Spiritual Truth Research Articles

Leo Tolstoy the spiritual educator

This paper considers the often overlooked religious and educational works of the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910). After outlining Tolstoy's life, religious and educational views, it is argued that Tolstoy has much to offer spiritual educators today. In particular, it suggests Tolstoy's insistence on the absolute and eternal nature of spiritual and moral truths, coupled with a free and heuristic pedagogy, are key ingredients of an authentic spiritual education.

Of Men and Mice: C. S. Lewis on Male-Female Interactions

Questions of gender are frequently bracketed when discussing C. S. Lewis's life and works. Perhaps most evade the issue because the distinctions are so sharply drawn—either Lewis is a misogynist or he is a product of his time. The issue of women in Lewis's works, however, should not be ignored. In this article, I focus both on Lewis's portrayals of the emancipated woman in his nonfiction writing (particularly ‘Modern Man and His Categories of Thought’, The Four Loves, and ‘Priestesses in the Church?’) and in his fictional writing (particularly ‘The Shoddy Lands’, That Hideous Strength, and Till We Have Faces). I argue that Lewis's frequently problematic portrayals of women in his fiction grow not only out of his theoretical dislike of the emancipated woman but also out of his theological understanding of gender. Building on the biblical image of the relationship of God and humanity as one of a marriage, Lewis casts his fictional couples as representations of the relationship between the masculine divine and the feminine mortal. While focusing on communicating spiritual truths, however, Lewis loses sight of social realities. In his final novel, Till We Have Faces, Lewis is able to get at the theological level by moving away from social context into the realm of myth.

Does Truth Exist? Insights From Applied Linguistics for the Rationalism/Postmodern Debate

The question of whether or not truth exists is at the center of the rationalism versus postmodern debate. Noting the difficulty of defining truth, the author uses the principles of linguistics to show that semantic skewing has resulted in the concept of truth being encoded as a noun, while it is really an attribute (true). The introduction of a metaphor—the “hourglass of truth”—enables the author to distinguish the realms of natural truth and spiritual truth. For Christians, these worlds are different, but connected by means of the declaration that Jesus is divine. The author uses this metaphor to illustrate that the conflict between adherents of different faiths is not based on disagreements over natural truth, but rather over different concepts of spiritual truth, and that, therefore, we cannot expect to resolve the differences using the principles of natural truth (such as logic). Finally, the author applies the concept of the hourglass to the rationalism-postmodern debate, and shows that it is possible for Christians from different sides of this debate (i.e., with different concepts of natural truth) to share a united concept of spiritual truth, even while each affirms the divinity of Christ.

The Paradox of Spiritual Matter and the Spiritual Matter of Paradox in Seamus Heaney and Robert Boyle

By examining the convergences between Seamus Heaney's oeuvre and Robert Boyle's 1669 treatise ‘The History of Fluidity and Firmness’, this essay shows that the Irish Poet Laureate has more in common with his famous seventeenth-century countryman than he does with the postmodernists with whom so many of today's critics wish to associate him. Most postmodernists—handicapped as they are by strictly materialist philosophies—flounder in the apparent contradictions lying at the surface of natural phenomena, and thereby conclude that meaning is unknowable or nonexistent. Heaney, on the other hand, investigates natural processes like erosion and petrification, dissolution and crystallization, with the keen eye, open mind, and Biblically enlightened spirit of the natural philosophers. Consequently, like Boyle, Heaney pushes deeper into the mysteries of nature and discovers spiritual truth in material paradox.

Modern Exempla: Crop Circle Tales in the New Age Era

One of the New Age phenomena is the cult that believes that crop circles (mainly) have an extraterrestrial or supernatural origin, and that the formations contain messages from beyond or above. One of the effective tools for initiation, persuasion and conversion is storytelling. More than contemporary legends the stories about crop circles look like traditional exempla, illustrating a spiritual (and most of the time positive) truth. The narratives can provide building blocks for an entire cosmology, ranging from human creation by godlike aliens to apocalyptic times in the near future. The accumulation of stories can determine people's perception and behaviour in daily life, and eventually lead to the belief in secret conspiracies to keep the general public ignorant about the truth.

