Happy new year!

Not a bad way to start 2021 - the Metropolitan Museum of Art's page-a-day calendar for the year begins with a study for one of the murals Thomas Hart Benton was crafting for The New School ninety years ago. It's for one of the two murals dedicated to 'City Activities' - activities we fervently hope will come back strong, even stronger, in the new year!

Farewell, 2020

Before and after

I'm just three weeks from the first meeting of my new lecture course "After Religion," and much remains up in the air about it. We'll be in zoomland still, and this time - since it's a lecture, with graduate students helming discussion sections - it's possible that I might never see even one of my students. I don't like the idea to a lecturing to a grid of black boxes "live," though students responded well to opportunities to participate in last Spring's course (though that was building on the momentum of having met in person for the first half of the semester). Very reluctantly I'm inclining toward prerecording my lectures and inviting students to meet me in small groups during the officially scheduled time - reluctantly because prerecording seems so impersonal, so resistant to the spontaneous and the playful which live classes allow. It also means that class visitors - I have a few planned - won't he able to take questions.. though perhaps I could have a few live classes when we can all be together? Tradeoffs whatever you do!

Also not finalized, though I'm nearly there, is the course material. A lot of things sorted themselves out when I decided (last week) what the assignments should be, and in particular that the final assignment should, as in the Job course, be one students might tackle in any medium. The prompt, once I'd decided that, was easy: What comes after religion? I'm actually incredibly excited to see what students come up with, whether they're designers or social scientists, creative writers or performers or activists... but that just makes me more desperate to find a way to make a personal connection to them earlier in the class. 

Helpful in winnowing possible readings was also the decision to try to include a non-text each week, whether a podcast, a video interview, an archive, a photo essay, even a guided yoga session. (Like this or this or this or this or this.) These will appeal to different learning styles - recommended especially for online instruction - and also make real my endorsement of multiple media for the final project. They also let me disrupt stereotypical views of what various religions look like. But they'll need to be good, since students in a hurry will almost certainly choose these if they don't have time for all the assigned work! Where they're instructively bad (like this) I'll need to integrate them into the lecture to make sure students aren't taken in by them!

The most intellectually exciting (and difficult) challenge is in the course material itself. This was going to be my take on "Religion 101" or "Intro to Word Religions" and the vastness of potential material is matched only by the number of ways any such project will go astray. I'd decided to sequester "world religions" at the center of the class - the middle of the semester - so I could inoculate the class against the dangers of this discourse, and let the constructedness of Buddhism, Judaism and their ilk become a feature not a bug: at a certain point and for a variety of reasons people started bundling things as "religions," all remarkably unified and coherent and many of hoary antiquity. All of them are in fact modern constructs, but so are we, and so is everything else we wrestle with... The course is called "After Religion" in part because we know better than to think that "religion" is a clear and enduring thing - but many other modern constructs have been historicized in this way, too (like "secularism"!), and part of being a modern person may be feeling the need for something like religion (especially if you call it something else, like "spirituality"!) - another reason for the course title.

The other reason for the course title - the one which most students probably think is the main one - is facing the idea that religion is over, a thing of simpler, perhaps more superstitious times (although some scary people seem not to have got the memo). That's wrong, of course, on many levels, and it'll be my pleasure to explore them. One is problematizing what Charles Taylor calls "stadial" thinking - the idea that history moves inevitably through discernible stages, say from magic to religion to science, so I decided the start and finish of my course should jumble that sequence: we would begin in the present, and end with the indigenous traditions usually left out (if not explicitly presented as superseded) in accounts of "world religions," appreciated again or anew by a generation which sees how the old modern constructs have devastated our relationship to our non-human earthly kin. "Indigenous" traditions are every bit as constructed as the others we'll have looked at - indeed often more clearly so, having had to reorient themselves after violent displacements of every kind.

So what might this all look like in practice? Here's the course skeleton I shared with the TAs. The high-minded theoretical aims are invisible but, I hope, operative through well-chosen topics presented in a compelling sequence. 

1 1/20   Welcome 

2 1/27   SBNR

3 2/3   Yoga – in West and beyond

4 2/10   (White) (Evangelical) (American) (Christian)

5 2/17   What is religion anyway? And “secularism”?

6 2/24   Invention of world religions

7 3/3   The invention of Buddhism

8 3/10   Islam as a world religion

 

SPRING BREAK

 

9 3/24   Modern religions: Baha’i and LDS (and Judaism?)

10 13/31   Provincializing Christianity

11 4/7   Syncretic new religions (and cults!)

12 4/14   Hindu TV Mahabharata, Left Behind, sci-fi

13 4/21   Indigenous resurgence 

14 4/28   Transhumanism, online religion, fashion

15 5/5   Conclusions

I'll talk you through them once I've determined the readings - next year!

