The political nature of all devotional practice

Introduction post 3 of 10

Good morning! Today’s post from the book series’s introduction explores why a political devotion should be more palimpsest than synthesis, more journey than arrival at any fixed view. This “identifying with and speaking with other voices” — the nature of all devotional practice — is inherently political. To access the other posts that make up the introduction to Political Devotions, click its subtitle’s post number: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10.

The six or seven years over which I wrote these devotional entries served this book’s particular cross between political and devotional thought. The years give the book not so much a synthetic as a palimpsestic quality. Any of the book’s more recent devotions represents a new attempt through which a reader can find traces of the book’s earlier devotions. I haven’t tried to reconcile the devotions. Put another way, each devotion I wrote shares not only my then-latest sources’ views but also, quite often, their underlying assumptions, most of which I didn’t discover and question until months or years later. When I began to select and arrange the devotions, I chose not to modify those assumptions. When, for instance, I decided to include a devotion celebrating John Locke’s right of revolution and another devotion challenging the philosophical cover Locke provided for those appropriating Native American lands, I didn’t think it was my place to reconcile the two devotions. If I had tried to eliminate my self-contradictions, I would have ended up with a treatise, something I have few credentials to write and, since I am not part of my readers’ local political communities, no right to write.

Besides, a synthesis suggests an arrival, but a palimpsest suggests a journey. By celebrating each place I’ve been, I hope to befriend readers who, though they’ve come from different places—perhaps places I’m destined to visit—find themselves now in some of the same places I was then.

But the devotional entries could constitute less a palimpsest and more a dialectical notebook, a writer’s tool for making meaning.¹ Each devotion silently responds to the other devotions. This dialectic makes even my most emphatic devotional entries provisional. I hope these silent spaces between the book’s devotions demonstrate something like what John Keats called “negative capability”—the capacity to discover meaning, rigged out with only a working thesis, while sailing the high seas of doubt.² Our toleration of ambiguity, as composition theorist Ann E. Berthoff reminds us, is a democratic practice.³

Devotions are inherently pluralistic, even democratic. Devotional reading, like literature, involves “identifying with and speaking with other voices,” Constance M Furey, a professor of religion, points out. The connections with others that devotional reading encourage move against dogmatic and authoritative (and so authoritarian) readings of a devotional text. This essential, quasi-public aspect of all devotional reading leads Furey to conclude that “. . . devotion is always political, even if never only political.”⁴ One may understand the term “political devotional,” then, as a pleonasm because of the political nature of all devotional practice. No one reads devotionally as a soloist; all devotional readings harmonize with those distant from us in place and in time. This book’s extension of devotions into the public sphere, then, makes explicit what we find implicit in all devotional practice.

My devotional entries’ multiplicity of assumptions moves toward, but doesn’t arrive at, a literal multiplicity of voices. My multiplicity of assumptions models the kind of internal multiplicity one finds in herself by, after many years, reviewing her devotional or reading journal.⁵ Devotional reading and its pluralistic self-understanding encourage us to step across our homes’ thresholds and help us to discover comfort and joy in public dialogue and action. I hope, then, that this book series, taken as a whole, suggests a kind of polity, one in which a group of citizens—like this league of fifty-two devotional series—can meet and read between one another’s lines, informing and challenging one another to act.⁶

I hope also that many citizens will warm to some of my sources, find other sources, and perhaps write their own devotional entries so that if they were ever bound together—a book by a publisher or a polity by a covenant—they would help create a future.

This is the third of ten posts that make up the book series’s introduction. Click here to read the next introductory post.

Photo by Matias North on Unsplash

1. A dialectical notebook entry responds to a previous entry, encouraging the interpretation of previous interpretations. Ann E. Berthoff, who first developed the dialectical notebook, describes the representation of one’s inner dialogue over time as a dialectic. Berthoff, “Recognition, Representation, and Revision,” 33.

2. Berthoff, 33.

3. Berthoff, “Democratic Practice, Pragmatic Vistas,” 134.

4. Furey, “Vivifying Poetry,” 78-79. Italics in the original.

5. In this sense, perhaps all personal journals, after a few months or years, amount to dialectical notebooks.

6. This “polity” of devotional entries makes explicit what literary critic I. A. Richards finds implicit in the act of reading a book. To Richards, a book does not exist principally to convey information or meaning. Instead, “a book is a machine to think with” because all meaning is mediated. Richards, “Richards Interviewed,” 11-12; Berthoff, “Richards and the Audit,” 74. Richards’s triadic understanding of reading suggests that readers create meaning in the process of interpreting what they read. Berthoff, 74.