Tag Archives: New York Times

Finding Vivian Maier: Chicago Photographer Noticed Even in New York

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New York Times — March 27, 2014 — by Manohla Dargis

Finding Vivian Maier

Excerpts below — Read more at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/28/movies/finding-vivian-maier-explores-a-mysterious-photographer.html?rref=movies&_r=0

An exciting electric current of discovery runs through “Finding Vivian Maier,” a documentary about a street photographer who never exhibited her work. She scarcely shared it even with those who knew her. Then again, many of her acquaintances when she was taking some of her remarkable images, particularly in and around Chicago in the 1950s and ’60s, were the children she cared for while working as a nanny. Later in her life, some of those children took care of her in turn, first by moving her into an apartment and then the nursing home where she died in 2009. What rotten timing: She was on the verge of being discovered, first as a curiosity and then as a social-media sensation and a mystery.

 

Read more at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/28/movies/finding-vivian-maier-explores-a-mysterious-photographer.html?rref=movies&_r=0

 

Harvard PhD, New York Times journalist ridiculed for expressing creationist beliefs

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Harvard PhD, New York Times journalist ridiculed for expressing creationist beliefs

The Guardian: Andrew Brown’s Blog

Virginia Heffernan’s creationism is wrong but makes good sense

The tech writer understands that the biblical account is a story. It’s just one that she prefers over the stories told by science

God and Adam's hands about to touch in a detail from the Creation of Adam by Michaelangelo

‘In popular culture, arguments about evolution are not clashes of facts against stories. They are the clash of two competing stories.’ Photograph: World Films Enterprises/Corbis

A US writer, Virginia Heffernan, has just outed herself as a creationist. As she is currently earning a living writing on technology for Yahoo! News, this is a brave thing to do and has been greeted with obloquy, bemusement, and patronising explanations about the difference between facts and stories. Now of course evolution is true. Evolution is a fact: it happens. It’s also a predictive theory: it explains why things happen and have happened in ways that allow us to find out more about the world. It is something that I find fascinating, but there are lots of things that fascinate me, from fly fishing to philosophy, which I don’t expect the rest of the world to take an interest in.

In that respect, evolution is different. It has come to mean an explanation for everything, including all sorts of questions which were once, and rightly, treated as philosophical or ethical. Even more, it has come to be taken up as a banner in the American culture wars. In that context it is unattractive. If you want to know why an educated American might decide evolution is untrue, spend some time at the website Why evolution is true, run by the Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne. The science there is great, but the tone of voice is something else: hectoring arrogant mansplaining with sputtering outbursts of extraordinary viciousness. If you don’t much care whether the science is true, this would convince you that there must be something wrong with it.

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Read more at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2013/jul/18/virginia-heffernan-creationism-nothing-wrong

NYT: Did Religious Liberalism Win the Culture War?

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NYT: Did Religious Liberalism Win the Culture War?

A Religious Legacy, With Its Leftward Tilt, Is Reconsidered

By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER  —  Published: July 23, 2013

For decades the dominant story of postwar American religious history has been the triumph of evangelical Christians. Beginning in the 1940s, the story goes, a rising tide of evangelicals began asserting their power and identity, ultimately routing their more liberal mainline Protestant counterparts in the pews, on the offering plate and at the ballot box.

But now a growing cadre of historians of religion are reconsidering the legacy of those faded establishment Methodists, Presbyterians and Episcopalians, tracing their enduring influence on the movements for human rights and racial justice, the growing “spiritual but not religious” demographic and even the shaded moral realism of Barack Obama — a liberal Protestant par excellence, some of these academics say.

After decades of work bringing evangelicals, Mormonsand other long-neglected religious groups into the broader picture, these scholars contend, the historical profession is overdue for a “mainline moment.”

As one commenter put it on the blog Religion in American History, “It’s heartening that dead, white, powerful Protestants are getting another look.”

In the last year, some half-dozen books on the subject have been published; Princeton and Yale have held conferences dedicated to religious liberalism, and the recent annual meetings of the American Historical Association and the American Academy of Religion included panel discussions on the topic.

