Belief in Doubt

My first experience of death was curiously aseptic. My grandmother had passed, but my parents didn't want me at the funeral. I was too young, the ceremony would be too long, the experience would be too traumatic—all reasons that seemed perfectly reasonable. I found out later their real aim was to keep me from seeing their headstone, which lay beside my grandmother's. I saw a photograph of it years later, my parents smiling, pointing at their names and, mercifully, the smooth marble of their incomplete entries.

I was haunted by this recollection while reading Mark C. Taylor's latest book, which contains a picture of the still-living author's gravestone—an austere "T," a modest block of granite flush with a well-trimmed lawn. Though this image appears halfway through the narrative, it nonetheless serves as a stark reminder that this book—indeed, every book—is accompanied by a coda carved in stone.

In the fall of 2005, Taylor, cultural critic and chair of the Department of Religion at Columbia University, underwent a biopsy for cancer and nearly died after going into severe septic shock. For weeks, Taylor hovered on the edge of life and death. Field Notes from Elsewhere is an intensely personal report from the limit—and a great deal more. In it, the author unearths buried family history, offers an Emersonian meditation on nature, reflects on the writer's life, and, perhaps most intriguingly, provides a pendant piece to After God (2007), the capstone in his career-long effort to provide a theology of culture.

Taylor is a controversial figure, not least for being a professor of religion able to confidently pronounce, "Theologians have had it wrong for centuries—God is not the Creator, creativity is God. Rather than a person, God is the infinite process in and through which everything arises and passes away." His twenty-plus books range from early work on Søren Kierkegaard and G. W. F. Hegel to postmodern theology to contemporary art to network theory to financial markets and back again. This This muscular embrace of interdisciplinarity has prompted the usual charges of intellectual promiscuity, though even his toughest critics grant that Taylor demonstrates astonishing range and breadth in his thought. Likely, though, they were less than amused by a recent op-ed in The New York Times where Taylor calls for, among other things, abolishing tenure and phasing out permanent academic departments in favor of problem-based programs. "Graduate education," he suggests, "is the Detroit of higher learning." Taylor, in short, has an unparalleled ability to tweak the noses of his fellow guild members, although questions remain about the degree to which his provocations are motivated by a Panglossian faith in technology and reflexively neoliberal values. Whatever the case, it's fair to say that Taylor is unafraid of ruffling feathers, and Field Notes tells us why.

Composed of fifty-two sections of alternating observations categorized as either morning or nightly reflections, Field Notes is offered in the spirit of what Taylor, channeling Kierkegaard, calls a dagbog—Danish for diary or journal. Personal reflection is mixed with philosophical speculation. Its main concerns are not far from that of a devotional text, an a/theological primer, to borrow one of the author's neologisms. Topics range from the seemingly mundane—sections on tipping or sports—to more esoteric speculation, including a surprisingly insistent discussion of the centrality of the word "perhaps" in his writing and his thought. He dwells on accidents—births, deaths, successes, and disasters—which all somehow prefigure his unfolding struggle with mortality. In turn, he demonstrates how his intellectual development was shaped by precisely these sorts of encounters with capricious fate. Shortly after his grandfather butchers a steer at a family celebration, he is felled by a stroke. Was it coincidence, Taylor wonders. Divine retribution? "Does blood sacrifice involve a restricted rather than a general economy? Are those who eat the flesh of the victim condemned by the sin of the father?"

Field Notes...