I want you to try a thought experiment with me.
Just for a second. Close your eyes. Imagine you're
not. Well, you. You don't have a name. You don't
have a job to get to. You're an animal. Okay,
I'm with you. Where are we going with this? Let's
say a hawk riding a thermal current over a huge
canyon. Or maybe a wolf. moving through a snow
-covered forest. The classic way to start thinking
about phenomenology, right? Trying to imagine
the welt, the self -world of another creature.
Exactly. Now, how do you see the world? The poet
Rainer Maria Rilke had this... really specific,
beautiful answer. He said that animals see the
world with whole eyes. He called it the open.
The open. Yeah. So when that hawk looks down,
it doesn't see landscape or property lines or,
you know, potential prey resources. It just sees
what is. There's no separation, no filter between
the observer and the observed. A hawk and the
wind are like part of the same single event.
Precisely. It sounds peaceful, doesn't it? But
then Rilke just pivots. He turns the camera on
us. Humans. And he says our situation is actually
tragic by comparison. Oh, so he says our eyes
are turned back upon themselves. We don't just
see the world. We analyze it. We categorize it.
We encircle it with concepts. And here's the
line that just floored me. Rilke says we seek
to snare the world, setting traps for freedom,
setting traps for freedom. Wow. That is a. Devastating
line. It really is. And it stuck with me reading
the material for today's deep dive because it
feels like that's exactly what we do, especially
when we try to understand other people. We build
these these intellectual cages. Right. We trap
them. We trap them in our categories, secular,
religious, modern, traditional. And we pat ourselves
on the back thinking we understand them. But
we just caught a shadow. We aren't seeing them
with whole eyes. And that sets the stage perfectly
for what we're getting into today, because we
are in a way. questioning the very tools we use
to understand the other. I mean, we live in this
information age. We have more data about other
cultures, other religions, other belief systems
than any generation in human history. You can
pull up Wikipedia right now and get a five -minute
summary of Shinto rituals or Sufi poetry. Instantly.
But the question is, are we actually understanding
the people behind that data? Or are we just trapping
them in our own neat little framework of reason?
Are we building a secular cage? That is the big
question. We are diving into a really fascinating,
definitely controversial, and I'll say it, a
pretty difficult paper. It's titled, What If
Anthropology Were a Spiritual Exercise? by the
anthropologist Khaled Farhani. It was published
in Current Anthropology in 2026. And we should
say, we're not just looking at the paper itself,
but at the explosion of debate it caused. I mean,
scholars from... Tel Aviv to Columbia to Cambridge
all jumped in on this. And just to clarify for
everyone listening, while this paper is technically
about anthropology, the academic study of humans,
it's really about something much, much broader.
Oh, absolutely. It's about how any of us encounter
people of faith in what we call a secular world.
It's about that huge divide between the religious
and the secular and asking if we can ever really
cross it. Specifically, we're going to dig into
a new framework Ferrani proposes called the Antheistic.
Don't worry, we will definitely explain what
that means. But the mission here is to see how
this changes the game for interfaith understanding.
Because, let's be honest, a lot of what passes
for interfaith dialogue can feel a bit, well,
superficial. Superficial is a good word. Or...
Cosmetic. Cosmetic is a polite way to put it.
Yeah. It often stays right there on the surface
of information exchange. I believe X, you believe
Y. Isn't that nice? Let's agree to be civil.
Have some coffee and cookies. Exactly. Farhani
is pushing for something far more radical. He's
asking, how do we move from just swapping facts
to genuine spiritual formation? How do we stop
analyzing people and actually start letting them
change who we are? So to get there, we first
have to understand the trap, the cage Rilke was
talking about. Ferroni starts his argument by
diagnosing what he sees as a deep sickness in
modern thinking, especially in the university.
He says we are trapped in sovereign secular reason.
Okay, that's a mouthful. Let's break that down.
Yeah, let's unpack that because it sounds like
a heavy philosophy lecture. What is sovereign
secular reason? The key word is sovereign. Think
of a king. A sovereign is supreme, absolute,
answering to no one. Okay, got it. Sovereign
secular reason is the belief that the human intellect
is the king. It's completely self -sufficient.
It operates, as the philosopher Immanuel Kant
might say, without the guidance of another. Meaning
it only relies on itself. On logic, observation,
that kind of thing. Exactly. It doesn't need
a God. It doesn't need a spirit, a muse, or a
revelation to help it understand the world. It
believes it has all the tools it needs right
inside its own toolbox. So it's the idea that
I can figure everything out just using my brain.
