BOBMA vol 1 | issue 1

BOBMAA publication of the Mizzou Religious Studies Club

Volume 1

March 2015

BOBMAExecutive Board

Co-Editors-In-ChiefShannon Orbe ‘15

Haydn Campmier ‘15

Design & Layout MangerRachel Koehn ‘15

Faculty Advisor

Bob Flanagan Assistant Teaching Professor

Director of Undergraduate Studies

A publication of the Mizzou Religious Studies Club

Volume 1 | March 2015

Table of Contents

03 Letter from the Editors

04 About BOBMA

05 Religious Experience & Transformation In Lost Rachel Koehn, undergrad ‘15

13 Mary Quite Contrary Samuel Stella, undergrad ‘15

19 Honor the Past to Shape the Future: Ohlone Women, Spirituality, and Indigenous Revitalization Abel R. Gomez, graduate

25 Kumare: A Film Analysis Gabry Tyson, undergrad ‘16

26 Professor Profile: Dr. Dennis Kelley

Letter From the Editors

Dear Readers,

Almost 40 years ago, the Religious Studies Department was founded at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Scholars began to turn their focus on a discipline, though often ignored and misunderstood, that could profoundly impact our community and Amer-ica’s understanding of diversity and religion. In August of 1981, Jill Riatt was appointed as the Head of the new Department. By 1985 she hired several professors who became trailblazers to the University and opened a door to new possibilities for students and the community. The study of religion is thriving at universities across the country and we are proud to be a member of this movement.

As we were reflecting on this history, we came to realize that there was no forum where undergraduates (and graduate students for that matter) can come together to share their research and interest in Religious Studies. We hope to continue the rich legacy of our department by founding this zine and filling this void. Through BOBMA, we hope that academics and students from a variety of institutions and disciplines will be able to see this field’s exciting expansion as it challenges students to engage in deeper academic inquiry.

Even though this is our first publication, we believe the articles enclosed are repre-sentative of the tremendous work and passion of the students of this field. Students’ work that is featured in this publication ranges from history, film, sociology, and many others. We are indebted to their commitment to the study of religion, and we hope that this zine will be of service to future students researching Religious Studies for many years to come.

Shannon Orbe and Haydn CampmierBOBMA, Co-Editors-in-Chief

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About BOBMAWho We Are

We are the students of the University of Missouri that have formed the Religious Studies Club. We are inquisitive. While others look with boredom, indifference, and fear, we gaze will wonder, curios-ity, and awe.

Mission Statement

To be an organization of students seeking to increase the presence of Religious Studies on the cam-pus of the University of Missouri and to provide a non discriminatory community for Graduate Students, Majors, Minors and interested students through education, thoughtful dialogue, and wel-coming outreach.

What is BOBMA?

After 13 years of Catholic school, I never wanted to take another religion course again. I told this to my adviser during summer welcome very matter-of-factly when we were discussing my schedule. “Are there any subjects you struggle with?” She prompted. “I would prefer to take the minimum amount of math and science if possible… oh, and no religion courses!” But to my dismay I had to take Intro to Religious Studies to fulfill my Freshman Interest Group requirements.

I begrudgingly went to Professor Flanagan’s Intro class as a freshman dreading the long semester ahead of me. There an old man shuffled to the front of Strickland’s classroom, picked up a piece of chalk, and wrote Dogma on the board. He turned to peer out into the sea of nervous and indifferent students through his thick round glasses. “Can anyone tell me what this word means?” He began. Often, when people think of religion they think of Dogma or religion as instructing followers in, what Professor Flanagan describes as, “the way it is.” However, we were at a public university; and therefore, would not be focusing on Dogmatic teachings of religion. He turned his focus once more to the blackboard and wrote a new word: BOBMA. “I would like to propose a different perspective of religion, that of BOBMA. This is a perspective of ‘the way it is’ in our world and I invite you to open your minds to new approaches of religion and thinking about our world during this semester.”

This new approach to religion was fascinating to me and I was inspired to continue taking Religious Studies course as an undergrad. I was lucky enough to take another course with Professor Flanagan where he encouraged me to become a double major in Religious Studies. For many students at the University of Missouri, Professor Flanagan is the first person they meet from the department and he is often the first person to propose new perspectives to students. He has become a great mentor to the Religious Studies club, undergraduates, and myself particularly. If I had not taken his class freshman year, my path at Mizzou might have been much different. For these reasons, we have de-cided to name our zine in his honor.

Shannon OrbePresident | Religious Studies Club

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Religious Experience & Transformation In Lost

Rachel Koehn, undergrad ‘15

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” - John Donne, Meditation XVII1

Introduction Full of references, overt and subtle, to religious ideas, symbols, and texts, the television series Lost, which aired from September 2004 to May 2010 on ABC, presents an opportunity to once again consider the rela-tionship between religion and popular culture.2 A close viewing of Lost reveals that theories about religious experience put forth by scholars such as Rudolf Otto, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Gerardus van der Leeuw, and William James are applicable to the plot, themes, and characters in the series. Lost is an exploration of various conceptions of religious experience with the goal of illustrating the transformational impact these experiences have on human life.

Methodology In the following discussion, I will rely on four theorists’ ideas about the concept of religious experience: Rudolf Otto, Friedrich Schleiermacher, William James, and Rodney Stark. Not only were these theorists influ-ential in the religious experience conversation, but their work also finds particular resonance in Lost compared to other discussions of religious experience. After presenting each theorist’s characterization of religious ex-perience, I will examine the portrayal of their ideas in Lost by providing specific examples from Lost episodes. The second portion of the piece will draw from the ideas of five scholars — Gerardus van der Leeuw, Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi and Michael Argyle, S. Brent Plate, and Jonathan Haidt — about the effects of and response to religious experience. I will use these scholars’ works to explore what I believe to be the reason depictions of religious experience exist in Lost: to communicate that religious experience, in whatever form, brings about individual transformation and a community-oriented life.

The Island as Religion One early 20th century scholar provides a basis for discussing religious experience in the context of Lost. The ideas of German theologian Rudolf Otto allow for the characterization of the island the characters are stranded on — referred to going forward as the Island — as itself a representation of religion. Establishing the Island as such creates a platform for the remainder of this piece: If the Island itself is religion, then interactions the char-

1 Donne, John. “Meditation XVII.” The Literature Network. Last modified 2014. Accessed November 29, 2014. http://www.online-literature.com.2 Lost. ABC. 2004-2010. Written by Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse.

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acters have with the Island can be deemed religious experiences. I will begin drawing the Island-to-religion paral-lel by examining statements about religion in Rudolf Otto’s “The Idea of the Holy.”3 Otto states that if there is “any single domain of human experience that pres-ents us with something unmistakably specific and unique, peculiar to itself, assuredly it is that of the re-ligious life.”4 This description of religion — despite being primarily introductory to Otto’s main points, which I will discuss later — can be applied in a com-pelling way to the Island. First, the Island is certainly “unmistakably specific,” as the mythology surrounding it states that its protec-tor, Jacob — a figure characterized as the Island’s de-ity in the series — carefully chooses specific people to draw to it.5 This is reinforced further when the char-acters discover that Jacob has written the names of the people he’s drawn to the Island on the wall of a cave, creating a list of possible successors as protector of the Island.6 The people listed are candidates for protector because they are flawed and emotionally damaged, and Jacob believes that the Island could help them.7 Thus, the survivors of Oceanic 815 are drawn to the Island individually, by name, because of very specific characteristics and for a very specific purpose. In ad-dition, the Island forces many of the characters to con-front difficulties in their past by presenting them with targeted, individualized reminders. For example, Jack Shephard hears the voice of his dead father, whom he had a strained relationship with, over the broken intercom at the Hydra Dharma station.8 Kate Austen encounters a black horse similar to one from her past that caused a car accident that allowed Austen to es-cape from the U.S. Marshal who was taking her into custody for murdering her stepfather.9 John Locke’s father, a con man who tricked Locke into giving him a kidney, inexplicably appears on the Island, forcing Locke to deal with his anger and hurt toward him.10 Once again, the Island’s supernatural qualities are

3 Otto, Rudolf. “The Idea of the Holy.” 1917. In Theories of Reli-gion: A Reader, edited by Seth D. Kunin, 80-85. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006.4 Otto, “Holy,” 80.5 Lost, “What They Died For” (Season 6, Episode 16).6 Lost, “The Substitute” (Season 6, Episode 4).7 Lost, “What They Died For” (Season 6, Episode 16).8 Lost, “A Tale of Two Cities” (Season 3, Episode 1).9 Lost, “What Kate Did” (Season 2, Episode 9).10 Lost, “The Man From Tallahassee” (Season 3, Episode 13).

strikingly specific to each person experiencing them, echoing Otto’s description of religion. A second facet of Otto’s definition is a “unique, pe-culiar to itself” quality of religious life. The Island possesses a number of unique qualities and offers the survivors countless peculiar, non-rational experienc-es. Most of the Island’s anomalous qualities are asso-ciated with a unique electromagnetic force that ema-nates from the Island.11 This type of energy is found nowhere else in the world, and it heals sickness, af-fects navigation — which makes outsiders unable to find the unique location of the Island — controls seis-mic activity, and even enables time travel.12 In addi-tion, the peculiarity of the Island is found in some of the markedly unexpected things encountered by the characters — polar bears, a sentient column of black smoke called the Smoke Monster, and a large ancient Egyptian statue, to name a few.13 Thus, Otto’s defini-tion of religious experience finds parallels in the de-piction of the Island in Lost. Perhaps the most well known facet of Otto’s work is coining the term “numinous” to describe the transcen-dent, inexplicable, intangible meaning of holiness be-yond simple morality.14 In Lost, the “numinous” can be found in the supernatural and non-rational quali-ties of the Island just described — those things that set it apart and make it something completely unique. In “The Idea of The Holy,” Otto states that experienc-es with the “numinous” must be “evoked, awakened in the mind.”15 This sort of awakening is depicted symbolically in Lost, as the characters’ encounters with the “numinous” Island are set into motion by the plane crash. Many of the episodes in Season 1 begin with an extreme close-up of a character’s eye opening, illustrating an awakening to new life on the Island.16 The episode then details the past of the character in the close-up to create the framework for an eventual transformation. Thus, Otto’s ideas about the initiation of religious experiences materialize in Lost: The char-

11 Lost, “The Variable” (Season 5, Episode 14).12 Lost, “Walkabout” (Season 1, Episode 4), “The Economist” (Season 4, Episode 3), “The Constant” (Season 4, Episode 5), “The Variable” (Season 5, Episode 14).13 Lost, “Pilot: Part 2” (Season 1, Episode 1), “Exodus: Part 3” (Season 1, Episode 25), “LaFleur” (Season 5, Episode 8)14 Otto, “Holy,” 82.15 Otto, “Holy,” 82.16 Lost, “Pilot: Part 1” (Season 1, Episode 1), “Walkabout” (Sea-son 1, Episode 4), “House of the Rising Sun” (Season 1, Episode 6), “The Moth” (Season 1, Episode 7).

