Do you believe in God? Nine out of ten Americans unhesitatingly answer yes. But for Douglas Porpora, the real questions begin where pollsters leave off. What, he asks, does religious belief actually mean in our lives? Does it shape our identities and our actions? Or, despite our professions of faith, are we morally adrift?
Landscapes of the Soul paints a disturbing picture of American spiritual life. In his search for answers to his questions, Porpora interviewed clerks and executives, Jews, evangelical Christians, Buddhists, Taoists, and even followers of Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh. He asked them about God, and about what they saw as their own place in the universe. What he found was a widespread inability to articulate any grand meaning of life. We lack heroes to inspire us. We lack a sense of calling, of transcendent purpose in our existence. Many of us seem incapable of caring deeply about the suffering of others. Our society is permeated with moral indifference. Yes, we are a believing people, but God is often a distant abstraction and rarely an emotional presence in our lives. Only such an emotional connection, Porpora argues, can be the basis of a genuine moral vision.
Our emotional estrangement from God and the sacred keeps us from caring about social justice, keeps us from wanting to change the world, keeps us enclosed in our own private worlds. Landscapes of the Soul is a passionate call to broaden our spiritual and moral horizons, to raise our eyes to the greater reality that unites us all.
"The meaning of life for me is just to enjoy myself." "It's all relative to your point of view." The rootless sentiments of today's college students are the springboard for Douglas V. Porpora's impassioned defense of the importance of moral foundations.
Landscapes of the Soul is a cri de coeur from a self-identified left-wing "campus radical" who finds common cause with cultural conservatives like Allan Bloom because they share a belief that moral truths are real and independent of our varied perspectives. But Porpora thinks that the central problem is not skepticism, but rather a basic lack of interest in "cosmic meaning." The problem isn't that we don't believe in God; it's that we just don't care.
Porpora goes into the fabric of American culture, interviewing Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Buddhists, urbanites and rural folks, atheists and New Agers, and drawing from a variety of ages, races, and levels of education. He argues that no matter what your "point of view," the modern landscape of American morality is bleak, impoverished by the thin soil of a relativism that is as vacuous as it is pervasive. Porpora's remedy is a reorientation that is infused with spiritual meaning. He wants us to return to a way of being that asks incessantly: "Is there a human destiny we were meant to fulfill?" --Eric de Place