I don't need any outside, you know, divine help.
Specifically, you don't need revelation. You
don't need divine speech. In this framework,
when reason looks at religion like, when a sociologist
studies a church service reason, treats God or
prophecy as objects to be studied. Like a rock
or an insect. Precisely. They're cultural artifacts.
We can analyze why you believe in God. We can
analyze the social function of prayer in your
community. But we never for a moment entertain
the possibility that God might actually be real.
Or that the prayer is actually... You know, talking
to someone. Right. It's like studying a group
of people who believe in Santa Claus. You could
write a very serious academic paper about the
economic impact of Santa Claus rituals, but you
never for a second think Santa's actually going
to come down your chimney. Exactly. You maintain
what's called methodological atheism. And Ferrani's
whole point is that this creates a secular cage.
It's a form of myopia, a blindness. We can analyze
people. We can write these brilliant ethnographies
about them, but we cannot truly meet them. Because
we've already ruled out the most important part
of their reality. We're cut off from the divine
possibilities that their lives represent. We're
setting Rilke's traps for the world, but we aren't
experiencing it. We are safe, but we are blind.
But hold on. Isn't that just science? I mean,
for science to work, doesn't it have to be objective?
If I'm studying a chemical reaction, I'm not
going to ask if the chemicals are having a spiritual
experience. Why is it a cage instead of just
a good, solid method? And that is the billion
-dollar question. For chemicals, sure, no one's
arguing that. But Furani, and a whole line of
thinkers he draws upon, would say that when you
apply that exact same method to people, Especially
people for whom God is the primary organizing
reality of their lives. You are fundamentally
missing the point. You're describing the container
but ignoring the contents. You're describing
the shell and ignoring the ghost in the machine.
By ruling out the divine from the get -go, you're
ruling out the very thing that makes their world
make sense. So you aren't being objective. You're
actually being deaf to a specific and crucial
frequency. Okay, so if the problem is this secular
cage where everything gets interpreted through
this one godless lens, what's the solution? Ferani
proposes something he calls a spiritual exercise.
Now, when I hear that phrase, I immediately think
of yoga or maybe a silent Jesuit retreat. What
does he mean in this academic context? He's borrowing
this term from a French philosopher named Pierre
Hadot. Hadot was a giant in the study of ancient
philosophy. He looked back at the Greeks, the
Stoics, the Epicureans, the Platonists, and he
had this huge realization. Which was? That for
them, philosophy wasn't just sitting in a classroom
debating logic puzzles. It wasn't about getting
tenure or publishing papers. It was a way of
life. It was practical. It was something you
did. It was transformative. A spiritual exercise
in this sense means a metamorphosis of the self.
It's not just thinking hard about a topic from
a distance. It's about training yourself to,
and this is a direct quote, die to your individuality
and plunge into the totality of life. Plunging
into the totality of life. That sounds a lot
more exciting than writing a dissertation. It
is. The goal isn't to accumulate knowledge like
you're collecting trophies for a shelf. The goal
is to liberate yourself from your own small ego
and access what he calls the mystery of the presence
of the universe. So it's a fundamental shift.
It's a huge shift from an intellect that tries
to conquer knowledge, to grab it, own it, cite
it, to an intellect that prepares itself to receive
knowledge. That is such a crucial distinction.
Conquering versus receiving. It feels like the
difference between being a hunter and, I don't
know, maybe a satellite dish or a gardener. That's
a great analogy. One is aggressive, right, going
out to kill and capture. The other is attentive,
patient, waiting for something to arrive or to
grow. The hunter sets the trap. The receiver
opens the door. And Farani is asking, what if
anthropology, the study of humans, wasn't just
a job you do from 9 to 5? What if it was a spiritual
exercise where you risk fundamentally changing
who you are by truly immersing yourself in the
reality of the other? What if the anthropologist
has to undergo their own metamorphosis just to
be able to see what's really there? That's the
question. And that leads us to the core concept
of this entire deep dive. It's the jargon word
of the day, folks. The atheistic. The atheistic.
Furani coined this term. And you have to listen
carefully because it sounds like atheistic, but
it is definitely not that. It also sounds a bit
like pantheistic, but it's not that either. No,
it's something unique. It's a linguistic bridge
he's trying to build. It comes from two Greek
roots. Yeah. Anthropos. Meaning human. And theos.
