The very first installment of this column opened with a story about the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin (1878-1953):
Responding to an adviser who had warned him against conflict with the Catholic Church, Stalin contemptuously demanded, “How many divisions has the pope?” It was a rhetorical question, of course. It presumed the obvious: With no army at all, what threat could the pope pose to Stalin’s tyranny?
But the tyrant’s presumption was wrong. Less than three decades after Stalin’s death, the Catholic Church elected a Polish pope. This proved a vital factor in the collapse of communism, not only in Poland but throughout eastern Europe and eventually even in the Soviet Union itself. The triumphant homecoming of John Paul II (1920-2005) soon after his election in 1978 demonstrated that the pope has very many powerful “divisions.” Stalin and his Communist successors are gone. The papacy remains. And John Paul II the Great, as he is now often known, is a canonized saint of the Catholic Church.
We told this story to illustrate the fact that, notwithstanding Stalin’s militant atheism and despite the predictions of many that religion would fade away, it remains vibrantly alive. It continues to influence political and other developments worldwide, positively and negatively. “Our essays,” we wrote, “will examine it around the world — Christian and non-Christian, ancient, medieval and modern — from many perspectives. Religion is of virtually infinite interest and human significance (not to mention its importance in eternity).”
For almost exactly eight years, my friend and former BYU colleague Bill Hamblin and I wrote this column, on religion around the globe, together for the Deseret News. It was just one of many projects that connected us since we first met as graduate students in Cairo, Egypt, at the beginning of the 1980s. I had already been writing a separate column for the newspaper, a personal column focused on specifically Latter-day Saint issues, so I approached the editors to see whether they would be interested in another column, on the wider world of religion. They were.
On Dec. 9, I learned that the Latter-day Saint Living Weekly section in which the older column had appeared had been discontinued, along with the need for the column. Frankly, I was shocked. But the editors wanted the joint Hamblin/Peterson column on world religions to continue. And then, the next day, I learned that my longtime friend and collaborator had passed away suddenly, without warning. The word “shock” scarcely conveys my reaction.
I’ll continue with the column as long as I’m permitted. I consider it worthwhile. I believe that better, more sympathetic mutual understanding between religions and worldviews is desperately needed by a world in which we bump into each other much more often and more insistently than we did in previous centuries. I hope that my effort can contribute at least slightly to such understanding.
I’ll make every effort to compensate, so far as I’m able, for the absence of my brilliant, learned, insightful, hilarious, occasionally difficult, defiantly independent, fiercely honest, always original friend. I’m under no illusion that I’ll always succeed; his global perspective was unique. His ability to see patterns and connect disparate phenomena was remarkable. Certainly the column will be poorer for his absence.
But I’ll try.
As I’ve thought about Bill’s premature passing and reflected on the fundamental nature of this column’s unifying focus, “religion” — a word that’s notoriously difficult to define — I’ve found myself repeatedly returning to a passage from the famous essay “The Will to Believe,” by the great Harvard philosopher and psychologist William James.
Condensed from a talk given to the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown Universities in 1896, the essay explores the merits — and limits — of scientific rationalism. In the passage that keeps coming to mind, he’s trying to distinguish religion from other, related, human endeavors:
“Science says things are; morality says some things are better than other things; and religion says essentially two things.
“First, she says that the best things are the more eternal things, the overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final word. ... The second affirmation of religion is that we are better off even now if we believe her first affirmation to be true.”
James’ comment provides real insight into the uniqueness of religious claims. But I also take comfort from it. Bill Hamblin’s exceptional mind and vivid personality are, I believe, among those “eternal things.”
Daniel Peterson teaches Arabic studies, founded BYU’s Middle Eastern Texts Initiative, directs MormonScholarsTestify.org, chairs mormoninterpreter.com, blogs daily at patheos.com/blogs/danpeterson, and speaks only for himself.