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See this imageWhy Religion? Paperback – 6 November 2018
by Elaine Pagels (Author)
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Product details
Paperback: 320 pages
Publisher: HarperLuxe (6 November 2018)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0062860984
ISBN-13: 978-0062860989
Product Dimensions: 15.2 x 1.6 x 22.9 cm
Boxed-product Weight: 454 g
Customer Reviews: 4.4 out of 5 stars148 customer ratings
Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 204,942 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#366 in Religion & Sociology
#1889 in History of Christianity
#367 in Sociology of Religion
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Review
"A minimalist work of great majesty, akin to a shimmering Agnes Martin Painting, whose stripped-down aesthetic allows light to pour forth from her canvas."--New York Times Book Review
"An intimate, evocative memoir."--Ron Charles, Washington Post
"Lucid, inspiring personal testimony."--National Book Review, "5 Hot Books"
"A wide-ranging work of cultural reflection and a brisk tour of the most exciting religion scholarship over the past 40 years. . . . Pagels is as fearless as she is candid."--Washington Post
"In clear, unsparing prose, Pagels enmeshes personal mourning, scholarly rigor, and one of the smartest modern testaments to the consolations as well as the inadequacies of spirituality. A small revolution in memoir to match the one she led in theology decades ago."--New York magazine
"Searing and wise. . . . tender and wrenching, sketched with exquisite detail."--Boston Globe
"Looks back on a rich life of learning, writing, loving, seeking truth and, inevitably, suffering. . . achingly beautiful . . . Readers of all faiths and none can learn from her brilliance and courage."--Dallas Morning News
"You don't have to be religious yourself to enjoy her thought-provoking work."--Bustle
"Pagels unpacks the relevance of religion in the twenty-first century--how religious traditions continue to shape the way we understand ourselves and the world and provide a framework for facing our most painful losses."--Lion's Roar
"A raw and often moving autobiography . . . The story of her grief . . . will touch all. A meaningful tale of pain and hope on the edges of faith."--Kirkus
From the Back Cover
In the wake of great personal tragedy, National Book Award Winner and New York Times bestselling author Elaine Pagels reflects on the persistence and nature of belief and why religion matters
Why does religion still exist in the twenty-first century? And why do so many people--even, and especially, those who challenge religion--continue to argue about the questions it raises? These questions took on a new urgency for Pagels when she was dealing with unimaginable loss--the death of her young son, followed a year later by the shocking loss of her husband. Here she interweaves a personal story with the work that she loves, illuminating how, for better and worse, religious traditions have shaped how we understand ourselves; how we relate to one another; and, most important, how we get through the most difficult challenges we face. A provocative and deeply moving memoir from one of the most compelling religious thinkers at work today, Why Religion? explores the spiritual dimension of human experience.
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Hande Z
3.0 out of 5 stars Why indeed?Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 29 November 2018
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Pagels had written several books on Gnosticism. She had long rejected Christianity, and for a long time, religion itself. Then tragedy struck her, not once, but twice – her lovely son, Mark, whose photographs appear in the book, died. She was devastated, and not long after, her husband, Heinz, died. She has two other children, David and Sarah, but two great loves in her life had been extinguished.
Pagel’s love for Mark and Heinz is touchingly made clear in this book. In it, she tells about how she struggled to understand their deaths, and how to overcome her grief. She revisits Christianity and other forms of spiritualism. Eventually, settling on a form of Christianity through her own interpretation of Paul’s words. Her interpretation, of course, was gleaned from her long-study of Gnosticism. At page 261, she asks, ‘What, then is the true gospel? Fascinated, I realized that the anonymous author of ‘The Gospel of Truth’ writes to answer that question, and to reveal that secret wisdom – or, at least, his version of it. He begins with the words “The true gospel is joy, to those who receive from the Father the grace of knowing him!” Plunging into that mystery, he says that the true gospel, unlike the simple message, doesn’t begin in human history. Instead, it begins before this world was created.’
Although this is a thoughtful, personal, and sincere book, the point that comes through mostly clearly is that when we cannot overcome grief through reason, we have to overcome it with another emotion. We are individuals and have to pick our choices. Those who can overcome grief through reason will not need religion even if that may, from some viewpoint depict them as cold. The second option, the one Pagels chose, was to overcome grief through the feeling of another emotion – in her case, she calls it ‘grace’ through God, not necessarily the Christian God, though.
There is a third option, which is to overcome grief (and the fear of death) not through reason or emotion. It is the Buddhist way of staring at death without a need to rationalise its purpose nor to feel grief or dread. It is to meet death and grief with plain equanimity.
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Santiago Escobedo
5.0 out of 5 stars Hope, Always Hope.Reviewed in the United States on 22 November 2018
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Many years ago when I first learned of Dr. Pagel's husband death, I was at the time a subscriber to the Sciences magazine and his obituary was part of an editorial, I thought to my self, bad things do happen to good people. As I read this book, Why Religion? I became more and more intrigued by the continual questioning of personal misfortunes by the author. Through it all—the frightening aspect of being the sole provider, becoming accustom to loneliness, and the slow passing of time, became too real to this reader. Afterward, I stood and questioned my beliefs in good and evil and what those concepts meant to me. I could not put down the book as I was drawn into Dr. Pagel's narrative and wanted to know the end result. But like a cushioned landing I was let down gently and walked away knowing all humans share the same questions. At the end, I immediately remembered the Pilgrims Mass at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compestla, Spain and that part of the mass where the expression of peace is shared by the attendees...suddenly, the words, "May peace be with you," are expressed in Spanish, French, Portualgese, German, Japanese, Italian, so many other languages but all conveying the same sentiment. I feel enlighten by the book and the fact that humans believe in hope and in a better tomorrow. Thank you, Dr. Pagel for sharing.
102 people found this helpful
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Roger Lipsey
5.0 out of 5 stars The height of intelligence, not only of mind but of heartReviewed in the United States on 24 November 2018
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There is reading a book, and there is drinking up a book as if you are unexpectedly thirsty for precisely its taste, for what it is. This is a drinking book. It offers much to readers who have been moved by Dr. Pagels' previous works, to those who have found their way independently to the Gnostic Gospels, to any for whom the question "Why Religion?" is vivid. In a time when there is so much idiocy, this book represents the height of intelligence, not only of mind but of heart.
