Scene of the crime

I'm not going to dwell on the exposure of the grifters with whom our now Grifter in Chief kept company, but had to remark on something striking about this map attending a Times article on one's network of tax avoidance. For the first time I can remember, the United States is not presented horizontally, latitude parallel to the frame. This presentation, the latitude bowed as if you're looking down on a globe, is more accurate to  true dimensions and distances, but it seems highly unusual in this context. The US appears to be pushed into a corner in a choke hold as its pockets are being picked. Coincidence?

Toasted

Not thinking about events in Washington, just making kale chips.

Approaching Hallowe'en

End of an era

After many years, my old Ikea extendable dining table is getting a rest. Numberless the meals it's hosted, for countless dear people over the years. I got it when I first started working two dozen years ago. It's not going anywhere, though! A new table will take over dining, but this one will just set up shop in the room next door.

Hearing things

In the subway this evening I was telling my Chinese partner about a talk I'd heard about folk religion in contemporary Jiangsu. A woman had been suffering from headaches, which neither the western nor the Chinese doctor had been able to treat, so she went to a spirit medium. The medium quickly went into a trance and asked the woman where she lived. When she named a building in a new complex which had recently been built over an ancient village, she said "of course!" as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. A teenaged girl had been killed by the Japanese in the 1930s, she informed the woman, and her grave had been disturbed by the new construction. Upset, she'd possessed the first person she could find, which happened to be the woman with the headaches. The spirit medium would help her exorcise the girl's ghost...

At this point we had to get off the train, but as we were stepping off, a young Chinese American woman who'd evidently been listening to our conversation said something. But what did she say? My partner and I remembered diametrically opposed things! I thought she said "I know it sounds crazy, but I believe it" - meaning the disturbed ghost's possessing a stranger. He heard her say "it's crazy but it really happens" - meaning such episodes of superstitious credulity. What to believe?

The medium, incidentally, arranged to lure the ghost girl from the suffering woman's bedroom with threats and gifts, burning spirit money for her at a crossroads at a river, and set her free. The scholar who'd told us the story, something of an authority on Chinese ghosts, ended his tale there. Did the woman's headaches stop? Need one ask?

Idol speculation

In "Buddhist Modernism" we've finally got to the arrival of Buddhism in the West - about eight weeks later than many of the students probably expected! Part of the story is how late any Asian religious teacher ever had the chance to speak for their traditions - the earliest was the World's Parliament of Religions at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. Before that (and it's not so long a history before that either), western folks made do with other westerners' translations and interpretations of Asian texts - as many still quite happily do.

It was an excuse to bring in my catalog from the 1893 Parliament, from whence hails this interesting picture: Buddhist and Aztec Idols! Why not? Idolatry was thought to be the same everywhere - part of why you'd bypass living practitioners for the supposed purity of texts.

New it all

Rather late in the game, the university is convening committees to figure out how to mark the New School's centenary in 2019. The drive is being spearheaded by Marketing & Communications, and by Development, so that somewhat restricts the possibilities for complexity.

Anyway, a faculty committee convened today, and bandied about a few very general ideas. The powers that be have been working with the slogan "100 Years of New," which nobody loves and a few of us really don't like. Some think it's too backward-looking - shouldn't our focus be our next hundred years? I think that over a hundred years the least one could expect would be a grammar check. But if not that, what?

"Still New"

"Always New"

"New Century"

"Yesterday's New and Tomorrow's Too"

"New Again"

"All New, 2.0"

"100 Years New"

At last it begins

Age before beauty

A few blocks away from our place, on the way to the Botanic Garden, is the burned hull of a building. It's been vacant as long as I've been here (a decade now); apparently insurance issues were never resolved. In recent years, the fence around it has been replaced by big boards which local artists are invited to use. A new suite went up this weekend.

Farmer's Market haul

HASK not

During our monthly vestry meetings, there's often an event or a music rehearsal going on in main . church building next door. Today nothing was planned, so everything was prepped for tomorrow's Soup Kitchen.

Hearing voices

Have I told you that, as part of a new curriculum of "one text" courses, I'll be spending half of next semester reading William James' Varieties of Religious Experience - just the Varieties - with a small group of students? The model comes (unsurprisingly) from the Philosophy Department, but I'm looking forward to giving some undivided attention to Varieties, which, truth be told, I haven't given a thorough reread since graduate school.

Varieties was on the bill in "Theorizing Religion" today - first of two days, where we're reading two clumps of lectures. As I've been doing for rather longer than I realized (时间都去哪儿了?), today's class was centered on reading aloud some of the many testimonies James includes. He read them aloud when delivering the lectures (although all of them were written texts before he vocalized them...), and hearing these strange words, in his voice, must have been a significant part of the experience of the Varieties. So students chose a half dozen of the long quotations and read them aloud. I had them consider the generosity of James' lending his voice this way  - surely, his reading wasn't mocking or distancing but a demonstration of a will to hear if not to understand others' experiences, he was a sort of spirit medium for others.

Later in the class I performed one of his acts of possession, quite emotionally rendering the famous account of the person overwhelmed by a sense that the gauziest film kept him from the catatonic paralysis of an "Epileptic patient" he'd seen in an asylum, unable to function or even move. It's shattering, heart-breaking. (No small number of students at our school know comparable experiences of anxiety and depression.) We lingered in it for a while, then I let them know that this was in fact James' own experience, though he never says so. Varieties isn't a view from the mountaintop of religious consolation and empowerment, but from farther down, by someone who's never been to the summit and is, indeed, "constitutionally incapable" of getting there. (He doesn't claim legitimacy from a personal experience of the depths, either.) What a feat of generosity the Varieties now seems, acknowledging the value of experiences he himself had not had! The class was awed...

