The Secular Mind.

Robert Coles, The Secular Mind. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999. 189pp. $19.95 (cloth).

Coles, one of the best story-tellers in social science, begins by telling us that some four decades ago when he was a resident in child psychiatry at the Children's Hospital in Boston he found himself "wanting to be a part of a seminar given by Paul Tillich" at Harvard. Each week and at key points of the discussion, he says, Tillich would refer to "the secular mind." But Tillich showed no strong interest in defining the word he inevitably used to characterize the cluster of barriers we had to penetrate if we were ever to get to the bottom of what really mattered. When Coles, seeking precision, stayed after class to question his renowned teacher, he left with deeper surmises rather than with clearer answers.

The "secular," Coles still pondering recalls, had something to do with the "distinction he wanted to make between Man the thinking materialist and Man the anxiously aspiring creator who bows his head and prays...." Later, especially in conversations with Dorothy Day (he dedicates the book to her and Tillich), again surmising when Day brings him from definitional surfaces to spiritual depth, Coles tells us he came to conclude that, parallel to a scientific and economic materialism, there can be something like a "religious materialism" which describes what happens, all too often, when the search for ultimate meaning stalls at a self-satisfying reassurance that severs the conscience from the call to human solidarity. This is, partially, the area in which Coles digs, between the competing but parallel tendencies toward a closed-in rationality of the worlds of social science and the closed-in world of institutionalized religion. The book's final effect (and it's a good one) is an invitation to join the honest sea rch for a spirituality strong enough to challenge a culture heavily, and subconsciously, influenced by the psychological and social sciences that once promised to replace modernity's dying religions.

Though he mentions several different kinds of secularity -- the things of a particular time; a prosaic secularism; rational secularism; our usual (secular) assumptions about what matters; a new domain of the secular: the church as a pillar of the nation-state's authority; 'formal' secularization; secular America; modern secular mind; a scientific secularism; secular psychology -- like his own teachers Coles never defines the term for us. In fact, part of the charm of the work is the stories he tells about the difficulties he had asking particular religiously creative people -- Tillich, Day, Walker Percy -- what they mean by the "secular." If we had to (and we don't) characterize Gales's methodology of bridging the world of social science, theology, activism, and clinical practice, we could do worse than calling him a segueist. His narrative way is to link the stories others -- important people and novelists dead and alive and his students and his patients -- have told him. Robert Coles's The Secular Mind is a book for the unhurried reader. His method is to tell us how he passes from a kind of respectful bewilderment to a grasp of the deeper meaning of their comments (which he invariable seems to have recorded). And so we, ordinary slow learners, learn through this exemplary slow learner to become deeper participants in a respectful yet distancing reflection on our culture and times. Not least, we learn that an openness toward a theologically literate spirituality seems an almost indispensable part of protecting the human from the culture's prevailing notion of "reason," the results of the reductionistic ambitions of social science and of our insufficiently challenged capitalist economic system.

Robert Coles as author is difficult to categorize and, probably, that's exactly how he wants it. Indeed, some of his (to this sociologist) most meditative sections (a kind of critical thought that reaches to meditation is what he aims at) deal with the dangers of theory in psychology and the social sciences more generally and the challenge of the particular (posed by patients, novelists, philosophers, the morally gifted, etc.) Of course, this sort of awareness is part of any responsible social science, but Coles's deft way of doing it is particularly effective and even important. Coles functions as a kind of spiritual director for social scientists, bringing them, gently, to face up to the sins of pride that are almost structured into the modern way of viewing science as mastery over nature, including human nature.

In his fourth and last chapter, "Where We Are Headed," Coles ends the book the way he began, this time remembering a conversation he had with a medical student who is tentatively trying, as he was with Tillich and still is, to put it all together, where "all" means heart and mind and not just the current smart and confident talk in academia and elsewhere. The chapter is about an emerging biological psychoanalysis built on biochemistry and physiology that threatens to bring about the scientization of psychology that Freud, unlike Coles, anticipated without worry. Coles like the student ruminates about the relationship of intellectual "progress" (Coles always italicizes this word) with human wisdom by reflecting that her grandmother seems wiser than her father who seems wiser than herself. As she prepares to leave his office she asks "whether I 'still believe in psychoanalysis."' Like Tillich, Coles's answer is hardly direct; it is, well, meditative. "I respond with a demurral, insist that psychoanalysis is no t something to be 'believed in'; rather, it is one more way of seeing things in a long chain of such that extends over the many centuries, millennia of our thinking, reflecting life."

None of the rich theological and activist minds that Coles recalls in the book -- like Tillich or Day or Percy -- ever directly asks Coles, seeking a better grasp of his depth, whether, or better, how, he still believes in theology or, to push it, theology's subject. Maybe someday another of his students will (or has) and Coles will add The Religious Heart to his many dozens of publications (including his Pulitzer Prize winning Children of Crisis).

His last meditative paragraph here on the secular mind that is ever and dangerously intent on mastery could serve as its opening lines: "One prays at the very least on behalf of one's kind, though unsure, in a secular sense, to whom or what such prayer is directed, other than, needless to say, one's own secular mind, ever needy of an 'otherness' to address through words become acts of appeal, of worried alarm, of lively and grateful expectation: please, oh please, let things go this way, and not in that direction -- the secular mind given introspective, moral pause, its very own kind of sanctity" (188--89). This slow learner left Coles's presence asking, "But is that enough"?

JAMES R. KELLY teaches in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Fordham University.