DIY seminar

Not a moment too soon, I've started tightening the bolts on this year's iteration of "DIY Religion." Though we won't get into the syllabus until next Wednesday, I'll be meeting the students a week from today!

What do I have planned for them? Alum voices will again play a significant part in the class, but we haven't the budget for six guest lecturers this time. This gives us time for some field trips, including to the newly redesigned "Contemplation Room" in the University Center (whence the above image of a chill Gnarls) and to the exhibit on Renaissance and contemporary Tarot at the Morgan Library.

The broader argument of the course has changed a bit, too. If last year's point was "gosh, religion has always been DIY!" this year's will also explore the resources and limitations of DIY in religion and more widely. These issues came up in our discussions last time, as we noted the bias "DIY" seems to have against established communities and institutions and even relationships - but can an individual really know what they need? The questions are made more urgent yet by the inroads AI agents have made in young people's lives even in the last year, threatening all those relationships and communities (and institutions like universities!).

A familiar refrain from all my classes: what we do in a seminar is special, something none of us could do on our own. 

Wave crochet

I'm in love with this photo by Brazilian-Australian photographer Daniella Tommasi, a finalist in the "Adventure" category of the Ocean Photographer of the Year competition at oceanographic magazine. Everything's in motion, rippling and circling both towards shore and sea.

Retainers

Attended most of our school's "Retention Summit" today, which was kicked off with a presentation including these framing slides. 

Retention is the unbeautiful term higher ed uses for students' staying at a school they've come to, rather than transferring or dropping out. I remember learning this argot when directing the first year program ages ago, where "persistence" (on students' side) and "retention" (on the institution's side) did battle against the amorphous forces of "attrition." 

 

For tuition-driven schools like ours, "retention is everyone's job."

Eclipse

Horrifying beyond words. Though those who design and sell them have plenty of words, all deniable. Every word here is an assault on meaning. 

According to the manufacturer, “the discomfort associated with the stimulation is usually effective in bringing individuals into compliance in less than three seconds and leaves no burns, marks or scars”. The company has advertised the device as a “humane, low-optics, de-escalation solution for many situations facing our men and women in uniform”.

Cloudscapes

Four minutes' difference!

 

Graphs about religion

I don't know what sources Ryan Burge used to construct this chart, but it's definitely a conversation-starter for religious studies at The New School, whose student body is almost entirely committed to the majors at the far upper right corner!

What is being shown here, though? Different majors might shape religious proclivities/aversions (one reason Evangelicals think "the university" is the enemy), but it's at least as likely that student sensibilities shape major choice. And not just "religious" ones, however defined. Burge shared the graph above on his facebook feed but kept for the truly inquiring some other related charts. 

Now, I do feel like I am only showing you one side of the coin here. It’s been all religion to this point—belonging and behavior. But we all know that those two factors are intimately related to political viewpoints. I write about this ad nauseam now, but to be Republican/conservative is to be religious. And the opposite is true for the left side of the political spectrum: there are a whole lot more nones among the ranks of liberals.

So Burge next offers the graph below taken from the same data set. Sure looks like the flip side of the same coin! But, as Burge helps us appreciate, there are a lot of things going on here...! Any claim like "XYZ major makes students more/less religious" is simplistic.

UPDATE 13/8:

And then there's this, not included in Burge's initial write-up, but shared today. 

Even if this weren't from a data set from a source worth being careful about, I'd want to know what the other options were, and, of course, the sample size. If these numbers are to be trusted, at least a fourth of the students in three-fourths of the listed majors identify as some kind of non-heterosexual, becoming a majority in many arts and humanities fields. Tell us more! And then add the data on politics and religion... maybe something on class background, too? 

What incentives/exclusions shape major choice for different kinds of students, regardless of their individual inclinations or vocation?

Misery map

After having our flight cancelled on the way over I thought we'd burned off our bad travel karma... and perhaps we had. Our return flight today was delayed 30 minutes, then 60, eventually arriving in New York two and a half hours late, but along the way I had time to learn that we were fortunate to be flying at all. The JetBlue terminal at JFK was full of long lines of marooned travelers. Indeed almost a thousand flights within, into or out of the US were cancelled today. 

 

The same flight we were on was one of almost two thousand flights cancelled yesterday (and it was cancelled twice more in the ten days before that), among countless flights cancelled across the country because of combinations of bad weather and an air traffic controller shortage. Today's "FAA ground stops" were in response to almost half of the exhausted air traffic controllers around the New York area calling in sick. You can watch the disruptions on FlightAware's "Misery Map."

