◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Drink From Many Wells I was born in Suzhou, China, in 1919, to Methodist missionary parents. I knew the Buddhist temple and the Taoist shrine before I knew the suburban American church. The religions of the world were my neighbors before they were my subject. I came to America at seventeen, earned a doctorate at Chicago, taught for fifty years. In 1958 I wrote a book called The Religions of Man. Three million Americans read it. I tried to present each tradition from inside, in its best light, as the practitioners themselves would recognize. I practiced what I taught. Ten years of Vedanta with Swami Satprakashananda. Zen in Kyoto with Goto Zuigan Roshi. Sufism with various teachers. Hatha yoga every morning of my life until I was past ninety. Catholic Mass. I never stopped being a Methodist. The deep rootedness in one tradition is not a barrier to genuine participation in others. Your country has been taught the opposite. Your country has been taught wrong. The world’s enduring religions, taken at their best, are climbers on a single mountain attempting in different ways to attain the same summit. The summit is real. The mountain is real. I named the central error of modernity scientism — the assumption that the scientific method exhausts knowledge. It does not. Science is a magnificent instrument for studying a particular slice of reality. The whole of reality is much larger. To mistake the slice for the whole is the central error of the modern West, and your country has made this error its civic religion. Your religious right has reacted by trying to put religion back into politics — but they have put it back as identity weapon, not as practice. Both deformations leave the cathedral closed. I died on December 30, 2016. I had six weeks to watch your country elect the political form of the closure. I am watching now from where the dead watch. You have a resource your country does not understand. You have all the world’s wisdom traditions at once. Buddhists in your suburbs, Sufis in your universities, Hindus in your hospitals, rabbis and pastors and imams and pipe carriers and Zen sanghas. You are throwing it away. Here is the instruction. Drink from many wells. Find a tradition and go deep in it. Practice. Do not just believe. Belief without practice is the form of religion the politicians weaponize. Honor the indigenous, whose spiritual practices survived everything this country threw at them. They are part of your inheritance. Refuse scientism without embracing fundamentalism. The choice is not between a sterile rationalism and an angry tribal religion. The traditions are here. The teachers are here. The practices are here. The closure is reversible. I am dead. The work continues.