The Angel Ape?

The Cultural Animal: Human Nature, Meaning and Social Life by Roy Baumeister: Oxford University Press, 2005, 450 pages, $29.95

Even in Kansas, various life forms evolved to band together in societies that exert a major influence on the behavior of the species. But only humans are molded by culture, writes psychologist Roy Baumeister in The Cultural Animal: Human Nature, Meaning and Social Life (Oxford University Press, 2005).

Culture explains our explosive success, letting us care for victims of storm and stress in New Orleans and divide our labor in performance- and output-enhancing ways; allowing us collectively, through language, to tell future generations what we’ve learned and individually to remodel our actions rather than be damned to endless, hardwired repetition.

Not that culture is the whole story, Baumeister admits: Our minds and thinking, for example, are bi-level: part ape (automatic), part angel (conscious). There’s no guarantee we’ll overcome the inner ape and express the angel, but we’ve got a fighting chance:

“Ultimately, one of the biggest differences between social and cultural animals is in the power of meaning to cause behavior. Human behavior is often caused or influenced by meanings: honor, pride, justice, patriotism, ambitions, goals, religious promises and other obligations. . . .”

If you’re baffled by violence, pained by human suffering and peeved by spam, try Baumeister. Caution: His sunniness is founded on numerous psychological studies, which means Cultural Animal is a pokey ever measured, is always an excellent and rewarding thing.
—Roger Martin

Sanctified Sex

Sexing the Church: Gender, Power and Ethics in Contemporary Catholicism by Aline Kalbian: Indiana University Press, 2005, 169 pages, $19.95

These days explorations of body meanings and body boundaries abound in cultural studies generally, in the study of religion in particular. Two newly published books by members of FSU’s Department of Religion are case studies in Christian attention to the body.

Aline Kalbian demonstrates the influence on modern Roman Catholic sexual ethics of the notion of each person as a gendered body. Amanda Porterfield’s Healing in the History of Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2005) (see review, opposite page) chronicles the nursing and curing of suffering bodies that has been central to the mission of Christianity from its beginning.

Kalbian’s interests in Roman Catholic thought, contemporary ethics and bioethics come together in her analysis of the uses of metaphors of gender in Catholic moral teachings regarding sex, marriage and reproduction since 1880. Specifically Kalbian focuses on the “sexing” of the church as female: bride, mother, and virgin. After establishing the crucial place of the concept of order as the organizing metaphor in Catholic social ethics she demonstrates how gender identity and “gender complimentarity” are assumed to be essential attributes of the natural order.

Kalbian, now an associate professor, writes in a lucid and direct style, providing an interesting study that is accessible to the non-specialist. Caution: the reader will find neither an in-depth analysis of the use of metaphor in religious and theological language nor an advocacy on one side or the other of such hot-button issues as gay and lesbian status or the priestly sexual abuse scandal (although Kalbian does note the relevance of her study to such issues). A discussion of the use of metaphor in religious language is not necessary to establish that Catholic theology and moral teaching rests on such metaphors. As far as advocacy is concerned, hers is a self-described “posture of polite suspicion,” a posture which is appropriate for her purposes and which serves the reader well. Kalbian is nothing if not even-handed in her treatment of papal and Vatican pronouncements.
—Leo Sandon

Moral Combat?

The Evolution-Creation Struggle by Michael Ruse: Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005, 336 pages, $25.95

It’s not science’s fault. But on occasion with some new discovery, science finds itself locked in a tense battle with religion. The ingredients are usually the same: fundamentalists on both sides, politicians, emotional rhetoric.

This time it’s about evolution and creationism—again. It’s been more than 30 years since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled creationism shouldn’t be taught in public schools. But the furor is back. Time magazine reported that 26 states in the past four years have reconsidered how they should teach evolution.

In the thick of the resurgence is Michael Ruse, FSU philosopher of science, with this timely book. Where scientists and advocates of “intelligent design”—a euphemism intended to make creationism more palatable to the masses—ignore each other or spin empty arguments, Ruse fills in with insightful context.

He sets up his own assertions by taking readers back more than 2,000 years to the beginnings of Christianity. Ruse weaves together the histories of religion and evolutionary theory, illustrating their own co-evolution. So entwined are the two that it becomes obvious they are fighting toward the same goal: to explain the origin of life. But that also implies defining who we are, our morals and our reality.

With such high stakes, both sides owe the other at least the courtesy of considering Ruse’s measured words.
—Christine Suh

A Healing Tradition

Healing in the History of Christianity by Amanda Porterfield: Oxford University Press, 2005, 218 pages, $25.00

Amanda Porterfield, FSU’s Robert A. Spivey Professor of Religion, is one of the nation’s leading scholars of American religious history. But she has not been exclusively Americanist in her work. She is a past president of the American Society of Church History and currently serves as co-editor of the society’s journal, Church History. In keeping with this widening focus she has written a study of healing in the entire history of Christianity as a world religion.

In her book Porterfield notes that healing has been a major force in the development of Christianity as an ongoing religious tradition. She argues that it has been, in fact, a defining force. This healing mission has been inspired through images of bodily wholeness. She writes that the dynamic relationship between metaphors of the body of Christ, the body of the Christian community, and the bodies of individual believers has “played crucial roles in many different expressions of Christian healing.”

While acknowledging the biological rootedness of culture and religion, Porterfield avoids biological reductionism insisting that an exclusively biological approach to religion cannot provide “an adequate understanding of religion’s complexity, fluidity, and historical development.” She does justice to that complexity and fluidity by discussing the whole range of the meaning of healing in Christian history, from Jewish backgrounds, through the exorcisms and healings of Jesus, to healing and concepts of wholeness in the context of modern science and technology. Those who desire more extended discussion of a particular subject may feel a bit unfulfilled, but that is the inevitable problem with such a wide-ranging survey. It is quite impressive that Porterfield accomplished such a comprehensive study in 185 pages. With extensive research and clear prose she makes the case that healing has been central to Christian practice, that it “has always been directed to human suffering and to bodies.”
—Leo Sandon