Vitraux du forêt

Nice to have an excuse to go to the Botanical Garden on a weekday!

History of ideas

In "Theorizing Religion" today we dove into Friedrich Schleiermacher's "On the Essence of Religion." I had students pair up to go through two pages line by line and they discovered that they didn't really understand what he was talking about, or even what he meant by things like "metaphysics," "morals" or even "religion" - things they hadn't noticed in skimming the text for class. An hour and a bit later they did - and had also learned the value of understanding a text in its historical context. 

And while they still hemmed and hawed at pronouncing his name - we decided to just mumble "Schlrrrrrr" - they liked what he was saying. Seeing how his invention (he calls it a discovery) of an "essence" of religion distinct from but the necessary complement to thinking and acting solved an intellectual puzzle made it all make sense. Next week we'll ask if that's the right puzzle to be solving!

Autumn shades

Love to tell the story

Our new music director continues to stretch our musical boundaries in wonderful ways. Today the choir not only sang Mozart's "Laudadate Dominum," which I love, but one of the congregationsal hymns was new to me, a 19th century song simple - pure! - and transporting.

Clown

The prophetic theological provocateur Claudio Carvalhaes, whose "confession to plants" in the chapel at Union Theological Seminary, where he is Professor of Worship, lit up the rightwing twittersphere (and who memorably visited one of my classes during covid) has a new project. During a recent sabbatical he learned to clown, and is now working on a play called "When Wajcha [his clown persona] meets Pachamama" which tries to face and overcome climate grief and despair with humor. We saw it with some Union friends. It's still a work in progress (there's a rat puppet Wajcha names Formaggio whose role in the story needs elaboration) but a work of fierce and infectious love.

Crisp

Colors changing

Red ivy is trying to upstage the maples but we know who will win.

Buddhist horizons

Oh, how I love teaching about Buddhism! Buddhism gets only a week in "After Religion," and the main object is to unsettle pat views of Buddhism (which I caricatured as Stop- Think- Stop Thinking- Done!), but it lets me explore another world of traditions and possibilities... Since this is a time when future courses are in the air - students are registering for Spring 2024 and faculty are assembling the 2024-25 (!) curricuum - I've half a mind to bring back one of my Buddhist studies courses. Or take a crack at orphaned "Buddhist Sutra Literature"?!

May your lips kiss mine!

Pope Francis met with leaders of Rainbow Catholics! among their gifts to him was the book on LGBTQ Chinese Catholics I had a hand in. 

Lateral

Photographer Paul Seibert took this amazing picture - perhaps last fall? There's so much go take delight in here, notably the shadow of the skyline stretching across the river in the middle of the picture. We're in it too, at about 3:30, to the upper right of Morningside Park, the smaller Manhattan park stretched out here...

Faith in poetry

Nice thing about where we live is that the Manhattan School of Music is literally just across the street. 

Lovely tonight to hear a talented cast of young singers bring to life Ned Rorem's remarkably wide-ranging song cycle "Evidence of Things Not Seen" on the centenary of his birth.

Foiled

Tried something new in "Theorizing Religion" today. We're starting a 4-session tour through some classic texts in the study of religion, but since the class meets weekly for 3 hours there's time to pair each one with something contemporary. For Hume's Natural History of Religion I decided it might be interesting to read some work by Sylvia Wynter, and chose the essay "The Pope must have been drunk, the King of Castile a madman: Culture as actuality, and the Caribbean rethinking modernity," in part because it's among her most accessible.

On its own this essay (from 1995) would already be a valuable corrective to the contemporary US-focused religious studies reflex to blame everything on "Protestant" conceptions of religion. Caribbean-oriented Wynter argues that our problems go deep into medieval Catholic understandings of the "non-homogeneity" of the supernaturally saved celibate church and the sinful secular world, a "non-homogeneity" reproduced first in Renaissance humanism's celebration of European "Man" in contrast to the brown and black "humans" colonized and enslaved in the age of empire, and then into 19th century "race science" and the invention of whiteness. As a frame and foil for Hume it worked brilliantly, too! Hume comes a few centuries after the Renaissance but, especially in NHR, writes like a humanist, apparently bypassing Christianity to root his arguments in the wisdom of Greco-Roman antiquity. And, while it's hidden by the all-purpose misanthropy of NHR, Hume in other works is just on the cusp of the invention of race. 

Wynter's title refers to the response of Cenú Indians to the papal bull "granting" the "new world" to the King of Spain, given definitive form in the 1513 "Requerimiento." Their land wasn't the Pope's to give, or the king's to accept! But, as Wynter stressed, the purpose of the Requerimiento wasn't really to persuade. If the inhabitants of these territories claimed by the King of Castile, by divine right vouchsafed by the Pope, didn't accept the new state of affairs, they announced themselves to be inimicos Christi, whom the Spanish crown was entitled to dispose of as they saw fit, killing or enslaving them. 

