The Participatory Turn: Thinking Beyond the Philosophies of Consciousness and Constructivism in the Study of Religion (review)

If we recognize the radically creative power of our consciousness, we are empowered to renovate the authoritarian and oppressive aspects of historical religious forms and to sculpt new forms of spiritual expression and horizons of ultimate value. Are we ready for such responsibility? The Participatory Turn, an edited compilation of eleven essays in the intersecting fields of religious studies, mysticism, and spirituality, offers multiple responses to such a vast proposition with aims to preserve ontological integrity without sacrificing that of modern critical scholarship. Editors Jorge N. Ferrer and Jacob H. Sherman make a strong case for the participatory turn as a new, coherent lens with which to view interdisciplinary contributions.

The basic project is the integration of religious experience and practice with modern critical thinking and postmodern epistemological insights about the constructed nature of human knowledge. What emerges from this "both/and" endeavor is "a pluralistic vision of spirituality that accepts the formative role of contextual and linguistic factors in religious phenomena, while simultaneously recognizing the importance, and at times even centrality, of nonlinguistic variables (e.g., somatic, imaginal, energetic, contemplative, and so on)" (2). The participatory turn is simultaneously methodological and ontological. As a dialectical methodology, it integrates the linguistic latticework that postmodernism has shown underlying and creating all of human experience with the profound ontological disclosures of religious phenomena. This integration allows for recognition of how culture and language shape religious phenomena without reducing spiritual experience and the real worlds it reveals to their cultural components. As a participatory ontology, it approaches religious phenomena as co-created events that arise from the encounter between the entire range of human capacities for knowing (including but certainly not limited to critical rationality) and the radically open and creative "mystery" that always exceeds our attempts to map or limit it. By including both the ontological and contextual forces that shape, but never circumscribe, the varieties of religious expression, the participatory turn also offers a new response to the challenge of religious diversity that does not succumb to the explicit or implicit privileging of a favored religious tradition that hinders current positions.

In its attempt to move beyond the limitations of both consciousness and culture, The Participatory Turn draws on seven of the most vigorous contemporary trends within religious studies in interdisciplinary view, given voice by a wealth of contributors, including Sean Kelly, Brian Lancaster, Lee Irwin, Beverly J. Lanzetta, William C. Chittick, Bruno Barnhart, Robert McDermott, G. William Barnard, and Donald Rothberg. The book suggests that such strands, when woven together, constitute an emerging academic ethos that recovers ontology without sacrificing the advances of critical scholarship. In eleven essays, these seven trends include: a postcolonial re-evaluation of emic epistemologies, a feminist emphasis on embodiment and sacred immanence, re-evaluation of the "pragmatic turn" in contemporary philosophy, a resacralization of language, a focus on the question of truth in postmetaphysical thinking, an emphasis on the irreducibility of religious pluralism, and particularly apropos for spirituality scholars, a renewed interest in the study of spirituality (variously defined amongst contributors).

Several highlights of the volume are well-suited for spirituality scholars. Part One begins with Jacob Sherman's detailed genealogy of participation, which guides his readers through the corridors of classical, medieval, and modern philosophy to uncover three historic forms of participation: formal, existential, and creative. Implicit in all three is the invitation to think in terms of a noncompetitive logic of intrinsic, constitutive relationality that, in turn, allows an acknowledgment of a person's contribution to a mystical event without reducing its ontological status. Sean Kelly distinguishes between embedded and enactive modes of participation and shows how the French systems thinker Edgar Morin can add sophistication to contemporary participatory approaches. Jorge Ferrer discusses what his vision of participation can contribute to the challenges of religious pluralism. In disclosing a radical plurality not only of spiritual paths...