The Australian Journal of Anthropology (2011) 22, 5675 doi:10.1111/j.1757-6547.2011.00107.

Religion on Dover beach

Rowan Ireland
La Trobe University

How does transcendental religion flourish when a secular frame sets conditions of belief? This
question is put in a case study of the Catholic Newman Society at the University of Mel-
bourne (195565). The Society flourished in a secular University where Charles Taylors
immanent frame was supposedly in place. Explanations are found in the particular spiritual-
ity nurtured in the Society and in the contingencies of Australian Catholicism in the mid-
twentieth century, but also in the conventions of secular discourse in the University. Conclu-
sions drawn from the case are: (i) that there are elective affinities between some forms of
transcendental religion and a secular context; (ii) that social science dichotomies that separate
the religious and secular obviate appreciation of elective affinities and hybridisation; (iii) that
there are parallels between ethnographic inquiry and inner-worldly spirituality that may help
us develop a conversational ethnography.

INTRODUCTION
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earths shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Matthew Arnold, On Dover Beach.1

Classical secularisation theory was predicated on a vision, akin to Matthew Arnolds,

of the sea of faith steadily receding in modernity, albeit with a long withdrawing
roar like some definitive ebb tide on Dover Beach. But the vision has faded since
the 1970s in the face of phenomena such as the worldwide Pentecostal explosion,
the re-emergence of public religion in certain modernising nation-states, the
development of new forms of private spirituality through global networks, and the

Rowan Ireland is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Sociology and Anthropology Program
at La Trobe University. His research interests and publications have been in religion, civil
society, and politics in Brazil and Australia. His ethnographic fieldwork has been conducted
in the Northeast of Brazil and in shantytowns in the Greater Sao Paulo area.

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 Religion on Dover beach

rise of fundamentalist movements. The subtraction story that accompanied the

vision has lost plausibility (Taylor 2007: 22). This was the story of the steady
advance of Reason and the realisation of human rights in modernity, with the
sloughing of religious illusion and the defeat of authoritarian religious institutions.
The story was challenged, not least by anthropological critiques of Western ethno-
centrism (Kahn 1995, 2001). Subtraction theories projected on to the whole world a
history in which one pure tide of modernity was sweeping away mystical sensibili-
ties and religious institutions from West to East, such that the world would be
reduced to Dover Beach. The alternative narrative in anthropology features many
beaches in which multiple modernities relate diversely with religious traditions.
Similarly, in Taylors Western-focused alternative narrative, the end of the story
is not Dover Beach swept clean by a singular secular modernity. Rather, modernity
itself has a religious provenance and is constituted in worlds of experience in which
religious belief and sensibility are challenged and transformed in secular contexts,
but not eliminated. Taylors is a new secularisation story in which transcendental
coordinates for self, social and physical worlds become optional, but not untenable.
This once taken-for-granted transcendent frame becomes optional and exercised
within a secular or immanent frame (Taylor 2007: 542). Similar revisionist notions
of secularisation abound. Some, like Hervieu-Leger (1990), locate changing forms of
religion at the heart of modernity. Looking closely at various forms of the return
to religion in France in the 1970s and 1980s, she argues that secularisation is not a
process of religious decline, but the process of the reorganization of the work of
religion in a society to meet, on the one hand, the challenges of modernity and, on
the other, to provide for the inevitable failure inherent in modernitys promises.2
Other revisionists (Joas & Wiegandt 2009) identify differing profiles of secularisa-
tion for religions in particular modernities.
In any case, now that old secularisation theory must be radically revised, and
its independent variable, modernity, is now understood as multiple, we are no
longer surprised to find forms of religious life that engage, and even prosper, in
worlds where the perspectives, senses of self, and values of the majority, and or sig-
nificant elites are (or are at least taken to be) those of a secular modernity. But lack
of surprise ought not to lead either devotees of that sort of faith or social scientists
who explore their religious worlds, to abandon inquiry into how this coexistence is
maintained in everyday life. Charles Taylor advanced the critique of old secularisa-
tion theory,3 but he has also helped us appreciate the challenge to the maintenance
of transcendental sensibility and belief posed by two factors. First is the optional
status of belief in God that appears integral to many forms of modernity; and
second, the actual prevalencethough its degree is debateableof a materialist
scientific sensibility turned commonsense in, for example, Australian and many
European societies.
Puzzlement over the maintenance of transcendental religion within the imma-
nent frame is particularly appropriate in instances where the faithful appear to reject
the modes of relating to the secular world assigned to them under the old

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paradigmritual withdrawal, encapsulation in total institutions, strict compartmen-

talisation of areas of life, for example. In the many instances where such modes
have been adopted by believers, we have ready explanations as to how pockets of
religion survive. But alternative modes of living religious faith in specific modern,
culturally plural contexts demand new, or more complex, accounts and explana-
tions. Further, as social scientists move away from etic explanations of religious
phenomena, it seems appropriate to turn to phenomenological inquiry into the
prospering of varieties of religious life in the secular age. It seems necessary to enter
into the experience of believers and to apprehend the horizon of taken-for-granted
possibility informing their perceptions of that experience.
But therein lies further puzzlement, this time about how to proceed with the
inquiry. As Joel Kahn points out, some sort of conversational engagement and
exchange with the faithful other is needed, once we take the emic turn. Conversa-
tional inquiry will have to be symbiotic in the sense that it must allow the possibil-
ity that both parties, the secular inquirer4 and the religious other, will review their
horizons and move towards shared ways of interpreting experience. This require-
ment of conversational inquiry renders unacceptable the old strategies of bracketing
out and suspension of disbelief once congenial to secular social scientists. When a
basic aim of social sciences explorations of religion is an open-ended conversation
with the religious other, bracketing out the deepest beliefs of the other, whether by
secular inquirer or believer, will mean speaking with false tongues and conversa-
tional failure (Kahn 2011).
This article seeks to address these several layers of puzzlement about how spe-
cific forms of religion are lived in particular modern and secular contexts. It sets
out from a descriptive account of a form of transcendental religion5 that flourished,
for a while at least, in a supposedly secular setting. The collective beliefs and prac-
tices of The Catholic Newman Society of students at the University of Melbourne
from 1955 to 1965 are characterised as transcendental religion in a secular univer-
sity, and an explanation is advanced for the flourishing of the organisation over sev-
eral student generations. The Society was orthodox, if experimental for the times, in
its Catholic beliefs and practices. But its members sought deep engagement in the
secular University as a central project of their faith. I was an active member of the
Society for some of those years and have drawn on my own memory, conversation
with other members, documents from the time, and testimonies published in a
recent book (Noone et al. 2008) for my portrait and analysis of the Society.
My engagement then, and faith commitments now, rather spoil the picture of a
firmly secular social scientist inquiring in puzzlement into the world of religious
others. But let us proceed on the basis of an assertion and a tease. The assertion is
that research into a religious community as it was forty years ago, and an attempt
to reassemble oneself in that context and time, is a tough exercise in the exploration
of otherness. Such a task is not all that different from that faced by the thoroughly
secular anthropologist pursuing a conversation with believers. The tease is to note
that, before the end of the study, the very concepts and dichotomies used to set the

