The Absorption Hypothesis: Learning To Hear God In .
The Absorption Hypothesis: Learning to Hear Godin Evangelical ChristianityT. M. Luhrmann, Howard Nusbaum, and Ronald ThistedABSTRACT In this article, we use a combination of ethnographic data and empirical methods to identify a processcalled “absorption,” which may be involved in contemporary Christian evangelical prayer practice (and in the practicesof other religions). The ethnographer worked with an interdisciplinary team to identify people with a proclivity for“absorption.” Those who seemed to have this proclivity were more likely to report sharper mental images, greaterfocus, and more unusual spiritual experience. The more they prayed, the more likely they were to have theseexperiences and to embrace fully the local representation of God. Our results emphasize learning, a social processto which individuals respond in variable ways, and they suggest that interpretation, proclivity, and practice are allimportant in understanding religious experience. This approach builds on but differs from the approach to religionwithin the culture-and-cognition school.Keywords: proclivity, absorption, Christianity, anthropology of religion, prayerHow does God become real to people when God isunderstood to be invisible and immaterial, as God iswithin the Christian tradition? This is not the question ofwhether God is real but, rather, how people learn to makethe judgment that God is present. Such a God is not accessibleto the senses. When one talks to that God, one can neithersee his face nor hear his voice. One cannot touch him. Howcan one be confident that he is there?Many people comfortably assume that training and talent are important in many areas of life: ballet, violin playing, and tennis—any of the arts or sports. It seems moreawkward to talk about talent and training when it comesto experiencing God, at least in Judaism and Christianity.Those who are religious might find it awkward because totalk of either talent or training seems to suggest that humancharacteristics, not God, explain the voice they heard orthe vision they saw. In the Hebrew Bible, those who hearGod sometimes stress their reluctance to be chosen for theirprophetic role. Their flat refusal to think of themselves assuitable adds to the reader’s faith in their authenticity. “Thenthe word of the Lord came unto me,” says Jeremiah, “saying,before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and beforethou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.Then said I, Ah, LordGOD! behold, I cannot speak: for I am a child” (Jeremiah1:4–6).And yet it may be the case that hearing God speak andhaving other vivid, unusual spiritual experiences that seemlike unambiguous evidence of divine presence might be, insome respects, like becoming a skilled athlete. In this article,we argue that something like talent and training are involvedin the emergence of certain kinds of religious experiences. Inparticular, we argue that people who enjoy being absorbedin internal imaginative worlds are more likely to respondto the trained practice of certain kinds of prayer and morelikely to have unusual spiritual experiences of the divine. Weargue that there is a capacity for absorption and that thosewho have a talent for it and who train to develop it are morelikely to have powerful sensory experiences of the presenceof God.The larger project here is to emphasize the role of skilledlearning in the experience of God. A new and exciting bodyof anthropological work argues that beliefs in invisible intentional beings are so widespread because they are a byproductof intuitive human reasoning. This is the kind of reasoningthat Daniel Kahneman (2003) describes in his Nobel speechas “system one”: quick, effortless, and implicit. These anthropologists argue that the biases in these intuitions evolvedto enable us to survive. We see faces in the clouds, as StewartGuthrie (1995) puts it, because it was adaptive for our ancestors to interpret ambiguous sounds as potential threats.If you assume that a rustling bush hides a crouching leopard,cAMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 112, Issue 1, pp. 66–78, ISSN 0002-7294 online ISSN 1548-1433. !2010by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2009.01197.x
Luhrmann et al.most of the time you make a foolish mistake—but occasionally, that interpretation will save your life.Justin Barrett (2004) attributes human anthropomorphism to an “agent-detection” system, a sophisticated development of a modular model of mind (Fodor 1983; Sperber1996). Pascal Boyer describes the mind as comprised of“specialized explanatory devices, more properly called ‘inference systems,’ each of which is adapted to particular kindsof events and automatically suggests explanations for theseevents” (2001:17). From this perspective, religion emergesbecause, as meaning-making creatures, humans spin websof significance around intuitive inferences in a form thatcan be remembered and transmitted (Atran 2002, 2007;Whitehouse 2004). This school of thought leads us to payattention to how easy it is for people to believe in God because those beliefs arise out of an evolved adaptation to theworld. These scholars capture an important aspect of thecomplex phenomenon of religious belief.And yet it is also hard for many people to