 

I don't remember flight cancellations being a thing. Perhaps that's because I've been lucky enough not to experience a cancellation before, but it's surely also connected to the more extreme weather brought on by climate change and the regime's attack on government services. 

 

Meditation garden

For our last California day we checked out the Self-Realization Fellow-ship Meditation Garden in Encinitas, surprised I've not been before.

Beach

 

Water + sand

 

Footprints last just a spell

Plowshares

I'm very moved to learn of "Rooted," a monument going up soon in Charlottesville, VA. It will be in the form of a banyan tree, open so that people can move and sit within it, open to the sky and the surrounding park, an invitation to gather, reflect and celebrate.

But this isn't just any monument. It will be made with the bronze used in an earlier statue, which used to organize this space in a completely different way - the monument to Robert E. Lee, erected in 1924, whose proposed removal provoked the "Unite the Right" deadly march in 2017. The statue was finally removed by the city five years ago, who partnered the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center to reimagine the space and its history in a program called Swords into Plowshares. 

JSAAHC in turn paired Boston-based non-profit MASS (Model of Architecture Serving Society) with Oakland sculptor Dana King, who "envision ROOTED not as another heroic statue but as an open civic landscape organized around welcome, gathering, beauty, and participation. Rather than asking visitors to look up at history, the project invites them to inhabit it." ROOTED was one of three compelling proposals developed (another of which involved a symbolic tree, too) and the one chosen by the community. MASS chose the baobab "for its life-giving fruit and the symbolism of resilience, interconnection and shared knowledge" - and for its "pan-African symbolism."

“The opportunities like this are extraordinarily rare,” said Jha D Amazi, principal of MASS’s Public Memory and Memorials Lab. “To transform the very material of a monument is to acknowledge that history cannot be erased, but it can be reimagined."

This will be one of a new generation of public monuments which are interactive and participatory rather than static, their meaning formed over time by communities on the ground rather than fixed once for all from above. Explains an article in Architect Magazine, "Rather than designing objects that proclaim a single historical truth, they are increasingly being asked to create places that accommodate multiple histories, invite dialogue, and evolve alongside the communities they serve. The goal is no longer to conclude historical debates but to provide civic spaces where those conversations can continue."

The form of a tree seems especially apposite here, monumental yet alive and changing, and particularly the baobab, known to be a place of gathering. On top of that ROOTED has found a way to make the opened-up tree feel like a community of people, its branches like human arms in a dance of gesture and signification. Its form is fixed, of course - at least the bronze component - but part of its empowering joy will be the awareness that its bronze has been reclaimed from hatred for love.

Luminous

Among the delights in the exhibition Clearly Indigenous: Native Visions Reimagined in Glass currently on show at the Mingei Museum in Balboa Park, a powerful foursome: "Element 3" (2007) by Tammy Garcia (Santa Clara Pueblo), "The Milky Way" (2014) by Adrian Wall (Jemez Pueblo), "When Stars Come to Earth" (2012) by Brian Barber (Pawnee) and "Spring Thaw Platter" (2016) by Larry Ahvakanah (Iñupiak).

Other stunners include the wall-filling "Charmed" (2012-19) by Joe Feddersen (Colville) - with a closeup, though it can't capture the slow shimmer of reflections and shifting shadows - and the glowing works of Dan Friday (Lummi), like "Schaenwyx (Salmon)" (2019).

Learning goals

August beckons, and the new academic year starts in a little less than four weeks. Am I late or early to be thinking about my syllabi? 

Neither course is new, but I'm planning a substantial overhaul of each. Last year's first year seminar "DIY Religion" was tuned to the Lang 40th anniversary and secured a budget to bring in six alum guest lecturers. This year that festive time seems like ancient history and, while I'm keeping alumni interviews, I'll have more time to direct the class sessions myself, go deeper into the problems with DIYing in religion. (Part of the windfall will be devoted to, of course, AI!)

My other class is "Religion of Trees," which I haven't had a chance to teach to really interested students in three years... during which time I've read a lot of books and written most of one myself! Haven't decided yet whether to take the class through the sequence of my book's chapters or keep something more like the course's original structure. 

Feeling out learning goals and creative ways to achieve them is always fun, but it just hit me that this won't be a fun semester whatever I do. Not just because of ongoing tumult at The New School. In the middle of week 11 of the 16-week semester fall the Midterm elections, and whatever's in store to subvert them or reject their outcomes. Ack!

Makes me want to hide in that Klimty field of California coneflowers!