Why Write?

It's an interesting question to consider, why anyone would write for others to read. Writing to make a living requires not only talent and dedication, but also a fair dose of luck – the better you are, the less luck you need, but you will always need luck. So writing with the express intention to make money from it is either foolish, or optimistic (or perhaps better to say “hopeful”).

I felt moved to write about why I write when, as I do from time to time, I was re-reading a collection of essays by Isaac Asimov. Most of these collections are compilations of his regular science fact feature from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (often referred to simply as F&SF, though that is subject to confusion with a description of a literary genre), which might be billed as science fact, but often contained things that took a certain departure from that brief. Each essay begins, almost invariably, with some anecdote from Asimov's own experience.

The Death of Fox

From the title of this post, you might have supposed that it was going to be a sort of tailpiece biography, covering the time shortly before and after the actual death of George Fox. Another possible interpretation would be that I was, out of all character, joining in with the sporadic habit of some Quakers online, bemoaning how unlike Fox most Quakers are today.

In either case, I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed. Rather, it is a reference to The Death of the Author, an essay by the French literary critic and author Roland Barthes (it's original French title itself being a play on the title of Le Mort d'Arthur, but that's too tangential a path for me to dive down here), and of the literary theory concepts that derive from it.

The essential principle of the essay, and the related (but separately posited) theory of the “intentional fallacy”, is that the author is not the authority when it comes to the meaning of a piece of work. Once an author has created a work, they might tell you what their intent was, you might infer it from other sources, but intent is not the determining factor of meaning. I don't say that this theory is universally accepted in the study of literature; I also probably don't understand it perfectly, not having studied literary theory or analysis, so please don't rely on my explanation (or lecture me too harshly if you know it better – I'm glad to learn more, but please keep it friendly).

Science and Faith: A Quaker Perspective

A popular trope these days depicts faith and religion as opposed to science. The logic behind this is simple – science is based on testability, reproducibility, and acting based on evidence. Religion by it's nature is considered to require actions based on faith, rather than evidence, and many religious claims are inherently untestable, or at least such tests as may be argued to be possible have factors that make such testing not reproducible; in terms of philosophy or science, the claims are unfalsifiable.

Anti-religion advocates also often point to religious persecution of scientists, as in the case of Galileo Galilei, or of religious authorities resisting the adoption or teaching of science, as in the case of evolution (for some time) or the attempts to have schools teach intelligent design as science. However, it is also true that many great scientists have been religious, such as the (Quaker) astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington, and the polymath Blaise Pascal. There are also cases of cultures and times where religion, even relatively authoritarian religion, has been a dominant feature of life, yet sciences have flourished – most notably the Islamic Golden Age.

The debate about whether religion in general is compatible with science will carry on in many places, especially online forums and blogs, for a long time yet. In this post, I will be addressing specifically the underlying assertion that faith stands opposed to reason and evidence, and applying specifically my own non-theist Quaker approach to faith to look at the implications.

Spiritual Accompaniment

I had a hard time, sitting down to write this post, with how I was going to refer to what I'm trying to talk about. It's a difficult idea. Three terms came up in conversations, in reading, or in thinking about things. What I'm talking about is certainly related to the priestly vocation, the calling that is considered in mainstream clergy to be a call to the priesthood – but we have no separate priesthood; we have rather a priesthood of all believers, and unlike some other groups with something approaching such a priesthood, we do very little to emphasise a priestly role for some over others in the liberal branch of the Religious Society of Friends. It's also related to the idea of the teaching ministry, a term in mainstream Christianity (and in some less mainstream churches) for the service given by suitably qualified members of the faith community in shepherding and guiding the spiritual development of their companions in their faith. A term perhaps more comfortable for liberal Quakers is spiritual accompaniment, which means much the same – in terms of goals – as teaching ministry, but with less implication of a didactic approach.

Whatever term you might prefer, the idea is this – that sometimes we need help from another person on our spiritual journeys, not just the help of the inward teacher, and perhaps that some people are suited or called to that work, perhaps only for a time.