New lights of the spirit

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

"Your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions," wrote the prophet Joel. That may seem the definition of the spiritual enterprise, but in the past few years it has not described mainstream religion in America or the rest of the West. Catholicism and the Protestant mainline have occupied themselves with the less glamorous task of figuring out how changing social norms on issues like homosexuality fit into visions seemingly codified long ago.

Even America's evangelical community, usually at the nation's vital and visionary edge, has been uncharacteristically subdued as it ponders a retreat from the political activism of the 1980s and '90s.

That leaves the dreaming to the folks on their country's cultural margins or, more specifically, to those intent on sharing the margins' insights with the mainstream. A gifted preacher has pulled African-American Pentecostalism onto center stage--and attracted the attention of white presidential candidates. A priest-academic has taken the stigma of Hispanic otherness and transformed it into a triumphant Catholic theology of mestizaje. A university professor, using her own life as an illustration, is opening Tibetan Buddhism to a large audience of African Americans.

The prophet Joel certainly didn't have Tibetan Buddhism in mind when he addressed his Jewish audience in the 5th century B.C. But that's the beauty of the dreams and visions of religion: you never know who may have them next.

--By David Van Biema