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Religious Experience & Transformation in Lost

acters’ awakening to the Island represents an awaken-ing to religion and religious experience. This discov-ery sets the stage for the discussion to follow.

The Predecessor of the Religious Experience Dis-cussion Friedrich Schleiermacher, a German theologian, became a predecessor to the religious experience con-versation in his 1799 book On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers.17 Schleiermacher presents unique ideas about the essence of religion and its relation-ship to human emotions, ideas that find resonance in many of the Lost characters’ early interactions with the Island. According to Schleiermacher, “religion’s essence is neither thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling,”18 and it is “distinct from other moments of immediate self-consciousness.”19 Schleiermacher’s conception of religious experi-ence can be seen in the supernatural, perhaps halluci-natory, interactions many of the characters have with the Island in the early seasons of Lost. These experi-ences address the characters’ psychological baggage, and seem to be emotionally driven times where the characters’ awareness of reality is diminished – a loss of self-consciousness. For example, Boone Carlisle, who is in love with his stepsister, realizes he needs to let go of his feelings when he hallucinates her death via the Smoke Monster.20 Carlisle believes the hallu-cination to be real and fixates on his grief for his sis-ter, Shannon, until John Locke points out that she is still alive.21 Jack Shephard, who betrayed his father, Christian, sees his now-deceased dad on the Island and follows him in search of internal peace.22 Sheph-ard is so emotionally focused on the pursuit of Chris-tian that he almost falls to his death off a cliff in the jungle.23 Therefore, these experiences can clearly be categorized as unthinking and driven by intuition and feeling. Further, they can even be interpreted to lack action as well, as they are hallucinatory and may 17 Schleiermacher, Friedrich. On Religion: Speeches to Its Cul-tured Despisers. Edited by Richard Crouter. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996.18 Schleiermacher, On Religion, 22.19 Proudfoot, Wayne. Religious Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985, 23.20 Lost, “Hearts and Minds” (Season 1, Episode 13).21 Lost, “Hearts and Minds” (Season 1, Episode 13).22 Lost, “White Rabbit” (Season 1, Episode 5).23 Lost, “White Rabbit” (Season 1, Episode 5).

take place inside the characters’ heads — the show is ambiguous in this respect. In addition, they are dis-tinct from moments of self-consciousness because of the separation from reality and disregard for the self that occurs. Thus, Schleiermacher’s early notions of religious experiences are mirrored in the early experi-ences the characters have with the Island in Lost. The theorists who followed Schleiermacher narrowed his more abstract conception of religious experience into more easily identifiable, less broadly applicable char-acterizations.

Qualities and Types of Religious Experience The next two theorists I will discuss put religious experience into more practical terms. In his 1902 work “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” American psychologist William James presents qualities of reli-gious experience.24 Decades later, in 1965, American sociologist Rodney Stark creates “A Taxonomy of Re-ligious Experience,” in which he organizes and de-scribes various types of religious experience.25 Both sets of ideas prove to be valuable in examining the presence of religious experience in Lost. We will first turn our attention to William James. In Lectures 16 and 17 of “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” James details four qualities of religious or “mystical” experience: ineffability, noetic qual-ity, transiency, and passivity.26 The first two of these characteristics are substantial for deeming any expe-rience religious, according to James.27 The next two, while “less sharply marked,” are also typical of these types of experience.28 Each of these four qualities can be clearly identified in the relationship between the characters and the Island in Lost, further solidifying my point that the series explores different views of re-ligious experience. First, James states that something is ineffable if “it defies expression, that no adequate report of its con-tents can be given in words.”29 The ineffability of the Island and the characters’ experiences on it becomes

24 James, William. “The Varieties of Religious Experience.” Electronic Text Center. Last modified 1996. Accessed November 29, 2014. http://etext.lib.virginia.edu.25 Stark, Rodney. “A Taxonomy of Religious Experience.” Jour-nal for the Scientific Study of Religion 5, no. 1 (Autumn 1965): 97-116.26 James, “Varieties,” 371-2.27 James, “Varieties,” 371.28 James, “Varieties,” 371.29 James, “Varieties,” 371.

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clear in the Season 4 episode “Eggtown,” in which Jack Shephard tells a fake story in Kate Austen’s trial about what happened after the plane crash.30 The Oceanic Six, the six characters who left the Island at the end of Season 4, concocted a fabricated story to tell publicly about the crash to protect the Island and those still on it, and because the truth about the Island is inexpli-cable, unbelievable and without rationality.31 For James, a noetic quality is a “[state] of knowl-edge” and “[carries] with [it] a curious sense of author-ity for after-time.”32 As Lost progresses, the characters discover properties of the Island that give them a sense of knowledge outside of the ordinary. For example, in Season 5, when the Island begins jumping in time, the characters develop an experiential knowledge of the rules of time travel and the results of breaking linear time — knowledge they would not have acquired off the Island.33 In addition, in the last season of the se-ries, the characters finally come to understand why they were brought to the Island in the first place —because they are candidates to replace Jacob as pro-tector. Thus, the series progresses from the characters being clueless about the existence of the Island and its underlying rules and powers to the characters acquir-ing, embracing, and acting on the unique knowledge gathered from time spent on the Island. Further, this “state of knowledge” about the Island also carries the after-time authority that James discusses. This is evi-dent first in the significance of the Island to the world as a whole. In the Season 6 episode “Ab Aeterno,” Ja-cob explains to Richard Alpert that the Island acts as a sort of cork for the world, keeping the electromagnet-ic power contained.34 If this power were released, the energy would collapse the Island — and, eventually, the Earth — in on itself until it ceased to exist.35 Thus, the Island is established as a time-and-space-tran-scendent authority. The after-time significance of the Island is represented in a different sense in the Season 6 flash sideways, an alternate reality the characters are assumed to experience after the events of the Island.36

30 Lost, “Eggtown” (Season 4, Episode 4).31 Lost, “There’s No Place Like Home: Part 3” (Season 4, Episode 14).32 James, “Varieties,” 371.33 Lost, “Whatever Happened, Happened” (Season 5, Episode 11).34 Lost, “Ab Aeterno” (Season 6, Episode 9).35 Lost, “The End” (Season 6, Episode 17).36 Lost, “LAX: Part 1” (Season 6, Episode 1).

In the flash sideways, each character one by one re-gains their memories of what happened on the Island and must do so before they are able to “move on” in the series finale.37 In this way, the Island is established as significant for the passage from present life to after-life or “after-time.” The third quality James provides, transiency, sim-ply means that religious experiences “cannot be sus-tained for long.”38 In Lost, the very quality that makes the Island so unique — the electromagnetic power — is sporadic, only present in certain areas of the Island, the places where the Dharma Initiative built its Swan and Orchid research stations.39 The electromagnetism also allows the Island to physically move to another location at any time, making its location temporary — transient — as well. 40

James’ definition of passivity is that the experiencer feels “as if his own will were in abeyance” and “as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.”41 This is evident in Lost in two senses. First, the characters’ initial exposure to the Island is completely involun-tary and against their wills, as it happens as a result of the plane crash.42 It is later revealed that the crash was the work of a superior power, Jacob, via the elec-tromagnetic incident Desmond Hume caused.43 This is certainly a passive beginning to the relationship be-tween the characters and the Island. The second sense is more literal and occurs in the characters’ interac-tions with the Smoke Monster. In several instances, the Smoke Monster physically lifts a character – a lit-eral example of a superior power grasping a person in a religious experience. This happens first to John Locke, who is almost dragged into a pit but is released at his request,44 and second to Eko, who is killed when the Smoke Monster slams him repeatedly against the ground.45 These two incidences represent passivity in religious experience. Therefore, each of James’ four characteristics of religious experience is seen in Lost.

37 Lost, “Happily Ever After” (Season 6, Episode 11).38 James, “Varieties,” 372.39 Lost, “Orientation” (Season 2, Episode 3), “There’s No Place Like Home: Part 2” (Season 4, Episode 13).40 Lost, “There’s No Place Like Home: Part 3” (Season 4, Epi-sode 14).41 James, “Varieties,” 372.42 Lost, “Pilot: Part 1” (Season 1, Episode 1).43 Lost, “Live Together, Die Alone: Part 2” (Season 2, Episode 24), “What They Died For” (Season 6, Episode 16).44 Lost, “Exodus: Part 3” (Season 1, Episode 25).45 Lost, “The Cost of Living” (Season 3, Episode 5).