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scene so far, including secular setting and transcendental religionwill have been
smudged. This will occur as the putative puzzle of the Societys flourishing is
addressed.
The article will conclude with three reflections that knit together the empirical,
conceptual and methodological. The first will be subversive in that it will entail con-
sideration of factors that make it difficult to generalise out of the case presented.
The second will, nevertheless, draw on the case to support the call made by others
to elaborate our concepts of modernity, the secular and oppositional models of sec-
ular scientific selfhood vs. mystical selfhood. The third reflection will consider some
curious parallels between the social scientist who experiences an impetus, or calling
out of the self, to seek out and converse with the other, and the believer who seeks
out and responds to the experience of the transcendent Other who calls. On the
basis of this latter reflection, some suggestions will be made about the form and
content of conversations between ethnographers of religion and the believers they
study.

THE NEWMAN SOCIETY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE, 19501966

From 1950 to 1966, a Jesuit priest, Jeremiah (Jerry) Golden was chaplain of the
Newman Society and Roman Catholic community at the University of Melbourne.
He was neither a leading intellectual, nor a charismatic leader, nor was he a
theological radical. But he had an idea of the University (close to John Henry
Newmans) and held fast to the notion that Catholic lay people should cultivate a
vocation to realise that idea through full participation in university life and engage-
ment in their disciplines. As Catholic chaplain, he saw his roles as including devel-
opment of a Catholic community around its own liturgical and social life, and
provision of pastoral guidance and resources for young Catholics (almost all from
Catholic schools and mostly first-generation university students) as they negotiated
their faith in the secular environment of the University. He attended to the tensions
between pursuit of the idea of the university and attention to those pastoral roles
with humour, sleight of hand, and immense hard work. If he had a genius, it lay in
holding contradictory enterprises together, and mediating the different personalities
and interests of members of the community.
Whether it was because of that genius of Jerry Golden, or the complex of factors
explored in this study, the Newman Society flourished. For at least those years from
1955 to 1964the portion of Fr. Goldens chaplaincy examined hereit became
one of the largest and most well-known sub-communities of the University of Mel-
bourne. During those years, every week of the academic year, there were regular
meetings of about 200 Catholic students in small groups modelled on the Young
Catholic Worker groups pioneered by the Belgian Msgr. Cardijn. Each year, there
were Summer and Winter Schools at which members of academic staff at the Uni-
versity and senior students would offer talks on topics such as Incarnation in the
University, Approaches to Literary Criticism, Psychology, Science, Technology

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Philosophy, Law, History, Contemporary Australia, Hope and so on. Series of

lunch-time talks (not just by and for the faithful) were organised and were usually
well attended. Small in-house journals and conference papers rolled off the presses
constantly. In the University at large, the quarterly journal Prospect (195865),
founded and edited by senior members of the Newman Society, was a lively forum
for political, educational and religious debates, and published some of the best poets
of the day.
Half a century later, a group of once-active members in the Newman Society,
myself included, organised a series of conversations in which upwards of sixty
alumni recalled aspects of the Golden Years, reflected on the legacy of those
years, and asked whether energies, insights and spiritualities generated in those
years might be deployed to address contemporary ecological, social, and economic
issues. I was assigned to be one of the speakers at a conversation on the spiritual-
ity of what we rather grandly called the Intellectual Apostolate, and how that
spirituality had impinged on our subsequent life-experiences. I defined my brief
in terms of the notion of spirituality defined by Catholic pastoral theologian, San-
dra Schneiders: the experience of conscious involvement in the project of life
integration through self-transcendence toward the ultimate value one perceives
(Schneiders 2000: 4).
Charles Taylor proved to be a source of ideas, concepts and frameworks for
comparison that have been stimulating and helpful in the task. In A Catholic
Modernity (1999), I found in Taylors own precise voice a spelling out of important
aspects of the spirituality I was assigned to describe. And then, in A Secular Age
(2007) I found much to help me in a critical appreciation of the Apostolate spiritu-
ality. In particular, notions like the porous self, and Taylors discussion of the secu-
lar society as one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human
possibility among others (Taylor 2007: 3), have been pivotal. Further, Taylors work
on the emergence of a secular age has stimulated thinking beyond my brief for the
Golden Years project. I have been led towards the hypothesis, entertained here, that
there may be elective affinities between certain types of theistic spirituality and
pluralistic secular modernity.

TAYLOR AND NEWMAN SOCIETY SPIRITUALITY

Taylor locates his faith and his own spirituality (he doesnt use the term in this
context), in a secular age.6 As Taylor sees it, in modern secular societies, and no
more so than in Western academe, the assumptions of exclusive humanism reign,
and constitute the air that people of faith breathe. Exclusive humanism recognises
no valid, rationally justifiable aim beyond human flourishing. It discounts any refer-
ence to transcendental purpose in individual or social projects and, therefore, any
claims that human life aims at something beyond itself or at the production of pub-
lic goods other than those which maximise the chances for individual or collective
self-fulfilment.

