicious stylistic choice that keeps attention on Catholicism is lived as opposed to on how it is portrayed. 4
Moving to the encyclopedic tradition, Smith locates its beginnings in the writings of Hellanicus in the 5th century C.E. and then charts the tradition’s development into the modern age through examples such as J. G. Frazer’s entries in the Encyclopedia Britannica.5 Among the problems with the encyclopedia, in Smith’s
words, is its tendency to rely upon “contextless lists, held together by mere surface associations rather than careful, specific meaningful comparisons with inter-
est in exotic content.”6 In light of Smith’s polemical appraisal, the comparative 3 4
5 6
Smith, “Adde Parvum Parvo Magnus Acervus Erit,” 247. The issue of whether to extensively discuss the “ethnographer’s gaze” is a complex methodological and stylistic question. On the choice in relation to the Catholic identity of the ethnographer and Catholic phenomena, see Mathew N. Schmalz, “American Catholic, Indian Catholics: Reflections on Religious Identity, Ethnography and the History of Religions,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 13 (January 2001): 91-97, https://doi.org/10.1163/157006801x00129. Smith, “Adde Parvum Parvo Magnus Acervus Erit,” 252. Smith, “Adde Parvum Parvo Magnus Acervus Erit,” 253. JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
Mathew N. Schmalz | 7
connections made through Catholics & Cultures might seem to be supported
by rather shaky classificatory scaffolding. But the categories used by the site do
draw upon established themes and practices identified in what could be called “the Catholic encyclopedia” and are thus recognizable to non-academically trained Catholics as well as to researchers.
Smith elevates the academically self-enclosed over the popularly accessible when it comes to comparison. If Catholics & Cultures were to move in a direction that academic comparativists might find more palatable, the most readily available framework is diffusion—a method that would synchronically and diachronically trace
particular devotions and rituals in and across cultures. Such an approach would also have to negotiate an important divergence emerging in the academic study of religion between scholarship focused on “routes” and scholarship focused on “roots.”7 To apply this distinction to Catholics & Cultures, an emphasis on “routes” would
map a devotion’s or ritual’s path away from its place of origin and then diagram how it changes and evolves. By contrast, an emphasis upon “roots” would concentrate on the beginnings of a devotion or ritual as well as its specific performative
context. As of now, Catholics & Cultures favors “roots” over “routes” but that need not remain the case—or even a binary choice—given the adaptable architecture of the site.
In pushing the possibilities of Catholics & Cultures to even more speculative
levels, there still remains a good amount cyber-grist for the virtual comparativist’s mill. For example, a more expansive thematic emphasis in the site—one that
considers narrative in addition to ritual—could develop into a resource akin to
the Motif Index of Folk-Literature pioneered by American folklorist, Stith Thompson.8 Content ranging from the tropes and structural elements of Catholic discourse and story-telling to the gestures, offerings, and contexts of ritual could—at
least theoretically—be collated and correlated and their appearances, divergences, 7 8
The distinction between “routes” and “roots” is made in Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 7. Stith Thompson, Motif Index of Folk-Literature; A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romans, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-Books, and Local Legends (Bloomington, Indiana: University of India Press, 1955-58), 6 v.
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Introducing Catholics & Cultures: Ethnography, Encyclopedia, Cyborg
and confluences charted and mapped. The Catholics & Cultures site could also
self-consciously adopt a more morphological approach such as that deployed in Catholics theologies of inculturation, which posit an essence to Catholicism that
incarnates itself in and through diverse cultural forms.9 Incorporating morphology
into Catholics & Cultures would lead to interesting, and predictably contentious, discussions about what taxonomic categories—and specific taxa—best correspond to observable aspects of Catholic phenomena as refracted through a global lens.
Having spun out various theoretical possibilities for the site as a platform for a comparative study of Catholicism, it is important to acknowledge that Catholics & Cultures does not seek to vindicate itself vis-à-vis established academic theories and methodologies. But no apology should be made for declining the theory
and method gambit since there remains no consensus in religious studies about whether foregrounding theory and method is a mark of superior scholarship. As
exemplified in the essays in the well-received Theory in a Time of Excess, some schol-
ars find religious studies to be over-theorized while some argue that is it under
theorized.10 Indeed, as Aaron Hughes observes in his “Introduction” to the volume, the very term “theory” over the last thirty years is used so much that it has become “coterminous with virtually all forms of scholarship on religion.”11 To further muddy matters, as Christopher Kavanagh argues in his extended reflections on the
essays included in Theory in a Time of Excess, there is often a tendency to equate “theory” specifically with “critical theory” in a way that “tautologically restricts the theoretical boundaries of the study of religion field and neglects the contributions
of more empirically inclined theorists.”12 For now, the field of religious studies still
remains divided among descriptivists, theologians, and theorists, who themselves, 9
For a specific case study of inculturation and its morphological and political aspects, see Mathew N. Schmalz, “Ad Experimentum: Theology, Anthropology and the Paradoxes of Indian Catholic Inculturation,” in Theology and the Social Sciences, ed. Michael Barnes (Maryknoll NY: Orbis Books, 2001), 161-180, https://crossworks.holycross.edu/rel_faculty_pub/9/. 10 Aaron W. Hughes, ed., Theory in a Time of Excess: Beyond Reflection and Explanation in Religious Studies Scholarship (Sheffield, UK: Equinox Publishing 2017). 11 Aaron W. Hughes, “Introduction,” in Theory in a Time of Excess: Beyond Reflection and Explanation in Religious Studies Scholarship, ed. Aaron W. Hughes (Sheffield, UK: Equinox Publishing 2017), 6. 12 Christopher M. Kavanagh, “Too Much, Too Little, or the Wrong Kind of ‘Theory’ in the Study of Religions?” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 30 (2018): 463, doi: 10.1163/15700682-12341439 JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
Mathew N. Schmalz | 9
as Kavanagh implicitly suggests, might more clearly delineate their differing commitments.13
That scholars debate the status of given theories or question their relevance is not, of course, an argument against theorizing. But given the contested landscape and boundaries of the academic study of religion, a particularly noteworthy aspect of Catholics & Cultures is how its empirical and descriptive orientation reaches to bridge the gap between the academic and the popular, the arcane and the accessible. On one level, the intent underlying this effort is most likely informed by understanding how web-based content is usually accessed: through a topic search that
directs a user to a single page. Given that many users find Catholics & Cultures in
this way, it makes sense to develop individual entries as fully as possible instead of recursively elaborating complex, and cross-referenced, categories and classificatory schemes. On another level, however, the reluctance to utilize robust theories of comparison could be perceived as a mild act of resistance. After all, Catholics &
Cultures uses encyclopedia and ethnography in ways that recognize and appreciate
how there is an audience for serious scholarship waiting—and living—beyond the bounded and privileged spaces of the academy.
While the layered combination of text, image, and video is a standard part of sites
and platforms on the World Wide Web, it is important to remember that the
advent of the Internet inspired—and continues to inspire—scholarly reflection on how web based technologies in cyberspace change our perceptions and senses of embodiment.14 Spurred by Donna Haraway’s influential “A Cyborg Manifesto,” cyborgian aesthetics as well as philosophies and theologies of transhumanism—not to mention cyborgs themselves—have become important subjects of academic discussion and debate.15 Accordingly, any academic use of web-based 13 Kavanaugh, “Too Much, Too Little, or the Wrong Kind of ‘Theory,’” 464. 14 For an early examination of issues surrounding Internet culture, see Rob Shields, ed., Cultures of the Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies (London: Sage Publications, 1996). See also Daniel Miller and Don Slater, eds., The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach (Oxford: Berg, 2000). 15 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Woman: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991 [1985]), 149-81. On Cyborgian aesthetics, see Aaron Parkhurst, “Becoming Cyborgian: Procrastinating the Singularity,” The New Bioethics 18, no. 1 (May 2012): 68-80, https://doi.org/10.1179/2050287713Z.0000000006. For an example of VOLUME 5 ISSUE 1 | WINTER 2021
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One of the nearly 200 dance groups, or bailes, participating in the 10-day feast for the Virgen del Carmen at La Tirana, Chile. Photo by Thomas M. Landy/ catholicsandcultures.org.
technologies needs to contend with cyborgian potentialities, dynamics and
theoretical constructs. Within these discursive contexts, “the cyborg” is not just a combination of human and machine, but a “blasphemous” metaphor and myth that undoes phallocentric pretensions to clarity and completeness by celebrating hybridity over unity, irony over congruity, and affinity over identity.16
On a superficial level, exploring Catholics & Cultures requires cyborgian components: you have to have a monitor, keyboard, and mouse and you also need to
be sure that both you and your equipment are plugged in and wired.17 A smart
phone—the cyborg signifier par excellence—might also work, as would a touch sen-
sitive tablet. As of yet, the disparate nodes created by these cyborgian interfaces have not yet been networked into a larger community or virtual research landscape of the kind that might be celebrated by theorists enamored with cyborgian philosophical and theological engagement with transhumanism, see Calvin Mercer, “Bodies and Persons: Theological Reflections on Transhumanism,” Dialog: A Journal of Theology 54, no. 1 (March 2015): 27-33, https://doi.org/10.1111/dial.12151. 16 Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 156. 17 For interesting reflections on the implications of such seemingly simple operations, see Søren Mørk Petersen, “Mundane Cyborg Practice: Material Aspects of Broadband Internet Use,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 13, no. 1 (2007): 79–91, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1354856507072859. Peterson argues that users of the Internet can be “perceived” as “mundane cyborgs.” JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
Mathew N. Schmalz | 11
possibilities.18 In principle, however, there is nothing preventing Catholics & Cultures from becoming a cyborgian context for community and research if the site
were given further publicity and suppler interface upgrades, or pursued more extensive connections with other Internet resources and communities.
What is fundamentally at issue for contemporary theorists of the cyborg, as it was for Haraway back in 1985, is understanding various iterations of cyborg metaphors
and myths as issuing from, and reciprocally enabling, the breakdown of established
boundaries between human, animal and machine, as well as the boundary between the physical and the non-physical.19 And it is in relation to boundaries that the
Catholics & Cultures site reflects what could be described as a nascent cyborgian aesthetic.
To choose somewhat arbitrarily among many aspects of Catholics & Cultures, consider the entry, “Dancing for the Virgin at La Tirana in Chile.” This entry begins with an overview of the July feast dedicated to the Virgen del Carmen in
which some 200 groups ceremonially dance, having spent the previous year in rig-
orous preparation and practice. Within the Catholics & Cultures site, a general
description of the feast is positioned or planted like the trunk of a tree, with links branching out to sub-studies considering the use of prayer, the creation of sacred space, the multiple influences on the feast, and the daily schedule. Temporal and quotidian boundaries can be blurred, rearranged, or transgressed depending upon how and when the content is accessed. Moreover, users can process the videos in
a variety of ways ranging from playing with motion and graphical display to ex-
ploring side-by-side comparisons with other videos from La Tirana as well as with thematically similar videos from different parts of the Catholics & Cultures site. A
menu of links also prompts connections to other feasts in different geographic lo-
cations, to entries about other uses of dance throughout the Catholic world and, of course, to numerous culturally distinct examples of Catholic devotion to Mary. The 18 On networked communities in cyberspace, see Steven G. Jones, ed., Virtual Cultures: Identity, Community in Cybersociety (London: Sage Ltd., 1998). 19 Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,”153-54. See also Constance Penley, Andrew Ross, and Donna Haraway, “Cyborgs at Large: Interview with Donna Haraway,” Social Text 26, no. 25 (1990): 8-23, doi:10.2307/466237. VOLUME 5 ISSUE 1 | WINTER 2021
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La Tirana entry can also be accessed obliquely through the “Practices and Values” menu that contains crucial categories for using the site as a comparative resource.
The structure of “Dancing for the Virgin at La Tirana in Chile” might seem fairly
ordinary by today’s standards, even though it does represent a substantial improvement over many other academic websites. But this conventionality is really the outgrowth of familiarity since the Internet and Internet-based platforms are so much
part of everyday life. “Dancing for the Virgin at La Tirana in Chile,” along with
the other entries on the Catholics & Cultures site, broadens the perceptual field for considering Catholic practices in and of themselves as well as through comparative
juxtaposition. As scholars and bloggers alike have continually emphasized, Internet technologies enable different ways of seeing and experiencing objects and events
just as hyper-linked and layered text enable different ways of forming and connecting impressions and ideas.
The specific aspects of the Catholics & Cultures site, along with their associated cyber-potentialities, generate an aesthetic: an implicit structure or styling shaped and oriented by interrelated principles and possibilities. The overall aesthetic of
Catholics & Cultures is cyborgian not just in its blurring of boundaries—physical, temporal, and conceptual—but in the agency and equipment required from the
user in order to successfully navigate in and through its content. Unlike a printed and bound monograph, the Catholics & Cultures site is a multidimensional resource, ever deepening and expanding its permeable vertical and horizontal margins in and through cyberspace.
Given its nascent cyborgian aesthetic, it very well may be that Catholics & Cultures will be seen as a forerunner for Catholicism’s engagement with post-modern
themes and concerns through the medium of the World Wide Web. Of course, the site itself does not make grandiose claims about its relevance or impact. This
modesty is misplaced: under Catholics & Cultures’ cyber-surface lie latent possi-
bilities that other intrepid researchers or commentators might wish to excavate and extend. Many forms of lived Catholicism in the United States are already chime-
ras: Latin-Mass Catholics use E-rosaries and confession apps; septum piercings
complement scapular wearing. In the age of COVID, Catholic worship and JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
Mathew N. Schmalz | 13
devotions have assumed cyborgian qualities as the context for worship, once lim-
ited to a specific geographical place such as a parish or shrine, is transposed into a cyber-realm that can be accessed by Catholics throughout the world. In these
contexts, the cyborg can be found, manifesting itself to emphasize irony over congruity; hybridity over unity.
While Catholics & Cultures does not explicitly reveal—or revel in—apparent dis-
junctions, it might point the way to more destabilizing forms of presentation like pastiche, bricolage—or simply giving informants the opportunity to comment on
their own portrayals on the site. Inspired by how Catholics & Cultures has raised
new possibilities for considering Global Catholicism, another web platform might make use of a more eclectic and destabilizing presentational idiom akin to that deployed by Gloria Anzaldúa in her literary work Borderlands/La Frontera: The New
Mestiza.20 In reflecting on her own experiences as Chicana, multi-sexual, and queer, Anzaldúa deploys numerous versions of English and Spanish, and draws upon the
tropes offered by personal narrative, poetry, and history to retrieve the hybridity
and ambiguity of the “non-unitary subject.”21 When such methods and aspirations
are brought into engagement with the study of Global Catholicism, questions and queries inevitably follow: Can Catholicism—the monolithic tradition par excel-
lence—be considered a non-unitary subject? How could such a non-unitary polymorphism be presented or evoked? And would there be anything learned from
such an approach? Catholics & Cultures suggests—gently—that cyberspace might at least provide a productive context for embarking on such a chimeric quest.
When it comes specifically to American Catholicism, its jagged and rough con-
tours can assume phantasmagoric, if not monstrous, shapes. When social media
fuels the ambivalent and ambiguous practices of lived Catholicism, the Catholic chimera really does breathe fire. There is nothing more vituperative than contend-
ing Catholic discourses in cyberspace. Catholics & Cultures reveals the pettiness of such debates by introducing contexts of lived Catholicism in which the spe-
cific concerns of Western—particularly American—Catholics are unknown or 20 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987). 21 Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, “Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: Cultural Studies, ‘Difference,’ and the Non-Unitary Subject,” Cultural Critique, no. 28 (1994): 5-28, doi:10.2307/1354508. VOLUME 5 ISSUE 1 | WINTER 2021
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irrelevant. Catholics & Cultures becomes if not a safe space then at least an alter-
native space—both global and Catholic—that can calm the Catholic chimera by freeing it from the cage, which American Catholicism has built.
A Catholic engagement with cyborg theory and other forms of post-modernism has political as well as intellectual ramifications that reveal very real conflicts and
fissures among various approaches to understanding and presenting Catholic life. But deconstructing Catholicism need not be something wholly negative or destructive—at least not in the ordinary sense. Deconstructing can set a context for
realizing different kinds of connections and appreciating more capacious configurations of affinity and identity. But even with its multiple ministrations to diversity, Catholics & Cultures can still inspire renewed appreciation for the “universal
Church”—a descriptive category that opens up a wealth of theological possibilities for consideration. After all, it could be argued, in order for any object or phe-
nomenon to be identified at all, it must have an underlying essence that perdures
through time and space. For now, the trajectories of the interpretative potentialities
put in motion by Catholics & Cultures would seem to depend most immediately on how the site’s descriptive and comparative methodologies can engage the cy-
borgian practices and perspectives made possible by working in and through the World Wide Web.
SCHOLARSHIP FOR PEDAGOGY Taking Catholics & Cultures seriously as scholarship is a necessary first step in
unpacking the multiple applications and uses of the site. And since Catholics &
Cultures is not monolith but cyborg, it is not a self-enclosed scholarly creation. In October 2019, a group of scholars gathered at the Hilton O’Hara in Chicago to spend a weekend discussing the Catholic & Cultures site.22 The pieces included in
the edition of the Journal of Global Catholicism are the product of that workshop. Each article probes the contours and content of Catholics & Cultures in order to
surface latent possibilities and tease out extensions to existing functions. Taken as 22 The workshop was sponsored by the McFarland Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture. Many thanks are due to Thomas Landy, Danielle Kane, and Patricia Hinchcliffe for their generous support and professionalism. JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
Mathew N. Schmalz | 15
a whole—though not necessarily in order—these scholarly contributions address three aspects or implications of the site: its organizational structure; its relevance for the study of Global Catholicism; and its pedagogical applications.
In “A Widened Angle of View: Teaching Theology and Racial Embodiment,” Mara Brecht argues that Catholics & Cultures can help white students reconsider how “tethered” global Catholicism is to official Catholic teaching and thereby
examine racialized assumptions made in Catholic discourse. Laura Elder observes in “Focus on the Busy Intersections of Culture and Cultural Change” that ritual and performance spaces are “busy meaning intersections of meaning making” as
she encourages the Catholic & Cultures project to consider cultural change more deeply. These two articles affirm how effective the Catholics and Cultures can be as
a tool in the undergraduate classroom while simultaneously suggesting new areas academic inquiry that the site could fruitfully engage.
Anita Houck, in “Ritual Among the Scilohtac: Global Catholicism, the Nacirema, and Interfaith Studies,” presents a provocative comparison between the Catholics & Cultures Project and Horace Miner’s famous article, “Body Ritual Among the
Nacirema.” Houck argues that the Catholics & Cultures site could move beyond
its focus on ritual and also—interestingly and again provocatively—suggests that
the content and structure of the site could cultivate a feeling of surprise. Houck concludes by situating the Catholics & Cultures site within current theological discussions of inclusion and multiplicity.
Marc Loustau also pursues a provocative line of argument in his “Teaching Sexu-
ality on the Catholics & Cultures Website: A Refreshing Turn toward the Longue
Durée.” Loustau focuses on the issue of teaching sexuality in the religious studies and theology classrooms. He observes that the Catholics & Cultures site occasion-
ally uses a “contemporary issues approach that considers sexuality in relation to legal and legislative decisions and government policies.” Loustau credits the Catholics & Cultures for pursuing a longue durée (lit. “long duration”) approach that
that emphasizes “long term and deep structural processes driving cultural and reli-
gious changes.” Loustau surmises that advocates of including sexuality in religious studies and theology curricula would “applaud” a greater emphasis upon Catholic VOLUME 5 ISSUE 1 | WINTER 2021
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attitudes toward sexuality as part of a study of Catholicism worldwide. The issue concludes with two articles that focus on pedagogy and its relationship to
issues of intellectual accessibility for students. In “The Value of Online Resources:
Reflections on Teaching an Introduction to Global Christianity,” Hillary Kaell, who uses the Catholics & Cultures site as part of a Global Catholicism course, asks
the questions: “How can we encourage students to use online sources? How can we empower them to seek out answers to their questions?” Her article then considers
specific examples of how Catholics & Cultures can be deployed in the undergraduate classroom. Stephanie Wong’s contribution, “Catholics & Cultures: A Panoram-
ic View in Search of Greater Understanding,” draws attention to the vast array of
content on the site while arguing that there needs to be greater attention given to “heuristic tools” for navigation and making “sense of Catholicism’s rich diversity.”
The effort to make sense of Catholicism’s “rich diversity” returns us to the distinctiveness of the Catholics & Cultures project. As the articles in this issue make
clear, in number and in conceptual importance there are overwhelming possibilities
suggested by Catholics & Cultures in its present form. With the site still evolving, it is crucially important to stress the adjective “overwhelming” since the labor that elevated the site to its present level was contributed—with some specific exceptions—by just two individuals: content developer Thomas Landy and content editor Danielle Kane. Any follow up to, or extrapolations from, this issue’s recommen-
dations for the Catholics & Cultures site will require time, resources—and many
more helping hands on keyboards and track pads. But given what Catholics & Cultures has already realized in addition to what it promises, the scholars writing
in this issue come together to affirm that the most important uses for the site relate to pedagogy. Whether students are Catholic or not, whether they consider themselves digital natives or not, Catholics & Cultures offers learner-users numerous ways to engage the Catholic tradition and to reflect more generally on how religion
can be lived in diverse cultural contexts. As scholarship for the pedagogy of global
Catholicism, Catholics & Cultures remains a unique resource whose potential will be most meaningfully realized not around the seminar tables of elite academic conferences but amidst the desks—and computer monitors—of ordinary classrooms.
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Mathew N. Schmalz | 17
BIBLIOGRAPHY Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Haraway,
Donna.
“A
Cyborg
Manifesto:
Science,
Technology
and
Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Woman: The Reinvention of Nature, edited by Donna Haraway, 149-82. London: Free Association Books, 1991 [1985].
Hughes, Aaron W. “Introduction.” In Theory in a Time of Excess: Beyond Reflection and
Explanation in Religious Studies Scholarship, edited by Aaron W. Hughes, 1-10. Sheffield, UK: Equinox Publishing, 2017.
Jones, Steven G., ed. Virtual Cultures: Identity, Community in Cybersociety. London: Sage Ltd., 1998.
Kavanagh, Christopher M. “Too Much, Too Little, or the Wrong Kind of
‘Theory’ in the Study of Religions?” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 30 (2018): 463-471. doi:10.1163/15700682-12341439.
Mercer,
Calvin.
“Bodies
and
Persons:
Theological
Reflections
on
Transhumanism.” Dialog: A Journal of Theology 54, no. 1 (March 2015): 27-33. https://doi.org/10.1111/dial.12151.
Miller, Daniel and Don Slater, eds. The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg, 2000.
Parkhurst, Aaron. “Becoming Cyborgian: Procrastinating the Singularity.” The
New Bioethics 18, no. 1 (May 2012): 68-80. https://doi.org/10.1179/2050287 713Z.0000000006.
Penley, Constance, Andrew Ross, Donna Haraway. “Cyborgs at Large: Interview with Donna Haraway.” Social Text 26, no. 25 (1990): 8-23. doi:10.2307/466237.
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18 | Introducing Catholics & Cultures: Ethnography, Encyclopedia, Cyborg
Petersen, Søren Mørk. “Mundane Cyborg Practice: Material Aspects of
Broadband Internet Use.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 13, no. 1 (2007): 79–91. https://doi .org/10.1177%2F1354856507072859.
Schmalz, Mathew N. “Ad Experimentum: Theology, Anthropology and the Paradoxes of Indian Catholic Inculturation.” In Theology and the Social Sciences, edited by Michael Barnes, 161-180. Maryknoll NY: Orbis Books, 2001. https://crossworks.holycross.edu/rel_faculty_pub/9/.
_____. “American Catholic, Indian Catholics: Reflections on Religious Identity,
Ethnography and the History of Religions.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 13 ( January 2001): 91-97. https://doi.org/10.1163/157006801x00129.
Shields, Rob, ed. Cultures of the Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies. London: Sage Publications, 1996.