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The existence of clear parallels between James’ work and the series further supports the various concep-tions of religious experience in Lost. Written more than half a century after James’ “Va-rieties,” Rodney Stark’s “A Taxonomy of Religious Ex-perience” also provides a practical description of reli-gious experience. Stark divides religious experiences into four categories: confirming, responsive, ecstatic, and revelational.46 He further subdivides these group-ings, but for the purposes of this discussion, we will focus only on the four larger divisions. Stark’s first category is confirming religious expe-riences, in which “the human actor simply notes the existence or presence of the divine actor.”47 The first confirming experience in Lost occurs when John Locke tells Jack Shephard that he has “looked into the eye of this Island, and what [he] saw was beautiful.”48 This is the first instance in the series in which the Island is personified, and it begins Locke’s treatment of the Island as a sort of higher power. A second confirming experience is Hugo Reyes’ first encounter with Jacob at his cabin in the jungle.49 Reyes stumbles upon the cabin and peers in the window, where he sees a shad-owy Jacob in a rocking chair.50 It is at this point that Reyes begins to acknowledge the presence of some sort of supernatural leader on the Island. The second configuration of religious experience for Stark is responsive experience, where “the divine actor is perceived as noting the presence of the hu-man actor.”51 The Island’s acknowledgement of and interaction with the characters first becomes evident in the Season 1 episode “Walkabout,” in which it is revealed that John Locke, who was paralyzed when he boarded Oceanic 815, can walk.52 Later, Ben Linus confirms that the healing was the Island’s doing, and that the Island also caused his spinal tumor as a way of transitioning the Others from Linus’ leadership to Locke’s.53 Rose Nadler, who had terminal cancer off the Island, is also healed by its supernatural quali-ties.54 The Island-facilitated healings and illnesses

46 Stark, “Taxonomy,” 99.47 Stark, “Taxonomy,” 99.48 Lost, “White Rabbit” (Season 1, Episode 5).49 Lost, “The Beginning of the End” (Season 4, Episode 1).50 Lost, “The Beginning of the End” (Season 4, Episode 1).51 Stark, “Taxonomy,” 99.52 Lost, “Walkabout” (Season 1, Episode 4).53 Lost, “There’s No Place Like Home: Part 3” (Season 4, Epi-sode 14).54 Lost, “S.O.S.” (Season 2, Episode 19).

are evidence of the Island’s response to the charac-ters. A more literal example of a responsive experi-ence is John Locke’s first encounter with Jacob when Ben Linus takes Locke to Jacob’s cabin.55 Frustrated because the cabin appears to be empty, Locke turns to leave when he hears Jacob say “Help me” and sees his shadowy form in the corner.56 Here, it becomes clear to Linus, Locke, and the show’s viewers that the Island and Jacob have a specific purpose in mind for Locke, as only a select few Island inhabitants are able to in-teract with Jacob directly.57 This suggests that in Lost, occurrences of Stark’s responsive experiences are an indication of a particular inclination toward religious experience and divine connection. Stark’s ecstatic religious experiences are those in which “the awareness of mutual presence is re-placed by an affective relationship akin to love or friendship.”58 The ecstatic relationship with the Is-land is personified best in the character of Richard Alpert, who is granted immortality by Jacob for his loyalty to the Island.59 In addition, Ben Linus’ affec-tionate relationship with the Island demonstrates this type of religious experience. Linus claims the Island as his birthplace despite not being born there,60 and he is willing to move the Island because of his strong desire to protect it even though doing so means he can never return to the Island.61 The Island has a similar effect on Jack Shephard, who was initially skeptical of its supernatural qualities,62 after he leaves it — Shephard’s life off the Island comes to revolve around getting back to it.63 After he returns, Shephard takes on the role of protector and ultimately sacrifices his life to save the Island.64 Thus, these characters’ expe-riences with the Island illustrate an ecstatic connec-tion. This depiction of Stark’s ecstatic experiences is strikingly similar to the ideas of Schleiermacher dis-cussed earlier, illustrating that evolving notions of

55 Lost, “The Man Behind the Curtain” (Season 3, Episode 20).56 Lost, “The Man Behind the Curtain” (Season 3, Episode 20).57 Lost, “The Man Behind the Curtain” (Season 3, Episode 20).58 Stark, “Taxonomy,” 99.59 Lost, “Ab Aeterno” (Season 6, Episode 9).60 Lost, “The Man Behind the Curtain” (Season 3, Episode 20).61 Lost, “There’s No Place Like Home: Part 3” (Season 4, Epi-sode 14).62 Lost, “Man of Science, Man of Faith” (Season 2, Episode 1).63 Lost, “Through the Looking Glass: Part 2” (Season 3, Episode 23).64 Lost, “Through the Looking Glass: Part 2” (Season 3, Episode 23).

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emotional involvement in religious experience are re-flected in Lost. This aspect of the religious experience conversation will arise again when I discuss various ideas about the effects of religious experience, many of which are emotionally driven. The final category of religious experience that Stark presents is revelational experiences, where “the hu-man actor perceives himself as a confidant of and/or a fellow participant in action with the divine actor.”65 The two characters who best demonstrate this type of experience are once again Ben Linus and John Locke, whose connections with the Island are particularly strong. For Linus, the revelational aspect of his re-lationship with the Island surfaces in the Season 3 episode “The Man Behind the Curtain,” in which he tells Locke that he is the only one who talks to Jacob and knows where he is.66 This positions Linus as Ja-cob’s confidant among the Island’s inhabitants. John Locke’s revelational experience takes on a more ex-treme characterization, as Locke’s body is overtaken by the Man in Black – Jacob’s brother and the lesser-but-evil deity on the Island.67 Thus, Locke becomes “a fellow participant” with the divine forces on the Island. This reinforces Stark’s taxonomy as a sort of map of the trajectory of the characters’ religious de-velopment over the course of the series. Therefore, it becomes clear that each of Stark’s categories of reli-gious experience is seen in the events of Lost. As we conclude our in-depth examination of theories of reli-gious experience as they appear in Lost, the reason for these parallels and those previously discussed begins to become clear.

Religious Experience and Transformation Thus far, I have demonstrated that the interpreta-tions of religious experience by four theorists — Otto, Schleiermacher, James, and Stark — are clearly repre-sented in the TV series Lost. At this point, the question becomes why these parallels warrant discussion, why they are significant. The conclusion I believe these connections with Lost are building to is that religious experience brings about transformation in the lives of people who experience it. To support this conclusion, I will begin by look-ing at the effects of religious experience described by

65 Stark, “Taxonomy,” 99.66 Lost, “The Man Behind the Curtain” (Season 3, Episode 20).67 Lost, “The Incident: Part 2” (Season 5, Episode 17).

Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi and Michael Argyle in The Psychology of Religious Behavior, Belief and Experience.68 These two scholars present several effects commonly reported by participants in psychological research on religious experience, including happiness, moral val-ues, and improved attitudes to the self 69— it is here that we see the connection between emotion and re-ligious experience put forth by Schleiermacher and Stark reemerge. In Lost, various characters’ responses to the Island reflect these categories of effects of reli-gious experience. The first effect Beit-Hallahmi and Argyle discuss is happiness, “‘persisting and positive’ changes in their attitudes to life.”70 This effect can be seen in the jux-taposition between the lives of the characters who left the Island and the lives of those who stayed on the Is-land. For those who were rescued — Jack Shephard, Kate Austen, Hugo Reyes, Sayid Jarrah, and Sun Kwon — life off the Island presents hardships and sorrows. Shephard becomes addicted to painkillers, Austen at-tempts to be a single parent to Claire Littleton’s son Aaron, Reyes ends up back in a mental hospital, Jar-rah’s wife is killed after only four months of marriage, and Kwon grieves her husband, who she believes died on the Island.71 In contrast, the characters who stay on the Island are able to establish happy and success-ful lives as members of the Dharma Initiative.72 Thus, continued exposure to and experience with the Island leads to increased fulfillment for Lost characters. Beit-Hallahmi and Argyle present improved moral values as a second reported effect of religious expe-riences.73 Many of Lost’s main characters undergo a shift away from their immoral lives off the Island. For example, promiscuous con man James “Sawyer” Ford becomes the trusted, respected head of security for the Dharma Initiative and a faithful romantic part-ner to Juliet Burke.74 Reckless fugitive Kate Austen becomes a loving, stable mother for Aaron Littleton.75

68 Beit-Hallahmi, Benjamin, and Michael Argyle. The Psycholo-gy of Religious Behavior, Belief and Experience. London: Routledge, 1997.69 Beit-Hallahmi, Psychology, 89-90.70 Beit-Hallahmi, Psychology, 89.71 Lost, “Ji Yeon” (Season 4, Episode 7), “The Shape of Things to Come” (Season 4, Episode 9), “Something Nice Back Home” (Season 4, Episode 10).72 Lost, “LaFleur” (Season 5, Episode 8).73 Beit-Hallahmi, Psychology, 89-90.74 Lost, “LaFleur” (Season 5, Episode 8).75 Lost, “Something Nice Back Home” (Season 4, Episode 10).

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Drug addict and rock star Charlie Pace transforms into a generous, reliable friend to Claire Littleton and courageously gives his life to allow the other charac-ters to be rescued.76 Clearly, some experiences on the Island facilitate shifts toward morality similar to those reported in some religious experiences. A third effect of religious experience cited by Beit-Hallahmi and Argyle is an increase in self-esteem, a “more positive [attitude] toward [oneself ].”77 The Is-land brings about this kind of internal change in many of the characters in Lost as well. John Locke, a frus-trated, depressed, angry office worker, embraces his leadership skills and sees himself as “special” on the Island.78 Hugo Reyes, an anxious, self-conscious fast food employee, realizes his ability to bring others to-gether and confidently accepts the role of the Island’s protector at the end of the series.79 Lost characters’ re-actions to the Island are often marked by a change in attitude toward the self. Therefore, the effects of reli-gious experience described in Beit-Hallahmi and Ar-gyle’s book begin to illustrate the characters’ various types of transformations in Lost. The ideas of Dutch historian and philosopher Gerardus van der Leeuw indicate further that Lost presents transformation as the trajectory of religious experience. In his 1933 work Religion in Essence and Manifestation,80 van der Leeuw comments on the hu-man response to religious experience: “man’s attitude to it is first of all astonishment, and ultimately faith.”81 Many characters undergo this type of transformation on the Island. Perhaps the most significant of these is that of the series’ hero, Jack Shephard, who in the ear-ly episodes of the series is established as “a man of sci-ence” whose ways of thinking and acting are set firmly in the rational.82 In the early seasons, Shephard’s logi-cal behavior makes him a fit leader for the survivors, but prevents him from accepting the mystical proper-ties of the Island. He responds to new supernatural events with incredulity and acts as if they are not sig-

76 Lost, “Through the Looking Glass: Part 2” (Season 3, Episode 23).77 Beit-Hallahmi, Psychology, 90.78 Lost, “The Man Behind the Curtain” (Season 3, Episode 20).79 Lost, “The End” (Season 6, Episode 17).80 van der Leeuw, Gerardus. Religion in Essence and Manifesta-tion. Translated by J. E. Turner. Vol. 1. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.81 van der Leeuw, Religion, 681.82 Lost, “Man of Science, Man of Faith” (Season 2, Episode 1).

