Free seating

The Lang 40th anniversary exhibition is coming together! These "stackable seats" made of thick corrugated cardboard, which will be covered with archival images, texts and photographs and piled into all sorts of interesting shapes for the exhibition in the University Center lobby, are fully recyclable... but they also work as seats, and might also be taken home as souvenirs. It's such fun to work with professional designers!

Something rather than nothing

I've had it with the "nones." Not those so designated but with the designation. For a while it seemed cute and even funny - "not nuns, nones!" - but in the present moment defining anyone purely negatively isn't fun or funny at all.

I've taught the Pew Research Center's "Modeling the Future of Religion in America" since it came out three years ago, noting its beholdenness to a narrow definition of religion as affiliation. It's Pew as much as anyone who has taught us about the "rise of the nones." Usually we critique its lumping together all "Christians" and, even more, its throwing all those who don't check an affiliation box on a survey into a monolithic sea of "nones." (Dumping everyone else into a residual category of "Other Religions" pisses students off, too - when it's included in the picture at all.) We notice how they offer graphs which let you tell the story either as one of the decline of Christianity or the rise of the unaffiliated, and note their prediction that, in three out of four hypothetical scenarios of religious "switching," Christians will cease to be a majority by 2070. These studies and the way they have been reported and interpreted feed the alarmist "America as a Christian nation" shibboleth. It all seems rather zero-sum but it was only this time through, with the DIY Religion class, that I noticed that they confirm this framing.(This is on the third page of a website where most people read only the first.) It comes as a relief that rates of rise or fall are likely to slow, possibly resulting in a kind of "equilibrium rather than one group ascending completely and the other disappearing." A relief and a surprise, given that the framing has suggested an inescapable existential battle between the two sides. And who was thinking in terms of anyone's "ascending completely"? Who could even conceive that?

In the context of our class, we noticed how incongruous this polarized story seems against the backdrop of the religious pluralism which has long characterized the American landscape. "Christians" count as a unified block rather than a world of jostling competitors only when contrasted with something else, but the sources we've been reading have argued that the vitality of the American religious scene has long derived precisely from that jostling competition and the particular voluntarist way of experiencing religion forced by an ever expanding spiritual pluralism. (To be fair, the Pew model comes from this peculiar denominationalist culture: everyone is free to affiliate, it's only when people decline to affiliate that they get spooked.) Attentive as we have been to the variety and spiritual depth and adventurousness of those relegated "nones," we see glasses overflowing where they worry about a glass emptying.

This isn't to say that nones are just religious in their own way. Rejecting or repurposing organized traditions is important for many, and not all experience this as freedom rather than emptiness. For many, "religion" just is obsolete. But in the present moment, the Christians vs. nones framing seems not just misleading but pernicious. Not only is the ever churning mix of American spiritualities obscured, with a stalemate between two competing visions the only conceivable alternative to the eradication of one by the other. (One student astutely observed that this sounded a lot like the bankrupt American two-party political system in 2025.) But a contrast between religion and irreligion (to name it) isn't between two similar competitors, two different visions of the good or true or beautiful - or spiritual. It's between something and nothing. (And so, in the extreme, everything and nothing.) 

"None" may just be a shorthand for "unaffiliated" in a conventional sense: just this year Pew finally tried to measure as agency, initiative and conviction what in the earlier studies appears only as absence. But "none" resonates with the most extreme rhetoric of the current administration, a Manichaeanism made explicit in that chilling speech of Stephen Miller's last week. 

We stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble. [...] What do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness, you are jealousy! You are envy! You are hatred! You are nothing! You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing. We are the ones who build. We are the ones who create. We are the ones who lift up humanity. ... To our enemies, you have nothing to give, you have nothing to offer, you have nothing to share but bitterness. We have beauty, we have light, we have goodness, we have determination, we have vision, we have strength. We built the world that we inhabit now.

In his signature enactment of the hatred and nihilism he claims define those he demonizes, Miller spat out the word "nothing" over and over and over. I watched the video: you could feel the spite building from the repetition. This extreme dehumanizing of those who think differently is central to his thinking, as it is to the "or we won't have a country" rhetoric of his boss. Its hollowness bellows.