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But he does not want, nor does he advise fellow believers, to hold their breath
in poisonous air, nor reject humanism, nor strive for a world-rejecting life of the
spirit. He points to the Christian roots of Western humanisms affirmation of
ordinary bodily life, and to the stream of Christian incarnational spirituality7 in
which renouncing [by which he means the radical decentring of the self in relation
to God]aiming beyond lifenot only takes you away but also brings you back to
flourishing, since Gods will is that humans flourish (Taylor 1999: 2122). This,
he notes, is the biblical agape. The characterisation of a spirituality that is at once
theocentric and affirming of the material, bodily good life is only the first of many
both ands (rather than either ors), and injunctions to symbiotic conversation (not
cognitive synthesis) that I have found apt and helpful in my attempt to describe
and analyse the spirituality of the Golden Years cohorts.
I will confine myself to outlines of four8 both and features of our spirituality
here, based largely on a reading of conference talks, a collection of short articles in
our roneoed journals, News Sheet and Forum,9 and testimonies in Noone et al.
(2008).10 First, examination of the desired life-integration, the personal transfor-
mation in Christ and the transformation of the world in justice sought in the
Apostolate spirituality (Sandra Schneiders phrasessee6) showed it as both theo-
centric and humanist. It involved theocentric de-centring of the self in relation to
God (It is no longer I),11 an aiming beyond life, and it involved the creative
quest for human flourishing in this world for ourselves and for others, on the
understanding that God ordained and graced human flourishing.
Second, our spirituality both endorsed secular modernity and criticised exclusive
secularity that framed the discourse of faith as irrational, or at best inferior and
rightly subordinate to the Rationality that reigned in science and technology. On
the one hand, we were committed to the freedoms gained in secular modernity. We
had no stomach for Pope Pius IXs Syllabus of Errors (1864), nor for the integral-
ism explicit in Action Francaise, and lurking in Bob Santamarias Bombay Examiner
article,12 nor for the traditionalist tribalism of what we dismissed as the ghetto
Church. On the other hand, we were critical of that form of modernity that exalted
scientific and technical reason over considerations of human value, especially where
the latter were grounded in Biblical faith. Our science and engineering groups, while
identifying with the rigour, the achievements and potential for achieving human
good in their disciplines, were also critical of hubristic secularism that, they averred,
ignored the requirements of human flourishing and justice in the name of progress,
economic growth or technological possibility.
Third, our spirituality was both individualist and communitarian. Individual,
unforced assent to norms, values, and notions of the good life was important to
usparticularly when we were pressed on a famous occasion to distinguish our
groups and their modus operandi from the abnegation of self that was required of
Chinese Communist cadres. In Gospel discussions, we urged one another to accept
personal responsibility and to exercise reason about goods to be individually pur-
sued. At the same time, the groups and the annual cycles of summer and winter

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schooling, constituted a self-conscious process that aimed to discover and realise

the good in communal relationships and in conversation. Our spirituality, or should
I say what I recall as the dominant stream in our spirituality, sought fulfilment not
in the lonely construction of the heroic self, though that was not excluded, but
primarily in what passed between usin our communal and community-building
relationships.
The fourth and final both and I want to note is that our spirituality was both
orientated to the present, to seizing the moment, and focused on viewing the pres-
ent as but a moment in the longue-duree, the unfolding future of Redemption. The
moment was to be seen, experienced, acted and reflected upon as part of the long
realisation of Gods Reign, the Kingdom that was always coming before and after
us, but also in some small but vitally important measure, through us acting now as
co-creators. Again, the three realities programme of our group meetings, our litur-
gies, and our Summer and Winter School discussions, aimed precisely at a symbio-
sis of the reflected-on now and the Reign of God already and coming. We were
often uncomfortable about the monarchical Biblical metaphor of the Kingdom (the
Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed), but we cultivated the vision it encapsu-
lated of an unfolding redemption of a fallen world in which we could be agents,
albeit far from all-seeing. For us, the stories and images of the Fall and continuing
redemption rendered unthinkable the idea that the tide should ebb permanently on
Dover beach.
The both and characteristic of our spirituality was grounded in a notion of God
as already and always moving in modernity and not confined to particular institu-
tions or cultures. It stood in marked contrast to certain other Christian (including
other Catholic) spiritualities around then, as now. It was communal in its genera-
tion, development and modes of worship. It sought to be imbricated in social life
with religious and non-religious others, and acknowledged interdependence in mis-
sion with them. It was to be expressed in the struggle for universal justice, and the
creation of community. In these features, it stood in contrast to Christian spirituali-
ties that are private in generation and practice, lived separately from secular life,
and expressed exclusively in the good works of charity and self-denial. We spoke
of charity, but it was the charity to think, as one of our mantras put it.
The Newman Society spirituality was also very different from the spiritualities of
the New Religious Movements (NRMs) and New Age that was to come. The con-
trast, though anachronistic, further sharpens the profile of our spirituality. Many
NRMs, for all their colour and exoticism, enjoined comparatively monotone spiritu-
alities, when compared to the attempt to live our both ands. By contrast with ours,
many were and are spiritualities of exclusive focus on the now and possess an exclu-
sive preoccupation with the development of the inner self (where the essential,
uncorrupted I rather than our waiting-to-be-found Other, pace Augustine, would
be found). With regard to modernity, the NRMs have tended either to embrace
capitalist modernity uncritically, and run workshops for success in it, or to reject
modern science, technology and, indeed, rational thought. Similarly, they have

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tended to bifurcate into spiritualities exclusively for the spirit as it frees itself from
the material or exclusively for cultivation of the sensuous and or material consump-
tion (see Heelas 1996).