“We now have quite a lot of good stuff on evangelical Protestantism,” said David A. Hollinger, an intellectual historian at the University of California, Berkeley, who delivered a provocative presidential address to the Organization of American Historians in 2011, defending the legacy of what he called ecumenical Protestantism.

“But we ought to be studying the evangelicals,” Mr. Holligner added, in “relation to the people they hated.”

Hated is certainly the word, and the feeling went both ways. In a 1926 editorial on the Scopes trial, TheChristian Century, the de facto house magazine of mainline Protestantism, dismissed fundamentalism as “an event now passed,” a momentary diversion along the march to modern, rational faith.

But by the 1940s evangelicals were mobilizing against the United Nations and other causes endorsed by mainline leaders, many of whom were later denounced as Communists in Christianity Today, the magazine founded in 1956 by the Rev. Billy Graham. The Century shot back, running editorials denouncing Mr. Graham as a Madison Avenue-style huckster leading a “monstrous juggernaut” that threatened to “set back Protestant Christianity a half-century.”

Mr. Graham’s magazine won the immediate battle for readers, surging past The Century in circulation within a year — a sign, Elesha J. Coffman argues in her new book, “The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline,” that The Century’s editors, mostly trained at the same elite institutions, were never as representative of the Protestant majority as they claimed to be.

But other scholars take a markedly different view. In “After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History,” published in April by Princeton University Press, Mr. Hollinger argues that the mainline won a broader cultural victory that historians have underestimated. Liberals, he maintains, may have lost Protestantism, but they won the country, establishing ecumenicalism, cosmopolitanism and tolerance as the dominant American creed.

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Read more at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/24/books/a-religious-legacy-with-its-leftward-tilt-is-reconsidered.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

Black Swan Books – NYT

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Black Swan Books – NYT

 

The Rail Bookshelf: ‘One Book at a Time’

By JULIE JUNE STEWART –  May 29, 2013, 5:48 am
Michael Courtney, 63, owner of Black Swan Books in Lexington, Ky., has led a life of books.Julie June StewartMichael Courtney, 63, owner of Black Swan Books in Lexington, Ky., has led a life of books.
Offerings at Black Swan Books, which is near the University of Kentucky and Keeneland Racecourse.Julie June StewartOfferings at Black Swan Books, which is near the University of Kentucky and Keeneland Racecourse.

After the hubbub and sensory overload of the Kentucky Derby, I always take a few days to explore Lexington, Ky. These are peaceful days. I usually visit the Keeneland Library researching topics for future stories. But there are so many books, and so little time. This year, I decided to check out Lexington’s award-winning used book store, Black Swan Books.

I have been a fan of bookstores since I was a child. My senses heighten as I wander up and down the rows of books as I seek treasures. I instantly perked up when I walked in the door. The building that houses the Black Swan was built in 1912, and it used to be a plumbing store with the showcase up front and the living quarters in the back. This produces a lovely meandering path as you wander from room to room and into the comfortable back room with a fireplace. Almost everything in the building is original.

The proprietor Michael Courtney, 63, has led a life of books. As a child, he loved the British author G.A. Henty’s historical adventure stories. At the University of Kentucky, which is just around the corner, he earned his Masters in library science, specializing in rare books. He worked in the UK Special collections as the curator of the Hillbrook political memorabilia collection. At the age of 34, he opened Black Swan Books and said that he built the bookstore “one book at a time.”

The Black Swan specializes in Kentucky authors, military history, literature and cookbooks. You know the kind; those fabulous old Southern cookbooks that are worn and notated. And of course, he has books covering all aspects of horse racing. No westerns (except maybe Zane Grey), popular fiction or romance novels to be found here, but if rare and collectible books or something special in a leather binding is your quest, this is the place for you.