It's madness but it kills, and the descendants of the vilified and enslaved continue to bear the scars of the raving presumption of "non-homogeneous" superiority of Catholic Church, modern state, Man of reason, human sciences, progress over all others. Descendants of all these remain blinded by an inability to understand ours as just one of many cultures - as in our need for religion (as we understand it) to be part of human nature and for all religions to be incipiently "world religions." But while NHR is the founding document of the social-scientific study of religion, the fall guy in today's discussion turned out to be the discipline associated today with Hume, "philosophy," Hume's alternative (though in more humble ways than most) to the mess of human ignorance, superstition and intolerance. Why are "philosophy" and "ancient philosophy" and "modern philosophy" in our curricula never marked as western? Jewish or Indian or African philosophy are hyphenated terms, but the project of philosophy "itself" is, in Wynter's sense, a dream of "aculturality." Drunk or mad?

And for those who don't get it or don't accept it (I'm thinking of my colleague R's talk in "After Religion" last week), isn't a text like Natural History of Religion a kind of Requerimiento?

Generation gap

The author of several widely read books on queer theology came to our church today to preach and lead a discussion on the subject. At least I thought his books were widely read! From the discussion it became clear that not only is "queer theology" a blank for many in our congregation but the very word "queer" remains for them a term of abuse. In vain did the speaker respond (perhaps a little glibly) that a certain amount of discomfort might be a good thing, especially in theology. What the term triggered for these people was clearly more than discomfort.

This reaction was eye-opening for me. In the circles in which I move "queer" has completely shed these associations. In the religious circles in which the speaker's books are known (and even thought to be a little basic) "queer theology" is almost mainstream now. And in schools like the one in which I teach, "queer" is one of the most common forms of self-identification among students and unequivocally a good thing. Our speaker talked us quickly through a few different senses of queer - an "umbrella term" for non-normative sexualities, a term of "transgression," a term of "resistance," a way of challenging "binaries" of all kinds, and even a formulation of "non-identity." I wonder if it has any of that productively uncomfortable baggage for either my aging co-parishioners or my young students!

In the setting of our church discussion, the term "queer" got in the way of many folks' hearing much of anything our speaker shared. Certainly inaccessible to them was the idea that "queer theology," whatever it is, isn't just theology by and for "queer people," whoever they be, but "theology" that is liberating for everyone. Who couldn't benefit from release from the binaries of identity and the dead weight of supposedly fixed identities? And isn't that the "good news"?

An amusing tangent, in discussion with friends after the discussion: the speaker had mentioned that his books have been translated into several Asian languges, including Chinese, which has a new word that even sounds a little like "queer." I recalled that "queer" doesn't translate into other European languages either, appearing as a loan word in discussions in German and French. While I worried about the implicit Anglo-American associations of the concept in these contexts, a friend loved the idea of a loanword, and wondered if we might just need a new word, too, without the negative associations... though that might blunt its edge. 

All to the good, I found myself thinking. A word by itself can't do that much, even if one could control its associations. And since we're talking "queer" - essentially a verb rather than a noun or adjective - any settled word will be a failure. If it holds open a space without upstaging itself, that'll be enough. Any suggestions?

Maple purples

Grieving and gutted

By happenstance I had guest speakers lined up to speak in "After Religion" last week and this week. E, an alum studying for the rabbinate, was to help us puzzle through how Judaism "became a religion" in modern western societies. R, a colleague teaching Islamic studies, was to discuss the difficulty of studying "Islam and Muslims" in English and in the terms of religion, etc.

But this is the middle of October, 2023. Hamas' massacres in Israel happened five days before my first visitor. By today, thousands of Palestinians in Gaza have also died and hundreds of thousands have been displaced by Israeli reprisals; many have been killed in the West Bank, too. The hostages taken by Hamas remain in captivity, even as all of Gaza is held hostage by the shutting off of its access to water, electricity and medicines.

And we had to have class! My visitors, both Americans but E Jewish and R Muslim, gave voice to the profound grief they and their communities are experiencing, not only because of the loss of life but because of the reactions of others to these losses and threats, ranging from indifference to bloodlust. These reactions, we learned, resonated with deep and defining histories of hurt. 

E spoke to us about anti-semitism in the west - cavils and conspiracies having little to do with Jewish life and "religion" (though rooted in Christian narratives) but depressingly, frighteningly persistent. If Hamas' attack was horrific - the greatest loss of Jewish life since the Shoah - the response among many non-Jews here was too, especially in the progressive circles where we move, where the victims were ignored, their killers excused or even celebrated. Are Jewish lives so expendable to them? Had they - had she - ever really been accepted as fellow human beings worthy of life? E spoke of being overcome by grief for "dead Palestinians and dead Israelis," a grief the articulation of whose breadth is seen as betrayal on both sides. 