THEOLOGICAL UNDERPINNINGS
The both and spirituality I have been trying to characterise was underpinned by a
set of theological notions rather than a systematic theology. Then again, theology in
the spiritualitytheologycommunity mix varied from being of little importance for
a small minority at one end to being extremely important for a small minority at
the other. In the broad middle, the record of conference talks, discussion papers
and my own memory suggests a now surprising level of acquaintance with concepts
and some arguments of theologians (mainly French, and some discussed in chapter
20 of A Secular Age) who became important influences in the deliberations of
Vatican II.
For present purposes, I need to only list the theological notions that were most
important to us and which figure most prominently in the surviving record. Some
of these receive further elaboration in later sections of the article.

A Trinitarian God: one God constituted in conversation between Father, Son

and Spirit.

Incarnation: the Word of God takes flesh in Jesus Christ, in particular time
and place, and redeems a fallen world through his death and resurrection.

The Mystical Body of Christ: the Incarnation and Redemption as historical

processes continue in the communities of the faithful through sacramental
practice and projects for the building of Gods Kingdom of universal justice
and peace in the world.

Continuing revelation and the development of Christian doctrine: notions that

Gods revelation, though encapsulated in the Biblical record, was not com-
pleted in it, nor confined to it.

A hermeneutical approach to the reading of Scripture and doctrine, and

commitment to translating received and new meaning into the language and
practices of particular times and places.

An essentially ecumenical Church: just as God as creator and redeemer is

already and always at work in the world and cannot be confined to the letter
of Scripture or doctrine, so Gods revelation cannot be found exclusively in
the Christian churches. Fidelity to the Church, we believed, entails conversing
with, listening to, and questing with diverse believers and unbelievers.

A relational conception of faith: our religious faith is not primarily constituted

in assent to doctrine but by our trust in, and response to, the experience
(communally cultivated) of a calling out by God-in-Jesus to become new
selvesa continuing response to the re-birth symbolised in baptism.

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Insofar, as there was real and not just notional assent to the above (Newmans
distinction was important to us) and we attempted communally and individually to
live the faith, we were a community of mystics, at least by comparison with those
of our peers who lived self-consciously within an exclusive immanent frame. How-
ever, we did not see ourselves as mysticsto us, the mystics were virtuosi of the
faith like John of God, Theresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart, perhaps Simone Weil. But
the designation is apt in Taylorian terms, on at least two measures. Taylor contrasts
the prevailing modern secular sense of self with that of the believers (Taylor 2007:
3543). Where the secular self is buffered (the self ends with my skin, so theres a
tight boundary between the inside I and the outside), the believer senses the self as
porous (in Christian tradition as open to, and dependent on, the flow of Gods
grace). The secular self (at least in Taylors ideal-typical rendition) conceives of
space and time as empty, but able to be given meaning and turned to the ends of
human flourishing exclusively by the exercise of scientific reasoning. The
believer mystic self negotiates a cosmos suffused with divine purpose (the Kingdom
of God, still in creation), which can be discovered through reflexive contemplation
of revelation and experience.
A note on our porous selves: the Catholic spirituality described certainly entailed
self-conscious porositynot to demons or evil spirits as in the enchanted world of
medieval popular Catholicism (or even in the contemporary popular Catholicism
described in Jean-Paul Baldacchinos contribution to this issue), but to Gods grace
and to the members of the sacramental community of the faithful. And a sort of
abnegation of the autonomous self (which we believed, paradoxically, was part of
the process of developing selfhood) was at least striven for as we worked towards
St. Pauls, Now not I but Christ lives in me (see11).
But if we were mystics on these measures, according to more conventional
conceptions we were not. We were not transported in ecstasy to contemplate an
utterly transcendent God, even though we might admire mystics whose vocation
it was to do so. And if we conceived the world as enchanted with divine pres-
ence and purpose, it was this world, which we were commissioned by faith to
understand with the tools and insights of our secular disciplines. We were com-
mitted to the freedoms gained in secular modernity and to the application of
best-practice science and technology to the flourishing of life on this planet in
justice and peace.
Of particular interest at this point is how the scientistsstudents and junior
staffin the Newman Society reconciled their mystical religious and scientific ori-
entations. The short answer, it seems, is that they did not feel a need to reconcile
absolute opposites, nor to invoke as a definitive principle what Stephen J. Gould
was to call non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA; see Gould 1997). Hugh Lacey,
later to become a distinguished philosopher of science in the USA, recalled in his
contribution to The Golden Years the tenor of discussions in the science group in
which he participated for several years:

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The vision we sought to articulate was to be of science, an independent activity with

its own motivating and regulative values and its own criteria for evaluating results. We
accepted readily that Christian beliefs should be held to consistency with the estab-
lished results of science. However, we maintained that the values of science could be
integrated well with Christian values, so much so that our Christian values could be
expressed by being committed wholeheartedly and authentically to scientific activity.
(In Noone et al. 2008: 166)13

It seems there was a moment in which our scientists did indeed recognise the
autonomy of religious and scientific magisteria. That moment, though, was experi-
enced as part of full response to a life-time vocationa cultivated sense of calling
outto integrate the values of the momentarily separated magisteria and to cali-
brate the discoveries made as the magisteria were faithfully applied. NOMA does
not entail nor prefigure spirituality in Schneiders sense, but our scientists sense of
vocation to work where the magisteria overlapped lay at the heart of theirs. For a
while (indeed, for a few of our scientists, throughout their whole scientific careers),
Teilhard de Chardins Phenomenon of Man (1961) became inspirational, promising
what the integration and calibration might achieve in a scientific vocation. Jim
Bowler,14 in one of the Golden Years conversations recalled:
For me it was almost a life line. Here was an eminent palaeontologist of worldwide
reputation placing the whole drama of human life, human and non-human, into a
consistent scientific and religious synthesis. (In Noone et al. 106)