56 people found this helpful
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P. N. Jensen
5.0 out of 5 stars Another amazing book by this exceptional authorReviewed in the United States on 21 November 2018
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The first half of the book tells the story of the death of her son and then her husband. As horrid as this story was and is, it was not what I expected. Just as I was growing weary (?) of this terrible sequence of events and its effect on her, she layers on the texture provided by the Bible and the Gnostic Gospels and the entire story begins to fall in place. This book is different than her other books. I am a loyal fan and, in the end, this book added knowledge and perspective. The answers to our questions may lie, in part, in ourselves. And finally, Fr. Barbour, faith is a gift.
53 people found this helpful
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AGrassini
5.0 out of 5 stars A moving personal story powerfully written by a historian with a deep understanding of suffering.Reviewed in the United States on 28 November 2018
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A moving personal story written beautifully and with depth. In asking universal questions about suffering and weaving in her quest for meaning, Dr. Pagel shows us a way to understand the imponderables of life. A must read for anyone who cannot find the answers in dogmatic religion—and for anyone dealing with grief. As poetic and impactful as Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking, but perhaps with more hope. It moved me to tears, and I could not put it down!
47 people found this helpful
Why Religion?: A Personal Story
by
3.97 · Rating details · 1,870 ratings · 336 reviews
Why is religion still around in the twenty-first century? Why do so many still believe? And how do various traditions still shape the way people experience everything from sexuality to politics, whether they are religious or not? In Why Religion? Elaine Pagels looks to her own life to help address these questions.
These questions took on a new urgency for Pagels when dealing with unimaginable loss—the death of her young son, followed a year later by the shocking loss of her husband. Here she interweaves a personal story with the work that she loves, illuminating how, for better and worse, religious traditions have shaped how we understand ourselves; how we relate to one another; and, most importantly, how to get through the most difficult challenges we face.
Drawing upon the perspectives of neurologists, anthropologists, and historians, as well as her own research, Pagels opens unexpected ways of understanding persistent religious aspects of our culture.
A provocative and deeply moving account from one of the most compelling religious thinkers at work today, Why Religion? explores the spiritual dimension of human experience. (less)
These questions took on a new urgency for Pagels when dealing with unimaginable loss—the death of her young son, followed a year later by the shocking loss of her husband. Here she interweaves a personal story with the work that she loves, illuminating how, for better and worse, religious traditions have shaped how we understand ourselves; how we relate to one another; and, most importantly, how to get through the most difficult challenges we face.
Drawing upon the perspectives of neurologists, anthropologists, and historians, as well as her own research, Pagels opens unexpected ways of understanding persistent religious aspects of our culture.
A provocative and deeply moving account from one of the most compelling religious thinkers at work today, Why Religion? explores the spiritual dimension of human experience. (less)
This memoir in addition to being of an account of overcoming personal tragedy, adds the unique dimension of insights of a respected historian of religion. Elaine Pagels is not only knowledgeable of the historical circumstances under which early scriptures were written, she found personal solace in those ancient words by identifying with the emotions and feeling that may have motivated those early writers. This book tells the story of how her personal and academic life combined to provide a unique reservoir of spiritual wisdom when facing the death of her 6-year-old son followed a year later by the death of her husband while mountain climbing.
Elaine Pagels participated in the translation of the Nag Hammadi library and provided insights into them with her books, The Gnostic Gospels (1979) and Beyond Belief (2003). Her other books, including Adam, Eve and the Serpent, The Origin of Satan, and Revelations, have contributed additional understandings of early Christianity and highlighted common issues shared by people of both ancient and current times.
This book, as indicated by the subtitle, is very much a candid “personal story,” but it is also a quick review and tour of much of the interesting religion scholarship over the past forty years. It can perhaps serve as an extended synopsis of her other books for those readers who don’t have time or motivation to read all of her other books.
Pagels draws on a wide array of religious influences including the Gospels, letters of Paul, Gnostic writings from the Nag Hammadi library, Buddhism, and Trappist monks. It is clear that her spiritual journey has not been confined by the strictures of orthodox Christianity.
Why Religion?—Was that question answered? It was a question that was asked of her when she applied for graduate school. She came from a family that was opposed to religion of any sort, and when she applied to graduate school she applied to five different schools in five different disciplines. Because of her background and scattered interests up to that point in her life, "Why Religion?" was a logical question to ask. I got the impression that she selected religion because it was Harvard University, though the quota of women had already been filled the year she applied so she had to wait a year to begin her studies. (view spoiler)
Other than the above, the question in the book's title is not explicitly answered. However, her life as recounted in this memoir provides the lived answer.
The following are some excerpts from the book that I found poignant. (Thanks to David Nelson for highlighting them in an email he sent out for Vital Conversations book group. The introductory comments to the individual quotations are my own.)
I liked this definition of "being religious."
Elaine Pagels participated in the translation of the Nag Hammadi library and provided insights into them with her books, The Gnostic Gospels (1979) and Beyond Belief (2003). Her other books, including Adam, Eve and the Serpent, The Origin of Satan, and Revelations, have contributed additional understandings of early Christianity and highlighted common issues shared by people of both ancient and current times.
This book, as indicated by the subtitle, is very much a candid “personal story,” but it is also a quick review and tour of much of the interesting religion scholarship over the past forty years. It can perhaps serve as an extended synopsis of her other books for those readers who don’t have time or motivation to read all of her other books.
Pagels draws on a wide array of religious influences including the Gospels, letters of Paul, Gnostic writings from the Nag Hammadi library, Buddhism, and Trappist monks. It is clear that her spiritual journey has not been confined by the strictures of orthodox Christianity.
Why Religion?—Was that question answered? It was a question that was asked of her when she applied for graduate school. She came from a family that was opposed to religion of any sort, and when she applied to graduate school she applied to five different schools in five different disciplines. Because of her background and scattered interests up to that point in her life, "Why Religion?" was a logical question to ask. I got the impression that she selected religion because it was Harvard University, though the quota of women had already been filled the year she applied so she had to wait a year to begin her studies. (view spoiler)
Other than the above, the question in the book's title is not explicitly answered. However, her life as recounted in this memoir provides the lived answer.