And I was not a little pleased to have done for James, lending my voice to him, what he did for so many others. What a pleasure it will be to give Varieties of Religious Experience even more time!

(And yes, that edition was blurbed by James' student Horace Kallen.)

Inside the block between 12th and 13th Streets, Fifth and Sixth Aves.

Museum mile

Inspired by reports about the soon-to-open Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, and some of its conceptual challenges, I decided to ask the students in "Theorizing Religion" how they might lay out a museum devoted the scriptures they'd just learned about in the MOOCs. For fun (and because I'm part of a committee rethinking the college's uses of spaced) I gave them a cutaway of the original uses of our buildings as a model. So here are Israel: The People's Museum, The Museum of Dharma, The (...) Museum, and the Shakti-Bhakti Museum. It's a fun way to get at people's sense of what's important, how things should be introduced - and what the MOOCs included and weren't able to.

Step by step

Going through some old boxes of files from my Princeton days, I found this quite detailed account of how "Schleiermacher's romantic theology" emerged... not sure if this is a plan for a blackboard graffiti sprawl or a reconstruction of an inspired sprawl that happened. More likely the latter! Fun! Fun in a different way was discovering that these notes were written on the back of an old cover letter applying for a job I didn't get! (I've turned it right-side up for ease of bemused reading.)

Post-religious

Shambling toward an essay on 'Anthropocene' and religious studies - which seems barely to have noticed the discussion - I was delighted today to happen on the interdisciplinary "Anthropocene Curriculum" which has been assembled through the Haus der Kulturen der Welt since 2013. Germans know more about theology than Americans, if less about religious studies, so I was hopeful. But what their cool visual search (the array is different each time) offered on the term "Religion" was just this.

 

It looks like religion is a player but it's not. Most links are circumstantial and there's no line of "relation" with "Anthropocene" at all! Is religion so obviously off the map? Are the religions dismissed without further ado as creatures of the now destabilized holocene (causes of anthropogenic effects but no use in understanding or combatting them), scholarship on religion as the study of sterile where not toxic fantasy? Are they human-all-too-human at a time where we need to rethink everything about what it does and doesn't mean to be human? Give us a chance!

Irreligion

A particularly destructive week, as the dotard of the adult day car center on Pennsylvanias Avenue destroys where we cannot build. The slimy half-measures on the Iran agreement and the Affordable Care Act are part of it, his reneging on a pledge to protect the DACA kids, his winks and nods on Puerto Rico, the gutting of clean power regulations, the ever shriller whining about the power of the free press, the idolatry of the flag. But particularly disturbing is his going all-in with the culture war of the increasingly marginal Evangelical right, with so broad a defense of the "paramount" right of religious freedom as to render all other civil rights conditional. (Indeed, you're able now to discriminate on sincerely held "moral" grounds, too, a shabby and unprecedented legal invention.) Beyond mortification that the worst pseudo-Christians should again have seized the public flag of religion, I sorrow at this further undermining of the moral imperative of our shared life, with its commitment to the work of tolerance and civility, its acceptance if not indeed celebration of a pluralistic society. Pray for us.

Season change

Commodity fetishist in chief

Somewhat unexpected resonance between Marx, our first shared reading after the MOOC adventure in "Theorizing Religion," and something in Forbes magazine. On his way to decrying the "fetishism of commodities," Marx laments the eclipsing of meaningful "use value" by abstract and inhuman "exchange value." This economic shift alienates people from themselves by making their labor, which would otherwise be central to fully human lives interacting creatively and caringly with other humans and nature, an abstraction worth only as much or as little as some stranger is willing to pay for it. It's the economic base for the wan religiosity of modern Protestantism, with its disembodied souls in some sort of relation with an abstractly sublime deity, their religious lives so private they may be unknown even to themselves (I added that part).

Anyway, it reminds me of some interesting observations made by Forbes writer Randall Lane in framing an interview with the president, which help make clear just how his professional deformation as the kind of wheeler-dealer he is makes him incapable of serving the common good, or even imagining it.

Donald Trump didn't get rich building businesses, despite years of brand-burnishing via The Apprentice and millions of votes from people who craved exactly that experience. Instead, his forte lies in transactions—buying and selling and cutting deals that assure him a win regardless of the outcome for others. The nuance is essential. Entrepreneurs and businesspeople create and run entities that have any number of interested parties—shareholders and customers and employees and partners and hometowns—that in theory all share in success. ... Dealmakers rarely seek that kind of win-win-win-win-win. Whether it's a stock trade, a swap of middle relievers or optioning a real estate parcel, a deal tends to involve just two parties and generally results in one coming out ahead of the other (so much so that a "win-win" is considered a noteworthy aberration).

I'm less inclined to suppose business as usual is hunky dory than Forbes, but this helps explain the tormenter-in-chief's cavalier, when not aggressive, destruction of everything multilateral - he'd rather throw out everything collectively crafted and maintained and replace it with opportunistic short-term bilateral strong-armings called "deals." Nothing else is real for him. (I wonder if this sheds light on the spirituality of his Evangelical base in some way, somehow, too - topic for another day.) Our president is the inhumanity of exchange value personified. We are in deep, deep trouble. Lose-lose-lose-lose-lose.