Philosophical sabbath

New School course catalogs never disappoint (until they moved online, that is). I've been enjoying dipping into some of the old catalogs which surfaced in that forgotten office closet last week - the real things, not digital copies!! 

And oh, the places you'll go! Consider this insanely ambitious Friday night course offered in the early days of the University in Exile, Fall 1934, by a German Jewish pacifist mystic to whom The New School had offered refuge. (He continued to teach there until 1940.) This delirious romp through "great philosophies of life" begins with the Vedas, Taoism and the Hebrew Bible and goes on to touch on just about everything ancient, medieval and modern on its ways to "the possibilities in philosophy for discovering greater realities." Each lecture is like a whole floor of the department store of philosophy. Among contemporaries, Lenin and Gandhi get airtime, as well as "modern non-rational philosophy as the basis of Fascism." Only "The Caballa" gets a whole lecture to itself. 

We were more interesting than one can even quite imagine today!

Pluralisms

In "DIY Religion" today we started thinking about pluralism, with the help of two figures important to New School history. 

One was the long-serving Horace Kallen, who endorsed what's still referred to as "cultural pluralism" over the assimilationist "melting pot" already in 1915. Our discussion showed that for it to work you need to be able to think about cultures plurally, indeed not as opposed outsiders to each other but as potential neighbors: we called this "pluralist culture." If you think this way, Kallen suggests, you will not only engage other cultures better but understand your own better (not confusing it with nation, for instance). When thinking about religion, Kallen recommends a similar pluralist self-understanding, praising the secularism of democracy as the "religion of religions" - the best way to regard and engage not only other religions but your own, too. I think the idea that cultures or religious traditions might appreciate each other in relation rather than compete for dominance seemed quaint to the class... but hopeful too, in an unfamiliar way. Pluralism as the gift (and work) of participatory democracy is a taste of the "Kallenism" that has defined The New School from its beginning!

The other figure was my colleague Katherine Kurs who, after a quarter century teaching at our college, has had to take the past few semesters off for health reasons. We read an autobiographical essay she published just as she started teaching at Lang, which presented a further iteration of religious pluralism, encountered now not only between traditions but within individual lives. For fascinating biographical reasons, Kurs describes becoming a member of both Jewish and Christian religious traditions - not amalgamating them syncretically, but seamlessly passing from one to the other each week. (She tells us this mobility, confounding to some others, is made possible by grounding in early mystical experiences.) This is a spiritual life that requires one to journey forth and then to return - over and over again with complete memory of where one has been in order that one might use such experiences to then assist others in their own passage. Mission statement of a spiritual guide! And a fine description, I might add, of Kurs' inspiring work as a teacher, too.

It was fun to introduce the adventure of pluralism, which Kurs' friend Diana Eck has argued is a practice of dialogue (something you can't do alone), in a free-wheeling seminar at The New School, a temple to the promise of personal and societal pluralism, to the religion of democracy.

Katherine Kurs, "Between the Mystic and the Mainstream," CrossCurrents 50/1-2 [Fiftieth Anniversary Issue] (Spring/Summer 2000): 121-30, 128 

War criminals

It's hard to keep track but just eight months into his term I believe the government of our "peace president" has involved us in a cascading series of illegitimate uses of military force - undeclared wars and other crimes showily dressed up as wars: The paramilitary war against undocumented migrants, and anyone who looks like they might be one, illegally deploying armed military on US soil to do so. A deliberately similar misuse of the military in a claimed war against "crime" in US cities, while preparing for another against imaginary "civil unrest." The drone assassination of eleven Venezuelan fisherman in their boat in international waters. (It would have been a war crime even if they had been members of a drug smuggling gang, which they weren't.) The just declared war on the "left" capitalizing on the tragic murder of Charlie Kirk... I could go on. The ontological war against anyone who doesn't fit a conservative science-denying gender binary, and indeed on science and its institutions too. The undeclared war against Iran's nuclear sites. The not just metaphorical war on the Constitution, habeas corpus, the separation of powers. The very real genocidal war the US supports in Gaza. Can they even imagine peace?

Going and coming

Ever evolving

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. 

I've made sure those marked-up ones, full of notes, numbers and Xs, are on their way to the Archives. But it's also a joy to hold in my hand things I've only known in their digitized form before. The amazingly varied and invariably creative cover images always inspire... and discoveries await. Like that this cover drawn by Edward Sorel, which has featured in several retrospectives for its witty spin on images of evolution, continues on the back! "Educated Man" is not the end of the story!

Like a schoolhouse of litle words

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. 

Powerful

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.

But what's it doing in a class called "DIY Religion," someone asked? I threw the question back to the class, who articulated ways in which it could be seen to model the "scrapbooking" of religious bricolage, to concretize the way we assemble personal religious worlds out of what we find around us, even to illustrate the fusion of different voices in a seminar. The artist emphasized the tension/dialectic of "control" and "comfort." I didn't need to add anything! I think our time with the work and its maker seeded important questions to our so far pretty uncritical celebration of "DIY Religion." Do we fully "control" any of the things we engage in our DIY?

In the subsequent class discussion I also raised some questions about the individualism of the "DIY" idea, and was inspired to go on a tangent about Japanese medieval Pure Land leader Shinran's distinction between self-defeating jiriki 自力 ("self power") and the tariki 他力 ("other power") of the Buddha Amida accessed when we recognize that we can't transform or enlighten ourselves. (My colloquial gloss: "I can't reach farther than I can reach.") Did the class know what a bodhisattva or Buddha was? Our visitor told us they were enlightened beings, and about their ability wisely to assume whatever form a suffering being needed in order to reach them, and then spoke of their relationship with the friendly gender-fluid bodhisattva 觀音 Guanyin - the subject of their senior work in Religious Studies, back in the day, and a regular interlocutor today!

All in all a very satisfying first encounter of future alums with an erstwhile first-year!

Stone Church

 

Wonders large and small at Dover Stone Church Preserve.

Necessary preconditions of violence

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.

Re-sourced

"DIY Religion" barrels ahead with seventeen very engaged students - including one who likes being the class whiteboard note-taker! 

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?

Splash of red

Portal

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.

The buzz

Just a GIF, but it captures the discovery that there are in fact bees cavorting around every bloom here! Look: you'll see more and more!