Smith, Jonathan Z. “Adde Parvum Parvo Magnus Acervus Erit.” History of Religions 11, no. 1 (August 1971): 67-90. https://doi.org/10.1086/462642.
_____. “Adde Parvum Parvo Magnus Acervus Erit.” In Map Is Not Territory, edited by Jonathan Z. Smith, 240-264. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.
Thompson, Stith. Motif Index of Folk-Literature; A Classification of Narrative
Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romans, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-Books, and Local Legends. Bloomington, Indiana: University of Indiana Press, 1955-58, 6 v.
Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne. “Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: Cultural Studies, ‘Difference,’ and the Non-Unitary Subject.” Cultural Critique, no. 28 (1994): 5-28. doi:10.2307/1354508.
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Cover image: The lead dancer of Barangay San Nicolas Proper's dance troupe carries an image of the Santo Niño in the Grand Sinulog parade, Cebu, Philippines. Photo by Thomas M. Landy/ catholicsandcultures.org.
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20
MARA BRECHT
A Widened Angle of View: Teaching Theology and Racial Embodiment
Mara Brecht is Associate Professor of Theology at Loyola University in Chicago. Her research addresses Christian faith formation in contexts of racial and religious diversity, pedagogy and the philosophy of Catholic education, as well as religious belonging in culturally hybrid contexts, most especially the context of Catholic higher education.
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Mara Brecht | 21
O
nline platforms invite us to explore the world widely. Social media lets us hear from people far from our homes. Live streaming allows us to
witness events around the globe in real time, and our feeds constantly
update us with the commentary, criticisms, and memes that pop up around any given phenomena. This is a native environment for today’s undergraduate and gradu-
ate students. Teaching Millennials and Generation Z requires accounting for the fact that this digital environment isn’t extra but constitutive for them and that’s
where they’re likely to encounter difference: online, through memes rather than intentional, academic study.
My commitments as a teacher of Catholic theology involve helping students uncover the breadth of the Catholic tradition—a breadth that’s beyond their imagining, with textures and complexities that couldn’t be adequately comprehended in a
lifetime—something that they might well expect in a classroom. But I’m also there
to help them discover and embrace difference. In that work, I’m attuned to the reality that difference already saturates these students’ worlds, in their “reality” and
certainly in the digital realm. To get them to see it, understand it, and recognize that difference it isn’t extra to their worlds, but constitutive of them—that demands
my disciplinary field of theology shift from highly abstract and speculative modes of inquiry to tangible and concrete ones.
This combination of circumstances—that digital life makes students almost overly
comfortable with difference because they often don’t take time to interrogate it, and that theology is overly abstract—present odd stumbling blocks for classes that aim to help students appreciate breadth, complexity, and difference. My comments in this essay begin from this teaching quagmire. I hope my reflections on the ped-
agogical value of Catholics & Cultures can aid fellow teachers of theology to use its resources to help students encounter and learn from the rich variety of Catholic
life and practice. The encounter with the internal diversity of Catholicism, I pro-
pose, can go so far as to help students tackle the challenging matter of racialized embodiment.
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22 | A Widened Angle of View: Teaching Theology and Racial Embodiment
CHANGING THE FOCAL LENGTH I’ll begin with a common metaphor in the study of religion: the lens. Teachers
often try to get students to recognize they see the world through a particular lens. Once they’ve done that—no small task—then they try and get students to exper-
iment with alternate lenses. In my theology classes, for example, I ask students: What does the doctrine of God look like if viewed through a feminist lens? The
exercise requires students to recognize we all come to what we see from a viewpoint. Then they have to understand trinitarian monotheism, how they view it, and
finally grasp feminist principles which, in turn, guide and shape how feminists view the Christian notion of God.
I will extend the lens metaphor, and consider the idea of focal length. Focal length
determines how much we see and the degree to which it’s magnified. A telephoto
lens has a narrow angle of view and is highly magnified because the longer a lens, the smaller the slice of the world that comes into view, and the larger the objects in
it appear to us. A wide-angle lens has a short focal length, a wider the angle of view, and includes more objects but they all appear smaller. More things are in view but they’re not magnified as much. (It’s worth noting that both narrow and wide angles of view have clear focus, clarity and sharpness.)
The classes I teach are theological and philosophical in nature. My students learn about what Catholics believe and think, how they got there, along with issues and ideas the Church actively debates. We explore the tradition propositionally, which is to say through the statements of belief the Catholic faithful have articulated over
the centuries. Of any Christian claim—for example “Jesus is God made flesh”— students learn about historical development, analyze philosophical influence, and
consider the forms of relationship and ethic that flow from such a claim. This type
of theological study typically makes use of a long focal length. Beliefs are magnified to a high degree and take up most of the narrow field of vision.
Through such a lens, the Magisterial tradition—the governing, authoritative body
of the Roman Catholic Church—looms large. So I frequently change lenses to remind my students that the Magisterium is not Catholicism. That is, Catholics JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
Mara Brecht | 23
across the world and throughout time live out vibrant lives of faith without giving
much (or any) explicit thought to what the Magisterium deems “orthodox.” The
tradition represented by the “official” Roman Catholic Church does not necessarily accord with the lived experience of Catholic practitioners, nor mirror the theolog-
ical positions developed by all Catholic theologians. My point isn’t to dispute the
official and authoritative teaching of the Roman Catholic Church, but to remind students that Catholicism isn’t supposed to be photographed through a telephoto lens. Ours is a wide-angle faith, a lived tradition, rich and varied in composition.
That doesn’t mean I discount the Magisterium or think it should be excluded from
the photograph, to stretch the metaphor yet further. In a class on the development of Catholic theology, students ought to learn something about Catholic beliefs as
they’re filtered through and articulated by the Magisterium: creeds, the Catechism,
orders and rites, and so on. Yes, I teach my students, the Catholic tradition includes, involves, and even specially reveres the Magisterium, but it is also the case that the tradition extends far beyond the Magisterial tradition. A quick diagram I often
draw up on the white-board makes the point visually: one circle, labeled Magisteri-
um, is encompassed by a larger one, labeled Catholic tradition. If you took a picture of that whiteboard with a telephoto lens, the Magisterium would take up the entire frame. But that’s not what’s on my whiteboard, it’s just the way it looks through a particular lens. This is where Catholics & Cultures can be especially useful. It can help fill in the white space in the larger circle surrounding “Magisterium.” The journal serves as a reminder not to forget our wide-angle lens.
If students are to appreciate Catholicism-beyond-doctrine as real Catholicism, as I believe they should, they must be given tools to understand lived Catholic faith
and practices as such. The concept of the Catholic or sacramental imagination is
helpful here. Andrew Greeley defines the Catholic imagination as “the imaginative
and narrative infrastructure of the Catholic heritage” that exists “beyond the walls of the Church.” It is how Catholics “picture the world” and think about God’s relationship to it.1 1
Andrew Greeley, The Catholic Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 16–17.
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24 | A Widened Angle of View: Teaching Theology and Racial Embodiment
The Catholic imagination is sacramental, Greeley explains, because Catholics perceive and experience reality as sacramental, as a medium for meeting God. For
Catholics, the natural world and all it contains, including society and human relationships, tells us something about God. These are also the places where God
becomes present among us.2 For college classes like mine, which are not designed to
be courses in Global Catholicism, Catholics & Cultures gives students a glimpse of how the Catholic imagination manifests the world over, and it gives them the tools to understand both doctrine and Catholicism-beyond-doctrine.
Each page of the website shows students other Catholics who live out their faith
in distinct cultural circumstances. It lets them widen the angle of their vision, broadening their perception of what constitutes the Catholic tradition by invit-
ing them to see faith lived out in a multiplicity of ways. Responding to what they
see, students can answer theological questions about the sacramental imagination: How do Catholics in x culture understand the world? How do they relate to God? (What does this—or doesn’t this—have to do with propositional theology?)
This activity, I propose, helpfully moves students from where they began to a new place of understanding. When students (and, in my experience, especially those who come from Catholic backgrounds and who attended Catholic primary or sec-
ondary schools) begin to study Catholic theology at the undergraduate level, their angle of focus tends to be narrow. They see a small, magnified slice of Catholic
faith and practice—one closely linked to the Magisterial tradition and expressed in the grammar of propositional theology. Through changing their lens and widening
the angle of view, that slice of the world sinks into the background, and what once appeared magnified now appears smaller, and relative to surrounding “objects.”
SHIFTING TO BODIES AND RACE My experience is that when students have their angle of view widened, their pre-
suppositions are scaled down. With a new lens, students can identify what they see as the center of Catholic faith—what particular way of believing and being
Catholic, what form of sacramental imagination—stands front and center of their 2 Greeley, The Catholic Imagination, 10–12. JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
Mara Brecht | 25
vision of what being Catholic is. For me, there is an imperative “next step” that must A Small Christian
Community gathers in
be taken even after putting on a wide-angle lens. The “next step” is to help students Mwanza, Tanzania. Photo courtesy of grasp the racialized roots of what was at the center of their narrow view. A new wave of philosophers, historians, and theologians observe a deep link between religion and race, and between Christianity and whiteness. These researchers
expose the subtle ways race operates in our everyday thinking, and how religion keeps racial hierarchies in place. This research suggests that any and all inquiry into
religion—including in the study of Catholic theology, as well as the study of global Catholicism—must also deal with race. If not, those inquires only help to cement further the status quo around racial privilege and power.
To return to the “teaching quagmire” I began with: helping digitally native students both to move beyond easy comfort with difference and to get concrete about something abstract like theology.
Encountering difference primarily in digital space has a way of convincing us that such encounters are outside of embodied reality, and so not subject to the forces of power and privilege that operate in “real” space. The truth is that even when we
Google, our bodies—our social locations and identities—matter. I want students
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James Jay Carney/ catholicsandcultures.org.
26 | A Widened Angle of View: Teaching Theology and Racial Embodiment
The Ghanaian Catholic community in Berlin, Germany worships at St. Michael's Church, Kreuzberg. Video still from Thomas M. Landy/ catholicsandcultures.org.
not just to encounter breadth and difference, but to make sure that breadth and difference register with them deeply—at the level of racial embodiment.
An example from the new scholarship on race and religion comes from historian Theodore Vial. He digs into the intellectual history of race and religion, exploring
why race and religion are two of the primary ways we talk about human identity.3 Vial doesn’t take the categories for granted: They came from somewhere and for
a specific purpose and continue, he says, to do “real work in today’s world.”4 Vial finds that race and religion have a common genealogy, rooted in the philosophies
of German idealists like Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Johann Herder.5
The German idealists originated a notion of race that is foundational for how we
understand race today. Kant, Schleiermacher, Herder, and their ken set up a way of thinking about human bodies such that bodies indicate cultural capacities.6 Physical characteristics (like skin-color, facial features, and hair texture) convey some-
thing about the deeper level capabilities a person or group have. A group’s ability 3 4 5 6
Theodore Vial, Modern Race, Modern Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 12. Theodore Vial, Modern Race, Modern Religion, 7. Theodore Vial, Modern Race, Modern Religion, 124. Theodore Vial, Modern Race, Modern Religion, 158. JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
Mara Brecht | 27
to have mastery over passions and desires, or to be capable of self-governance, for example, is indicated by physical features. Our commonplace understanding of race today as a physically observable traits that signals social grouping has its roots
in the German idealist conception—even if we also now have the sense that we should not attribute capabilities to social groups.
Religion, like race, comes from the German idealist way of thinking about humans. Religion is essentially a social classification. It developed not as a generic category but “always embodied in specific social group.”7 This history exerts its influence today. Though we have broad categories like Jewish, Christian, and Muslim, these categories are only meaningful because we picture actual people in them. In other
words, we don’t—we can’t—think about religion abstractly, but only in how they manifest in the practices and lives and people. And, as with race, the German ideal-
ist tradition connects external feature to internal qualities. The “language, gesture, and customs” given by religions penetrate beneath the surface of the skin of those who participate in them to constitute who religious people are.8
Thus, religion and race, together, account for how social groups form, have identity, and maintain the boundaries of community.9 Just as our taxonomic classifications come from German idealist thought, we are also influenced by German idealism in
how we organize these categories. We inevitably position different groups along-
side one another, drawing comparisons among them and, according to Vial, “load
our comparisons with assumptions about the relative progress of the groups under consideration on a trajectory of progress toward human flourishing.”10 In other words, we arrange groups on a spectrum that is also a scale.
Though I’ve only just breezed through an enormously complex body of research, consider what could happen if students of theology put their widened perspective of the Catholic tradition into dialogue with three basic ideas: (1) race-think-
ing links physical characteristics to innate capacities, (2) religion always already 7 8 9 10
Theodore Vial, Modern Race, Modern Religion, 204. Theodore Vial, Modern Race, Modern Religion, 158. Theodore Vial, Modern Race, Modern Religion, 92. Theodore Vial, Modern Race, Modern Religion, 223.
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28 | A Widened Angle of View: Teaching Theology and Racial Embodiment
involves race-thinking; (3) racial and religious categories are inevitably positioned teleologically. As students delve into Catholics & Cultures, they can attend to mo-
ments when “race” enters their awareness; they can interrogate how their notion of Catholicism as a religion is not just widened, but possibly challenged by what they see; they can ask what their own skin color has to do with their first-hand experience of Catholicism.
To be sure, many students in our classrooms are not white, and so don’t come at their studies from white perspectives. Moreover, Catholics & Cultures clearly shows that there are Brown and Black Catholics, and so the Catholic tradition is not white-washed. But here lies just the point. My hunch is that the Magisterium
and the propositional theology that reflects that “slice” of the Catholic tradition is often the focus of most students’ understanding of Catholicism, not because it is the seat of doctrinal authority but rather because the Catholicism of Western
Europe takes up their whole field of vision. That is, students from the dominant culture (that in the lineage of Western Europe) see “Catholicism” as coterminous with the authoritative Magisterial tradition because the authoritative Magisterial
tradition is the form of Catholicism that is known and practiced by whites. In other words, what students tacitly understand to be “official” or “true” Catholicism is really just Catholicism that is familiar, that is white.
With theoretical precepts from this research on the entanglements of Christian theology and whiteness in hand, students can face thorny questions: Which Catholic practices fill the center and which fill the periphery of their views of the tradi-
tion? Do the sacramental imaginations of Brown and Black Catholics factor into our theologies? Which Catholics are real Catholics? To be clear, these questions are
provocative and self-reflective—meant to point out the priorities and limitations
of perspective. These are not questions about empirical facts, nor are they only addressed to white students. (That is, it’s possible for white, European Catholi-
cism to “anchor” how people of color view the tradition.) Catholics & Cultures, set alongside new theoretical perspectives on race and religion, can help break the hold white racialization has on “the” Catholic way of understanding the world and God’s relationship to it.
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Mara Brecht | 29
BIBLIOGRAPHY Greeley, Andrew. The Catholic Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Vial, Theodore. Modern Race, Modern Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
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LAURA ELDER
Focus on the Busy Intersections of Culture and Cultural Change
Laura Elder is an Associate Professor of Global Studies at Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame. Trained in cultural anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, her primary research interests are global political economy, Islam, and gender in South and Southeast Asia. Always fascinated by the interplay of culture and capital, during her graduate studies she examined the dynamics of sex, money, and power among hedge funds in Asia. She has conducted fieldwork in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Qatar, and Singapore. Currently she is finishing a comparative analysis of the promotion of women’s expertise in Islamic financial services in Southeast Asian and Gulf Cooperation Council countries.
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Laura Elder | 31
A
s a cultural anthropologist working in South and Southeast Asia, I am
delighted to see the significant representation of these areas on the
Catholics & Cultures website. From an anthropological point of view,
however, I would suggest a reorganization and increased emphasis on the dynamics
of cultural change across the site. From Ghost cultists to prosperity Christians and wealth-affirming Buddhists to market Muslims, recent decades have ushered in an unprecedented religious resurgence around the world.1 And this turn to piety has been marked by popular participation, voluntary association, a re-recognition of
laity expertise, a focus on prosperity and, in particular, an increased leadership role for women.2 Many scholars argue that this resurgence marks the desire of ordinary
believers for security, self-initiative, and dignity in the face of overwhelming social, economic, and environmental change. But a common theme running through the
literature on religion is that dissenting voices within major religious institutions have broken away, forming communes as well as business enterprises to establish and practice new ways of life based on a revised understanding of their faith.3 1
2
3
See Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Judith Butler, Jurgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornell West, The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, eds. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan Van Antwerpen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Harvey Cox “Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America. David Martin; Is Latin America Turning Protestant? The Politics of Evangelical Growth. David Stoll.” American Journal of Sociology 97, no. 2 (1991): 579–582, https://doi .org/10.1086/229812; Daniel D. Groody, Gustavo Gutiérrez, and José O Aylwin, The Preferential Option for the Poor beyond Theology (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014); Robert Hefner, “Religious Resurgence in Contemporary Asia: Southeast Asian Perspectives on Capitalism, the State, and the New Piety,” The Journal of Asian Studies 69, no. 4 (2010): 1031–47, https://doi.org/10.1017/s0021911810002901; Tariq Modood, Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007). Alexander Agadjanian, “Evangelical, Pentecostal and Charismatic Churches in Latin America and Eastern Europe: An Introduction,” Religion, State and Society 40, no. 1 (2012): 3–10, https://doi.org /10.1080/09637494.2012.669581. Paul Freston, “Evangelical Protestantism and Democratization in Contemporary Latin America and Asia,” Democratization 11, no. 4 (2004): 21–41, https://doi.org /10.1080/1351034042000234512; Hefner, “Religious Resurgence in Contemporary Asia." See Tomoko Akami, “Between the State and Global Civil Society: Non-official Experts and Their Network in the Asia-Pacific, 1925–45,” Global Networks 2 (2002): 65–82, https://doi.org /10.1111/1471-0374.00027; Edmund Terence Gomez, Robert Hunt, and John Roxborogh, “Introduction: Religion, Business and Contestation in Malaysia and Singapore,” Pacific Affairs 88, no. 2 (2015): 153–71, https://doi.org/10.5509/2015882153; Charles Hirschkind, “Beyond Secular and Religious: An Intellectual Genealogy of Tahrir Square,” American Ethnologist 39, no. 1 (2012): 49–53, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2011.01346.x; Mary Ida Bagus, “Getting the Monkey off Your Back: Women and the Intensification of Religious Identities in Post-Bomb Bali,
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32 | Focus on the Busy Intersections of Culture and Cultural Change
Some of this literature suggests that these non-conforming groups have ventured into business to support and promote their belief in the distinctiveness of their faith. These groups have created local and transnational business links that, among
others, allow them to transfer funds to complement the activities of fellow communities in need of resources for proselytizing.4
In this vein, the dynamic connections of religious resurgence reveal the important
ways that religious ritual and performance are meaning making spaces which are not self-contained or cut off from the rest of culture, but rather are a key locus
of cultural change. Renato Rosaldo, for example, shows us rituals are “the busy intersections of culture.”5 And I, in turn, ask my students: What does religious resurgence mean politically, economically, and socially? Where would you locate
the appeal of these practices? What is the basis of conflicts? What is the role of the state and/or global forces? On the Catholics & Cultures website, a renewed emphasis on busy intersections of meaning making—as rituals are connected, disconnected, and reconnected to other domains of social life—would improve the utility
of the site for analyzing these connections. El Shaddai, a populist, prosperity gospel
oriented Catholic group originating in the Philippines, for example, now claims millions of adherents and substantial multinational business initiatives around the
world.6 Based on Katherine Wiegele’s work, the documentation provided for El Shaddai on the website provides a careful exposition of how El Shaddai welds
4
5 6
Indonesia,” Women’s Studies International Forum, Special Issue: From Village Religion to Global Networks: Women, Religious Nationalism and Sustainability in South and Southeast Asia, 33, no. 4 (2010): 402–11, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2010.02.014; Mohamad Maznah, “The Ascendance of Bureaucratic Islam and the Secularization of the Sharia in Malaysia,” Pacific Affairs 83, 3 (2010): 505–24, https://doi.org/10.5509/2010833505; Geoffrey Samuel and Santi Rozario, “From Village Religion to Global Networks: Women, Religious Nationalism and Sustainability in South and Southeast Asia,” Women’s Studies International Forum, 301–4, https://doi.org/10.1016 /j.wsif.2010.02.003. See, for example, James B. Hoesterey, “Prophetic Cosmopolitanism: Islam, Pop Psychology, and Civic Virtue in Indonesia,” City & Society 24, no. 1 (2012): 38–61, https://doi.org/10.1111 /j.1548-744X.2012.01067.x; Daromir Rudnyckyj, Spiritual Economies: Islam, Globalization, and the Afterlife of Development (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010); Filippo Osella and Benjamin F Soares, Islam, Politics, Anthropology (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Renato Rosaldo, Culture & Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (New ed. Boston: Beacon Press 1993), 17. Katharine L. Wiegele, Investing in Miracles: El Shaddai and the Transformation of Popular Catholicism in the Philippines (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005). JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
Laura Elder | 33
self help, hope and prosperity among impoverished, marginalized workers who El Shaddai's Saturday evening "gawain," or
have been excluded from both political and development initiatives. The site also fellowship service, in gestures to the significance of El Shaddai among elites and those with political Manila is broadcast all
over the country. Photo
influence but unfortunately provides no context regarding conflicts between these by Thomas M. Landy/ groups of adherents. Further, the discussion of El Shaddai could better represent
the meaning making among followers around the world not just in the Philippines. While meaning making is “on the menu” the framing of the entire website around
nation-states works against users following these networks of charismatic practice
elsewhere. If we move to Hong Kong, for example, we learn that in Hong Kong, “One Filipino priest suggests that half of Filipinos in Hong Kong would probably
prefer charismatic forms of worship over traditional types…” and that, “Members are at times engaged in fun and laughter, and at other times cry and in distress as they reflect on life’s difficulties and their worries.” From an anthropological point of view, it would be beneficial to fully represent practitioners’ own interpretations of
their work and lives as well as the ways that ritual practice binds migrant workers and communities of practice transnationally.7 To put it another way, the people who
are being represented on the screen spend most of their lives at work, laboring to 7
Nicole Constable, Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Migrant Workers, 2nd ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007); Nicole Constable, “Migrant Workers and the Many States of Protest in Hong Kong.” Critical Asian Studies 41 (March 2009): 143–64, https://doi. org/10.1080/14672710802631202.
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catholicsandcultures.org.
34 | Focus on the Busy Intersections of Culture and Cultural Change
Filipino Catholic El Shaddai members at daily liturgy, St. Joseph Church, Hong Kong. Photo by Thomas M. Landy/ catholicsandcultures.org.
provide for families and networks that extend across the globe. And as this labor cuts across national, cultural, religious boundaries, the site itself could usefully connect across these spaces.