Meaning God. So human God. Ferani defines the
atheistic as an intermediate, atopic space. A
topic, meaning no place. Right. It's not a physical
location you can put on a map. It's not a church.
It's not a lab. It's a perceptual space, a state
of mind where human reason and divine intelligence
get actually meet. Okay, hold on. This sounds
very theological. Do I have to believe in a specific
God to enter this atheistic space? Do I have
to be religious? If I'm a hardcore secular humanist
listening to this, am I just... disqualified?
It's a great question. And Ferroni is very careful
here. He says, no, you don't have to be a monotheist.
You don't have to sign up for a specific creed
or go to a specific building on Sundays. But,
and this is the big but, he says it requires
an agnostic assent to the existence of a divine
order. Agnostic assent. That's a fascinating
phrase. It feels like a contradiction. Usually
agnosticism is about not assenting. It's about
saying, I don't know. Right. But here it's like
saying, I don't know for sure, but I'm going
to say yes. to the possibility. It's an act of
intellectual hospitality. It's a space where
reason stops being indifferent to revelation.
So it admits that maybe just maybe human reason
isn't the only intelligence in the universe.
It admits that revelation isn't just a cultural
myth to be analyzed, but a potential source of
real truth. Ferani also calls this the daemonic
space. Daemonic? Like demons? That sounds a little
terrifying. Guggles, in the ancient Greek sense,
not the Hollywood horror movie sense, the daemon
was a spirit, an intermediary between gods and
humans. Socrates talked about his daemon as a
divine voice that guided him. Oh, okay. So think
of this space as a laboratory where reason admits
it's fragile. He calls it an aporia generator.
Aporia, meaning a puzzle you can't solve. Yeah.
A logical dead end. Exactly. A logical impasse.
A roadblock for pure logic. The atheistic space
deliberately leads to puzzles that reason alone
cannot solve. And that's the whole point. Why?
What's the goal of that? Because it forces the
human intellect to pursue what Ferrani calls
its homecoming. It's about realizing it has a
home in the divine and trying to listen for that
signal, even if it can't fully decode it yet.
So instead of shutting out the spooky stuff or
the divine stuff because it doesn't fit our neat
scientific model, we deliberately open a door.
We create this meeting place, the atheistic,
where we can listen to what he calls voices that
are near yet emanate from a place beyond. It's
like tuning an old radio. You're trying to find
a frequency you didn't even believe existed.
And you have to be very quiet and very patient
to even hear the static. And this is where it
gets really practical for our listeners who care
about interfaith dialogue. Because usually when
we enter a dialogue, we keep our secular shields
up. We say, that is your truth, this is my truth,
and we're just comparing cultural notes from
a safe distance. But in the atheistic space,
you drop the shield. You enter a common ground
where no one owns the territory. We are both
standing in the mystery together, looking up.
It sounds risky. It sounds like you have to be
willing to be fundamentally wrong about your
own worldview. It is. It's perilous. But Ferani's
argument is that it's the only way to truly understand.
If you stay safe in your fortress of reason,
you never really meet the person who lives outside
the walls. To help us visualize this, to make
it less abstract, Ferrani doesn't give us a textbook
definition. He gives us biographies. He introduces
three guides. And none of these people were traditional
anthropologists. They didn't have PhDs in the
field or write for academic journals. But Ferrani
says they did the work of this deep immersion
better than most academics ever could. They're
such fascinating figures, three lives, three
totally different paths, but they all converge
on this idea of an atheistic encounter. They
show us what this spiritual exercise actually
looks like in practice. They really do. Okay,
let's meet guide number one, Simone Weil. The
threshold dweller. That's a great name for her.
Simone Weil was a French philosopher, a mystic.
an activist in the early 20th century, a giant
of 20th century thought, but a very, very strange
one. She was Jewish by birth, but was intensely
drawn to Christianity, right? She wrote these
beautiful, profound essays about the Christian
mystics. She did. She even had mystical experiences
of Christ. But, and this is the absolute key
to understanding her, she famously refused baptism.
She refused to officially join the Catholic Church.
Which seems so contradictory on the surface.
If she loved Christianity so much, why not go
all the way? Because she wanted to stay at the
intersection. That was her word. She said her
vocation was to belong at the intersection of
Christianity and everything that is not Christianity.