R, speaking a week later, as the United States government has aligned itself with the Israeli state and members of both political parties have endorsed a near-genocidal siege of Gaza, shared the bitterness of Muslims who are forever having to beg to recognized as human in western contexts where the Muslim is persistently associated with the medieval, the barbarous, violence. I'd introduced "orientalism" in the class a few weeks ago but realized I'd only scratched the surface. The foundational premising of the west's very identity on its distinction from the 'oriental' makes our efforts to correct these issues, R said, seem merely "rhetorical." She and others in her generation are "gutted" at the return of the same islamophobia as during 9/11.

What a gift these were, painful but precious. I learned an enormous amount, and students surely did too. I have learned to recognize the dehumanizing cadences - sometimes implicitly and even explicitly genocidal - of many reactions to the situation. But I've also realized that I have no experience remotely analogous to the intergenerational traumas they described. I could only wanly observe (to myself) that the collision of these histories in Palestine/Israel allowed outsiders culpably to misunderstand what was going on, whether supposing there is an eternal enmity between Jews and Muslims (when in fact, R reminded us, there were 1400 years of coexistence) or thinking what's happening there is not deeply entangled with the ideas - religious, historical, "modern"- of the rest of us, especially those who think ourselves better than the histories of the "old world."

In stitches

The on-again-off-again fashion-religion thing is on again! A few of us gathered as part of Fashion Education Week to bring together recollections from the spring's "Faith - Fashion" symposium - and to sew together the reactions participants had left on pieces of muslin. Apparently it wasn't an entirely new thing to ask people to use cloth this way, as these patches on the wall - in response to the question WHAT CAN FASHION DO? - attest! But our virtuosic ways of stitching them together (I'll have a picture for you sometimes) have apparently won converts, and our finished quilt will be on permanent display in the fashion studies office!

ChalkFIT

The FIT Illustration students are at work again! Such fun to see them working from sketches, cell-phones and community feedback.

Squash

Why do we carve pumpkins?

In the air...

Fall comes in many colors...

Battlers

Just some trees doin' their resilient thing in Riverside Park...

Twists and turns

In "Religion of Trees" on Monday we spent some time discussing what we've been doing with our drawing. Students said the practice of the drawing which ends each of our classes has become a sort of ritual, and I post all the images faithfully to our Instagram page, but we hadn't thought about what it all adds up to. I told them that our 110+ images had moved beyond being little root tips to form a root plate, but what do we want to build from it? They seem happy to discover each other's perspectives, and are excited that word about the Instagram page is getting around, but I think there's more to do. I'm not sure we're quite getting at what initially inspired the drawing - engaging, responding to, relating to trees in a non-verbal way. 

So in the coming weeks I'm thinking of some more involved drawing sessions. For instance, in one we will plant ourselves (heh) in front of a tree and draw it, looking only at the tree, not the drawing. (This was a practice Katie Holten introduced me to at Tree Wonder last year.) In another, just to free our pencil tips, we might draw in a single line, never lifting the pencil from the page. More ambitiously, we might pay attention to all the twists and turns in a branch, realizing that many are places where a branch was cut or dropped. That came to me today, when we went to Jefferson Market Garden and I found myself drawn to a very contorted branch, very much the work of an artist-pruner. (My jerky drawing is in the spread above.) Most street and park trees are shaped by pruning after pruning, and learning to see this will be important for the class - see and feel it, through drawing. If we had a forest nearby we might notice that trees in the wild sport lots of phantom branches too - maybe we could connect it back to the phantomful tree of life!

When the world was young

Can you believe these? Photographs from the Archives of the newly planted Lang courtyard trees in 1997, in b&w and in color.

They'd already grown a lot by the time I arrived, 5 years later, but construction photos show how little space their roots have... (also)

団子より花

Are the trees in your landscape boys or girls? 

This may not be a question you've asked yourself. But perhaps you should:

When planting trees, not appreciating different tree genders can lead to many unwanted problems.

This is the opening of a web page, one of many the "Religion of Trees" class found doing a collective internet trawl today on the "gender(ing) of trees." It's representative in its unwillingness to realize that the boy/girl framework makes sense of as good as no trees. 

It duly lists the kinds of tree sexual system - cosexual, monoecious, dioecious and polygamous - and gives examples. (The red maples in our courtyard are polygamous.) It even reveals that species with separate "male" and "female" trees - dioecious - are very rare. 

