Tanya M. Luhrmann, "Metakinesis: How God Becomes Intimate in Contemporary U.S. Christianity "

Questions for Making Connections within the Reading:

1. Luhrmann’s title, “Metakinesis: How God Becomes Intimate in Contemporary U.S. Christianity,” promises to explain a process. As it happens, Luhrmann discovers that the process of establishing an intimate relationship with God does not involve “metakinesis” alone. In your own words, summarize the forces that come into play to foster the establishment of an intimate relationship with God in the community Luhrmann discusses.

2. What is Luhrmann’s relationship to the those who attend Horizon Christian Fellowship? To religious faith, more generally? As you re-read her essay, underline the words and phrases that you would cite to describe she is being neutral and when she is being evaluative.

3. What is the relationship of Luhrmann’s conclusion to the preceding sections? Does her understanding of the phenomena she has studied arise from her research or has her research confirmed an existing hypothesis? If you just read the conclusion, how would Luhrmann’s argument be effected?

Questions for Writing:  

1.  One can imagine another explanation for the phenomena Luhrmann has studied: the emergence of the personal God is a sign of the End Times. Luhrmann, though, doesn’t entertain such an explanation; for her, the rise of these faith communities is a cultural fact that warrants study and requires analysis. What is gained when faith is treated in such terms? What, if anything, is lost?

2. It is a common practice in college to ask students to uncover the biases in an assigned reading. In this instance, though, the issue of bias is particularly vexed: Luhrmann is a trained anthropologist studying faith communities who have established a personal relationship with God. While both sides might well claim to have direct access to an objective truth, one might argue that both sides are blind to their own biases. Is it possible to uncover the “facts” of how human culture works or is the inevitable outcome a set of unverifiable hypotheses? If results of studying culture are inevitably subjective, is this grounds for continuing or discontinuing the pursuit?

Questions for Making Connections Between Readings:  

1.  We might say that in “Waiting for a Jew: Marginal Redemption at the Eight Street Shul,” Jonathan Boyarin also tackles the question of how one establishes an intimate relationship with God. But Boyarin is concerned with a rather different community of believers. As he recalls, the religious community of his childhood is today “as obliterated as any shtetl in Eastern Europe.” In seeking the renewal of such communities, is Boyarin caught up in the same socio-religious dynamic that Luhrmann describes? Are the developments Boyarin describes parallel to the ones that concern Luhrmann or are the two communities destined to intersect at some point?

2. Both Luhrmann and Christine Kenneally are centrally concerned with the ways that embodiment shape human thought and expression. But the phenomena they study are separated by millions of years: how humans came to have language versus how Americans at the end of the 20th century have come to seek out in greater and greater numbers a personal relationship with God. Can Kenneally’s argument be usefully extended to the situation Luhrmann studies? That is, can the search for an intimate relationship with God be understood as a gesture? An embodied form of communication? Is the rational essence of humanity lost in such a formulation?