Every few years, someone cleaning out an office or closet happens on a trove of New School history. The latest find includes course catalogs from the dean's office of the Adult Division in that division's heyday, when the appearance of the New School Bulletin was an event in the city's cultural calendar. Some of these ring-bound bulletins record which courses ran and which were cancelled - about 25% each time - so they're a precious complement to the digitized catalogs.
The online newsletter of our Global Studies program featured some reflections from the new chair, who remarks on the value of gathering for joy and study in this time where "our communal and personal worlds are turned upside down by cruel and reckless policies and events that challenge established vocabularies," adding a reflection on how recent events have made some of her earlier work about how genocide might better conceptualized and so prevented seem "both quixotic and presumptuous." "As we witness several genocides being waged across the world," she writes, "even critically engaged concepts seem lacking in the bluntness and compassion necessary to describe the loss."
The newsletter ends with a poem by the indispensable Mary Oliver:
I haven't read this poem before but it is characteristically lovely and true. And it is so apt for the work we are called to do at a time when it seems that there is "nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split, dropped by the gulls..." Could this really be "like a schoolhouse"?
I think of our students, who have never known things whole or shut.
A first alum came to visit "DIY Religion" today. It's the artist whose work graces the course syllabus! In real life, the nine sculptural feet of "Comfort ⇄ Control" made the pretty 8-inch splash on the syllabus almost vanish in comparison.
The story of the work made it even more compelling. it was assembled over nine months out of discarded plastic wrappers and shopping bags retrieved in Thailand, Vietnam and London, which the artist discovered could be melted and fused by being ironed (through parchment paper) and then layered and stitched together. The work is part of a years-long feminist engagement with the way we are composed of what we consume... and with the ways we, especially women, are expected to make ourselves into consumables. It's meant to be beautiful and nauseating at once, ominous and enticing, substantial and insubstantial, personal and impersonal. The students, especially the young women, resonated strongly with it.
The latest outrage, Christian nationalism as U. S. foreign policy!
Funnily enough (not funny really), just last night I was reading about the Moscow, Idaho liberal arts college associated with New Apostolic Reformation, the patriarchal anti-democratic Christian nationalist outfit of which our Crusader tattoo-sporting Secretary of Defense ("War"!) is a member. Their raison-d'être as a college dedicated to the liberal arts - arts of a free man - represents the very same skewed view of freedom:
Without [God], truth and freedom dissolve into relativism and chaos. We believe historic, biblical Christianity, as contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, to be the only basis on which the search for truth and the exercise of liberty are meaningful or possible. Liberty is found not in the absence of law, but in keeping the letter and spirit of the Law of God: “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” (2 Cor. 3:17).
I'll have more to say at some point about what "liberal arts" can do in a time where the espousers of such artfully illiberal ideas share the stage with prominent members of the administration (an administration one of whose "enemies" is us liberal colleges and universities). Soon!
But back the day's evidence of Christian nationalism's blunderbuss attacks on the American idea. @StateDept's distorted depiction of the American founders as advocates of Christian liberty is one which has been taught for generations now in private and home schools. So it’s not that surprising to see it here, if deeply alarming. (Get ready for lots more of this dreck as we approach the bicenquinquagenary, though.)
However the philosophical argument about freedom may be at least as dangerous. This pablum about the "necessary preconditions of freedom" lines up with the account of white Christian nationalism in Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry's The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy (Oxford, 2022), which I happen to have read recently, too. Gorski and Perry's book traces back to the 17th century a white Christian nationalist "trinity": freedom (for God's elect), order (everyone else in their place below them) and violence (the way that order is maintained and enforced). In this upside-down world, defined by racial conflict and sanctified by bespoke theology, violence - of the white man against others - becomes the proof and expression of Christian "freedom," and the very story of the United States of America!*
I’ve been putting off reckoning with the daily assaults on American democracy in this blog, but these historical, conceptual and religious atrocities fall in my wheelhouse. I'll have more to say on these toxic travesties of Christianity as well as of democracy and its values.
* This illuminates the use of the genocidal term "eradicate" in @StateDept's post, and another of the day's horrors, a prezudenshul meme aligning the horrors of the Vietnam war with plans to lay siege to Chicago, and implying - despite the profoundly antiwar message of the film it references - that indiscriminate violence against people of color was righteous and glorious.
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We're easing our way into the subject (after a brief section on the history of our school, DIY-U). Today's assignment was to assemble an annotated list of "sources" someone might use in their "DIY religion," and, while some students initially wished I'd specified what I meant by "sources," by the end of sharing I'm confident all could see the value of the wide-open prompt. (I had given some examples, by the way.) Even with just one or two things from each student, we put together a more capacious, inclusive and engaging list than any of us could have come up with on our own. Helpfully anonymized by the note-taker, the list will reappear next week as a check-list: have you experience with each of these? If not, why not?
The scaffolding has come off nearby Riverside Church, whose western wall has been under renovation for a long time. We rediscovered its great west portal when the sun was at a perfect angle for the statues, a nearly century-old evocation of Chartres, both those in profile and those illuminated head-on.
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cavorting around every bloom here! Look: you'll see more and more!
Miyazaki Hayao's "風の谷のナウシカ/Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind" (1984) is one of my favorite movies, but I've somehow never thought to read the manga which inspired them - and which continued to appear well after the appearance of the movie. I'm reading them now, rapt!
It's impossible for me to read it without hearing Joe Hisaishi's unforgettable sound track, but the manga itself is full of sounds. Since the phonetic (katakana) characters marking sounds are part of the manga design, the translators offer an index at the end of the book for English language readers to add the right sound. But the translators think the sound effects need translating, not just transliterating!
Try it for yourself on these pages from the second volume (of what eventually became seven), which correspond to the climax of the movie. Your read from right to left. I'm finding I'm more familiar with the music of manga katakana than English language comic book sound effects!
I invited the specter of AI into the first session of "DIY Religion" today, even as we set up a very analog classroom. As an icebreaker I'd asked students to tell us something they'd done for the first time in the last week - sort of a no-brainer for first year students - and we heard about sleeping in airports, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge and visiting the Met, getting a nosering, asking someone to be their friend, and lots about food: first fried oreos, Taco Bell, Five Guys and a sandwich costing more than $35. When it came my turn all I could think to say was that I'd gotten to know NotebookLM, one of the AI devices the university is sharing with us. I was relieved that the name drew a blank, though they surely know other similar programs. I told them a little about it anyway, and how when I added a bunch of texts from our class it described another class - interesting enough, but not the one we're embarking on. I guess I'm opening a space, or acknowledging we're all now in the space, where AI is always present.
Or maybe not always. I've been moved by articles I read in the Chronicle of Higher Education on student fatigue at online LMSs (learning management systems), as well as on the irresistible ease with which AI can generate summaries, to abandon online reading responses. Instead, I'm having students buy a notebook (I showed them my MUJI one as an example) and copy passages from the readings into them, and then respond, all longhand. Mind-maps, diagrams and drawings welcome too! The notebooks will start our class discussions but also provide them an archive of the highways and byways of their thinking over the course of the semester.
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