Manhattan moonshine

This time of year the setting sun briefly flashes back at me from the Empire State Building and its friends before setting. Here's the view from my work/dining table! (The screen in the window accounts for the vertical lines; what you see as white hot was in fact a smouldering red.)

Only connect

Actually, it's taken more than two months. But we finally have broadband! It's taken several visits by technicians, endless hours waiting for technicians and on phone queues, not to mention staring in helpless wonder at the vine-consumed cable boxes in the super-less building beyond our yard, and three companies (CableVision struck out; TimeWarner is AWOL; Verizon finally came through, with just one technician's visit and followup line-work). My poor housemate thinks he's come to a developing country. I guess he has.

Good book

Just in time for our discussions about how to configure our "Queer Christianities" conference, and who our audiences are, a young adult novel I'd learned about online showed up - an Amazon suggestion which gets a blurb from the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church. It's quite wonderful. A teen romance, a coming out story, a story of serious religious exploration and discovery (more Bible quotes than any other novel I've ever read!). It doesn't just challenge the idea that there can be no home for gay folk in a serious Christianity but shows the power of the Bible as a text for "softening, not hardening, hearts"  and the joy of being a whole person loved by God. It will change minds and save lives among young gay Christians.

A magician in the classroom?

A magician visited "Lived religion in NYC" today. I mean that almost literally, in two senses. The visitor is a specialist in helping couples design interfaith marriage services (for which she also officiates). She described to us the long process of exploring the partners' religious backgrounds, practices and hopes with them, soliciting accounts of their understandings of their relationship and of marriage, and of her work translating it into the at once mystical and dramatic "language" of successful liturgy. She had brought along two liturgies she recently developed for us to look at, one Jewish and Hindu, the other Kabbalistic and Wiccan, and as she talked us through the second one, you really got a sense of how the "change in ontological status" she had told us a marriage service needs to effect was effected. It's a kind of magic.

But she's a magician in another, more technical (and anachronistic) sense as well. I'd invited her to our course at this point because we have explored all the things ordinary religious people do for themselves, without the support or sanction of "organized" religion or religious specialists. And yet ordinary people support organized religion and religious specialists too. Why? It's not just external compulsion and the temporal power of spiritual organizations. I've been suggesting that there are things one might feel the need for a specialist for, and this visitor was supposed to exemplify this. As she explained how difficult it is to do what she does well, this seemed confirmed.

But then it became clearer and clearer to me that she may be a religious specialist but is no sort of segue to organized religion. To my surprise I was thinking in Durkheimian terms (terms we all supposedly learned to shed in graduate school!). What she offers is not religion but magic. She works as an individual for individuals, and maintains her standing through her ability to effect results. Her authority comes from this effectiveness, and comes from her distinctive life and personality, not any sort of authorized training, lineage or ordination. (The answer to the question how she could marry a Mormon and a Catholic, for instance, is simply and finally that she has. Now that's magic!) When I quipped that, in light of the fact that half of all Americans now marry across religious lines, her line of work might be something one might mention when asked "what can you do with a religious studies degree?" she put me in my place: she didn't learn how to do this from books.

We all shed Durkheim's religion/magic distinction, though, because he seems simply wrong to see in one the guarantee of a shared moral life in community, in the other an individualistic and amoral practice which could not generate anything like such stability and meaning and may even undermine it. (I've often quoted John Gager's suggestion that in fact "magic" is no more than a name for "religions we don't like," "religion" a name for "magic we do like.") In this specific case, is not the interfaith marriage liturgist helping individuals transcend individual needs and deepening and extending moral communities?

Philosophy game

Apparently at least one student from the class I visited last Friday has condensed Socratic dialogue into a breezy game for two people.

The first person asks something like, say: "What is learning?"

The other starts to answer something along the lines of: "It's when someone, um, teaches, er..." and then shakes her fists in the air and cries: "I'm so frustrated!"

Storm damage

Did I say we got off easy? Well, only 50,000 households lost electricity. But a thousand trees in Central Park are down, and untold others throughout the city... including this one from the berm along Plaza Street West. You might recognize the site - the tree this one used to face across the fence was taken out by that tornado last year.

Fall back

Once again New York City got off easy. Yesterday was dark, miserable, wet and cold, but today was bright and almost warm, a lovely mid-Autumn day. Most, if not all, the leaves survived on the trees.

Wettersturz

Fall's only barely begun, and here comes a big snowy Nor'easter - more snow than has been seen in October in recorded memory! But frankly one is coming to expect that sort of thing. No more climate as usual!

