Turning East: Why Americans Look to the Orient for Spirituality-And What That Search Can Mean to the West

by Harvey Cox

Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso

Genres: Religion, Buddhism

Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Harvey Gallagher Cox Jr., Ph.D. (History and Philosophy of Religion, Harvard University, 1963; B.D., Yale Divinity School, 1955) was Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard, where he had been teaching since 1965, both at HDS and in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, until his retirement in 2009.

An American Baptist minister, he was the Protestant chaplain at Temple University and the director of religious activities at Oberlin College; an ecumenical fraternal worker in Berlin; and a professor at Andover Newton Theological School. His research and teaching interests focus on the interaction of religion, culture, and politics. Among the issues he explores are: urbanization, theological developments in world Christianity, Jewish-Christian relations, and current spiritual movements in the global setting. His most recent book is When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Decisions Today. His Secular City, published in 1965, became an international bestseller with more than 1 million copies sold. It was selected by the University of Marburg as one of the most influential books of Protestant theology in the twentieth century.

Reviews

[Shashank · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book reads as if Harvey Cox explored the eastern religions as they were popping up in America and eventually found something personally sustaining in meditation and then used all his academic knowledge to try and explain it to himself so it was less threatening and he could keep his worldview as intact as possible. Harvey finds through interviews and personal exploration/research that of the many reasons people give for turning to eastern traditions, the three major ones are: 1) seeking community 2) seeking direct experience of both something sacred and their regular lives 3) turning away from lacks in their culture[negative religious experiences, patriarchy, capitalism, environmental callousness].

Harvey asses that the need for direct experience can be supplied through some of the spiritual disciplines including meditation, and people can also find some form of community though overall he finds the community insufficient if it isn’t arising from within western culture. Also meditation easily becomes a tool of conventional self-discovery and identity quest. Our narcissism reducing eastern spiritual disciplines to caricatures of themselves. Finding new identities can’t be liberation or transcendence, it’s just a change of clothes. I enjoyed this line of thought and feel it still holds up in many ways. Mediation is meant to moves us away from narcissism and has a soteriological purpose and an ethical vision most of which is easily lost in its cultural transportation.

Ultimately much like Jung he seems to feel there is a western cultural character that simply can’t get/put on an eastern tradition. The basic conflicts and issues of western civilization arise from within it and must be solved from within. Capitalism/Consumerism, environmentalism, a breakdown of community and estrangement from our own experience at a personal level are the most salient historical conflicts he discusses. The fact that eastern traditions address our personal issues in compelling ways but don’t solve our historically specific cultural problems seems an odd thing to hold against them, but Harvey seems to find this a damming limitation.

Whatever promises/substance he sees is mostly spilled haphazardly out across the pages, undigested and a bit of mess. But since his academic background is in religious studies and he seems to have kept up with popular sociology of the time it’s still interesting and you can see the seeds of many of the criticisms that have arisen over the years about the attempts to establish eastern religions in western countries. The whole thing is very sloppy and he tends to shift from sophisticated to superficial examples to better fit his argument, but the leaps in reasoning are never explained or even expanded upon. He’s jumping all over the place and it comes down to already having a Christian worldview which the arguments in the book are mostly a defense of.

At one point prostitution becomes the template for all modern human interactions, buying and selling of human relations and needs in the market divorced from more intimate concerns. His is a very all or nothing perspective. Turning east can’t dismantle our consumer capitalism and its discontents but will simply be assimilated as another commodity. Along with reducing religion to a consumer commodity the perils include it’s appeasing and exasperating our narcissism, false authority figures, dumbing down of ancient traditions, false idealization of eastern traditions, and as escape from historical struggles. These are all valid criticisms imo, and Harvey lays out a clear connection as to how and why they arise in this cultural dialogue. Anyone interested in these kinds of criticisms will benefit from reading the book which was quite perceptive in this regard. Fundamentally the peril of turning east is a fall away from historical signification and the theology of hope within historical time. Either this turn east solves all our problems or it’s just not that lasting/significant for Harvey.

What hurts the book is that the promises section is sadly lacking and shallow, I’d not recommend anyone read this book looking for the positive impact such movements and traditions have had or could have both at a personal and societal level. Cultural transmission and dialog is a complex process deserving of balanced and subtle analysis, this book tends towards the paranoid and overly generalized for my taste. Harvey laments that we have an idealized orient in our head that keeps the “real” orient from reaching us. He again falls into an all or nothing line of thinking. Cultural influence is a slow process toward better but still often imperfect understanding, criticizing the beginning and middle for not being the end is ridiculous.

[Erika · Rating 3 out of 5]

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