Finally, a renewed emphasis on cultural change would also provide a better means
for exploring reflexively, by seeking to understand both yourself and others in and
through the website. As the philosopher Ian Hacking has so persuasively shown
us “representing is intervening” and, while telling stories, describing practices, and
interpreting rituals, the site could provide a frame for both how people think about
“others” but also how people think about themselves. Ritual spaces are framed by, and most importantly alter meanings, as people seek to manifest desire and as-
pirations (for this world or another one) through ritual performative space. For example, again thinking through the Philippines, the extraordinary work of Julius Bautista provides a particularly innovative view from the margins by connecting the Philippines’ leading export (Overseas Foreign Workers) to the ways that some Catholic men seek to recuperate respect, masculinity, and self-worth through rituals of the Passion. Bautista takes us into the world of Sencho,
a forty-year-old technician from the Philippine province of Pampanga who, JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
Laura Elder | 35
for most of the past fifteen years, has whipped his own back to a bloody pulp in a ritual commemorating Jesus Christ’s Passion on Good Friday. When I spoke to him in 2012, he told me that he began self-flagellating on behalf of
his mother, Meling, who worked as a domestic helper in Hong Kong to earn enough money to service a family debt. Sencho’s flagellation was a way of appealing for God’s help in alleviating his family’s financial situation. After sev-
eral years of this kind of self-sacrifice, Sencho too had taken up employment
in the Middle East, an endeavor he took on with a self-confidence extending from the ritual experience. “No problem,” he recalled; “if I could flagellate, I knew I could handle Saudi.” Narrating this experience brought back memories
of his mother, who had since passed away because of illness. “My flagellation is painful.... But that’s nothing compared to how she sacrificed for us in Hong Kong. She’s the [real] hero...she’s the martyr.”8
The binding, meaning making work here is painful but I suggest well-worth representing, if the intention of the website is to fruitfully provoke thoughtful conver-
sations across our world rather than just within our own cultural contexts. On the website these rituals are carefully presented as over-sensationalized in the media
and as discouraged by the Catholic Church. This is a very understandable repre-
sentational choice, perhaps meant to minimize the “othering gaze,” but I suggest that this choice inadvertently shifts focus away the power being claimed by participants. A more ethnographic move, one that I ask of my students and that benefits
critical understanding, is to include both the observe and the observed in all representations. To this end, and again as a step beyond ethnocentrism, ritual cultures
and practice in the United States should be also included on the site. The World Wide Web is also of course itself a busy intersection of culture and it has become
an essential meaning making space because it connects across cultural spaces. Best
practices in designing for the web rely on forging community by connecting into and out of spaces, places and cultures. Another important step in reemphasizing cultural change would be to provide links (both interreligious and intercultural)
betwixt and between this website and other online forums. For example, the Phil8
Julius Bautista, “Export-Quality Martyrs: Roman Catholicism and Transnational Labor in the Philippines,” Cultural Anthropology 30, no. 3 (2015): 424.
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36 | Focus on the Busy Intersections of Culture and Cultural Change
ippines exposition is written by Tom Landy and Esmeralda Fortunado-Sanchez
but it is not linked to Esmeralda Fortunado-Sanchez’s work, the work of others, the organizations mentioned, or other individuals or collectivities that make mean-
ing here there and everywhere. For example, if we move to China, to the context of Lancang river valley in Yunnan, we similarly find a fabulous description of altar pieces at Niuren Catholic church but the marginalization, exploitation, forced resettlement, and devastating cultural and economic upheavals of dam development
along the Lancang (the headwaters of the Mekong river affecting the livelihoods of millions) is relegated to the introduction.9 Fortunately, the links provide some of
these important connections. Here, I suggest that, if politics is not restricted to the introduction, if we dig into these intersections and link in and out and across, then
the webs of meaning which are created through the busy intersections of culture come alive and site users can better represent, understand, and analyze cultural change globally.
9
Bryan Tilt, Dams and Development in China: The Moral Economy of Water and Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
Laura Elder | 37
BIBLIOGRAPHY Agadjanian, Alexander. “Evangelical, Pentecostal and Charismatic Churches in
Latin America and Eastern Europe: An Introduction.” Religion, State and Society 40, no. 1 (2012): 3–10. https://doi.org/10.1080/09637494.2012 .669581.
Akami, Tomoko. “Between the State and Global Civil Society: Non‐official Experts and Their Network in the Asia‐Pacific, 1925–45.” Global Networks 2, no. 1 (2002): 65–82. https://doi.org/10.1111/1471-0374.00027.
Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Bautista, Julius. “Export-Quality Martyrs: Roman Catholicism and Transnational Labor in the Philippines.” Cultural Anthropology 30, no. 3 (2015): 424–47.
Butler, Judith, Jurgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornell West. The Power of
Religion in the Public Sphere. Edited by Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan Van Antwerpen. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
Constable, Nicole. Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Migrant Workers. 2nd ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007.
_____. “Migrant Workers and the Many States of Protest in Hong
Kong.” Critical Asian Studies 41 (March 2009): 143–64. https://doi .org/10.1080/14672710802631202.
Cox, Harvey. “Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America.
David Martin; Is Latin America Turning Protestant? The Politics of Evan-
gelical Growth. David Stoll.” American Journal of Sociology 97, no. 2 (1991): 579–582. https://doi.org/10.1086/229812.
Freston, Paul. “Evangelical Protestantism and Democratization in Contemporary Latin America and Asia.” Democratization 11, no. 4 (2004): 21–41. https://doi .org/10.1080/1351034042000234512.
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Gomez, Edmund Terence, Robert Hunt, and John Roxborogh. “Introduction: Religion, Business and Contestation in Malaysia and Singapore.” Pacific Affairs 88, no. 2 (2015): 153–71. https://doi.org/10.5509/2015882153.
Groody, Daniel G., Gustavo Gutiérrez, and José O Aylwin. The Preferential Option for the Poor beyond Theology. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press 2014.
Hefner, Robert. “Religious Resurgence in Contemporary Asia: Southeast Asian Perspectives on Capitalism, the State, and the New Piety.” The Journal of Asian Studies 69, 4 2010: 1031–47. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0021911810002901.
Hirschkind, Charles. “Beyond Secular and Religious: An Intellectual Genealogy
of Tahrir Square.” American Ethnologist 39, no. 1 (2012): 49–53. https://doi .org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2011.01346.x.
Hoesterey, James B. “Prophetic Cosmopolitanism: Islam, Pop Psychology, and Civ-
ic Virtue in Indonesia.” City & Society 24, no. 1 (2012): 38–61. https://doi .org/10.1111/j.1548-744X.2012.01067.x.
Ida Bagus, Mary. “Getting the Monkey off Your Back: Women and the Intensifi-
cation of Religious Identities in Post-Bomb Bali, Indonesia.” Women’s Studies International Forum, Special Issue: From Village Religion to Global Networks:
Women, Religious Nationalism and Sustainability in South and Southeast Asia 33, no. 4 (2010): 402–11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2010.02.014.
Maznah Mohamad. “The Ascendance of Bureaucratic Islam and the Secularization
of the Sharia in Malaysia.” Pacific Affairs 83, no. 3(2010): 505–24. https://doi .org/10.5509/2010833505.
Modood, Tariq. Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007. Osella, Filippo, and Benjamin F Soares. Islam, Politics, Anthropology. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
Rosaldo, Renato. Culture & Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. New ed. Boston: Beacon Press 1993.
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Rudnyckyj, Daromir. Spiritual Economies : Islam, Globalization, and the Afterlife of Development. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010.
Samuel, Geoffrey, and Santi Rozario. “From Village Religion to Global Networks: Women, Religious Nationalism and Sustainability in South and Southeast
Asia.” Women’s Studies International Forum, Special Issue: From Village Reli-
gion to Global Networks: Women, Religious Nationalism and Sustainability in South and Southeast Asia 33, no. 4 (2010): 301–4. https://doi.org/10.1016 /j.wsif.2010.02.003.
Tilt, Bryan. Dams and Development in China: The Moral Economy of Water and Power. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
Wiegele, Katharine L. Investing in Miracles: El Shaddai and the Transformation of Popular Catholicism in the Philippines. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press 2005.
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A N I TA H O U C K
Ritual among the Scilohtac: Global Catholicism, the Nacirema, and Interfaith Studies
Anita Houck is Professor of Religious Studies and Theology at Saint Mary’s College (Notre Dame, Indiana), where she holds the Joyce McMahon Hank Aquinas Chair in Catholic Theology. She received her Ed.M. from Harvard Graduate School of Education and M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Divinity School and has served on the Board of the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality and as Vice President of the College Theology Society, from which she received the Monika Hellwig Award for Teaching Excellence in 2017. Her articles and talks cover a range of topics, especially religion and humor, vocation and single life, and pedagogy; and she is co-editor, with Mary Doak, of Translating Religion (Orbis, 2013).
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I
n the first episode of the CBC sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairie, the benefi-
cent and beleaguered Reverend Magee finds that he has unwittingly rented the
hall of his Episcopal parish to a small Muslim community that is using it as a
mosque. When a congregant, Joe, stumbles upon the community’s Friday prayers, he reacts with horror. The good pastor tries to reassure him. “They’re Muslims,” he explains; “they pray five times a day.” Joe’s shock only increases: “You rented the parish hall to a bunch of fanatics?”1
In a move as old as Plato2, the scene’s humor is targeted at Joe’s ignorance. But
the target is less Joe’s ignorance of Islam than his ignorance of his own Christian religion, which has its own traditions encouraging frequent prayer. In contrast, Ma-
gee’s response recognizes this shared value: Christians pray; Muslims pray—and Muslims may even pray better.
The scene points toward capacities that many teachers in interfaith studies, comparative theology, and religious studies try to foster. First among them may be religious literacy, an understanding of religious traditions that allows an accurate sense of similarities and differences and that includes a sound (if evolving) awareness of one’s own religious identity. But these courses also tend to value what we might call
interfaith dispositions, attitudes and skills that may be more difficult to teach—for
instance, a sense of connection with those who are different, usually through a shared commitment to the common good or a shared search for truth; empathy
with the Other, appreciated as fully human; and humility, including the willingness to questions one’s own cultural assumptions.3 1 2 3
Michael Kennedy, dir. Little Mosque on the Prairie, season 1, episode 1, aired January 9, 2007, on CBC, Youtube, January 21, 2019, https://youtu.be/9xJQwqb7jh4. Philebus 48-50 specifically locates the laughable in ignorance, particularly self-ignorance, in those without the power to retaliate. While there’s no one curriculum or list of learning goals for interfaith competence, references to dispositions for interfaith study appear in many prominent texts. For instance, comparative theologian Catherine Cornille articulates five different “conditions for inter-religious dialogue”: “epistemological humility”; “generosity or hospitality toward the truth of the other”; “commitment,” or “identification with a particular religion from which one engages in dialogue”; “interconnection,” or “belief that one may actually understand the teachings and practices of another religion in a way that might open up one’s own religion to new insights and actions”; and “empathy” (21). Mary C. Boys’s four characteristics of interreligious dialogue include similar dispositions: “the ability to enter another religious tradition without losing one’s own boundaries,”
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In their efforts to help students develop such interfaith dispositions, teachers have
many resources available, pop-cultural artifacts like Little Mosque among them. But
few are as reliably successful as Horace Miner’s classic 1956 article “Body Ritual among the Nacirema,”4 published by American Anthropologist as an ethnographic study of a little-known North American people. “Nacirema” was not written as a
pedagogical tool; indeed, it’s spawned studies in various academic fields, including homages by scholars using Miner’s distinctive style to depict other groups.5 But it
4 5
“the experience of investing in the health and welfare of another’s religious tradition,” “movement beyond tolerance to a genuine religious pluralism,” and “keener awareness of both commonalities and differences between religious traditions” (50-51). Eboo Patel’s Interfaith Leadership: A Primer argues for a complex network of necessary characteristics, with dispositions appearing throughout: “identity”; “theory”; “vision”; “knowledge base”; a “skill set” that includes awareness of one’s context and one’s own narrative, as well as the ability to facilitate interfaith communication; and personal “qualities” that can be “honed,” like “grit” and “relatability.” Interfaith Youth Core’s IDEALS (Interfaith Diversity Experiences & Attitudes Longitudinal Survey) study of college and university students in the U.S. links knowledge and attitudes: “despite making gains across the college years, students have much room to grow in their religious literacy. Correspondingly, there may be an opportunity to improve their attitudes toward people with diverse religious identities” (22). In an important anthology, Comparative Theology in the Millennial Classroom: Hybrid Identities, Negotiated Boundaries, Madhuri M. Yadlapati, reflecting on teaching religion in a public university, argues for “the kind of transformative learning that builds autonomy and critical self-reflection” (“Dharma and Moksha,” 177). Wakoh Shannon Hickey and Margarita M. W. Suárez, in their essay in Interreligious/Interfaith Studies: Defining a New Field, argue for not just “religious literacy” but “interfaith literacy,” which requires “the dispositions of reflexivity, empathy, and humility” (109), all conducing to a pluralist stance: ”We also want to persuade students that people who differ from us have something useful to teach; not just about themselves but about ourselves” (112). In the same volume, Usra Ghazi endorses what Alyssa N. Rockenbach and Matthew J. Mayhew (creators of the IDEALS survey) call a “pluralism orientation,” defined as “the degree to which one is accepting of, recognizes shared values and divergent beliefs with, and meaningfully engages with others of different worldviews” (204); in the same essay, Mark E. Hanshaw concludes that interfaith studies promotes reflection on one’s own “values and ethics, as well as how ethical attitudes or assumptions might influence social behaviors and interactions within a broader context” (208). On the other hand, the essay by Kristi Del Vecchio and Noah J. Silverman identifies six themes that recur in curricula in interfaith studies, and none of these could be considered a disposition. However, dispositions likely underlie two of the six—experiential learning (50-52) and personal reflection (56)—and contribute to the field as a whole, since “interfaith/interreligious studies centers fundamentally around human relationships” (57). Horace Miner, “Body Ritual among the Nacirema.” American Anthropologist 58, no. 3 (1956): 503–7, doi: 10.1525/aa.1956.58.3.02a00080. For a brief review of the reception of the article, see Mark Burde, “Social-Science Fiction: The Genesis and Legacy of Horace Miner’s ‘Body Ritual among the Nacirema,’” American Anthropologist 116, no. 3 (2014): 549–61, https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.12123. Among Miner’s imitators, Burde mentions Michael Kimmel, “Ritualized Homosexuality in a Nacirema Subculture,” Sexualities, 9, no. 1 (2006): 95–105, doi: 10.1177/1363460706060695; and Robert Alun Jones, “Myth JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
Anita Houck | 43
is best known for its ability to lead students to question their own cultural assump-
tions and reframe their approach to the unfamiliar.6 The present article explores the perennial success of Miner’s text in the classroom and asks whether Catholics & Cultures may be able to do some of the same pedagogical work—and may even do it better.
FROM 'LIKE US' TO US: TEACHING THE NACIREMA In a brilliant study of Miner’s article, Mark Burde issues a wise invitation: “Readers unfamiliar with ‘Body Ritual among the Nacirema’ may wish to consult Miner’s article before proceeding, lest the bluntly prosaic nature of the following synopsis
spoil the author’s intended effect.”7 For those disinclined to follow Burde’s advice, here is a taste of Miner’s work: the passage that, in my experience, has probably horrified the most students, both in college and high school classes:
The daily body ritual performed by everyone includes a mouth-rite. . . . this
rite involves a practice which strikes the uninitiated stranger as revolting. It was reported to me that the ritual consists of inserting a small bundle of hog
hairs into the mouth, along with certain magical powders, and then moving the bundle in a highly formalized series of gestures.
In addition to the private mouth-rite, the people seek out a holy-mouth-man once or twice a year. These practitioners have an impressive set of parapherna-
lia, consisting of a variety of augurs, awls, probes, and prods. The use of these objects in the exorcism of the evils of the mouth involves almost unbelievable
ritual torture of the client. The holy-mouth-man opens the client’s mouth and, using the above mentioned [sic] tools, enlarges any holes which decay may have created in the teeth. Magical materials are put into these holes. If there are
6
7
and Symbol among the Nacirema Tsigoloicos: A Fragment,” American Sociologist 15, no. 4 (1980): 207-12. The IDEALS report, which promotes “preparing students to be successful leaders in our religiously diverse society” (6), recommends four “educational interventions.” The first is to provide opportunities that “challenge assumptions and prompt perspective-taking” (29). A. Rockenbach et. al., IDEALS: Bridging Religious Divides Through Higher Education, Interfaith Youth Core, 2020, https:// www.ifyc.org/ideals. Burde, “Social-Science Fiction,” 550.
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no naturally occurring holes in the teeth, large sections of one or more teeth are gouged out so that the supernatural substance can be applied.8
As the passage suggests, the thesis of Miner’s article is that the “magical beliefs
and practices” of the Nacirema qualify them “as an example of the extremes to which human behavior can go.” This extremism appears above all in their excessive
fascination with “the human body, the appearance and health of which loom as a dominant concern in the ethos of the people.” Miner describes ritual objects such as home shrines with charm-boxes full of “magical packets [that] are so numerous
that people forget what their purposes were and fear to use them again”; rituals that, besides the mouth-rites described above, include a rite for men that entails
“scraping and lacerating the surface of the face with a sharp instrument” and, for women, “bak[ing] their heads in small ovens for about an hour”; and an array of
ritual practitioners, from “holy-mouth-men” to “vestal maidens” to a “witch-doctor” known as a “listener.”
The key to the text’s success is that it is superbly executed as a trick. In what Burde
calls “twenty paragraphs of disciplined deadpan delivery,”9 Miner’s diction expertly guides the reader to share the author’s apparent revulsion. Almost every student—
and, indeed, almost every scholar I know—buys in, expressing varying levels of concern, disgust, and shock. Even those few who notice the bias in Miner’s language
(“magic-ridden,” “sadistic,” “barbaric”) may find themselves as troubled by the practices Miner describes as by the anthropologist’s description. Yet it’s not uncommon
for students to defend the Nacirema by noticing similarities: “Well, we have some-
thing like that. Going to the holy-mouth-man is a little like when we go to the dentist.” Eventually, some student new to the text figures out what Miner is up to, or one
of the students who read the article in a previous course (and who has been sworn
to secrecy up to this point) reveals that “Nacirema” is “American” spelled backwards. When students realize that the people they’ve been shocked by are (a slight-
ly dated version of ) themselves, the response is often a groan approaching—and sometimes actually becoming—laughter. The class then recites a litany of practices 8 9
Miner, “Body Ritual,” pars. 10-11. Burde, “Social-Science Fiction,” 550. JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
Anita Houck | 45
that they now see are not just like ours10 but in fact are ours: medicine cabinets full
of expired prescriptions; tooth-brushing, shaving, going to a salon that has “those hair dryers you use for updos”; dentists and nurses and psychologists. The result is
almost invariably what Burde calls “moments of sudden Gestalt shift, of abrupt reassignment of signifiers to signifieds in young adult minds, often before the very eyes of the knowing instructor, momentary merchant of astonishment.”11 Students are often struck by how often they sensed that the Nacirema were like them in
one practice or another. While they failed to solve Miner’s puzzle, they succeeded in practicing important interfaith dispositions by identifying similarities, expressing a sense of connection, and even feeling empathy for the Naciremans’ apparent
suffering. After the reveal, many take a further step in empathy and connection, volunteering examples from their own traditions that could look similarly strange
to outsiders. Many students, unlike Miner, talk about actual religion, including, at the Roman Catholic college where I teach, the Eucharist.
Though Miner’s piece relies on deception, no student I know has objected. Instead, as Burde notes, “The force of the mental tea-tables upset has been enough
to drive young people the world over to web chronicle the nature of the firecracker moment and to plaster the Internet with their amazement.”12 The article’s staying
power, then, lies primarily in its ability to show convincingly, viscerally, and rel-
atively painlessly that the culture students inhabit is not normative, is not more
logical or natural than the cultures of others. As Elizabeth Miller puts it, “Students, therefore, learn to become aware of their own assumptions so that they might not come to ethnocentric conclusions about other cultures. . . . [Miner’s] deliberately erroneous and etic description of American culture makes it clear to students that to understand a culture, one must first disconnect from one’s own (ethnocentric) cultural lens and learn the culture’s meanings.”13
10 “Ours” and “we” are usually the words students use. Like Catholics & Cultures, Miner’s piece can be used to question the assumptions and overgeneralizations behind such language, for instance, by examining the examples of shaving and hair dryers. 11 Burde, “Social-Science Fiction,” 550. 12 Burde, “Social-Science Fiction,” 550. 13 Elizabeth Miller, “Learning to Interpret Cultural Meaning through an Etic Description of a Familiar Culture,” Teaching Sociology 42, no. 4 (2014): 299-300, doi: 10.1177/0092055X14540584. VOLUME 5 ISSUE 1 | WINTER 2021
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An essential reason why the exercise triggers recognition rather than resentment is
humor. To be sure, most students miss the jokes skewering the foibles of anthropologists, “gag upon gag carried off in deft parody of the participant-observer form
being imitated.”14 Instead, their recognition and laughter are directed at them-
selves,15 expressing one of the dispositions needed for interfaith studies: intellectual or epistemological humility, which Catherine Cornille explains as “recognition that
there is still room for growth in one’s understanding of the truth.”16 They haven’t, after all, laughed at the Nacirema; they’ve been concerned for them, shocked by them, but not drawn into mockery. Instead, it seems likely that the use of humor, as Sherryl Kleinman, Martha Copp, and Kent Sandstrom write of similar exercises of
defamiliarization, “discombobulates students and gives them a lighthearted way to analyze a practice they wish to take for granted”—in this case, the practice of seeing the world through their own unquestioned assumptions. “Mak[ing] students
laugh,” they continue, “. . . helps soften their resistance to critiquing a practice they
have accepted as polite or benign.”17 In the end, initiating students into the secret of Miner’s famous article has the benefit of creating the same kind of community that’s achieved by an inside joke.18 Throughout the semester, when a comment in 14 Burde, “Social-Science Fiction,” 550. 15 Self-deprecatory humor is often seen as praiseworthy in general and pedagogically helpful in particular. This view has come under renewed scrutiny, particularly as it applies to members of marginalized groups, in response to Hannah Gadsby’s influential 2018 Netflix show Nanette: “I built a career out of self-deprecating humor. That’s what I built my career on. And I don’t want to do that anymore. Because do you understand what self-deprecation means when it comes from somebody who already exists in the margins? It’s not humility. It’s humiliation. I put myself down in order to speak, in order to seek permission to speak.” The issue is a crucial one for educators. In the case of “Nacirema,” the students laugh at themselves together, in their identity as students and scholars, and my sense is that this laughter is salutary rather than destructive. Hannah Gadsby, Nanette, filmed at the Sidney Opera House, Netflix, 2018. 16 Catherine Cornille, “Conditions for Inter-Religious Dialogue,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Inter-Religious Dialogue, ed. Catherine Cornille (Hoboken: Wiley, 2013), 21. 17 Sherryl Kleinman, Martha Copp, and Kent Sandstrom, “Making Sexism Visible: Birdcages, Martians, and Pregnant Men,” Teaching Sociology 34, no. 2 (2006): 130, doi: 10.1177 /0092055X0603400203. 18 Lisa Gasson-Gardner and Jason Smith argue for the importance of “shared affective experiences” in comparative theology, which should foster “other kinds of knowledge—embodied knowledges—that are not dependent on propositional truths but are generative of classroom community” (120). Lisa Gasson-Gardner and Jason Smith, “Feeling Comparative Theology: Millennial Affect and Reparative Learning,” in Comparative Theology in the Millennial Classroom: Hybrid Identities, Negotiated Boundaries, ed. Mara Brecht and Reid B. Locklin (New York and London: Routledge, 2016), 113-25. JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
Anita Houck | 47
class suggests ethnocentrism, we can lightly remind each other, “Let’s throw a little ‘Nacirema’ on that.”
Miner’s trick initially works by portraying difference, but ultimately it relies on col-
lapsing difference into identification—on moving from “barbaric” to “like us” and finally to “us.” Thus one reading of the piece, which Burde articulates but doesn’t
necessarily endorse, is that ethnocentrism can be vanquished by seeing similarities: “‘Nacirema’ implicitly points to the duty of anthropologists to find the recognizable
and the ordinary in another people’s unfamiliar and superficially strange behavior. Let us thus be hawkers of familiarity as much as merchants of astonishment. May the exoticizing cease.”19 But authentic interfaith engagement also requires the rec-
ognition of difference—what Eboo Patel calls “the ‘inter’ in interfaith”20—and here Miner’s article is of less help. The article does lead students to question aspects of
their own cultures, including tenacious but arbitrary standards of beauty. But it doesn’t offer them the chance to wrestle with real difference, since the Other evap-
orates before posing any lasting challenge. Indeed, when students experience actual interfaith difference, whether visiting congregations in town or watching Muslim students at Rutgers explain their choice to cover in the video “Hijabi World,”21 they often retreat to the familiar, concluding happily that “we’re all the same.” It’s an assertion admirable for its empathy and interconnection, but, like similar statements
in the realms of racial/ethnic and gender identity, it erases too much. Thus Madhuri M. Yadlapati ponders “how useful it is to allow students to make sense of unfamiliar traditions and practices by seeing parallels between, for example, Hindu poly-
theism and ritual devotion and Catholic veneration of saints and elaborate rituals. Could this be an avenue to make something acceptable, because it is like something already familiar, and therefore a way out of really questioning the categories
they are forcing onto the study of these different traditions?”22 John Paul Sydnor 19 Burde, “Social-Science Fiction,” 566. 20 Eboo Patel, Interfaith Leadership: A Primer (Boston: Beacon, 2016), EPUB edition, “Theory.” 21 Dina Sayedahmed and Hamna Saleem, “Hijabi World,” Newest Americans, 2015, https://newest americans.com/hijabi-world/. 22 Madhuri M. Yadlapati, “Dharma and Moksha, Works and Faith: Comparatively Engaging the Tension between Ethics and Spirituality,” in Comparative Theology in the Millennial Classroom: Hybrid Identities, Negotiated Boundaries, ed. Mara Brecht and Reid B. Locklin (New York and London: Routledge, 2016), 188. VOLUME 5 ISSUE 1 | WINTER 2021
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articulates the more desirable outcome: “Interreligious encounter interrogates the
familiar, contextualizes the isolated, and doubts the obvious.”23 In pedagogical
terms, “just like me” may be preferable to defensiveness. But learning from Miner is only a first step toward being able to learn (unlike Little Mosque’s Joe) from those who are different from me.
