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Zusammenfassung von Why Religion?

Name: Why Religion?
Rating: 3.9 (40 reviews)
Author: Elaine Pagels

Elaine Pagels

A Personal Story

3.9 (40 Bewertungen)

28 Min.

Kurz zusammengefasst

'Why Religion?' by Elaine Pagels is an exploration of how religion can provide a sense of meaning and purpose in the face of suffering and loss. It delves into the history of religion and its evolution over time, arguing that we can learn from different religious traditions to find common ground.

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Why Religion?
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What’s in it for me? Learn about life and loss from one of America’s foremost religious scholars.

Why religion?

It’s a question the author gets all the time. After all, she’s dedicated her life to religious study, writing multiple groundbreaking books on subjects ranging from the controversial “gnostic gospels” to the origins of Satan. And yet she’s not what she terms a “Bible-believing Christian.” Indeed, she doesn’t subscribe to any single religious creed.

So why religion?

These blinks offer a roundabout answer to that question. After embarking on a career as a religious scholar, the author suffered a series of personal losses that threatened to shatter her life. But instead of succumbing to despair and depression, she persevered. During the most difficult years of her life, her academic work was guided by the questions forced on her by loss. And how she coped with that loss was, to a degree, shaped by the stories of deprivation and survival that abound in religious texts.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how one woman survived the seemingly unsurvivable;
why grief often turns into guilt; and
that a happy ending isn’t always a comfort.

Religion offered the author a means of expressing feelings that her family suppressed.

When the author, Elaine Pagels, was 15 years old, she was offered a new life. Not that this offer was extended to her alone. Indeed, it happened in a stadium in San Francisco, where over 18,000 people had gathered to hear the evangelical preacher Billy Graham deliver one of his sermons.

Unlike most of the attendees, Elaine was there out of mere curiosity. She’d been invited along by a friend, whose father drove them from their hometown of Palo Alto, California, to listen to this charismatic Christian. She had no idea what to expect.

But despite her initial ambivalence, Elaine was touched and thrilled by Graham’s invitation to religious rebirth. In the end, she came forward, along with thousands of others who’d decided to accept Jesus into their hearts. The crowd cheered, and the choir sang. Now they were “born again.”

Elaine found it impossible to resist this invitation for one reason: her family.

She’d been brought up in a household that enshrined rationalism and suppressed emotion. Her father, a research biologist raised Presbyterian, became a staunch evolutionist after reading Darwin in college, dismissing Biblical stories as a bundle of nonsense that could appeal only to people unfamiliar with science.

But beneath her father’s calm, rational exterior, rage simmered, always ready to erupt. Elaine’s mother endured his outbursts in silence and was extremely sparing with expressions of maternal tenderness; to petitions from her daughter for motherly understanding, she’d invariably reply, “You shouldn’t feel that way.”

Neither parent encouraged physical closeness or expressions of emotion.

So, for Elaine, Billy Graham’s words were an invitation to a new way of living. For her, becoming a born-again Christian meant freeing herself of her earthly father, who knew little about her, and adopting a heavenly father, who knew everything about her and loved her unconditionally.

To the 15-year-old Elaine, the right decision seemed clear enough, and she accepted Jesus into her heart.

Unsurprisingly, her parents were appalled when they found out – her father because he hated religion in general, and her mother because Elaine’s choice had upset her father. These reactions frightened Elaine, but also pleased her, because they seemed to confirm that she’d discovered a new, better world, a place where emotions could be expressed freely and love reigned supreme.

What she couldn’t have known then is how little time she’d spend there.

Elaine abandoned Christianity after the death of her friend Paul.

Roughly a year and a half after Elaine accepted Jesus into her heart, she received some terrible news. Her close friend Paul was dead, killed in a car accident the night before.

In the year leading up to this tragedy, Elaine had begun spending time with a group of artistic individuals. Paul was one of them. Together, they encouraged each other’s artistic pursuits and interests. All of them were actors at the local community theater, and while driving around together at night, they would sing songs and recite poetry.

In graduate school, Elaine studied the gnostic gospels.

In 1942, near the Egyptian village of Nag Hammadi, an Arab farmer dug up a man-sized jar that contained an ancient collection of books. These books eventually found their way to Cairo, where a French scholar, Jean Doresse, stumbled upon them. He was astonished when he deciphered the first words: “These are the secret words of the living Jesus, and the twin, Judas Thomas, wrote them down.”