In hands like theirs, Pew's already prejudicial shorthand "nones" becomes poison. The unaffiliated are not free-thinkers, seekers, innovators, DIYers, but defined purely as negativity, emptiness, a chaos threatening to engulf and consume "the world that we inhabit." The setting in which Miller spoke, and things students in the class have mentioned seeing in their internet feeds, made me aware that the outrageous "are you something or nothing" challenge might be appealing to some young people lost in this age's uncertainty.

How do we teach them that plurality is not only possible but actual reality?

Squiggles

I pray that this works

Today saw the installation of the new Dean of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, Winnie Varghese. The twelfth dean, the Very Reverend Varghese is the first woman, the first woman of color, the first Indian American, the first queer woman in this position, but when asked about being the first woman in the position in a TV interview replied with deflationary charm: "isn't it amazing that in 2025 we're still seeing such firsts?" I've admired this no-nonsense visionary for years. 

The service (which I watched on livestream*) was multifaith, as events at the Cathedral often are, including readings from the Quran (about Mary and her son) and the 15th century Bhakti mystic Kabir. The sermon, by Right Reverend Vicentia Kgabe, Bishop of Lesotho, was mostly on Isaiah 58's reminder that religious ritual without care for the least of these is incomplete, that feeding the hungry and caring for the widow, the orphan and the stranger is itself "sacramental" work. Musical selections were woven in, one of which floored me. It's the 2022 "Plowshare Prayer" by queer singer Spencer LaJoye and sung by Rachel Kurtz.

Dear blessed creator, dear mother, dear savior
Dear father, dear brother, dear holy other
Dear sibling, dear baby, dear patiently waiting
Dear sad and confused, dear stuck and abused

Dear end-of-your-rope, dear worn out and broke,
Dear go-it-alone, dear running from home
Dear righteously angry, forsaken by family
Dear jaded and quiet, dear tough and defiant

I pray that I’m heard
And I pray that this works

I pray if a prayer has been used as a sword
against you and your heart, against you and your word
I pray that this prayer is a plowshare, of sorts
that it might break you open, it might help you grow

I pray that your body gets all that it needs
and if you don’t want healing, I just pray for peace
I pray that your burden gets lighter each day
I pray the mean voice in your head goes away

I pray that you honor the grief as it comes
I pray you can feel all the life in your lungs
I pray that if you go all day being brave
that you can go home, go to bed feeling safe

I pray you’re forgiven, I pray you forgive
I pray you set boundaries and openly live
I pray that you feel you are worth never leaving
I pray that you know I will always believe you

I pray that you’re heard
and I pray that this works

Amen on behalf of the last and the least
On behalf of the anxious, depressed, and unseen
Amen for the workers, the hungry, the houseless
Amen for the lonely and recently spouseless

Amen for the queers and their closeted peers
Amen for the bullied who hold in their tears
Amen for the mothers of little Black sons
Amen for the kids who grow up scared of guns

Amen for the addicts, the ashamed and hungover
Amen for the calloused, the wisened, the sober
Amen for the ones who want life to be over
Amen for the leaders who lose their composure 

Amen for the parents who just lost their baby
Amen for the chronically ill and disabled
Amen for the children down at the border
Amen for the victims of our law and order

I pray that you’re heard
and I pray that this works

I pray if a prayer has been used as a sword
against you and your heart, against you and your word
I pray that this prayer is a plowshare, of sorts  

All this in "the biggest gothic cathedral in the world," not far from the UN where our monstrous president just tried to turn plowshares back into swords. Dean Varghese shared her vision for her work as part of "The Church as an imagination shaping force."

I believe the most important thing we do in the church is to share the good news of Jesus, who connects heaven to earth, and reinscribes the sacredness of all life by his life. As his church, it is our work to bear witness to the God-With-Us in our time. 

The church can be an imagination shaping force, which is critical work today. 

