Other than religion

For years, when planning and revising the syllabus for "Theorizing Religion," the required course for our religious studies minors, I've felt there was something missing. A major argument of the class is that the modern western category of "religion" distorts the experience of non-western (and non-modern) peoples, and may even have been designed to do that. The world religions paradigm, despite its kumbaya veneer, does that too, registering and (to a degree) venerating as "religion" only those aspects of premodern and non-western traditions which resonate with what Tomoko Masuzawa calls "European universalism." If the modern western "religion" concept was so lousy, oughtn't I to be introducing alternatives from non-western and premodern traditions? The problem (beyond the very real limits of my reading) was baked in: if "religion" is a modern western thing, illegitimately projected onto cultures and traditions foreign to it, then there are no non-western or premodern analogs to turn to. Indeed supposing there are is just repeating the same mistake; assuming there must be counterparts to it reasserts the universality of the category of "religion" we claim we're trying to think beyond!

In "After Religion," I had just one class - our topic for the week is What is "religion" anyway? - to take a stab at these questions, but I made headway somehow! The time limits probably helped, as did the fact that this course isn't an introduction to the academic study of religion. But best of all were the readings I wound up assigning, two chapters from Brent Nongbri's Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept, and an essay on "Indigenous African Traditions as Models for Theorizing Religion" by Edward P. Antonio. (Students were also assigned a fab documentary about The Satanic Temple, but that's topic for another post.) Nongbri's a historian of the religions of the ancient (western) world, and his little book deftly demonstrates the many unfamiliar ways the word religio was used before modernity - there was no analog to the modern concept - and chronicles the emergence in the Renaissance and early modern period of the "modern notion of religion as an essentially private or spiritual realm that somehow transcends the mundane world of language and history (18), touching on Ficino, Bruno, Herbert of Cherbury, Bodin and Locke. But for most of my students, the European 16th and 17th centuries are ancient history.

More exciting and accessible was the careful argument of Antonio. Before discussing it (in my prerecorded lecture, trying to be animated but not overact), I held up Nongbri's book and the book where Antonio's essay appears, Religion, Theory, Critique: Classic and Contemporary Approaches and Metholologies, a literal door-stopper. More to the point, Religion, Theory, Critique's almost seven hundred pages include fifty-fifty six fine-print chapters on theory of religion of which only four are about "Religion beyond the West," one of which is Antonio's. (The others are, predictably, on the Arabic din, on the Chinese zongjiao, and on  translation.) The myopia of my "Theorizing Religion" is, alas, par for the course. But Antonio's piece as a revelation.

Antonio is rightly leery of the question what African traditions can contribute to the western theory of religion. African traditions are immensely varied and the western theory of religion has routinely ignored all of them. And besides: there is no analog to the modern notion of religion. Any contribution would have to begin by insisting on the "otherness" of indigenous African ways to western theory. Most of what is theorized under “religion” can be theorized in nonreligious terms in African traditions (150).

The point cannot be to ground a new universal theory of religion in indigenous African traditions. The idea that there is such a thing as religion and that it is universal, the idea that underwrites the efforts of many scholars of religion to see religion everywhere, is largely a Western obsession. (149) Instead of a "theory" or "model" he suggests African indigenous traditions might illuminate as a "heuristic," a rough guide that aids the discovery of intelligibility and understanding in knowledge and interpretation (148). Writing in English (except for one reference to ubuntu), Antonio deflects from "religion" with the language of the everyday, common-sense, immanence, phenomenology, hermeneutics, pragmatism, anthropology and, most important, a "humanism" focused on persons, communities, hospitality and health and maintained by the indispensable work of divination whose ethically superior practitioners provide[e] a space for determining the preconditions of proper relationally and thus of what it means to be human (152). 

When not explicitly or tacitly denying Africa has religion, or relegating its traditions to some "primal" category, western scholars note the embeddedness of "religion" in everyday social life and argue the significance of the "practice of everyday life" is entirely attributable to religion. Everything is sacred! Antonio suggests that this gets things back to front. Religious practices do not refer to phenomena outside the world (150). The immanent world of everyday social interactions is where everything happens, including not only the relationships that constitute us, but the equally significant practices of hospitality with "others," from ancestors to spirits. If the theory of religion were open to this "heuristic," Antonio brings it together, African religious traditions will have taught the study of religion the importance of privileging not gods, spirits, the cosmos, notions of salvation understood as the quest for the other world, and ritual as bizarre performance of inarticulable abjection, but humanity as the space of relational encounter with otherness in the fullness of all its variety—human, natural, and spiritual (153).