Wow. She felt she had to remain on the threshold
of the church so she could be in solidarity with
the outsider, with the heretic, with the unbeliever,
with the vast majority of humanity that wasn't
Christian. She felt that by joining the club,
she would be separating herself from the rest
of the world she loved. That is a profound act
of solidarity. It's almost like she didn't want
the comfort of being in siege. She chose to stay
out in the cold with everyone else. It went further
than just labels. It was physical. During World
War II, when she was living in safety in England,
she refused to eat more than the meager rations
that were being given to people in Nazi -occupied
France. She literally starved herself to death.
Out of solidarity. She did. And that's what makes
her such a powerful guide. This is not just participant
observation. This is dying with your subjects.
And her key concept for us is attention. Attention.
And sounds so simple. Pay attention. We tell
our kids that all the time. Pay attention in
class. But for a while, attention was a spiritual
discipline of the highest order. It wasn't just
focus. It wasn't just concentrating on a math
problem. She wrote, and this is an amazing line,
studies are nearer to God because the attention,
which is their soul. The soul of studies is attention.
For her, true attention meant suspending your
own thought, actively emptying your mind, leaving
the soul, as she put it, empty and ready to be
penetrated by the object. Ready to be penetrated
by the object. That is the exact opposite of
the trap Rilkes was talking about. It's not about
grabbing the world. It's about letting the world
grab you. It's making yourself a blank slate.
Exactly. It's a radical, vulnerable openness.
And think about what that means in an interfaith
context. When you listen to someone of another
faith, are you analyzing them? Are you mentally
forming your counter -argument? Are you categorizing
them? Or are you just quiet? Or are you emptying
yourself so completely that their reality can
actually enter you? That's Weil's lesson. True
understanding requires an empty soul. You have
to shut up, not just with your mouth, but with
your mind. Okay, that's a high bar. Let's move
to guide number two, Martin Buber. The Bridge
Builder. Buber was a Jewish philosopher born
in Vienna who eventually moved to Jerusalem.
And likewise, he was a fascinating outsider.
He wasn't quite a political Zionist. He wasn't
orthodox in his religious practice. He always
stood in between different worlds. And his big
famous concept is I -thou. Even people who haven't
read philosophy have probably heard of I and
thou. Yes. Buber's whole philosophy is that all
life is meeting. He makes this crucial distinction
between I -it relationships and I -thou relationships.
Okay, what's the difference? In an I -it relationship,
I treat you as an object, a thing. You are a
means to an end. You're a waiter who brings me
coffee, a voter who gives me power, a research
subject who gives me data for my book. I experience
you, but I don't truly meet you. But I -thou
is different. I -thou is a genuine encounter.
I meet you not as a collection of traits, but
as a whole unique universe. And Buber believed
that in every true I -thou encounter between
two people, there is a glimpse of the eternal
thou. which is his word for God. And this wasn't
just abstract armchair philosophy for him. He
was living this in Jerusalem during incredibly
turbulent times, the lead up to 1948 and beyond.
He was actively trying to build bridges between
Jews and Arabs, between Israelis and Palestinians,
when everything was actively falling apart. He
was. He saw the sociologist or the anthropologist
not as a spokesperson for a group, but as a partner
with God and the world. He believed Revelation
wasn't just something that happened once on Mount
Sinai thousands of years ago. He said revelation
whispers to us in the course of every ordinary
day. The divine presence is here now in our meetings
with each other. Exactly. The divine presence
dwells among us. So for Buber, dialogue is an
existential demand. It's not just a nice thing
to do. It's a fundamental way of being alive.
If you aren't doing it, you aren't fully human.
If you aren't truly meeting the other, you're
just bumping into objects in the dark. Well said.
Which brings us to guide number three, and he's
arguably the most adventurous of the bunch, Muhammad
Assad. The desert wanderer. Assad's life story
is just incredible. He was born Leopold Weiss
into a Jewish family in what is now Lviv, Ukraine.
Grew up in Vienna. He was a journalist, a traveler.
He goes to the Middle East in the 1920s and just
feels this irresistible pull, this urge to wander.
And he ends up converting to Islam and writing
one of the most famous and respected English
commentaries on the Quran. He goes from Leopold
Weiss to Muhammad Assad. A massive, total transformation.
And his key concept for us is surrender. Islam,
of course, means surrender. It does. And his
own story of conversion is so telling. He didn't
sit down with a spreadsheet and logically deduce
that Islam was the most correct religion. He
describes faith coming to him like a robber who
enters a house by night. That is a wild image
for finding religion, a robber. It implies a
kind of violence or at least a complete lack
of control, an intrusion. It implies he was overtaken.
