The story of American religion is usually told around the twin pillars of denominational religion and Evangelical Christianity, as if that were the whole story. Jeff Kripal suggests that there is a third major pillar. The story of American religion and its long experiment with a “democracy of Spirit” cannot be told without taking this pillar into account. This Third Way has gone by many names and carried many different nuances—“mystical,” “spiritual,” “metaphysical,”—many of which are generally misunderstood or underappreciated. Jeff’s conviction is that any truly practical spiritual or effective mystical life in the modern world requires a clear understanding of the larger story from which terms like “spirituality” and “mysticism” developed, and in which they still make the most sense. As a mystical religion, Quakerism is a part of this larger story.
Jeff says, “Once individuals are thoroughly grounded in the full sweep and depth of this American story, they can then become more effective social actors and more informed citizens, grounded now in a deep democracy of Spirit that is completely immune from the fundamentalist fallacies of equating God and country, church and state.” As part of his presentation, Jeff will highlight the religious openings of a few historical figures, and look at how they translated these mystical and spiritual experiences into practical social forms.
Jeffrey J. Kripal (Ph. D., University of Chicago, 1993) is the J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religious Studies and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Rice University, Houston, Texas. His areas of interest include the comparative erotics and ethics of mystical literature, American countercultural translations of Asian religions, and the history of Western esotericism from ancient gnosticism to the New Age. Jeff is the author of many books. His most recent is Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (Chicago, 2007)
Complete conference and registration information will be available early 2010.