I love this, and have to stop myself from wanting to - yes - universalize it. Isn't this really what's going on even in those "religions" where people are convinced they are guided by "phenomena outside the world," think they can and should stand alone before the transcendent without any human aid or witness? It resonates with my long-standing efforts to characterize religion (sic) in terms of "wider moral communities." And yet, of course, Antonio is also saying that this is not a better, broader account of "religion," though it may describe interactions and relationships which theories of "religion" might appreciate. To learn from it I'll need to try to see whether "anthropological humanism" can satisfy my local as well as broader concerns, and if not, why not. And of course not to stop with the generalizations (and English terms) of his necessarily abbreviated article. Not in this class, but in the next "Theorizing Religion"!

City as country

At the end of an eloquent account of "caring for country" (an Australian Aboriginal understanding of the gift of being born as kin in places of mutual sentience and care with all other species) as a resource in responding to the 'Anthropocene' (which she proposed we translate as "in the midst of great ad growing destruction"), the wonderful Deborah Bird Rose asks:

is it possible to re-imagine urban and suburban places as kinds of ‘Country’? I absolutely do not want to trivialise Aboriginal Country, and yet I do want to consider the possibility that the Western nature-culture binary presupposes that Country cannot be a city, or part of a city. But is this so? Is it not possible to go beyond the idea of natural areas within urban spaces, an approach which still seems to maintain the nature-culture divide, and to look more thoughtfully at how a city might be reconfigured if the aim of urban life was to inhabit and care for Country. Could the city, and city-dwellers, all of us urban flora and fauna, become part of a story of Country? Could we be working together for Country? Could we find lawful ways of being where we are whilst reconfiguring who we are so that even in cities we are able to nourish and strengthen our true backbone as kin within the gifts of Earth life?

"Country and the Gift," in Humanities for the Environment: Integrating knowledge, forging new constellations of practice, ed. Joni Adamson and Michael Davis (Routledge 2017)

[10/31: Not sure how this sad news passed me by, but Deborah Bird Rose passed away two years ago after a long illness. May her memory be for blessing.]

Woven in

In "Religion and the Anthropocene" today, I tried to get us to think about ritual, using the fascinating ideas of Frédérique Appfel-Marglin. Human beings are part of an "inter-collectivity" with "non-humans" (plants, animals) and "other-than-humans" (the dead, spirits, gods, etc.), and the way we communicate with them is through ritual. I proposed we start our discussion with this:

What separates out ritual action from everyday action is that in the former, the patterning of actions is designed to focus awareness so as to synchronize the awareness of the different participants – humans, non-humans, and other-than-humans – enabling them to weave each other into a continuous world, a regenerated world. (164)

This comes near the end of her argument, gathering together reflections on how ritual sustains continuity of space and helps us maintain a livable experience of time, and I thought it would lead to an exciting discussion. It didn't. The issue turned out to be not only the difficulty of the idea that modern conceptions of uniform space and linear time are constructions, but the notion that there really are "non-humans" and "other-than-humans" out there for us to communicate with in the first place.

When the class drew blanks I asked them what they knew of shamanism, and learned about new age "shamans" who use various potent substances to "potentiate spiritual experiences," deal with trauma, help people connect with their "ancestry." "Experiences of what?" I asked; "ancestry or ancestors?" But the students didn't want to go there. Spiritual technologies might polish the mirror of the self's self-understanding, but not open the door to the more than human. Next week we encounter Robin Wall Kimmerer's sorrow at the "species loneliness" of western people, who think humans are the only people around. Will it fall on deaf ears, or receptive ones?