He was defenseless. He didn't find faith. Faith
found him. It broke in. And this connects directly
to his view of knowledge. He spent years living
with Bedouins in the Arabian Desert. And he deeply
critiqued the Western way of trying to conquer
knowledge. He called it intellectual rape. Yikes.
Those are very strong words. But he meant that
we try to force the world to give up its secrets,
to grab what we want from it. Incredibly strong.
He argued that to bridge a cultural distance,
you shouldn't try to conquer the culture. You
have to surrender our senses to it. You have
to let the desert strip away your Western defenses.
You have to let the cultural distance overwhelm
you, not the other way around. So we have Vile
emptying her soul, Buber meeting the Thao, and
Asad surrendering his senses. All three of them
are talking about lowering the defenses of that
sovereign self. They're all talking about a kind
of profound vulnerability. Precisely. They are
the living models for what Firani wants anthropology,
and by extension, all of us, to become. They
show us that to really know the other, you have
to risk the self. You can't stay safe on the
shore and still understand the ocean. So Frani
takes these lives, these models, and he tries
to systematize them into a new way of doing things.
He breaks this down into five facets of transforming
the practice. If we really want to adopt this
atheistic approach, what do we actually do differently?
Right. It's one thing to have these inspiring
biographies. It's another thing entirely to have
a method. So let's walk through these five facets
because they provide a kind of roadmap for this
spiritual exercise. Okay. Facet number one, method.
He talks about immersion as a way of life. Currently
in anthropology, immersion is a tool. It's something
you do for fieldwork. You get a grant. You go
live in a village in the Amazon or a neighborhood
in Cairo for a year. You take notes. You try
to behave like a local. And then you pack your
bags. You go home to your comfortable university
office and you write your book. Exactly. It's
a project. It has a start and an end date. It's
a 9 -to -5 logic, essentially. You dip in and
you dip out. It's professional. You don't bring
the jungle home with you, usually. Verani argues
that for the atheistic seeker, immersion has
to be a logic for living. It's 224 -7. It's existential.
Think of Weil again. She didn't just study the
working class. She became a factory worker. She
wanted to disappear into the crowd, to love them
as they are. So the shift is that the researcher
doesn't just produce a text and ethnography as
the end product. They consciously reorient their
entire life. The product is the life that they
live. It's a total commitment. The research never
really ends. It sounds exhausting, to be honest.
It sounds like there's no off switch. But I get
the point. OK, facet number two, form of knowledge.
He calls this revelatory thinking. This goes
right back to Assad's robber. In the secular
academy, we believe we construct knowledge. We
build theories like we build houses. We stack
the bricks of data. We apply the mortar of analysis.
And we have a structure. A nice solid theory.
Farhani says we need to learn the art of letting
go. We need what he calls docility. Docility.
That word usually has a negative connotation
like being a doormat or a passive sheep. But
here it takes on a different meaning. It means
being teachable. Being quiet enough to hear.
It's about listening to the unsaid and unsayable.
It requires silence and patience. We are waiting
for the truth to speak to us rather than interrogating
the truth until it confesses. It's a shift from
active construction to active reception. It's
admitting that maybe the truth is shy, and if
you shout at it with your theories, it's not
going to come out and talk to you. I love that.
The truth is shy. That's perfect. Okay, facet
number three, object of knowing. What are we
actually studying with this new method? This
is a direct critique of Emile Durkheim, one of
the founding fathers of sociology. Durkheim famously
and reductively equated God with society. Right.
The idea that when people are worshiping God,
they're really just worshiping the collective
power of their own social group. God is just
us, shouted really loudly. Exactly. So sociologists
study the social and they think they've successfully
explained away the divine. Ferani says no. Stop.
