Hear ye, hear ye!

Public Seminar has gone and redesigned their site, renaming "verticals" (which nobody really understood anyway) as "seminars." So New School Histories is now a seminar, and our latest is actually the announcement of the release of our podcasts! Listen to "A place to go for adult values," "Allergies to gender" and "Building pirate ships and castles" here!

Learn something new

All of the advertising space in the Union Square subway concourse has been filled with New School swag this week. Come join the cool kids at the Festival of New! Many of the people invited to its assorted conversations are names unknown to me - new, I guess! But two discussions I attended today had me thinking in a new way about 1919 and why one might have thought that universities weren't up to the task of preparing us for an increasingly complex and dynamic world...

In one, dedicated to new thinking on climate resilience, a speaker and his host, both of whom encourage people to envision futures 50 or 60 years from now as part of urban planning, disagreed over whether human beings were hard-wired for short-term thinking. The speaker thought not: while the amygdala forces short-term thinking, the prefrontal lobes are designed to help us think long term, as ancient societies show. Short-term concerns have to be addressed before people can really settle into longer-term visioning, but it can be done. (Meditation can help too, apparently!) Our culture, however, trains us to be short-term thinkers in every way - a culture we need to change if we are to develop the "ethics of the anthropocene" we urgently need.

I got to thinking about what a school could to encourage longer-term thinking, and whether our school does it. We talk a lot about wicked problems, challenging the status quo, being unafraid of the new. But our curriculum's determinedly presentist. Can people envision a more than immediate future if they never learn about the past?

The other panel was about decolonizing the university, and also touched on the anthropocene. One speaker recalled alum Roy Scranton's argument that we need to learn to let our (western) civilization die before it destroys all possibility of life on this planet, and went on to argue that universities, as producers of colonialist knowledge and validators of colonialist structures and institutions may need to go, too. It's not enough to bring indigenous knowledges, epistemologies and scholars into the university; as long as they are just a supplement to a settler colonial institution the institution is unchanged, or even made more dangerous. Referring to the Universidad de la Tierra in Oaxaca, he imagined new institutions serving the needs of indigenous people and the ecological lifeworlds they alone understand how to sustain (a kind of long term thinking!). The authority we enjoy as credentialed university professors? We may need to give it away.

This too got me thinking of 1919. The founders' criticisms of universities as reactionary, dangerously committed to old ways of knowing and thinking, aren't as radical as these critiques (though they too had seen a civilization collapsing in WW1). But to the extent that they abandoned university careers to throw in their lot with a fledging "school" which disdained disciplines and degrees and an education built around inheritances, they too gave away the prestige of being part of an institution which didn't realize it was bankrupt and complicit. We're a university ourselves now, of course... Much to ponder!

In other news, the US president shot someone on Fifth Avenue today.

Why religion at New School? A dozen responses

We opened "Theorizing Religion" to the public today as part of the Festival of New... four of the people who signed up even came! But it gave me an excuse to invite Matthew Kaufman to speak, and to put together a series of archival images chronicling religious studies at the New School - or perhaps New School history through religious studies.

1920: The first course on religion - taught by Horace Kallen! 

1929: Another Kallen course puts religion on notice

1932: A course asks all the right questions (but on Friday nights!)

1934: The University in Exile brings sociology of religion

1945: New School is where Reinhold Niebuhr analyzes the postwar

 

1951: Tillich, Arendt and others address the modern crisis of meaning

 1961: The spirit of decolonization reframes comparative religion

1970: The New School embraces the Age of Aquarius

1983: We explore feminist reimaginings of religion

1995: Our tradition of interrogating secularism is alive and well

 

2007: Students enact the dialogue of religion and theater

2012: We bring together scholarship, theology and lived religion

Claravoyant

At the festive opening of the centennial "Festival of New" this morning, something remarkable happened. In semio-scripted and off the cuff remarks by assembled deans, provost, president and chair of the student senate (faculty and staff were not represented) none of the usual suspects at the scene in 1919 were mentioned (John Dewey, Charles Beard, James Harvey Robinson, Thorstein Veblen) but Clara Mayer was, several times! Kudos to all who have recovered the memory of the woman who, for nearly four decades, helped make the New School what it was - only to be written out of the story for another six. She's such a hot property now, the dean of one of the divisions she wasn't involved in told me as we munched commemorative babka after the festivities, that everyone wants to claim her! There's some kind of justice in this.

Bless this house

The move is complete! A few things need yet to be unpacked, curtains need to be arranged, art needs to go up on the walls, but these are details. A friend who is a priest came by after church today for the Blessing of a Home. It's a lovely liturgy which blesses each part of a residence, naming and consecrating what takes place there. Each room is sprinkled with water with a bit of salt in it, each of these having been first purified of dark spirits (not quite not an exorcism!); we trust that our improvised substitutes for the recommended hyssop did the trick!

Confession

Something that happened at my new neighbor, Union Theological Seminary, has apparently got the conservative twitterverse in a frenzy.

Pagan nature worship, they cried, idolatry or worse! But what Associate Professor of Worship Cláudio Carvalhaes was doing was something deeply religious, ecological in a genuinely Christian way and, it seems to me, quite profound. His introduction included these words:

Many of us have a disconnected relationship with nature and relate to nature as outside things, as "it." Today we will try to create new connections by talking to the plants, soil, and rocks and confess how we have related with them. Confessions are also forms of mending relations, healing, and changing our ways. We are all manifestations of the sacredness of life and the "we" of God's love is way beyond the human, so let us confess to “each other" including plants, soil, rocks, rivers, forests.