Synchronized awareness with non- and other-than-humans might be one of those topics which students are shy too talk about in class - reading responses sometimes tell of enthusiastic or deeply moved engagement with ideas which, in class, nobody would own up to even finding interesting. There was a glimmer of something as I read them an account Apffel-Marglin gives of an American student asked to participate in a ritual at the Sachamama Center for "biocultural regeneration" she started in Peru - it collects and cultivates a particularly rich form of rain forest soil, whose microbial superpower apparently traces back to precolumbian "biochar," but frames this work with rituals engaging the forest, and the soil itself.

We involve our interterm U. S. undergraduates in these rituals, asking them to speak from their hearts in their own words. Some find this impossible and decline, but many are able to speak. I recall one vivid case where the student told me she could not possibly speak to the soil. Then I saw her with a bowl of chichi at a distance speaking at great length to the earth. When she returned I commented that she seemed to have been able to overcome her reluctance. She answered that she had explained to the earth at length how and why she could not speak to her! (201) 

The class laughed at that, and again when I asked what might happen the next time: "remember me, the one who couldn't talk to you?"

Funny how my relatively new courses in religion and ecology converge with the older religious ethics classes, with their attention to wider moral communities...!

Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, Subversive Spiritualities:

How Rituals Enact the World (Oxford 2012)

Family values

Traits common to all organisms include such non-depressing and religiously fertile capacities as end-directedness and identity maintenance; traits common to all animals include awareness and the capacity for pleasure and suffering; traits common to social beings include co-operation and meaning making; traits common to birds and mammals include bonding and nurturance; traits common to humans include language and its capacity to share subjective experience, and thus to know love.

Ursula Goodenough and Terrence W. Deacon , "The Sacred Emergence of Nature," in 

The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, ed. Philip Clayton (NY: OUP, 2008), 860;

qtd in Carol Wayne White, "Stubborn Materiality: African American Religious Naturalism

and Becoming Our Humanity," in Entangled Worlds: Religion, Science, and New Materialisms, ed. Catherine Keller and Mary-Jane Rubenstein (Fordham, 2017), 251-73, 265

Up!

The "Spotlight on Teaching" cluster on "Teaching the Moral Traditions of Others," which started as an AAR panel two years ago, is up (here)!

Growth

Ah, Saturdays in Brooklyn - I'm going to miss you! Today I went from the farmer's market (where I made a contribution to "textile recycling") to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Expecting (actually dreading) the uniform green of summer I was delighted to find blooming rosebay (a rhododendron native to the eastern North America), irises, mountain laurel, extravagances of little roses and the splendid red display below. From there it was on to the Brooklyn Museum for coffee, a glimpse of Clarissa Dalloday (a Woolfian riposte to Bloomsday), and a stroll through the wonderful American collection. Nice neighborhood I live in!

This was braided with work on an essay I'm finishing on teaching comparative religious ethics. It's based on my AAR paper last year  - our panel on teachingreligious ethics is becoming a special section in a journal! Somewhat awkwardly, though, I find my thinking has changed.

The paper
is called "Wider Moral Communities," but about "Exploring Religious Ethics," which traversing Buddhist and Christian traditions. Yet because of "Buddhism and Modern Thought," along with the enduring questions of "Buddhism and Liberal Arts," my understanding of Buddhist ethics has deepened. Hsiao-Lan Hu's account of anattā (non-Self) as the flip-side of pratītya samutpāda (interdependent co-arising) is central to the change, I think. Will I incorporate this new understanding in the paper? I can't, really. For one thing, there's a respondent, who's expecting my paper to be basically the same as the one she responded to in November. For another, I'm not sure where this will lead - an ethics without selves!?

Mountain ranges

As we near the end of Buddhism and Modern Thought, we finally have a syllabus! Well, we've reached the point where no further updatings are necessary, because no more are possible. More than any other course I've taught, this class really has reshaped the course in its own image, with all the riddles about rivers and riverbeds applying.

Our program of readings ends with a bunch of readings on Zen, a little ironic since there is no tradition in Buddhism as suspicious of words. But it's (sorry Vajrayana) the Buddhist tradition to have engaged most interestingly with the unfolding of modern sensibilities and cultural production. That's why it was at the heart of our very first reading, which explored an elective affinity between modernity's claim to transcend history and similar aspirations in "Buddhism," both as western construct and as Asian tradition. Words beyond words: I'm hoping this will help us come to some useful insights about acts, contemplative as well as ethical as well as aesthetic: our readings are about the nexus of Zen (through the charismatic D. T. Suzuki) and modern arts: John Cage, and improvisational dance.

