At this stage of my life, my primary concern is the natural world and the preservation of the environment, but religion has been a longstanding interest for me, going all the way back to when I was a preschooler. I remember being fascinated by the televangelists Oral Roberts and Katherine Kuhlman on the Sunday morning broadcasts. The way they talked – I particularly remember the way Kuhlman said “I believe-ah in miracles!” at the beginning of her TV show – seemed stranger, and a little scarier, than anything else I experienced on TV or the rest of my life. Watching these programs gave me the same feeling that I got from suspense or horror movies, and I liked it.
All twelve years, from first grade through high school graduation, I went to Christian, most specifically Catholic, schools. I started first grade before Vatican II, and all the nuns wore the black habits and wimples. That they dressed so oddly and seemed to live so differently was something that puzzled me. The nuns didn’t live in a far away land, like natives in a National Geographic television show. They lived in a two-story house next to our church, but they lived as though they were from another place or time. In school I watched my teachers as carefully as I could, observing how they walked down the hall or cut a piece of paper with scissors, trying to see how different or how similar they were to my family and neighbors.
In high school part of our religious education during my junior year was the study of New Testament and early Church history. Our religious instruction had bored me until then, with nothing to tweak my curiosity or challenge much thought. It surprised me and amazed me that the bible could be studied and analyzed, just as though it were an ancient artifact. You could look at it like any other book, not just as a source of inspiration or the font of Christian principles. That year our class learned of when and why Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote their Gospels and that there were other gospels, such as the gospel of Thomas, which had been dug up a matter of decades beforehand. My teenage curiosity was primed.
My senior year part of our religious studies included learning of other religions, Buddhism, Judaism, etc. and I remember diving into my religious schoolwork that year. My interest in religion continued into college, and I fulfilled a great deal of my humanities requirements with religious studies courses. So you see, I’ve been interested in religion, academically and as it is lived and practiced, my whole life.
Of course there are qualities that religion and the natural world share. They both offer beauty and a sense of order. And as I have stated with this blog, I am fascinated with the way people think and why things make sense to them. The emphasis with this blog is on the environment and how people think about the natural world. But I am also interested in how people think in general. Interviewing individuals about their religions allowed me to sit down with dozens of people and hear their story of how they came to believe as they do. In discussing their religious beliefs these men and women share with me what they considered to be important. They told me how they made sense of their lives and made sense of their beliefs. It showed me how they think and what they value.
One of the books that I consulted as I was writing As We Believe was the Joy of Sects, by Peter Ochiogrosso, who has written several books on religion. Ochiogrosso started his writing career as a music writer and coauthored Frank Zappa’s autobiography. Maybe Ochiogrosso found similarities between music and religion, things that tied together the pope and punk and similarities between the Dalai Lama and Rama Lama Ding Dong. What I like to believe is that, like me, he has more than one interest that he has wanted to write about.
Like Ochiogrosso, I started my writing career writing about music, and I still write frequently about music and musicians. I don’t have any plans to write another book, but if I do, it will probably be about the environment, the subject that interests me the most now. Till then, if you have any interest in what people might say about their religious beliefs, you can check out As We Believe on lulu.com.
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