Do not confuse the social with the divine. That
is a massive category error. So what are the
new objects of study? The new objects of study
in this spiritual exercise are things that exceed
our human categories. God. Evil. Death. Existence
itself. The big stuff. The scary stuff. The stuff
that sovereign reason tries to ignore or explain
away as just cultural constructs or psychological
phenomena. Frani calls it the quandary puzzle
menace of the unreasonable. We have to be willing
to face the fact that some things are beyond
our tidy social explanations. We have to look
at evil not just as a social dysfunction, but
as a real menacing force. We have to look at
existence as a miracle, not just a biological
fact. Facet number four, location. Where does
all this happen? And here, Ferrani gets a little,
well, so spicy. He has some harsh words for the
university. Devils. He does not pull any punches
here. He, along with his guide Martin Buber,
is deeply skeptical of the modern academy. Buber
called academic scholarship drudgery. He was
terrified of becoming a university lecturer and
losing his spiritual vitality. Ferrani goes even
further. He describes the university as a place
of intellecticide. Intellecticide. The murder
of the intellect. That is a pretty harsh accusation
for a tenured professor to make about his own
workplace. It is. He argues that the modern university
is obsessed with security. It's modeled on the
market. It's about production, grants, safety,
rankings, avoiding lawsuits. And he asks this
really provocative question. Can the university
serve manna and manna, spiritual nourishment,
or can it only serve? mammon money and markets.
And he connects this directly to the current
political moment, doesn't he? He mentions the
inability of universities to protest genocides,
and he's specifically referencing the war in
Gaza. He does. He sees the market modeled university
as fundamentally cowardly. It cannot speak truth
to power because it's too beholden to that power
for funding and prestige. It's staffed by what
he calls security minded people. So the location
of this spiritual exercise might have to be on
the margins of the institution or at least in
constant tension with it. You can't just be a
comfortable academic. You have to be a bit of
a rebel. Which brings us to the final one, facet
number five, the knowing subject. That's us.
That's the person doing the studying. How do
we change? This is the culmination, the transformation.
The seeker must acknowledge their own fragility.
They have to admit they are dependent. The subject
becomes a vessel. The outcome isn't just that
you see the world differently or that you publish
a new paper. The outcome is that you become somewhat
different. You are the experiment. You are not
just a brain in a jar analyzing the world. You
are a soul in the world being changed by it.
That's it. Exactly. So we have this really robust,
really demanding framework, the atheistic. Now
I want to pivot and apply it very specifically.
What does this mean for our listeners who are
trying to navigate a world full of different
religions, different beliefs? We have a source
here, a blog post summary titled, What if interfaith
dialogue were a spiritual exercise? explicitly
applies Verani's ideas to this field. And this
is where the rubber really meets the road. If
we apply this atheistic lens to the way we do
interfaith dialogue, we see three huge challenging
shifts. And these are shifts that really challenge
the way most of us think about getting along
with our neighbors of different faiths. Let's
take them one by one. Shift number one, from
information to formation. We touched on this,
but let's go deeper. Most interfaith work, as
we said, is informational. Here is my holy book.
Here is yours. Here is my holiday. Here is yours.
I don't eat pork. You don't eat beef. It's safe.
It's polite. It's about correcting misconceptions
and building tolerance. It's basically a show
and tell or a Wikipedia exchange. Did you know
that in my religion, we do this? And that has
value. Let's be clear. We need to know those
facts. But Farhani's framework implies it's not
enough. The dialogue must be formational. It
must be about changing who you are. The challenge
becomes, are we willing to let the other's reality
make a genuine claim on us? What does that look
like in practice? It means when I sit down with
a Buddhist, I'm not just listening to learn about
the Four Noble Truths. I'm willing to let their
understanding of suffering fundamentally challenge
my own comfort and my own attachments. When I
sit with a Muslim, I'm willing to let their discipline
of daily prayer expose my own spiritual laziness.
So it's moving from that's interesting to that
convicts me. It's letting the other person be
a mirror that shows you your own flaws, your
own gaps, your own spiritual poverty. Correct.
It transforms dialogue from a polite coffee chat
into a spiritual workout. It's supposed to be
hard. Okay, shift number two. This feels like
the hardest one for... modern secular people
taking revelation seriously it is absolutely
the most dangerous one in normal secular dialogue
we bracket truth we have this unspoken agreement
we say that is your truth and this is my truth
we act like we're in a museum looking at different
paintings we can appreciate the art without believing
it depicts reality we can say oh what a beautiful
myth that is But the atheistic approach says
you have to get out of the museum. You have to
grapple with the possibility that the other is
holding a piece of divine truth. Exactly. Remember
Muhammad Assad? When he picked up the Quran,
he wasn't appreciating it as great Arabian literature.
He was facing the terrifying possibility that
this was divine speech. The risk here is real
and it is total. This framework implies that
genuine dialogue might reconstitute your identity.
What do you mean by that? I mean, you might convert.
Or you might be so radically transformed in your
own faith that you become unrecognizable to your
old self. It takes all the safety rails off.
