“As irreligious as a jackrabbit” – Ursula LeGuin

PARIS REVIEW: You’ve said that you were “raised as irreligious as a jackrabbit.” And yet an interest in religion is present in a great deal of your writing.

URSULA LE GUIN: I think I have—well, I can’t call it a religious temperament, because the trouble is the word religion. I am profoundly interested in both Taoism and Buddhism, and they’ve given me a lot. Taoism is just part of the structure of my mind by now. And Buddhism is intensely interesting to me. But if you don’t call it a religious cast of mind, then you have to call it something like spiritual, and that’s woo-woo and wishy-washy. There are these big issues that religion tries to deal with, and I’m quite interested in that.

Last week I started a series of posts on Peter Watson’s Age of Atheism and Thomas Nagel’s thoughts on the “religious temperament.” Since then I’ve been contemplating even more than usual about what it means to be a person who is inclined in some way toward religion, “spirituality,” “the Holy” or whatever social terms we might use. It’s clear that some people follow this drive toward religion, but others express it in non-religious ways, and that in and of itself fascinates me. Someone like LeGuin can be raised “as irreligious as a jack-rabbit” and resist the terms religion and spirituality, yet still reach for the phrase “religious temperament.”

It’s not just the question of why some people experience a “God-shaped hole” in their life, as theists and theistic apologists sometimes explain it, and why some don’t – though that question may be interesting in and of itself. It’s the question of why some people desire transcendence as an answer to life, while others are quite satisfied with immanence. Perhaps those people find “holiness” in this world. Perhaps they see no need to separate between holiness and the unholy, between this world and any other. Perhaps it’s merely that the language of religion is a holdover from pre-secular worldview, and in a thoroughly secularized society such language will be entirely replaced with something else (another interesting question!)

In any case, I was excited to see this interview with speculative fiction author Ursula LeGuin from a recent issue of the Paris Review. After speaking to the question of her religious temperament, the interview continues: