Until the cows come home

Here's a thought-provoking map making the rounds. It's a rather capricious summary of a series of maps depicting land use across the 48 states. The starting data points look more like this spangled map:

What it does rather well is show how very much land is devoted to the livestock industry (including of course dairy), and how little goes to growing everything else we eat - falling mostly into the "special use" (!) category in the lower map, and condensed in the rust belt in the one above. But it's otherwise bizarre, lumping all timberland in the west and all cities in the northeast! All just so one can say the "100 largest landowning families" own territory the size of the state of Florida?

TGIF

Here's the syllabus for my Sophomore Tutorial, which starts tomorrow!

Late summer light

In the new

 

Our seminar on New School Histories began today. Not quite at capacity but enough to run. Perhaps the students found it engaging enough to tell their friends about it... Today's class began with the students' prior knowledge of The New School - what they knew about it before they came here, whether it proved to be true or not - and wound up with a tour of sites on campus which try to convey our rich tangle of legacies.

Events of abundant evil

As the world reels from another set of revelations of pervasive abuse of children by Catholic priests and the complicity of the Church hierarchy, I thought it a good time to return to "Sex Abuse and the Catholic Church," the reflections of an interdisciplinary group of scholars at Yale a few years ago. A new preface drew my attention to a chapter on the issue in a new book by Robert Orsi, one of the conveners of that research project, prophet of 'lived religion" and a leading interpreter of 20th century American Catholic experience.

In it Orsi argues that this abuse was specifically Catholic and tries to understand its devastating harm and lasting consequences against the backdrop of his idea that Catholicism is a religion of "presence," offering believers "abundant events" which span, link and jumble heaven and earth, the human and the divine. Rapist priests thus inflicted on their victims a uniquely "abundant evil." Orsi spent time with survivors groups, the experiences of one of whose members - he calls her Monica - are described at considerable length. Here's one:

The horrific proximity of evil to holiness, most publicly on display when a predator priest took God's body in his hands and lifted it up to the congregation that included his victims, provoked in some of the abused the most visceral anger and an unsublimated desire for supernatural retribution, at the time of their abuse or later in their lives. Monica remembered being at a Mass said by one of her abusers and thinking at the elevation of the Host, "You can't keep holding that Eucharist [up over your head] without losing." She imagined the Host (now the body of Christ) getting heavier and heavier until it had taken on the weight of an immense stone, which the priest was no longer able to hold aloft. Then it fell and crushed him to death.

Nothing of the sort happened, of course, many of the priests having gone to their graves revered and protected by laity and clergy alike. Monica felt "skinned alive," at once exposed to other Catholics and invisible to a opaquely judgmental God. Like other survivors Orsi encounters, Monica suffered "years without speech," lacking any words for making sense of or even naming the experience, telling noone.

Here's another of Monica's experiences, from a later stage in her life, when she has found herself unable to go to Church or to pray to God and yet is drawn "back" to the presence of the Eucharist.

Sometimes she visited suburban churches and hid in her car in the parking lot, watching, and sometimes resenting, people going to Mass seemingly easily and without fear. She kept a close eye on the church's front doors. When a certain quality of rich and resonant silence fell over the parking lot - Monica identified it as a palpable shifting in the currents of the air that she was able to feel in her body - she knew it was the time of the Consecration inside the church. Then "in just those few moments," the outside walls of the church "didn't exist anymore" and "I would be close to God on the altar." 

The heart breaks. All walls must come down.

History and Presence (Harvard, 2018), 220, 240-41

Canvasing

This is what students in "Theorizing Religion" will find in our online learning system Canvas. (I add files in bursts as we go along.) It's a little misleading, of course. These are indeed the readings for the first six weeks (full syllabus here), but they'll be intertwined with a MOOC on a "world religion" - Buddhism or Islam. And right after that come the old guard: Hume, Schleiermacher, Marx, James, Freud, Durkheim, Weber, Eliade - albeit braided with contemporary critiques and alternatives. But this initial list gives a better reflection, in approach as well as demographics, of the field of religious studies today.

Stranded in time

Just finished a novel I picked up in Garden Books in Shanghai a few weeks ago. It's the first novel of 余华 Yu Hua, a contemporary writer whose name came up over and over in my class at Renmin. (Yu Hua's China in Ten Words was one of the first things I read when I was in China in 2014-15, and one of the most illuminating.) His most celebrated novel 活着 To Live (also made into a film) was the topic of several final essays offering a Chinese comparison to Job. Cries in the Drizzle (1991) is apparently less well known even in China, the translator tells us. Beautifully crafted, it anticipates many of Yu Hua's later works. I found the mordant moral of To Live already here, for instance: Apart from life itself I cannot conceive of any other reason for living. (282)

在细雨中呼喊 Cries in the Drizzle (originally 呼喊于细雨) is a sort of Bildungsroman. The narrator grew up in rural Zhejiang in the 1960s and 1970s as Yu Hua did. But the book ends up describing a world whose characters (the narrator only partially excepted) can't escape it. It conveys this through a narration which moves first forward from a point when the narrator was twelve, then deeper and deeper into the past, before ending back at the very moment it began. At least in his narrative, everyone's fate is already set. From the start Cries in the Drizzle is also masterful in conveying the strangeness of memory, indicating where and how it fills in what the narrator saw with things he heard, things he imagines others must have seen, even things others experience but cannot communicate with anyone else. Here he describes the death of his younger brother Sun Guangming, a death he's already told us was going to happen several times before.