If I really truly listen to you with that why
-like attention, I might not come back as the
same person. I might realize that you are right
and I am wrong about the fundamental nature of
the universe. That is the price of admission
to the atheistic encounter. If you aren't willing
to risk your own worldview, you aren't really
engaging. You're just observing from a safe distance.
You're still in the cage. Which brings us to
shift number three, the atopic meeting place.
This is the idea of the common ground. But it's
not a common ground where we water everything
down to the lowest common denominator, some kind
of vague, we're all spiritual mush. Right, not
that. It is a space of that agnostic ascent we
talked about. We don't have to agree on doctrine.
You can be a Christian. I can be a Jew. Someone
else can be a Muslim. But we must agree that
there is divine order worth listening to. We
meet in that shared humility. We meet in the
powerful agreement that we are not the center
of the universe. It's like we both agree to look
up at the sky, even if we see totally different
constellations. We just agree that the sky is
there and it's bigger and more mysterious than
both of us. That is a beautiful way to put it.
We share the awe. even if we describe the source
of that awe differently. Now, this all sounds
very noble, very poetic. I'm almost ready to
sign up for the Antheistic Club, but this is
a deep dive, and we don't just accept things
at face value. Ferroni's paper received some
very serious, very sharp pushback from other
scholars in the field. Oh, absolutely. And these
critiques are really important because they poke
holes in this potentially romantic vision. They
ask the tough, necessary questions. They do.
The responses published in Current Anthropology
were pointed. They raise critical questions about
privilege, about violence, and about the very
definition of what it means to be spiritual.
Okay, let's get into it. Critique number one
comes from Yasmin Moll, an anthropologist at
the University of Michigan. She points out a
divide between the religious and the spiritual.
And Moll makes a very grounded, practical point.
She essentially says, look Khalid, many of us
anthropologists are already religious people.
They pray. They go to mosque or church or synagogue.
They do anthropology to pay the bills. They don't
need their academic discipline to be their church.
Right. She's basically saying, I have a rich
spiritual life. Thank you very much. I don't
need my fieldwork to provide my fullness of being.
I have a prayer rug for that. Exactly. Why burden
the job with the monumental task of saving your
soul? But she goes deeper. She offers a correction
on Farhani's reading of Muhammad Asad. She argues
that Assad didn't seek agnostic assent or wonder.
He sought certitude, he found Islam, and he was
sure about it. He wasn't just hanging out in
the atheistic space enjoying the mystery. He
bought the house. He moved in. Right. She suggests
Farhani might be romanticizing the seeking part,
the wandering, the questioning over the finding
part. For many, many religious people, the goal
isn't to wander forever in a beautiful mystery.
The goal is to arrive at the truth with a capital
T. So Maul is asking if this atheistic space
is just a projection of a liberal, academic kind
of spirituality that values the question more
than the answer. It's a great point. It's easy
to love the question when you don't have to commit
to an answer that might demand things of you.
Okay, a very strong critique. Critique number
two comes from Elaine Oliphant and Joel Robbins.
They bring up the problem of the divine. This
is the dark side argument. Ferrani talks about
the divine, about revelation as this source of
oneness. connection and transformation. It all
sounds lovely. But Oliphant and Robbins remind
us, revelation isn't always benign. Not at all.
History is absolutely full of violent revelations.
God told me to smite you. God told me this land
is mine and you and your people have to leave.
Yeah, hearing voices from beyond isn't always
a recipe for world peace. Sometimes it's a recipe
for a crusade or a genocide. Exactly. If we open
the door of reason to revelation, how do we distinguish
between the wister of the divine and a dangerous
delusion or a malicious call to violence ferrani
talks about the need for discernment but robbins
points out he doesn't really explain how we discern
what's the test and they also point out a glaring
exclusion in his examples ferrani's models vile
buber assad are all abrahamic they're all monotheistic
they deal with a big god what about everything
else right what about ancestors what about nature
spirits what about polytheism oliphant asks does
Does atheism exclude an indigenous worldview
of the spirit world because it's too focused
on a divine order or revelation in the Jewish,
Christian, or Muslim sense? If my reality is
populated by forest spirits, do I fit in Farani's
club? That's a heavy critique. If we're trying
to escape the secular cage, are we just jumping
into a slightly larger monotheistic cage? Are
we just trading one Western -centric bias for
another? It's a real danger. They warn that we
can't ignore the violent history of Christian
and European concepts of religion and the divine
being imposed on other cultures. We have to be
incredibly careful not to universalize a specific
kind of God talk. And then we have critique number
three from Omer Ibrahim. This one hits on the
very real issues of power and privilege. And
Ibrahim asks the deeply uncomfortable question,
who gets to surrender? who can actually afford
to dissolve their ego right if you're a tenured
professor at a prestigious western university
maybe it feels romantic and liberating to surrender
your ego but if you are marginalized if you're
oppressed if your ego is attacked every day then
effacing your ego might sound a lot like just
giving up the little power you have Precisely.