The Nag Hammadi library, as it came to be known, would end up shaping Elaine’s entire life, both as a scholar and as a person.

Elaine’s son Mark was born with a life-threatening condition.

Elaine was surprised, and not a little embarrassed, when her friend, the artist Mary Beth Edelson, proposed a ritual. Edelson reassured the doubtful Elaine that, though she’d only done it once, it had worked.

A ritual for what?

Uncanny events surrounded Mark’s surgery.

On the night before Mark’s operation, Elaine refused to leave his room. With the surgery scheduled for early the next morning, Mark had already been admitted to the hospital, and Elaine defied a nurse’s orders by spending the night on the floor, next to his bed. But she got little rest.

After a few anxious, sleepless hours, Elaine suddenly sensed that she wasn’t alone. It seemed to her that a group of women, holding hands and seated in a circle, was there with her. In particular, she recognized a cherished colleague who’d retired from Duke University the year before. The group soon vanished, but Elaine felt comforted.

Mark developed a rare lung disease and died at the age of six.

No cure. No treatment. Fatal in all cases.

Less than a year had passed since Mark’s open-heart surgery, and Elaine had taken him to the hospital for one of his regular checkups. Now she listened in disbelief as the doctors told her what they themselves could hardly believe: tests had revealed that Mark had pulmonary hypertension, a rare and terminal lung disease.

Elaine was racked by guilt after Mark’s death, and she realized the Bible had conditioned her to feel that way.

After Mark’s death, Elaine wasn’t only cast into the deepest despair; she was also racked by guilt. It had been her job, as a mother, to protect his life, to keep him out of harm’s way – and she’d been unable to do those things. Had she therefore failed as a parent?

Such questions weighed on her unbearably. Grasping for answers and hoping for relief, she recalled stories from the Bible, noting that grief is often entangled with guilt in such tales.

Just as Heinz and Elaine were beginning to move forward, Heinz fell to his death.

Elaine had heard that parents who lose a child often separate. But this didn’t happen to her and Heinz. In fact, they grew even closer, welded together by the strength of their love and the strain of their loss.

What’s more, they were still parents. About a year before Mark’s death, after a miscarriage, Elaine and Heinz decided to adopt a baby girl, Sarah. And about a year after his death, they adopted a baby boy, David. Though still grieving Mark’s death – for Elaine, that grief would never really fade – it began to feel possible to move forward with life.

After Heinz’s death, Elaine found some comfort in the Gospel of Mark.

Shortly after Heinz’s death, Elaine sat silently in a chapel. In that deep quiet, she felt that she could talk to Heinz. And so she asked him how he felt about what had happened. Though she hadn’t expected a reply, an inner voice immediately responded.

Unexpectedly, the answer she heard was, “This is fine with me.” “How,” Elaine asked, internally, “could it be fine?” Heinz had abandoned her and their two babies. Was that fine?

Decades later, Elaine received an honorary degree from Harvard and felt that her heart had healed.

Nearly 25 years after Heinz’s death, Elaine received an honorary degree from Harvard. At first, she didn’t want to attend the ceremony. Heinz had been at her first Harvard graduation; how could she bear to go to the second one without him? In the end, however, accompanied by Sarah and David, now both in their mid-twenties, she did go.

And sitting in that crowd of graduates, she realized that she’d graduated in a deeper sense. She’d passed life’s true test: surviving despite unbearable loss.

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Worum geht es in Why Religion??

Why Religion? (2018) is a personal answer to the question its title poses. Rather than explaining why anyone should adopt or eschew religious belief, Elaine Pagels’s moving memoir shows how her life experiences led her to the study of religion, and how that study has helped her cope with the difficult events of her life.

Bestes Zitat aus Why Religion?

I longed to turn to my mother for comfort, but she didnt have enough for herself, let alone any to share.

—Elaine Pagels

Wer Why Religion? lesen sollte

Atheists who were once religious
Students wondering how study can affect life
Bereaved individuals trying to cope with loss

Über den Autor

Elaine Pagels is a renowned religious scholar. Currently a professor at Princeton, she received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981 and was awarded a National Humanities Medal in 2016. Her previous books include The Gnostic Gospels, The Origin of Satan and Adam, Eve, and the Serpent.

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