Response to James K. A. Smith, Lois Malcolm and Gerard Loughlin

AbstractThis article possesses no continuous argument of its own, but consists in a series of replies to observations made by J. K. A. Smith, L. Malcolm, and G. Loughlin regarding my book The Beauty of the Infinite. Thus it addresses a great number of topics, often only tenuously related to one another, and in an order dictated by the pieces to which it responds. Certain themes, however, can be identified as dominant: the capacity of natural reason to discover spiritual truths, the proper rhetoric of evangelical persuasion, the ontological premises that inform (and perhaps justify) that rhetoric, the place of aesthetics within theological reasoning, the role of divine law within Christian ethics, the need for Christian rhetoric adequately to encompass the reality of suffering and loss, the Christian metaphysics of being, the nature of Christian hope, the value of ‘tragic theology’ and the Christian metaphysics of evil.

Home Meets Heimat

Home Meets Heimat

This grand & magnificent place: the wilderness heritage of the White Mountains

This is the complex story of New Hampshire's White Mountains, from the range's days as the majestic homeland of the Abenaki, first seen by English colonists four centuries ago, to its unassailable standing today as one of America's most beloved national forests, comprising 112,000 acres of protected wilderness. Christopher Johnson, an avid hiker intimately familiar with the White Mountains, achieves two important objectives in This Grand and Magnificent Place. He lovingly explores their rich ecological, political, economic, and cultural history and, more broadly, opens a panoramic window on the evolution of American attitudes and policies toward over time. Two competing visions of historically have coexisted in America: the instrumental, in which the is seen as a conglomeration of resources to be exploited for the benefit of entrepreneurs and consumers, and the aesthetic, in which the is appreciated for its natural beauty, the personal growth that it stimulates, the national pride it engenders, and the spiritual truth it offers. Johnson never loses sight of this fundamental dichotomy as he shares marvelous true tales of the first intrepid European settlers whotamed the Whites. He discusses Ethan Allen Crawford, the area's first innkeeper, the emergence of tourism, and America's love affair with the wilderness experience; and he explores tales of Thomas Cole, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and other renowned artists who immortalized these mountains in their works. He considers the coming of grand resort hotels-and the contemporaneous revival-in the late nineteenth century and the passing of the landmark 1911 Weeks Act, which was instrumental in preserving American in the face of development and threats of irreparable environmental damage. Johnson traces the perilous course of the twentieth-century movement toward preservation, which has successfully conserved the Whites, an extraordinary American treasure, for future generations. Finally, he poses thoughtful and essential questions regarding the destiny of this American wilderness, exploring the balance between maintaining its usefulness while conserving its glorious heritage. This skillful and accessible history will rivet general readers, students, and professionals interested in the history, culture, and politics of the White Mountains, as well as those fascinated by environmental history and protection everywhere.

“And the Word was Made Flesh”: Divining the Female Body in Nineteenth-Century American and Catholic Culture

AbstractThis article sheds light on the complex interactions among knowledge, power, and the body in nineteenth-century American and Catholic culture through examining a series of “miracle cures” of Catholic women that took place in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., between 1824 and 1838. It analyzes the gender and power dynamics of the cures and of the stories members of the Catholic hierarchy told about the cures, situating both within the religious and cultural context of nineteenth-century North America. The bodies of cured women were scrutinized and “read” very carefully by Catholic men as a means of access to divine knowledge, and the article explores the cultural and theological factors that legitimated this process. Finally, the reading of women's bodies took place in the context of Protestant anti-Catholicism, and I argue that, given the sympolic importance of female bodies at the time—pure, healthy female bodies “incarnated” spiritual power and truth—stories of miracle cures were a means of validating Catholicism in the face of attacks against it.