By way of preparation, we read some Suzuki today, too, along with part of David Loy's The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory, and building on Monday's discussion of Keiji Nishitani's "What is Religion?" It's a discussion of what he calls "Affirmation-in-Negation" (a translation of 即非, sokuhi) and argues is the central logic of Zen Buddhism - and what makes Zen masters sound so irrational. Drawing on examples from the Diamond Sutra Suzuki identifies the structure

For A to be affirmed as A, A has to be non-A; therefore it is A

and argues that this is the central insight of Zen and of Japanese spirituality and also - as these turn out to be in his generation's understanding of world history - of human nature at its truest.

We spent a large chunk of class trying to puzzle this out, much of it focused on mountains. In what way could it be true that "The mountain is not a mountain, therefore it is a mountain"? For Suzuki and the tradition he claims to speak for, this is not epistemology or psychology (though it might be those, too) but ontology. To accept the suchness of the mountain, we need to understand that it is not a mountain.
In effort to shed light on this I conjured up all sorts of mountains, from the mythical Mount Meru, so tall you cannot see it, to the Ochtruper Berg, the little bump celebrated as the closest thing to a mountain in the town where my mother grew up, from the ancient Alabama Hills subsiding near Mount Whitney to the perfect Mount Fuji I saw emerging one day on twenty student easels set up on the shore of Lake Hakone facing where, on a less foggy day, Fuji would have been seen. But I was really thinking of a line I fell in love with the year I studied phenomenological geography in Paris, and another I found once in a book of literary aphorisms. (I'm amazed neither has found its way into this blog before today.)

A l’esprit qui contemple la montagne pendant la durée des âges, elle apparait flottante, aussi incertaine que l’onde de la mer chassée par la tempète: c’est un flot, une vapeur; quand elle aura disparu, ce ne sera plus qu’un rève. 

Élisée Reclus, Histoire d’une montagne (1875-6)

All stones are broken stones.

James Richardson, Vectors: 47 Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays (2004)

Students were better on the negation than the affirmation part - better at seeing how words come between us and the things whose nature they are thought to disclose, how they substitute abstractions and memories and projects for the thing there facing us - but that's par for the course. If there is anything to this form of non-thinking, it involves actual experiences of the irreducible thisness of every this, irreducible even though evanescent, suspended like Saint Francis' inverted Assisi but as real as real can be.

I'm not sure it helped when I suggested that a mountain, a contingent aggregation of stuff which rose and fell as all things do, was like our supposed "selves," too. When I asked, rhetorically, "Can you get from the acceptance of thisness to ethics? Isn't Buddhism supposed to be about compassion?" I had to answer myself, rhetorically, "Didn't you hear the compassion in my description of the arising and subsiding of the mountain?"

Perhaps this will put us in the right frame of mind to sit through Cage's 4' 33". It certainly puts me right in the zone of my Wider Moral Communities project. Agency is blown wide beyond the human, decoupled from the toxic fantasy of a self. But there are still things you have to be human to do, or to be engaging another person.

Inset quote from Suzuki Daisetz, "The Loic of Affirmation-in-Negation" (1940),

trans. in Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook, ed. James W. Heisig, Thomas P. Kasulis

and John C. Maraldo (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2012), 214-18, 217

Metta for the dead

As you may know, my life was changed by a Japanese Buddhist priest friend's quip, many years ago, that religion in Japan could perhaps best be described as "ethics for the dead" (死者に対する倫理). That's the grain of sand around which my oyster brain has been polishing the pearl of my "Exploring Religious Ethics" course; the "Wider Moral Communities" project grows out of it, too.

