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"Raposa has fulfilled the religious thinker's
dream: to compose an erudite creative study that is also
a spiritual gem."
--Robert C. Neville, Boston University
Boredom matters, writes Michael Raposa, because it
represents a threat to spiritual life. Boredom can undermine
prayer and meditation and signal the failure of religious
imagination. If you engage it seriously, however, it can
also be the starting point for philosophical reflection and
spiritual insight. It can serve as a prelude to the
discovery or rebirth of religious meaning.
Boredom, then, is a paradox, surprisingly complex and
ambiguous. Being bored with someone or something can
represent a trivial matter--being bored with one's clothes
or a magazine article--or a matter of significant
consequence--being bored with one's marriage or the music
one loves to play. Boredom can signify a moral failure or
the presence of virtue. Appreciating the value of boredom
does not require that one welcome, much less celebrate, its
occurrence. Raposa simply invites us to pay attention to
boredom's many possible lessons.
The principal methods Raposa employs are philosophical.
Drawing on Peirce's idea that all experience is interpreted
experience, Raposa sees boredom as a failure of
interpretation, an inability to read signs in life as
religiously meaningful. The Gospel of Mark depicts a
prayerful and passionate Jesus juxtaposed with his drowsy
disciples in Gethsemane. Their failure to discern what is
happening in their midst, Raposa suggests, is a powerful
example of what medieval Christian theologians called
acedia, their term for boredom with the rituals of spiritual
devotion. But these descriptions of acedia bear a striking
resemblance to mystical accounts of the "dark night," a
terrifying but necessary stage in the mystic's spiritual
journey.
Drawing on this notion and others from eastern and
western religious traditions, Raposa asks us to see boredom
playing an ambivalent role in spiritual life, often serving
as a metaphorical midwife for the birth of religious
knowledge. His subject, he admits, seems tongue-in-cheek at
first, but a stunning depth is quickly revealed. His lucid,
witty, and intelligent discussion offers a path to the kind
of meaning that is a fundamental desideratum in human
experience.
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"Raposa has fulfilled the religious thinker's dream: to
compose an erudite creative study that is also a spiritual
gem. Building on his previous studies of Peirce's semiotics
and theory of religious experience, this book explores
'boredom' as a key religious semiotic activity, and in so
doing Peirce's philosophic contribution is enriched. But it
does so through enlightening our own experience of boredom
with the classic insights of the last thousand years of
Christianity and, to a lesser extent, Buddhism. I commend
this book to those who care nothing about Peirce, for it is
our best analysis so far of boredom or acedia. To those who
do, I say that this is a genuine extension of Peirce's
thought."
--Robert C. Neville, Dean, Boston
University
"Michael Raposa has analyzed a topic too seldom studied
in the Anglophone world. His book is learned, subtle, and
deeply thought-provoking. I highly recommend it."
--David Tracy, University of Chicago Divinity
School
"Lyrically written and judiciously composed, informed by
esoteric sources and reflections but arranged so that a
general, intellectual readership can enter and be drawn in,
Boredom and the Religious Imagination is anything but
boring. It's the book William James might write if this were
his subject: offering the reader a way to reexperience
everyday phenomena in new and more subtle ways. Rather than
simply talking about boredom, this book performs a way out
of it. Raposa turns his religious sensitivity and human
concern back through the ages to report on the ways noted
thinkers of old have lost their drive to create and do, and
he leaves us their diagnoses along with remedies that may
have lasting value for us: including physical work,
spiritual exercises, and ways to practice and maintain
attention."
--Peter Ochs, University of Virginia
"Attention and discernment are central to religious
practice in many traditions. Raposa shows that attention to
boredom and its causes can illumine religious experience and
practice. Ritual, meditation, and the cultivation of mental
states and habits have been neglected by philosophers of
religion because of the Protestant origins of the
discipline. Using insights from Peirce, Heidegger, and
others, Raposa extends the scope of current analyses of
religious experience. This is a very interesting book."
Wayne Lee Proudfoot, Columbia University
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