Courtney escorted me back to the rare book collection, which featured a nice selection of horse books. The walkways were adorned with sturdy boxes holding Courtney’s recent purchase of 850 volumes of 20th century books by women poets. I asked him if he had the turf writer Joe Palmers (1904-1952) book “This Was Racing,” which I was hoping to purchase as I had given my copy away as a gift. I smiled because Courtney knew instantly what I was looking for. “Yes,” he said, “unfortunately it is sitting in a box on my counter waiting to be shipped to Great Britain.”

Many of Courtney’s customers are from all over the world. Out of town customers flood his store during the Keeneland meet, the local horse sales and Derby week. They are usually looking for books about thoroughbred breeding or Stud Books to complete their collections. Frederico Tesio and Ken McLean books are very popular. Many people purchase books from Walter Farley’s Black Stallion series for their kids or because they read them in their childhood and are completing their set.

Courtney’s oldest book in his store right now is a 1618 book of religious sermons in English. One of his most exciting books was a copy of John Filson’s 1784 “The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucke” of which there are only 12 known copies.

The Black Swan is a one-man operation. People bring Courtney books every day looking to sell or trade.

“Some days that’s all I do all day long is look at books,” he said. “The basement is full, the building next door is full, and all the boxes on the floor are full. I can’t afford help anymore, it’s just me.”

I spent hours carefully going through the horse books and finally honed my selections down to 14 volumes. Many of the books are pristine and autographed enhancing their provenance with the mementos of previous owners. Courtney has wrapped the hardbacks individually in clear jacket book covers.

The last book he read was Frank Case’s “Tales of a Wayward Inn” about the history of the Algonquin hotel in New York, which Case owned. I asked him if there was a special book he was looking for. He responded, “There are lots of books I would love to have personally, but is there a one book that people are looking for? Not really because everything eventually shows up here at some point.” He did pause when I asked him how he felt when he was holding a book in his hands. “That is not a fair question,” he said. “I am probably more attuned to books than most people. It doesn’t matter whether it is good or bad. Notably it’s more than an object.”

Courtney has embraced modern technology. He has a Web site and a Facebook page in which he announces his latest purchases or coming poetry readings. He says Facebook is how he reaches out to the college crowd. “The point is once you get the young people in the door, then a lot of them are mesmerized,” he said. “Plus a lot of them have never seen a real book store, and they come back.”

We talked about the plight of books. Many older books have lost their audience. They are not published in electronic versions to be read on a Kindle. He has to turn away a lot of books because there is no market for them. He explained to me that many books donated to second hand stores are simply shipped away to be pulped. “They do not deserve to be pulped because we are losing information. In the “information world”, we are losing information and that is sad.”

About a week after I returned home, a box arrived from Black Swan Books. Inside was each of my purchased horse books neatly wrapped in brown butcher paper, each protected in their jacket cover. I am a patient woman. I know that I could easily find my Joe Palmer book on Amazon. But I would rather let Michael Courtney find it for me, a man who is sharing his love of books with the world, one book at a time.

In a bucket-list moment, Julie June Stewart bought a ticket to the 2008 Belmont. She hasn’t stopped going to the races since. That is when she isn’t taking on a wildfire, hurricane, volcano or oil spill as the nation’s leading expert in disaster airspace coordination. She recently won third place in the 2012 Thoroughbred Times fiction contest with her suicide prevention story “Moses Finds A Jockey.”

Physics Envy – NYT Op-Ed

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Physics Envy – NYT Op-Ed

Heroes of Uncertainty

By  —  Published: May 27, 2013

We’re living in an empirical age. The most impressive intellectual feats have been achieved by physicists and biologists, and these fields have established a distinctive model of credibility.

To be an authoritative figure, you want to be coolly scientific. You want to possess an arcane body of technical expertise. You want your mind to be a neutral instrument capable of processing complex quantifiable data.

The people in the human sciences have tried to piggyback on this authority model. For example, the American Psychiatric Association has just released the fifth edition of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders. It is the basic handbook of the field. It defines the known mental diseases. It creates stable standards, so that insurance companies can recognize various diagnoses and be comfortable with the medications prescribed to treat them.