The phrase came to mind after "Buddhism and Modern Thought" today as I reflected on our discussion of a beautiful talk Alice Walker gave at the first African-American Buddhist Retreat in 1997, "Suffering too insignificant for the majority to see" (shared with the wider world here). Walker frames her talk with the account of the murder of George Slaughter, a young African American man in the Antebellum South, by a posse led by his own (white) father, incensed, it was reported, that his horse was too fine. After an eloquent account of Buddhist responses to oppression - she references the Dalits we read about Monday, and is sure young Gautama rejected caste distinctions - and of what Buddhist practice offers oppressed peoples, she returns to the people who participated in Slaughter's murder. She returns, however, in a mode of meditation, building on and building out the familiar formulas of metta meditation.

In metta meditation you start by sending loving-kindness (metta) to yourself. The wishes are versions of this:

May I be happy.

May I be healthy.

May I be free from danger.

May I live with ease.

The circle of metta expands by steps, first to a benefactor, then to a friend, then to a neutral person, then to a difficult person, and finally to all beings.

May he/she/they/we be happy.

May he/she/they/we be healthy.

May he/she/they/we be free from danger.

May he/she/they/we live with ease.

As you know I find this psychologically as well as ethically profound. But today (after doing the guided metta meditation with Sharon Salzberg from last year) we were discussing Walker, who writes:

Let us bring our attention to the life of our young brother, our murdered ancestor, George Slaughter. We know he was a beautiful young man, and that it was this beauty and his freedom expressing it that caused his father, himself unfree, to seek his death. We can see George sitting on his stunning saddle horse. We do not know if his half-sister, white, confused by her liking for her darker brother, gave it to him. We do not know if his mother, dark and irresistible, as so many black women are, gave it to him. We do not know if he bought it himself. All we know is that he is sitting there, happy. And the horse, too, is happy.

George Slaughter, an English name. We might think of Bob Marley, half-English, with his English name; perhaps George had a similar spirit. A kindred look and attitude.

 May you be free

May you be happy

May you be at peace

May you be at rest

May you know we remember you 

The circle widens:

Let us bring our attention to George’s mother. She who came, weeping, and picked up the shattered pieces of her child, as black mothers have done for so long.

May you be free

May you be happy

May you be at peace

May you be at rest

May you know we remember you

Let us bring our attention to George’s father. He who trails the murder of his lovely boy throughout what remains of time.

May you be free

May you be happy

May you be at peace

May you be at rest

May you know we remember you

Let us bring our attention to those who rode with the father, whose silence and whose violence caused so much suffering that continues in the world today.

May you be free

May you be happy

May you be at peace

May you be at rest

May you know we remember you

And now let us bring our attention to George’s horse. With its big dark eyes. Who drank George’s blood in grief after the horror of his companion’s bitter death. We know by now that the other animals on the planet watch us and know us and sometimes love us. How they express that love is often mysterious.

May you be free

May you be happy

May you be at peace

May you be at rest

May you know we remember you

What Walker does here is an extraordinary thing, supporting her claim that the study and practice of Buddhism ... is good medicine for healing us so that we may engage the work of healing our ancestors. Healing our ancestors? It's perhaps an appropriation of Buddhism (Walker claims not to be a Buddhist, and draws explicitly from indigenous, Womanist and other traditions), but it's one that has happened in many places before, perhaps all of them. Are not the dead, our dead, the moral community par excellence? Expanding the circle of our metta to them is, for some, no stretch at all. (The ancestors were very present also at the first retreat for Buddhists of color held at Thich Nhat Hanh's Deer Park Monastery near Escondido, CA in 2004, "Colors of Compassion.")

Metta for the dead. Of course.

Perhaps, indeed, it is widening the circle to the dead which grounds a practice in space as well as time. One of my most thoughtful students (white, a bit of a bodhisattva) saw in Walker's reflection the way towards a true and truly American Buddhism:

as far as America is concerned, Buddhism begins not in 1844 in the European scholar’s office (where surely Buddhism cannot happen at all) but rather only after the European decides it is more profitable to leave his office, to bring dukkha to the New World by ships with sugar and slaves, and to let the slaves really live it.  

May I say: Amen?

God flip

I've just finished Deborah Bird Rose's Wild Dog Dreaming, my first Kindle-for-Mac book (hence no page references, sorry). It covers a lot of territory, including a powerful meditation on the Book of Job, imagining that at least one of Job's dogs must have kept him company on the ash heap - which manages, somehow, to change everything.