A blurry picture appears before my eyes, as though I can see time in motion. Time becomes visible, a translucent gray whir, and everything has its place within that dark expanse. Our lives, after all, are not rooted in the soil so much as they are rooted in time. Fields, streets, houses - these are our companions, placed like ourselves in time. Time pushes us forward or back, and alters our aspect.

When my little brother left the house that fateful summer day, his leave-taking was entirely routine - he must have left the house a thousand times before in just the same way. But because of the outcome of this particular departure, my memory has altered the particulars of that moment. When I traverse the long passage of memory and see Sun Guangming once more, what he was leaving was not the house: what he exited so carelessly was time itself. As soon as he lost his connection with time, he became fixed, permanent, whereas we continue to be carried forward by its momentum. What Sun Guangming sees is time bearing away the people and the scenery around him. And what I see is another kind of truth: after the living bury the dead, the latter forever lie stationary, while the former continue their restless motion.

trans. Allan H. Barr (Anchor, 2007), 34

Vista

Checking in with the Met on a Friday night without a special exhibition to see, we had a delightful wander through the wonderfully empty European paintings galleries. They've been rearranged since last I rambled (actually dramatically compressed as the skylights are being changed), so even familiar works felt like new discoveries. This gorgeous altar by Joachim Patinir, one of the pioneers of western landscape painting, is now positioned on the last wall you see of the room with Brueghel's famous harvesters - the wall one you enter through - so you experience it first as waves of green and blue flowing into the edge of your visual field. Even before I stepped into it's open-armed embrace - there's no barrier - it took my breath away. It looks like it was painted yesterday, not 500 years ago. Go see it, and on a Friday! (If the Met's too far out of your way, you can inspect it in detail here.)

Sophisticated memory

Memory is a strange thing, unreliable even when it isn't (as mine is) getting a little creaky with age. William James was right - we remember what we remember remembering, or (mis)remember (mis)rembering.

Today I had lunch with a boy from San Francisco, soon to be eighteen, on a college tour with his father. The fun part was that his father was someone I grew up with - and we haven't seen or been in touch with each other since we were the boy's age! Much territory was covered as the father and I caught up, but the boy held his own.

After lunch I asked if he was a coffee drinker; he was - "I'm up to about eleven cups a day!" he said with something like pride - so we repaired to the irresistibly atmospheric Caffe Reggio. He loved it, could already see himself as a student hanging out there with his friends. But, he informed me with a knowing smile, he'd heard that in Italy coffee isn't served in caffes; it is served at bars. A world of worldliness awaits!

How long have you been a coffee drinker, I asked? Maybe since seventh grade, he said. And then my memory started skittering out of control. When did I first drink coffee? I've been telling people (and telling myself) for years that it was in college; indeed, that it was instant coffee made for me by a famous theologian at Oxford. The Nescafé chez Rowan Williams is true (I even remember the brown mug) but in the presence of this very young coffee afficionado I remembered that I was drinking coffee when I was his age too... if you can call General Foods International Coffees coffee! I thought I was terribly sophisticated. And didn't know for coffee: I drank it before bed, nobody having told me it would keep me up. (It didn't, perhaps because it was barely coffee!)

What's in a name?

Found out today about this great resource from our archives - a table listing the many many name changes which can make telling the story of The New School so very hard! (And this isn't even all - it's just the immediate forebears of extant programs.)

University of exhale

The New School, as you know, lumbers toward its centenary next year. Belatedly, all sorts of people are noticing. You might have thought that the work my friend and colleague J and I have been doing over the last several years - the courses taught (next one starts next week), talks given (I gave one this morning, and give another tomorrow), articles published, exhibitions and websites organized - would have led to a broader, deeper appreciation for our rich and complicated legacies. No such luck. Folks continue to get the most basic things wrong (like above). The work of "demythologizing the New School" never ends.

Melodramatic flora

Not everyone is taking this end of summer thing so well.

One down

Behold, the syllabus 1.0 for "Theorizing Religion," 2018 version!




We start a week from today.

Practices of engagement

This somewhat rangy paragraph, from the newer piece by Saba Mahmood I'm using in "Theorizing Religion" this year, speaks to many issues I think I'll be working through in the coming semester - not just in "Theorizing" but in my sophomore tutorial, "Lives of Contemplation."

