All souls

 Someone's kitted out the courtyard for Dia de los Muertos!

LREL S26

We do a lot with a little! 

Please invoke such powers as you know to ensure we get enough students to sign up for these great courses! In the current austerity, the threshold for cancellation is higher than it's been before, and non-major programs like ours need all the help we can get.

Palimpsest

I've been through the exhibition now with alums of various generations - one over zoom! - and all concur that it captures the spirit of the place: always changing (indeed, in crisis!) but also reassuringly the same. And each alum made at least a few delighted (re)discoveries! The team that put this together done good! This interactive multi-site narrative about the life of the liberal arts is "unbound" in all the right ways. Bravi us! 

Trunk line call

4 eyes: better than 2! Look at that tree in the river, I said as we crossed a stream on a visit to friends in central Pennsylvania, wondering how its carcass had been moved into the middle. But my companion thought I meant the other tree, which I had entirely missed, the new one!

Buzz

Did you know most native bees are not social but solitary? This is a "bee hotel" for them at the Penn State Arboretum's pollinator garden. Cool!

Gone

One of the most important ideas in Timothy Snyder's warnings about tyranny is "don't obey in advance."

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do. 

I found a chilling example of this in today's Times. From this A Pile of Rubble headline you'd never guess that the president has trashed a wing of the people's house not only without permissions and precautions but without even admitting he was doing so. He said his vanity ballroom would leave the existing structure untouched. Oops. 

The formulation Critics are enraged (as critics always are) while Others say it was time for a change is what anticipatory obedience looks like. It frames a crime against history and tradition as fodder for "X was right about everything." 

But there's even more anticipatory caving to abuse of power in the ratification of his crime. Just a day ago his $300 million ballroom, for which no formal plans have been publicized, let alone reviewed or approved, was a "$250 million ballroom" and just last week it was a "$200 million ballroom." This Makeover will be a temple to bribery!

Full circle

My series of alumnae/i-led classes in the "DIY Religion" first year seminar came full circle today! 

Our speaker was an anthro-pologist who's just defended a fascinating dissertation on non-Turkish Muslim ummah in Istanbul. But fifteen years ago he was in a first year seminar here himself. It was called "Religion in Dialogue" - with yours truly! 

Launched

The exhibition is up! (Pics soon.) We kicked it off at a celebration of Eugene Lang College's 40th anniversary, which was attended by current staff, faculty and students, alums - and a dozen descendants of our namesake benefactor. The team which put together the exhibition was represented by our stellar undergraduate research assistant, above!

Liberal ats unbound

Tomorrow's the celebration of the 40th anniversary of my school, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts! 

The process of putting together a commem-orative exhibit at the same time the university as a whole contem-plates a restructuring has been, it must be said, a little surreal, though perhaps not that different from the New School's day-to-day! In any case, we're telling the big story of the liberal arts at The New School, which goes back twice as far and involves other programs and populations. We focus on the special freedom and responsibility of self-designed liberal arts education, the relationships formed both in seminars and in reaching across to other university communities... all of which allow us to imagine next chapters of many kinds!

I love this poster our director of communication designed after listening in on one of our conversations. She came up with the exhibition title "Unbound" too!

Redefining presidential

Whose streets? Our streets!

You won't see this in the newspapers - I looked in vain in my usual sources, particularly disappointed by the grey lady though I should know better - but those of us there know it happened. I don't want to wait another four months for the next one.

No Kings, Morningside Heights

 

 

We want justice,

 

We want peace! 

 

We want ICE 

 

Off our streets!

 

 

Morningside Heights was out in force for today's epic No Kings protest. Hand-made posters ranged from the cerebral to the visceral. 

 

No kings!

It's been a while, but it'll be good to stand for democracy tomorrow.

Tangents come round

Another chance to talk about New School history - what turned out to be the only faculty-led session at "family weekend." Scheduled in the very pleasant but very non-classroomy Faculty Lounge, I had to do without visuals but this turned out fine. The organizers promised an experience of a New School class, so I put the good people who showed up to work in groups interpreting and then updating the 1918 "Proposal for a New School of Social Science for Men and Women." Thinking of the who, what, where, when, why and how of the "Proposal" gave us a template for thinking of the future New School: Who, what, where, why, how is demanded today? (Between those assignments we had a crash-course in how The New School came to look so completely different from what its planners envisioned, and why that frees us to think boldly about how its future might need to be different again.) 

 

We didn't have heaps of time - five minutes in groups, and five minutes to hear from all the groups (!) - but it was enough to get some rich suggestions for creating an accessible, diverse and idealistic space that nonetheless prepares students for a non-ideal world riven by misogyny, racism and xenophobia... This is unpretty 2025, after all.

