Liberal arts and virtues

After a whirlwind tour of New School history in "DIY Religion" today, we have a session on liberal arts on Wednesday. Nominally it's about our particular college's understanding and practice of the liberal arts, but the momentum of doing 100+ years in 100 minutes today tempts me to be more ambitious. Liberal arts really matter in an illiberal time! 

I'm also looking for an excuse to share some images I've recently enjoyed in exhibitions, and some of which the class will have a chance to enjoy too. Here's the first:  

These are two panels by Francesco Pesellino, c. 1450, painted for a cassone, a kind of trousseau for Florentine brides. Currently in the collection of a museum in Alabama, they are part of the Morgan Library's exhibition on the Tarot - which we'll be visiting in a few weeks. The seven liberal arts (above) and seven virtues are represented as women; at their feet are associated historical or biblical figures, all male. 

Who do we have here? 

In the representation of the seven liberal arts, above we find, at right, the Trivium: Logic (with Aristotle), Rhetoric (with Cicero) and Grammar (with Priscian). At left, the Quadrivium: Arithmetic (Pythagoras), Geometry (Euclid), Music (Tubalcain) and Astrology (Ptolemy). This array allows the artist to place astrology/astronomy at the center! 

The panel of the virtues places the theological virtues at center: Faith (with St. Peter), Charity (with St. John the Evangelist) and Hope (with St. James the Greater). Flanking them are the four cardinal virtues: Prudence (Solon), Justice (Solomon), Fortitude (Samson) and Temperance (Scipio Africanus). I get all this from a website which informs me also that these panels were once in the collection of one Ludwig Wittgenstein!  

These might be a fun invitation to think about what the liberal arts are today, and who exemplifies them... and if there's a connection between the liberal arts and virtue! 

Maybe I'll have an excuse to share a contemporary work I just encountered at the Wassaic Project's summer exhibition, Tim Olson's "The Seven Heavenly Virtues at the Seventh Heaven Academy of Beauty" (2025). Painted on glass in fabulous detail (and with the same emplematic objects as Pesellino, if sometimes wittily updated) you'll find again Prudence, Faith, Hope and Charity (above), Fortitude, Justice and (below). The work is a pendant not to liberal arts but to "The Seven Deadly Sins at the Super Seven Motel" (2024).

I feel like sharing all of these, old and new, as an antidote to something I'd rather not share, a creepy selection of virtues included in a work showing as part of a Christian nationalist exhibition at the State Department, disingenuously called "Passport to Patriotism: 250 Years of Diplomacy." 

This is "Valor, Purity, Justice (Old Glory)" (2026). While these virtues are apparently associated with the colors of the American flag, they here look so like something from Fascist Italy it makes my skin crawl (especially the Christian resonances of "purity" - which is conspicuously not one of the classic seven virtues). It's the work of a satirical painter, but the show it's in seems to be as unironic as they come. No doubt they'd place scary white men in front of each of the three droopy white women. 

As it happens, the forces of darkness are claiming the liberal arts for their reactionary attack on democracy and learning. I call on all the traditional virtues and liberal arts to come to our rescue!

Access restored!

Last days of summer

Onboarded

My courses are both off to a good start, new versions of old courses but already, with the students' help, breaking new ground.

In "DIY Religion" yesterday we brainstormed "religion" and "DIY" on their own before imagining what "DIY religion" could be, discovering at least three kinds of DIY - and so three kinds of DIY religion - on the way: (1) learning by doing, (2) finding what you need, (3) making do with what's to hand. These are quite different, and lay the groundwork for richer conversations than we had last year.

And in "Religion of Trees" our regular starting encounter with an elder - the elm in nearby Washington Square Park fêted as Manhattan's oldest tree - was enriched by the brand new New York Tree Genus Map, and revelations about the tree itself from Harriet Rix's wonderful The Genius of Trees. We call it an English elm (a colonial tree!) but it's not originally English either, having been brought to the British Isles as a cutting during the Roman Empire - and originally from Spain!

I'm not sure students were quite ready to follow me in wondering if this makes it the same tree as the one it was cut from, almost four centuries ago, and the same as all the other cuttings before and after, but notice has been served. We'll follow up on the surpassing strangeness of trees (not just clonal ones like elms) in our next class, when we consider what pronouns to use when referring to - or addressing - them.

Glacial tsunami

I started the day with this. (US media were slow to pick it up.) You may have seen it, and the longer take posted later by Chinese authorities, which confirmed it's not AI, and including longer footage of the many people who fled the building, only to be engulfed by a torrent powerful enough to collapse a parking garage and send buses bouncing. Or the other videos of enormous surges of brown and black water tearing down valleys in Nepal, sweeping away bridges, pulling down buildings, washing away all in their path... 

The apparently glacier-triggered cascade tumbled at the edges of my consciousness all day. The border crossing to Tibet looked familiar. I remember my anxiety as guards looked through our things, leafing through some books I'd brought and tearing out a few pages, worried they might not let me through. And when I later learned that at least a hundred Indian Kailas pilgrims are among the missing, it seemed to confirm that this was the very place we'd passed through on the 2013 Kailas kora. The scenes of jumbly Nepali towns downriver (the flood barreled through mile after mile after mile of them) brought back memories of busy streets full of market stalls and children. All gone?

I've established now that this was not the place we were, which was one river valley farther to the east, Zhangmu-Kodari rather than Gyirong-Rasuwa. (Unsurprisingly, Chinese border buildings all look the same.) 

But this makes the reality of the horror even greater, washing away the self-pity of my having lost places of precious memory, as if this calamity were somehow about me - and somehow containing it as that kind of loss. 

No such thing. All gone.

Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom

Checked out the twin exhibitions on the Tarot at the Morgan Library today, Renaissance Symbols and Modern Visions. I'm planning to take the "DIY Religion" class there. Tarot is not really my thing but, judging from last year's cohort, it's likely to be of more than casual interest to at least a few of the students. I'm not sure the part about the original 15th century Italian tarocchi cards will wow them, but the modern adaptations have something for everyone. For me, it was the Six of Trees (they're flying!) from Rachel Pollack's Shining Tribe Tarot of 1994.

Rising tide

The timing of the record is particularly notable. Global ocean temperatures are typically highest in March and April, following the austral summer, yet this record has been reached in August. It also exceeds the previous highest August value, recorded in 2023 at 20.98°C. This latest daily record follows a succession of monthly sea surface temperature records and near-records observed throughout 2026 across the extra-polar ocean (60°S to 60°N), underscoring the persistent warmth seen across much of the global ocean. Copernicus

Window dressing

First day of orientation, The New School still a work in progress! These workers are involved in the restoration of the Orozco Room murals.

Snap!

Tree damage in Riverside Park, perhaps from Thursday night's squall.

If you can make it out, imagine that opening of sky was once filled with a tree canopy, and look down to where the trunk of that tree was and, in part, still is. Then look left, to see where the snapped-off tree fell, and up and down to see the damage done to the tree on which it fell.

Hither and yon

(Hit the triangle to play this time lapse of this evening's splendiferous sunset. Remember, you can enlarge the video by clicking the open square, second from right on the bottom)

In stitches

More machine-stitched Gnarls, this time gracing a hoodie, on one many racks of collegiate merch on sale outside the University Center. I don't think we had quite this much in years past, our liberal arts students being too cool for collegiate gear, and the designers all in self-curated couture and vintage.