Dogs, Rose shows with both dingo stories from Australia and myths and poems from ancient and contemporary societies, invite us to a more complex relationship with the earth. They care for us, engage us in our humanity in a profound way. (An essay by Levinas, "Name of a dog," is the surprise proof text for this: a dog named Bobby alone acknowledged the humanity of Jewish prisoners of war during WW2, but Levinas, writing several decades later, can't return the gesture and respond to the "face" of a dog.) Yet hers is no romantic view of cuddly puppies:

What with their howling at the threshold of life and death, their eating of corpses, and their public sex, dogs bring sex and death together in the most visible and stunningly extravagant ways. The dogs’ outrageous excessiveness is so dog, and so world, so in the present, so in the face of human conventions, and thus forever a reminder of our connections within the world of life, lust, death, grief, and unbounded enthusiasms and desires.

Have I mentioned that Rose's first work, her most fieldwork-based book, was called Dingo makes us human? This book fleshes that claim out more broadly. And its base notes remain Aboriginal in inspiration.

She ends this book with a description of a moment early in her fieldwork when a fraught funeral was happening outside but she was kept inside by Old Tim Yilngayarri, telling her stories about birth. This was more than a diversion. Aboriginal worlds build in oscillations between life and death, as they do between humans and other forms of life. Aboriginal ritual moves between dance and non-dance, music and non-music; the gaps between precisely scripted moments are filled with humor and improvisation. Rose quotes ethnomusicologist Cath Ellis' description of Aboriginal music as "iridescent," characterized by the shifting of figure and ground. Rose calls this the "flip."

In the performance of ceremony, there are many flips. For the dancer there is the flip between the feet on the ground and the ground on the feet: Who is the dancer, and who is the danced? If we focus on motion, it is clear that both are dancer and danced, and that the significance of this mutuality is located in the flip back and forth between us.

The flip is part of what Rose commends to us as ways of living in a time of extinctions, extinctions in part triggered by the culture of human beings claiming to be, like Job's God, separate from and superior to the Earth. Her reading of Job doesn't consider the largely Earthy content of the divine speeches. The closest she'll come to theism is this gloss on Old Tim's exclamation, "True God! God's a man: Lord Jesus":

Sometimes he is human, sometimes not, sometimes clever, sometimes not. There is always an element of uncertainty; we can’t know for sure which person or animal is god at any moment. 

Rose's objection to God-talk is that it refuses the ambiguity of life - think of those unruly life-loving death-dealing dogs - an ambiguity falsified by categorical distinctions of nature or value and better understood in terms of an embodiment of the "law of participation" Lévy-Bruhl thought characteristic of animist cultures. What she's recommending isn't an easy New Age spirituality either.

The flip is not an oscillation outside of time, but rather, as part of life, it works with the dynamics of disorder and creation. It is important to note that the philosophy of the flip runs counter to two important maxims that are current within contemporary spirituality movements. It is not possible that “we are all one” in flip philosophy. Differences must exist; there must be I and You, self and other, death and life, in order for there to be flips back and forth. Nor is it possible that “everything is connected to everything.” It is the movement away that makes possible the movement toward. The unmaking and the making both matter. 

Dingoes apparently often appear in human form, but never to us humans. We need to learn to be part of a world wiser than we are - even about what it means to be human.

二千五百番通

This is the 2500th post on this blog. How the time does fly! But how pleasingly appropriate that this should come up on the eve of a trip back to Australia, for which the blog was created 2484 days ago, 1 Sep '06. In that time I've shared a good many views of Australia, as well as Taiwan, India, Turkey, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, Nepal, China, Portugal, Spain, and sundry places in the good ol' United States of America (look 'em up - that's what the little white search box at upper left is for!). But a blog isn't only or even mainly for holiday snaps and stories; slices of life, more like, cross sections, rhythms... It's a strange beast, a blog, hovering between evanescent and forgettable daily concerns and being a lasting record of the march of time.