THE SURVIVAL OF CATHOLIC MYSTICS ON DOVER BEACH

The Newman Society flourished over several student generations, and some of the
signs of this flourishing are noted in the Introduction to this article. The Golden
Age (a play on the name of the chaplain) of the Apostolate was to pass,15 but the
Catholic this-worldly spirituality described is to be found, with variations, in many
different contextse.g. in the Basic Church Communities of Latin America. This
flourishing and transferability could be said to further disconfirm old secularisation
narratives, but that is not of concern here. What is of interest is to consider how
the community, expressing and maintaining its spirituality in generations of stu-
dents, remained vibrant for as long as it did.
Survival, let alone flourishing, should have been problematic if Taylors Anglo-
secular modernity had been fully realised in the University of Melbourne at the
time. The faith and the sense of self of individual students would have been under
constant and, for many, irresistible challenge. As Taylor has sketched, in a secular
context we might expect three inescapable pressures to have been part of the experi-
ence of any believer in a transcendent God who is also moving in history. One,
already alluded to, would have been the experience of any form of belief as
optional, which runs counter to the faiths exclusive option to respond ever more
deeply to the God who calls us out to personhood, again and again. Another would

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have been the pressure of authenticity: the pressure to be an authentic, mature self,
seeking autonomy and eschewing porosity. A third challenge is that of soteriology:
the maintenance of a vision and a relationship with a God who wills and creates for
our flourishing (a) when there is so much pain and suffering in the world and (b)
when many of the academic disciplines engaging students were predicated on the
supposition of empty time and space rather than a cosmos suffused with meaning
and grace. These challenges would be aggregated, and value added to them, in
encounters with thoroughly secular, but admired mentors in university, public and
private life.
For students, the experiences of faith as optional and faith as entailing regressive
porosity might have been expected to be particularly de-stabilising or even subver-
sive of faith and the sort of Catholic spirituality described here. Some of my friends
and acquaintances from Newman Society days could be taken as confirming this
expectation. In the seminars leading up to the production of The Golden Years,
there were many indications of dissent and departure from the beliefs and practices
of those years. But in all reported instances, those withdrawals took place long after
the Golden years experiences, and many of those who participated in the seminars
retain the spirituality of those years to this dayin some form or other. So, at the
University of Melbourne in the 1950s and 1960s, how was mystical belief and prac-
tice nurtured and maintained when many of the features and challenges of a secular
context, a la Taylor, were in place?
Part of the answer, I think, is suggested in the qualification in the question to
the term secular context. The University was secular according to criteria derived
from Taylor. But it was not experienced by us as monolithically or implacably or
aggressively secular. Rather, it was experienced as a variegated spacea Rationalist
Society and a few public atheists here, a very active Student Christian Movement
(SCM) and a few public believers therewhere we could pursue the conversations
essential to our faith, inside and beyond the community of faith. As a physical
place, after all, the northern boundary of the University was occupied by residential
colleges of the major Christian denominations, some with attached theology schools.
And the University was more to us than just a neutral terrain for debate and con-
versation. By the later 1950s at least, our predecessors in the Newman Society had
won recognition and respect for the intellectual achievements of Catholics in several
disciplines and as public intellectuals.16 So this was a place in which we could feel
we belonged.
More importantly, the University provided public space and time for these
debates and engagements. The secular University provided opportunity for the sym-
biotic conversations required for the development of a particular sort of theistic
faith. Some contributors to The Golden Years report that, as promising post-grads
or junior academics, they had encounters with secular seniors of the how could
you kind. But although remembered, such encounters seem not to have been trau-
matic and were uncommon. The Society itself, and some individual members, e.g.
Tony Coady (now Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and

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Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne), report more of a challenge and threat
to the spirituality described from conservative elements in the Catholic Church than
from the secular University.17
Another part of the answer lies in the sub-community that we maintained in
religious rituals, group meetings, conferences, dances and so on. The boundaries of
the community were quite loose, and intersection with other sub-communities and
the University itself high, but sustaining intra-communal social relations were dense.
Individuals and their spiritualities were constantly nourished in a community con-
stituted in the social life of the groups, conferences, dances and bush hikes on the
one hand, and collective liturgies and devotions on the other. The bonds formed in
intellectual exchanges were also strong. Although the designation of the community
as the intellectual Apostolate seemed too pompous and elitist to many participants,
there was serious reading and discussion in many of the groups of some of the new
theology in the lead up to Vatican II. Testimonies in The Golden Years recall the
excitement generated by the new ideas about the Church and the role of the laity,
and by new trends in theology. Intellectual excitement itself seems to have had a
hand in generating and sustaining community and social life. Jim Bowlers record
of the personal and shared impact of The Phenomenon of Man does not stand
alone.
A third part of the answer lies in the both and character of the spirituality nur-
tured in that sub-community. These justifications were often expressed in para-
doxes. There is the one noted by Taylor: that de-centring the self to aim beyond life
lends purpose and strength to projects for the flourishing of human life. Another
paradox is that fidelity to the Magisterium (the body of essential defined doctrines
of the Church) involved commitment to translation of its contents and reflexive
development of theology by lay people. The attempt to live these paradoxes gave us
a sense of adventure and mission. Negotiating paradox energised us. Further, our
spirituality inflected our experience such that differences between believers and
unbelievers were often (only notionally always) experienced as challenging stimuli,
not as a threat. Difference stirred the sense of mission.
Put together the inner dynamics of the Newman Society as a community, the
inner-worldly mysticism nurtured in that community, and the lenient secularity and
variegated composition of the University, and it seems plausible that a set of elective
affinities operated to sustain the Newman Society over several student generations.
Included in these affinities was a sort of virtuous circle of mutually influencing fac-
tors in which a stable, rewarding, low-boundary community nurtured a spirituality
of inner-worldly mysticism which, in turn, moved and motivated Catholic students
to engage fully in University life, secular elements and all. The University context,
its secular aspects included, provided both stimulus and opportunity for the engage-
ments that the young inner-worldly mystics sought. Then, in the reflexive discus-
sions and liturgical celebrations of the community, new discourse, insights and
challenges to faith brought from the University would (at times at least) inform and
energise the community.