The recent editions of this manual exude an impressive aura of scientific authority. They treat mental diseases like diseases of the heart and liver. They leave the impression that you should go to your psychiatrist because she has a vast body of technical knowledge that will allow her to solve your problems. With their austere neutrality, they leave a distinct impression: Psychiatrists are methodically treating symptoms, not people.

The problem is that the behavorial sciences like psychiatry are not really sciences; they are semi-sciences. The underlying reality they describe is just not as regularized as the underlying reality of, say, a solar system.

As the handbook’s many critics have noted, psychiatrists use terms like “mental disorder” and “normal behavior,” but there is no agreement on what these concepts mean. When you look at the definitions psychiatrists habitually use to define various ailments, you see that they contain vague words that wouldn’t pass muster in any actual scientific analysis: “excessive,” “binge,” “anxious.”

Mental diseases are not really understood the way, say, liver diseases are understood, as a pathology of the body and its tissues and cells. Researchers understand the underlying structure of very few mental ailments. What psychiatrists call a disease is usually just a label for a group of symptoms. As the eminent psychiatrist Allen Frances writes in his book, “Saving Normal,” a word like schizophrenia is a useful construct, not a disease: “It is a description of a particular set of psychiatric problems, not an explanation of their cause.”

Furthermore, psychiatric phenomena are notoriously protean in nature. Medicines seem to work but then stop. Because the mind is an irregular cosmos, psychiatry hasn’t been able to make the rapid progress that has become normal in physics and biology. As Martin Seligman, a past president of the American Psychological Association, put it in The Washington Post early this year, “I have found that drugs and therapy offer disappointingly little additional help for the mentally ill than they did 25 years ago — despite billions of dollars in funding.”

All of this is not to damn people in the mental health fields. On the contrary, they are heroes who alleviate the most elusive of all suffering, even though they are overmatched by the complexity and variability of the problems that confront them. I just wish they would portray themselves as they really are. Psychiatrists are not heroes of science. They are heroes of uncertainty, using improvisation, knowledge and artistry to improve people’s lives.

The field of psychiatry is better in practice than it is in theory. The best psychiatrists are not austerely technical, like the official handbook’s approach; they combine technical expertise with personal knowledge. They are daring adapters, perpetually adjusting in ways more imaginative than scientific rigor.

The best psychiatrists are not coming up with abstract rules that homogenize treatments. They are combining an awareness of common patterns with an acute attention to the specific circumstances of a unique human being. They certainly are not inventing new diseases in order to medicalize the moderate ailments of the worried well.

If the authors of the psychiatry manual want to invent a new disease, they should put Physics Envy in their handbook. The desire to be more like the hard sciences has distorted economics, education, political science, psychiatry and other behavioral fields. It’s led practitioners to claim more knowledge than they can possibly have. It’s devalued a certain sort of hybrid mentality that is better suited to these realms, the mentality that has one foot in the world of science and one in the liberal arts, that involves bringing multiple vantage points to human behavior. Hippocrates once observed, “It’s more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a person has.” That’s certainly true in the behavioral sciences and in policy making generally, though these days it is often a neglected truth.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on May 28, 2013, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Heroes Of Uncertainty.

Death of Blogs? Maybe Not!

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Death of Blogs? Maybe Not!

A List of Worthwhile Blogs Occasioned by NYT-Reported Demise of Blogging

There’s been a lot of chatter about The Death of Blogs the last few days, among media both mainstream and conservative, prompted in part by the New York Times‘ decision to shutter a few of its own. Marc Tracy, writing at the New Republic, bemoans the replacement of thoughtful blogging by an “endless stream of isolated dollops of news”:

Smaller brands within brands, be they rubrics like “Media Decoder” or personalities like “Ben Smith,” make increasingly little sense in a landscape where writers can cultivate their own, highly discriminating followings via social media like Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter, while readers can curate their own, highly discriminating feeds. In this world, there is no place for the blog, because to do anything other than put “All Media News In One Place” is incredibly inefficient.