nificant to life on the Island.83 However, as the series continues, Shephard leaves the Island and his life falls apart, leading him to accept the unique qualities of the Island to heal his own emotional shortcomings.84 He comes to believe that it is his destiny to return to the Island85 and eventually sacrifices himself for the Island.86 In this way, Shephard’s response to the Is-land parallels van der Leeuw’s ideas about the typical reaction to religious experience. A second idea of van der Leeuw’s is that the ulti-mate goal of religion is “salvation” and that this sal-vation requires “a devaluation of all that has preced-ed, a new creation of the life that has been received ‘from elsewhere.’”87 This can be clearly seen in the final season and resolution of Lost. The final scene of the series shows the main characters reunited in a church, which fills with a bright light to symbolize the characters moving on to a sort of afterlife.88 This moving on is unique to those who were on the Island and encountered its strange power. Thus, the charac-ters achieve salvation as a result of their experiences on the Island. In addition, moving on to the afterlife is only possible after the events of the flash sideways in Season 6.89 The sideways flash presents a prefer-able reality to the one the characters left when the plane crashed, creating the “devaluation” of previous experiences that van der Leeuw describes. Of course, this new life has been received “from elsewhere” – the Island. Van der Leeeuw also remarks earlier in the text that “salvation is therefore Power, experienced as Good.”90 This is clear in the flash sideways, as each character must remember what happened on the Is-land before they can enter the church to pass on to the afterlife.91 Thus, as soon as each character recognizes the good things that resulted from the power of the Island in their lives, they may attain salvation. In this way, the conclusion of Lost illustrates the trajectory of salvation that van der Leeuw points to as fundamental to religious experiences. With transformation estab-lished as a proposed result of religious experience, we

83 Lost, “Man of Science, Man of Faith” (Season 2, Episode 1).84 Lost, “Through the Looking Glass: Part 2” (Season 3, Episode 23).85 Lost, “316” (Season 5, Episode 6).86 Lost, “The End” (Season 6, Episode 17).87 van der Leeuw, Religion, 681.88 Lost, “The End” (Season 6, Episode 17).89 Lost, “The End” (Season 6, Episode 17).90 van der Leeuw, Religion, 102.91 Lost, “Happily Ever After” (Season 6, Episode 11).

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will conclude by discussing the significance of such transformation.

Transformation and Self-Transcendence Based on Beit-Hallahmi and Argyle, Lost’s iterations of religious experience facilitate transformation in the characters. Through the lens of van der Leeuw’s ideas, these transformations build to the moment of salva-tion captured in the series finale, “The End.” It as at this point that we find the goal of these transforma-tions and the driving force of Lost: self-transcendence in the form of community. The idea that religion and religious experience build to self-transcendence is borrowed from social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s 2012 Ted Talk, “Religion, Evolution, and the Ecstasy of Self-Transcendence.”92 Haidt suggests that self-transcendence is “one of the main reasons why most people consider themselves to be spiritual,” that the uplifting feeling of being more than oneself is what makes religious experience so at-tractive.93 In addition, Haidt posits that in this state of religious self-transcendence, “individuals unite into a team, a movement or a nation, which is far more than the sum of its parts.”94 American religious studies scholar S. Brent Plate applies this idea to Lost in a reflection on the series finale:

In other words, the secret of Lost was already summed up in the mantra of the second sea-son finale: “Live together, die alone.” Such a great contrast to the existentialist view of life that tells us we are born alone and die alone. Contrast Merton: “We learn to live by living to-gether with others.” Even one of the main writ-ers of Lost, Damon Lindelof, says “in order to redeem yourself, you can only do it through a community.” That is the secret that is revealed, unveiled. This is the apocalypse of the story.95

Thus, the following trajectory is established in Lost:

92 Haidt, Jonathan. “Religion, Evolution and the Ecstasy of Self-Transcendence.” Speech presented at TED2012, February 28, 2012. TED. Last modified March 2012. Accessed November 29, 2014. http://www.ted.com.93 Haidt, “Self-Transcendence.”94 Haidt, “Self-Transcendence.”95 Plate, S. Brent. “What the Lost Finale Is Really About.” Reli-gion Dispatches. Last modified May 22, 2010. Accessed Novem-ber 29, 2014. http://www.religiondispatches.org.

religious experience leads transformation, transfor-mation leads to self-transcendence, and self-transcen-dence leads to community. It is this achievement of community that makes religious experience itself es-sential to human life.

Bibliography

Beit-Hallahmi, Benjamin, and Michael Argyle. The Psychology of Re-ligious Behavior, Belief and Experience. London: Routledge, 1997.

Donne, John. “Meditation XVII.” The Literature Network. Last modified 2014. Accessed November 29, 2014. http://www. online-literature.com. Haidt, Jonathan. “Religion, Evolution and the Ecstasy of Self-Transcen-dence.” Speech presented at TED 2012, February 28, 2012. TED. Last modified March 2012. Accessed November 29, 2014. http://www.ted.com. James, William. “The Varieties of Religious Experience.” Electronic Text Center. Last modified 1996. Accessed November 29, 2014. http://etext.lib.virginia.edu. Lost. ABC. 2004-2010. Written by Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. Otto, Rudolf. “The Idea of the Holy.” 1917. In Theories of Religion: A Reader, edited by Seth D. Kunin, 80-85. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006. Plate, S. Brent. “What the Lost Finale Is Really About.” Religion Dis-patches. Last modified May 22, 2010. Accessed November 29, 2014. http://www.religiondispatches.org. Proudfoot, Wayne. Religious Experience. Berkeley: University of Califor-nia Press, 1985. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despis-ers. Edited by Richard Crouter. Cambridge Texts in the History of Phi-losophy. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Stark, Rodney. “A Taxonomy of Religious Experience.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 5, no. 1 (Autumn 1965): 97-116. van der Leeuw, Gerardus. Religion in Essence and Manifestation. Trans-lated by J. E. Turner. Vol. 1. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.

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Rachel Koehn, a senior from Houston, Texas, will graduate in May 2015 with a Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies and a Bachelor of Journalism in Stra-tegic Communication. Koehn plans to attend law school in her home state af-ter finishing her undergraduate career.

Mary Quite ContrarySamuel Stella, undergrad ‘15

“I appear to you, my children, on a bank in Florida. You have made money your god! Do you know how cold are your hearts? You turn away from my Son, Jesus, for your money. Your money is your god....”1

“I Pray for her, she prays for me. Prayer has been keeping me alive.”2

“A miracle cannot be physically explained. This image can be and has been scientifically analyzed. It’s due to chemicals and all that.”3

In December of 1996, Mary, the virgin mother of Jesus, appeared on the exterior windows of an auto-finance building in Clearwater, Florida. In December of 1996 a customer noticed a vaguely familiar shape in the irides-cent stains on the exterior windows of an auto-finance building in Clearwater, Florida.4 I would like to fight and to ask the reader to fight, any temptation to affirm or deny the ‘reality’ of either of these accounts. Quickly after this initial revelation, the image on the bank in Clearwater was drawing crowds. Police estimate that over 500,000 people came in the next few months.5 They came to see a miracle. It seems to me that miracles are too much neglected in the discourse around religion. To put it simply, miracles evade our explanatory models and in doing so they direct our attention to the gulf between theology and the critical study of religion. Yet it may be the miraculous which, if anything, is at the core of religion itself. If this is the case, neglect of the miraculous is inexcusable. Miracles not only challenge the critical scholar, they can subvert insider discourses as well. In fact, I will argue that this is a major feature of miracles, they upend expectations of all kinds. I will also propose a new way to examine miracles. As a caveat, it should be stated that the discussion here is primarily concerned with miracles within Christianity. I will use Mircea Eliade’s concepts of the Sacred and hierophany, and Bruno Latour’s concept of the Factish. After outlining the general course such an examination will take I will deploy it in a discussion of the Our Lady of Clearwater apparition. First it may be necessary to establish what is meant by “miracle.” When used in this paper the term “miracle” refers to a nexus. The miracle nexus can include humans, places, objects, deities, images, ideas, cultures, his-tories, and anything else which becomes entangled in the impossible. It is the impossible which makes such a nexus miraculous. Of course, even the impossible cannot really happen or it would be, by definition, possible.

1 “Virgin Mary Tells Cincinnati Visionary Why Her Image Appears on FL Office Building” Shepherds of Christ, accessed October 23, 2014, http://www.sofc.org/news_1.htm2 Chris Tisch, “For Mary’s faithful, a shattering loss,” St. Petersburg Times (St. Petersburg, FL.) March 2, 2004.3 Christina Headrick, “Images of Faith,” St. Petersburg Times (St. Petersburg, FL.) Dec. 27, 2000.4 Ibid.5 Eileen Schulte, “Image of Mary Beckons Few Now,” St. Petersburg Times (St. Petersburg, FL.) Sep. 28, 2002.