 

At the end, it being 2025, I also thought it only fair to bring in what I'd advertised on my schedule as a "surprise guest" - Claude, my AI of choice. Given the same prompt I'd given them, it came up with an impressive list of reasons for new thinking (including "AI disruption"!):  

You need to know that this is how the writing of most college essays starts these days, I quipped, exaggerating perhaps less than I thought I was. There's nothing wrong with using the best tools available to you, I added, but even our short time together today showed what AI can't give you: the reality that human meanings are many, and that we learn best and think most creatively when engaging with diverse others. The small group pedagogy which has always characterized The New School is perhaps even more urgently necessary today. A little pat, but what the occasion demanded!

 

Chatting afterward with some parents, including the parents of one of my students (who was there too), I found myself building a whole pedagogy out of going on tangents - something AI can't give you but something our students do very well indeed. I always start with Dewey's idea that we only really absorb new knowledge if we can connect it to knowledge and concerns we already have, but today it seemed that it's precisely in tangents that we see that connecting happening. 

 

And it's not just about how individuals learn. The magic of a seminar or discussion-based curriculum is that you get to see other people making connections with the same new knowledge you're grappling with, which might lead you to course-correct your tangents, and will also surely set you off on new tangents together. AI definitely can't do that! 

 

The only thing better than this social dance of tangents would be if you could do it in a structured way and more than once, engaging other new things together - perhaps once or twice weekly for a semester? What a community this would be - and of course the more accessible and inclusive the better. Would it prepare students for success in a frightened and suspicious world reeling from algorithmically charged atavisms? It shows there are alternatives...

Best kept secret

Funny story, sorta. The self-design Liberal Arts major which I direct is introducing its first dedicated course, modeled on something in the far larger Bachelors Program for Adult and Transfer Students self-design program with which we currently merging. Deans have long hoped more of our students would choose this path, but many apparently don't even know it exists! So we had a talented student designer come up with this poster for us. ("Best kept secret" was my idea.) Student workers are the best! Except when they're not. The student charged with reproducing and posting them claims to have put them up but there are none to be seen. The secret remains secret.

Stackable

These last two weeks I've been watching with mounting excitement as cardboard and wood "stackable seats" are assembled near our dean's office. These ingeniously versatile structures will form the skeleton of the Lang 40th exhibition, "Unbound: Liberal Arts at The New School."

Triumph of western barbarity

The indispensable Heather Cox Richardson draws our attention to the language of the recent presidential proclamation reclaiming "Columbus Day" from the haters. I'm struck by the Christian nationalist story which the writer of the proclamation (surely not the prez) is setting up. Some excerpts:

Today our Nation honors the legendary Christopher Columbus — the original American hero, a giant of Western civilization, and one of the most gallant and visionary men to ever walk the face of the earth. This Columbus Day, we honor his life with reverence and gratitude, and we pledge to reclaim his extraordinary legacy of faith, courage, perseverance, and virtue from the left-wing arsonists who have sought to destroy his name and dishonor his memory. ... 

He was guided by a noble mission: to discover a new trade route to Asia, bring glory to Spain, and spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ to distant lands. ... 

Upon his arrival, he planted a majestic cross in a mighty act of devotion, dedicating the land to God and setting in motion America’s proud birthright of faith. Though he initially believed he had arrived in Asia, his discovery opened the vast frontier and untold splendors of the New World to Europe. He later ventured onward to Cuba and other islands in the Caribbean — exploring their coasts and engaging with their people.... 

Guided by steadfast prayer and unwavering fortitude and resolve, Columbus’s journey carried thousands of years of wisdom, philosophy, reason, and culture across the Atlantic into the Americas — paving the way for the ultimate triumph of Western civilization less than three centuries later on July 4, 1776.

Jesus Christ and Western civilization, virtue and steadfast prayer, "thousands of years of wisdom, philosophy, reason and culture" and "America's proud birthright of faith" - all of them culminating in the Declaration of Independence, "the ultimate triumph of Western civilization," oh my! This is a submarine sandwich of white nationalist tropes, tropes long associated with the figure of Columbus. 

Richardson draws attention to how explicitly Christian it is. But haven't I said I think the storyline for 1776-2026 is going to be the less overtly Christian "faith, family, freedom"? That's in the proclamation, too, in its nod to the Italian Americans who created Columbus Day. (There's no mention of the civilizations of the Indigenous People of Turtle Island smothered by the Christian "birthright.")

To this day, the United States and Italy share a special bond rooted in the timeless values of faith, family, and freedom. 

How do you think Giorgia Meloni understands the three f's? I won't nauseate you with more of this tripe; there is doubtless lots more of it to come. (This bombast will surely characterize the captions of the promised National Garden of American Heroes for which the NEH was eviscerated.) But I have to rub my eyes at the realization that the folks behind this belligerent chauvinism believe themselves to be the ultimate fruit of Western civilization! 

Where's Sylvia Wynter when you need her?

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!

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.