Andrew Sullivan and Ann Althouse are skeptical. The cover story in the Columbia Journalism Review touches on similar themes, but with conclusions that it seems to me bloggers should be somewhat heartened by, especially the idea that “many young consumers prefer to have their news filtered by an individual or a publication with a personality rather than by a traffic-seeking robot or algorithm.”

Truth be told, I don’t have much time for the conservative blogosphere for the simple reason that there isn’t much personality. So much of it is just repetitive outrage about Obama appointees or Brett Kimberlin’s criminal record that it’s not really a useful way to keep yourself informed. I usually stick to Ace of Spades, Outside the Beltway, RedState, and the Gateway Pundit for up to date right-of-center news. The conservative blogosphere’s alleged decline strikes me as a mixed blessing at worst, if it’s even true, since the best blogs, the above included, will keep their readers and even gain more as the lower-quality ones drop off. Regardless, there are underappreciated gems and they deserve to be encouraged, so in the interest of doing so, here are a few that have kept me coming back. They range widely in ideological orientation, posting frequency, popularity, and in pretty much every other way, but I’ve tried to stick to ones you might not have heard of:

Against Crony Capitalism — What it sounds like
Booker Rising — A blogospheric home for black moderates and conservatives
A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days (Pejman Yousefzadeh) — Foreign policy and politics
Garvey’s Ghost — A Garveyite’s perspective on politics
Gucci Little Piggy — Social science commentary
The Hipster Conservative — Religion, politics, and philosophy for conservative hipsters
Iowahawk (David Burge) — Some of the best political humor on the web
Jesus Radicals — Theology from the radical left
L’Hote (Freddie DeBoer) — Left-wing contrarianism
Naked DC — Insider-y political commentary
Notes on Liberty — A solid libertarian group blog
Pinstripe Pulpit (Alan Cornett) — Religious and sartorial matters from a former assistant of the late Russell Kirk
Prez16 (Christian Heinze) — Clever, digestible political commentary
The Rancid Honeytrap — Commentary from the left
Ribbon Farm (Venkatesh Rao) — Economics and social commentary
Rorate Caeli — Traditional Catholicism
Slouching Towards Columbia (Dan Trombly) — Liberal realist foreign policy
The Trad — Culture and style for trads
Turnabout — Jim Kalb’s commentary
United Liberty — Another solid libertarian group blog, frequently updated, and great for breaking news

In the future, I’ll try to do a better job engaging with some of these folks. And if you have more to recommend, leave ‘em in the comments.

Controversy Over Herod Exhibit – NYT

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Controversy Over Herod Exhibit – YT

Anger That a Herod Show Uses West Bank Objects

Jim Hollander/European Pressphoto Agency

The exhibition “Herod the Great: The King’s Final Journey” includes a reconstruction of his tomb, with his sarcophagus, center.

By 
Published: February 13, 2013

JERUSALEM — In one room sits a sarcophagus of reddish-pink limestone believed to have held the body of King Herod, painstakingly reconstructed after having been smashed to bits centuries ago. In another, there are frescoes from Herod’s elaborate underground palace, pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle. Throughout, elaborate animated videos show the king’s audacious construction — atop the desert fortress Masada; at his burial place, Herodium; and his most famous work, the Second Temple of Jerusalem.

The Israel Museum on Tuesday opened its most ambitious archaeological exhibition and the world’s first devoted to Herod, the lionized and demonized Rome-appointed king of Judea, who reigned from 37 to 4 B.C.E. and is among the most seminal and contentious figures in Jewish history. But the exhibition, which the museum director described as a “massive enterprise” that involved sifting through 30 tons of material from Herodium and reconstructing 250 artifacts, has also brought its own bit of controversy.

The Palestinian Authority says the exhibition is a violation of international law because much of its material was taken from near Bethlehem and Jericho, both in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. An Israeli group of archaeologists and activists complains that the museum, however unwittingly, is helping the Jewish settlement movement advance its contention that the West Bank should be part of Israel and not a Palestinian state.