Off-brand

This is what we're not seeing. 

An article, over six months ago (I thought I'd shared it), asked "Where are the photos of people dying of COVID?" It noted how in other countries, everyone knew what the pandemic looked like, but here, for reasons of journalistic ethics, the pandemic was literally invisible to most people. (Her article had to make do with photos from Italy.) No wonder so many didn't take it seriously, and still don't. 

A new article discloses that the ravages of the pandemic in the US have been not only invisible but hidden. A political appointee in HHS made restrictions on journalists in hospitals even more onerous, even as other rules were being relaxed in the face of unprecedented circumstances. He might have thought patient privacy protections especially important at this time - although existing rules already require signed consent from anyone depicted; the patient in the rare photo above, taken in Houston a month ago, gave consent. I fear the Trump appointee was more likely motivated by ideas coming from his boss in the White House that paint media as the "enemies of the people" and reporting on COVID-19 as politically skewed. I wonder if he ever had to witness what has been going as a third of a million of his fellow citizens have lost their lives shut off from everyone they know.

But the fault is not his alone, the article points out. A psychiatry resident who's remarked on the total disjunct between the experiences of those in hospitals and those outside observes: "Hospitals, as businesses, as profit-driven entities, do not want to be associated with death and suffering — it is very off-brand for them," I think. Perhaps with a president who's not afraid to face pain and grief, a party which recognizes the humanity of all citizens, we'll do better. Still, how many lives might have been saved had we been confronted with the reality of what COVID does to people? Look again at that picture. Don't look away.

12-day feast

 

 

Some folks have already tossed their Christmas trees, can you imagine? Ours is here for the Twelve Days of Christmas - until the Feast of the Epiphany - at least!

Ice art

Site-specific and mixed-media...

 

Just a little digital manipulation of the photo to bring out the hairline cracks which drew my eye to this gauzy skin of ice reveals...

a cosmos!

Boxing Day Best!

FaceBook is just irresistible. Say your Christmas plants inspire you to post a picture like this, maybe with the caption Boxing day Best! Before you know it, a translator friend in Berkeley has commented And a Christmas tree right outside your window! Beautiful. A fashion designer colleague in New York writes Love the vase! A journalist friend in Paris adds Love the panettone!

Winter light

Every last leaf has fallen ... but you can see the river!

Adeste fidelis

How I miss these folks! What's become an important Christmas tradition for me is setting up this simple Mexican nativity group in different ways each year in a nook in our house in California - with various things creatively scavenged. Remember the 2010 lights, the 2012 bubble wrap, the 2016 shells, the 2018 shadows, last year's macadamia nuts? 2013's (above) incorporated Torrey Pine seeds and flowers from my mother' garden. There's been one every year though I didn't show all here, like 2011's with lemons from my father's tree! And the year when styrofoam blocks and impending war inspired 3 scenes predates this blog by a few years.

Christmas in California wasn't in the cards for us this year, alas, but sorting through these photos is almost as good as setting it up anew! Hope the spirit of Christmas finds a way into all our worlds in 2021 too.

At sixes and sevens

As we process the event of the Great Conjunction (say, couldn't an observer on Saturn have noticed something too, the tiniest blue blip in the vicinity of Jupiter and its moons?) I'm delighted by a story which crossed my FaceBook path. Folklorists have long noticed that the story of the Seven Sisters, the constellation known to us as the Pleiades, is so widespread among the world's peoples that it might be among the oldest stories out there. Most folks in fact only see six stars but the stories obligingly explain that one of the seven sisters is hidden or otherwise absent. But why did they think there were seven in the first place? 

 

Some settler Australian astronomers recently wondered: if the story is indeed so ancient as to predate human migrations from Africa, maybe the constellation looked like seven stars to our earliest ancestors. (There are in fact more than seven in the cluster, ten of them in principle visible to the human eye.) Dial backward, the way folks have done with Jupiter and Saturn in our sky, and it seems that 100,000 years ago a seventh star, now so close to another as to be indiscernible, probably was far enough removed to be visible! How cool would that be: a story so old it tells of an older one still.

Social distance

 

Took a walk along the High Line Monday

Twinkle

Okay, so maybe there was a bit of sour grapes in it! I felt an unexpected delight when a friend in Philadelphia sent this picture this evening with the caption Zoom in for Saturn and Jupiter! I zoomed, and thrilled!

Twinkle in the eye

It was cloudy tonight, but even had it been clear I doubt we could have made out the "Great Conjunction": too much ambient city light. So this might be sour grapes. But what's the big deal? Jupiter and Saturn were nowhere near each other, just appeared so from our vantage point. We gave up thinking the earth the center of the universe years ago, even before the last time these two appeared so close in the earth sky!