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This is merely a word game though, and does not get at what is meant when those who encounter miracles claim that the impossible has happened. What they mean is that, by becoming entangled in the miracle nexus, they experience a new plane of possibilities. Their expectations are overturned. Previous scholarship on the kind of phenomena which I am investigating has focused on a limited set of points within miraculous nexuses. Studies of a pil-grimage site or of a relic or of a charismatic personal-ity, for example, are limited to a few points within the nexus, but the miraculous is seldom confined to a sin-gle or even a few points. It would be too narrow to say that the miraculous apparition in Clearwater, Flori-da is confined to that place, for example. Rita Ring, claiming to be relating a message from Mary said, “do not be afraid. You will make great advances in helping with the completion of the Fatima Message there.”6 Immediately, the nexus has expanded to include the Fatima apparition and by extension all other Marian apparitions, in all other places, and all those humans connected to them in various ways. The sacred which changes the field of possibilities in Medjugorje or Fatima shares in the sacred possibilities at Clearwater, and in the homes of those who access it in personal devotion. There is a connection, but the points remain distinct. The nature of Medjugorje is fundamentally shaped by all the factors religious studies scholarship is adept at exploring; the socio-political history of Bosnia, the myths and symbols particular to itself etc. and yet the Mary who appears there is claimed to be, in some way, the same Mary who appeared in Guada-lupe and who saw her son crucified in Jerusalem. It is also claimed that she doesn’t really appear at all, that she is merely a construction. Factish, as Latour defines it in The Modern Cult of the Factish Gods is “(a) label … for the robust cer-tainty that allows practice to pass into action with-out the practitioner ever believing in the difference between construction and reality, immanence and transcendence.”7 It is a portmanteau of fetish and fact and it results from this problem of belief. The dilem-ma is this; fetishes are obviously made by humans but

6 “Virgin Mary Tells Cincinnati Visionary Why Her Image Appears on FL Office Building.” Shepherds of Christ, accessed October 23, 2014, http://www.sofc.org/news_1.htm7 Bruno Latour, On The Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, (Dur-ham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2010), 22.

treated as autonomous and this is a problem for mod-erns who would call such a treatment “belief”. “The visitor knows; the person visited believes… [Moderns],wherever they drop anchor, they soon set up fetish-es: that is, they see all the peoples they encounter as worshippers of meaningless objects… A Modern is someone who believes that others believe.”8 Those who experience a shift in the field of possibility by becoming entangled in a miracle nexus are non-mod-erns. The problem Latour sees is that “in all our activi-ties, what we fabricate goes beyond us.”9 Those who would destroy the nexus or try at least to untangle it and set the points out neatly are engaged in what La-tour calls iconoclash, “we can define iconoclashas that which happens when there is uncertainty about the exact role of the hand at work in the production of a mediator.”10

So then, is the miraculous nexus fabricated? Of course it is, but it also exceeds those who have fab-ricated it. It is this outstripping of the fabricator, this autonomy of the construction which I would radically suggest can be spoken of and analyzed as a subject it-self. Pinocchio is not just a marionette, but a nebulous, shape-shifting divinity sending strings back to the puppeteer, making us ask who is controlling whom. Perhaps it is not such a radical leap, if the nexus re-ally does outstrip and overtake those who have con-structed it and thereby gain some autonomy how can it be anything but a subject? The second thing I pro-pose is that the sacred, used in way Eliade and Otto use it, is exactly such a construction and that the ex-perience of it’s powerfully transgressive autonomy is hierophany.11 A hierophany in this case is a “manifes-tation of something of a wholly different order, a real-ity that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural ‘profane’ world.”12 The bridge between Eliade and Latour is hopefully becoming clear. When humans construct the sacred they are constructing factishes and allowing the con-struction to surpass them. Eliade speaks of the sacred as “pre-eminently the real… Religious man’s desire to live in the sacred is in fact equivalent to his desire to 8 Ibid., 2.9 Ibid., 22 3.10 Ibid., 72.11 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1959), 9.12 Ibid., 11.

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Mary Quite Contrary

take up his abode in objective reality.”13 I don’t entirely disagree with the assessment but I would emphasize what Rudolph Otto said about the nature of the sa-cred (heilige), “He finds the feeling of terror before the sacred, the awe-inspiring mystery… an overwhelming superiority of power… Otto characterizes all these ex-periences as numinous… The numinous presents it-self as something ‘wholly other,’ something basically and totally different.”14 The sense of differentness is what allows humans to experience a different field of possibility in the miraculous nexus. This is consistent with the profane/sacred dichotomy. In the profane nexus I may have a crippling illness and little pos-sibility of cure but within the miraculous nexus the possibilities are different, in the sacred construction-which-exceeds-constructor I may be relieved, cured, or made to suffer in new and worse ways. Because the miraculous nexus is autonomous and sacred, at-tempts to control it may be subverted. Rather, we can expect that the miraculous nexus will communicate with many voices, some of which will contradict each other. It will act unpredictably and in so doing give a general impression of differentness. With a theoreti-cal base established let’s return to the example of the apparition in Clearwater to see how well it holds up. Rita Ring is a key point in the nexus I am investigat-ing here. If one accepts the idea that the miraculous is not confined to a single place, occurrence, image etc. then where one begins a tracing of the points does not matter so much. Rita Ring is a good starting point be-cause she claimed to receive locutions from Mary and thereby contributed much to the personality of the nexus. It must be pointed out that she is a rather mys-terious figure. Despite having published, at present, 13 books of her messages from Jesus and Mary, there is almost no biographic information on Ring available. After the image was first noticed on December 17, 1996 Ring claimed to have received a message from Mary (it is the quote which began this paper) confirming her presence on the bank.15 Ring had already been claim-ing to have visions of Mary and locutions, mostly from Jesus, for several years. In fact she had co-founded a lay ministry called Shepherds of Christ with a priest

13 Ibid., 28.14 Ibid., 9 10.15 “Virgin Mary Tells Cincinnati Visionary Why Her Image Appears on FL Office Building” Shepherds of Christ, accessed October 23, 2014, http://www.sofc.org/news_1.htm

named Edward Carter who had in late August of 1992 been involved in an appearance of Mary as “Our Lady of Light” at Cold Springs, Kentucky.16 This ap-paritional phenomena was closely linked to the so-called “Batavian Visionary”, an anonymous woman in Ohio.17 So far, a tracing of this part of the nexus looks something like:

Batavian Visionary --> Our Lady of Light (Ohio 1991)18 --> Fr. Edward Carter --> Rita Ring --> Our Lady of Clearwater (Florida 1996).

Of course, this is grossly incomplete. All of these hu-man actors have countless but impossible to trace connections to a broader and very complicated net-work of Marian phenomena including but not limited to: Medjugorje, Fr. Gobbi, the Marian Movement of Priests, Lourdes, and Fatima. Mary has spoken in all these connected loci which compose the nexus. It is too great a task to fully trace the Marian net-work, but hopefully the above demonstrates the use-fulness of the metaphor of the nexus. The miracle nexus in Clearwater, Florida has tendrils extending across the world and through time, and its fundamen-tal character is constructed (and constructs) by the things to which it is connected. Once it is sufficiently constructed though, it begins to overtake the con-structors. One of the first going-beyonds may not be initially obvious but it is important. The ecclesia, here referring to the institutional Roman Catholic Church, is a crucial constructing agent. It is the source mate-rial that gives the initial shape of the hierophany. The ecclesia has a complicated process for dealing with Marian (and other miraculous) phenomena and final authority rests in the Pope.19 What is clear is that the ecclesia has a strong interest in sanctioning or repu-

16 Peter Steinfels, “The Vision that Wasn’t. Or Was it?,” Cold Spring Journal (1992), http://www.nytimes.com/1992/09/02/us/cold spring journal the vision that wasn t or was it.html 17 “Local Apparition History” Our Lady of Light: Visits and Messages to a Batavia, Ohio Visionary accessed Nov. 5 2014, http://www.ourladyoflight.org/history.htm#Apparition_Sites18 Ibid.19 Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Norms Regarding the Manner of Proceeding in Discernment of Pre-sumed Apparitions or Revelations” Vatican City, Feb. 25 1978, http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu-ments/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19780225_norme ap parizioni_en.html, accessed Nov. 19 2014.

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Mary Quite Contrary

diating miraculous phenomena, especially when a claim of locution is made. A person who claims to be dictating messages from Mary or Jesus is claiming su-preme authority. This is a troubling situation for the ecclesia which must protect its dogmatic authority. In the case of Clearwater, the diocesan spokesperson, Bill Urbanski, said “A miracle cannot be physically ex-plained. This image can be and has been scientifically analyzed. It’s due to chemicals and all that.”20 The stance is similar higher up the hierarchical chain. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued the formal process of authorization or prohibition in November of 1978 in a document titled (in English) “Norms Regarding the Manner of Proceeding in the Discernment of Presumed Apparitions or Revela-tions” which lays out the Church’s interest in investi-gating and “authorizing or prohibiting public cult or other forms of devotion among the faithful.”21 Yet, the same norms which establish the Church’s interest in authorizing or prohibiting also establish a precedent of suspended decision wherein no decision must be immediately made; “In doubtful cases that clearly do not put the good of the church at risk, the competent Ecclesiastical Authority is to refrain from any judge-ment and from any direct action.”22 Included in this provision is the idea that the miracles in question may very well fade into “oblivion”.23 I would contend that this formulation actually belies a default skepticism on the part of the church. By explicitly calling on the Ecclesiastical Authority, generally a Bishop, to hold off on making a decision if the case is doubtful (miracles almost by definition are) unless there is a danger to the good of the church (a fairly high bar) the Church places its stakes on the “presumed supernatural fact fall[ing] into oblivion”. In the meantime, though, the miracle speaks. According to a flier dated June 28, 1998 the miracle in Clearwater spoke of dire consequences if it was ig-nored,

20 Christina Headrick, “Images of Faith,” (St. Petersburg, FL.) Dec. 27, 2000.21 Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Norms Regarding the Manner of Proceeding in Discernment of Presumed Apparitions or Revelations” Vatican City, Feb. 25 1978, http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19780225_norme ap parizioni_en.htmlaccessed Nov. 19 2014.22 Ibid. 23 Ibid.

Jesus Speaks: The fires in Florida are a way that the Father has allowed this earth to be chastised for ignoring their Mother appearing on the building in Clearwater. They have their heads buried in the sand and do not even come to be awakened to the fact that God is speaking to them. Pray for the state of Florida. If they ignore the Mother any longer, your world is on a fine line. I am the Almighty God.24

Fr. Tom Madden, a local priest, said of this statement that it was “not the nature of the message of Jesus”.25 What the Church had constructed was exceeding it. Part of what I am suggesting here is that even though the institutional church may find that the miracle nexus says things that it wished it wouldn’t, it provides an access to the sacred, a hierophany, which nurtures the vitality of the religious impulse. This is clear in the reports of possibility shift associated with the Clear-water nexus. The shifts mostly have to do with health issues and include the healing of a 5 year old boy from fever26 and the survival of a woman who expected to die after lung cancer surgery.27 These possibility shifts have to do with this-worldly concerns, they are not, primarily, about something ultimate. This is what is meant by hierophany, the sacred is seated in the pro-fane. But the sacred is unpredictable, it has a life of its own, and we can expect it to exceed those who have constructed it, and who would give it voice, as it ex-ceeded the institutional Church in Clearwater. Though the miracle nexus in Clearwater, as medi-ated by Rita Ring and Shepherds of Christ, overtook the authoritative structure of the Church, it was not controlled by its devotees either. True to the nature of a hierophany, the nexus in Clearwater powerfully transgressed them as well. Even though Mary, appear-ing on a window, radically altered the field of possibil-ity for those who encountered her, and, through Rita Ring and Fr. Carter, spoke of a “Movement” centered

24 Deborah O’Neil, “Ohio Ministry Aims to Elevate Virgin Mary Site,” St. Petersburg Times(St. Petersburg, FL.) July 19, 1998.25 Ibid.26 Christina Headrick, “Images of Faith,” St. Petersburg Times(St. Petersburg, FL.) Dec. 27, 2000.27 Chris Tisch, “For Mary’s faithful, a shattering loss,” St. Pe-tersburg Times (St. Petersburg, FL.) March 2, 2004.