believe in Godwhen they are thoughtful, reflective, and deliberative (thekind of reasoning Kahneman described as “system two”).This difficulty is particularly evident for those in an arguablysecular society (Asad 2003; Taylor 2007), where there aremany alternatives to religious commitment, but E. E. EvansPritchard (1956) describes even the Nuer as struggling toarrive at what they felt to be the correct understandingof divinity. One sees this difficulty of making sense of thesupernatural in Augustine’s Confessions (1963), as he agonizesover how to interpret the true nature of God. One seesit among U.S. evangelical Christians who often believe insome abstract, absolute sense that God exists but struggleto experience God as real in the everyday world aroundthem. For many who believe intuitively that the supernaturalexists, it takes effort to accept that a particular interpretationof the supernatural is correct, and it takes effort to livein accordance with that interpretation—to live as if theyreally do believe that their understanding is accurate. Itrequires learning, and the learning can be a slow process,like learning to speak a foreign language in an unfamiliarcountry, with new and different social cues. That learning isoften stumbling and gradual for those who convert, take onnew roles, or go through an initiation process. People mustcome to see differently, to think differently, and above allto feel differently, because to believe in a particular form ofthe supernatural as if the supernatural is truly present is, formost believers, to experience the world differently than ifthat form of the supernatural were not real.In this article, we contribute to an approach to religion that is focused on skilled learning. Learning as such—learning explicitly named and studied—was once relegatedto side corners of anthropology, addressed through childhood socialization (Kulick 1992; Schieffelin 1990) or apprenticeship (Herzfeld 2003). Yet, within the anthropologyof religion, there is emerging a set of scholars who addresslearning directly and who see learning as at the heart of theprocess of having faith. Saba Mahmood (2005) argues that Absorption Hypothesis67her female subjects neither follow Islamic commands blindlynor find themselves forced to veil or pray against their will.Instead, she describes the way they learn to realize piety:that they willingly and with determined effort transformtheir internal lives to enact given ideals. Rebecca Lester(2005) precisely charts the process through which postulants in a Mexican Catholic order slowly become confidentabout the presence of God in their lives. Charles Hirschkind(2006) gives an account of moral self-fashioning as Islamicsubjects deliberately craft their sensibilities, emotions, andwill through their engagement with cassette sermons. AnnaGade (2004) provides a careful, detailed account of the wayIndonesian Muslims set out to become pious through particular techniques of reciting the Qur’an and the impact ofthose techniques on the their emotional experience. Theseethnographers draw our attention to how hard religiouspractitioners work, how they labor to develop specific skillsand ways of being, and how those skills deeply shape theirexperience of faith.In this article, we work with a theory that learning toexperience God depends on interpretation (the socially taughtand culturally variable cognitive categories that identify thepresence of God), practice (the subjective and psychological consequences of the specific training specified by thereligion: e.g., prayer), and proclivity (a talent for and willingness to respond to practice). Interpretation and practiceare different kinds of learning, we suggest, and they canbe understood as skills because, as the learner learns, thelearner becomes more proficient, and there are noticeable,incremental differences between the novice and the expert.This is a theory about the complexity of learning.It draws on existing scholarship in the anthropology ofreligion—and, in particular, on two strands of theory. Thefirst emphasizes the importance of the acquisition of cognitive and linguistic representations of God. Susan Harding(2000:60) recognizes that people do experience God in remarkable ways but is willing to say that language is not only atthe center of Christianity but also sufficient in itself to explainconversion. Webb Keane (2007) acknowledges that thereare intense spiritual experiences but focuses his analytic lenson the representation of interiority and its consequences.Vincent Crapanazano (2000) devotes his scholarly attentionin understanding Christianity to its language, and he acutelylinks commitments to linguistic literalism in both U.S. fundamentalism and U.S. jurisprudence. Because of this, andbecause of the emergence of the interest in language ideology and in Christianity’s self-conscious use of language,much of the recent work on religion—by, among others,Jon Bialecki (2009), James Bielo (2009), Fenella Cannell(2006), Simon Coleman (2000), Matthew Engelke (2007),Joel Robbins (2001), and Bambi Schieffelin (2002)—hasfocused on language and linguistic representation in religion and their consequences for the religious. We see thisapproach as arguing that religious actors must acquire cognitive and linguistic knowledge to interpret the presence ofGod.