It feels especially right to be heading back to Australia at this milestone because I'm feeling, as I did back at #1, like I'm embarking on something new. Maybe it's finally finally being finished with the Job project, a project which I've been working on in one way or another for eleven years - though it's rarely been my main thing. What was/is my main thing? A good question. You might recall that the project when I headed off for sabbatical in Melbourne in 2006 was "the problem of the good." Since then I've been entranced by "lived religion," among various other things. But I haven't had a "next project" and happily allowed New School anniversaries, Aboriginal Australia, the India China project on Himalayan religion and ecology, religion & fashion, queer Christianities, Buddhism & liberal arts and even Leibniz to pull me this way and that.

I feel like I'm ready to move on! On to what? Let's call it "Wider Moral Communities" for now, the name of the paper I'll be giving at AAR in November. I don't want to jinx it by defining too much at this stage, but it's basically pursuing the intuition that answers to the question "how shall we live?" can't be answered only with reference to human experience, rich and varied though it is across time and culture and even among individuals. It's not just that there may be more members to our moral communities than living adult human beings, not just that we might be called to relationships of care with what Graham Harvey calls "other-than-human persons" (which might be animate or inanimate, embodied or disembodied, focused or diffuse) but that we might learn something profound from them about ourselves.

If you've followed this blog when it gets weird and oracular, you know this isn't really new - though it's new to feel things coming together into a "project." You'll have caught whiffs of this in my evolving understanding of religious studies as "the discipline that reminds us there is no consensus on the real," ruminations on ethics of care, rhapsodies on religious naturalism (including James on our "religious function" and the "demands of the universe"), grappling with "indigenous" knowledge and kinship, my curious ideas about "resource uses" for ERSEH and emerging understanding of the everyday, of "lived" religion... In a way the deeper questions of the "problem of good" are at play here, too. I think the opportunity to work with images afforded by the blog (and a sequence of trusty cameras) may also have contributed, and even the strange temporality of the blog itself - thank you!

But Australia's part of it as well, I'm sensing, a big part. I've spent the last 3 weeks here in Del Mar starting gently to explore various things I've been wanting a chance to think about for a long time, from Merleau- Ponty to ecofeminism to a book called Plants as Persons. Time and again the trail of references and acknowledgments leads down under. 2006-7, the year I spent in Australia, was the year many people "got" ecological awareness - me among them. It was the year of "An Inconvenient Truth." But what I got seems to have been shaped by specifically Australian experiences, too. "The land," one wants to say, and ancient cultures (what got me tripping about centuries and millennia), but surely also a certain historical and cultural self-consciousness among thoughtful "settler Australians," an all-bets-are-off off-the-mapness. And Leunig!

Wider!

This seems to be my lucky year professionally! For the November Annual Meeting, the American Academy of Religion's Comparative Religious Ethics and Teaching Religion Groups are co-sponsoring a session - and mine is one of the proposed papers they've selected. "Exploring Religious Ethics" gets its fifteen minutes of fame! I won't tire you with the detailed proposal, here's the abstract.

Wider moral communities: A framework
for teaching comparative religious ethics 

A course in religious ethics has to be a course about religion too, otherwise it risks reproducing secular western understandings of ethics which render much of religious practice unintelligible or merely symbolic. Especially in courses for non-majors we face students who think that all religions are flavors of “compassion” or iterations of moralistic therapeutic deism - or, if not, are dangerously (or perhaps excitingly) irrational. This paper describes a way of exploring religious ethics which challenges the idea that ethics is preeminently about what living adult human beings owe each other. A focus on the bounds of the moral community in different religious traditions – we are part of larger communities including the dead, spirits, God(s), animals, etc. – allows a richer appreciation of the nature and norms of religious action (including ritual) across traditions and a deeper understanding of human participation in religious worlds.

It takes my thinking in "Exploring Religious Ethics" to a further level, considering the different forms of agency of non-human members of our moral communities. This, I propose to explore, will make clearer the specific obligations and opportunities of human existence, but also broaden our sense of agency in such a way as to reassess the different sorts of things different sorts of human beings do. Are some of our actions more like the actions of ancestors or mountains or God? I'm excited: a chance for me to bring to reflection (and pedagogy) some of what I have learned from trying to teach about Australian Aboriginal traditions, as well as from Everyday Religion and Sustainable Environments in the Himalaya; I think there's things from work with Parsons colleagues to be explored here, too.