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Mary Quite Contrary

on her image in Clearwater, she left.28 Sometime in the night before March 1, 2004, the top three win-dows, which comprised the head of the image, were broken, shot out with a slingshot and ball bearings.29 In the days that followed Ring implied that Mary left because her devotees had failed her. The message giv-en on March 2nd at the broken image included this quote of a previously given message from Mary:

I cried for the young ones, the ones that do not care and will lose their souls. How do I make you see for you will not listen to me? What can I do? I come. I ap-pear. I beg. I plead. I give you these gifts from my Son, and you reject me. I do not deliver messages very of-ten anymore for I have been ignored.30

For those who had become entangled with the mira-cle nexus in Clearwater the image of Mary was deeply orienting and their experience of a shifted possibility field improved their lives. In order to become so entan-gled, though, they had to grant Mary an agency that permitted her to act, at times in disorienting ways, and ultimately, to leave. A sense of the disorientation is felt in the reports of those who were entangled in the days after March 1, 2004; “‘I feel a personal attack… symbols like that are very important to us,’ said Jose Vidales … ‘I hope God forgives them,’ said Arlene Livingston … ‘I think whoever did this should be struck by light-ning,’ said Jim Sarelas.”31 Just as those who became entangled in Clearwater always knew that the image there was resultant from chemical processes, they also knew that the destruction of the image was also physi-cal and caused by human agency. Still, by seating the personality of the nexus in the immanent it became vulnerable to iconoclasm, or else, able to leave on its own. Latour says of the iconoclast, “the idol-smasher is doubly mad: not only has he deprived himself of the secret to produce transcendent objects, but he contin-ues producing them even though his production has

28 “Rita Ring’s Daily Message, March 3, 2004” Shepherds of Christ, accessed December 1, 2014, http://www.sofc.org/DAILY/3-3 2004.htm.29 Chris Tisch, “For Mary’s faithful, a shattering loss,” St. Pe-tersburg Times (St. Petersburg, FL.) March 2, 2004.30 “Rita Ring’s Daily Message, March 3, 2004” Shepherds of Christ, accessed December 1, 2014, http://www.sofc.org/DAILY/3-3 2004.htm.31 Chris Tisch, “For Mary’s faithful, a shattering loss,” St. Peters-burg Times (St. Petersburg, FL.) March 2, 2004.

become absolutely forbidden.”32 In my interpretation, this means that the personality of the nexus is not fully destroyed even when its immanental frame is smashed. Mary left the building, and Mary was erased from the building, but these statements are about at-tributes of Mary which beg for a reinterpretation of the miracle, not facts about the miracle itself. Just be-fore Mary left Clearwater, she took up residence in Passaic, New Jersey, this time in a tree stump.33

Mary, Mother of God. Mary the Imaginary. Mary quite contrary. I prefer this last appellation for the miracle nexus. Mary who was rejected by the diocese, Mary who said what she oughtn’t, Mary who healed the sick, and Mary who left them. She has overturned every expectation. She is impossible. It is this element which I am suggesting needs to be integrated with the sacred. The sacred is not only the wholly other, it must also include the impossible. The sacred is not only the pre-eminently real it is also the patently unreal. When this kind of impossibility situates itself in the imma-nental frame, i.e. on a bank window, the entire field of possibility changes. As I said earlier, the miracu-lous points to the gulf between the critical study of religion and theology. Scholars, even those engaged in a phenomenological study, can’t give full credit to insider perspectives, in part because the reports are often contradictory, or they would fail to deepen un-derstanding of the phenomena they investigate. What I have presented here, and what I hope to continue to develop, is a way of getting into the gulf. No doubt, it is a dangerous place to be. I am unwilling to say ei-ther that Mary, the Mother of God is present in the nexus, or that she is not. I am also unwilling to say that the miraculous phenomena in the nexus is essentially imaginary, only illusory. Instead, I have opted for a third way, one which suspends such ultimate conclu-sions in order to penetrate the gulf. Latour’s factishes provide a critical component. For me, they are the nei-ther-nors, not divinities the way insiders see them, but still hierophanies, the sacred in the profane, and so, not religion the way the critical scholar has wanted to see it as of late. It is my hope, though, that this is a way

32 Bruno Latour, On The Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, (Dur-ham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2010. 80.33 Jonathan Miller, “For Some, Tree Stump in Passaic Is Rea-son to Believe,” The New York Times, November 4, 2003. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/04/nyregion/for some tree stump in-passaic is reason to believe.html

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Mary Quite Contrary

which can illuminate the gulf and show, finally, both critical scholars and theologians what is there.

Bibliography

Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Translated by Willard R. Trask. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jova-novich, 1959.

Headrick, Christina. “Images of Faith.” St. Petersburg Times(St. Pe-tersburg, FL), Dec. 27, 2000.

Latour, Bruno. On The Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2010.

“Local Apparition History” Our Lady of Light: Visits and Messages to a Batavia, Ohio Visionary. Accessed Nov. 5 2014, http://www.our-ladyoflight.org/history.htm#Apparition_Sites

Miller, Jonathan. “For Some, Tree Stump in Passaic Is Reason to Believe,” The New York Times, November 4, 2003. http://www.ny-times.com/2003/11/04/nyregion/for-some-tree-stump-in-passaic-is-reason-to-believe.html

“Norms Regarding the Manner of Proceeding in Discernment of Presumed Apparitions or Revelations.” Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Vatican City, Feb. 25 1978, http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19780225_norme-apparizioni_en.html, accessed Nov. 19, 2014.

O’Neil, Deborah. “Ohio Ministry Aims to Elevate Virgin Mary Site.” St. Petersburg Times(St. Petersburg, FL). July 19, 1998.

“Rita Ring’s Daily Message, March 3, 2004” Shepherds of Christ. Ac-cessed December 1, 2014. http://www.sofc.org/DAILY/3-3-2004.htm

Steinfels, Peter. “Cold Spring Journal; The Vision that Wasn’t. Or Was it?,” The New York Times. September 2, 1992. http://www.ny-times.com/1992/09/02/us/cold-spring-journal-the-vision-that-wasn-t-or-was-it.html

Tisch, Chris. “For Mary’s faithful, a shattering loss,” St. Petersburg Times(St. Petersburg, FL). March 2, 2004.

Sam Stella is a senior Religious Stud-ies major and is planning on going on to earn a masters in Religious Studies. He is particularly interested in the in-tersection of material religion and con-cepts of the miraculous in American Christianity.

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Mary Quite Contrary

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Honor the Past to Shape the Future: Ohlone Women, Spirituality, and Indigenous RevitalizationAbel R. Gomez, graduate

In his 1953 Handbook of the Indians of California, prominent anthropologist Alfred Kroeber infamously wrote, “The Costanoan group is extinct so far as all practical purposes are concerned.”1 Sixty-two years later, it is clear that the community of which Kroeber wrote is not only alive, but in a period of cultural revolution. The Ohlone peoples, as they now call themselves, are the indigenous peoples of the San Francisco Bay Area. Landless and stripped of federal recognition, Ohlone peoples have for the past thirty years experienced a renaissance and reclamation of cultural traditions. In this paper, I argue that through the transmission and practice of cultural traditions that may be labeled “religious”, some modern Ohlone people see themselves as returning to indig-enous ways of relating to the land and ancestral spirits. By doing so, Ohlone peoples blend ancestral traditions with contemporary needs as resistance to the on-going colonization and occupation of their territories. In this paper, I focus on three overlapping spheres of culture transmitted by Ohlone women, ceremonial traditions, political traditions, and reclaimed traditions. Though these are arguably artificial divisions, I mark these out as distinct categories solely for the purposes of analysis. The data from this study comes primarily from interviews I conducted with Ohlone women in the summer of 2014. I draw additional context from several historical works on Ohlone peoples, oral histories of Ohlone elder women compiled by Janet Clinger, and a number of interviews and video clips available online. Given the minute sample size, I am unable to posit any over-arching theories regarding Ohlone women’s culture broadly. Instead, I present this study as a work in process, examining how and why the particular women I spoke with transmit cultural traditions. I acknowledge that as a non-Native person and man, there may be limits to my un-derstanding of Ohlone women’s culture. What follows is an interpretation based on my observation, research, and conversations with Ohlone women.

Ohlone Women’s Culture Though there has never been a single Ohlone identity, there are some common experiences that many Ohlone people share. According to anthropologist Beverly Ortiz, pre-contact Ohlone people were comprised of eight language groups and lived in around 50 autonomous tribal communities. Their traditional territory “extends from San Francisco and Richmond, California, south to Monterey, San Juan Bautista and environs, and inland towards the San Luis Reservoir.”2 The horrific enslavement of Ohlone peoples within the Catholic mission system and genocidal policies of expansion in California have meant that on multiple occasions, tra-ditional Ohlone stories, songs, rituals, and customs were forced underground. Some of these traditions were preserved in families, often in small or hidden ways. Despite the huge population decrease in the mission sys-

1 Kroeber, 464.2 Ortiz (1994), 99.

tem and the loss of federal recognition in 1927, several groups of Ohlones have sought to relearn, reclaim, and revitalize the traditions of the ancestors in the 20th and 21st centuries. As in other Native American groups, women play a central role in the transmission and revitalization of Ohlone culture. They are mothers, political organiz-ers, tribal chairwomen, teachers, artisans, ceremonial leaders, and many other roles. Often Ohlone women play multiple roles, a testament to their determina-tion and commitment to their community. Though it is important to note that these women may have differing political views, educational levels, and “ra-cial”/phenotypic makeup, each can be considered a member of an ethnic-based community of Ohlone people. Each of the women I interviewed identifies as an Ohlone person, tracing their ancestry to the Native peoples of the Bay Area. Further, they are committed to the process of learning (and in some case, creating) traditional cultural ways that strengthen their bonds as Ohlone people. It is also important to note that a central element of tradition among Ohlone women, as amongst Ohlone people broadly, is that it is tied to relationships with other-than-human presences. That is, Ohlone cul-ture has elements of what might be labeled “religion”. These traditions can be described as “religious”, us-ing the definition proposed by religion scholar Rob-ert Orsi, in that they are connected to “a network of relationships between heaven and earth”.3 This is important because by participating in many of these traditions, modern Ohlone people are reviving a “net-work of relationships” to ancestral spirits and spirits of place, in some ways like their ancestors may have done. In other words, Ohlone traditions are not “just” about reviving a traditional ethnic culture, but also about reviving ways Ohlone peoples, as an ethnic group, were in relationship with other-than-human presences in the landscape.

