T. M. LuhrmannBesprekingen

When God Talks Back is the story of American Evangelical Christianity. It isn’t exactly a history so much as it is an examination of how otherwise reasonable people can believe in something that you can’t see or feel. The author is Tanya M Luhrmann, an Anthropologist trained in Psychology. She decides to talk to evangelicals and ask them questions about their personal relationship with God. It is interesting to read since a lot of these people just sound crazy to me.

Those who are not new to my reviews might be familiar with my stance on religion as a whole. I am a non-believer and I have been for around ten years or so. For every Clive Staples Lewis there exists a Christopher Hitchens, and this has affected how I consider certain aspects of belief. I was raised Roman Catholic which is not exactly known for having fun Church Services. It made me think of how bored God must be on his Throne in the sky, listening to the Choirs of Angels singing songs of praise. Who makes an entire race of beings just to be praised by those beings? The songs themselves are also boring, and mostly in minor keys, making them sound depressing. Also, the sacraments and pomp seemed stupid to me. Woohoo, I get to eat Christ and drink his blood.

As to why these people sound crazy, their stories about how they became believers are heart-warming and encouraging, but then you find out that they consult God about everything. I mean, Everything. What to wear, where to go to school, whether to have burgers or fish, it becomes ridiculous to me. Most of the study the author conducts is about whether or not these people are nuts. It is quite fascinating to read and quite quotable. My problem is with how evangelicals contact God in the first place. Obviously, it is through prayer. How else do you talk to a disembodied entity? Then you have to listen to the random static of your mind. Random thoughts that come to mind could be God talking to you, and he cares about everything you do. You’re just awash in the Spirit of God.

Now just because you think of something random or weird doesn’t mean it’s God talking to you. It could just be that the person is pretending. This means that they have to have some kind of standard for how to assess the veracity of God Messages. This makes sense, or else you could have someone say that God told them to go and kill people. This is a huge no-no since God wouldn’t do that.

Anyway, while the book was interesting at first, my attention began to flag around halfway through the book. Other than that, the book tells you how to tell different denominations apart from each other, the ideas shared by all evangelicals, and how an otherwise intelligent, discerning person can believe in a so-called Imaginary Friend. It is an attempt to bridge the gap between the believer and non-believer. I suppose it does a somewhat good job, especially since these people shared their private thoughts and feelings on something so personal.

Would have made a great New Yorker article. As a 400-page book it feels stretched pretty thin. And Luhrmann, while seemingly an interesting person, is not a great writer. Still worth your time if you find the subject compeling.

This is an interesting account of the effects of a certain type of prayer training on the spiritual life of practitioners. The combination of observation, participation and experiment was particularly useful. However this book does not address the outward effects of the churches that were studied. There is very little comment on the moral code taught, or the political or social aspects of Christian practice among these groups. Not asking all books to be all thing; just noting that this is a narrow study, not a general account of a religious movement.

Would have made a great New Yorker article. As a 400-page book it feels stretched pretty thin. And Luhrmann, while seemingly an interesting person, is not a great writer. Still worth your time if you find the subject compeling.

Luhrmann's exploration of the technologies of prayer used by evangelical Christians fascinated me and illuminated my own prayer experiences, although I do not engage in quite the same practices as the people she reports on here. Overall, I learned not only something about prayer but also about the history of evangelistic Christianity in the U.S, and the context within which such churches are growing today.½

I have read maybe a dozen ethnographic studies and this by far the best one, not only because of it's method, it's respect but also because of its discipline and desire to connect the experiences described with a wider theoretical notion of cultural anthropology. Luhrmann goes to Britain and joins a coven or two and reports. His primary concern is what he calls interpretive drift, how people living in rationally dominated Western scientific culture come to invest themselves in magic. What fascinates him is their eventual conversion to a point where they know what they are doing to be true while also knowing it would not withstand the rational criteria that dominates their lives, at their job, in their family. He is compassionate and eventually honest about his experience but what is so impressive is not only his immersion (we would expect that from an anthropologist) but his willingness to chase down the theoretical implications of their less rational opinions. The central experience, and he details each of their means of acceptance, is a kind of play which allows the participant to subjectively experience a power outside the delimited world of scientific determinism. It' s not religion but it does take advantage of relativism and tolerance, and for many functions as a kind of spirituality. He is remarkably clear on how magicians create a cosmology that allows them to evade the scientific method. At the end, he provides a kind of background for the intellectual trends and arguments that dominate anthropology and philosophy regarding meaning and culture and translation. Not being familiar with his sources, or as familiar as he was, I could have used a far longer section providing the context for his orientation, which favors, as one might expect, a great reliance on the experiential rather than the theoretical. Nonetheless this is a book that straddles two audiences and seeks to satisfy both. As an non scholar I read up and found many idea I want to follow up on. At the same time, the book was sufficiently scholarly to gain a place in the current literature in the field. I would look for more work by Luhrmann. He is a challenge but well worth it.