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The dynamics of the virtuous circle sketched above were contingent, of course,
on a wide range of factors. These varied from vicissitudes in the personal lives of
lay leaders in the community18 to much broader demographic and cultural factors,
and developments in the Catholic Church in Australia and overseas. The Newman
Society flourished at a particular moment in the intersection of these factors. Only
a few aspects of this contextual moment can be mentioned here. To begin with,
there was movement in the Catholic Church. Worldwide, an outwardly stable insti-
tution was in a state of exemplary instability as theologians and a minority of
bishops (mainly European) surveyed the wreckage left by the Churchs accommoda-
tion of Fascism, the loss of the European working classes, the arcane, triumphal-
ist discourse of Catholic apologetics, and a pervasive clericalism that alienated an
increasingly well-educated laity.19 The period leading up to and including the Sec-
ond Vatican Councilthe years the Newman Society flourishedsaw a welter of
movements in the Church for reform of the liturgy, involvement of various catego-
ries of the laity (including students) in Catholic Action, theological renewal and
reform of Church governance. The common theme of these movements was
aggiornamento, the opening up to the modern world, but they also signalled an
opening up within the Church: that is, an opening up of opportunities for lay
experiments in new ways of being Church. Some of those experiments were aborted
or co-opted, where the old clericalism raised the bridges of the fortress Church.
Others proceeded in greater or lesser part because they were ably sheltered and
defended by chaplains and other sympathetic clergyas happened in the case of
the Newman Society.
In the Australian Church, little had changed over the preceding half-century
or more. There was turmoil surrounding Bob Santamaria and his Movement, with
its claim to be the central agency of lay Catholic Action under the control of the
bishops. But for a time, at least, much remained intact. Weekly attendance at
Mass hovered around seventy per cent (compared to about thirteen per cent
now), and there were still plenty of priests to go around. The system of Catholic
schools, run largely by religious brothers and nuns, educated the vast majority of
Catholic students to primary school level, and most Catholic youth in urban areas
who were going on to secondary education were able to attend Catholic colleges
and convents. Most of the (still small proportion) Catholic students who matricu-
lated to University were products of this system, and their involvement in the
Catholic world through family and schools appears to have been deep and
intense.20 And that is where the demographic factor becomes important. The
Catholic world was still largely an Irish Catholic world, and the Church still
loomed large, even among third- or fourth-generation IrishAustralians, because it
was the central institution involved in the settlement and eventual, slow, upward
mobility of Catholics.
The argument taking shape here is about coincidence. The Newman Society
prospered when an opportunity for young laity to experiment with new ways of
being faithful Catholics coincided with a significant proportion of young Catholic

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 Religion on Dover beach

matriculants being sufficiently motivated to seize the day. For students, immersion
and involvement in the old, intact Catholic world created the sentiments and
meansemotional, cognitive and socialto perceive and then embrace the oppor-
tunity to be in the front line of the creation of a new way of being Church. By
the later 1960s, that coincidence had passed. The passing has to do with another
complex of factors: the rapid disintegration of the old Catholic world, hastened by
the determinations of Vatican II; ethnic and class diversification of the Catholic
population; and, among youth, the colossal impact of global youth popular
culture.21
This brief rehearsal of contextual contingencies might seem to have pushed
aside, on a sort of Ockhams Razor principle, the previous primary argument about
the role of elective affinitiesbetween this-worldly mysticism, the congenial com-
munity in which that mystical sense of the relational self and the meaningful
cosmos was performed and reproduced, and the supposedly secular but variegated
Universityin the Newman Societys flourishing. However, the evidence of the tes-
timonies in Golden Years, and the rather profuse printed records of the Newman
Society, suggest otherwise. There is room in the evidence for another both and:
contextual contingencies and elective affinities worked together to provide what, in
retrospect, appears to have been a very special moment in the history of the Austra-
lian Catholic Church and Australian universities.

THREE REFLECTIONS
On the limitations of the case
That list of contingent factors operating at a particular moment over forty years ago
alerts us to several constraints on generalisation from it to any continuing elective
affinity linking this-worldly Catholic mysticism and secular contexts. There is no
consideration in this article of other supposedly secular contexts of that time or at
any other moment past or present. Universities themselves seem less encouraging of
extra-curricular conversations than they once were; the demographic profiles of stu-
dent populations are different, as are agecohort cultural and political experiences.
Mainstream churches, including the Catholic Church, loom, if the word is at all
appropriate, much smaller in the lives of the erstwhile faithful. Nonetheless, the bot-
h and spirituality survives as a competitor in the range of spiritualities found in
contemporary Catholicism, including Australian, although its carriers may be ageing
almost as fast as the clergy. There are no chances for a revival of anything like the
Newman Society in its Golden era. But the central elective affinity of inner-worldly
spirituality and variegated secularity is still to be foundin laicising, religion-based
social service NGOs; in the environmental, social justice and peace movements; and
perhaps even in the biographies of some politicians.22 So many possible instances of
the elective affinity come to mind when we are alerted to look for it that we must
ask: why dont we see it and know more about how it works in individual biogra-
phies and public life?

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On key concepts
One of the reasons for the invisibility of elective affinities between the secular and
the mystical is conceptual. It is hard to see out beyond the secular vs. mystical sen-
sibility dichotomy and beyond the old secularisation theory frame based on it. Such
a move, however, is necessary to appreciate the hybridisation of secularscientific
and mysticalreligious sensibilities at the individual and collective levels. Charles
Taylor has helped us see some outcomes of past hybridisation, far away from the
boundaries set by exclusive humanism and religious fundamentalism. But the case
study of the Newman Society, and latter-day instances suggesting continuing pro-
cesses of elective affinities of the secular and the mystical, might prompt us to look
for signs of mystical sensibility where our conceptual spectacles lead us to expect
only Dover Beach and processes of secularisation.
Two claims can be made, though admittedly more by assertion than consider-
ation of further evidence. First, secular contexts are as variegated as ever, and
inflected with discursive and practical heritage from varieties of inner-worldly mys-
ticism. Second, and conversely, inner-worldly mystical sensibilities continue to
develop in ways that can only be described in terms of cycles of secularisation and
re-sacralisation. This claim, of course, needs to be unpacked and supportedas it
can be, if a little thinly, from some of the autobiographical pieces in Golden Years.
But the further evidence and further challenge to conceptual dichotomies of
Taylors work (e.g. porous vs. bulwarked selves; secular mind-centred vs. enchanted
world view) must come from careful ethnographical inquiry into lived spiritualities.