In the Eastern U.S., some 40% of the trees are monoecious, 30 percent are cosexual, 20% are dioecious and 10% are polygamous. Around the globe, about 75% of all trees are cosexual, 10% monoecious, 10% polygamous and 5% dioecious.

But it can't quit the model from animal reproduction it warns against. 

For most trees, sexual behavior is not strictly male or female. Trees effectively reproduce using different combinations of functional sexual parts distributed in different types of flowers and cones. 

The strict gender concepts of pure male and pure female we understand with animals must be flexible when applied to trees.

"Flexible"? Or perhaps its final lines sneakily invite us to discover the queerness of nature all around us?

So inspect your trees and take an inventory. Do you have more boys or girls in your landscape?

Queerness isn't unthinkable for most in our class, though most had no idea that trees were quite so nonbinary in quite so many ways. I had the students divide into groups, each charged with reading two short pieces and surfing the web for more, and then drafting a brief response. The most spirited, riffing on Katriona Sandilands' ode to the fluidly dioecious white mulberry, offered a tribute: 

Dear mulberries 

 

you are delicious and so generous. i don’t care how you reproduce. you are an intersectional wonder and share your goods with us all. thank you for your labor and your kindness. you are a home to so much, and fuel so many industries both in human economy and life of other species. your sex changing depending on humidity and light is the coolest shit i’ve ever heard. so maleable and wonderful. no wonder you have been so resilient in our world. 

love you always 

lang religion of trees 

xoxo 

ps you are delicious

Blaze of glory

Our now annual trip to see the fall foliage in the Adirondacks was, as ever, thrillingly beautiful. But it's also emotionally confusing, jumping forward a few weeks in time to see the seasonal change coming our way, like sneaking a peek at the last pages of a book you're reading. 

Arriving, as is our wont, on a weekday, we were delighted to find few other leaf-peepers, but leaf-peepers we were, helicoptering in to the woods just as the leaves turned - which, I started to feel already last year, evinces a kind of cluelessness about the trees we were apparently celebrating. The areas we explored are close to those which a wordsmith near the Wild Center in Tupper Lake praised in last week's Fall Foliage Report:

foliage is expected to be near-peak this weekend in parts of Franklin County, with spotters predicting 75-80% color change .... Look for a bright display of maize, banana, daffodil, clementine, mustard, yam, burnt sienna, ginger, beet, rhubarb, raspberry, paprika and pimento-colored leaves of above average brilliance.

I think we saw leaves in all these colors - but of course we see them because the trees have disinvested in them. Unlike spring flowers, fall colors are a byproduct, an aftereffect. I was casting about for a metaphor. Is it like visiting a town on the day they hang their laundry out? The day after a big parade? An image came to me of an ocean liner, its decks lined with soldiers off to war, waving flags, but is there any correlate to the well-wishers on the dock, praying for their safe return? It started to seem more like we were coming for a comedy when what was playing was a tragdy, a forest-wide act of abandonment, more like when the ancient Japanese placed their old folks in trees and left them to die. I wondered what becomes of worker bees when the queen has no further need for them.

Then we took a walk in a piece of woods that has become a favorite. A mile from the place we usually stay in Blue Mountain Lake, we've seen it in practically every season. (OK, not summer high season!) The light was dim - it had been raining heavily all day - and we walked gingerly with umbrellas, avoiding mud. But the view was stunning. A surprising number of trees still sported green leaves, limned with yellow, and pale oranges wafted high above, but the glory was on the ground before us, the freshest leaf litter in rain-polished scarlets and purples and golds. It felt like walking in a cave full of jewels.

And it came to me that the leaves were as delighted as I was. Waving on the tree, even dancing in the wind as their petiole releases - the things the human leaf-peepers thrill to - weren't the point. Reaching the forest floor, where they would make their final contributions to the forest, that was nirvana. Anthropomorphizing away, I even imagined them happy to be touching other leaves at last, not in competition but in concert.

I was really just applying to leaves what I have learned about the tree trunks and branches - that their participation in the life of the forest doesn't end when they fall, but only changes. (We city slickers get to see this neither for trunks, branches nor leaves, all of which are spirited swiftly away as soon as they fall.) Haskell put it memorably in the chapter of The Songs of Trees dedicated to a green ash which fell in the forest and which he visits over the following year to find an ever changing cast of new characters. 

Before its fall, a tree is a being that catalyzes and and regulates conversation in and around its body. Death ends the active management of these connections. ... But a tree never fully controlled these connections; in life, the tree was only one part of its network. Death decenters a tree's life but does not end it. (83-84)

Saturated

Rainy day in the autumnal 'Dacks? No problem!

Reminiscence

I used to touch the sky, I can imagine this tree recalling...