It is the responsibility and gift of the church to introduce wisdom into the conversation, a gospel urgency, the great arc of history, a global, inclusive, and compassionate view, and an earnest search for justice and beauty to generate Christian imaginations for this time. 

At our best we are among the institutions that equip the people of the community who make healing and justice real. 

We can do that through the arts, our liturgy, and strategic use of the great buildings that are our heritage. I am eager to explore how the Cathedral could engage the great questions of the day in its vast forum.

Feeling very proud to be Episcopalian right now - but I can hear Dean Varghese gently but firmly nudging with a smile: get to work.

 

* Part way through the service, the livestream seemed to encounter technical difficulties. I learned later that Winnie's father had collapsed, perhaps from the heat in the cathedral, and the family had to take him swiftly to hospital. (Thankfully he's recovered.) As a result Nadia Boltz-Weber's lovely "Prayers of the People" and Winnie's own closing remarks weren't delivered, and while the service concluded with the planned hymn and procession, the surprise appearance of the Queer Big Apple Marching Band planned for the very end will have to come some other time.

Working forest

The inhumanity

A friend who worked for the National Endowment for the Humanities shared a link to an article about federal workers' experience of being targeted, harassed, and finally peremptorily dismissed by variously cruel and incompetent stooges of our administration of inhumanity. 

My friend was among many in the Federal Government who administered grants to civil society, huge numbers of which were summarily canceled in mid-cycle on the most political of grounds with narry a thought to the consequences. This quote wasn't from my friend but could have been. 

Swirls

Leaf-taking

The US president disgraced himself and our country at the United Nations yesterday. "This man is stark raving mad," a senior diplomat texted a reporter, "Do Americans not see how embarrassing this is?" Do we ever. Even the reeds in the Adirondack lakes see.

Beyond nihilism and fanaticism

DIY Religion's tour of New School-connected thinkers on religion continued today with two heavy-weights from sociological debates about secularization, Peter Berger and Jose Casanova (with cameos by John Dewey and Alfred Schutz). Berger's the best known secularization theorist to have recanted in the face of evidence that religion seemed to be on the wane only in Europe. Casanova wrote one of the most famous books refuting and moving on from secularization theory, Public Religions in the Modern World. (They didn't overlap, though, Berger's two decades ending shortly before Casonova's three and change began.) 

I gave the class the essay where Casanova first laid out the argument of his book, "Beyond European and American Exceptionalisms: Towards a Global Perspective" (2003), and a piece Berger wrote for The Christian Century, "Protestantism and the Quest for Certainty" (1998) which uses the phrase "do it yourself"! Casanova's essay was a good text for explaining the rise and fall of secularization theses, but I'm not sure anyone in this generation can imagine a world without religion. But Berger's arguments - at least until he changed from his sociologist's hat to speaking as a Mainline Protestant - proved electric, and felt intensely relevant. 

Berger's argument, in a nutshell, is that modernity leads not to a decline in religion but to a change in how people are religious. What effects this change is pluralism, which relativizes beliefs and practices earlier generations might have unquestioningly taken for granted. In this "age of uncertainty," we are free - or forced - to choose what we will believe. (His book The Heretical Imperative made this argument in 1979.) But uncertainty is unnerving, and if everyone has their own belief, it may seem that the only certainty is the unsatisfying virtue of tolerance. Relativism can slip into nihilism: there is no truth! And this can push people to seek the unquestioning certainty offered by various dangerous types, what Berger calls "fanaticism," until they realize its fundamental mendacity. He described a dispiriting dialectic of nihilism and fanaticism and back again which struck some of my students as perfectly describing what they encounter online every day.

Berger offers an antidote to this downward spiral: communities that sustain us in faith (knowingly not knowledge) in the context of uncertainty. Contrasting them with demanding fundamentalistic religious organizations, he calls them "weak" institutions - voluntary associations where "uncertainty-wallahs" can share their uncertain faith rather than pretending certainty. 

