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I’ve been spending the last couple of days at the University of Michigan hospital, along with my mom and brother, as my dad has had surgery. (He’s doing great, btw.) One of the things you do in the hospital is walk around a lot–you need to stay close enough to be of assistance if necessary, but you also need to move your legs.

Michigan’s is an exceptional hospital. As a visitor, I notice that their signage is ample and clear, that employees are quick to ask whether they can help you find anything, and that the architecture is generally bright and welcoming.

One of the other things I’ve noticed is that the hospital invokes a sense of ritual to remind itself (and its guests) of its aspirations. If you walk along the hallway towards the medical school (which is attached to the hospital), you encounter frame after frame of class pictures for the last 100+ years of med school classes. Fraternities do this too. It communicates to everyone that there’s a long tradition here, and that the school is proud of its graduates.

There are also enormous banners hanging in the main atrium, with photos of patients and doctors behind words from the Michigan fight song: “Hail to the victors valiant, Hail to the conquering heroes, Hail, hail to Michigan, the leaders and best.” As a kid who grew up singing the Victors at football and basketball games, the song has a deep imprint on me, as it does on most people associated with U of M or Ann Arbor. To see the lyrics in print strikes me as a little corny. But when you see a 20-foot picture of a guy with a huge scar on his chest and the words “Hail to the conquering heroes,” it’s very moving.

What the hospital administration has very consciously done here is invoke the practices of ritual. In both cases, the photos serve as a mirror of the aspirations of the hospital community: This is who we are, this is what we’re about. In the case of the banners with the fight song words, they remind all who see them of the larger purpose, the higher vision, of which they are in pursuit. By evoking (literally) the music of the song, they also trigger the deep emotional associations that singing with 100,000 people at a football game brings about, and unify what might otherwise appear to be two disparate parts of the campus (the football team and the hospital; though the two actually share a lot in common–a focus on the body, service to the larger community, and the status of revenue-generators and profit centers).

Northwestern, and many others, could learn from this example.

From Fish’s blog at the NYT:

Eagleton acknowledges that the links forged are not always benign — many terrible things have been done in religion’s name — but at least religion is trying for something more than local satisfactions, for its “subject is nothing less than the nature and destiny of humanity itself, in relation to what it takes to be its transcendent source of life.” And it is only that great subject, and the aspirations it generates, that can lead, Eagleton insists, to “a radical transformation of what we say and do.”

The other projects, he concedes, provide various comforts and pleasures, but they are finally superficial and tend to the perpetuation of the status quo rather than to meaningful change: “A society of packaged fulfillment, administered desire, managerialized politics and consumerist economics is unlikely to cut to the depth where theological questions can ever be properly raised.”

By theological questions, Eagleton means questions like, “Why is there anything in the first place?”, “Why what we do have is actually intelligible to us?” and “Where do our notions of explanation, regularity and intelligibility come from?”

The fact that science, liberal rationalism and economic calculation can not ask — never mind answer — such questions should not be held against them, for that is not what they do.

Okay, I say a lot of the same things. But I also think that the rest of this column reinforces my contention that both the critics of the new atheism and the new atheists themselves are still talking about religion in essentially Protestant terms. (Or, as I would say, the idea of religion itself is a Protestant notion.) Jewish life can’t be broken out this way, and while Jewish thought and ritual are certainly animated by some of the same questions of other traditions, I think it’s really important to avoid the “all religions are essentially the same” trap. They’re not. Each tradition is its own language, with its own ways of understanding the world that are difficult, if not impossible, to translate.

Still, I’m always happy to see thoughtful intellectuals taking on Ditchens.