IN SEARCH OF THE SCILOHTAC: TEACHING WITH CATHOLICS & CULTURES Catholics & Cultures and “Nacirema” have much in common. First, both purport
to depict daily lived religious experience: the website “seeks first to provide insight
into Catholic practices and beliefs as they are understood by those who live them,” and Sylvester Johnson and Burde both give Miner some credit for spurring the study of religion, especially so-called Western religion, toward greater attention to materiality.24 In this way, both sources provide a challenge to assumptions that religion is primarily textual, hierarchical, and dogmatic, a challenge especially import-
ant pedagogically because, as Yadlapati writes, “there is such a dramatic suspicion of ‘ritualistic’ religion that many students consider anything they identify as ritual
to be less than spiritual.”25 Second, both sources have a kind of sensory vividness, Miner through his explicit and tendentious language and the site through photographs, videos, and detailed verbal description. Third, neither source was created
explicitly for the benefit of students in need of a lesson in cultural relativism. That said, the site, which identifies itself primarily as “a growing, changing depiction
of the global Church today for an international and interreligious audience,”26 23 John Paul Sydnor, “Teaching World Theologies through Film,” in Comparative Theology in the Millennial Classroom: Hybrid Identities, Negotiated Boundaries, ed. Mara Brecht and Reid B. Locklin (New York and London: Routledge, 2016), 217. 24 As Sylvester A. Johnson writes, “This recent turn examines Western religion as something that extends beyond texts and beliefs to comprise bodily practices, material structures, and a full purview of corporeality. What appeared a half-century or so ago as an unconscionable, ethnographic reading of US Americans as tribal people—a methodological heresy made palatable as light-hearted humor— has now become comfortably enmeshed in the mainstream of religious studies scholarship” (465). Sylvester A. Johnson, “The Rise of the Nacirema and the Descent of European Man: A Response to Manuel A. Vásquez’s More than Belief,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 24, no. 4–5 (2012): 464–81, doi:10.1163/15700682-12341244. See also Burde, “Social-Science Fiction,” 553. 25 Yadlapati, “Dharma and Moksha, Works and Faith,” 188. 26 “About This Site,” Catholics & Cultures, accessed 14 May 2020, https://www.catholicsandcultures .org/about-site. JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
Anita Houck | 49
embraces a pedagogical purpose Miner’s piece lacks: “Catholics & Cultures is the first program in the nation to prepare students for leadership and participation in a
Church that is global in scope and yet remarkably shaped by local culture.”27 Finally, though Miner’s authorial intention remains debated,28 the website addresses the
same ethnocentric assumptions that “Nacirema” has become famous for dismantling: “Most Catholics experience the faith through a single cultural lens. Yet peo-
ple all around the world live and imagine it in a rich diversity of ways. Catholics & Cultures widens the lens with a scholarly, vivid and accessible look at the religious
lives and practices of contemporary Catholics in countries around the globe.”29
Thus both sources present to students, even those who have had years of Catholic education, something they will quickly realize they don’t already know, and both can offer the experience of surprise.
Catholic & Cultures, however, gives students the opportunity to look at real re-
ligious difference, to apply their developing interfaith dispositions to people who
are not merely defamiliarized but genuinely unfamiliar. Thus, as with “Nacirema,” the site’s initial effect is likely to be destabilizing. Catholics & Cultures isn’t set
up for the visceral and immediate shift “Nacirema” enables, primarily because the site works deductively: everything published there is already identified as part of
a legitimate, modern religious entity that, in most contexts, is not as easily dis-
missed as Miner’s “barbaric” Nacirema. It is possible, though, to use parts of the site, carefully decontextualized, to create something of the intentional defamiliarization offered by “Nacirema,” and thus to offer a similar lesson on the temptations
of ethnocentrism. In classrooms populated primarily by U.S. students, one obstacle
to this project is that Catholics & Cultures doesn’t yet explore U.S. Catholicism, so it isn’t possible to have U.S. students judge themselves—a significant moral ad-
vantage of Miner’s piece. But the site does cover parts of Anglophone Canada, which has cultural similarities to much of the U.S. As it turns out, the webpage
“Христос Родився! Christ is Born! Ukrainian Catholic Christmas in Ontario” 27 “Educator Resources,” Catholics & Cultures, accessed 14 May 2020, https://www.catholicsand cultures.org/educator-resources. 28 See Burde, “Social-Science Fiction,” especially 553-57. 29 “About This Site.” VOLUME 5 ISSUE 1 | WINTER 2021
50 | Ritual among the Scilohtac: Global Catholicism, the Nacirema, and Interfaith Studies
includes a passage that, when taken from the site without context and edited lightly
to remove explicit references to Christmas, resembles “Nacirema” in many ways: unfamiliar (even italicized) terminology; detailed description of rituals; and ref-
erences to cultural practices that might sound like magic, for instance, in aiming
to predict or affect the future. Moreover, when the time comes to put the passage back in context, the students may get to grapple with the recognition that these
people who sounded so strange can’t be dismissed as only Other: at colleges like mine, where most students identify as White, the family will look much like other families they know, even dressed for the most part in clothing recognizable from our Midwestern winters. Here’s the passage:
In a corner of the room is a didukh, a sometimes elaborately braided sheaf of
wheat, recalling the family’s ancestors (the word derives from the word for grandfather), and serves as a sign of hope for a good harvest to come. An extra
place setting at the table recalls ancestors no longer present, and is also a place for the stranger who comes in. Garlic around the didukh serves to ward off
evil. At the center of the table are three braided loaves of kolach, . . . layered in
three tiers, with a lit candle sticking out the top. This bread is not consumed at the meal.
The first course is kutya, boiled wheat berries mixed with poppy seeds and honey, and uzvar, stewed fruits. One of the most surprising traditions, one not kept in all households, but which all are at least aware of, is that the man of the house flips a spoonful of kutya at the ceiling. If it sticks to the ceiling, it is a sign of a good harvest to come, and prosperity.30
Students’ responses to this passage resembled those of students reading “Nacirema,” in that they initially identified foreignness rather than similarities to their own
practices. But even the site’s mention of “surprising traditions” elicited no dismis-
sive comments, perhaps for several reasons: the ritual seems joyful and harmless, evoking none of the concern or indignation inspired by Miner’s descriptions of 30 Thomas M. Landy, “Христос Родився! Christ is Born! Ukrainian Catholic Christmas in Ontario,” Catholics & Cultures, updated May 20, 2020, https://www.catholicsandcultures.org/canada -ukrainian-catholics-celebrate-christmas-holy-supper-mass. JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
Anita Houck | 51
“sadistic” practices; the diction is largely neutral; and the class (which had not read Holy Supper in a Ukrainian Greek Catholic home in
“Nacirema” as a group) consisted of upper-class students who had chosen a semi- Waterloo, Ontario, nar in interfaith studies, not first- and second-year students required to take a 101 Canada. Photo by course in religious studies as part of the College’s core curriculum.
In a second step, students responded to photos that show devotees offering gar-
lands and candles, among them women in sarees and shalwar kameez, but that don’t show clearly what the devotees are venerating.31 Here the students, most of them Catholic, started to echo another kind of response to “Nacirema”: the
procession is like lighting candles in churches; flowers placed before a glass-encased statue are like offerings they’d seen placed before statues of Mary. Gradually, photos
increased the sense of familiarity, culminating with an image of Mary draped in an
orange saree and holding a baby in an ornate dress. When students learned that 31 When the images included captions, they were too small to be read when projected. Thomas M. Landy, “Shrine and Feast Honoring Mary Attract Indian Catholics and Hindus,” Catholics & Cultures, updated July 30, 2018, https://www.catholicsandcultures.org/india/shrines-pilgrimage/our-lady -good-health. VOLUME 5 ISSUE 1 | WINTER 2021
Thomas M. Landy/ catholicsandcultures.org.
52 | Ritual among the Scilohtac: Global Catholicism, the Nacirema, and Interfaith Studies
At St. Mary’s Basilica, Banaglore, India, side arcade with a statue of the Virgin that is said to have miraculous qualities draws large crowds who leave flowers at the Virgin's feet and burn candles before her. A stand sells flowers and candles to be used as offerings at the shrine. Photos by Thomas M. Landy/ catholicsandcultures.org.
JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
Anita Houck | 53
these images depicted practices not merely like offer-
ings they knew of, that the statue was not merely like one of Mary and Jesus, there was none of the shock
or laughter, and little of the embarrassment, of an encounter with the Nacirema. Perhaps this is largely
because students’ observations had been generous, so the transition was relatively painless. But the website still generated something of a gestalt shift and expe-
rience of humility, as students realized that they had assumed that the rituals they were analyzing—a pro-
cession undertaken by dark-skinned devotees, with many women in sarees or shalwar kameez; a ritual
meal that includes warding off evil and predicting the future by flipping food at the ceiling—were
not Catholic. As with Miner, too, the exercise produced enough of a shared class experience to create
an inside joke that could be invoked against future statements about “Catholicism” as a monolithic tra-
dition—and especially as just its Roman, Midwestern-U.S. incarnation. To use material from the site out of context, admittedly, goes against the site’s intent, which is not only “to provide insight into Catholic practices and beliefs as
they are understood by those who live them,” but also “to understand those prac-
tices and beliefs in the context of the cultures they navigate and variously reflect, shape, and oppose.”32 More importantly, because the site depicts actual people living their faith, if students’ reactions had been insensitive or critical, they would have
had to reckon with the morality of dismissing actual people’s religiosity; and their teacher, who had duped the students into those reactions, would surely have borne the greater guilt.
As an introduction to the site, though, the exercise may have done its job: it allowed
us to observe difference together, and so to confront our ethnocentrism together. 32 “About This Site." VOLUME 5 ISSUE 1 | WINTER 2021
The statue of Our Lady in a donated saree at St. Mary's Basilica. Photo by Thomas M. Landy/ catholicsandcultures.org.
54 | Ritual among the Scilohtac: Global Catholicism, the Nacirema, and Interfaith Studies
When the students went on to explore the site on their own, they encountered further surprises, but most of these were easily embraced with a straightforward “I didn’t know that. . . .”—a simple enough statement that nonetheless expresses the
crucial disposition of humility. Moreover, because the site introduced students to
real people with both real similarities to and real differences from them, it offered a virtual version of what Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell have called the “My Pal Al” effect: when I develop a relationship with someone from a religion different from mine, I’m likely to have more-favorable views of people from not
only that religion, but from any religion different from mine. Such transformation may occur to some extent even without sustained personal relationship; Sydnor ob-
serves that even brief interfaith experience can be transformative, as when site visits
in his introductory course “gave flesh to the skeleton of information my students got from their textbooks,”33 and Eboo Patel links the “Pal Al” effect to Pew and
Gallup research showing that merely gaining religious literacy about Islam leads
to more-favorable views of Muslims.34 Similarly, the initial exercise with, and later
exploration of, Catholics & Cultures seemed to evoke dispositions needed for interfaith understanding and interfaith relationships, not only humility about initial judgments but also a sense of connection to Others and an awareness of similarity
and difference. These dispositions are just as important for intrafaith encounter as
for interfaith, and practicing them in an intrafaith context may make them more available in interfaith contexts.
While developing dispositions, the site also increased religious literacy, particularly about Eastern Catholic Churches and also to some extent about interreligious
cooperation.35 Teaching religious literacy is not the Naciremans’ strength; teachers
and students have to do a good deal of unpacking to learn from Miner even about U.S. culture or anthropological methods. Consequently, for teachers scrambling 33 Sydnor, “Teaching World Theologies through Film,” 205-07. 34 Patel summarizes the “Pal Al” effect and the two studies in “The Interfaith Triangle” in Interfaith Leadership: A Primer. 35 For instance, the site discusses Hindu participation in rituals at Our Lady of Good Health in Bengaluru, India (“Worshipers at the shrine include as many Hindus as Catholics, in part because Hindus tend to be comfortable drawing non-Hindu religious figures into their worship life”). Landy, “Shrine and Feast Honoring Mary Attract Indian Catholics and Hindus.” JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
Anita Houck | 55
to meet multiple learning goals in just 37.5 contact hours a semester,36 Catholics
& Cultures may win the day in terms of simple multi-tasking. More importantly, for students identifying as Catholic, the site can encourage a more expansive, less
rigid—in short, a more accurate—sense of what that identity means. The process of
encountering the complex diversity-in-unity of the Catholic Church parallels the process John Dunne famously called “passing over and coming back,”37 learning from the unfamiliar and returning home with a renewed understanding of one’s
own religiosity. That process gives students an opportunity to discover, as Francis
X. Clooney puts it, that “‘here’ and ‘there’ are not stable referents, either in terms of
fixed religions with clear boundaries or in terms of a pilgrim’s subjective sense that his or her home and destination are simple, simply demarcated.”38 Whether pre-
sented through a trick or not, then, the site has the potential to foster knowledge and dispositions important in interfaith engagement.
In some ways, the site isn’t yet as useful as it could be for these endeavors. First, because the U.S. isn’t explored in any detail, the site may leave intact the view many U.S. students hold that their religiosity is in some way normative, natural, or
univocal. One of the virtues Burde identifies in “Nacirema” is that it “temporarily inverts habitual power relationships, with the dominant Anglo-American culture
being discussed in analytical terms ordinarily reserved for cultural Others such as
aboriginal peoples.”39 On the website, in contrast, the U.S. Church remains the
tacitly non-Othered. To be sure, at this stage in the site’s development, the U.S. receives the same depth of treatment accorded the vast majority of nations: a page
of demographic information and links to articles on other sites. But without visual representation and ethnographic description (beyond a pie chart of religious affiliations), these materials are unlikely to challenge U.S. students’ ethnocentrism.
36 Typically, three-credit courses meet 150 minutes (2.5 hours) a week for fifteen weeks. 37 For an analysis of Dunne’s oft-cited method, see Jon Nilson, “Doing Theology by Heart: John S. Dunne’s Theological Method.” Theological Studies, 48, no. 1 (Mar. 1987): 65–86. 38 Francis X. Clooney, “Afterword: Some Reflections in Response to Teaching Comparative Theology in the Millennial Classroom,” in Comparative Theology in the Millennial Classroom: Hybrid Identities, Negotiated Boundaries, eds. Mara Brecht and Reid B. Locklin (New York and London: Routledge, 2016), 228-29. 39 Burde, “Social-Science Fiction,” 551. VOLUME 5 ISSUE 1 | WINTER 2021
56 | Ritual among the Scilohtac: Global Catholicism, the Nacirema, and Interfaith Studies
Another strength of Miner’s piece is that it draws attention to the way religion is represented. Because it demonstrates (to adapt a line from Miner) the extremes to which anthropological description can go, a class that undertakes a study of the Nacirema can emerge fifty minutes later with a sense of how authorial choices
shape how readers view a culture. Catholics & Cultures could help students gain similar insights by providing materials reflecting on the challenges involved in ob-
serving religion respectfully and representing it accurately. For instance, students who watched the video of the Ukrainian Catholic Christmas dinner shared my discomfort as a member of the family explained the meal at length. We knew that
those assembled had already fasted all day, and we saw that the delay seemed to distress a young woman with developmental disabilities. During the 2019 conference on Catholics & Cultures in Chicago, Thomas Landy clarified that this expla-
nation of the meal was an expected part of the dinner celebration, not something
added for the benefit of the observer. A reflective note on the website would have educated viewers about this catechetical aspect of the celebration, while helping to
explore questions of etic representation that Miner raises well but can’t, in the end, fully address.
Finally, while the site depicts ritual in the context of other aspects of culture, it could do more to depict ritual in the context of other aspects of religion. The site
endeavors to portray “the religious lives and practices of contemporary Catholics in countries around the globe,”40 but the content is devoted almost exclusively to
ritual. Rituals are a worthy focus, particularly because, in Miner’s day as in ours, scholars and students influenced by the Christian tradition tend to see religion
(as the quote from Yadlapati suggested earlier) primarily as a matter of orthodoxy, while downplaying or even being suspicious of practices.41 But an accurate depic-
tion of “what it means to be Catholic today” could give more attention to other
aspects of Catholicism, such as community engagement and social justice. Even the “Practices & Values” page of the website, which might be expected to refer 40 “About This Site.” 41 She illustrates the point by observing that “Christian students do come to understand the ways in which asking people whether they are saved is a question that does not translate well to other traditions that emphasize orthopraxy over orthodoxy.” Yadlapati, “Dharma and Moksha, Works and Faith,” 188. JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
Anita Houck | 57
to such topics, emphasizes rituals (“In some places in the world, people practice
Catholicism publicly, with religious displays in city squares, streets and even stores, while in other places, religious practice is considered private, and reserved for the home and sacred spaces”42). Granted, ritual lends itself particularly well to visual
representation. But community structures and social justice can also be portrayed through images, and in fact the site does venture into these areas in some of its articles, including pieces on lay organizations in Uganda43 and Denmark44 and social
services in Tanzania.45 More coverage of similar aspects of Church life would give a fuller picture of both the institutional Church and the daily experience of Catholics. It would also better fulfill the site’s intent to “provide teaching resources about
Catholic life in all its richness and particularity—to explore what Pope Francis refers to as the ‘dialects’ of a global Church.” The reference is to Pope Francis’s 2019 Bangkok address to priests, religious, seminarians, and catechists, which certainly
doesn’t discount ritual (“Prayer is the center of everything”), but which also puts
ethics, community, and social justice at the heart of Catholic life: “As for the first stirrings of your vocation, many of you in your early years took part in the activities of young people who wanted to put the Gospel into practice and to go out into
the cities to visit the needy, the neglected and even the despised, orphans and the
elderly.”46 Additional attention to social justice could also enhance the site’s value for interfaith studies, since social justice often provides common ground among
religions and is the basis of many interfaith initiatives. From a pedagogical point 42 “Practices & Values,” Catholics & Cultures, accessed May 14, 2020, https://www.catholicsand cultures.org/practices-values. 43 Thomas M. Landy, “Church Guilds in Uganda Active in Community Development,” Catholics & Cultures, updated August 10, 2018, https://www.catholicsandcultures.org/uganda/lay -organizations. 44 Thomas M. Landy, “Catholics in Denmark Identify with Coffee Hour and Charity,” Catholics & Cultures, updated July 27, 2018, https://www.catholicsandcultures.org/denmark/lay -organizations. 45 James Jay Carney and Krystina Kwizera-Masabo, “Catholic Schools, Medical and Social Services Serve Many in Tanzania,” Catholics & Cultures, updated April 27, 2020, https://www.catholics andcultures.org/tanzania-catholic-schools-medical-and-social-services-serve-many. 46 Pope Francis, “Apostolic Journey to Thailand: Meeting with Priests, Religious, Seminarians and Catechists,” St. Peter’s Parish, Bangkok, 22 November 2019, accessed 14 May 2020, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2019/november/documents/papa-francesco_20191122_ consacrati-thailandia.html. VOLUME 5 ISSUE 1 | WINTER 2021
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of view, learning about similar commitments to social justice may create a bridge sturdy enough to support students as they grapple with differences in ritual practices and institutional structures.
THE FAMILY OF THE UNFAMILIAR: TOWARD MULTIPLICITY AND INCLUSION Where Miner’s article, as Burde says, is about “a familiar people unflatteringly depicted from an unfamiliar standpoint,”47 Catholics & Cultures shows a variety of
unfamiliar people respectfully depicted from a familiar standpoint—“familiar” read literally, as siblings within the Church. In presenting such variety with scholarly
respect, the site can accomplish something of Miner’s gestalt shift, challenging the assumption that my culture’s Catholicism is the only Catholicism. That fuller un-
derstanding of Catholicism makes an important contribution to religious literacy, but it also provides a template for the study of other worldviews: the experience of seeing the complexity of Catholicism can translate to acknowledging complexity
elsewhere. This move is important particularly since, in the process of working toward basic religious literacy, interfaith pedagogy can inadvertently encourage over-
generalizing. Overgeneralizations may be flattering (in the earlier example from
Little Mosque, Rev. Magee’s understanding of “Muslims pray five times a day”)
or unflattering ( Joe’s understanding of “Muslims pray five times a day”); either way, they are among the most important mental habits to interrogate. Dismantling
overgeneralizations supports the realization that, in Yadlapati’s words, “individual
religious traditions are not monolithic wholes but are themselves living, dynamic processes of interpretation”48 and thus opens up the way to the genuine listening needed for interfaith conversation.
This pedagogical potential, of course, comes with no guarantee. Sibling rivalries can
be the most deeply felt and threatening, and interfaith skills are often hardest to deploy in intrafaith settings. It’s not for nothing that the joke voted “the funniest
religious joke of all time” takes as its target Christianity’s often-violent internecine
47 Burde, “Social-Science Fiction,” 556. 48 Yadlapati, “Dharma and Moksha, Works and Faith,” 188. JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
Anita Houck | 59
intolerance.49 Thus, there’s sadly no surprise in hearing that viewers of Catholics &
Cultures sometimes dismiss unfamiliar practices as heretical.
But the site’s work is all the more important for that. Its portrayal of the diversity
within the Church embodies the Catholic theological conviction that, as Stan Chu
Ilo has put it, “Each culture carries the beauty of the seed of God’s Word at its
source”50 and is a locus of the workings of the Holy Spirit. Chu Ilo argues, accord-
ingly, for a “hermeneutics of multiplicity and inclusion,” insisting on the importance of “the historically voiceless and marginalized groups and cultures within the one
Catholic family.”51 Such an approach promises to be destabilizing for those who have long rested in the center of a Eurocentric institution, since “It is so easy to reaffirm what we have always professed, to profess what we have always believed, and to de-
fend what we have always lived” (italics in original).52 But moving beyond such ethnocentric distortion is a matter of theological urgency for the entire Church. Only
thus, Chu Ilo argues, can the Church hear the guidance of the Spirit “who leads the Church and her faithful into the fullness of truth in order to meet the new challeng-
es of the present.”53 That “fullness of truth” is essential for the Church’s flourishing, and it cannot be perceived except through the Spirit’s varied manifestations around the world. An awareness of those manifestations is also essential on a pedagogical 49 The joke’s author, Emo Philips, quotes the joke in the brief news article announcing its victory (Emo Philips, “The Best God Joke Ever—and It’s Mine!,” The Guardian, September 29, 2005, https:// www.theguardian.com/stage/2005/sep/29/comedy.religion): Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, “Don’t do it!” He said, “Nobody loves me.” I said, “God loves you. Do you believe in God?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “Are you a Christian or a Jew?” He said, “A Christian.” I said, “Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?” He said, “Protestant.” I said, “Me, too! What franchise?” He said, “Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?” He said, “Northern Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?” He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?” He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region.” I said, “Me, too!” “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?” He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.” I said, “Die, heretic!” And I pushed him over. 50 Stan Chu Ilo, “Contested Moral Issues in Contemporary African Catholicism: Theological Proposals for a Hermeneutics of Multiplicity and Inclusion,” Journal of Global Catholicism 1, no. 2 (2017): 55, doi: 10.32436/2475-6423.1015. 51 Chu Ilo, 59-60. 52 Chu Ilo, 70. 53 Chu Ilo, 64. VOLUME 5 ISSUE 1 | WINTER 2021
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level, so that students who identify as Catholic can come to the interfaith table with an accurate understanding of their tradition, and thus of their identity.