68American Anthropologist Vol. 112, No. 1 March 2010The second strand emphasizes embodiment and sensorypractice, the impact of action and phenomenological experience on the actor. Sherry Ortner (1984) famously characterized anthropology of the 1970s as a study of practice:the impact of what we do and say on a daily basis. ThomasCsordas, perhaps the leading contemporary spokespersonfor embodiment theory within contemporary psychological anthropology, emphasizes the ways in which peopleexperience abstract concepts physically through repeatedenactment. From this has emerged a field that could be variously called “the anthropology of the senses” or—as Csordas(1993) has described it—of the “somatic mode of attention” (see Geurts 2003; Howes 2005; Seremetakis 1996;Stoller 1989). Outside of anthropology, a growing body ofscholars has begun to look at the consequences of specificritual and prayer practices (e.g., Carruthers 1998). We takethis approach as arguing that religious actors must learn toexperience embodiment through particular cultural practices. This learning, too, contributes to the way divinity isidentified and experienced.Yet, although meaning must be learned, meaning is notlearned by all people in the same way. This article emergedfrom the ethnographic observation that not only did peoplediffer in their experience of the divine but also that thosedifferences were patterned and seemed to have something todo with a response to training. In the ethnography describedhere, people who reported that they heard God often werealso more likely to talk about vivid mental imagery andunusual sensory experience, and they sometimes attributedthose phenomena to prayer practice, as if they were the sideeffects of training. All congregants were invited by theirsocial world to learn to hear God speak, and because hearingGod was so important for them, most of them sought tolearn. They acquired the cognitive and linguistic patternsthat helped them to identify God’s presence. They alsolearned that there were specific practices they were meantto undertake, practices that were understood to enable themto hear God more effectively. But despite their practice, notall of them were able to hear God, or at least to hear Godas vividly as others. Some seemed to have what we couldcall a “proclivity” for the practices they are asked to learn.They were either more able to learn those skilled practicesor more interested in acquiring them, and those practicesseemed to change the way they experienced what they callspirituality.We suggest that there is a skilled practice that is responsible for some (but not all) of those differences. I (TanyaLuhrmann, the first author) recognized that something likethis skill was involved as I did my ethnographic research.1 Thefirst part of the article describes the participant-observationthat led me to recognize that there were people who hada proclivity for some kind of skill and who developed thatskill into expertise. The second part of the article describesthe more quantitative and more psychological methods usedto specify the nature of this skill more precisely. To dothat second phase of the research, I called on colleaguesin other fields: a psychologist who helped me to shape thequestionnaires through which we evaluated the skill morecarefully (Howard Nussbaum) and the statistician who didthe statistical analysis of the results (Ronald Thisted). Themixed methods give us more confidence that there is a realphenomenon here worthy of further work. So this is ananthropological detective story: the ethnography suggestedthat there was a puzzle that had something to do with a kindof skill, and as ethnographer I turned to more psychologicalmethods to try to pin it down. We identify what we havefound as “absorption.” At the end, we turn to the questionof what we think absorption is and how it might relate tothe attempts to understand similar phenomenon describedby other anthropologists and in other fields.THE ETHNOGRAPHIC PUZZLEThe ethnographic puzzle—the observation that people notonly experience God differently but also that those differences are patterned, as if there is a skill dimension involved in some spiritual practice—emerged from more orless traditional ethnographic fieldwork conducted by thefirst author in Chicago at an experientially oriented Christian church: two years of Sunday morning services, a weeklyevening Bible-study housegroup, conferences, retreats, coffees, trips, and casual conversations. The church was a Vineyard Christian Fellowship (there are eight in Chicago). Sociological data suggests that the Vineyard is representative ofthe major demographic shift in the religious practice of theUnited States since 1965, toward spiritualities more focusedon an intimate and present experience of God (e.g., Miller1997; Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life 2006). TheVineyard, now with over 600 churches nationwide, is anexample of a “new paradigm” evangelical Protestant church(Miller 1997; see also Bialecki 2009). Their members tendto be white and middle class, although not exclusively. Theircongregations are more likely to meet in gyms, not in actualchurch buildings, and like their surroundings they are informal. They are more likely to have a rock band than a choir,and they use contemporary Christian music rather than traditional hymns (although they may incorporate a hymn intothe service). They call themselves “Bible based,” by whichthey mean that the Bible is taken to be literally or nearliterally true, and they embrace an experiential spirituality.In many ways these churches take the spiritual innovations of Pentecostalism and render them acceptablefor white, mainstream, and middle-class congregations (cf.Robbins 2004; Wuthnow 1998). They are part of what theirhistorians describe as “third-wave” Christianity—the firstwave being Pentecostalism and the second being the CatholicCharismatic Revival (Jackson 1999; see Coleman 2000).Scholars attribute the emergence of this experiential Christianity to the interest in spiritual experience that explodedin the 1960s with the Jesus People (or to use the pejorativephrase that captured the distress these groups generated inthe middle class, the “Jesus Freaks”; cf. Eskridge 2005). Asthe decades passed, the exuberance of this hippy Christianity