Saba Mahmood, "Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?"

in Is Critique Secular?, ed. Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler and Saba Mahmood

(NY: Fordham University Press, 2013), 58-94, 83

The problems of the day

A new academic year means a new iteration of "Theorizing Religion," the one required course for our minor in religious studies. Revising it each year is a chance for me to accommodate what seem to be new issues and approaches in the academic study of religion, as well as the concerns and interests of our students. (Last year, you'll recall, I decided to address students' religious illiteracy by using MOOCs.- It's never easy, since you have to take something out to accommodate anything new. The next year you assess if the cost was worth the benefit. Over time, some texts have found their way in and out and back in again - Tomoko Masuzawa's account of the 19th century western construction of Buddhism as universal and Islam as not is one. This year the core of classic texts, which I'd tried to replace with mini-lectures last year to make way for MOOCs on world religions, is back - hello again, Hume and Schleiermacher! But the MOOCs are there too (winnowed to just the strongest, the ones on Buddhism and Islam), taking fewer class periods because of the awkward gift of three holidays within our first four weeks.

The biggest change this time around involves politics. The shibboleth of "religious liberty" has become a central cudgel in the current administration's arsenal of reaction, and will surely be front and center in the news as a new Supreme Court Justice nominee is vetted, and as the conservative movement seeks grounds for new cases. (The Masterpiece "cake artist" has been persuaded to sue the State of Colorado again.) But there's also the question of the president's most faithful base, "white Evangelicals," whom many - including many religious people - deride as hypocrites, if they are Christian at all. Aren't they? On the other hand, when we read J. Z. Smith's famous critique of the category of "cults," used by mainstream Christians to distance themselves from the People's Temple, we'll have to contend with the claim that the president's supporters are a cult, some even embracing that term!

So what new readings am I including? There will surely be new religious freedom debates in the next months so I'm reserving a class near the end of the semester to see what Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, the tireless critic of the very idea one could have a neutral policy on religious freedom, will have written about them. (Last year we read her take on "Hobby Lobby" - who's to say one's business isn't a religious concern? Religion as essentially private is itself a religious view, contingent and unrepresentative.) An older piece by Saba Mahmood is being replaced by a newer one challenging the glib assumption of secularists that they are reasonable while religion traffics in emotion. On the other hand, political theorist William Connolly's essay "The Evangelical-Capitalist Resonance Machine" is joining the team (indeed the day after the November election), with its affect-centered non-explanation for the partnership of Christianity and capitalism. But, in conjunction with our reading on religious exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism, we'll also read the Barmen Declaration, theological exclusivism as radically anti-authoritarian. More about all those as we get to them. It's all a lot more complicated in practice than liberals (like yours truly) imagine it is in theory.

This is also the time of Black Lives Matter, and this course needs a more consistent engagement with white supremacy, once again apparently on the ascendant. So we're spending a week mid-semester on a splendid new work in the anthropology of religion, Elizabeth Pérez's Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions; also a brilliant work of theory, it also builds out the "lived religion" and "religion-making" themes which have been part of the class for a while now. And I've decided early on to feature part of black liberation theologian James Cone's last book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, which calls out so-called Christians in America for ignoring lynching, and for failing to realize Jesus was lynched, too. Cone makes you want to cry out that "white Christianity is not Christianity!" but it will be my duty as educator to note that this claim, appropriate in a work of theology, isn't available - at least not in the same way - for a scholar of religion.

Ruin studies

Have you heard about the outlines of ancient human structures and settlements which have been revealed by the British version of this summer's record-breaking heat? The Times has some nice pictures in an article about it, oddly placed in the "Opinion" section. The author, a researcher and historical novelist, wraps up his account of variously florid responses to these ghostly presences:

The apparition of these traces has caused the same questions to be asked over and over: What do these strange signs mean? Are they signs of hope or omens of doom? Are they ruins or runes? When we’re gone, how will the land remember us? If these ghosts in the grass have the answers to our questions, they are not telling us. They sit in mute witness as we try to understand, waiting to disappear again with the coming of the rain.

The author's working toward a PhD in "ruin and memory studies" so I should probably defer to him. But it seems sloppy to lump together the idea these cropmarks mean something, that they are signs of hope or doom, that they might have answers to our questions, that they sit in witness. Each of these seems worth parsing, and considering as an expression of efforts by people in our own time to make sense of time and our place in it. I'm there, too.

Crown shyness

From a facebook post reposted by an old friend I learned the name for a phenomenon I've long noticed and marveled at (New York's plane trees do it consistently): crown shyness. Apparently the how and the why of it have not been satisfactorily explained... outsmarted again!

Summer's end

Meet the family

An article in the New York Times Magazine about Carl Woese, whose work upended the idea that all forms of life and their relationships can be represented on a tree diagram, includes this rather nice hand-drawn image from a 1999 article by Ford Doolittle. Genes can be transferred horizontally as well as vertically, even between forms of life otherwise remote from each other. Is it still helpful to think of a tree of life? If one thinks of trees whose branches fuse, perhaps, but that may still misrepresent the potential for quick rather than slow, steady changes.

Packing problem

Part of the challenge of education in New York is holidays. Every couple of years it makes starting a course in the Fall a rather complicated business, especially if it's a Monday-Wednesday course, and this is one

 

of those years. The usual challenge of fitting your course materials into a pedagogically effective sequence is exacerbated by a schedule which doesn't let your class find a rhythm, a groove, until week six - too late!

This year we have an additional disruption coming up, cresting in week eleven. It will be one of those times when the relevance of what we do in the classroom is called in question - even if a "blue wave" rushes in.