Among the gestalt-shifts that 101 students encounter in the textbook we use is the
revelation that “yoga” is not the domain of Lululemon but a word applied to a diverse
set of Hindu spiritual practices. The book, World Religions in Dialogue: A Compara-
tive Theological Approach, includes Yadlapati’s observation that “The Bhagavad Gita’s teaching on the four margas [raja yoga, jnana yoga, karma yoga, and bhakti yoga] is often cited as support for the Hindu view that there are many paths to salvation or enlightenment. Today, it serves as a traditional theological motif for affirming the
value of different religious traditions and teachings for different cultures and different individual temperaments.”54 Catholics & Cultures, in its portrayal of the multiplicity and inclusiveness of the Church, may suggest a similar “theological motif ” for Catholicism. This diversity-in-unity is an image that arises from the very nature of
what Chu Ilo calls “the one Catholic family”; it can also, like the margas in Yadlapati’s comment, invite appreciation for the religious variety throughout the one human family. In interfaith studies, the dialogue circles back around, as the diversity of
worldviews sheds light on the possibilities within Christianity. As David L. Gitomer writes, “the study of non-Christian religions opens up ways of thinking about the gospel implicit but not yet emerged within Christian communities.”55 Catholics &
Cultures has a part in this dialogue. It invites students and their teachers to gain knowledge about the sometimes-surprising diversity of human religious life. Per-
haps even more importantly, it also invites them to practice the humility, empathy, and sense of connection that can make understanding across difference possible.
54 Madhuri M. Yadlapati, “Hinduism: An Insider’s Perspective,” in World Religions in Dialogue: A Comparative Theological Approach, ed. Pim Valkenberg (Winona, MN: Anselm Academic, 2013), 151. David L. Gitomer makes a similar point, while acknowledging that the increasing potency of Hindu nationalism limits the conviction of his proposal: “it could still be said that Hindus have a head start on pluralistic thinking, since they grow up with Hindu neighbors who worship different gods, or because they learn theistic monism almost as early as they learn theistic pluralism. It is an experience that feels very different than the ideas expressed in the generous but still limited inclusivism of the Vatican II declaration on non-Christian faiths.” “‘Tell Me One Thing, Krishna. . .’: A Personal Reflection on Catholic Faith and Religious Pluralism,” in As Leaven in the World: Catholic Perspectives on Faith, Vocation, and the Intellectual Life, ed. Thomas M. Landy (Franklin, WI: Sheed & Ward, 2001), 69-70. 55 Gitomer, “‘Tell Me One Thing, Krishna. . .,’” 70. JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
Anita Houck | 61
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Kennedy, Michael, dir. Little Mosque on the Prairie. Season 1, episode 1, “Little
Mosque.” Aired January 9, 2007, on CBC. Youtube, January 21, 2019, https:// youtu.be/9xJQwqb7jh4.
Kleinman, Sherryl, Martha Copp, and Kent Sandstrom. “Making Sexism Visible: Birdcages, Martians, and Pregnant Men.” Teaching Sociology 34, no. 2 (2006): 126–42. doi: 10.1177/0092055X0603400203.
Landy, Thomas M. “Христос Родився! Christ is Born! Ukrainian Catho-
lic Christmas in Ontario.” Catholics & Cultures. Updated May 20, 2020. https://www.catholicsandcultures.org/canada-ukrainian-catholics -celebrate-christmas-holy-supper-mass.
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_____. “Shrine and Feast Honoring Mary Attract Indian Catholics and Hindus,”Catholics & Cultures.Updated July 30,2018.https://www.catholicsand cultures.org/india/shrines-pilgrimage/our-lady-good-health.
Miller, Elizabeth. “Learning to Interpret Cultural Meaning through an Etic Description of a Familiar Culture.” Teaching Sociology 42, no. 4 (2014): 298– 302. doi: 10.1177/0092055X14540584.
Miner, Horace. 1956. “Body Ritual among the Nacirema.” American Anthropologist 58, no. 3 (1956): 503–7. doi: 10.1525/aa.1956.58.3.02a00080.
Patel, Eboo. Interfaith Leadership: A Primer. Boston: Beacon, 2016. EPUB edition. Philips, Emo. “The Best God Joke Ever—And It’s Mine!” The Guardian, September 29, 2005. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2005/sep/29/comedy.religion.
Rockenbach, A. N., et. al. IDEALS: Bridging Religious Divides through High-
er Education. Interfaith Youth Core, 2020, https://ifyc.org/resources/bridg��ing-religious-divides-through-higher-education https://www.ifyc.org/ideals.
Sayedahmed, Dina, and Hamna Saleem. “Hijabi World.” Newest Americans, 2015, https://newestamericans.com/hijabi-world/.
Sydnor, John Paul. “Teaching World Theologies through Film.” In Comparative
Theology in the Millennial Classroom: Hybrid Identities, Negotiated Boundaries,
edited by Mara Brecht and Reid B. Locklin, 205-18. New York and London: Routledge, 2016.
Yadlapati, Madhuri M. “Dharma and Moksha, Works and Faith: Comparatively Engaging the Tension between Ethics and Spirituality.” In Comparative Theology in the Millennial Classroom: Hybrid Identities, Negotiated Boundaries,
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_____. “Hinduism: An Insider’s Perspective.” In World Religions in Dialogue: A Comparative Theological Approach, edited by Pim Valkenberg, 146-56. Winona, MN: Anselm Academic, 2013. VOLUME 5 ISSUE 1 | WINTER 2021
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M A R C R O S C O E L O U S TA U
Teaching Sexuality on the Catholics & Cultures Website: A Refreshing Turn toward the Longue Durée
Marc Roscoe Loustau is Managing Editor of the Journal of Global Catholicism and a Catholics & Cultures contributor. As a scholar of religious studies in the context of personal, social, and economic change, his research has focused on Catholicism in Eastern Europe where, after decades of official state atheism, there has been a prominent resurgence of religion in public life. Loustau has taught courses at the College of the Holy Cross on contemporary global Catholicism. He holds a Th.D. from Harvard Divinity School.
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INTRODUCTION
S
ince the advent of a movement for including sexuality in religious studies
and theology curricula scholars have embraced a variety of methods and frameworks, but one popular approach is to organize classroom instruction
about sexuality around discussions about “current issues.”1 The rationale is that in contemporary North American societies sexuality has an almost inherent relation-
ship with a particular realm of politics centered on government policy, legislation, and judicial decision-making. Indeed, advocates of teaching about sexuality in the religious studies and theology classroom often comment that the prevalence of political debates, legislative actions, and judicial decisions in the daily news cycle
makes sexuality a necessary part of their teaching. Students at American universi-
ties already hear every day about Supreme Court decisions, bills passed or rejected, and policies implemented by the executive branch. In the words of American Protestant theologians Kate Ott and Darryl Stephens,
Complicating discussion of sexuality within a religion or theological classroom are curricular silences that contrast sharply with public debate about religion and sexuality in U.S. media and politics…Students may talk a lot about sexuality, but are they engaging the topic critically with the disciplinary tools of religious studies and theology?2
Dealing with sexuality in relation to “current issues” will equip students to be better at what they already do, including consuming news and talking about hot-button controversies with others in their community.
When I speak of a current issues approach, I also have in mind several examples of 1
2
For instance, Kate Ott describes a series of classroom exercises designed to foster creative and symbolic expression of personal experience. One exercise uses a creative medium to depict a timeline of participants’ sexuality. “They were encouraged to use visual art, poetry, prayer, songs, or a movie clip playlist.” Kate Ott, “Inviting Perspective Transformation: Sexual History Awareness for Professional Formation,” Teaching Theology & Religion 20 (April 2017): 120, https://doi.org /10.1111/teth.12374. Kate Ott and Darryl Stephens, “Embodied Learning: Teaching Sexuality and Religion to a Changing Student Body,” Teaching Theology & Religion 20 (April 2017): 111, https://doi.org/10.1111 /teth.12373.
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courses in Christian theological ethics that I took in graduate school. These syllabi
exemplify the current issues approach that, in my view, the Catholics & Cultures website should be commended for variously complicating, questioning, relativiz-
ing, elaborating, and developing. Typically, the current issues approach takes up
sexuality-related topics casuistically. In a course on Christian ethics, for instance, there would be a multi-week unit on abortion featuring readings that exemplify and advocate a range of stances on the legality of terminating a pregnancy. The
unit on abortion would be followed by units on any number of the sexuality-re-
lated current issues that I listed above: same‐sex marriage, prostitution, the use of
new reproductive health care technologies, genital alteration in children, and the
Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal. Students would be introduced to differing
perspectives by studying specific pieces of legislation, cases in which government representatives prosecuted individuals for violating existing laws, and historical and contemporary judicial decisions.
The current issues approach seemed to appeal partly as instructors gained greater
awareness of and a desire to respond to sexuality’s role in constituting America’s “culture wars.” Pedagogical reflections on sexuality in the religious studies and theology classroom often emerge from an awareness that sex is at the very heart of
the United States’ bitterly fractured politics. Instructors are very aware that they
lead discussions about the between biological sex and social roles ascribed to men and women amid a recent history of contested and bitter debate that has largely
pitted “traditionalists” against “progressives.” Advocates of these points of view are
only finding new and mutual ways to exclude each other. Whether instructors pin this divide to the post-1960s “sexual liberation” or a longer historical timeline that
begins with the early 20th century women’s suffrage movement, almost everyone agrees that classroom discussions about sexuality inevitably refer back the unraveling of a Christian consensus about sexuality and gender roles that has led to a
starkly divided American national politics and pushed sex to the center of leftright public debate.
Like many religious studies and theological scholars, the Catholics & Cultures
website often treats sexuality as a stand in or index for socially-situated actors’ JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
Marc Roscoe Loustau | 67
attitudes toward change in general.3 But in my exegetical analysis of the C&C website’s content, I will also highlight how the site takes a refreshing approach that
consistently encourages students to make sense of sexuality-related topics in relation to long-term and deep structural social transformations like urbanization, nation building, and the changing role of lay leaders. The site’s pedagogy suggests that
cultures change in the mode that the famous Annales School of history and social
science once called “the longue durée.” The Annales School famously used the term
longue durée to convey the broad, slow sweep of history, as distinct from “events time,” which focuses on phenomena and occurrences that are of the moment and
immediately observable.4 When discussing practices that reveal important cultural
changes, the Catholics & Cultures program highlights the context provided by long-term structural change without overshadowing the importance of events like
legislation, judicial decisions, and policy shifts—the bread-and-butter of events time’s short-term time scale on which a great deal of contemporary religious studies and theology classroom conversations dwell.
The Catholics & Cultures website does not ally itself with any particular theoreti-
cal school or perspective, and I do not claim to reveal any such hidden or implicit allegiance. My point is rather to use this comparison with a particular theoretical
approach as a heuristic device to highlight certain features, tendencies, and habits
within the site’s material. By calling attention to these tendencies, we can better see how the site offers a refreshing alternative to commonplace ways of imagining and
enacting the pedagogy of sexuality in the religious studies and theology classroom. We can therefore also understand one of the many other contributions the site is making to contemporary religious studies and theology pedagogy. 3
4
See, for instance, Marie Griffith’s argument that American Christians’ views regarding sex came to stand in for attitudes toward change and modern ideas in general. R. Marie Griffith, Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 5. Historian Ferdinand Braudel imagined deep structures to be like geographic formations: “Such general collective human interaction with physical nature forms an extremely slow-moving, almost imperceptible temporality—a structure perhaps, but a structure subject to historical mutation.” Dale Tomich, “The Order of Historical Time: The Longue Durée and Micro-History,” Almanack 2 (2011): 38-52, http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/2236-463320110204. Still, my goal is to use the distinction between longue durée and events time as a heuristic device to clarify certain features of the C&C website.
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A related subplot of this article is my attempt to highlight the C&C website’s effort to
destabilize the culture war narrative that informs religious studies and theology ped-
agogical reflection about sexuality.The Catholics & Cultures website takes a similarly
third-way approach—neither directly opposing nor obviously confirming—to the culture wars framework. Triangulation is the site’s primary tool. For instance, when
the C&C website compares discussions about sexuality, it sets up a three-way com-
parison with the United States and another Catholic community. In the page about Guam, responses to the sexual abuse crisis are compared implicitly to the United
States and explicitly to Ireland. In his book, Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice, Michael M. J. Fischer argues that by creating a triangulated comparison
between three distinct cultures, anthropologists can avoid the tendency to divide
the world into polarized good-bad moral options, a tendency that is often invited by dualistic comparison between a home or familiar culture and a foreign or unfamiliar one.5 The C&C site uses triangulation to encourage instructors to move
beyond the expectation that discussions about sexuality will divide students into opposed culture war-style factions.
In the first section, I will provide an overview of the categories and concepts the C&C website uses to discuss sexuality: informants’ responses about issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, and the sexual abuse crisis typically fall in the sec-
tion titled, “Marriage, Family, and Gender Roles.” After this introduction, I move
through three sections that present my exegetical analysis highlighting the C&C
website’s “longue durée” perspective. Instead of simply challenging the conventions of religious studies and theology instruction, I argue that the C&C website uses its focus on deep structural transformations like urbanization, nation building, and
the rise of lay leadership to variously complicate, question, relativize, elaborate, and develop the current issues approach. Intertwined with this exegesis are my observations about the website’s triangulation of the culture wars framework.
BEYOND THE NULL CURRICULUM The C&C website has no distinct and named section on sexuality; the site deals with 5
Michael M. J. Fischer, Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003): 5-7 JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
Marc Roscoe Loustau | 69
sexuality most often in the subsection on “Family, Marriage, and Gender Roles” located in the “Practices and Values” section. However, this categorization should
not lead to the conclusion that sexuality is a “null curriculum” on the C&C site. Originally developed by educational theorist Elliot Eisner in the mid-1980s, the null curriculum is the inverse of the topics that instructors explicitly state on course
documents like syllabi.6 Students still learn something about null curricular topics based on their absence. For instance, because religious studies and theology class-
rooms are incubators for critique and exposure, the absence of some topics sends the
message that these topics are not fit for such treatment. Ott and Stephens write that their goal, as advocates for teaching sexuality in the religious studies and theology
classroom, is to better equip faculty, “to move sexuality education from the null curriculum to the explicit curriculum in a responsible, pedagogically‐effective way.”7
The C&C website advances this goal of responsibly and effectively shifting sexuality from the null to explicit curriculum. The front page of the “Family, Mar-
riage & Gender Roles” subsection frames this topic as an opportunity to organize a wide-ranging classroom discussion about roles and responsibilities in different
cultures. In addition to the roles and responsibilities of spouses, nuclear family
members, adult children and elderly parents, and the divorced, the C&C website asks: “What the place of homosexual and transgender persons is in the Church
and in society.”8 The C&C website also agrees that aspects of family life can stand
in for debates about social change. Official Church teaching has come to focus on the family, according to the author, “particularly as cultural norms in some countries have shifted toward greater acceptance of divorce, non-marital heterosexual
relations and homosexual relations, and as the number of single-parent households has risen significantly.” 9 The C&C website understands “gender roles” to be a broad category that should allow faculty and students to create wide-ranging classroom 6
7 8 9
Eliot Eisner, The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluation of School Programs (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1985). David J. Flinders, Nel Noddings, and Stephen J. Thornton, “The Null Curriculum: Its Theoretical Basis and Practical Implications,” Curriculum Inquiry 16, no. 1 (Spring, 1986): 33-42 Ott and Stephens, “Embodied Learning,” 109. “Family, Marriage & Gender Roles,” Catholics & Cultures, accessed April 27, 2020, https://www. catholicsandcultures.org/practices-values/family-marriage-gender-roles. "Family, Marriage & Gender Roles.”
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conversations. The subsection’s front page signals this goal by encouraging instructors to use the site’s materials so that students pay attention to “both men’s and women’s roles as they are assigned or negotiated in a culture.”10
Sexuality is not confined to pages about family, marriage, and gender roles. The C&C website recognizes that sexuality, because it stands in for transformation
more broadly, is often on informants’ minds even when they are speaking about
other areas of life. On the C&C website’s page about lay confraternities in Spain,
the author notes that these groups provide year-round fellowship for members. Spanish lay confraternities are traditional groups, recognized by the diocese, that carry out specific responsibilities on important religious holidays. These groups are
not shielded from debates about sexuality through which Spanish Catholics con-
sider and confront broader social changes. Spain’s increasing tolerance for divorce,
remarriage, and homosexuality can be measured, according to the C&C website, by the groups’ formal and informal membership procedures. “Occasionally there
have been scandals that have led to expulsions, but these are rare and traumatic
for the members if they happen. Members said that divorced and remarried or openly gay members are not expelled, but would likely not achieve high positions in the organization.”11 Changes affecting the institution of the family are felt just as
strongly in the life of a lay confraternity, because participation is a matter of “family tradition” and “family loyalty to a particular brotherhood is often very important.”12
There are numerous other cases in which the C&C website explicitly names sexu-
ality-related topics while also folding them into pages that deal with other themes. For instance, the page about “Worship” in Ireland includes a note about the profound impact of the sexual abuse scandal on all aspects of Irish Catholicism. The
Church has even limited parishioners’ ability to use cameras in a church in case children might be photographed; this restriction affected the C&C researcher’s own ability to provide a visual record of contemporary Irish Catholic worship.13 10 11 12 13
“Family, Marriage & Gender Roles.” “Family, Marriage & Gender Roles.” “Family, Marriage & Gender Roles.” Thomas M. Landy, “Modern Irish Mass Missing Reverence, Intimacy, and Parishioners,” Catholics & Cultures, accessed April 27, 2020, https://www.catholicsandcultures.org/ireland/worship. JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
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All in all, the C&C website fully acknowledges the role of sexuality in constituting Barrel-chested costaleros take on the role of
and transforming culture. The C&C website’s information will aid instructors in carrying the pasos, or transforming a null curriculum into an explicit topic of conversation in religious floats, in Spain's Semana studies and theology classrooms.
DENMARK AND NORWAY: SEXUALITY IN NATIONAL UNITY CULTURES Norway’s Catholics grapple with sexual mores within the range of possibilities offered by a national “unity culture.” The C&C website’s introductory page about
Norwegian Catholicism describes Norway’s pervasive and deep structural shift towards a “unity culture” over the course of the 19th century. The architects of
this nation-building project sought to gather together locally and regionally distinct communities into a single cultural entity defined by several shared institutions: “one church, the Church of Norway, one king, one language, one culture.”14 Norwegian Lutherans’ attitudes toward religious practice and the role of the
Church of Norway in everyday life sets the tone for Catholics, too. Catholics 14 Thomas M. Landy, “Introduction: A Single Parish in Norway among Most Diverse in World,” Catholics & Cultures, accessed April 27, 2020, https://www.catholicsandcultures.org/norway-single -parish-serves-17800-multi-ethnic-catholics-bergen. VOLUME 5 ISSUE 1 | WINTER 2021
Santa processions. Gender roles in confraternities are often exaggerated. Photo by Thomas M. Landy/ catholicsandcultures.org.
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Young families extend out the door for the English Mass at St. Paul Catholic Church in Bergen, Norway. Photo by Thomas M. Landy/ catholicsandcultures.org.
generally follow the practice of keeping quiet about one’s faith: “When you scratch
under the surface, Norwegians do believe in God. It’s just that they seem to be
deeply uncomfortable talking about God.”15 Other values embraced by both bornand-raised Norwegians and immigrants alike include modesty, privacy, egalitarian-
ism, and tolerance. Tolerance and privacy dictate that overt practices that suggest
religious fervor spark confusion. Whereas the norm for the Church of Norway, is to visit four times in one’s life—for baptism, confirmation, marriage and one’s funeral – “one man reported that his conversion to Catholicism met no hostility, but sometimes puzzlement.”16
The Norwegian national cultural values of reservedness and modesty also shape the
range of possibilities for engaging topics related to sexuality. Norwegian Catholics
do not seem to voice negative opinions or offer judgments as much as they express reservations and worries. According to the C&C website, they worry about both
the Church’s teachings and Norwegian cultural attitudes toward divorce and same-
sex marriage: “Even though some said that they found the Church’s conception of marriage to be too idealized or rigid, interviewees repeatedly said that even if 15 Landy, “A Single Parish.” 16 Landy, “A Single Parish.” JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
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divorce is sometimes necessary, most people ‘give up too easily’ on marriages.”17 The
&C website then contrasts this Norwegian approach to the conventional “culture war” style that Americans use to handle this topic:
Yet even those who sought to distance themselves from some Norwegian family and gender norms never spoke in terms of culture wars. One Mexican-born
Catholic said that she was struck how much Norwegians welcomed and priori-
tized children, more than other countries she knew in Europe. Indeed, by many measures of educational and social wellbeing, children are quite well cared for in Norway.
By highlighting this difference, the C&C website seems to want to relativize stu-
dents’ expectations that sexuality should constitute a “culture war” in which society
is divided into two opposing opinion-groups. The C&C website suggests that the culture war is itself a cultural attitude, one that is relative to contemporary American society. Although the emergence of the American “culture wars” about sexu-
ality-related issues plays a significant role shaping religious studies and theology
instructors’ event-oriented pedagogy, the Catholics & Cultures website takes pains
to highlight alternative approaches to the same topics and the cultural themes that inform these approaches.
The national cultural value of privacy serves a similar purpose in the C&C coun-
try profile about Denmark. Danish Catholics express and embrace the virtue of privacy by maintaining a cozy (hygge) atmosphere in church services as well as in
everyday interactions. According to the author, the Mass in Danish has this dis-
tinctively Danish feel that emerges from the desire to, “keep things friendly, nice, and ordered in regard to relationships and conversation.”18 Privacy and conviviality prevail especially when it comes to issues of sexuality that constitute the American culture wars. The C&C website notes that the Church’s official representatives do make an effort to communicate and explain the reasons for the Church’s stance on
the issues that constitute the American culture wars, including same-sex marriage 17 Landy. “A Single Parish.” 18 Thomas M. Landy, “Denmark’s ‘Hygge’ Worship Style Emphasizes Simplicity and Tranquility,” Catholics & Cultures, accessed April 27, 2020, https://www.catholicsandcultures.org/denmark/worship. VOLUME 5 ISSUE 1 | WINTER 2021
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and family reproductive practices. Both priests and laypeople seem to engage the
Church’s teachings so as to convey their feeling for Danish culture’s everyday interactive norms:
At the same time, priests and catechists know that Catholics often differ from
the Church on sexual issues. That disagreement does not seem to take the form
of protest. Given the privacy of Danes, one person described the situation as, “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
There is another implicit contrast with expectations born of the American culture wars. Dramatic public protests characterized both liberal and conservative Catholics’ contributions to the American culture wars. When Catholics in New York City
disagreed with ecclesiastical officials’ approach to conveying the Church’s stance
on using contraceptive technologies, it led to some of the most dramatic and con-
troversial protests of the 1980s and 1990s.19 There is also an implicit pedagogical
message in this comment, a recommendation that students and teachers recognize
the diversity of possible responses to disagreements about sexuality. More deeply, the C&C website calls on students to recognize that cultural norms like privacy
and comfort are as much a part of the global Church’s life as those values that underwrote the polarization of the American culture wars.
