For The Wall Street Journal, five luminaries, including Abby Wambach and Jay Shetty, offer their takes on this month’s topic: devotion.
“With the intense interest in religious communities that we’re not part of as sources of techniques for self-transformation,” Professor Liz Bucar says, “there is a rejection of devotion because of how that might decenter oneself, and how it might involve the hard work of questioning what you think is right, real and true in the world. What makes something devotional—the part that people don’t usually want to appropriate—are broader concerns of metaphysics, cosmologies and ethical systems. Devotion is work, a work of constantly interpreting and reinterpreting. Religions wouldn’t mean anything without it.”