John Henry Newman’s Vision of the Catholic Medical School

Though many Newman scholars are aware of the success of the Medical School of the Catholic University in Dublin, less attention has been paid to his philosophical view which undergirded the medical school. This essay examines Newman’s developing “idea” of a university in light of the Medical School, which was not simply to train practitioners of medicine, but also to educate physicians in an awareness of the spiritual truths and values at stake in the practice of medicine and so serve to integrate the body, mind, and heart as well as to provide links between religion and science.

The Oneness of Objective Reality and Spiritual Truth

Spirituality and science discover that they are both motivated by the desire to know, and realize that mere sensory perception does not guarantee the truth of knowledge. The concepts that emerge in the new sciences show a striking similarity to the ideas that come to the mind of spiritually intuitive persons, giving rise to the hope that with the recognition that at the bottom objective reality and spiritual truth are one, the historic opposition (or feud) between science and spirituality can at last be overcome.

Issues related to spirituality and the search for truth in sectarian institutions of higher education

AbstractThe foundational spiritual truths of sectarian institutions, often criticized by the secular academy, may provide a basis for a vigorous search for truth in the transition from modern to postmodern society.

Consuming visions: mass culture and the Lourdes shrine

Plastic Madonnas, packaged holy tours, and biblical theme parks can arouse discomfort, laughter, and even revulsion in religious believers and nonbelievers alike. Scholars, too, often see the intermingling of religion and commerce as a corruption of true spirituality. Suzanne K. Kaufman challenges these assumptions in her examination of the Lourdes pilgrimage in late nineteenth-century France.Consuming Visions offers new ways to interpret material forms of worship, female piety, and modern commercial culture. Kaufman argues that the melding of traditional pilgrimage activities with a newly developing mass culture produced fresh expressions of popular faith. For the devout women of humble origins who flocked to the shrine, this intensely exciting commercialized worship offered unprecedented opportunities to connect with the sacred and express their faith in God.New devotional activities at Lourdes transformed the act of pilgrimage: the train became a moving chapel, and popular entertainments such as wax museums offered vivid recreations of visionary events. Using the press and the strategies of a new advertising industry to bring a mass audience to Lourdes, Church authorities remade centuries-old practices of miraculous healing into a modern public spectacle. These innovations made Lourdes one of the most visited holy sites in Catholic Europe.Yet mass pilgrimage also created problems. The development of Lourdes, while making religious practice more democratically accessible, touched off fierce conflicts over the rituals and entertainments provided by the shrine. These conflicts between believers and secularists played out in press scandals across the European continent. By taking the shrine seriously as a site of mass culture, Kaufman not only breaks down the opposition between sacred and profane but also deepens our understanding of commercialized religion as a fundamental feature of modernity itself.

Converting California: Indians and Franciscans in the Missions (review)

Converting California: Indians and Franciscans in Missions. By James A. Sandos. (New Haven: Yale University Press. 2004. Pp. xix, 251. $35.00.) James A. Sandos set a formidable task for himself in writing this new treatment of a well-furrowed subject, Franciscan missionization in Alta California, 1769-1830's. His stated intent is to reconcile two prevailing but opposing interpretative views of mission era: the pro- and anti-Franciscan schools of thought. The former been dubbed Christophilic Triumphalist by David J. Weber: 'self-sacrificing priests of Christian God selflessly devoted . . . to bringing spiritual truth and uplift to benighted savages.'The latter school, which has emerged over past fifty years, Sandos labels Christophobic (p. xiii). To complete his new synthetic approach, author introduces a new interpretative element, theohistory, a combination of theology and history as a complement to accepted ethnohistory (p. xvi). The net result is a book that fascinates and frustrates, since it literally oscillates between two polarized theses. But it appears that more weight is given to negative aspects of Franciscan missionary activities as seen from Nihilist perspective. To author's credit, however, he repudiates those critics' charges that missionaries enslaved Indians and instituted a policy of genocide. Sandos' primary target throughout is Junipero Serra. The friar is castigated for inscribing on the theological clean slate of California . . . his well ordered understanding of medieval world. In 'these last centuries' before Apocalypse, Serra would build a model of a primitive Christian church, a community of Indians and Franciscans clustered in their mission settlements learning and teaching Christian doctrine, preparing themselves for return of Christ (p. 79). Serra's medieval views, according to author, were derived from his devotion to life of St. Francis Solano (1549-1610), famed Franciscan missionary who died in Peru, philosophy and theology of Scot Franciscan, John Duns Scotus (1263-1308), and mystical writings of Franciscan nun, Maria de Jesus de Agreda (1602-1665), noted for her four-volume The Mystical City of God (1670), which expositated concept of Virgin Mary's Immaculate Conception. Serra is taken to task for adherence to Scholastic theological view of egocentric structure of universe in face of sixteenth-century Copernican heliocentric system. Serra's repudiation of latter proves his medieval outlook in all things. The frustrating elements in Sandos' book are argumentative. However, he an excellent chapter on venereal disease, which is well detailed in respect to syphilis, but slights impact of gonorrhea on birth rate. Nor does chapter detail problem of native lack of sanitation and sanitary habits. One of widespread health problems was skin disease. To credit of government and friars, smallpox never appeared in Spanish California. Quarantine was well understood in respect to some contagious diseases. …