GUAM: THE RISE OF LAY CATHOLIC ASSOCIATIONS The C&C website does not ignore the current issues and recent events that are
often the main fodder of religious studies and theology classroom conversations about sexuality. Country descriptions often situate recent events as a factor influencing informants’ preoccupations and concerns. The website then juxtaposes the
context set by contemporary events in relation to urbanization, nation building, and other deep structural transformations. The C&C website’s page about Guam
illustrates this decision to render contemporary events as one context among others
for understanding cultural change. On the Guam front page, there are several stan-
dard articles highlighted with clickable images.20 Below these highlighted pages is 19 See Anthony Michael Petro, After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 20 “Guam,” Catholics & Cultures, accessed April 27, 2020, https://www.catholicsandcultures.org/guam. JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
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a page under the heading “See All” and set off by a bullet point: “Unraveling: Sex
abuse, the Neos, and a Year of Reparation in Guam.” That page’s opening para-
graph describes a series of contemporary events in Guam’s Catholic Church that, transposed to an American diocese with American ecclesiastical officials, could frame a typical classroom discussion about the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church. An archbishop was under canonical investigation along with four-
teen priests for a raft of abuse allegations; the archbishop was placed on leave; lay
Catholics marched and protested; Guam’s Church faced millions in legal claims; the Vatican eventually stripped the archbishop of his position and forbid him from returning to Guam.21
After this description, the site presents the crisis in Guam’s Church in relation to
a broader structural transformation that began in the early 20th century but has increased apace in the post-Vatican II period: the rise of global and lay Catholic
movements. The C&C website states that, “The crisis is linked to, or perhaps parallels, a separate crisis over the ascendance of the Neocatechumenal Way,” which
stands alongside the Cursillo movement, Focoloare, and the Catholic Charismatic
Renewal as one of the most popular global lay movements.22 The C&C website
uses its description of the sexual abuse crisis in Guam’s Catholic Church as an opportunity to highlight the cultural specificity and diversity of this global phenomenon: “To a degree difficult for an outsider to understand, the crisis over the Neos seemed to have caused nearly as much upheaval and dissension as the one
over abuse.”23 In Guam, the Neocatechumenal Way adopted a highly counter-cul-
tural approach encouraging participants to openly flout widely-held local cultural norms. Against social norms like humility and privacy, the Neocatechumenal Way
promoted a public ritual of the confession of sins. Where some might have felt it appropriate for individuals to deal with their own sins, the C&C website writes 21 Thomas M. Landy, “Unraveling: Sex Abuse, the Neos, and a Year of Reparation in Guam,” Catholics & Cultures, accessed April 27, 2020, https://www.catholicsandcultures.org/guam-unraveling-sex -abuse-neos-and-year-reparation. 22 Landy, "Unraveling." For a history of one such movement, the Cursillo movement, see Kristy Nabhan-Warren, The Cursillo Movement in America: Catholics, Protestants, and Fourth-Day Spirituality (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). 23 Landy, “Unraveling.” VOLUME 5 ISSUE 1 | WINTER 2021
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about a backlash against Neocatechumenal Way participants who wear their sin like a badge.24
However, the C&C website does not shy away from noting commonalities across these contexts. American Catholics are familiar with the role that lay Catholic
movements have played in creating bridges between Catholics and Charismatic, Pentecostal, and Evangelical Christians. In the United States, practices like the
public confession of sins are strongly associated with the latter traditions, and beginning in the mid-20th century Catholics adopted these Protestant forms as a
way to “renew” or “revitalize” the Church.25 American and Guamanian Catholics
make the same associations between lay Catholic movements and Protestantism. The C&C website notes that Guamanian Catholics call the Neocatechumenal Way’s confession practice a “born-again” habit.26 In Guam, the sexual abuse crisis
has become a referendum on the deep structural transformation of growing lay authority within the Church, a change that is strongly associated with the grow-
ing popularity of global lay Catholic movements. Despite and perhaps because
many American Catholic college students have grown up in contexts where the
presence of lay Catholic movements is a familiar and natural part of the religious environment, the C&C website encourages these readers to patiently attend to the local cultural context that shapes perceptions of these movements. This kind
of awareness helps students see both the similarities and the differences between their understanding of how lay Catholic movements operate in and influence local Catholic communities.
The C&C website also uses triangulation to destabilize readers’ moral judgments
about Guamanians’ responses to the sexual abuse crisis. Readers might be tempted
to make what Michael M. J. Fischer calls a “polar comparison,” or a comparison between the familiar American and unfamiliar Guamanian response to the sexual
abuse crisis.27 According to Fischer, such dualistic comparisons encourage readers 24 Landy, “Unraveling.” 25 See Thomas Csordas, Language, Charisma, and Creativity. The Ritual Life of a Religious Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 26 Landy, “Unraveling.” 27 Fischer, Emergent Forms, 5-7 JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
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In the face of a severe clergy sex abuse scandal in Guam, the new archbishop declared a year of reparation. Photo by Thomas M. Landy/ catholicsandcultures.org.
to move from comparison to evaluative moral judgment: One case is morally better than the other. This tendency is even stronger when it comes to a topic that has
prompted highly moralized responses in the popular press. Perhaps in anticipation
of this tendency, the C&C website enacts Fischer’s own suggestion. The C&C
website compares Guamanian lay Catholics to Irish lay Catholics, adding a third unfamiliar case to create a triangulated comparison that destabilizes the habit of creating simplistic “better/worse” judgments.28 For Irish Catholics, the sexual abuse
scandal violated a cultural value of integrity and amounted to blatant hypocrisy, what the website calls “the most scarlet of sins.”29 Many Irish Catholics left the
Church because they wanted nothing to do with hypocritical institutions and of-
ficials. In contrast, Guam’s Catholics addressed the issue of leaving the Church by
adopting a stance of humility that personalized the question. The act of leaving the Church is a matter of one’s personal reckoning with God over sin, not a col-
lective judgment about the institution’s moral status.30 Ultimately, according to the
C&C website, the triangulated comparison between the United States, Ireland, and Guam “points to the difference that culture may play in responses to sexual abuse.”31
28 Fischer, Emergent Forms, 181. 29 Landy, “Unraveling.” 30 Another example of triangulation can be found on the C&C website’s Nigeria “Family, Marriage & Gender Roles” page: “Modernity and city life also seem to be transforming the family in modest ways, but there are still marked differences between contemporary Igbo and Western or Asian conceptions of the family.” Thomas M. Landy, “Family Building in Nigeria Carries on Lineage, Spirit of Ancestors,” Catholics & Cultures, accessed April 28, 2020, https://www.catholicsandcultures.org/ family-building-nigeria-carries-lineage-spirit-ancestors. 31 Landy, “Unraveling.” VOLUME 5 ISSUE 1 | WINTER 2021
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UGANDA: URBANIZATION AND NATIONAL MARTYRDOM Sometimes contemporary events’ influence on informants’ attitudes toward sexu-
ality are noted in a page’s footnotes, while the relationship between sexuality and broader demographic transitions is highlighted in the page’s main text. This distribution of contemporary events and broad trends is evident on the provocatively-
titled page in the section on Marriage, Family, and Gender Roles in Uganda. “In Uganda, polygamy is legal, homosexuality is not.”32 The title highlights the other-
ness of sexual attitudes in the Ugandan Church, the particular feature of Ugandan
life that would seem the strangest to the average American observer. Indeed, based on contemporary laws, the average American observer could expect the reverse
to better reflect this person’s moral and cultural expectations. The C&C website’s first sentence highlights urbanization as the particular broad trend within which
changing cultural views about sexuality should be understood: “While extended clans play a role in the lives of families in many ethnic groups in Uganda, urban living has eroded some of these links.”33
Urbanization is front and center in the site’s discussion of sexuality partly because the researcher conducted his short-term fieldwork in Uganda’s largest city, Kam-
pala. The C&C website as a whole makes virtues out of practical decisions about the best uses of resources to conduct research. While admitting that sometimes
researchers are writing about only a single city or region in a large and diverse country, the pages always highlight the diversity of Catholic practice even in that
particular place and context. The Ugandan section, for instance, highlights the relationship between urbanization and cultural attitudes toward sexuality. In theoretical language, the page on Ugandan marriage makes the point that change
is never teleologically oriented. In the C&C website’s much more accessible and pedagogically-friendly language, the author notes that informants described a departure from traditional ways, “even as traditional expectations endured in other 32 Thomas M. Landy, “In Uganda, Polygamy is Legal, Homosexuality is Not," Catholics & Cultures, accessed April 27, 2020, https://www.catholicsandcultures.org/uganda-polygamy-legal -homosexuality-not. 33 Landy, “In Uganda.” JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
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ways.”34 Extended family households are prevalent in urban Uganda. This highlights, according to the C&C website, “both the strength and vulnerability of fam-
ily structures in contemporary Ugandan life.”35 The C&C website often juxtaposes
ethnographic reporting of informants’ statements and sociological analysis of deep structural changes at play in a particular ethnographic context. In Uganda, rural
family structures are both strong and vulnerable, which translates into informants’ reports about the strategic and situational reasoning they employ in their deci-
sion-making about whom to marry. The C&C website reports that a young male university graduate and city resident complained that rising urban income levels
has led brides’ fathers to make extravagant dowry demands. But the new invention of paying dowries on “installment plans” allows urban men a level of freedom in negotiations with such demanding fathers-in-law.36
The C&C website situates Ugandans’ “deep aversion to homosexuality” not in an
explanatory framework but rather in the informants’ own reporting and commen-
tary. The author reaches back to Ugandan Catholicism’s collectively-remembered
founding narrative of the “Ugandan martyrs” to situate informants’ statements in a particular context of nation building. The martyrs were a group of forty-five
men from the Baganda ethnic group whom the King of Buganda killed between
1885 and 1887 amid wider political and religious conflicts in colonial-era Uganda. According to the C&C website’s descriptions of the contemporary events during which Ugandans commemorate the Martyrs, “Their feast is an enormously important national day.”37 Anthropologist China Scherz’s excellent summary history
of Christianity’s profoundly formative role in Ugandan colonial-era political conflicts also provides useful historical information about the Martyrs’ role in Ugan-
dan nation building. Scherz argues that the Martyrs were caught up in conflicts over Protestant and Catholic missionaries’ political activities in Uganda during the period of British protectorate rule over the Kingdom of Uganda. Missionaries were periodically expelled and welcomed back into the kingdom throughout the late 34 35 36 37
Landy, “In Uganda.” Landy, “In Uganda.” Landy, “In Uganda.” Thomas M. Landy, “Ugandan Martyrs’ Feast," Catholics & Cultures, accessed April 27, 2020, https://www.catholicsandcultures.org/uganda/shrines-pilgrimage/martyrs-shrine-feast-namugongo.
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toward the Longue Durée
19th century.38 The martyrs were recent converts and members of the King’s court
who, during the missionaries’ periodic absences, became involved in contests for political influence. Later in the 1890s, British interventions led to civil war between
Protestants and Catholics, but years before the political contestation reached this point the King put to death twenty-two Catholic and twenty-two Anglican men.
The C&C website states that both churches have celebrated their dead as a way to highlight their role in crafting a unified Ugandan national identity, but Catholics
have been in the forefront of celebrating and honoring the martyrs. Most impor-
tantly for my analysis, the site continues, “Accounts of their death repeat that some of the martyrs were killed for their refusal, as Christians, to commit sodomy for
the king, or to condone his practice of it.” The connection between “contemporary
events” and Ugandan Catholics’ attitudes toward homosexuality is much less clear. A recent legislative decision outlawing homosexuality appears in a footnote at the
bottom of the page that summarizes respondents’ statements about marriage, polygamy, homosexuality, and gender and family: “At the time of the interviews,” the
C&C website states, “the theme [homosexuality] was very much in the news, as the
parliament had passed a law giving a life sentence for homosexual acts, and severely punishing those who fail to report a homosexual.”
This footnote signals a tendency in the C&C website’s handling of important legislative actions and their relationship with cultural change. The emphasis given
to such events and pedagogical goals they serve might be reversed in many religious studies and theology syllabi, especially those written by instructors who
favor a “contemporary issues” approach to organizing discussions about sexuality. The event to which this footnote refers, a recent parliamentary and legislative action, might take center stage in such curricula, especially if instructors adopt a
casuistical approach that teaches students to weigh different arguments in order to make a final moral judgment about an issue. Within the context of an in-class mock debate—a typical classroom tool used to teach students the practice of moral
casuistry—sexuality’s relationship to long-term processes like post-colonial nation 38 China Scherz, Having People, Having Heart: Charity, Sustainable Development, and Problems of Dependence in Central Uganda (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 28-35. JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
Marc Roscoe Loustau | 81
building would likely be presented as useful background information, akin to the C&C website’s footnote. The C&C website should be commended for complicat-
ing rather than directly and simplistically opposing the current issues approach to
teaching sexuality. On the site’s Uganda country profile, the authors do not dismiss but rather recognize the context provided by legislation and other current issues in
shaping respondents’ attitudes. But the site highlights the longue durée-style deep structural changes that also contextualize Ugandan Catholics’ statements, a practice that helps relativize the current issues pedagogical approach.
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toward the Longue Durée
BIBLIOGRAPHY Catholics & Cultures. “Family, Marriage & Gender Roles.” Accessed April 27, 2020. https://www.catholicsandcultures.org/practices-values/family-marriage -gender-roles.
_____. “Guam.” Accessed April 27, 2020. https://www.catholicsandcultures.org /guam.
Csordas, Thomas. Language, Charisma, and Creativity. The Ritual Life of a Religious Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Eisner, Eliot. The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluation of School Programs. New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1985.
Fischer, Michael M. J. Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.
Flinders, David J., Nel Noddings, and Stephen J. Thornton, “The Null Curriculum: Its Theoretical Basis and Practical Implications,” Curriculum Inquiry 16, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 33-42.
Griffith, R. Marie. Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics. New York: Basic Books, 2017.
Landy, Thomas M. “Modern Irish Mass Missing Reverence, Intimacy, and Parishioners.” Catholics & Cultures. Accessed April 27, 2020. https://www .catholicsandcultures.org/ireland/worship.
_____. “Introduction: A Single Parish in Norway Among Most Diverse in
World.” Catholics & Cultures. Accessed April 27, 2020. https://www.catholics andcultures.org/norway-single-parish-serves-17800-multi-ethnic-catholics -bergen.
_____. “Denmark’s ‘Hygge’ Worship Style Emphasizes Simplicity and Tranquil-
ity.” Catholics & Cultures. Accessed April 27, 2020. https://www.catholics andcultures.org/denmark/worship.
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_____. “Unraveling: Sex Abuse, the Neos, and a Year of Reparation in Guam.” Catholics & Cultures. Accessed April 27, 2020.
https://www.catholics
andcultures.org/guam-unraveling-sex-abuse-neos-and-year-reparation.
_____. “Family Building in Nigeria Carries on Lineage, Spirit of Ancestors.”
Catholics & Cultures. Accessed April 28, 2020. https://www.catholics andcultures.org/family-building-nigeria-carries-lineage-spirit-ancestors.
_____. “In Uganda, Polygamy is Legal, Homosexuality is Not." Catholics
& Cultures. Accessed April 27, 2020. https://www.catholicsandcultures .org/uganda-polygamy-legal-homosexuality-not.
_____. “Ugandan Martyrs’ Feast." Catholics & Cultures. Accessed April 27, 2020.
https://www.catholicsandcultures.org/uganda/shrines-pilgrimage
/martyrs-shrine-feast-namugongo.
Nabhan-Warren, Kristy. The Cursillo Movement in America: Catholics, Protestants,
and Fourth-Day Spirituality. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.
Ott, Kate. “Inviting perspective transformation: Sexual history awareness for professional formation.” Teaching Theology & Religion 20 (April 2017): 117– 125. https://doi.org/10.1111/teth.12374.
Ott, Kate and Darryl Stephens. “Embodied learning: Teaching sexuality and religion to a changing student body,” Teaching Theology & Religion 20 (April 2017): 106–116. https://doi.org/10.1111/teth.12373.
Petro, Anthony Michael. After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Scherz, China. Having People, Having Heart: Charity, Sustainable Development, and Problems of Dependence in Central Uganda. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
Tomich, Dale. “The Order of Historical Time: The Longue Durée and Micro-History.” Almanack 2 (2011): 38-52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/2236-463320110204.
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HILLARY KAELL
The Value of Online Resources: Reflections on Teaching an Introduction to Global Christianity
Hillary Kaell is author of Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage (New York University Press, 2014) and editor of Everyday Sacred: Religion in Contemporary Quebec (McGill-Queens University Press, 2017). Her newest book, Christian Globalism at Home (Princeton University Press, 2020) explores the development of a global Christian imaginary through the lens of child sponsorship programs. She is co-editor of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion's book series at Palgrave Macmillan Press and Associate Professor of Anthropology and Religion at McGill University in Montreal. Prior to starting at McGill, she was a faculty member in Religious Studies at Concordia University, where she remains co-convenor of the Material Region Initiative and a faculty fellow in the Centre for Sensory Studies. Follow her @hillarykaell and learn more on her website.
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T
en years ago, I first stepped into a large undergraduate classroom with my
newly minted Ph.D. and my carefully chosen ‘professional’ attire. Since
then, one key lesson I have learned is that my classroom style can be a re-
flection of me. I like to chat. I like informality. I don’t like wearing heels. My older, wiser self wears whatever shoes she wants and opens up lots of room for informal discussion and questions. I have also learned that the majority of students take my
courses on modern and contemporary Christianity as electives, often in order to
reflect on their own Christian upbringing or heritage—and that’s okay. In fact, it
is more than okay: it’s a precious opportunity for students to become more selfaware and thoughtful human beings. As many of my students have shown me, it is
a mode of reflection that they want and that may be absent in their core classes in, say, Accounting, Political Science, or Engineering.
For these reasons, I wasn’t too surprised when, the week before going to Chicago for a symposium on the Catholics & Cultures website, a student in my Introduc-
tion to Global Christianity class raised her hand and asked a question unrelated to that day’s course content. “I’m Ukrainian Catholic,” she said, “is that more like Catholic or more like Orthodox? My mother says it’s Greek.” The question was
clear and succinct; it was something that had likely been on her mind for a while. I briefly responded that some Eastern—or “Greek”—churches were in communion
with the Roman Catholic Church, though the rituals and celebrations were culturally specific. “But I’m not an expert in Ukrainian Catholicism,” I said (admitting
you don’t know everything is also okay—another key lesson I’ve gleaned during my decade in the classroom). Then I continued, “Let’s pause for a moment and
see if we can find anything more on Catholics & Cultures.” I pulled up the site on
the screen in front of the class. Sure enough, there was an article, colorful images, and links to multiple other sections of the site with information about rituals and foods—two things that interest my students greatly when it comes to their own heritage traditions because it allows them to speak from a place of expertise.
We didn’t go through all those articles in class, but navigating through the site
on the screen in front of them was valuable in itself: I was pointing students to a reputable online source where they could turn for more information, which would VOLUME 5 ISSUE 1 | WINTER 2021
86 | The Value of Online Resources: Reflections on Teaching an Introduction to Global Christianity
Screenshot of menu options on the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church at catholicsandcultures.org.
remain accessible to them after our semester together ended. “Digital natives” they may be, but my students, at least, are often (and quite understandably) chary of
web-based sources or stumped about how to navigate the amount of potential
information online. Scrolling down through the Catholics & Cultures pages, I showed them the endnotes after each one. On the site’s introductory page, I re-
minded them to check if scholars have contributed and helped to vet the materials. Yes, we concluded, this is a good website from which to get factual material and it could be cited in their final papers.
That short pause in my preplanned lecture speaks to a general concern for any un-
dergraduate teacher. How can we encourage students to selectively utilize online
sources? How can we empower them to seek out answers to their questions? In my Religious Studies classes, which take an anthropological approach to the study of Christianity, a further concern of mine is to clarify how scholars go about studying
religion to begin with—the comparative approach, the emphasis on culture and practice, the focus on observation. I also try to impress upon my students that
scholars often sound “objective”—perhaps because, unlike one’s cranky relatives, they rarely state that this religion is “right” and that one is “wrong.” Yet they also JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
Hillary Kaell | 87
make choices about what to include and exclude when they weave together comparative points. The Catholics & Cultures website is a brilliant teaching tool for a
basic analysis of methodology: it is a clear and colorful way to show undergraduate students how this kind of Religious Studies scholarship gets done. Navigating
through the site, I can show my students how its authors discuss discrete examples, which they have then chosen to link to other examples with a common theme. It
exemplifies how scholarship is crafted, which also helps me explain the process of writing a final paper for my course.
The place where I teach leads me to focus on more particular objectives as well. Concordia is one of three English-language universities in Quebec and, like many
of the province’s premier universities, it has a Catholic heritage (one of its two campuses, Loyola, recalls that past). In my classroom, the majority of students are
local to Montreal and the surrounding areas. A bit more than a third come from families of ‘allophone’ descent (neither English- nor French-speaking) that are mainly Italian, Portuguese, Greek, and Lebanese. A quarter or so are first-gen-
eration immigrants, usually from places like Haiti or Cameroun (not surprising since Quebec favors immigrants from francophone countries). Most of the other students represent the historic English and French Canadian majority.
Whether students’ families are new to Montreal or have been settled for genera-
tions, a large number of them have Catholic roots. They also live in a province where
Catholic names and iconography are ubiquitous. For example, I live on a street
named for a bishop across from a hospital named for the Virgin Mary and a public school named for an early Quebecois saint. There is a large stone cross in front of the school and the spires of an enormous mid-nineteenth century church are also
visible from my window. My students live in this Catholic-saturated cityscape too, yet most of them arrive in my classroom repeating a historical myth gleaned from
Quebecois politics and media (and much debunked by historians, to little avail). This myth views Catholicism as singular, constitutionally anti-modern, and con-
trolling of all facets of people’s lives. It represents Catholicism—which my Catholic
heritage students often call “the Church”—as utterly dominant in Quebec until the 1960s when “the people” overthrew it and, suddenly, became secular and free. VOLUME 5 ISSUE 1 | WINTER 2021
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Students from historic Quebecois families tend to take this narrative largely for granted, especially if they are of French Canadian descent. Students from recently immigrated or practicing Catholic families tend to repeat it as a facet of Quebec’s
history, while acknowledging that this singular vision of “the Church” does not re-
flect their own experiences of actually being Catholic. So where does it leave us in my Introduction to Global Christianity course? As with students everywhere, some of mine are smart and subtle thinkers. Others, with spotty attendance and other
things on their minds, pick up only the most basic of points. For the first group, my goal is to nudge them towards understanding that many aspects of Quebecois society they think of as ‘secular’ (and, often, ‘moral’ or ‘ethical’) reflect a still-present
Catholic sensibility—as do the communitarian politics that have led to laws like Bill 101 (enforcing French in the public sphere) and Bill 21 (enacting certain bans
on religious clothing). Such conceptions of the social good are deeply rooted in two centuries of Catholicized governance linking language, nation, and (a certain kind of ) religion. While I have not used the Catholics & Cultures site to address
this issue, I have found it extremely useful in addressing students in the second
group—those who pick up the basic points. For those students, I aim to impart just three things about contemporary Catholicism: 1. Catholics are diverse, with
significant variation across the world 2. Catholics do not simply obey “the Church” 3. Catholics do have many rituals but these do not make them incapable of “rational” thinking.
To cover these points, I use three sections of the Catholics & Cultures site most
often. The first is “Catholics by Country.” My students’ own Catholicism (practiced
or heritage) is usually intermeshed within a specific national context, though they
may never have thought about it as such. Toward the beginning of the semester, for example, we talk about food and memory. It invariably prompts a conversation
in which students talk about the ‘taste’ of rituals—the kind of foods their grand-
mothers make at particular holidays, saint’s feasts, or confirmations and funerals. For many students, these are ‘national’ foods, rather than Catholic ones per se, and
it opens up a discussion about the nuances of these categories. The “Catholics by
Country” section is a place where I can send students to contextualize these expe-
riences within their families and communities. At another moment in the course, JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
Hillary Kaell | 89
Screenshot of Catholics by Country at catholicsandcultures.org.
I also assign sections of it as background reading when I divide them into small groups to research different Marian apparitions. I use “Catholics by Country” for
my own lectures too, and to provide visuals when I am introducing a new topic. As students are mulling over possible topics for their independent final papers, I again send them to this section of the site to see if a country description sparks their interest.
