Feel the love

At a time when hatred and fear are being celebrated in the highest places, and cities are vilified as particularly hellish, it was a wonderful balm to explore the exhibition "Dear New York," in Grand Central Station. The work of Brandon Stanton, the photographer behind Humans of New York, this exhibition replaces all the station's advertisements for two weeks with portraits and interview snippets. Most news images of the exhibition show the iconic central hall of Grand Central, but it's actually the least changed (except for being advert-free, I suppose). 

Images from Stanton's work snake along the corridors connecting the three levels of subways beneath the station, mixing with the people making their way to and from trains. Taking pictures of my own I was initially torn between waiting for people to pass so I'd get an uninterrupted view of Stanton's exhibition, and trying to stage the people hurrying obliviously by with it. Looking at my pictures now, the most satisfying are those in which you feel that the folks in his photos and in mine are the same, all New Yorkers with stories you may never know, but which work like Stanton's assures you are worth the knowing.

 

In Vanderbilt Hall, there's new work from other photographers - profiles of the work of ten local neighborhood photographers (one focusing on the homes of the formerly incarcerated), and surrounding them on three sides, portraits by New York schoolchildren describing people "who have had an impact" on their lives. Lots of cleverly posed mothers and fathers and siblings and friends, grandparents, teachers, priests, neighbors... 

 

It's impossible not to feel buoyed by all the love surfaced and celebrated here. (The interactions of people viewing the exhibition were unusually kind and tender, too. I think many of us had tears in our eyes.) I think something like Humans of New York could be done anywhere ... and probably should! 

Lived religion

Unplanned, both my classes are reading from Meredith McGuire's Lived Religion this week! In both, we're not only getting to know a recent direction in research, but pushing back against narratives which presnet current American pluralism unprecedented. McGuire refers to work by historian Peter Burke, who draws on Bruegel's "Fight between Carnival and Lent" to argue that pre-Reformation European Christianity had a much broader understanding of religion, one encompassing feasting as well as fasting in prescribed rhythms. Way fun to have that image overlooking our class discussion! 

In "Theorizing Religion" we also watched a witty video by the young scholar who produces the series "Religion for Breakfast," one of whose exhibits is an amulet from late-Roman Anatolia which happily mixes together Christian and non-Christian images; the class really got into it when I pointed out that such an amulet won't just have been an individual's syncretic secret but produced on a wider scale for many people. Both helped the class see beyond individualistic conceptions of private spirituality. As McGuire puts it: 

[I]ndividual religion is, nevertheless, fundamentally social. Its building blocks are shared meanings and experiences, learned practices, borrowed imagery, and imparted insights. (Lived Religion, OUP 2008, 13).  

Wishing blue skies

A morning view for a change... 

Come into my parlor

 

Frog mouths galore

Headwinds

At a meeting of our University Curriculum Committee (where I am one of the Faculty Senate reps) today, someone from the Provost's Office reported that she'd been losing sleep over recent EAB and WEF reports. She may be privy to newer ones (I asked if she might share them) but I found one of each, EAB's "The Future of Student Success," which included fun graphics like the one below, a backgrounder for variously dire scenarios for the future of American higher ed institutions. The 

World Economic Forum "Future of Jobs Report 2025" predicted that in a rapidly changing economy the majority of people employed today will require additional training within the next five years. The hastening obsolescence of "skills" makes the case for liberal arts education stronger, my Provost's Office colleague told me in a private zoom chat. But good news is otherwise hard to discern in these reports. And the two I found are from 2024 and January 2025, respectively, before the US government's war on universities was launched! Fasten your seatbelts.

Wanderers and their shadows

 We had the second alum-led session in "DIY Religion" today, by a fairly recent graduate who is in her first year in the PhD program at Harvard's Committee on the Study of Religion, focusing on medieval Christianity and critical theory. I've given the alums carte blanche to teach about whatever they think might contribute to an understanding of "DIY Religion" today, and each will be on a wildly different topic. Beyond acquainting students with multiple images of where their studies might take them, it's making our course truly multivocal and multidisciplinary!

The first, two weeks ago over zoom, was entitled "Healing technologies." An alum who tried and left Rabbinical School before completing a Masters in Social Work focused on the way religious rituals can give body to a liberated future rather than an oppressive past - and suggesting ways of DIYing within rather than beyond "religions."

Today's, entitled "(A)theological dissent," took the class into dense passages from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Friedrich Nietzsche to provide a genealogy of efforts to move beyond a Christian culture. Key was "Acquaint Thy Self First Hand With Deity," the 1836 speech that got Emerson banned from Harvard Divinity School for thirty years (though now there's an endowed professorship named after him). Each of us is divine, if we only knew it and stopped accepting the forced mediocrity of imitating earlier supposedly more spiritual figures and ages. And yet Emerson still considered himself a Christian - and was in imagination still too Christian-like for our "atheist, not anti-theist" alum.

In Nietzsche's Gay Science we first mulled over the famous "Where is God? ... We have killed him!" section (§125). Is the magnitude of this deed not too great for us? Do we not ourselves have to become gods merely to appear worthy of it? But the presenter's goal was this:

Delight in blindness. – ‘My thoughts’, said the wanderer to his shadow, ‘should show me where I stand, but they should not betray to me where I am going. I love ignorance of the future and do not want to perish of impatience and premature tasting of things promised.’

The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (CUP 2001), 120, 162 

The presenter's suggestion was that really DIYing it means letting go of received ideas not only of what "religion" is but even of what it means to be a "self." Can we live into presence, relation, and care for the oppressed without losing ourselves in the impatience of "projects" which seem future-oriented but really perpetuate the problems of the past?

Heady stuff, and no more something I could have come up with than the earlier alum contributions. But that's the point! I want the students to receive what the alums think valuable to share. And compared to my more academic presentations, these alum offerings are inspirational - and challenging - in a whole other way. Emerson was on to something: 

Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul.  

The Major Prose, ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson (Belknap Harvard, 2015), 114

I'm provoked too! 

Yet to come: alum-led classes on "Trans saints," "Making hijra," "Spirit and revolution" and "Wild church"! All framed by "Comfort ⇄ Control"! 

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!