He warns that this call for ego effacement can
be a colonial trick. It's easy for a privileged
scholar to talk about surrendering to the other.
But for a colonized subject, survival might require
the exact opposite. Asserting the self, building
up the ego, not dissolving it. He asks whose
temporality we're operating on. Is the researcher's
spiritual journey happening at the expense of
the people being studied? It's the eat, pray,
love problem, isn't it? Am I using your culture,
your reality, as a kind of exotic backdrop for
my own personal enlightenment project? It's a
potent and necessary question. Ibrahim reminds
us that spirituality doesn't happen in a political
vacuum. It happens in a world of very real power
dynamics. So Farhani gets hit with these critiques
from all sides. Elitism, exclusion, romanticism,
naivete about violence. Does he just roll over?
No. He writes a defense, a rebuttal. And this
is where the context gets incredibly... real
and raw. He is writing from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem
during what he calls the Al -Aqsa flood, the
war in Gaza that started in October 2023. And
this context is inescapable for him. He frames
his entire response using the metaphor of the
flood. The biblical flood, Noah's flood. Yes.
He asks how that ancient story names our current
time, a flood that is washing away truths and
untruths alike. What does he say? He says we
desperately need big universal stories. He argues
that in the face of what he calls the disintegrating
powers of capitalism and war, small local stories
aren't enough. If we just retreat into our little
tribes, our little identities, we will be crushed
by the massive machinery of war and markets.
So for him, universalism isn't the oppressor.
It's the life raft. In his view, yes. He says
we need big stories, a universal vision of humanity
and the divine to counter the big destructive
force. that are tearing the world apart. And
then, addressing Ibrahim's powerful point about
power, Farhani argues that the atheistic can
be the lot of the defeated. It isn't just a luxury
for the privileged. How so? How does that work?
He suggests that the spirituality of the oppressed
is a real and powerful thing. He says that this
atheistic mode, this radical openness to the
divine, might actually work better for those
who are crushed, for those who are, in his words,
working and thinking from lost, unpromising places.
For them, it is a way to survive. the siege.
The siege. That leads to his final powerful provocation.
He says the university and sovereign secular
reason itself are a siege on the human intellect.
They're surrounding us, blockading us, starving
us of meaning. And he closes by quoting the great
Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish who wrote, by
taking this journey you can besiege your siege.
Besiege your siege. That is an incredible image.
It means turning the tables on your captor. It
means that by opening up to the divine, by refusing
to be trapped in the pure material secular world,
the intellect frees itself. It breaks the blockade.
It pursues its divine possibilities even, and
especially amidst dark times. It is an act of
intellectual and spiritual resistance. So, we
have traveled all the way from Rilke's secular
cage through Furani's atheistic space, guided
by Veal, Buber, and Assad. We've faced the tough
critiques, and we've looked at the profound implications
for how we talk to one another. We've seen how
this one idea challenges the academy, challenges
interfaith dialogue, and ultimately challenges
us personally. It has been quite a journey. Yeah.
And it really does leave us with a lot to chew
on. I think the biggest takeaway for me and maybe
for you listening is about this idea of the courage
to be transformed. It's about realizing that
knowing things isn't enough. You have to risk
being someone new. Yes. And that true knowledge,
this kind of knowledge comes with a real cost.
It costs you your certainty. It costs you your
defenses. It costs you the illusion of control.
So here's my final question to you, the listener.
The next time you find yourself in a conversation
with someone who sees the universe in a fundamentally
different way than you do, maybe they're from
a different faith maybe they have no faith at
all ask yourself this are you analyzing them
are you just collecting data points for your
mental map of the world or you being attentive
or are you willing to let their reality truly
enter you are you willing to be in a sense besieged
by their truth because maybe true understanding
isn't just about safety or tolerance maybe it's
about the profound risk and the profound reward
of being changed and on that note We'll leave
you to your own spiritual exercises. Thanks for
diving deep with us.