The section of the site that I use most, however, is Practices & Values. I mine these pages for photos and videos that populate my lectures with specific examples from specific locations. This visual media is especially useful to clarify what I mean when
we discuss inculturated rituals. I also draw on these resources when we compare multiple iterations of a global phenomenon, for example, in our classes about Mar-
ian apparitions or pilgrimages. The short videos, which are housed in the Educator section, are a particularly welcome resource since we have ample time to contex-
tualize and discuss each one, which is not the case when I show full-length films. VOLUME 5 ISSUE 1 | WINTER 2021
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The videos allow me to show students the diversity among Catholics, including in places that I may know little about (but that may be familiar to some of my Above: Screenshot of Practices & Values. Above right: Screenshot of Videos at catholicsandcultures.org.
Catholic heritage students). These detailed examples often prompt students to ask questions that might not have occurred to them when reading a description of the same kind of event.
The Practices & Values section also sometimes flags key issues for me that I would have otherwise neglected to include in my lectures. For example, I was perusing the site before beginning a cycle of classes on migration. Although I was planning to mention remittance payments, the site noted the importance of this money
for building projects, including churches. It was a helpful reminder not to ne-
glect the role that migration can play in changing built environments. Another issue I planned to raise was the role of returned migrants who bring new religious
ideas and practices; I had not considered internal migrations within a single country. After reading through sections of the Catholics & Cultures site, I opted to
assign the post on China and internal migration, juxtaposed with a newspaper
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Hillary Kaell | 91
article on Quebec’s urban migra-
tions in the 1960s and 1970s and the resulting closure or amalgamation of rural parishes.
The Educator section is the third
part of the site I have used—and it is the one I would like most to see expanded. I have found Marc
Loustau’s blog particularly help-
ful. We have so few examples of professors writing a play-by-play of a course in real time, including
what did or did not work. Instead, most sites provide syllabi—a useful
resource, of course, but it is akin to providing the plans of a building whereas Loustau offers valuable details about how he shifts around the furniture after mov-
ing in. The blog is especially pertinent to my Global Christianity course. In his very first post, Loustau notes that he asked his students to brainstorm words in answer
to a question: What do you think of when you hear “global” and “the globe”? It seemed like the perfect way to begin the semester, since I had been trying to think
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Screenshots of pages on Migration & Immigration and Chinese Migration at catholicsandcultures.org.
92 | The Value of Online Resources: Reflections on Teaching an Introduction to Global Christianity
of how to introduce the idea that ideological assumptions factor into our imagined connections with others.
Inspired by that post, I asked students to bring in world maps on the first day of class—anything they found online, but ideally something creative—and we dis-
cussed how the world could be imagined in multiple ways. It worked reasonably
well, but was a bit too conceptual for some of them on the first day. At our next meeting that week, I reformulated it and tried Loustau’s brainstorming exercise where he asked students to think of words associated with “the global” general-
ly and vis-à-vis Christianity. The discussion proved much more successful, since students contributed as a group to fleshing out the idea. However, they also found
it much harder to brainstorm words associated with Christianity than seems to have been the case in Loustau’s class. This difficulty likely reflects our different
environments. Whereas Loustau’s class was taught in a Catholic college setting, my students may know little about Christianity at the beginning of the semester Words that students associated with Catholic and Global in Marc Loustau's Contemporary Global Catholicism class. catholicsandcultures.org.
or may hesitate about talking ‘religion’ in a public university where they are unused
to doing so. Perhaps they were also concerned about finding the ‘right’ words (in English, no less) for ideas and rituals they know from home, especially among
Catholic immigrant and Catholic heritage students. Whatever the case, next time I teach the course I will refine the first week further by assigning an easy-to-read introduction to Christianity in preparation to our brainstorm so students can refer to ‘expert’ descriptors if they choose.
Loustau’s blog has prompted me to assign new activities too. For example, I was
aware that he included a chapter from my book about Holy Land pilgrimage in
his course and that, in advance of the class discussion, Loustau asked a student to speak with his uncle about a comparable trip. In the blog, Loustau reports that it went very well, with the student speaking for ten minutes about his uncle’s experience. It inspired me to create a new assignment for Global Christianity during
our cycle of classes on immigration. In previous years, I had assigned two sociolog-
ical articles: one argues that religion is “good” for immigrants and another argues
that it isn’t. My goal was to encourage students to think about how these scholars define the terms of debate. Is assimilation “good”? Are there benefits to retaining JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
Hillary Kaell | 93
Screenshot of Marc Loustau's blog on Vatican II's grassroots at catholicsandcultures.org.
ties with your community of origin and how can it be empirically tested? After reading Loustau’s post, I realized that my students had other resources upon which
to draw—namely, the people around them. I created a complementary assignment
where each student was tasked with interviewing someone who had immigrated, which in practice usually meant older relatives. It brought an element of ‘real’ ex-
perience that greatly enriched our classroom discussion, especially because it led students to dissect how race, class, education, luck, and variety of other factors were
integral to how immigrants talked about “religion,” and whether they assessed it to have been a positive or negative force in their lives.
At the seminar in Chicago, we were asked to reflect on whether as educators we felt
the Catholics & Cultures site could be improved. My answer was yes, but largely by
doing more of the same. I would like more questions at the bottom of posts for pro-
voking discussion in the classroom and among readers. I would like to hear more about teaching activities that are feasible for a public university classroom, which
could be scaled large or small depending on enrollment. I would love to see more videos, including those that feature aspects of everyday life. As it stands, many videos highlight liturgy, priests, and church interiors and, while they are enormously useful in my lectures on the inculturated Mass, they are less helpful for other parts
of my syllabus. For most of my students, going to Mass monthly—now down to
less than 10% of Catholics in Quebec—is not the only, or even primary, kind of ritualization in which they participate. This diversification of materials is hardly
outside of the Catholics & Cultures mandate—indeed, it speaks to the very ethos the site already so ably promotes.
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94
STEPHANIE M. WONG
Catholics & Cultures: A Panoramic View in Search of Greater Understanding
Stephanie M. Wong is an Assistant Professor of Theology/World Christianity at Valparaiso University. She teaches courses about Christianity in Asia, Latin America, Africa and in immigrant communities around the world. In her research, she focuses on Christianity in Asia, especially the Catholicism in modern China. Prior to joining the faculty at Valparaiso, Stephanie studied for her doctorate at Georgetown University, for the Master of Divinity at Yale University, and for a B.A. at Washington University in St. Louis.
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T
he Catholics & Cultures initiative offers a much-needed panorama of the variety present in Catholic life around the globe. In an era when internet
usage can reinforce siloed perceptions of the world and risks producing ho-
mogeneous echo chambers, the Catholics & Cultures website intentionally collates
diverse snapshots of lived Catholicism. In this reflection, I offer some observations about how the website already serves this purpose and how it might also help viewers make sense of the dazzling array of case studies.
CATHOLICS & CULTURES: AN ONLINE PROJECT In recent years, there has been much discussion about whether various internet-based technologies—for instance, online publishing, social media, and web
search—have brought about a more open exchange of information or simply cre-
ated more ideological distance between people groups.1 Originally, early visionaries of the internet hoped it would serve as a connective cross-cultural tool. Tim Berners-Lee, the English engineer and computer scientist who invented the World
Wide Web, explains, “I imagined the web as an open platform that would allow everyone, everywhere to share information, access opportunities, and collaborate
across geographic and cultural boundaries.”2 However, it has become apparent that
these idealistic outcomes are not the only ones. We have seen how the internet
can also erode our control over personal data, enable the spread of misinformation, and—perhaps most troublingly—give us the false impression of access to truth when in fact algorithms (such as Google’s historic PageRank or Facebook’s News
Feed algorithms) narrow our information sources and thus shape our very perceptions of what is possible and reasonable.
In this context, the Catholics & Cultures website represents a valiant effort to make the internet work for, not against, greater understanding. After all, Cathol-
icism is not immune to ideological battles. All across the World Wide Web and
social media, Catholics can be seen arguing over Catholic identity. What does it 1 2
Seth Flaxman, Sharad Goel, Justin M. Rao, “Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Online News Consumption,” Public Opinion Quarterly 80 (Special Issue, 2016): 298-320. Tim Berners-Lee, “I invented the web: Here are three things we need to change to save it,” The Guardian, March 11, 2017, accessed April 24 2020, https://www.theguardian.com /technology/2017/mar/11/tim-berners-lee-web-inventor-save-internet.
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mean to be a Catholic, especially in relation to culturally inflected debates over
hot-button issues: immigration, inter-religious encounters, the status of LGBTQ priests and laity, the rights and reparations owed to wronged minority groups, the
proper response to sexual abuse in the Church, and so on? These are extremely im-
portant conversations to have, and yet so often they play out along predictable lines. Without a conscious effort to use the World Wide Web to hear a greater range of voices, Catholics’ internet usage can simply reproduce the ideological echo-chambers of wider society within online Catholic circles.
The Catholics & Cultures project clearly aspires to break free of the ideological
battle-lines that can become entrenched in any one society. It asks us to consider
Catholics anew in a more diverse way: globally. Just as Jesus urges the disciples at the Sea of Galilee to throw their nets to the other side of the boat to catch a full load ( John 21), so too the website seems to urge the observer to turn away from his
or her familiar side of the boat and see what can be found, unexpectedly, in other waters.
STRUCTURAL CHOICES: ‘COUNTRY’ AND OTHER THEMES If a more panoramic understanding of lived Catholicism is the goal, then the current website already does much to signal and achieve it. The “About This Site” section explains the hope of transcending any singular view of Catholicism:
Most Catholics experience the faith through a single cultural lens. Yet people all around the world live and imagine it in a rich diversity of ways. Catholics
& Cultures widens the lens with a scholarly, vivid and accessible look at the religious lives and practices of contemporary Catholics in countries around the globe.3
The website’s spotlighting of so many different communities and practices makes
it hard to maintain the perception that one’s own form of Catholic practice is the only one.
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Structurally, the website organizes Catholics by “countries around the globe.”4 By adopting this geographic frame, the website avoids inadvertently reproducing ec-
clesial structures or importing a pre-conceived cultural sense of who Catholics are. For instance, the website does not have us first look to Rome or foreground the
ecclesial headquarters of the Church in any structural way. (Though where it is in-
cluded, it is listed as “Holy See” rather than “Vatican City State,” which does raise some confusion about whether the organizing principle is geographical territories
or governing jurisdictions.5) Nor does the website suggest civilizational categories to us, like a “Catholic Europe” or a “Western Christendom.” In other words, the project does not seem to stand on any particular ecclesiology or church history.
Rather, the project aspires to an ostensibly more neutral frame. Catholic communities are listed simply by geographic country. The countries are organized alphabet-
ically in English. Where this introduces geo-political complications (for instance, Hong Kong is listed separately from China but as “Hong Kong, China (SAR)” as
an acknowledgement of Hong Kong’s status under the One Country Two Systems policy), there seems to be a good faith effort to acknowledge complexities. On the whole, the geographic organization does serve the goal of breaking the viewer out of any preconceived, singular definition of who counts as Catholic. When scrolling down the list of countries, the viewer must immediately choose, “Which one?”
In addition, the website offers two other avenues for perusing the site’s content: the tabs called “Feasts & Holy Days” and “Practices & Values.” These are cru-
cial tools because they allow the viewer to consider the diversity of Catholicism through lenses that can see detail within a national community or see trends across borders. In “Feasts & Holy Days,” there are links for learning about idiosyncratic local celebrations that one might not know to look for on the country level. For
instance, the Feast of the Three Saints is celebrated with dances of prayer for fer-
tility in Obando, Philippines. This involves a pilgrimage to the particular Church of San Pascual Baylon and is not a practice of the Philippine nation as such.6 4 5 6
"About This Site." Editor's note: A change was made on the site to Vatican City State in response to this feedback. “Obando Feast of the Three Saints and Fertility,” Catholics & Cultures, accessed April 24, 2020, https://www.catholicsandcultures.org/feasts-holy-days/obando-feast-three-saints-philippines.
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Feast of the Three Saints, Obando, Philippines. Photo by Thomas M. Landy/ catholicsandcultures.org.
In “Practices & Values,”there are topics like “Charismatic Practice”and “Migration &
Immigration” which collate articles and videos from as widely ranging places as India, Romania, Sri Lanka, and Tanzania.7 For instance, the page on “Death, Mourning & the Afterlife” pulls up spotlights on animitas (roadside shrines) of Chile and
the burial practices of Chinese Catholics.8 Such juxtapositions invite cross-regional
and cultural-cultural comparison. These functions help to liberate a passive viewer from thinking too much in terms of “country”and invite him or her to consider patterns across within and across different communities.
Since currently the “Feasts & Holy Days” and “Practices & Values” sections are still
less developed than the more dominant “Country” frame, the project coordinators
might do well to expand the opportunity for thematic searches. As an instructor of World/Global Christianity, I already find the website to be a useful pedagogical
resource for introducing students to the fact of diversity within Catholicism or 7 8
“Charismatic Practice,” Catholics & Cultures, accessed April 24, 2020, https://www.catholicsand cultures.org/node/223/charismatic-practice. “Death, Mourning & Afterlife,” Catholics and Cultures, accessed April 24, 2020, https://www.cath olicsandcultures.org/practices-values/death-mourning-afterlife. JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
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Roadside shrines across Chile called animitas honor sites where the body and soul separated. Photo by Thomas M. Landy/ catholicsandcultures.org.
helping them research a community they are already aware of. For instance, if I
have a Mexican-American student eager to understand the religiosity of her immigrant grandparents, it is easy enough to point her to the “Mexico” section as a good
resource for basic statistics and articles of sample devotions.9 However, I am most eager for my students to think thematically about Christianity as a global phe-
nomenon. For instance, immigration: how do religious networks shape immigrant communities, forging ties between those who move and those who stay behind? Or charismatic prayer and practices: to what extent does Charismatic Catholicism
draw on or militate against folk or indigenous religious sensibilities? If viewers could search Catholics & Cultures by a more exhaustive set of themes to pull up all
the tagged pictures, videos and articles pertaining to that theme, the website could serve as a rich research database indeed!
PEDAGOGICAL OPPORTUNITY: A HEURISTIC TOOLKIT This call for more extensive thematization brings me to my final observation, namely that the Catholics & Cultures project could serve as a platform for ongoing
conversation about how to understand lived Catholicism in all its global diversity. In its current form, the website undertakes the ambitious tasks of a) collecting
information and audio-visual snapshots from communities around the world, and then b) making this accessible online. No doubt, the organizers and contributors
have enough work cut out for them in simply continuing to create content. There 9
“Mexico,” Catholics and Cultures, accessed April 24, 2020, https://www.catholicsandcultures.org /mexico.
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are still numerous countries not yet covered (the United States, Canada, Russia, Indonesia, and others) and probably innumerable rituals and practices of interest still to feature. Nonetheless, if I might dream big for a moment, I can imagine a
version of Catholics & Cultures that not only presents such data but gives the viewer some tools for understanding it.
The late Jonathan Z. Smith once challenged scholars of religion not to avoid the
crucial task of interpretation. He was concerned that scholars too often research a case study and then simply present it, offering their data as though it stands repre-
sentative of something without ever engaging the second-order question of what
that might be. Smith urged scholars to make a heuristic contribution, to offer some way of thinking that takes a previously unintelligible subject and renders it more intelligible:
The cognitive power of any translation, model, map, generalization or re-description—as, for example, in the imagination of ‘religion’—is, by this under-
standing, a result of its difference from the subject matter in question and not
its congruence… Too much work by scholars of religion takes the form of a paraphrase, our style of ritual repetition, which is a particularly weak mode of translation, insufficiently different from its subject matter for purposes of thought. To summarize: a theory, a model, a conceptual category, a generalization cannot be simply the data writ large.10
This challenge has often haunted my own research and writing in the area of Chinese Catholicism, as I agonize over how to both present the material in a respon-
sibly accurate way and also re-present it with interpretive value added. Yet I take Smith’s challenge to heart because, on those occasions that I have come to greater clarity, that agonizing process is also the most satisfying. To the extent that we can gain an understanding of “Catholics and cultures” and work out what the meaning of that connective “and” might be, we will have learned something truly valuable.
Moreover, the task of interpretation may well be unavoidable—especially in the 10 J.Z. Smith, “A Twice-told Tale: The History of the History of Religion’s History,” in Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 371-2. JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
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classroom. Any project that sets out to teach about something so complex as lived religion on a global scale will have to adopt organizing principles for the sake of
coherent communication. This quickly became apparent to me in my first semesters
of teaching as a professor of global/world Christianity when drafting and testing out syllabi. The sheer variety of possible different case studies to include could seem
delightful, colorful and patterned to me but overwhelming, chaotic and even disconcerting to my students. These were generally curious and open-minded students
who could appreciate the intrinsic fascination of different Christian communities living out their faith in distinct ways. But they did not hesitate to ask, with a poignant sort of curiosity, what could be said in the midst of that diversity: was there
was anything held in common by Christians around the world, did it made sense to
talk of a singular Catholicism or Church at all, were there were any patterns to be discerned in expressions of faith across cultures, and why or why not? While at first I was hesitant to tackle such large and loaded questions, I could not fault the stu-
dents for asking them. Indeed, these were the sorts of questions that my syllabus, chock full of geographically far-flung and culturally defamiliarizing case studies, had implicitly begged them to ask.
I have come to believe that if I want my students to think critically about our material, it is not enough to show them interesting samples of Christianity around the
world. My role also involves suggesting “translations, models, maps, generalizations or re-descriptions” that students might try as thinking tools for making sense of the data.11 Of course, any such model or generalization is provisional, and some are
more useful than others for purposes of thought. However, as the above discussion of the website’s structure shows, we can never get away from organizing frames
entirely. We employ categorizing concepts like “country” because we have to think and communicate in terms of something.
As the project continues, the website would do well to host more explicit reflection on the diversity of lived Catholicism. What second-order heuristic tools might do the least obscuring and the most clarifying for our understanding of global Cathol-
icism? What does the global scale gain for our view of global Catholicism that we 11 Smith, “A Twice-told Tale," 371-372. VOLUME 5 ISSUE 1 | WINTER 2021
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would not see on a smaller scale? Teachers of world/global Christianity must offer
conceptual support for thinking about the diversity within our tradition, for ex-
posure alone may not bring about appreciation. There is always the risk that when people apprehend something they do not recognize, they might view its difference as an automatic threat rather than a potential boon.
CONCLUSION The Catholics & Cultures website currently offers an impressive array of snapshots
of Catholics in different cultures. For those of us who would like to see the internet bring the world’s people into greater connection and awareness of each other, this
site exemplifies the internet at its best. Until the advent of the commercial airline flights and the World Wide Web, few Catholics in history had the opportunity to
see any expression of Catholicism beyond that of their own local community. The Catholics & Cultures project has taken advantage of these modern capabilities to successfully “widen the lens.”
When viewers peruse the Catholics & Cultures site, they are likely to encounter something new—perhaps they will see countries listed that they had never even
considered might have a Catholic presence, or watch videos of processions and dances of a sort they have never participated in, or hear the Mass with music in an
unfamiliar style. This opportunity to experience something novel online is extreme-
ly valuable because it is rare. Search engines generate results based on what others have already clicked on or linked. Internet-based news sites often lead viewers to focus on the same sorts of political and economic events day after day. Social media platforms encourage the sound-biting and recycling of memes. These aspects
of digital life threaten to close down our range of thought and limit us to familiar impressions and ideas. The Catholics & Cultures website, however, asks the viewer
to consider new features of lived Catholicism and to embark on the brave journey of discerning what that diversity means for Catholic identity today.
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WORKS CITED Berners-Lee, Tim. “I invented the web: Here are three things we need to change to save it.” The Guardian. March 11, 2017. Accessed April 24, 2020. https:// www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/11/tim-berners-lee-web-inventor-save-internet.
Catholics & Cultures. Accessed April 24, 2020. https://www.catholicsandcultures. org/about-site.
Flaxman, Seth, Sharad Goel, Justin M. Rao. “Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Online News Consumption.” Public Opinion Quarterly 80 (Special Issue, 2016): 298-320. https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfw006.
Smith, Jonathan Z. Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
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THOMAS M. LANDY
Catholics & Cultures as an Act of Improvisation: A Response
Thomas M. Landy is Director of the Rev. Michael C. McFarland, S.J. Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture at the College of the Holy Cross. A sociologist with a specialization in the sociology of religion, his primary research is in global Catholicism, and he founded and leads research on Catholics & Cultures. He has conducted research in 30 countries and authored nearly 250 articles for the site. He also is founder and director of Collegium, a consortium of 65 Catholic colleges in the U.S. and Canada that sponsors an annual summer colloquy for faculty on faith and intellectual life. Landy is editor of As Leaven for the World: Catholic Reflections on Faith, Vocation and the Intellectual Life (Franklin, WI: Sheed and Ward, 2001), and with Karen Eifler, Becoming Beholders: Cultivating a Sacramental Imagination in the Classroom (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2014). He is recipient of the John Henry Newman Medal and the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities' Presidents' Distinguished Service Award. JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
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I
’m extraordinarily grateful for the opportunity to engage in a sustained way— at the Journal of Global Catholicism 2019 scholars’ workshop in Chicago, and
through the essays from some of those participants published in this volume—
in conversation about the work of Catholics & Cultures. The Journal of Global
Catholicism and the Catholics & Cultures website are linked as elements of a common initiative but serve different functions. This issue of the Journal is a reminder
of how each can help the other fill its respective role. The public nature of the Cath-
olics & Cultures website and the ongoing engagement I try to have with people from the places I write about ensures that the website continuously benefits from feedback, but the opportunity to engage scholars about the work in a sustained dis-
cussion is an invaluable privilege.1 I’m grateful to Mathew Schmalz for conceiving and organizing this opportunity, and to all who contributed to it.
Perhaps the best place to begin my response is where Mathew Schmalz’s introductory article ends, with an argument that the potential of Catholics & Cultures
“will be most meaningfully realized not around the seminar tables of elite aca-
demic conferences but amidst the desks—and computer monitors—of ordinary classrooms.” I take this in no way to disparage our great Chicago discussions, but to call attention back to the original and enduring intention of the Catholics &
Cultures initiative. As befits the purpose of this Journal issue2, my response will try to address both pedagogical and scholarly implications.
Catholics & Cultures is, in significant part, a response to my own experience in
the classroom designing and teaching an undergraduate course on contemporary global Catholicism. That experience laid bare how large the gaps in scholarly literature are, and how far short the Western academy has fallen at trying to under-
stand Catholics on their own terms in their manifold contexts. Certainly there were an array of contextual theologies to turn to, but as a sociologist my interests were much more ethnographic, and deliberately not normative. In social-scientific 1 2
Though I conceived and have long been the primary author for Catholics & Cultures research, I’m by no means the only one. In this essay, I won’t try to speak for other authors, but can speak about the broad direction and priorities that I’ve set for those authors. Mathew N. Schmalz, “Introducing Catholics & Cultures: Ethnography, Encyclopedia, Cyborg,” Journal of Global Catholicism 5, no. 1 (Winter 2021): 4.
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literature, I could draw on works that painted a broad-brush picture of the demographic shifts in the Church today but told us nothing about the lives and practices
behind the statistics. I could also turn to a large number of historical studies of
global Catholicism. The much smaller number of studies I found on contemporary
global Catholicism, insightful as they were, were often written primarily for other scholar-specialists, presuming a great deal of contextual background that made
them challenging to teach in a survey course. Some works purporting to be about
contemporary global Catholicism proved mostly to be historical, falling flat when
it came to the contemporary story. Few put lay Catholics in the center of the story, as agents helping to shape their own ways of being. I wanted resources that would help students understand and imagine a broader context, without simply projecting
their own experiences about Catholicism into new spaces, to thus enable them to engage specialized scholarly work more fully. As a scholar committed to the study
of lived religion, I wanted students to be able to understand the beliefs and practices of Catholics in any context on those Catholics’ terms, not only mine or the American academy’s.