Ms. Luhrmann is an anthropologist, and this book reports her findings about the question that defines a large group of Americans: How do Evangelicals come to and maintain an intense belief in a very personal God? For at least this member of smaller group of Americans (agnostic intellectuals) this is a question of great interest, personally and politically. Personally, religious faith looks a bulwark, an emotional support, and a source of joy to many, but it also looks intellectually impossible. Politically, the deep religious faith of many Americans affects their political choices, and can therefore affect how all of us live -- the agnostic as well as the devout.

Ms. Luhrmann answers the first question brilliantly, but hardly touches on the second. I suppose that's fair enough: her study was about how the religious function in their own context, not in the broad polity. But her overall discussion was so enlightening that I really missed at least a little on the broader political issues, which is why four and a half stars instead of five.

Ms. Luhrmann makes it very clear that belief is hard work, which requires individual practice and study, and accepting the key role of the group. Some of the people she interviewed experienced a "road to Damascus" moment, but many did not -- and most of those who did had accept much less spectacular experiences as transformative. She reviews the way that people pray, the way they learn to think of God as a friend and companion, and the nature of the God in which they believe. This examination of how believers change their thinking made more sense to me than anything else I have read about how people come to believe. She also examines the practices of the groups she studied (groups she joined feels more accurate) in the light of religious mental disciplines practiced by other, very non-Evangelical people -- including C.S. Lewis and Jesuits.

This book accomplishes something very difficult. It expresses convincingly rigorous academic conclusions about a belief system that is foreign to most academics, and it does so without a hint of condescension. One feels that Ms. Luhrmann spent so much time with the groups she was studying that she understood them from the inside out, as a member rather than an observer, but was still able to reach conclusions. A really good and interesting book, maybe I should have given 5 stars!½

The author seems to have joined a church community to observe and report on behavior - a dubious premise. Focusing on staying an outsider, is it possible to be accurate in something that touches so deeply? Also, seems mostly ignorant of the long tradition of mysticism in the historical Church.

This study of the training and practice of American psychiatrists is important reading for anyone interested in the treatment or diagnosis of mental illness and in the current state of practice in the united States. The author has specialized in the study of how people entering a cultural subset, in this case psychiatrists, learn how to perceive and act within the worldview of that subset.

Dr. Luhrmann makes what could have been a dry anthropological study accessible to a lay reader, with astonishing sensitivity and a keen sense of humor.

While I found that the book relied a bit too heavily on firsthand accounts as a frame for corroborating historical, psychology, and anthropological accounts of God, I was also impressed by the book's scope and its argument that the evangelical conception of God- as always kind, ever-present, and aware of all details of our personal lives, is in some sense a response and reaction to our postmodern age.

Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England
T. M. Luhrmann
Harvard UP, Cambridge MA, 1989
382p, index, bibliog.

It has been almost twenty five years since Dr. Luhrmann did the research on which her dissertation and this published version of it were based. It seems time to examine how well the work has held up; is it still worth reading or is it merely a historical curiosity?

The first thing to note is that the title is inaccurate and was probably chosen by the publisher to attract more readers. Although Luhrmann meets and interacts with Witches (note: as a Witch, I choose to capitalize the term when it refers to the religion, though Luhrmann does not), the majority of her time appears to have been spent with a variety of organizations within the Western Mystery tradition. She examines groups of four types: Witchcraft, ad hoc ritual magic, Western Mysteries and non-initiated paganism. The research she did in the London area was the subject of her doctoral dissertation in anthropology. Her research focus was on the question of how “ordinary, well-educated, usually middle-class people . . . not psychotically deluded, and . . . not driven to practice by socio-economic desperation” can come to believe in the importance and efficacy of magic, given that the surrounding culture rejects such beliefs. Luhrmann’s answer is that magicians learn to interpret their experiences in ways that confirm the expectations that they have been taught in books, classes and meetings. Further, she believes that as the activities of magic become more important to an individual they are moved to rationalize their involvement with a number of mutually reinforcing ideas about the importance of magic as a metaphor, a symbolic system, a method of psychological self-help and as true within a relativist world view that challenges concepts of one objective truth. A study similar to Luhrmann’s could be done on a variety of belief systems that make truth claims. For instance, I imagined as I reread the book that thought processes similar to those she described could be attributed to a new student of Freudian analysis, a new police trainee, or a person encountering radical politics. In fact, Luhrmann has subsequently done research within the communities of psychiatry and of evangelical Christianity.