Socrateasing

I wore a tie today - perhaps the first time all year! But it was a special occasion. It was for a 3rd grade class in the South Slope, and I was their visiting philosopher. (Inspired by a café philosophique book for children, the teacher Mrs. B has been leading exciting discussion of questions like "What came first, the chicken or the egg?" "Is the glass half full or half empty?" "Can you be happy and sad at the same time?" and - my favorite - "Am I here?" My friend J, who has a daughter in the class, told the teacher she could bring a real philosopher to the class, so there I was, just in time for Mrs. B to introduce Socrates.) I didn't wear just any tie:
I had them inspect the tie - several recognized "The Thinker" - and had us all try to sit in that position and see if it made us think deeper thoughts. "This is what many people think of when they think of a philosopher," I said, then asked them to show me what their study had suggested a philosopher looked like. Several offered variations on "The Thinker," with head tilted or hands folded beneath the chin or hands covering the eyes. One pointed diagonally upward like John Travolta in "Saturday Night Fever" - the gesture of "I've got it!" Another put a finger to his temple and smiled brightly: "Lightbulb," he explained. We'd almost choreographed a philosophy dance, so I tried to remember all their gestures in order, then asked "Want to see how I picture Socrates?" I posed with my friend J as if in the midst of an engaged dialogue. "Forget The Thinker: Socrates thinks you can't do philosophy all by yourself."

Mrs. B had offered a brief description of Socrates (taken from here), and then asked if anyone wanted to try to have a Socratic dialogue with me. Many volunteered (mostly girls). What did I think would be a good question to get us started? I chose "What is learning?" and over the next twenty minutes we really truly had Socratic exchange! Several students took their turns, all with perceptive and interesting answers which I bounced back to them with Socratic spin, each giving up at a certain point (Mrs. B: "How do you feel? Frustrated?" Student: "Yes!" Me: "That's great!"), until by the end we'd reached one of those points Socrates most enjoyed. We'd agreed that learning isn't just someone teaching you something, and that you don't learn everything someone tells you or you read in a book but only some things, and that you learn those things rather than others because you're ready to, and that that means that in some sense you already know them ... so, in fact, it seems you don't need to learn them at all! I didn't set out to get to this deliciously Socratic paradox (had they just learned from me that you can't learn from another person?), but there we were! I dare say Socrates, who described himself not as a teacher but as a midwife, would have been proud.

From this height we attained to even higher peaks. One student asked: if I need someone to help me to learn something, surely that person needed someone, and that person needed someone, and that person needed someone ... so who was the first to know something? After praising the question and bouncing it around (Mrs. B: "How do you feel when you ask a question and someone just says it's a good question and doesn't answer it?" Student responses mixed!) I suggested that perhaps the first person was a Thinker type - assuming the Rodin posture - and perhaps what they came up with was not new knowledge but a new question.

After interruption by a long series of announcements over the PA system and snacks, it was time to wind down. Any last questions for me, asked Mrs. B? I punted on "What caused the sun?" and parried on the rather wonderful "How do you know your name?" Then a boy asked, "What is a question?" very pleased with himself but not expecting me, too, to be pleased by his query. (I was of course delighted.) I passed it around. "Something that has an answer," said someone confidently. "Maybe," I said, "maybe not." As our time ran out I thanked Mrs. B for her hospitality and the class for their excellent philosophizing and, making the Socrates-Travolta gesture, took my leave.

What fun! I recalled a visit to a class of 5th graders at Trinity School several years ago; the instructor told me that at about age 10 children's minds open to the pleasures and paradoxes of abstraction, and that this is a great time to do philosophy. His was a religion class and they were discussing Zen Buddhist koans - brilliantly, just like today's kids. And this in turn reminded me of Nel Noddings' book Educating for Intelligent Belief or Unbelief, which argues that big questions arise naturally in elementary school curricula if you let them - and if you let them, amazing things will happen. Amazing things happened today!

PS Someone took a picture - notice the Rodin and Eureka-moves!

Extended family

Today could have been the day we exploded the category of "lived religion," but I'm not sure anything like that happened. We've been discussing the adoption and adaptation of mizuko kuyô 水子供養 rituals in America as chronicled in Jeff Wilson's brilliant book, Mourning the Unborn Dead: A Buddhist Ritual Comes to America (which I've discussed before). This gave us an opportunity to think about the work of ritual - what it does and how - and whether the mysterious continuum from fertilized egg to successfully delivered baby isn't perhaps better understood through ritual than definitions and artificially drawn lines. (I put on the board the awful proposed amendment to the Mississippi State Constitution which is likely to be voted in at the next election: the term ‘person’ or ‘persons’ shall include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.)

I also got to talk about what in other classes I call the question of the limits of the moral community. A discussion of rituals for "children who unfortunately were not able to be born" (to use the language used at Hasedera in Kamakura) let me suggest that our discussions of "lived religion" have focused only on "human beings who managed to be born and haven't yet died." But no religion thinks that's all there is, and certainly no lived religion, which where ties with ancestors, the departed, and whatever other forces and agents there are perhaps most intimately felt and maintained.

