Where but at the University of Chicago could a theologian have "find a religious commitment" at the top of his to-do list?
It is not that Dan Arnold hasn't been looking. He and his wife belong to a Mennonite group that gathers weekly for a potluck supper and hymn singing in Hyde Park, a longtime home for freethinkers of all stripes. He was confirmed as an Episcopalian and, since his college days, has been fascinated by the faiths and philosophies of Asia.
But "if asked to list my religion, I wouldn't say Buddhist," Arnold said. "I'd say `none.'"
In his career Arnold has wrestled with perhaps the most fundamental religious question: how to understand the existence of evil in a universe presumably governed by some principle or power of good. It also was posed to him in undeniable form when two loved ones were senselessly murdered.
Now, he has won a coveted prize from the American Academy of Religion for the year's best book on the subject. The judges said of "Buddhists, Brahmins, and Belief," Arnold's first book: "It reminds us that our most timely conversations often have counterparts in religions and cultures seemingly far afield from our own."
Arnold will receive his award at the group's convention Saturday. He shares this year's award with two other professors, one of whom is a U. of C. colleague, Jonathan Smith, who won for a collection of essays written over two decades titled "Relating Religion."
The American Academy of Religion, a learned society founded in 1909, includes 10,000 faculty members at universities and seminaries.
Arnold's book was cited for its "exceptionally sophisticated style," though that may be more apparent to other academics than to lay readers. The book opens with the observation: "The cardinal Buddhist tenet of anatmavada (selflessness)--the claim that `persons' are causally continuous series of events, not enduring substances--is, as Buddhists recognized, profoundly counterintuitive."
Roughly, that translates as: Buddhism has an answer to life's dilemmas, but on first blush it doesn't make sense, even to Buddhists.
People who find it tough to get their arms around that proposition may take solace in the fact that it took a while for Arnold, too. He grew up in Denver, where his father was a history professor and the family went to an Episcopalian church because it was the closest. As undergraduate at Carleton College, he went on a Tibetan study program to India and Nepal.
After enrolling as a graduate student in history at Columbia University, he found himself registering for religious studies courses. "It took a while to find that I had an interest in epistemology," said Arnold, 41.
That is the branch of philosophy concerned with questions of knowledge. How do we know? What are the sources, and the limits, of human knowledge?
"Indian texts and Western thought, like analytic philosophy, are similar, I found," said Arnold. "Both traditions can be studied in conversation with each other."
He did just that, but not in a university library. After dropping out of graduate school, he went back to Denver and got a job at local intellectual landmark, the Tattered Cover Book Store.
"I spent five years reading philosophy books," Arnold said. "I got a lot of education there."
Eventually, he formalized his training, enrolling in the Divinity School of the U. of C., where he earned a doctorate in 2002 and now teaches courses in the philosophy of religion. Along the way, life presented him with a theological issue in a more compelling way than any book could.
Shortly after Arnold and his wife met, her parents were murdered. Not by some stranger, but by an orphan they had raised from infancy. They were Mennonites, for whom the love of Christ means an unbending rejection of an eye-for-an-eye philosophy--two pacifists who couldn't escape a violent world.
"How can things like that happen?" Arnold said. "The question is the same for most everything we do and undergo in life."
The impulse toward religion has a lot to do with death, he said. "What do we do with our understanding of our precariousness?"
Buddhists note that people assume life has goals and that, by purpose and drive, we can be winners. Yet those very assumptions alienate us from ourselves, condemning us to frustration.
"We never reach the end zone and spike the football," Arnold said.
The solution is to realize that life isn't a gridiron, he added. There are no yard-line markers. We ourselves are but temporary accumulations of matter.
"There is no unchanging essence of `you,'" Arnold said. "Death, the dear one that is gone, was never real."
Westerners often assume that Indian thought deals with death and loss by the concept of reincarnation--we get a chance to make up for life's disappointments in a kind of rerun. In fact, he noted, reincarnation is a burden in Eastern eyes. It means more suffering until we get it right, realize the futility and enjoy the peace of psychological extinction.
For all the philosophical coherence of that view, Arnold said he would choose another theological route, should he get the impulse.
Perhaps it's all those potluck suppers, the singing, the blessings before the meal. Or, maybe, the way his wife's family held to faith and to a resolve to working for social justice, despite all adversity.
"If I could reach a point of commitment," Arnold said, "it would be a Mennonite one."
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rgrossman@tribune.com