Following Thoreau's "Tracks in the Sand": Tactile Impressions in Cape Cod

In the published version of the eulogy he gave for his best friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1862) praised Henry David Thoreau's acute senses: His power of observation seemed to indicate additional senses. He saw as with microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet, and his memory was a photographic register for all he saw and heard. And yet none knew better than he that it is not the fact that imports, but the impression or effect of the fact on your mind. Every fact lay in glory in his mind, a type of the order and beauty of the whole. (245) Throughout his writings, Thoreau is, as Emerson indicates, a meticulous observer and recorder of sensory perceptions and natural facts. However, while glorying in the beauty of nature in and of itself, he believed that such observations and facts are important only as they lead to the truths that illuminate one's relationship to the environment and to God. Like most of the people labeled transcendentalists, Thoreau rejected Locke's theory that all knowledge is gained directly through the senses. Instead, Thoreau believed that people are born with innate knowledge, which he, like Emerson, equated with the voice of God within. As people mature from the innocence of childhood to the experience of adulthood, however, they tend to lose touch with this spiritual consciousness. To prevent the corruption of this intuitive faculty, Thoreau believed people must continually strive to renew themselves by seeking the spiritual truths available in nature. In describing Thoreau's use of sensory perceptions in his writings, F. O. Matthiessen (1941) observes, "What separates [End Page 7] Thoreau most from Emerson is his interest in the varied play of all his senses, not merely of the eye, a rare enough attribute in New England and important to dwell on since it is the crucial factor in accounting for the greater density of Thoreau's style" (87). Certainly, ample evidence exists for the acuity of all of Thoreau's senses, as well as for the exhilaration he derived from a fully sensuous experience in nature. However, an underlying tension between the pleasure he derived from contact with nature and a fear of physical intimacy pervades Thoreau's attitude toward touch. As a result, scholars have voiced many conflicting statements about Thoreau's use of this sense. On the one hand, Matthiessen claims: He became ecstatic when he talked about touch. . . . He knew, like Anteus, that his strength derived from ever renewed contact with the earth. But he wanted more than contact with nature, he wanted the deepest immersion, and his delight mounted at being drenched in the summer waters of the pond, or when he could wonder whether "any Roman emperor ever indulged in such luxury as . . . walking up and down a river in torrid weather with only a hat on to shade his head." (88) In contrast, however, Richard J. Schneider maintains: Another of the lesser senses for Thoreau was touch. Like taste, it was too limited because it required that its object be immediately present. In his relations to nature (as in his relations to men), he preferred that there be some space between him and the object with which he was communicating. Too often when he was close enough to touch something, he was also too close for the rest of his senses to perceive it as a whole, as anything more than surface. (1973, 43–44) Although Matthiessen's and Schneider's comments appear to be contradictory, there are elements of truth in both observations. Reports of Thoreau's prickly disposition and the aching lack of intimacy that characterized his interpersonal relations are legendary. John Weiss, one of Thoreau's classmates [End Page 8] at Harvard, writes that "he was cold and unimpressible. The touch of his hand was moist and indifferent, as if he...