As Director of the McFarland Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture at the College of the Holy Cross, I was extraordinarily fortunate to have significant institutional support to launch an initiative that could address these concerns. I was
also able to imagine it differently because of the unparalleled opportunity that the
World Wide Web offered to rethink what the project could be and how to deliver it. I was fortunate to be able to rely on the talents of Danielle Kane to design a visually compelling site.3
My initial research travels shifted my thinking about the web from opportunity to ethical imperative, as I grew more determined that the benefits of the research
should not only flow one way, from the rest of the world to American students, but should be as accessible as possible in the places written about on the site. On those trips, I learned how often the Western-published books that I turned to were
inaccessible, because of cost, in the very countries they were written about. My 3
Thanks are due as well to Troy Thompson of Daedal Creations, who is responsible for the architecture of the site, and to numerous colleagues in Information Technology Services at the College of the Holy Cross. JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
Thomas M. Landy | 107
audience needed to be not only American students, but a wider world. Writing for multiple audiences is a challenging task. Evidence of competing tugs
to serve more than one audience accounts for some of the concerns raised in the articles in this issue of the Journal. Our authors were asked, appropriately, to think about how it serves their particular student audiences. Trying to write for both
American college students and a global audience has raised questions about what one can assume readers need as background and about how to provide the sort of
material that serves a classroom audience without scaring away readers who might be put off by scholarly digression and preoccupations. In 2020, just about one-third
of the 256,000 visitors to the Catholics & Cultures website were from the United
States. Fewer than 18% of the additional 333,000 YouTube views came from the U.S. Nearly half of the website views came from the 150 countries usually counted
as “developing” or “under-developed.”4 The multiplicity of audiences is a challenge to keep in mind as we think about what the site can be.
RECOGNIZING DESCRIPTIONS OF VOICE AND CHALLENGES As an outsider to most of the cultures I’ve written about—especially important
where I know that a people’s experience has been diminished by outside writers— and because I want to foreground people’s understandings of their own cultural
world, I often share the articles with some of people I write about before they are
published. I want to be sure that they recognize themselves in the accounts I give of
them. The articles in this volume by Mathew Schmalz and Marc Loustau, who have
the longest experience with the initiative, pass a similar test. It’s easy to recognize my goals in them. Like ethnographers whose work is enriched by more time spent with their subjects, their success might be due to the number of collaborations we have had. I see in each of their articles a more sophisticated articulation and extrapola-
tion than I would have used, advancing the work in ways I hadn’t fully considered. 4
Though all such counts are contested, I relied on the list OECD member countries (https://www. oecd.org/about/document/list-oecd-member-countries.htm, accessed January 29, 2021) to make the point. Data are derived from Google Analytics, accessed January 29, 2021. YouTube views, though to a smaller number of countries were even more skewed outside the US and OECD realm.
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One way that both help clarify my own self-understanding is their comments about methodologically avoiding “simple binary opposition” as Schmalz puts it.5
From the beginning I was concerned to write and to organize the site in a way that made it clear that U.S. Catholicism had no reason to claim any normative role as a
basis for comparison. The decision to not simply write for an American audience necessitated and reinforced the rejection of comparative binaries. Though I had
never named it as such, the comparative “triangulation” method that Loustau cites aptly names the strategy behind this work.6 That triangulation, insofar as it can continue to develop, can help address a concern that I share with Anita Houck: not
wanting students to “other” or exoticize the people they encounter on the site, nor
to look at difference in such a way that lets them “erase too much.”7 The goal is to lead them to see parallels, but not conclude that “we’re all the same.”
As Loustau intuits, I determined from the beginning not to impose an American sex-and-gender-centered culture wars worldview on it, but rather to find out where
my interlocutors took me.8 Nonetheless, the longue-durée perspective is undoubt-
edly an authorial voice that I bring to the work, given my own education, much as I’ve wanted to think that I put my subjects’ voice and interpretations frontand-center. Some of the most interesting navigational challenges I encountered in
fieldwork entailed separating worldviews on sex and gender, given that the people I learned from onsite often compared themselves to what they knew about American society, given who they were engaging.
Stephanie Wong and Mara Brecht help capture the logic behind the structure
of the Catholics by Country section of Catholics & Cultures site.9 Whatever the 5 6
7 8 9
Mathew N. Schmalz, “Introducing Catholics & Cultures," 5. Marc Roscoe Loustau, “Teaching Sexuality on the Catholics & Cultures Website: A Refreshing Turn toward the Longue Durée,” Journal of Global Catholicism 5, no. 1 (Winter 2021): 78, 76, 77, citing Michael M. J. Fischer, Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003): 5-7. Anita Houck, “Ritual among the Scilohtac: Global Catholicism, the Nacirema, and Interfaith Studies,” Journal of Global Catholicism 5, no. 1 (Winter 2021): 47. Loustau, “Teaching Sexuality on the Catholics & Cultures Website,” 67. Stephanie M. Wong, “Catholics & Cultures: A Panoramic View in Search of Greater Understanding,”Journal of Global Catholicism 5, no. 1 (Winter 2021): 97; Mara Brecht, “A Widened Angle of View: Teaching Theology and Racial Embodiment,” Journal of Global Catholicism 5, no. 1 (Winter 2021): 22-28. JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
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challenges of organizing under the banners of nation states not least from my perspective because cultural and national boundaries do not neatly overlap, one of the
primary ways of accessing the site is through an alphabetical list of countries, without reference to typology or categorization, or even a breakdown by continent.10 Though the site could thus be accused of ignoring power differentials surely at
work in the global Church, I prefer to think that it confounds the ways that readers
may be accustomed to think of Catholicism in terms of centers and peripheries, “real” ways of being Catholic, and adaptations that are somehow less authentic.
In the same way that “sex and gender” is not a distinct category on the website, but a theme interwoven throughout, so too race is not treated as a specific analytical
category. Even categories like “African,” “Asian,” “Latin,” or “European” Catholicism are avoided. The site is dedicated to exploring local cultural identities rath-
er than aggregate ones; more interested in understanding, say, the particularities
of Igbo Catholicism than using it to stand in for a broad category of “African” Catholicism. I am interested in understanding how racial identities impact beliefs
and practice. But I’ve more often hoped that by not replicating and reifying them, it can help to “break the hold white racialization has” on so many Catholics’ imaginations, something that Anita Houck’s pedagogies using the site show is possible and intriguing to students.11
Kaell’s point that we have to help students see that “Catholics do have many rituals, but these do not make them incapable of ‘rational’ thinking” certainty de-
scribes one of the purposes of the site.12 Every encounter that I’ve had so far with ordinary Catholics about miracles, including those in what we might describe as
more “enchanted” cultural contexts, is with people whose mindset also turned to science-based solutions where possible. The people who talk about miracles to me
always go to hospitals as they are able. Attention to rituals is one way that we can 10 For other critiques of using the nation state as a primary lens, see Laura Elder, “Focus on the Busy Intersections of Culture and Cultural Change,” Journal of Global Catholicism 5, no. 1 (Winter 2021): 33 11 Brecht, “A Widened Angle of View,” 28; Houck, “Ritual among the Scilohtac,” 51-54. 12 Hillary Kaell, “The Value of Online Resources: Reflections on Teaching an Introduction to Global Christianity,” Journal of Global Catholicism 5, no. 1 (Winter 2021): 88. VOLUME 5 ISSUE 1 | WINTER 2021
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help students think of Catholicism as more than doctrine, as they should.13 Kaell’s comment also raises another issue, about the challenge of writing about ritual. I have yet to write up an entry for Lourdes, for several reasons, but encoun-
tered a specific challenge that stays with me: On a visit there, I befriended some young men who had driven overnight from a northern Italian Catholic drug rehabilitation center where they were hoping to change their lives. They fit no one’s stereotype of Lourdes pilgrims, which may be what drew me to them. Yet they
were completely enchanted by the experience, eager for help and intercession in their lives. A little while after they returned from the sacred baths, I asked one of
them what it was like. “È fredo” he replied. And that was it. “It was cold.” I asked a
little more about it, and got some details about the process, but very little, in words, though their expression made clear that it was moving to them. Later, a French
pilgrim answered the same question, “C’est froid.” You can guess what a Spaniard told me. Whether in a ritual bath at Lourdes, or when talking to people who pray
by dancing at La Tirana, I encounter particular difficulty at times over the need to turn powerful experiences into explanations that can be articulated in words. No doubt this is not an original observation, but it is nonetheless very real to me.
The videos on the site, as Kaell acknowledges, certainly favor liturgical and more
spectacular, seasonal ritual events over quotidian forms of religiosity in daily life. Clearly, daily, quiet, interior expressions of Catholic life are more difficult to record
and to explain, but no less important for the study of lived religion. The web loves
spectacle, and spectacles have drawn attention to the site. For American (and likely
Canadian) students, such spectacle also points to an aspect of life that is largely missing from their experiences of Catholicism, which often other than through
Mass attendance, limits religious practice to the interior and private realms. As Houck notes, citing Yadlapati, students too often “consider anything they identify
as ritual to be less than spiritual.”14 Even if more private experiences have yet to 13 Brecht, “A Widened Angle of View,” 23. 14 Madhuri M. Yadlapati, “Dharma and Moksha, Works and Faith: Comparatively Engaging the Tension between Ethics and Spirituality,” in Comparative Theology in the Millennial Classroom: Hybrid Identities, Negotiated Boundaries, ed. Mara Brecht and Reid. B. Locklin (New York and London: Routledge, 2016), 188 as cited in Houck, “Ritual among the Scilohtac,” 48. JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
Thomas M. Landy | 111
be adequately visualized on the site, the expression of so many public forms of Emotion overtakes
pilgrims dancing for the
religiosity gives American students another context to compare to and to question. Virgen in La Tirana, Chile, for reasons they often
One surprise that emerged from our conference and these articles is the request can't articulate. Photo by
that the site include more on Catholicism in the United States, to help students to Thomas M. Landy/ see through their own culture and of course to understand America’s own plural- catholicsandcultures.org. ism.15 Given that there are so many enormous vacuums to fill in our understanding
of Catholic life in the rest of the globe, this has never seemed a priority. Writing
about them can, I see, help students to understand how the Catholicism they know is context-driven, perhaps putting to rest the assumption that leads to labeling other people’s practice, but not one’s own, as “syncretic.”
Until we add more info about American Catholicism to the site, there is still an
opportunity to use the examples from other cultures as a source for getting Amer-
ican students to interrogate their own cultures and cultural assumptions: teachers can use it to encourage students to question the normativity and limits of their
own culture. If students find it so strange that teens would devote themselves to dancing for the Virgin at La Tirana, ask them what about their own culture gives 15 Houck, “Ritual among the Scilohtac,” 55; and Elder, “Focus on the Busy Intersections of Culture and Cultural Change,” 35. VOLUME 5 ISSUE 1 | WINTER 2021
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them the attitudes that they presume are “natural” for all teens. Rather than ask why northern Chilean teens are passionate about dancing, ask why their culture
tells them not to do it, rather than let them think that they make such decisions naturally or freely.
NAVIGATING SCHOLARLY EXPECTATIONS As I approached the Chicago workshop and this essay volume, a lot of my own
reflection has been focused on the ways that the website conforms to, or chooses to set aside, conventional scholarly expectations. How do the site’s entries—written
with more than one audience in mind—conform to the standard expectations of scholars, particularly when it comes to invoking theory and developing cross-cultural categorizational themes? Catholics & Cultures intends to bring scholarly rigor but also, not least because of its short-form pieces, disappoints them.
Schmalz aptly takes up one of those conventions, reflection on my own place in the ethnography, identifying best why I adopt the stance that I do, which is to largely
remove myself as an explicit character from the text.16 My embodiment as a 6’4” pale White man makes the need to reflect constantly on such questions blatantly
obvious. I literally stand out. That’s true whether at La Tirana, where I was much
taller than almost any other of 200,000 people and where height, like skin-color, was referenced as a sign of the socioeconomic status of the dancers, or at Fr. Mbaka’s massive all night prayer service, where I stood out so much among the tens of
thousands in the Nigerian crowd that my presence was never not apparent, and often commented on, even by Fr. Mbaka from the stage. I was also welcomed in an
exceptional way, which also gave me insight into the power of hospitality, belonging and community that night.
Inescapable as those challenges are on the ground, as a writer my goal is still to center attention on the lives of lay people. I’m increasingly cognizant how difficult
scholars find this—whether distracted by a need to focus on their own selves as actors in the discourse, on elites as they impact the lives of lay people, or on the
primacy of academic theory. Each of those tasks is important, but it is hard to do 16 Schmalz, “Introducing Catholics & Cultures,” 5. JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
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them simultaneously, or in short-form pieces. Ordinary readers are seldom interested in long discourses on the ethnographer’s
gaze, even if those questions are never absent from my own writing. And internet
readers’ attention span is known to be shorter. Readers give up more quickly if an article doesn’t seem to be written for their needs. Focus on the ethnographer’s gaze
signals quickly that this is an article for anthropologists, not for ordinary readers. On the web, I don’t have the luxury of burying the lede. My choice has been to signal that I am aware of the challenge my role plays but to not spend time unpacking
each instance. I’d hope, in fact, that conversation about that could be a topic for conversation in the classroom. One of the reasons that interlocutors often seem
willing to spend time with me is precisely because they respond favorably to the idea the site could be a good way to help others throughout the world understand their own way of practicing and believing. Their participation is inevitably an act of sharing and performing.
Laura Elder suggests a way that the site could be expanded, or improved, from
her perspective, by focusing attention by means of “reorganization and increased attention on the dynamics of cultural change,” a priority in anthropology today.17 17 Elder, “Focus on the Busy Intersections of Culture and Cultural Change,” 31. VOLUME 5 ISSUE 1 | WINTER 2021
Conspicuous in the crowd, the author was invited on stage during Fr. Mbaka's all night prayer service in Nigeria. Photo by Thomas M. Landy/ catholicsandcultures.org.
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Certainly it is possible to refocus on transnational networks, or processes of change. Global Catholic stories, however, have long been skewed to focus on transnational
movements and actors, neglecting local particularities and local actors as shapers of their own lives. The Catholic Church may be, after all, the transnational, global
institution par excellence. It seems to me that the work of identifying the many
vernaculars that are often lost in those transnational and temporal discourses is the most important contribution Catholics & Cultures can make. The evidence is clear
that many of these vernaculars have been, if not lost, rendered invisible beyond the local areas where they are rooted. Given that they still take the site’s readers—including scholars—by surprise, it seems that there is still a great deal of work to be done first on the vernacular front.
The emphasis on temporal change that Elder suggests is one possible route (also explored to a limited degree in each entry), but again, this is actually a well-trod
route, even if Elder wants to do it in new ways. We are all well-accustomed to thinking about religious change over time. Stories about temporal change in Catholicism are legion. Comparative studies are few.
I’m conscious, too, that the site will disappoint readers who believe that scholarly
discourse equals critical discourse. Ordinary people seldom see themselves in the
critical light that critical scholars might want, and the site is dedicated primarily to explaining how lay Catholics in different contexts see and understand their re-
ligious worlds. The site offers examples that could well be thought about critically in scholarship and the classroom, but an important first step to learning is understanding and representing fairly.
Nowhere do I feel more acutely the sense of having disappointed scholarly expec-
tations than in the relationship between my own work on the site, and theory. I
was drawn into the sociology of religion as a field because of an interest in theory, which led me to choose Peter Berger as a mentor. In graduate school, it was hammered home that data without theory isn’t sociology.
At the same time, like Berger and others, I have had to come to grips with the
failure of grand theorizing, which has made me much more cautious about theJOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
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ory. There are lots of theoretical perspectives to disappoint—variously held dear
by anthropologists, religious studies scholars, theologians, and sociologists, often esteemed in part as markers of disciplinary boundaries and identity.
Catholics & Cultures is certainly vulnerable to the charge that it is undertheorized, or under-interpreted.18 Yet I also bump up against the realization that a funda-
mental problem with theorization is that it is quick to make conclusions about the world based on very partial information. Secularization theory proved radically flawed because it universalized an experience centered largely in Europe, and projected it onto the rest of the world. Catholics & Cultures is a chance to build theory
from the ground up, moving it to the background, allowing it to be bolstered by the
opportunity for it to be formulated with a greater range of human experience in mind. Interpreting what a ritual or practice represents may need, for now, to entail ascription in small and localized ways.
For all these challenges, the site certainly stands out because it opens up new experiences and ways of being seldom before accessible to users. In that way, it is a first step, indeed an improvisational step.
CATEGORIZATION: PRACTICES & VALUES, THEMES AND VARIATION Clearly, as a number of papers here have argued, thematic categorization, and draw-
ing threads across themes, is a valued exercise and still a challenging one. Currently thematization is most fully addressed in a large section of the site titled “Practices & Values,” a section that Kaell says she turns to most often, but that other papers
ask for more from.19 I concur that the classificatory scaffolding is “rather conven-
tional” but continue to struggle with how best to classify in ways useful for both academic and non-academic audiences.20 Some of the challenge lies in how viewers come to the site, through Google searches that don’t likely seek out information
using the frames and concepts that scholars might like. Scholars may be interested 18 Wong, “Catholics & Cultures,”100. 19 Schmalz, “Introducing Catholics & Cultures,” 5-7; Wong, “Catholics & Cultures” 95-99; Kaell, “The Value of Online Resources,” 89. 20 Schmalz, “Introducing Catholics & Cultures,” 5. VOLUME 5 ISSUE 1 | WINTER 2021
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in themes like embodiment, but it doesn’t seem as though too many others search for “embodiment and Catholicism.” Other ways to search, say, for indigenous folk practices risk marginalizing those practices as somehow less Catholic.21
We surely have to think about how to find tagging and categorization tools that are useful in tracing themes across cultures in comparative fashion. The sort of mo-
tif-tracing Schmalz suggests could have a place as a distinct scholarly tool under
“Educator Resources,” with thematic links more suitable to academic than popular readers.22 Whether or how to trace any “routes” that link these remains a more difficult, vexing question, perhaps work for a different project.23 Some of the ear-
liest-posted articles could also be revisited to build in links to later-posted ones, which tend, for obvious reasons, to have more links. Certainly on the Catholics & Cultures site, categorizing needs to be a flexible, improvisational task, something that tagging may be suitable for.
IMPROVISATION IN ACTION: GROWING A FIELD, AND TEACHING WHAT WE’RE NOT TRAINED TO TEACH Mara Brecht’s essay addresses important ways that Catholics & Cultures could be useful in the many theology classes ”that are not designed to be courses in global
Catholicism.”24 In fact, the great majority of courses in theology and religious stud-
ies are not designed as courses in global Catholicism, but more and more faculty seem to recognize the need to broaden the lens to include it. Hillary Kaell identifies the challenge: teaching global Catholicism entails teaching about contexts that
we probably don’t know much—or enough—about. When engaging Catholics & Cultures material, faculty are often learning at the same time as their students, as she does.25
Obviously we should teach out of expertise. But for anyone who peruses the site enough, it also ought to become clear how much even we experts don’t know. I’ve 21 Wong, “Catholics & Cultures,” 99. 22 Schmalz, “Introducing Catholics & Cultures,” 7. 23 Schmalz, “Introducing Catholics & Cultures,” 7; Elder, “Focus on the Busy Intersections of Culture and Cultural Change,” 30-36. 24 Brecht, “A Widened Angle of View,” 24. 25 Kaell, “The Value of Online Resources,” 85. JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
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regularly spoken to prominent scholars of Catholicism who are completely startled to learn of the very existence of some huge feast or regionally typical ritual featured
on the site. Teachers need in-depth studies and theories to make sense of the pluralism, but these are few. Moreover, I regard it as problematic to rely on theories
developed without reference to so much of Catholic lived experience. The broad work that Catholics & Cultures fosters is, as I see it, an inherently improvisational enterprise. We want to teach about it, but we have to learn something about it as we go along.
In fall 2020, having realized that my wings were clipped and that much of the research that I wanted to do would have to be on hold, I took the opportunity to
return to the classroom to a newly designed Ethnography of Global Catholicism class, a late curricular entry that turned out to be a relatively small, Zoom-based
seminar. The course was designed to have students do their own ethnographic
research using the tools available in COVID-19 time. Happy as I was with the course, the one real longing that I noticed in course evaluations seemed to jibe with Stephanie Wong’s request that I more thoroughly synthesize the Catholics & Cultures materials that I taught from.26 Students were looking to me to heavily interpret and thematize, while I wanted to show them ethnographic examples
from the site and ask them to grapple with them, to help them imagine their own
ethnographies without turning their work into a search for examples that confirm pre-existing theories or categories.
That late-developed course itself was an act of improvisation, a sort of workshop
in the art and practice of ethnography. In the end, I got them, mostly successfully, to live with the variety and multiplicity that they saw, and to improvise with me.
Improvisation remains at the heart of the website, too. The articles in this Journal
issue reveal what a challenge that poses, but also remind me to own up to the improvisational nature of the work. The methodological triangulation that we dis-
cussed earlier is an act of improvisation, an additive process increasingly possible as I encounter the range of possibilities that I might not have imagined. So too is 26 The course also used scholarly books and examples, but I interpreted their request to refer to the website. VOLUME 5 ISSUE 1 | WINTER 2021
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theorization. The challenge is how much to posit interim, smaller scale theoriza-
tion, when I would still like to see many of the 30 countries further fleshed out, and more than 175 countries are left to be written about. Certainly those countries will yield more than just variation on already-known themes. Theory will have to be built from the ground up, provisionally, incrementally, improvisationally.
What will faculty do when they encounter forms of Catholic life that don’t fit their own categorizations and prior theoretical and pedagogical goals? I’ve been sur-
prised, judging by what I can find out about website traffic using Google analytics, that some articles about what I take to be the most original, even unique aspects of
Catholic life (the dances at La Tirana are one example) have not had the traction the way others have, despite being promoted on our main page. I suspect that it’s
because they don’t clearly reflect the stories that people want to tell, or know how
to tell, or want told to them. This is true for both popular readers and in the classroom. The question, “What do we do with this information?” does hang over stories
like that, and thus the whole project. Do things like this, even if they draw huge participation, simply remain as “exceptions” and “outliers,” thereby marginalizing the people for whom they are central?
I believe that in addition to what we can teach students out of the accumulated
knowledge that we inherit from our disciplines, some of the best teaching happens when we are pushed to improvise, to think in public with our students. Many of
these essays provide great examples of that work, and it will take more of that thinking in public to teach global Catholicism and to improve the site and grow the field.
I understand Catholics & Cultures not only as a tool and a resource. I also think of it as an invitation to do that work together, to have others join in interpreting and categorizing what the site brings to light.
Though I agree with Schmalz, as I quoted in the outset of this article, that the
primary value of the site may be in the classroom, I haven’t given up on the notion that the project can change what happens in elite academic circles, though I don’t have a particular agenda for how that should happen. Elite conversations ought JOURNAL OF GLOBAL CATHOLICISM
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to be open to change upon encountering new data. I am convinced that to the
degree the site calls attention to important elements of Catholic life that are heretofore ignored, Theology and Religious Studies should change by exposure to the
experiences brought to light. And I don’t expect that what’s left to find are merely variations on already known themes.
The field has a long way to grow. This issue of the Journal of Global Catholicism, like the Chicago conference, is a welcome step in that direction.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Fischer, Michael M. J. Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv125jj6d.
OECD. "Our Global Reach." Accessed January 29, 2021. http://www.oecd.org/ about/members-and-partners.
Schmalz, Mathew N., ed. "Catholics & Cultures: Scholarship for the Pedagogy of Global Catholicism." Journal of Global Catholicism 5, no. 1 (Winter 2021).
Yadlapati, Madhuri M. “Dharma and Moksha, Works and Faith: Comparatively Engaging the Tension between Ethics and Spirituality.” In Comparative Theol-
ogy in the Millennial Classroom: Hybrid Identities, Negotiated Boundaries, edited by Mara Brecht and Reid. B. Locklin. New York and London: Routledge, 2016. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315718279-14.
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