I need to find some way to include this in next semester's "Religion and Ecology" course! Perhaps I can invite him to come visit!

His own petard

Why does the impeachment of an eminently lawless president fill me with foreboding? Because he's the president, with enormous power at his disposal, and can be counted on to stop at nothing to survive, may it cost rule of law and the integrity of the country (and the world) what it will? Or because we'll see just how many others, for what range of bad and worse reasons, are willing to support him as he does it?

Toys will be toys

 

This actually thrills me. How better to help folks understand that gender is performative? Intended for age six and up, each doll comes with long and short hair and variously gendered and not-so-gendered looking kit, allowing 100 different combinations. I can't imagine growing up knowing this, let alone seeing it happening in my own hands. Trivializing? Perhaps. But it will make the Pope shudder.

Off the wall

The latest installment of our newer truer history of The New School (the 24th!) relates our storied murals and other works by our muralists to contemporary controversies around political art in schools. Fascinating!

Fugit

In just a month, the setting sun has moved from to the right of Grant's Tomb south... guess we won't see it hit the horizon again until Spring!

MOOC redux

This years Theorizing Religion class digesting the HDS "World religions through their scriptures" MOOCs (Islam and Buddhism) and producing outlines of courses of their own! I had little to do but chaperone...

Overpurge

Unpacking in the new apartment is nearly complete! And guess what: I was so zealous in shedding books, donating the equivalent of twenty boxes to the Brooklyn Public Library, carrying many others to my office and leaving not a few for the Brooklyn street, that this is all that's left. Overdid it a little...! But I don't doubt their numbers will soon swell.

Morningside Park, first day of Fall

Future religion course

Barely into the new academic year and already thinking about the next one. Course planning has to start early at a university where a relatively small corps of full time faculty are stretched across many programs and divisions, so the ULEC program to which I regularly contribute (Job and the Arts, and the New School History class) sent feelers out this week. As it happened, their query arrived just as I was preparing the reading from Tomoko Masuzawa's The Invention of World Religions for "Theorizing Religion."

Unlike many religious studies folks in small programs, I've never had to teach the survey course of world religions which is the staple of most programs, and a feature of many American undergraduate educations. Like folks in bigger departments, I get instead to teach how problematic any such course must be. And yet I'm aware that any course at the introductory college level must be problematic - and that that can in part be remedied by making those problems a part of the discussion. Presumably there are ways of doing this for the world religions course so many students want. (More than half my students in any given class are there because "I've always wanted to take a course on religion.") For various reasons I've toyed with the idea of concocting a world religions lecture course for the New School for years, and this year I think I got there. Here's what I proposed:

I'd like very much to design a religion course appropriate for this school and this moment for Spring 2021. It would provincialize western, especially US, understandings of religion, world religions and religious liberty; consider the emergence of new religions, secularisms and indigeneities in our own time; and look to the Anthropocene future. 

"World religions," indeed "religion," could be in the middle section of the course, engaged as compelling constellations whose rise and fall we chart! And my "Religion and the Anthropocene" questions could form the final section: what resources, in "world religions" or "new religions" or anywhere else, might help us in a time of anthropogenic climate crisis?

Working title (an homage to Alasdair Macintyre): "After Religion."

Sympoeisis

We didn't quite get to life, the universe and everything (time was limited) but the student-led discussion after a screening of the Lynn Margulis documentary tonight was pretty exciting - and left us all with an appetite for more occasions to talk about science (especially evolutionary biology) and religion (or perhaps spirituality). My interdisciplinary science colleagues were there, too. The chair, K, a molecular biologist, said the film was like six semester's of biology in two hours. My co-conspirator in planning this event, D, also a microbiologist, explained to us that Margulis "thinks like a microbe."

Trophy

What is this marvelous thing? It's from the 1928-29 catalog of the New York School of Fine and Applied Art (soon to be renamed Parsons School of Design). A caption explains: Poster design advertising hardware implements. The design is based on Research study of 17th Century historic trophy panels and rendered in the modern manner. Who is this advertisement for? Were there ever folks conversant with 17th century trophy panels and modern art movements (like Dynamic Symmetry) and able to connect them to the pleasures of tool ownership? For Frank Alvah Parsons, advertising, like everything else, should be artful - responding to and cultivating the appreciation of beauty and sense of inner harmony which a full life and engaged citizenship required. Golly!

Garden State

Back to the City by way of a lovely arboretum in Morris County, NJ.

Jerseyed

We're wrapping up our week in New Jersey, which was mostly leafy

suburbs with only the occasional mall or post-industrial wasteland view,

 out in the rolling hills beyond the burbs, where you can smell Fall.

Slide

We followed in the footsteps of Harold and Kumar, subjects of a famous New Jersey movie celebrating its 15th anniversary this year. Back when

it was filmed White Castle didn't yet offer the Impossible Burger, so they had prophetically to improvise: the actor playing Kumar was vegetarian.

Anabolism!

The latest installment of our newer truer history of The New School is up on Public Seminar - one of mine. The prehistory of the school I teach at, it brings together questions and discoveries of many years trying to figure this place out. I'd originally entitled it Experimental Colleges: The New School's Long Road to a Four-Year College, but the PS editors bumped my subtitle to title and added a slightly more boosterish subtitle of their own, 100 years in, the New School's experimental ethos lives on. That sounds rather more coherent and consistent than the story warrants! No matter, anyone who actually reads the piece will discover that the prehistory of our 4-year college is full not only of cool ideas but also of false starts and abandoned experiments.