Dostoevsky and Schiller: National Renewal Through Aesthetic Education

Dostoevsky and Schiller:National Renewal Through Aesthetic Education Susan McReynolds Dostoevsky's novels pivot upon scenes of spiritual transformation, moments of revelation that resolve dilemmas for which no logical solution can be found. Raskolnikov, for example, analyzes his crime from philosophical and sociological angles until he almost dies; he is saved by his dream of the plague and by the image of Sonia's face. When insight and progress come to Dostoevsky's fictional characters, they come as dream, memory, and rapture before images of beauty and suffering. The choice between spiritual and logical solutions confronting Dostoevsky's characters is also a choice between Russia and the West. The rationalism and corollary doctrine of egoism that drives characters like Svidrigailov, Stavrogin, and Ivan Karamazov to madness and death are clearly associated in Dostoevsky's novels with Western philosophy. The ability to surrender to the beneficial power of images is associated with characters like Dmitry Karamazov, who is able to accept the primacy of spiritual truth—the truth of his need for expiation—over the fact of his legal innocence of his father's murder. The breadth of spirit that renders Dmitry receptive to the truth revealed in his dream image of the suffering child is clearly identified in The Brothers Karamazov as a distinctively Russian national trait. The contrast between reason, death, and the West, on the one hand, and receptiveness to imagistic truth, salvation, and Russia, on the other, [End Page 353] drives the plots of Dostoevsky's novels. This familiar feature of Dostoevsky's art is first articulated in texts unfamiliar to most readers; the historical essays of the early 1860s that were among his first published works after his return from exile. In 1849, Dostoevsky was arrested as a member of the Petrashevsky Circle, an association dedicated to disseminating the tenets of Western socialism in Russia. For his participation in the Circle, Dostoevsky was initially condemned to death; the sentence was commuted to four years of hard labor in Siberian prison camp, to be followed by an indefinite period of military service in Siberian exile. When Dostoevsky returned to St. Petersburg and public life in 1860, he and his older brother Mikhail launched the journal Time. Mikhail served as editor. Dostoevsky would publish The Insulted and Injured and Notes from the House of the Dead in its pages, in addition to numerous essays dedicated to contemporary literature and events. The essays on Russia and Europe published in Time were a creative workshop in which some basic features of his later novels—most notably the contrast between Western positivism and Russian spirituality, conceived as the capacity to embrace imagistic revelations of the truth—were first developed. The pressure of Dostoevsky's developing artistic craft is clearly apparent in these non-fictional texts from the early 1860s, which narrate modern Russian and European history as a story structured by a dual plot of death and redemption. Before Dostoevsky wrote novels structured around the contrast between characters like Dmitry and Ivan Karamazov, he wrote essays structured around the contrast between Russia and Western nations like France and England. Before Crime and Punishment portrayed Raskolnikov's resurrection as the surrender to images offering glimpses of something that eludes rational analysis, Dostoevsky's essays in Time predicted national renewal for Russia through her embrace of the truths conveyed by the images of fine art. Some essays in Time compose a plot of national rebirth through the effects of artistic images for Russia, but others admonish readers with what Dostoevsky believed would be the terrible consequences of positivism for the West. Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, published in Time in 1863, casts France and England as mortally ill victims of a materialist worldview that can only grasp the challenges of modernity as scientific and political problems. The spiritual solutions that will be revealed to Russia through images of beauty, Dostoevsky warns, will elude nations ensnared in rational approaches to their problems. [End Page 354] Throughout his post-exile life, Dostoevsky believed that political improvement results from changes in the moral condition of individuals, inner changes that are catalyzed by images, not reached through rational deliberation. In 1861, he writes of the Imperial edict...