The following are some excerpts from the book that I found poignant. (Thanks to David Nelson for highlighting them in an email he sent out for Vital Conversations book group. The introductory comments to the individual quotations are my own.)
I liked this definition of "being religious."
“Am I religious?” Yes, incorrigibly, by temperament, if you mean susceptible to the music, the rituals, the daring leaps of imagination and metaphor so often found in music, poems, liturgies, rituals, and stories – not only those that are Christian, but also to the cantor’s singing at the bar mitzvah, to Hopi and Zuni dances on the mesas of the American Southwest, to the call to prayer in Indonesia. But when we say “religious,” what are we talking about?” (p.32)This is a reminder how pain and grief can strip away the usual comforts of religious faith.
Whatever most people mean by faith was never more remote than during times of mourning, when professions of faith in God sounded only like unintelligible noise, heard from the bottom of the sea. (p. 98)This distinguishment between "find meaning" and "make meaning" makes sense to me.
We found no meaning in our son’s death, or in the deaths of countless others. The most we could hope was that we might be able to create meaning. (p. 104)The following is an articulation of how sorrow from the loss of a loved one can linger for years, and can return at unpredictable times.
“You have no choice about how you feel about this. Your only choice is whether to feel it now or later.” Although her comment helped a little at first, during the next twenty-five years I would keep discovering that how much I was able to feel, or not, and when, was not a matter of choice. (p. 121)I agree with the following
“Do you believe in life after death?” “Yes, of course – but not my life after my death.” (p. 137)Wouldn't it be nice if we could depend on God to make sure that life is fair?
I still wanted to believe that we live in a morally ordered universe, in which someone, or something – God or nature? – would keep track of what’s fair? (p. 167)The followings is Pagel's description of the experience of emerging from grief.
Emerging from a time of unbearable grief, I felt that such sayings offered a glimpse of what I’d sensed in that vision of the net. They helped dispel isolation and turn me from despair, suggesting that every one of us is woven into the mysterious fabric of the universe, and into connection with each other, with all being, and with God. (p. 177)(less)
Nov 06, 2018Ron Charles rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: religion-spirituality
A rare lung disease killed Elaine Pagels’s 6-year-old son, and then about a year later her husband fell to his death while mountain climbing. After that Job-like run of tragedies, no one would have blamed Pagels if she had decided to “curse God and die.”
But she held on. Through rage and terror and despair so overwhelming that it made her faint, she held on.
“I had to look into that darkness,” she says at the opening of her new memoir, “Why Religion?” “I could not continue to live fully while refusing to recall what happened.”
Pagels acknowledges that “no one escapes terrible loss,” but as the country’s most popular historian of religion, she brings a unique reservoir of spiritual wisdom to bear on the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. A MacArthur “genius” and a professor at Princeton University, she has long been one of those rare bilingual academics capable of speaking to lay and scholarly readers. Her foundational work, “The Gnostic Gospels” (1979), revolutionized our. . . .
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...(less)
But she held on. Through rage and terror and despair so overwhelming that it made her faint, she held on.
“I had to look into that darkness,” she says at the opening of her new memoir, “Why Religion?” “I could not continue to live fully while refusing to recall what happened.”
Pagels acknowledges that “no one escapes terrible loss,” but as the country’s most popular historian of religion, she brings a unique reservoir of spiritual wisdom to bear on the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. A MacArthur “genius” and a professor at Princeton University, she has long been one of those rare bilingual academics capable of speaking to lay and scholarly readers. Her foundational work, “The Gnostic Gospels” (1979), revolutionized our. . . .
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...(less)
In 1945, two years after Elaine Pagels was born in northern California, an Arab farmer on the other side of the world made a stunning discovery. In a cave near the village of Nag Hammadi in Egypt, he found a six-foot-long jar containing 52 secret texts. They were gospels in Coptic Egyptian, which presented mystical sayings, beliefs, and ideas of Jesus that were quite different from those found in the New Testament. Deemed heretical at the time of their transcription, the scripts were apparently buried by defiant monks, who’d been ordered by religious authorities to destroy them. About a millennium and a half later, Pagels, now a Harvard-trained religious scholar, would be part of a team who translated those texts. In 1989, she wrote a best-selling non-academic book which explores them. One reviewer, referring to Pagels, observed that women were “easily seduced by heresy”. Some readers sent personal letters damning Pagels to hell. Yes, preoccupation with textual purity and heresy remains alive and well in the modern age.
Early in Why Religion? Pagels explains that over the course of her career she has been regularly asked about the role of religion in her own life. Is she, for example, a believer? Or is her interest in religion purely academic? Why Religion? is a focused memoir which seeks to explain how and why Pagels was attracted to the discipline of religious studies, a very unconventional calling for a young woman coming of age in the 1960s (and one in which she encountered a fair bit of male chauvinism). She also addresses some of the ways in which religion and a sort of mysticism have given shape and meaning to a life marked by significant tragedy.
Pagels’s family of origin was repressive and not at all religious. Her mother, who was uncomfortable with both physical closeness and emotional displays, did sometimes take Elaine and her brother to the local Methodist church for Sunday school, but the children’s attendance was not a significant part of their lives. Pagels’s father, a research biologist, had traded his Calvinist upbringing for Darwinism. Passionately anti-religious, he was also given to unpredictable fits of rage, and his daughter learned early on to adhere to a code of silence. Being quiet was the only way to be safe. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that when she was 15, Elaine was attracted to evangelical Christianity. Some high school friends were attending a Billy Graham “crusade” at a Palo Alto stadium. Pagels went along with them. Swept up in the emotional intensity of the experience, she found herself walking towards the altar, moved by Graham’s words to surrender herself to Jesus. She believed that if she were “born again”, she could break out of her family and “enter into the family of a heavenly father . . . [who] loved her unconditionally.”
Pagels’s parents were horrified. “Their reaction,” she writes, “secretly pleased me, confirming that I’d struck out to find a different world.” Hers was an atypical teenage rebellion; for several years during adolescence she attended an evangelical church once or twice weekly. However, when Paul, a young Jewish artist friend (from a different crowd) died tragically in a car crash, church members harshly pronounced that since he had been a Jew, he could only have gone to hell. Pagels was shocked. The exclusiveness and superiority of the group was exposed, and she broke permanently with evangelicalism. Her friend’s sudden death had left her not only grieving, but questioning, too: Where do the dead go, and how do we go on living when death is ever present and inevitable?
