Macondo was already a fearful whirlwind of dust and rubble being spun about by the wrath of the biblical hurricane when Aureliano skipped eleven pages so as not to lose time with facts he knew only too well, and he began to decipher the instant that he was living, deciphering it as he lived it, prophesying himself in the act of deciphering.

My point of departure in this essay is Davíd Carrasco's Convocation Address at the Harvard Divinity School in September 2006. Speaking of the borderlands between Mexico and the United States, Carrasco projects an image of a vexed and ambiguous zone that is not merely geographic or political; it defines an existential situation of being betwixt and between, of struggle and suffering, that Karl Jaspers sums up in the term Grenzsituationen (borders/limit situations). The frontier throws up images of borderline experiences, of a destabilized and transgressive consciousness in which “dreams, repressed memories, psychological transferences and associations” possess greater presence than they do in ordinary waking life, and religious experiences emerge from the unconscious like apparitions. This interplay between borderlands and borderline phenomena—between “the differences we have with others and the conflicts within ourselves” also finds expression in the work of Gloria Anzaldúa. “Mestiza consciousness,” she observes, may be identified with a “juncture … where phenomena collide.” This implies “a shock culture, a border culture, a third country” where migrants find themselves at the limits of what they can endure, border patrol agents are stretched beyond the limits of what they can control, and intellectuals find that orthodox ways of describing and analyzing the world do not do justice to the experiences involved.

“Olhe, um terrorista!” yelled the construction worker as I passed. I was living in Salvador, Brazil, where eighty percent of the population identifies as something other than white. Though not sharing the same ancestry as my neighbors, I never, as a moreno (brown-skinned person), stood out to them as different. Yet to the man who pointed me out that day, I did. He apparently had been watching the news: another round of Arab men arrested on suspicion of plotting a terror attack. It was a small moment, an aberration amidst the abundance of hospitality I was enjoying in a country not my own. Born in Sri Lanka and raised in the United States, I chose to move to Brazil mainly for personal enrichment—to study and practice liberation theology in a land regarded as one of its homes. With so varied and privileged a background, I saw myself as something of a supra-cultural globetrotter, immune to other peoples' limitations of cultural and national identity. Whenever crossing what others referred to as borders, I rarely ceased to feel centered. Yet that day—the day I was labeled a terrorist—I suffered something of the migrant's anguish, the de-centering humiliation that typically accompanies the border crosser.

Many scholars of religion who teach today in nondenominational schools may take it for granted that these schools have no institutional mandate to espouse a particular religious agenda. Yet, how did this relatively new approach become common during the last century, when in the preceding era the opposite was true? A close reading of one context or institution can reveal broader trends applicable in many other realms. The evolution of the approach to religious scholarship at nineteenth-century Harvard can serve as one such specific, but widely illuminating, point of inquiry. The deliberate shift away from instruction in doctrinal theology toward a more modern approach to religion as an academic field of study became a prominent trend in American higher education, with Harvard leading the way. But why did Harvard pursue this particular agenda in advance of other institutions? This article suggests that the answer lies largely in political concerns. Harvard was concerned with issues of perception and the practical consequences resulting from public expression of disapprobation.

A number of recent studies have drawn attention to how the study of religion and religious seeking were intertwined in European and American cultures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ann Taves, Leigh Schmidt and Hans Kippenberg, for example, have pointed to ways that particularly Protestant anxieties and dilemmas shaped scholarly thinking about categories such as experience and “mysticism.” Scholars have been less interested, however, in the other side of the exchange—less interested, in other words, in how scholarship has reshaped religious belief and practice. The first Americans to study religion scientifically, American psychologists of religion, serve as a particularly useful illustration of how scholarly methods influenced modern ways of believing, but there is still little historical scholarship on the key figures involved. There remain few critical works, for example, on the pioneer psychologists of religion—Edwin Starbuck (1866–1947), George Coe (1862–1951), James Bissett Pratt (1875–1944), and G. Stanley Hall (1844–1924)—and their ways of studying and attempting to reform religion. The notable exception is, of course, the literature on William James, which includes an enormous number of dissertations and monographs, including several important studies examining the Varieties of Religious Experience and James's other efforts to help fashion a science of religion. But even the scholarship on James does not consider how he and others used the sciences to reform religious belief and revitalize American culture. Given the fact that James identified himself as a psychologist, engaged a wide range of neurological, physiological and psychological thinkers in his work, and drew extensively on psychologists like George Coe and Edwin Starbuck, it is remarkable that these contexts have been overlooked. His debt to the psychologist Edwin Starbuck is particularly striking. In his Varieties, he uses or refers to Starbuck's empirical work twenty-six times, he draws from Starbuck's questionnaire data thirty-seven times, and he mentions Starbuck by name a total of forty-six times, which is roughly the equivalent of once in every six pages of text.

So many postmodern theologians are busy retrieving “negative theology,” while others label such retrievals “misconstruals,” that observers might be tempted to conclude that there was, or is, such a single thing as “negative theology.” Yet anyone seeking a definition or even sampling relevant texts encounters a diverse array of premodern apophatic authors with a multiplicity of negative theologies. I here survey some of the diverse strands of Christian negative theology and argue in favor of one strand of that tradition in relation to Christ, the incarnation, and the cross.

“Learn to think with pain.”