Ceremonial Traditions Ceremony plays a central role in the lives of some Ohlone people today as it did pre-contact. Contem-porary Ohlone ceremonial traditions are dynamic, blending what survived the colonial project and his-torical records with inspiration from the ancestors.

3 Orsi, 2.

Anthropologist James Clifford suggests a similar ex-perience occurs within many contemporary indige-nous communities. In Returns, he writes, “[Indigenous communities] reach back to deeply rooted, adaptive traditions: creating new pathways of in a complex postmodernity.”4 They honor the past to shape the fu-ture. Importantly, participation in Ohlone ceremony does not negate the practice of other religious tradi-tions. For example, Ruth has been part of ceremonies and is devotedly Catholic. Regardless of their individ-ual religious views, it appears that it is the practice and the desire to connect to a sense of ancestral lineage that draws these women together as a ceremonial group. As founder of the Confederation of Ohlone Peo-ples, Charlene has participated and helped organize multiple ceremonies for Ohlone people. In her inter-view with Earth Medicine Alliance, Charlene men-

4 Clifford, 7.

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Honor the Past to Shape the Future: Ohlone Women, Spirituality, and Indigenous Revitalization

Image by Ruth Morgan. Graphic by Kanyon Sayers-Roods.

tions that the organization was created to offer a way for Ohlone people to reclaim their identities, histo-ries, and traditions. When asked about ceremonial traditions in my interview with her, Charlene spoke primarily about child blessing ceremonies that she has helped to facilitate. She mentioned that these cer-emonies are important because they help to establish deep relationships between the young child and the environment around them. Part of this ceremony in-volves the parents going into the water and submerg-ing their child into the ocean as they say prayers. As a recreated, revitalized tradition, such a ceremony likely has a profound level of meaning in that it allows mod-ern Ohlone people to return to a sacred relationship that their ancestors had with their historic territory, even as it is still colonized land. Ann-Marie and Kanyon have also made major con-tributions to the revitalization of Ohlone ceremonial traditions as caretakers of Indian Canyon. Located in Hollister, California, Indian Canyon is the only “Indian Country” in the San Francisco Bay Area. Ac-cording to Ann-Marie, Ohlone people have occupied the site for generations. Indian Canyon hosts ceremo-nies, educational events, and an annual story telling gathering. As Ann-Marie explained, “We have eight sweat lodges. We have in excess of forty or fifty differ-ent sites for the hembleciya, or vision quest, and many workshops take place here.”5 In addition to providing space for Ohlone people, Indian Canyon offers land to any indigenous group seeking land for traditional cer-emonies. Ann-Marie mentioned that many Ohlone women’s ceremonies have taken place there. Indian Canyon was the site of an honoring of Ohlone elders ceremony in 2004 and 2006 to honor Ohlone women elders. Ann-Marie, Kanyon, Char-lene, and Ruth participated in this ceremony. Drawing upon older cultural traditions and inspiration from the spirit world, this honoring ritual was intended to celebrate and ceremonially acknowledge a group of Ohlone women as Ohlone elders. Ann-Marie men-tioned in her interview that great care and attention went into the preparation for this event, including cre-ating regalia and the prayerful crafting of several hun-dred olivella necklaces. “And every bead was a prayer and so you could really feel the energy of those neck-laces”, she told me. Ann-Marie also mentioned that in the creation of dances and songs for this ceremony, 5 Vassternich.

tobacco was to offered to ancestral spirits for guid-ance and “it just evolved naturally”, as she put it. The ceremony was important not just for the individual women who participated, but also because it signaled a reawakening of Ohlone traditions and community in the modern world.

Political Traditions Indigenous women have been central to many forms of political organizing for indigenous peoples in North America and around the world.6 Four Ca-nadian women founded the most recent and perhaps largest indigenous rights movement, Idle No More, in 2012. According co-founder Sheelah McLean, “the vast majority of the movement’s participants and or-ganizers are women.”7 Ohlone women have also been politically active, particularly in the quest for federal recognition and protection of sacred sites. As in oth-er Native communities, political organizing by some Ohlone groups becomes the loci for new forms of reli-gious praxis that resist the effects of colonization. The political organizing efforts of Corrina Gould are an excellent example of these new religious forms. She and her friend, Johnella LaRose (Shoshone), be-gan Indian People Organizing for Change in 1999. The organization has been especially involved with the preservation of Ohlone shell mound burial sites. In 1909, archeologist Nels Nelson created a map of the over 400 shell mounds that remained in the Bay Area.8 According to Megan Stacy of the Sacred Land Film Project, all remaining shell mounds in the Bay Area have been compromised in some way.9 To draw attention to these shell mounds Corrina and Indian People Organizing for Change organize an annual protest at the Bay Street Mall in Emeryville, the site of perhaps the largest shell mound in the Bay Area. During construction, thousands of Ohlone bod-ies and artifacts were unearthed.10 Corrina was in-volved protests when developers proposed the mall to be built on that site in 1999. Since the mall’s opening in 2000, Corrina has organized protests to remember the site as a sacred place and honor the spirits of her an-cestors annually the day after Thanksgiving, the larg-

6 Ibid, 288.7 Caven.8 Roberts and Booker.9 Stacy.10 Spicuzza.

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est shopping day of the year. The protest takes place at the cross streets of Shellmound Street and Ohlone Way. Over the years the protest has developed into a ceremony of sorts. During this protest, families and members of the community come together to remem-ber the space and share information with shoppers. Food, song, prayers, and stories are shared. Sage is burned throughout the event. Chris Treadway of the West County blog estimated that around 200 people attended the most recent protest in November 2014.11 The annual protest at the Bay Street Mall demon-strates the dynamism of Ohlone traditions, which can adapt to the needs of the community. In this politi-cal tradition, it appears that practices are performed to reaffirm relationships to the other-than-human worlds. For Corrina, the burial sites mentioned above are of vital importance because “it’s our connection to the land. It’s where are ancestors are.” Because the Ohlone people are not a federally recognized Native American group, Corrina and others must continue to organize to ensure what is left is protected. Corrina sees this kind of organizing as part of her life work, protecting ancestral sites so that her children and grandchildren “can have a place to sing and to dance and remember who they are”.

Reclaimed Traditions In Returns Clifford argues that indigenous move-ments “often express the new, the way forward, in terms of the old”.12 That is, many indigenous move-ments suggest that in order to go forward “in a good way”, as some Native Americans would say, there must be a return to ancestral values and relationships. While the amount of traditional Ohlone culture that has survived is controversial, all five women I inter-viewed expressed a strong committed to learning and reawakening Ohlone traditions. The elder women in-terviewed in Janet Clinger’s collection of oral histories echo similar sentiments. Ruth Orta is among the Ohlone women revitalizing the traditions of her ancestors. Though her mother taught her that she was Native, it was not until she was an adult that she actively sought out knowledge of her Native heritage. Ruth took part in the Ohlone Interns Program in 1996 where she learned the traditional way

11 Treadway.12 Clifford, 35.

to prepare acorn soup. In a short video for the Oak-land Museum of California, Ruth states,

The oak tree was important to my ancestors be-cause of the food source that it gave from the acorn…also the spiritual value that all Natives had for their trees, plants, even the animals. So the tradition I do today is the acorn preparation and my daughters and my granddaughters and my great granddaughter and my great grand-children do the traditions with us so they can learn and so we can carry it on for generations to come.13

Preparing the acorn the traditional way can be a long process, which includes cracking, grinding, leeching, and cooking. The final product is akin to a thick soup. Despite the fact that Ruth uses a coffee grinder to grind the acorns, participating in this tradition allows her to connect to her ancestors. Ruth demonstrates this acorn tradition at cultural events throughout the year, including the annual Ohlone Day Gathering in Fremont, California. By learning and reclaiming Ohlone traditions, Ruth’s family reclaims a history and a legacy of the indigenous peoples of the Bay Area that root them to their ancestral lands. They are part of a much larger global movement, unprecedented in history, of indigenous peoples revitalizing their tradi-tions and identities in the 21st century.

Conclusion Though it appears that Ohlone women play a vi-tal role in the revitalization of Ohlone traditions, I am unable to make any broad claims based on the small number of individual Ohlone women I interviewed. Still, it is interesting that so many of the public fig-ures associated with the movement are women. It is also interesting that the 2009 study on Ohlone people for the National Park Service by three anthropolo-gists named an Ohlone woman, Linda Yamane, as the “single most active individual in the field of Ohlone/Costanoan material culture revival.”14 Linda has been involved in the revitalization of Ohlone songs and sto-ries as well as the Rumsien Ohlone language. She is perhaps best known for her work to revitalize Ohlone

13 Oakland Museum of California14 Milliken et al, 233.

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basketry, a tradition associated with Ohlone women pre-contact. Her name came up during many of the interviews I conducted in the Bay Area in 2014 for my larger master’s thesis project on Ohlone spirituality. More research is needed on my part to uncover how many women are involved in the revitalization move-ment. Further research may also shed light on why so many would are drawn to the movement as well. Ohlone people, like members of other indigenous communities, are survivors. Despite missioniza-tion, genocidal politics of the American government, and the forced removal from their traditional lands, Ohlone culture lives on in the modern world. It is clear that Ohlone women have played a central role in this. They receive and transmit traditions in a num-ber of interconnected spheres, which can include cer-emony, political demonstration, and newly reclaimed traditions. These traditions function, at least in some circumstances, as way to cultivate and re-establish relationships to the human and other-than-human world. They strengthen bonds among members of the Ohlone community and create a means to resist the effects of colonization. Through the continual study of their historical past and the reclamation of ances-tral traditions, these women are able to honor their past to shape their future.

