I know what I know, if you know what I mean

At an intimate workshop sharing the "Theorizing Religion" class activities around definitions of religion and the religions of unexpected things like capitalism, academia and fashion, I gave folks a few definitions of religion to chew over. Three were serious, the fourth not so much. 

If you don't recognize it, that last one is from the song which VH1 listed as No. 23 of the "100 Greatest One-Hit Wonders of the 80s," Edie Brickell's "What I am" - and was inspired by irritation at a college world religons class! (I used it once before, almost twenty years ago (!).) I told the assembled people I'd included the smile on a dog to keep things light-hearted but after a while noted that it was in the list also as a corrective to the potentially merely anthropological claims of the other three (Tillich, Suzuki, Durkheim). Religion might be a fact not just about human beings muddling along but about the solicitation of the more-than-human world in which we find ourselves.

The event was my contribution to a suite of events around the "Fashion - Faith: Rituals and Dialogues" exhibition, and the conversation my prompts fostered among these fashion-focused students quickly left me behind: wearing something that "just feels wrong," the fate-like power of "trends," the rage for reusing other' clothing, the "transcendent" feeling when wearing and being recognized in the work of a famous designer who just died, the daily "ritual" of dressing, death... 

I guess that, contrary to my pious pedagogical protestations, "the religion of fashion" is to me really not (yet) more than a conceit... But the enthusiastic reception of this, along with all the other components of the exhibition, suggest I may have opportunity to learn more. Shouldn't we turn this into a team-taught course, the BFA Fashion colleague who'd had the transcendent experience wondered?

Cotton candy snow

Blizzard of 2026

After nineten inches of snow finished falling, NYC was a sight to see!

How it begins

First blizzard warning for NYC in nine years!

Repent

From the Great Litany, for the first Sunday of Lent... 

Delusions of grandeur

I'm partial to the AI versions of the banner where "justice" is replaced by "rapist" but the enabling of this cult of personality is beyond distressing.

Get the drift

Mostly people complain about the grimy rests of the past weeks' snows but it occurred to me that they're actually quite beautiful in their own way. Worthy of a Ross Gay "delight practice" gesture?!

马年快乐

This horse (from our Met daily calendar) looks a little overwhelmed. Lunar new year, Ramadan and Mardi Gras, all at once?

Out lines

More and less evanescent lines on the Kazimiroff Nature Trail

Intervention

In today's church bulletin, a copy of a public letter sent by the head of the Anglican Church in Canada to the head of the Episcopal Church. 

Our nation finds itself in a "time of distress," he writes, which is "heartbreaking for us, your northern neighbors, to watch." How good to be reminded that other hearts break with ours, see the blessing in our acts of loving resistance. How grateful I feel to read his call to Canadian Anglicans "to continue holding in prayer all of you in this intense, unpredictable season in the life of the United States of America."

Upcycling

Today we had a symposium featuring people whose work appears in the exhibition "Fashion - Faith: Rituals and Conversations," including a panel for us members of the planning team. The symposium ranged widely, as the exhibition does, making a stimulating whole out of what had started as a grab-bag of piecemeal ideas and connections. We heard about young Muslim American influencers and their innovative takes on hijab, the vestments designed for the ordination of Episcopal bishops (including Gene Robinson), an erstwhile Tibetan Buddhist nun's art in body-hugging and inflatable latex, the extravagantly garbed figures of an invented religion called Abwoon Dominus...

Discussion ranged from testimonials to fashion designed by "people of faith" to a young religious studies scholar's insistence that "fashion is capitalism, religion is violence, that's just authentic!" A Japanese priest told us how, when he was doing monastic training, the robes made him feel he needed to get up at 5:30am rather than his preferred 2pm. An older Moroccan woman responded to the presentation of work on new stylish hijabs by reflecting that when she grew up, she envied the women in hijab their freedom not to have to do up their hair, etc.; these young women's freedom is being taken away! In indigenous designer challenged the fashion industry's obsession with "scaling up" but also the expectation that each designer set up their own shop - why not find someone already doing what you're interested in and joining them?

I'm sort of hoping this project continues. Not that this phase is finished yet - I'm offering a workshop called "Is fashion a religion" in ten days, assisted by students from "Theorizing Religion." I'll bring from today's discussions a renewed sense that standard understandings of dress in terms of "self-expression" and "being seen" may mischaracterize religious - but also putatively non-religious - forms of attire.

Anthrobscene

 

 

 

 

 

 

What wicked, wicked people these are

Question Mark Religion

Meanwhile, in "After Religion," I today tried to cover both the history and problems of the modern notion of religion (private, individual, focused in feeling, etc.) and the history and problems of the idea of world religions (incoherent category privileging Christianity-like imperial formations, etc.) - what I called, borrowing from Brent Nongbri, the idea of religion a genus and species. This folded together two lectures 

from last year's iteration, each a bit of a condensation of several sessions of "Theorizing Religion." Somewhat disturbingly, I think it made sense as a digest - even with the additional critique of the ideas of religion and world religions of American Indian philosopher Vine Deloria. I tried somewhat subliminally to communicate what I was doing through 

some fiddling with image on the agenda slides I use to structure and punctuate my lectures. A giant question mark composed of symbols of world religions (a piece of free clip art amusingly entitled Question Mark Religion) towered over the class as we began, then tilted to one side as we noticed the surprisingly modern pedigree of "religion." It   

lurched further - to an almost fishhook angle - as we dissected the faux pluralism of "world religions," before stabilizing into a kind of horizontal correction as we learned about Deloria's critique of time-based religions from the vantage of space-based ones. I hope it felt like a kind of calibration, arriving at an unexpected alternative coherence.

The reason for the compression of what had originally been three lectures near the center of the course into two nearer the start is to make space for some of the other things this moment seems to demand. Today's was the first of the pair "Challenging Religion" and "Challenging the Secular," and will be followed by a pair (expanded from one lecture) focusing on the multifaceted threat of religious nationalism.