On anthropology, religious mysticism, and the other

A contemporary anthropology of the religious other, as previously noted, seeks to
avoid objectifying the other and eschews the power that resides in the representa-
tion of the others beliefs and practices. More positively, this anthropology seeks
open conversational exchange between the anthropologist (whether of secular or
religious sensibility) and the religious other. In this quest for understanding, there
are some curious parallels and congruencies with the conjoined projects of inner-
worldly mystics, to develop the self (spiritual formation) and engage fully in the
secular world. These are worth consideration if only because they may point to ways
forward for a renovated anthropology of religion.
The inner-worldly mystics discussed here, and what we might call conversational
anthropologists, share at least three things. There is a common social psychology of
the relational self.23 This is based on the notion that the self is not a sort of poten-
tial, embedded and realisable in individual bodies, but that it is essentially rela-
tional, called out into being by others. It is conceived as always under construction
in selectively mimetic response, or rejection of response, to others. At any given
moment, the self is constituted by the history of response rejection. The mystic,
much in the manner articulated by Emmanuel Levinas (van Riessen 2007), adds in
a first calling into human being and selfhood from the Other, and a quest thereafter
to purify the self evolving in the interactions of everyday life according to the model

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of perfect relationality found in discovery of the Other.24 But this adding in does
not obviate the claim that some mystics and conversational anthropologists share a
common notion of a relational self.
A second common understanding builds on the first. It concerns the central role
of conversational exchange as the key to both self-understanding and understanding
of the otherthe latter and former being necessary conditions for one another. Per-
haps, a third commonality concerns the nature of those conversations: that they
should strive towards truth, conceived as self-giving or non-concealment.
Tentatively, I suggest that exploration of these congruencies might provide some
stimulating leads for a conversational anthropology of religions. The inner-worldly
mystics described here sought personal spiritual development through group reflec-
tions on the self-in-formation (and de-formation) in the relationships of everyday
life. These reflections were informed by group-assisted contemplation of the differ-
ence between the self being called out in those relationships and the self called out
by God in Jesus. At the same time, as we have seen, these mystics sought engage-
ment, enjoined by faith, in worlds of secular and religious others in open-ended
conversations. In the seminars of the Golden Years project, participants were able
to return to intra-community and outreach conversations and engagements to
reconstruct and remember both the community and the University as it had been.
And, unselfconsciously, we used the methodology of the group meetings to draw
out connections between ourselves then and now. For many, right from the begin-
ning, interest was more on the now, and the future, than the then. But the process
of re-construction of relational selves-in-formation in the Society and the University
seems to have produced remarkable insights into both those entities as experienced
social units.25
Therein is the basis for the suggestion about leads for anthropologists of reli-
gion. Both the form and content of the Societys model for the spiritual develop-
ment of the self in and through relationships may have something to offer to
anthropologists. Put most simply, the anthropologist might attempt to enter into
relationships with religious others in the same way as members of the Newman
Society tried to engage with one another to develop their spiritualities. Of course,
that is not simply doneit certainly did not come easily to members of the Society.
It involves the anthropologist putting herself on the line, initially to establish trust,
in some form of honest presentation of why she desires conversation. Trust, so the
Newman Society model suggests, might lead on to a series of conversational
exchanges in which anthropologist and the other(s) gradually open to scrutiny and
questioning of their different forms of engagement in a shared social world, and
their journeys in relational self-formation26 in worlds that may not be shared. In
the end, the record of conversations, including the anthropologists own revelations
of self in relational formation, will be the stuff of the anthropologists communica-
tion of the religious world to those outside.
The phrase conversational exchanges begs the question of content, only a little
answered by those other phrases engagement in a shared social world and

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journeys in relational self-formation. Again, following the Newman Society model,

we can go a little further. There might need to be some mutually agreed agenda for
some conversations so that they include the parties articulating what they see, par-
ticularly what they see as problematic in their shared social world, what judgements
they make about the situations they describe, and what, if anything, they feel called
on to do about those situations (that is, the See, Judge, Act agenda for Society
group meetings). The agenda would also include room for self-formation stories in
which successes and achievements would figure alongside regrets, disappointments
and expressions of loss or disillusionment. That might be difficult to realise, given
the inarticulateness in such matters on the part of some of us male Anglo social
scientists, and the proneness of some sorts of believers to formulaic expression (or
suppression) of deep personal emotion. But who ever thought a truly conversational
anthropology could be easy! It may indeed be so difficult to achieve in actual field-
work as to remain only an ideal to be devoutly pursued. Perhaps, a wise and prag-
matic anthropologist will agree with Eipper (1996) that anthropology is about
testimony and that, short of sharing journeys in selfhood, the more realisable goal
for anthropologists is to give honest and graphic testimony to the testimonies of
others and responses to those testimonies. That may fall short of the ideal proposed
here, but still advance understanding of the religious other.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This article developed and was several times extensively revised, in the course of dis-
cussions and conversations in the informal seminar which gave rise to this collec-
tion of articles. The author is grateful for the stimulation and encouragement given
by members of the group, several of whom have beliefs and views different from
his. In particular, the author wishes to acknowledge the comments, corrections and
suggestions made by Chris Eipper.