Around the same time, Pagels participated in a UCLA seminar on the sociology of mental illness, which also played a role in her decision to pursue religious studies. The course required students to make regular visits to Camarillo, a state psychiatric hospital. There she met a young Mormon who’d had a mental health crisis after he’d begun reading texts along the lines of The Origin of Species. These had filled him with “bad thoughts” that made him question the religion he’d been raised in. Pagels’s interest in the religious impulse and the early days of Christianity was further stimulated. She was particularly curious about the persistence of religion in an age of science.
In her memoir, Pagels considers major events in her own life through the lens of religion. One point that she hammers home is that the old stories, the myths of the Old and New Testaments, do not have to be accepted as the truth to exert an influence on even a fairly liberal person’s mindset. The stories of the Bible are repositories of the cultural codes of a nomadic sheep and goat-herding people, and we may not be aware of the degree to which they still govern modern attitudes. For instance, biblical texts reflect a culture that valued fertility and therefore condemned sexual activity of a non-procreative kind. Such views have echoed across the millennia and still impact modern attitudes to homosexuality.
A discussion of the rage that is part of intense grief leads to a stimulating and fairly accessible discussion of the figure of Satan, who was invented, Pagels says, to deflect blame (about the injustices of life) from God. (The Ancient Greeks, she explains, had no need for Satan, since their prophets never claimed that the gods were unequivocally good. Buddhists, too, don’t wrestle much with “the problem of evil” for different reasons: for them, the most basic premise is that all life is suffering.) Biblical storytellers, however, chose not to blame God for disasters, but a member of his heavenly court instead: “a malicious trickster who throws obstacles into one’s path . . . to lure his targets toward danger and death.” He is a kind of psycho-religious construct, an “invisible antagonist” envisioned for millennia by people “bushwack[ing their way] through rough emotional terrain”. Pagels tells about one of her own powerful dreams featuring Satan—whom she doesn’t believe in—which she had the anxiety-ridden night before her son’s open-heart surgery.
Quite bravely for an academic, Pagels writes about many spiritual experiences she has had during her lifetime. For many years Pagels and her first husband, Heinz, struggled with infertility. When she finally did have a son, Mark, quite late in life, the boy’s time would be cut short by untreatable congenital heart disease. Shortly after Mark’s death at the age of six and the adoption of two young children, Heinz, too, would die. Most of the mystical episodes Pagels recounts are related to these tragic personal losses. Before the deaths of her son and her husband, she had taken for granted that death was the end; her experiences challenged that assumption.
Pagels also touches on a number of other unusual experiences—including a controlled LSD “trip”, being the focus of a fertility ritual, and attending an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting where she recognized that willpower alone could not release her from alcohol’s anesthetic powers. Through these personal stories and others, she shows how religion meets the imaginative needs of humans, serves the significant irrationality within, and receives, contains, channels, and sometimes inflames some of our most intense emotions.
Pagels’s memoir took seven years to write. That doesn’t surprise me. For the most part, it is a rich, stimulating, and thoughtful work, simultaneously personal and scholarly. Unfortunately, in the last chapter, the personal is almost entirely abandoned for the academic. Pagels provides an analysis of The Book of Revelation and looks at the ways it has been used fairly recently in the War on Terror. Some of the epistles of Paul the Apostle and a few of the secret texts found at Nag Hammadi are also examined. The discussion might have been meaningful to me if I had some background knowledge of the material. I don’t, so it was pretty hard-going. I didn’t enjoy reading it, and I felt that Pagels was no longer telling the personal story promised in the subtitle of her memoir. I thought this was an unfortunate way to end a book that had otherwise melded the personal and the scholarly quite well.
Rating: 3.5 (less)
Early in Why Religion? Pagels explains that over the course of her career she has been regularly asked about the role of religion in her own life. Is she, for example, a believer? Or is her interest in religion purely academic? Why Religion? is a focused memoir which seeks to explain how and why Pagels was attracted to the discipline of religious studies, a very unconventional calling for a young woman coming of age in the 1960s (and one in which she encountered a fair bit of male chauvinism). She also addresses some of the ways in which religion and a sort of mysticism have given shape and meaning to a life marked by significant tragedy.
Pagels’s family of origin was repressive and not at all religious. Her mother, who was uncomfortable with both physical closeness and emotional displays, did sometimes take Elaine and her brother to the local Methodist church for Sunday school, but the children’s attendance was not a significant part of their lives. Pagels’s father, a research biologist, had traded his Calvinist upbringing for Darwinism. Passionately anti-religious, he was also given to unpredictable fits of rage, and his daughter learned early on to adhere to a code of silence. Being quiet was the only way to be safe. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that when she was 15, Elaine was attracted to evangelical Christianity. Some high school friends were attending a Billy Graham “crusade” at a Palo Alto stadium. Pagels went along with them. Swept up in the emotional intensity of the experience, she found herself walking towards the altar, moved by Graham’s words to surrender herself to Jesus. She believed that if she were “born again”, she could break out of her family and “enter into the family of a heavenly father . . . [who] loved her unconditionally.”
Pagels’s parents were horrified. “Their reaction,” she writes, “secretly pleased me, confirming that I’d struck out to find a different world.” Hers was an atypical teenage rebellion; for several years during adolescence she attended an evangelical church once or twice weekly. However, when Paul, a young Jewish artist friend (from a different crowd) died tragically in a car crash, church members harshly pronounced that since he had been a Jew, he could only have gone to hell. Pagels was shocked. The exclusiveness and superiority of the group was exposed, and she broke permanently with evangelicalism. Her friend’s sudden death had left her not only grieving, but questioning, too: Where do the dead go, and how do we go on living when death is ever present and inevitable?
Around the same time, Pagels participated in a UCLA seminar on the sociology of mental illness, which also played a role in her decision to pursue religious studies. The course required students to make regular visits to Camarillo, a state psychiatric hospital. There she met a young Mormon who’d had a mental health crisis after he’d begun reading texts along the lines of The Origin of Species. These had filled him with “bad thoughts” that made him question the religion he’d been raised in. Pagels’s interest in the religious impulse and the early days of Christianity was further stimulated. She was particularly curious about the persistence of religion in an age of science.