Where are we going? The fate and failings of contemporary spirituality

AbstractThis paper takes to task the dumbing‐down of spirituality in western culture. No stone is left unturned and no punches pulled in this self‐confessed rant at how spiritual truths and practices have been misunderstood, misinterpreted and misused – usually to remove any sense of discipline from spiritual practices and leaving them as sugary pills to comfort our egos rather than transform our lives. Healthy spirituality requires us to ‘walk the middle road’ without falling into the extremes or into the arms of extremists. Despite the critique, the author remains optimistic and ends on such a note. Although much of the article may at first seem cynical about the world of contemporary spirituality, the author is passionate about the possibility for our culture to grow out of spiritual childishness and adolescence and flourish into the maturity of spiritual adulthood. Copyright © 2004 Whurr Publishers Ltd.

An occult poetics, or, the secret rhetoric of religion

Drawing from a number of “New Age” or occult texts, the essay characterizes the rhetorical functions of the deliberate use of difficult language in occult discourse as the outworking of an “occult poetics.” The essay suggests that most contemporary New Age discourse tends to follow a pattern illustrated in the Platonic dialogues: 1) it emphasizes the limits of language; and 2) it tends to stress the necessity of new vocabularies or novel expressions for intuiting ineffable, spiritual truths. The essay concludes by comparing occultism to the contemporary academic debate over obscure theoretical terminology.

Sentimental Types and Social Reform in Uncle Tom's Cabin

Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe is usually described as a writer in the sentimental literary tradition, but this view is complicated by her abiding religious beliefs. Take, for example, a remarkable passage in her third novel, The Minister's Wooing (1859), a novel critical of Calvinist theological institutions, where death infuses sentimental keepsakes with transcendent significance: So we go, dear reader,--so long as we have a body and a soul. Two worlds must mingle,--the great and the little, the solemn and the trivial, wreathing in and out, like the grotesque carvings on a Gothic shrine;--only, did we know it lightly, nothing is trivial; since the human soul, with its shadow, makes sacred. Have not ribbons, cast-off flowers, soiled bits of gauze, trivial, trashy fragments of millinery, sometimes had meaning, and deadly power, when they belonged to one who should wear them no more? For so sacred and individual is a human being, that, of the million-peopled earth, no one form ever restores another. The mold of each mortal type is broken at the grave; and never, never, though you look through the faces on earth, shall the exact form you mourn ever meet your eyes again! Like the novel in which it appears, this passage interweaves the sentimental and the spiritual to create a moving meditation on the transience of daily life. The true significance of everyday affections and artifacts is only when the death of their owners invests them with an meaning, a deadly power. (1) contrast to the Calvinist's second sight that stemmed from the unequivocal acceptance of original sin, this passage suggests that to see truly is to see them categorically in the context of loss, not depravity. That is to say, Stowe is far more invested in the full range of human emotion and social life than her Calvinist predecessors even as she draws from their theological lexicon--The mold of each mortal type is broken at the grave--to develop her observation. Puritan Biblical exegesis, the type was a jealously guarded category to be strictly distinguished from arbitrary tropes (such as allegories, metaphors, similes, and so forth) that were the frail product of the human imagination. this orthodox view, the exegetical type is not a trope at but rather a divinely sanctioned and real institution, event, or individual of the Old Testament whose full historical and spiritual significance is revealed through a parallel antitype in the New Testament. As Perry Miller put it some time ago, In the type there is a rigorous correspondence, which is not a chance resemblance, between the representation and the antitype; in the trope there is correspondence only between the thing and the associations it happens to excite in the impressionable ... senses of men. (2) Stowe draws upon and revises this exegetical tradition when she views sentimental artifacts, affections, and individuals as types and suggests that they are known rightly only when seen through the awful shadow of the soul that invests all things with sacrality. If, as Sacvan Bercovitch has influentially argued, a writer like Emerson fused Romantic naturalism and Puritan hermeneutics in a model of spiritual growth ... that eliminated the tension between [temporal] process and [spiritual] fulfillment, this tension remains for Stowe but has been reconstituted upon sentimental coordinates. (3) Like Emerson, though, Stowe would reveal the presence of the transcendent in the everyday through the absolute singularity of the individual. For Stowe, individuals are unique not because they are different from one another but paradoxically because they are alike in being unique types of the same subsuming spiritual truth. (4) What is at stake in Stowe's sentimental type, then, is a taxonomic view of the individual--the self whose personal emotions articulate universal truths and moral claims--that stems from a complex (and often contradictory) nexus of social, religious, and political discourses. …