NOTES
1 Quoted by Charles Taylor (2007: 570).
2 See p. S24 for her new definition of secularisation.
3 See, though, in this collection, Chris Eippers critique of Taylors arguments against the
British sociologist Steve Bruces influential and sophisticated version of old secularisation
narrative and analysis.
4 Note that the secular inquirer is so designated by virtue of commitment to the secular
motivations, rules of evidence, and principles of interpretation and argument of an aca-
demic discipline. This commitment does not entail that the secular inquirer cannot also
be a religious believer.
5 In Taylors terminology, transcendental religion would be a redundancy since he
defines religion for his purposes in terms of transcendence. I use the phrase to indicate
that the form of religion referred to comprised a frame of perceptions and meanings,

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a sense of self, and notions of the good, grounded in belief in a transcendent God. In
earlier drafts of the article, I referred to this as mysticism, for easy contrast with secu-
larism and to indicate that belief refers to a sense of relationship to the Other, called
God. In my description of the spirituality of the Newman Society I have dropped the
descriptor mysticism, not least because the members of the group studied did not think
of themselves as mystics. But in analysis and interpretation I have found it convenient
to use Max Webers notion of inner-worldly mysticism.
6 Schneiders, following her general definition of spirituality, defines Catholic spirituality
as: the life of faith, hope and love within the community of the Church through which
we put on the mind of Christ by participating sacramentally and existentially in his pas-
chal mystery. The desired life-integration is personal transformation in Christ, which
implies participation in the transformation of the world in justice for all creatures
(Schneiders 2000: 6).
7 A spirituality involved in the life of faith in the Word of God made flesh (incarnate) in
Jesus Christi.e., identical with Schneiders notion of Catholic spirituality.
8 There are many other both ands that could be used to characterise our Apostolate spiri-
tuality more finely than I have done with my listing of four. One is that our spirituality
urged on us both fidelity to the Magisterium of Catholic church teaching, but also crea-
tivity in all things, including reflective theologising, since to be created in the image of
God the Creator implied the responsibility to be co-creators.
9 I have provided more chapter and verse in my contributions to Noone et al. (2008:
1004, 20511, 2459).
10 Herein there is a problem in analysis. It is subject to the criticisms made of the sort of
analysis Evans-Pritchard did so well when he drew out the logic of Azande and Nuer
beliefs. It is an ideal-typical description based on the claims and injunctions voiced in
the literature we produced for one another, but one that is too thinly informed by testi-
monies from groups or from individuals about how beliefs and orientations actually fig-
ured in our lives at the time. Nonetheless, personal memory and testimonies do temper
logic-seeking description and analysis.
11 Refers to one of the most frequently quoted New Testament passages in our talks, Gala-
tians 2: 20: I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ
lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God,
who loved me, and delivered Himself up for me.
12 B.A. Santamaria was the leader of The Movement, an organisation of Catholics which
sought to fight Communists in the Trade Unions in the middle decades of the twentieth
century. His Bombay Examiner article defended a notion of Catholic Action as militant
Catholic laity in the political arena under the direction of their bishops. Leaders of the
Newman Society formulated very different conceptions of Church and state in opposi-
tion to Santamaria and many Australian Catholic bishops (see Duncan 2001).
13 Lacey, in retrospect, is critical of what the group achieved: we didnt get much beyond
the rhetorical, and he goes on to discuss ambiguities in the positions taken back then.
He outlines his present position which accepts the scientific values of objectivity, neu-
trality and autonomy, but rejects what he calls the decontextualised approach in science
in which the phenomena studied are always to be dissociated from their human, social
and ecological contexts. Decontextualisation will be inappropriate in the investigation of
human agency, social relations and phenomena in ecological systems. He has been

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asking how to engage in science so as to further the values of the kingdom of God?
the latter as construed by some theologians of liberation. See Lacey (2005) for a fuller
exposition.
14 Jim Bowler, now a professorial associate in the School of Earth Sciences, University of
Melbourne, is a geomorphologist with a lifetime interest in the evolution of the Austra-
lian landscape.
15 One of the authors contributions to the Golden Years is an account and analysis of
decline (pp. 2459). See also Tony Coadys contribution (pp. 1236) where he outlines
some of the negatives of the Newman Society at the time. These and other contribu-
tions present necessary correctives to the idealistic portrait given here as a consequence
of the focus on the spirituality of the Society.
16 Included are Catholic academics, like the philosopher Max Charlesworth, who were
occasional speakers at Newman Society functions, but not active members in my time.
17 Coady refers, in particular, to the intense clericalism of the Catholic Church at the time.
Interestingly, apropos of this, he refers to reading a paper by Charles Taylor, written
in the early 1960s: I recall reading an excellent paper by the young Canadian Charles
Taylor which made a devastating critique of clericalism and the underlying contempt
of Gods creation that lay behind it (p. 125).
18 See McLaren (2009). Vincent Buckley, a lecturer, and later Professor of English at the
University of Melbourne, was a leader in the community for many years. His public cru-
sades and private life crises, all documented by McLaren, mediated the enormous intel-
lectual contribution he made to the articulation of the Apostolates inner-worldly
mysticism. Crisis and decline in the Apostolate was linked to, but by no means entirely
caused by, storms in and surrounding Buckley in his private and public life.
19 Many of us read Cardinal Suhard (Archbishop of Paris after World War II) surveying
the wreckage, and looking in hope to a renewed Church, as part of our induction into
the Newman Society. Another such reading, mentioned in many of the Golden Years
testimonies was Yves Congar (1957).
20 I have reported on the background experiences of a sample (N = 48) of those involved
in the Golden Years project in The Golden Years, 25259.
21 A somewhat similar complex of factors helps explain the decline in numbers and influ-
ence in University life of the SCM. See Howe (2009). This study helps dispel old images
of Australian society as thoroughly secular. It also points to a neglect of the religious
factor in Australian historiography.
22 This assertion is based on personal observation but may be buttressed by rare studies of
personnel in religiously based social service NGOs like Holden et al. (2008).
23 Taylor (1989) has elaborated this social psychology.
24 In the case of Trinitarian Christian mystics the model of perfect relationality is found in
the relationships between Jesus and the Father as expressed in the Holy Spirit. For this-
worldly Christian mystics, though the model can be described in these Biblical and creedal
terms, it can only be apprehended in the processes of spiritual formation, which includes
reflection on, and assessment of, the relationships of everyday life. See Alison (1998).
25 I cannot stress too much that the portrait of the Society presented here is idealised and
incomplete because of the focus on abstracting the spirituality fostered in it. The Golden
Years representations include references to the political conflicts, the patriarchal sexism,
the drunkenness, etc. that figured in the fuller, less analytically focused reality.

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26 Note that these journeys in the formation of the self may be described as spiritual
formation under Sandra Schneiders first general definition.

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