Luhrmann et al.settled into the more conventional and conservative culturalforms of new paradigm Protestantism (Shires 2007). Sundaymornings at these churches are relatively conventional. People do not speak in tongues or fall, smitten by the Holy Spirit,during the service. Yet many speak in tongues when prayingalone, and these churches expect their congregants to experience God directly, immediately, and concretely. It is acentral teaching in such churches that the direct experienceof God is the result of prayer.Prayer is far more important in a new paradigm Protestant church than in a mainstream conventional Protestantchurch. At the Chicago Vineyard church, the pastor talkedrepeatedly about the importance of prayer and devoted entire Sunday morning teachings to explaining prayer. Therewere extra services during the week so that congregantscould get more time to pray. Each Sunday-morning servicebegan with 30 minutes of prayerful singing described by thechurch as “worship,” and every service ended in a call forpeople “who need prayer” to come up front to get prayer.Indeed, there was a “prayer team” chosen by and trainedwithin the church, and as the service drew to a close onesaw 20–30 people up at the front of the room, their handson each others’ shoulders, with those who were prayingspeaking aloud and those who were being prayed for standing with tears running down their face. Congregants oftentalked about their prayer lives. When people prayed for eachother, they often wanted prayer to help their prayer lives toimprove.Prayer was understood to enable the person who prayedto develop a relationship with God, and it was important notbecause it produced results (although it was understood thatit did, that God would respond to prayer in direct andconcrete ways) but because God wanted a relationship witheach human person. As the Purpose Driven Life, written bySaddleback pastor Rick Warren, put it: “God wants to beyour best friend” (Warren 2002:85). This relationship isunderstood to be like a relation between two persons. Thehuman person speaks to God, and God speaks back. Many,many books about prayer written for and read by evangelicalChristians emphasize the dialogic, interactive, human qualityof this relationship. In Hearing God, for instance, evangelicalintellectual Dallas Willard explains that God’s face-to-faceconversations with Moses are the “normal human life Godintended for us” (Willard 1999:18).God was understood to speak back in several ways. Hespoke through the Bible. When congregants read scriptureand felt powerfully moved or affected by a particular passage, they might infer that God spoke to them through thatpassage—that he led them to that particular page to havethem read and respond to it. One woman illustrates thiscultural model here:I was reading in Judges and I don’t even know why I was readingit. There’s a part where God talks about raising up elders in thechurch to pray for the church. And I remember, it just stuck inmy head
The Absorption Hypothesis: Learning to Hear God in Evangelical Christianity T. M. Luhrmann, Howard Nusbaum, and Ronald Thisted ABSTRACT In this article, we use a combination of ethn
May 02, 2018 · D. Program Evaluation ͟The organization has provided a description of the framework for how each program will be evaluated. The framework should include all the elements below: ͟The evaluation methods are cost-effective for the organization ͟Quantitative and qualitative data is being collected (at Basics tier, data collection must have begun)
Silat is a combative art of self-defense and survival rooted from Matay archipelago. It was traced at thé early of Langkasuka Kingdom (2nd century CE) till thé reign of Melaka (Malaysia) Sultanate era (13th century). Silat has now evolved to become part of social culture and tradition with thé appearance of a fine physical and spiritual .
On an exceptional basis, Member States may request UNESCO to provide thé candidates with access to thé platform so they can complète thé form by themselves. Thèse requests must be addressed to esd rize unesco. or by 15 A ril 2021 UNESCO will provide thé nomineewith accessto thé platform via their émail address.
̶The leading indicator of employee engagement is based on the quality of the relationship between employee and supervisor Empower your managers! ̶Help them understand the impact on the organization ̶Share important changes, plan options, tasks, and deadlines ̶Provide key messages and talking points ̶Prepare them to answer employee questions
Dr. Sunita Bharatwal** Dr. Pawan Garga*** Abstract Customer satisfaction is derived from thè functionalities and values, a product or Service can provide. The current study aims to segregate thè dimensions of ordine Service quality and gather insights on its impact on web shopping. The trends of purchases have
Chính Văn.- Còn đức Thế tôn thì tuệ giác cực kỳ trong sạch 8: hiện hành bất nhị 9, đạt đến vô tướng 10, đứng vào chỗ đứng của các đức Thế tôn 11, thể hiện tính bình đẳng của các Ngài, đến chỗ không còn chướng ngại 12, giáo pháp không thể khuynh đảo, tâm thức không bị cản trở, cái được
Detection and Hypothesis testing Rejecting a hypothesis aka detection H 0: The \null" hypothesis i.e., the hypothesis that the data might allow you to reject H 1: The alternate hypothesis Example: H 0: Average IQ of Group1 subjects Group2 subjects H 1: Average IQ of Group1 subjects Group2 subjects Given data we wish to probabilistically test out the hypotheses
Le genou de Lucy. Odile Jacob. 1999. Coppens Y. Pré-textes. L’homme préhistorique en morceaux. Eds Odile Jacob. 2011. Costentin J., Delaveau P. Café, thé, chocolat, les bons effets sur le cerveau et pour le corps. Editions Odile Jacob. 2010. Crawford M., Marsh D. The driving force : food in human evolution and the future.