Works Cited

Bean, Lowell John. Introduction. The Ohlone Past and Present: Na-tive Americans of the San Francisco Bay Region. Ed. Lowell John Bean. Menlo Park: Ballena Press, 1994. xxi-xxxii. Print.

Brunvand, Jan Harold. The Study of American Folklore; an Introduc-tion. New York: W.W. Norton, 1968. Print.

Castillo, Edward D. “The Language of Race Hatred.” The Ohlone Past and Present: Native Americans of the San Francisco Bay Region. Ed. Lowell John Bean. Menlo Park: Ballena Press, 1994.

Caven, Febna. “Being Idle No More: The Women Behind the Movement.” Cultural Survival. Cultural Survival, Mar. 2013. Web. 28 Nov. 2014.

Clifford, James. Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-first Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. Print.

Clinger, Janet, Ruth Morgan, and Ann-Marie Sayers, comps. Ohlone Women Elders: Restoring a California Legacy. Hollister: Costanoan Indian Research, 2004. Print.

Danielson, Larry. “Swedish-American Mothers: Conservators of the Tradition.” Folklore On Two Continents: Essays in Honor of Lin-da Dégh. Ed. Nikolai Burlakoff and Carl Lindahl. Bloomington: Trickster Press, 1980. 339-347. Print.

Earth Medicine Alliance. “Ceremonies of Ohlone Peoples; Vi-sion Quests, Memorials, Crossing Over Ceremonies. (Part 4/7)” YouTube. YouTube, 21 Aug 2011. Web. 13 Aug. 2014.

Field, Les and Alan Leventhal, Dolores Sanchez, and Rosemary Cambra. “A Comtemporary Ohlone Tribal Revitalization Move-ment: A Perspective From the Muwekma Cosanoan/Ohlone In-dians of the San Francisco Bay Area”. California History.Vol. 71, No. 3, Indians of California. (1994). 412-431. Print.

Milliken, Randall, Laurence Shoup, and Beverly Ortiz. Ohlone/Costanoan Indians of the San Francisco Peninsula and their Neighbors, Yesterday and Today. San Francisco: National Park Service Gold Gate National Recreation Area, 2009. Web.

Oakland Museum of California. “The Oak Tree: Ruth Orta and Family on Oak Trees and California Natives.” YouTube. YouTube, 5 Sept. 2013. Web. 6 July 2014.

Orsi, Robert A. Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them. Princeton: Princ-eton University Press, 2005. Print.

Ortiz, Beverly. “Chocheño and Rumsen Narratives: A Compari-son.” The Ohlone Past and Present: Native Americans of the San Francisco Bay Region. Ed. Lowell John Bean. Menlo Park: Ballena Press, 1994. 99-164. Print.

----. Ohlone Curriculum with Bay Miwok Content and Introduc-tion to Delta Yokuts. Fremont: East Bay Regional Park District, 2013. Print.

Kroeber, Alfred L. Handbook of the Indians of California. Berkeley: California Book, 1953. Print.

Leventhal, Alan, Les Field, Hank Alvarez, and Rosemary Cam-bra. “The Ohlone: Back from Extinction.” Ohlone Past and Present: Native Americans of the San Francisco Bay Region. Ed. Lowell John Bean. Menlo Park: Ballena Press, 1994. 297-336. Print.

Roberts, Allen and Matthew Booker. “Shell Mounds in San Fran-cisco Bay Area.” Spatial History Project. Stanford University, 2014. Web. 10 Dec. 2014.

Sayers, Ann Marie. “Noso-n ‘In Breath So it is in Spirit’—The Story of Indian Canyon.” The Ohlone Past and Present: Native Americans of the San Francisco Bay Region. Ed. Lowell John Bean. Menlo Park: Ballena Press, 1994. 337-356. Print.

Shoemaker, Nancy. Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women. New York: Routledge, 1995. Print.

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Smith, Andrea. Native Americans and the Christian Right: The Gen-dered Politics of Unlikely Alliances. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. Print.

Spicuzza, Mary. “Emeryville Replaces Historic Shellmound with Street Mall.” Editorials. The Berkeley Daily Planet, 16 Mar. 2012. Web. 1 Dec. 2014.

Stacy, Megan. “Shellmounds of the Bay Area.” Sacred Land Film Project. Sacred Land Film Project, 26 Jan. 2011. Web. 1 Dec. 2014.

Stahl, Sandra K. D. “The Personal Narrative as Folklore”. Journal of the Folklore Institute, Vol. 14, No. 1/2, Special Double Issue: Sto-ries of Personal Experiences. (1977). 9-30. Print.

Toelken, Barre. The Dynamics of Folklore. Boston: Houghton Mif-flin, 1979. Print.

Treadway, Chris. “Black Friday Protest Held at Shellmound Site in Emeryville.” West County. West County Times, 28 Nov. 2014. Web. 1 Dec. 2014.

Vassternich, Talga. “Ann Marie Sayers - Ohlone Presence.” You-Tube. YouTube, 7 Nov. 2010. Web. 14 Dec. 2014.

Abel R. Gomez is a second year MA student in the Religious Studies De-partment at the University of Missouri. His research focuses on contemporary Indigenous religious traditions, place, and identity.

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Kumare: A Film AnalysisGabry Tyson, undergrad ‘16

I recently watched Kumare, a documentary about New Jersey filmmaker, Vikram Gandhi, on his quest to perpetuate the idea of religious leaders as nothing more than illusions in the mind of their followers. He impersonated an In-dian guru and set out to Arizona to spread the word of his fake alter ego, Sri Kumare. With the help of his two friends, he quickly booked gigs at multiple yoga studios and collected a gather-ing of people who wanted to learn from the pro-claimed master himself. His disciples are interviewed as saying he is one of the most influential and “real” people they’ve ever met, not a doubt in their mind that his identity was anything less than authentic. His philosophy is simple: truth is an illu-sion. There is a guru inside everyone and it’s up to you to bring that inner guru out. Basically, through all of his teachings he was telling his students that he was a phony, but regardless of his teaching style, the way he enhanced his fol-lowers’ lives was noticeable and irrefutable. As a religious studies major and an enthusi-astic proponent of the theoretical, I found this documentary to be extremely interesting. While the description of the documentary sounds a bit sacrilegious at first glance, when looked at clos-er it offers a firsthand look at how movements get started and gain followers. Gandhi pretends to be a guru, but the only thing that isn’t real is his accent and backstory; his teachings are all his own personal beliefs. Isn’t this how philoso-phies and religious movements get started? One person has an idea, shares it with another per-son and if they agree they join together and live by those ideals. It speaks a lot to the authority of perceived power, because had he walked in to those yoga studios as an every day Jo-shmo

from New Jersey and taught the same princi-ples, he would have been looked at as a crazy skeptic of religion. In a twisted turn of events, I personally be-lieve he both supported and refuted his hypoth-esis of leaders as illusions with his little experi-ment. Did he fake being a guru? Yes. Did he gain followers and supporters by promoting the idea that he was a religious leader? Yes. Does this make him an “illusion”? Yes and No. Guru is a Sanskrit word that means teacher. In many Indian religions, a guru is known as one with exceptional wisdom that passes this wisdom from teacher to student. Although his teaching style was questioned by some of his students after he revealed his true identity, many still agreed that he was one of the most in-fluential people they’ve ever met and continued to live their lives the way he had taught them. Leaders are only leaders if they have people to lead, obviously. They only possess the powers and authority they do because their followers give it to them. So I suppose they are illusions in the sense that they don’t have a proclaimed right or doctrine to power other than that peo-ple believe they have it, but all in all that is the whole premise of a leader. So, Vikram Gandhi may have not been a guru at first, but who’s to say he wasn’t one at the end?

Gabry Tyson is a junior studying Journalism, International Studies and Religious Studies. She’s spending this semester in Milan.

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Professor Profile: Dr. Dennis Kelley

Having Had a Spiritual (Re)Awakening: Traditional Spirituality and Sobriety in Indian Country

Abstract:Alcohol abuse recovery and prevention programs among American Indians provide an opportunity to view the process of cultural revitalization that I refer to as “reprise,” the conscious re-articulation of traditional spirituality viewed as latently present but suppressed due to colonization. Reprise efforts in American Indian communities frequently frame alcohol abuse recovery and prevention as a key feature, and the alcohol prob-lems experienced by Natives as indicative of the struggles Native people are faced with from modernity. The “firewater myth,” the assumption that Native Americans are somehow inherently predisposed to alcoholism and that it effects them differently than other discrete ethnic groups, contributes to the view of traditional Native lifeways as archaic behaviors best abandoned. Many American Indian approaches to alcoholism have established recovery systems that reverse this image, affirming traditional Native spirituality as a key aspect of the return to health, especially for Native alcoholics.

Interview with Dr. Kelley

1. How long have you been teaching?

I actually was teaching a couple of courses in an Ethnic Studies department while in grad school, so all-in-all, I have been teaching my own course for about 14 years.

2. What drew you to Religious Studies and your speciality within this discipline?

I grew up in a pretty diverse neighborhood, actually a housing project, and I was always aware that all my friends had different worldviews that showed up in different ways--food choices, holidays and festivals, etc.-- and I was always interested in what those differences were all about, I guess. I was an Anthro and Philosophy double major in college--they didn’t have Religious Studies where I went--and after I got all of the require-ments done, I basically made a Religious Studies major with independent projects. My senior project was a comparison of the character Peter from the Christian tales to Coyote in Native Californian tales.

3. What subjects do you wish to teach in the future?

I will teach my Religion and Humor course in the summer session this year, and I would like to make that a reg-ular class. I also have a class called “Indians and Missionaries” that I would like to teach (never taught it here).

4. If you had a time machine, would you go back in time or go into the future? Why?

I think future because I would be stressed out that I was going to inadvertently change the future if I went back in time, and I just couldn’t enjoy it. Nobody got time for that.

Dr. Dennis Kelley

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BOBMAA publication of the Mizzou Religious Studies Club

Documents

BOBMA vol 1 | issue 1