In her memoir, Pagels considers major events in her own life through the lens of religion. One point that she hammers home is that the old stories, the myths of the Old and New Testaments, do not have to be accepted as the truth to exert an influence on even a fairly liberal person’s mindset. The stories of the Bible are repositories of the cultural codes of a nomadic sheep and goat-herding people, and we may not be aware of the degree to which they still govern modern attitudes. For instance, biblical texts reflect a culture that valued fertility and therefore condemned sexual activity of a non-procreative kind. Such views have echoed across the millennia and still impact modern attitudes to homosexuality.
A discussion of the rage that is part of intense grief leads to a stimulating and fairly accessible discussion of the figure of Satan, who was invented, Pagels says, to deflect blame (about the injustices of life) from God. (The Ancient Greeks, she explains, had no need for Satan, since their prophets never claimed that the gods were unequivocally good. Buddhists, too, don’t wrestle much with “the problem of evil” for different reasons: for them, the most basic premise is that all life is suffering.) Biblical storytellers, however, chose not to blame God for disasters, but a member of his heavenly court instead: “a malicious trickster who throws obstacles into one’s path . . . to lure his targets toward danger and death.” He is a kind of psycho-religious construct, an “invisible antagonist” envisioned for millennia by people “bushwack[ing their way] through rough emotional terrain”. Pagels tells about one of her own powerful dreams featuring Satan—whom she doesn’t believe in—which she had the anxiety-ridden night before her son’s open-heart surgery.
Quite bravely for an academic, Pagels writes about many spiritual experiences she has had during her lifetime. For many years Pagels and her first husband, Heinz, struggled with infertility. When she finally did have a son, Mark, quite late in life, the boy’s time would be cut short by untreatable congenital heart disease. Shortly after Mark’s death at the age of six and the adoption of two young children, Heinz, too, would die. Most of the mystical episodes Pagels recounts are related to these tragic personal losses. Before the deaths of her son and her husband, she had taken for granted that death was the end; her experiences challenged that assumption.
Pagels also touches on a number of other unusual experiences—including a controlled LSD “trip”, being the focus of a fertility ritual, and attending an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting where she recognized that willpower alone could not release her from alcohol’s anesthetic powers. Through these personal stories and others, she shows how religion meets the imaginative needs of humans, serves the significant irrationality within, and receives, contains, channels, and sometimes inflames some of our most intense emotions.
Pagels’s memoir took seven years to write. That doesn’t surprise me. For the most part, it is a rich, stimulating, and thoughtful work, simultaneously personal and scholarly. Unfortunately, in the last chapter, the personal is almost entirely abandoned for the academic. Pagels provides an analysis of The Book of Revelation and looks at the ways it has been used fairly recently in the War on Terror. Some of the epistles of Paul the Apostle and a few of the secret texts found at Nag Hammadi are also examined. The discussion might have been meaningful to me if I had some background knowledge of the material. I don’t, so it was pretty hard-going. I didn’t enjoy reading it, and I felt that Pagels was no longer telling the personal story promised in the subtitle of her memoir. I thought this was an unfortunate way to end a book that had otherwise melded the personal and the scholarly quite well.
Rating: 3.5 (less)
A rare lung disease killed Elaine Pagels’s 6-year-old son, and then about a year later her husband fell to his death while mountain climbing. After that Job-like run of tragedies, no one would have blamed Pagels if she had decided to “curse God and die.”
But she held on. Through rage and terror and despair so overwhelming that it made her faint, she held on.
“I had to look into that darkness,” she says at the opening of her new memoir, “Why Religion?” “I could not continue to live fully while refusing to recall what happened.”
Pagels acknowledges that “no one escapes terrible loss,” but as the country’s most popular historian of religion, she brings a unique reservoir of spiritual wisdom to bear on the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. A MacArthur “genius” and a professor at Princeton University, she has long been one of those rare bilingual academics capable of speaking to lay and scholarly readers. Her foundational work, “The Gnostic Gospels” (1979), revolutionized our concept of early Christianity, won a National Book Award and became a bestseller. Her subsequent books, including “Adam, Eve and the Serpent,” “The Origin of Satan” and “Revelations,” have continued to complicate conventional understandings of Christianity and trace the persistence of ancient attitudes in modern society.
Now, at 75, with disdain for “the facile comfort that churches often dole out like Kleenex,” Pagels leads us through the remarkable events of her life by considering the consolations and the tortures of faith. “Why Religion?” is, as its subtitle states, a personal story, but it’s also a wide-ranging work of cultural reflection and a brisk tour of the most exciting religion scholarship over the past 40 years.
[Elaine Pagels’s ‘Revelations’: Tracing reinterpretations of the Apocalypse]
Given Pagels’s famously ecumenical approach, it’s surprising to hear that her spiritual journey began at a stadium revival preached by Billy Graham. At 15, vaguely curious, she tagged along with some Christian friends to the Cow Palace outside San Francisco. Her family was ferociously secular, but when Graham invited the assembled crowd of 23,000 people to be born again, Pagels found his invitation irresistible. In tears, she stepped forward to be saved. “That day opened up vast spaces of imagination,” she writes. “It changed my life, as the preacher promised it would — although not entirely as he intended.”
That reference to “imagination” — the first of many laced through this memoir — foreshadows her eventual break from orthodox Christianity, but it also suggests her determination to think creatively about sacred texts and the influence they wield. One of the bedrocks of her philosophy is that “what we imagine is enormously consequential.” While others, like her parents, simply dismissed religion as a chaotic system of fairy tales, Pagels has felt impelled to keep asking, “Why is religion still around in the twenty-first century?” It’s a question that has sent her searching around the world and across millennia.
But in her 20s, while studying modern dance with Martha Graham, she was interested in many things. With a childlike sense of awe, she applied to five graduate schools in five fields. She never says so (she’s far too modest), but it’s clear she could have excelled in any of them. Harvard University told her they already had too many women in their religion program — Why waste openings on the flighty sex? — but if she were still interested a year later, she could apply again. Fortunately, she did, and before long she was working on a “top secret” cache of Egyptian documents discovered in 1945 — heretical gospels long rumored but considered lost in the sands of time. “I was amazed,” she writes, “to find that some of these texts spoke words I’d never heard before yet longed to understand.”
