How Should We Talk About Religion? Inwardness, Particularity, and Translation

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2009

Abstract

The question this paper addresses is set forth in its title: How should we talk about religion? It is obviously crucial that we learn to talk about the religions of others, both in the national and the international arena. But there are serious difficulties. (1) Even believers find it difficult to talk about their own religious experience, because it is by nature ineffable. Even to approach the problem requires art. Sometimes art at the highest level, as exemplified by the English religious poet George Herbert in his poem, "The Windows." (2) When one talks about the religion of others, the difficulties multiply. For one thing, it seems to be a characteristic of religious life that what makes sense in one world makes no sense at all in another. When we talk about the religion of others we are thus talking about makes no sense to us, which leads either to a kind of contempt or to patronization--as in the case of American courts talking, as though they understood and respected them, about the beliefs of native Americans. (The example given is the dispute between the Natural History Museum and Indians from Oregon over a meteor claimed by the latter to be of religious significance.) (3) When we talk in the languages of our academic disciplines about the religious life of others we are particularly likely to bleed it of all significance. The approach suggested here is to regard talking about religion as an especially challenging species of translation, requiring as all translation does the exercise of an art that simultaneously respects the language of another and insists upon the value of the language into which the translation is made. The effort to do this is itself of interest, for it generates a series of fundamental questions about the nature of reason, religion, community, and discourse itself.

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