“What the Israel Museum is doing is like coming and saying, ‘Listen, the heritage of the West Bank is part of our heritage first of all,’ ” said Yonathan Mizrachi, an archaeologist who helped found the Israeli group, Emek Shaveh, in 2009. “It’s part of the idea to create the narrative that those sites, no matter what the political solution,” are “part of the Israeli identity.”

James S. Snyder, the director of the museum, dismissed such criticism as propaganda and political opportunism. The Oslo Accords signed by the Israelis and Palestinians in the 1990s provide for Israeli involvement in archaeology in the territories until the resolution of the overall conflict, and Mr. Snyder said that at the end of the exhibition, the museum plans to return the artifacts to the West Bank, to Israel’s civil administration, which he said would arrange for their return to the sites from which they were taken or to store the material until “the site can be prepared for its care and/or display.” He noted that the museum had spent a “huge” sum — he would not specify how much — to restore and make available for public consumption artifacts that might otherwise have been lost, like many of the antiquities in Iraq and Egypt.

“We’re not about geopolitics, we’re not about minefields, we’re about trying to do the best and the right thing for the long term for material cultural heritage,” Mr. Snyder said. “Our goal was to invest in the preservation of this material and return it to the sites. We are but custodians, and we are always ready for it to be where it belongs.”

But Hamdan Taha, director of the Palestinian Authority’s department of antiquities and cultural heritage, said that while Oslo provides for Israel’s excavation in the West Bank, exhibiting the material was another story. He complained that the Palestinians were never consulted about the project, which he called “an aggression against Palestinian cultural rights in their own land,” and said it would “not help to reconstruct peace between the Palestinians and Israel.”

The exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Ehud Netzer, a Hebrew University archaeologist who spent 40 years searching for Herod’s burial place before discovering it in 2007 at Herodium. He died after being injured in a fall at the site in 2010. The tholos, a circular set of columns that topped the tomb, is partly rebuilt in the exhibition, along with the sarcophagus said to be that of Herod and two others.

The many rooms are filled with pottery, coins, busts and frescoes that illustrate the legend of Herod. The king has been admired by historians for his remarkable buildings, but condemned for the murder of his wife and children, among many others. His Judaism was questioned, and he was often denounced as a puppet of Rome, an image the exhibition does little to defy as it explores his relationships with Antony and Cleopatra, Augustus and Marcus Agrippa.

Shmuel Browns, a tour guide and expert on Herodium who helped Netzer excavate the site as a volunteer, said he was awed by the meticulous reconstruction, particularly of a large basin adorned with several heads that was found in pieces in two disparate places at the site, now an Israeli national park.

“They’ve built things from what was found that you could never imagine from what you saw at the site,” Mr. Browns said. “The message is very, very strong about who Herod is and what he did. He wasn’t intimidated by topography, he wasn’t intimidated by material, he wasn’t intimidated by lack of water.

“He’s a fascinating character,” Mr. Browns added. “He just got very, very bad press.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 15, 2013

An article on Thursday about the Israel Museum’s new archeological exhibition devoted to King Herod and the controversy generated because many artifacts were taken from West Bank territories occupied by Israel since 1967 referred incompletely to plans for returning the items. The Oslo Accords signed by the Israelis and Palestinians in the 1990s provide for Israeli involvement in archaeology in the territories until the resolution of the overall conflict, and the museum director, James S. Snyder, said that at the end of the exhibition, it plans to return the artifacts to the West Bank, to Israel’s civil administration, which he said would arrange for their return to the sites from which they were taken or store the material until “the site can be prepared for its care and/or display.” There are no plans to hand the items over to the Palestinians at the end of the exhibition.

A version of this article appeared in print on February 14, 2013, on page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Anger That a Herod Show Uses West Bank Objects.