Music in Lubavitcher Life (review)

Reviewed by: Music in Lubavitcher Life Beverley Diamond (bio) Music in Lubavitcher Life. By Ellen Koskoff. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. 2001 pp. Glossary, appendices, bibliography, index. Cloth, $39.95. The ethnomusicologist Ellen Koskoff has produced a long-anticipated study of music in the Lubavitcher Jewish community in America (particularly Crown Heights, New York, but also smaller communities in Pennsylvania and Minnesota). The book is based on fieldwork conducted over a twenty-two-year period. The lengthy engagement with this branch of the Hasidic Jewish religion not only has deepened her knowledge but has also allowed her to reflect on shifts in beliefs within the community and within her own attitudes toward Orthodox Judaism. It is rare that we read products of such extended reflection about an encounter that is effectively cross-cultural. Koskoff was raised in "an upwardly mobile, politically left-wing Jewish family" that had no prior involvement with the Hasidic world. As the specific subject matter of the book is completely outside the experience of this reviewer, I appreciate Koskoff's clear writing about Lubavitcher history and Hasidic theology. The role of the musical genre of nigunim (song) in relation to that history and theology is explicit. But most importantly, the lived experience of the musical performance of nigunim in relation to the laws of Lubavitcher belief, the stages of devekut, and the tensions between tradition and modernity come alive in this engaging book. In the first two parts of her study, Koskoff unfolds an idealized account of Lubavitcher belief and spiritual practice, while the next two look at the inherent tensions and contradictions of life lived, "the untidy ground of culture" (105). Koskoff makes effective use of the strategy of shifting between experiential description and more objectified explanation, a style of representation found in a number of recent ethnomusicological monographs. She includes fieldwork "scenes" to help us understand her relationship to the community and to enliven descriptions of individuals and experiences. These first-person accounts incorporate her questions, some of her insecurities, and even her disagreements with Lubavitcher friends. A vividly crafted opening ethnography of a farbrengen (a spiritual and social gathering) introduces many concepts that recur subsequently. Chapter 2 moves to analytical issues, discussing ethnomusicological approaches, Jewish music scholarship, gender theory, and performance study. Parts of this chapter still read like the literature review in a PhD dissertation, with references that provide a broad framework, rather than a real working of ideas, but she has certainly rethought and updated the material in the long period since she wrote her dissertation on this subject. We learn that this study is rooted in cognitive approaches and studies of culture as performance. She sees "culture as ideational and internal, as well as material and external" (23). Part 2, "Inside the Context," presents core religious beliefs, Lubavitcher Hasidim's history and philosophy, as well as contemporary social contexts. Her account clarifies the meaning of the ten sefirot that symbolize stages of seeking unity with the divine (devekut). A large array of Lubavitcher laws, sometimes described by the metaphor of fences, are described. The challenges they present for modern adherents are [End Page 92] also acknowledged. We also learn of the distinctions between "lifers" (those born Lubavitcher), ba'alei teshuvah (converts), and secular Jews. The hierarchical power of the rebbe and his circle are respectfully presented. The remaining chapters explore music more specifically, explaining its power of redemption and restoration. She analyzes a nigunim (song) collection of central importance, the Sefer Ha-Nigunim, as a window on social and spiritual hierarchy. Chapter 6 describes basic musical features (scales, formal structures, ornamentation) as codes of Lubavitcher belief, and introduces different types of repertoire that are either nearer to or farther from the spiritual core or "crown." Part 3, "Inside the Performance," is the most compelling part of the book. Here the author moves beyond an "idealized" account to explore how Lubavitcher actually use musical performance to "perform their core beliefs into being" (103). She demonstrates how singing reflects fundamental tenets of Lubavitcher belief: (1) the belief that true spirituality is irrevocably linked to the past; (2) the conviction that women are inherently closer to God but...