“Why Religion?” — a counterpoint of sorts to Huston Smith’s “Why Religion Matters” (2000) — moves freely among the intimate details of Pagels’s life, her marriage to the brilliant physicist Heinz Pagels and the challenges of upending centuries of calcified belief. Along the way, she describes the terrors of raising a terminally ill child, considers the ethics of futile medical interventions and testifies to the temptation and havoc of denial.
She is consistently, sometimes hilariously humble. She mentions that she started reading Greek the way one of us might mention that we started watching “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.” World-famous acquaintances — Jerry Garcia, Andrei Sakharov, Oprah Winfrey — are noted without a whiff of arrogance. Her controversial professional triumphs and critical discoveries are recounted with head-spinning speed. Indeed, Elaine Pagels’s previous books, which are concise to a fault, are not always well served by being so aggressively summarized in this new book. As she speaks of profound spiritual and religious matters, I pined for a more poetic and contemplative style, something along the order of Marilynne Robinson or Christian Wiman.
But when the memoir arrives at the death of her little boy, Pagels’s tone feels bracingly appropriate. “I can tell only the husk of the story.” It felt, she says, “like being burned alive.” Grasping for some explanation, pricked with the cruel sense that illness is the punishment for sin, she began to search for the source of this self-recrimination. Suddenly, the Bible texts seemed stained with dread:
“Working hard to stay steady, or seem to, I could no longer afford to look through a lens that heaps guilt upon grief,” she writes. “Although I wasn’t a traditional believer and didn’t take such stories literally, somehow their premises had shaped my unconscious assumptions. Now I had to divest myself of the illusion that we deserved what had happened; believing it would have crushed us.”
That unspeakable experience confirmed her understanding of the influence of the Bible’s stories. “Whether we believe them or not, they are transmitted in our cultural DNA, powerfully shaping our attitudes toward work, gender, sexuality, and death,” she writes. “I sought to untangle my own responses, while sensing how powerfully our culture shapes them.” One gets the impression that studying herself in the crucible of grief was often the lone activity that kept her sane.
Feeling confused and overwhelmed, she turned to the New Testament, the Gnostic gospels of the Nag Hammadi library and Buddhism. In theory and practice, her life demonstrates the freedom that comes from breaching the boundaries of orthodoxy and accepting insight wherever it might be hiding.
Those include mystical places that most academics would be reluctant to enter. But Pagels is as fearless as she is candid. In the depths of her sorrow, she recalls uncanny coincidences, acts of precognition, ghostly visitations and even a confrontation with a demon one night in the hospital. These episodes are never submitted as factual evidence of supernatural intervention. Instead, Pagels offers her subjective experiences to demonstrate the way our lives are molded by ancient stories, consciously and unconsciously.
Still, the facts are as hard as a gravestone: No saint interceded to fill her son’s lungs. No angel caught her husband as he fell from Pyramid Peak. And no ray of divine inspiration eventually illuminates a greater good in their deaths. But that’s not the end of the story for Pagels. With the twinned spirits of seeker and scholar, she kept studying the Gospels, the letters of Paul, the Gnostic texts and the insights of Buddhism and Trappist monks until she understood that suffering is an essential and common element of human life. Toward the end, she writes, “My own experience of the ‘nightmare’ — the agony of feeling isolated, vulnerable, and terrified — has shown that only awareness of that sense of interconnection restores equanimity, even joy.”
When that ray of happiness finally pierces the gloom in her life, “Why Religion?” feels miraculous and yet entirely believable. (less)
But she held on. Through rage and terror and despair so overwhelming that it made her faint, she held on.
“I had to look into that darkness,” she says at the opening of her new memoir, “Why Religion?” “I could not continue to live fully while refusing to recall what happened.”
Pagels acknowledges that “no one escapes terrible loss,” but as the country’s most popular historian of religion, she brings a unique reservoir of spiritual wisdom to bear on the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. A MacArthur “genius” and a professor at Princeton University, she has long been one of those rare bilingual academics capable of speaking to lay and scholarly readers. Her foundational work, “The Gnostic Gospels” (1979), revolutionized our concept of early Christianity, won a National Book Award and became a bestseller. Her subsequent books, including “Adam, Eve and the Serpent,” “The Origin of Satan” and “Revelations,” have continued to complicate conventional understandings of Christianity and trace the persistence of ancient attitudes in modern society.
Now, at 75, with disdain for “the facile comfort that churches often dole out like Kleenex,” Pagels leads us through the remarkable events of her life by considering the consolations and the tortures of faith. “Why Religion?” is, as its subtitle states, a personal story, but it’s also a wide-ranging work of cultural reflection and a brisk tour of the most exciting religion scholarship over the past 40 years.
[Elaine Pagels’s ‘Revelations’: Tracing reinterpretations of the Apocalypse]
Given Pagels’s famously ecumenical approach, it’s surprising to hear that her spiritual journey began at a stadium revival preached by Billy Graham. At 15, vaguely curious, she tagged along with some Christian friends to the Cow Palace outside San Francisco. Her family was ferociously secular, but when Graham invited the assembled crowd of 23,000 people to be born again, Pagels found his invitation irresistible. In tears, she stepped forward to be saved. “That day opened up vast spaces of imagination,” she writes. “It changed my life, as the preacher promised it would — although not entirely as he intended.”
That reference to “imagination” — the first of many laced through this memoir — foreshadows her eventual break from orthodox Christianity, but it also suggests her determination to think creatively about sacred texts and the influence they wield. One of the bedrocks of her philosophy is that “what we imagine is enormously consequential.” While others, like her parents, simply dismissed religion as a chaotic system of fairy tales, Pagels has felt impelled to keep asking, “Why is religion still around in the twenty-first century?” It’s a question that has sent her searching around the world and across millennia.