Why Church Is Good For You

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Why Church Is Good For You

New York Times op-ed on Benefits of Going to Church

OP-ED GUEST COLUMNIST

The Benefits of Church

Andrea Kalfas

<nyt_byline>T. M. LUHRMANN

Published: April 20, 2013 167 Comments
  • ONE of the most striking scientific discoveries about religion in recent years is that going to church weekly is good for you. Religious attendance — at least, religiosity — boosts the immune system and decreases blood pressure. It may add as much as two to three years to your life. The reason for this is not entirely clear.

T. M. Luhrmann

Social support is no doubt part of the story. At the evangelical churches I’ve studied as an anthropologist, people really did seem to look out for one another. They showed up with dinner when friends were sick and sat to talk with them when they were unhappy. The help was sometimes surprisingly concrete. Perhaps a third of the church members belonged to small groups that met weekly to talk about the Bible and their lives. One evening, a young woman in a group I joined began to cry. Her dentist had told her that she needed a $1,500 procedure, and she didn’t have the money. To my amazement, our small group — most of them students — simply covered the cost, by anonymous donation. A study conducted in North Carolina found that frequent churchgoers had larger social networks, with more contact with, more affection for, and more kinds of social support from those people than their unchurched counterparts. And we know that social support is directly tied to better health.

Healthy behavior is no doubt another part. Certainly many churchgoers struggle with behaviors they would like to change, but on average, regular church attendees drink less, smoke less, use fewer recreational drugs and are less sexually promiscuous than others.

That tallies with my own observations. At a church I studied in Southern California, the standard conversion story seemed to tell of finding God and never taking methamphetamine again. (One woman told me that while cooking her dose, she set off an explosion in her father’s apartment and blew out his sliding glass doors. She said to me, “I knew that God was trying to tell me I was going the wrong way.”) In my next church, I remember sitting in a house group listening to a woman talk about an addiction she could not break. I assumed that she was talking about her own struggle with methamphetamine. It turned out that she thought she read too many novels.

Yet I think there may be another factor. Any faith demands that you experience the world as more than just what is material and observable. This does not mean that God is imaginary, but that because God is immaterial, those of faith must use their imaginations to represent God. To know God in an evangelical church, you must experience what can only be imagined as real, and you must also experience it as good.

I want to suggest that this is a skill and that it can be learned. We can call it absorption: the capacity to be caught up in your imagination, in a way you enjoy. What I saw in church as an anthropological observer was that people were encouraged to listen to God in their minds, but only to pay attention to mental experiences that were in accord with what they took to be God’s character, which they took to be good. I saw that people were able to learn to experience God in this way, and that those who were able to experience a loving God vividly were healthier — at least, as judged by a standardized psychiatric scale. Increasingly, other studies bear out this observation that the capacity to imagine a loving God vividly leads to better health.

For example, in one study, when God was experienced as remote or not loving, the more someone prayed, the more psychiatric distress she seemed to have; when God was experienced as close and intimate, the more someone prayed, the less ill he was. In another study, at a private Christian college in Southern California, the positive quality of an attachment to God significantly decreased stress and did so more effectively than the quality of the person’s relationships with other people.

Eventually, this may teach us how to harness the “placebo” effect — a terrible word, because it suggests an absence of intervention rather than the presence of a healing mechanism that depends neither on pharmaceuticals nor on surgery. We do not understand the placebo effect, but we know it is real. That is, we have increasingly better evidence that what anthropologists would call “symbolic healing” has real physical effects on the body. At the heart of some of these mysterious effects may be the capacity to trust that what can only be imagined may be real, and be good.

But not everyone benefits from symbolic healing. Earlier this month, the youngest son of the famed pastor Rick Warren took his own life. We know few details, but the loss reminds us that to feel despair when you want to feel God’s love can worsen the sense of alienation. We urgently need more research on the relationship between mental illness and religion, not only so that we understand that relationship more intimately — the ways in which they are linked and different — but to lower the shame for those who are religious and nonetheless need to reach out for other care.

<nyt_author_id>

T. M. Luhrmann, a professor of anthropology at Stanford and the author of “When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God,” is a guest columnist.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on April 21, 2013, on page SR9 of the New York edition with the headline: The Benefits Of Church.