To make the point I recalled the painting above, Charles Willson Peale's portrait of his family - painted over thirty-five years (1773-1809), during which time his first wife died and he married again: both wives are in the portrait, and the two little girls at the table died as children. I recalled other family portraits from the exhibition at the New-York Historical Society where I saw this one which included gauzy figures of babies who had been stillborn. Not so easy to answer the census-takers question "how many people are there in this family or house?"

What happens to "lived religion" when we expand the sense of the community in this way, and take into account the fluid boundaries which lead William LaFleur to entitle his book on mizuko rituals in Japan Liquid Life? We don't - well, I don't - want to endorse an approach which accepts the "buffered self" Charles Taylor thinks replaced the "porous self" in our "secular age."

Return of the prodigal

Disappeared last Thursday. Reappeared today! I thought I had lost it in a museum but the person who found it - a student at our college and even more miraculously one who knew one of my students - found it on a subway platform! In the meantime I've learned my lesson: everything important goes on Google docs from now on!

Spring 2012 LREL

We put on a very good show, if I say so myself. I'd like to take them all!

LREL happening

Our little religious studies program is really starting to get a groove on!

The "Everyday Religion and Sustainable Environments in the Himalayas" research project has got a lot of us exploring the concept and methodology of the study of lived religion. We're having a roundtable on the topic in February which should include at least discussions of Jewish humor, Buddhist forestry, Hindu water use and whatever I come up with. Maybe I'll get some ideas during the trip I'm taking as part of the project this coming January, which will take me back to Nepal and Delhi, and perhaps also to Sikkim and Darjeeling! Or maybe I'll take a swipe at queer Christianity as a site for understanding lived religion...

Why queer Christianity? Well... the Provost's Office just announced the academic symposia and conferences it will be supporting next semester. Among the seven selections (out of 46 applications) was our proposal for a conference called "Queer Christianities." We proposed it because a number of our courses this academic year touch on the topic (including my course this semester), but since then we have seen other schools and institutions try to do it justice and fail badly. Now we get to put our money where our mouth was. Wish us luck!

How amazing is this picture from Cassini? There are 4 moons of Saturn on view:

The big moon is Titan, and by big, I mean bigger than the planet Mercury. Big enough to have a thick nitrogen atmosphere, clearly visible in this picture. The bright moon superposed right on top of Titan is Dione, its icy surface shiny and white.

On the right, just outside the rings, is tiny, flying saucer-shaped Pandora. And the fourth moon? That’s Pan, the tiny white spot in the gap in the rings on the left, barely visible in this shot. But that’s understandable, since Pan is less than 30 km (18 miles) across, and this was taken from a distance of nearly 2 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) away! (Source)

Luck running out?

There's an article by behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman, excerpt from a new book, in the Times Magazine this week that should upset Wall Street even more than the Occupiers. Kahneman describes research which finds that the stock market cannot be played. Two thirds of mutual funds underperform in any given year, and no fund outperforms the rest of the mutual funds over time. When the performances of various stock advisers in an investment firm was compared with each other and their own performance in other years, the correlation between yearly rankings and overall performance was... zero! In highly efficient markets ... educated guesses are not more accurate than blind guesses. ... the firm was rewarding luck as if it were skill. (33, 62) Our whole society has been rewarding luck as if it were skill, and bet our futures on the sort of "illusion of validity" Kahneman has exposed.

Lived religion at OWS

I'm not sure if this "sacred space" has been at Occupy Wall Street all along - I noticed it for the first time today. It's at the other end of the park from Broadway, where the interfaith services happen at 3:30 on Sundays. Next time I'm down there I'll take time to investigate what has found its way to the altar, and ask what activities have constituted themselves around it.

Sweet

This monster hitched a ride home from the Farmers Market at Grand Army Plaza. A "Portuguese cabbage" (couve tronchuda) of unusual sweetness - and girth. Food for days!

New vistas

One of my friends moved today, from a cosy fifth-floor walk-up in Chelsea where she's lived for over two decades to a very grand old house (a rectory) on West 99th St. I helped with the move for a few hours, tiring but also wonderful work. Nice to be there as a home folded up in one place, and emerged again in a new one. Sort of a sacred moment.

This is not the view from her window. It's from West 90th St., and appears in a book of window views of Central Park by Betsy Pinover described in today's Times. Deliciously confusing: keep your eye on the green brick wall and you'll get it.

One of those days

Chockablock with good things, but chockablock nonetheless. A class visit to the Rubin, Hinduism and Buddhism. A class observation for the first year program, all about poetry slams. A meeting of a university-wide committee charged with thinking about general education, which I've somehow ended up chairing. A discussion of issues of rape in mishrashim of Dinah and Augustine's response to the sack of Rome by two of my colleagues. A vestry meeting at Holy Apostles. I need a digestivo!