But in her 20s, while studying modern dance with Martha Graham, she was interested in many things. With a childlike sense of awe, she applied to five graduate schools in five fields. She never says so (she’s far too modest), but it’s clear she could have excelled in any of them. Harvard University told her they already had too many women in their religion program — Why waste openings on the flighty sex? — but if she were still interested a year later, she could apply again. Fortunately, she did, and before long she was working on a “top secret” cache of Egyptian documents discovered in 1945 — heretical gospels long rumored but considered lost in the sands of time. “I was amazed,” she writes, “to find that some of these texts spoke words I’d never heard before yet longed to understand.”
“Why Religion?” — a counterpoint of sorts to Huston Smith’s “Why Religion Matters” (2000) — moves freely among the intimate details of Pagels’s life, her marriage to the brilliant physicist Heinz Pagels and the challenges of upending centuries of calcified belief. Along the way, she describes the terrors of raising a terminally ill child, considers the ethics of futile medical interventions and testifies to the temptation and havoc of denial.
She is consistently, sometimes hilariously humble. She mentions that she started reading Greek the way one of us might mention that we started watching “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.” World-famous acquaintances — Jerry Garcia, Andrei Sakharov, Oprah Winfrey — are noted without a whiff of arrogance. Her controversial professional triumphs and critical discoveries are recounted with head-spinning speed. Indeed, Elaine Pagels’s previous books, which are concise to a fault, are not always well served by being so aggressively summarized in this new book. As she speaks of profound spiritual and religious matters, I pined for a more poetic and contemplative style, something along the order of Marilynne Robinson or Christian Wiman.
But when the memoir arrives at the death of her little boy, Pagels’s tone feels bracingly appropriate. “I can tell only the husk of the story.” It felt, she says, “like being burned alive.” Grasping for some explanation, pricked with the cruel sense that illness is the punishment for sin, she began to search for the source of this self-recrimination. Suddenly, the Bible texts seemed stained with dread:
“Working hard to stay steady, or seem to, I could no longer afford to look through a lens that heaps guilt upon grief,” she writes. “Although I wasn’t a traditional believer and didn’t take such stories literally, somehow their premises had shaped my unconscious assumptions. Now I had to divest myself of the illusion that we deserved what had happened; believing it would have crushed us.”
That unspeakable experience confirmed her understanding of the influence of the Bible’s stories. “Whether we believe them or not, they are transmitted in our cultural DNA, powerfully shaping our attitudes toward work, gender, sexuality, and death,” she writes. “I sought to untangle my own responses, while sensing how powerfully our culture shapes them.” One gets the impression that studying herself in the crucible of grief was often the lone activity that kept her sane.
Feeling confused and overwhelmed, she turned to the New Testament, the Gnostic gospels of the Nag Hammadi library and Buddhism. In theory and practice, her life demonstrates the freedom that comes from breaching the boundaries of orthodoxy and accepting insight wherever it might be hiding.
Those include mystical places that most academics would be reluctant to enter. But Pagels is as fearless as she is candid. In the depths of her sorrow, she recalls uncanny coincidences, acts of precognition, ghostly visitations and even a confrontation with a demon one night in the hospital. These episodes are never submitted as factual evidence of supernatural intervention. Instead, Pagels offers her subjective experiences to demonstrate the way our lives are molded by ancient stories, consciously and unconsciously.
Still, the facts are as hard as a gravestone: No saint interceded to fill her son’s lungs. No angel caught her husband as he fell from Pyramid Peak. And no ray of divine inspiration eventually illuminates a greater good in their deaths. But that’s not the end of the story for Pagels. With the twinned spirits of seeker and scholar, she kept studying the Gospels, the letters of Paul, the Gnostic texts and the insights of Buddhism and Trappist monks until she understood that suffering is an essential and common element of human life. Toward the end, she writes, “My own experience of the ‘nightmare’ — the agony of feeling isolated, vulnerable, and terrified — has shown that only awareness of that sense of interconnection restores equanimity, even joy.”
When that ray of happiness finally pierces the gloom in her life, “Why Religion?” feels miraculous and yet entirely believable. (less)
I've been reading Elaine Pagels since 1990, the summer after my sophomore year in college. I remember stealing little reading breaks while canvassing for Greenpeace in Kansas City. I'd sit on the grass and read 10-20 pages of The Gnostic Gospels, and feminist theologian Carol P. Christ's Laughter of Aphrodite, and Catherine Keller's From a Broken Web. A few weeks later I'd begin Adam, Eve, and the Serpent - I was finding such intellectual excitement in these books! At school, I recalled hearing that Pagels's husband, Heinz, a renowned physicist, had died in a tragic hiking accident. I wondered about her story.
This is sort of two types of memoir in one: Pagels describes her family, youth (she hung out with with Jerry Garcia in the Bay Area as a teenager), early attraction to evangelical Christianity, academic career, marriage, and she explains what inspired her to research each of her books and then short synopses of the book topics - but readers most interested in the scholarship don't really need to read this (read the books instead). The other memoir here is of her heartbreaking, life-shattering losses, and this is what I can't forget. Her story of her grief is as truthful and sad to read as anything by Joan Didion or Isabel Allende (in Paula). I cried for her as I read.
I was surprised to learn that Pagels is herself quite spiritual - not religious - but spiritual and rather mystically-minded. When I was majoring in religious studies my peers and I, and most of our teachers, tended to assume that the academic study of religion eventually made us LESS religious (if we began that way at all) and less capable of spiritual experience. (This is a whole topic of its own that I don't want to write about today.) But Pagels's question of "why religion?" is not just a book title for her - she seems to be continually searching in some way for meaning, and like any religious scholar she is fascinated why human beings have turned to religion for answers. Unlike the New Atheists she knows that to understand human culture we must study religious history as well as religious experience. (less)
This is sort of two types of memoir in one: Pagels describes her family, youth (she hung out with with Jerry Garcia in the Bay Area as a teenager), early attraction to evangelical Christianity, academic career, marriage, and she explains what inspired her to research each of her books and then short synopses of the book topics - but readers most interested in the scholarship don't really need to read this (read the books instead). The other memoir here is of her heartbreaking, life-shattering losses, and this is what I can't forget. Her story of her grief is as truthful and sad to read as anything by Joan Didion or Isabel Allende (in Paula). I cried for her as I read.