Even apart from Berger's suddenly switching to theological mode to root all this in Paul Tillich's "Protestant principle," First Corinthians' God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong and the "kenotic," this was a harder sell. I made a passionate case that weak - participatory, democratic - institutions are what we need, now more than ever. I'll be curious what stays with students from all this, and if it offers them some resources to resist the present fanaticisms, whose appeal several of them clearly feel.

We didn't, alas, have time to see Berger hit the limits of his own tolerance for uncertainty, in a telling anecdote from a conference he'd attended on "epistemological modesty":

One of the participants from Israel recounted a story from Talmudic literature. It went something like this: A group of rabbis were arguing over the right interpretation of a biblical text. Rabbi Eleazar, who had interpreted the text one way, was one of the authorities cited, as was Rabbi Yochanan, who had interpreted it differently. The rabbis could not agree. In the group there was also a mystic, an adept of the Kabbalah. He said that it was possible for him to enter into an ecstasy that would take him directly before the throne of the Almighty; he offered to do so and to ask God himself to give the correct interpretation. The group agreed, whereupon the mystic took off in his ecstasy, stood before the throne and addressed God: "King of the Universe, we cannot agree on this text. Can you give us the correct interpretation?" 

God, who of course was himself occupied in the study of Torah, shuffled his papers, shook his head, and finally replied: "Well, Rabbi Eleazar says so-and-so, but Rabbi Yochanan says so-and-so, and then there is Rabbi Amitai who says so-and-so . . ." 

I'm not altogether comfortable with this story. I'm inclined to think that, both from a Jewish and a Christian point of view, we should assume that God could indeed have given the right answer. 

Sublimest weakness!!! But even without this, ours was a profound and wide-ranging discussion, I think.

A tree grows in Chelsea

Got to take Religion of Trees on the road again - this time to St. Peter's, an old Episcopal church in Chelsea, recently revived by a brilliant group of young clergy people. Led a wonderful discussion with twenty-odd parishioners in the little garden next to the church, but the highlight came before that, when I headed off to the same garden with the kids during the sermon and announcements. I don't get to spend much time with little people so this was a big treat! And I started the adult forum with a report on the kid's, complete with movements.

We started by being trees, stretching our arms out and up, or downward like a Christmas tree, or up and waving about like palm trees, or out and down like willows...

Then I told them someone (it was Thomas Merton) said that A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. Could we try to do that, too?

Then I told them that there's a place in the Bible (Isa 55:12) where we read that the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees in the fields shall clap their hands. How do trees clap? We agreed that they needed the help of the wind, so we took turns being trees and the wind pushing their boughs together. Turns out, I said, that trees are interacting with everything around them all the time - including us!

Then we went around and looked at the trees in the little garden, noticing branches and suckers and healed wounds and which were easiest to climb. I taught them they could go up to trees and, after asking permission, greet them with touch. Hugging not always possible or advisable! Street trees especially appreciate such greetings, I said, because they're often all on their own. And, while they're much bigger than you or me, most of them are actually quite young, like you!

The adults got a little more, Merton and Isaiah supplemented by Mary Oliver, Mircea Eliade and Robin Wall Kimmerer, along with all manner of tangents inspired by their questions and observations. But the stars of the show were the trees we carry - as when I led a similar forum at Church of the Ascension last year, everyone had tender stories about relationships with trees - and the trees around us as we gathered. 

I can't show you pictures of the kids, but here are some of the trees who attended our discussions.

Soaring so high above an understory of other trees, this London planetree represented one ideal of treeness, quite different from those traditions which love their trees gnarled and twisty, like this one:

Then we pondered the painful spectacle of this tree holding its own against scaffolding, the bane of many a New Yorker's experience! But we also appreciated the care with which the scaffolding constructors had opened gaps for the tree. A slightly sobering image of our future together, tree people and human people...

I'm hoping people left with some new ideas but also new eyes for the trees at St. Peter's and beyond.  

Whirlpool of deities

Figuring we need all the help we can get these days, I've broken out the "OMG: Design your own Deity" refrigerator magnets my office-mate colleague gave me for DIY Religion. While one sheet of magnets is missing, I'm sure visiting students will craft even more creative chimeras on the office fridge door!