Another factor in evaluations of this work is that the chapters which contain her conclusions and theoretical framework are not particularly accessible to a non-academic audience. She cites a number of anthropological works that are unlikely to be familiar to a lay audience and uses a professional vocabulary that verges, at points, on jargon. Philosophical discussion of the nature of belief may be pertinent to Luhrmann’s thesis, but it is conducted in vocabulary unfamiliar to the average reader.

Luhrmann makes clear that she believes that the question of whether magical claims are objectively true is irrelevant to her study. Nevertheless, I am struck by how few truth claims she actually cites. It is hard to believe that she spent over a year embedded in the magic using community without encountering a magical cure, a job obtained against odds, a clearly predictive dream, or the like. The entry “magic, experience of” in the index points to one woman’s experience of seeing a landscape as if the air were filled with golden specks. It seems disingenuous for the author to imply that a growing belief in magic is nourished only by subjective experiences; psychological states; a growing acceptance of the beauty of myth and ritual; and interpretive drift. This too may account in part for the Pagan community’s reception of the book. If the people she worked with did tell her of magic that worked they may be understandably upset that she writes as though she has established that their beliefs and practices are merely mental exercises. “Humph, doesn’t she remember that G’s cancer never came back, isn’t that evidence?” they may be thinking.

Serious students of magic will probably want to read this work, if only to be able to respond intelligently to the type of claims it makes. It is not, however, a guide to practice, or a history of the movement. Much has changed in the community since it was written, most notably the growth of the internet, which has materially altered the ways in which people enter and become part of the magical community. In addition, it is doubtful that any community in the United States or other nations provides quite the breadth of opportunity in terms of numbers, kinds and endurance of groups as did London at the time of Luhrmann’s study. I might also add that a new community of practicing magicians that I have observed in the blogosphere seem much less reticent about claiming practical and verifiable results for their magical work. I’m not sure how Luhrmann would respond to a magician who asserts that the insurance check after his house burned was in the exact amount he had requested from a Geodic demon that had been serving him by producing smaller sums when ordered in appropriate rituals.

As a non-Christian I found this to be a fascinating anthropological account of the prayer life, training and inner experiences of an evangelical congregation.

read for Psych Anthro at UCB

The author's PhD thesis - and very interesting on a number of levels.
First of all, there is the content - magic users in England at the time.
Secondly, there are the ethical issues involved - they are touched on in the work, but I'd be interested to read the full thesis.
Thirdly, there is what I have heard referred to as the "Lurhman effect" still floating around in this country. See Hutton, King Arthur, in which he discusses this....

From Amazon: "The hard work required to make God real, how it changes the people who do it, and why it helps explain the enduring power of faith. How do gods and spirits come to feel vividly real to people - as if they were standing right next to them? But it isn't easy to maintain a sense that there are invisible spirits who care about you. In How God Becomes Real, acclaimed anthropologist and scholar of religion T. M. Luhrmann argues that people must work incredibly hard to make gods real and that this effort helps to explain the enduring power of faith.
Drawing on ethnographic studies of evangelical Christians, pagans, magicians, Zoroastrians, Black Catholics, Santeria initiates, and newly orthodox Jews, Luhrmann notes that none of these people behave as if gods and spirits are simply there. Rather, these worshippers make strenuous efforts to create a world in which invisible others matter and can become intensely present and real. The faithful accomplish this through detailed stories, absorption, the cultivation of inner senses, belief in a porous mind, strong sensory experiences, prayer, and other practices. Along the way, Luhrmann shows why faith is harder than belief, why prayer is a metacognitive activity like therapy, why becoming religious is like getting engrossed in a book, and much more."

On nearby taller shelf