I was surprised to learn that Pagels is herself quite spiritual - not religious - but spiritual and rather mystically-minded. When I was majoring in religious studies my peers and I, and most of our teachers, tended to assume that the academic study of religion eventually made us LESS religious (if we began that way at all) and less capable of spiritual experience. (This is a whole topic of its own that I don't want to write about today.) But Pagels's question of "why religion?" is not just a book title for her - she seems to be continually searching in some way for meaning, and like any religious scholar she is fascinated why human beings have turned to religion for answers. Unlike the New Atheists she knows that to understand human culture we must study religious history as well as religious experience. (less)
Sep 16, 2018Rebecca rated it really liked it · review of another edition
(3.5) Pagels is a religion scholar best known for her work on the Gnostic Gospels of the Nag Hammadi library, such as the Gospel of Thomas. She grew up in a nonreligious Californian household, but joined a friend’s youth group and answered the altar call at a Billy Graham rally. Although she didn’t stick with Evangelicalism, Christianity continued to speak to her, and spirituality provided a measure of comfort in the hard times ahead: infertility, followed by the illness and death of her long-awaited son, Mark, who underwent heart surgery as an infant and died of pulmonary hypertension at age six. Little more than a year later, Pagels’s physicist husband Heinz fell to his death on a hike in Colorado.
The author doesn’t gloss over the horror of these events, the alternating helplessness and guilt she felt, or the challenge of continuing in her normal life as a Princeton University academic and mother (to their two adopted children) in their wake. Nor does she suggest that religion was what got her through. It’s more that she sees religion’s endurance as proof that it plays a necessary role in human life. She also had experiences that she couldn’t explain away as coincidences, including dreams, moments of consolation, a vision of the connectedness of life while on LSD, and the continued presence of her husband and son after their deaths. These are more successfully conveyed than in Barbara Ehrenreich’s Living with a Wild God.
Along with her continued scholarship on the Gnostic Gospels, Pagels has published works on the Adam and Eve myth, the origin of the concept of Satan, and the book of Revelation. There is more about her academic output than I expected from a memoir, and less than I expected about what happened in the 30 years since these major bereavements. I wanted to know more about how she rebuilt her life, but the book sticks doggedly to loss and its immediate aftermath, and focuses on Pagels’s intellectual development, sometimes to the exclusion of her emotional journey. It’s comparable to Claire Tomalin’s A Life of My Own in that respect. Potential readers should keep the title in mind and ponder whether they’re interested enough in the question to read a whole book about it – it really is all about religion. (Releases November 6th.) (less)
The author doesn’t gloss over the horror of these events, the alternating helplessness and guilt she felt, or the challenge of continuing in her normal life as a Princeton University academic and mother (to their two adopted children) in their wake. Nor does she suggest that religion was what got her through. It’s more that she sees religion’s endurance as proof that it plays a necessary role in human life. She also had experiences that she couldn’t explain away as coincidences, including dreams, moments of consolation, a vision of the connectedness of life while on LSD, and the continued presence of her husband and son after their deaths. These are more successfully conveyed than in Barbara Ehrenreich’s Living with a Wild God.
Along with her continued scholarship on the Gnostic Gospels, Pagels has published works on the Adam and Eve myth, the origin of the concept of Satan, and the book of Revelation. There is more about her academic output than I expected from a memoir, and less than I expected about what happened in the 30 years since these major bereavements. I wanted to know more about how she rebuilt her life, but the book sticks doggedly to loss and its immediate aftermath, and focuses on Pagels’s intellectual development, sometimes to the exclusion of her emotional journey. It’s comparable to Claire Tomalin’s A Life of My Own in that respect. Potential readers should keep the title in mind and ponder whether they’re interested enough in the question to read a whole book about it – it really is all about religion. (Releases November 6th.) (less)
Elaine Pagels is clearly more comfortable addressing her chosen field of study than she is writing about her own personal struggles. While she outlines the horrific tragedies of losing her young son and husband within a year of each other, she never does a deep dive into her agony and any ramifications it may have had on her own religious experience or faith.
To say it's "A Personal Story" is only partially true. She gives us the physical details but, unlike most successful memoir, there's too much "telling" and too little "showing." We understand the events and can imagine their devastation, but that's all we can do is imagine because Pagels keeps the reader at arm's length. We are not drawn into her raw emotion on a deep, personal level. We are moved because of our own empathy and not because she strips herself bare and invites us in.
We learn nothing of the childhoods of the two children she adopted and suddenly we're at the end of the book with a lengthy, scholarly discussion on reframing the gospel narrative. The question of Why Religion? never quite dovetails with her own journey.
She writes: "My own experience of the 'nightmare'--the agony of feeling isolated, vulnerable, and terrified--has has shown that only awareness of that sense of interconnection restores, equanimity, even joy."
So this is what Pagels tells us, but she never shows us what that isolation, vulnerability, terror and joy look or feel like. I think fans of Pagels earlier work (The Gnostic Gospels, for example) will love this book. Others, who are looking for a memoir along the lines of Mary Karr's Lit, Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle or, more recently Tara Westover's Educated and Julie Barton's Dog Medicine will be sorely disappointed. (less)
To say it's "A Personal Story" is only partially true. She gives us the physical details but, unlike most successful memoir, there's too much "telling" and too little "showing." We understand the events and can imagine their devastation, but that's all we can do is imagine because Pagels keeps the reader at arm's length. We are not drawn into her raw emotion on a deep, personal level. We are moved because of our own empathy and not because she strips herself bare and invites us in.
We learn nothing of the childhoods of the two children she adopted and suddenly we're at the end of the book with a lengthy, scholarly discussion on reframing the gospel narrative. The question of Why Religion? never quite dovetails with her own journey.
She writes: "My own experience of the 'nightmare'--the agony of feeling isolated, vulnerable, and terrified--has has shown that only awareness of that sense of interconnection restores, equanimity, even joy."
So this is what Pagels tells us, but she never shows us what that isolation, vulnerability, terror and joy look or feel like. I think fans of Pagels earlier work (The Gnostic Gospels, for example) will love this book. Others, who are looking for a memoir along the lines of Mary Karr's Lit, Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle or, more recently Tara Westover's Educated and Julie Barton's Dog Medicine will be sorely disappointed. (less)