I made do with internet sightings, an image on twitter apparently taken in Tampa (with several moons!!), and the google doodle showing us what we wanted to see. Various live streams disappointed, even more than watching the solar eclipse that way. It's clear that for those who did see it, it was a tiny part of the sky - though it conjured the depth, and the closeness, of space in a powerful way. Every constellation hides the depth of space and time behind the shape we project on to it. Deep!

But rather than peevish I feel unmoored in a nice way by all this. Constellations, conjunctions and eclipses are in the eye of the beholder - from no other vantage point would they appear. Other celestial observers, if any there are, see other plays of shape and depth. This doesn't make us significant or insignificant but connects us to every other vantage in the universe, each of which has its Great Conjunctions, whether anyone's there to notice or not. It's like the thought I've had on seeing reflections of sun or moon seem to stretch across water to me. What I'm seeing isn't an illusion, but the wonder is what I'm not able to see - the same phenomenon embracing a myriad other points of view. Same and different. The discovery is being and moving in space - the same space - with all these others, potential and actual. (The poignancy of that insight has something to do with the fleetingness of all conjunctions, and with those other vantage points not being occupied, and with how, even if they were, none of us can perceive the beauty seeking out the other... but those are topics for another day.)

All conjunctions are great! The nicest articulation of this experience came in Tyson Yunkaporta's account of the way the Rainbow Serpent appears to us. I've quoted it before, but here it is again. 

When us-two see that arc in the sky, that Rainbow Serpent, we are seeing only one part of it, and it is subjective: just for us. If we move, the rainbow also moves, only appearing in relation to our standpoint. If you go to the next hill you will see it in a different position from where I am seeing it. The moon sisters were trapped by a similar phenomenon, chasing the reflected moon on the surface of the night sky, thinking it was a fish they could spear. But like the rainbow that image moves in relation to where you are sitting, so they could never catch it. Now you can see their shadows in the moon where they remain trapped to this day, a warning to all about the illusion of chasing fixed viewpoints. 

The Serpent loves the water because that is what allows us to see him, and he communicates with each of us this way, but he is not just an entity of water. He is an entity of light. The part we are seeing there in the wet sky, or in the fine spray coming off the front of a speeding dinghy, is just a line across the edge of a sphere. The line moves across multiple spheres that are infinitely overlapping, spiraling inwards and outwards, extending everywhere that light can go (or has gone or will go), and the Rainbow Serpent moves through this photo-fabric of creation. He goes under the ground too, because light has been there in the past and he is not limited by linear time. 

Ah, but is he a wave or a particle? I guess that depends on how you’re looking at him, but we could see him as a wave, a snake, because he is constantly in motion across systems that are constantly in motion and interwoven throughout everything that is, was and will be. 

Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, 54-55

Every conjunction is a twinkle in the Rainbow Serpent's eye.

Nourishing

It's been nine months since I set foot in the Church of the Holy Apostles so it was a strange pleasure to return for a brief visit today. I was meeting the woman who will become my co-warden in the new year. She lives nearby and is deeply knowledgeable about the life of the soup kitchen as well as the congregation, so she was the ideal guide.

Our church congregation remains in zoom diaspora, but the work of the soup kitchen is ongoing, and nothing short of amazing - warm meals for the homeless and supplies for healthy and balanced meals for families by the tens of thousands. Not quite what the space was built for, but serving well!

After the snow

Cold dark day, with a few flurries. Here's the westward view out our window - across the Hudson to New Jersey, and down to a parking lot.

Solstice approaching

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We got a tree!

Seeing through zoom

In our final meeting for "Religion and the Anthropocene," we realized we'd beaten zoom exhaustion. This sketch, drawn by a student in one of the small-group meetings, wasn't meant to be creepy - "eyes are the hardest thing to draw," she explained, and she didn't have time to draw them. Perhaps it's also that we know by now that in zoom rooms people aren't looking at you when you think they are! What she captured instead - the larger group understood this immediately when I asked her to share the image with them - was our presence, our genuine availability to each other.

My classes' final session is always dedicated to sharing final syntheses, and this was no exception. But what was exceptional was how many students' reflections discussed the community we'd created together. While the self-selecting group of students adventurous enough to sign up for a 9am Friday seminar on religion (eek!) and the Anthropocene (wha?) were clearly part of it, I take a little credit too, as this was the class I'd divided in three groups whom I meet each week for 40 minutes each (then leave the zoom room to them), around our shared 90 minute class. What made the difference wasn't just the intimacy of the small groups but the fact that I wasn't always there. We'd almost replicated a classroom, where students could form bonds outside the class and its projects - something that, it emerged from discussion, otherwise just wasn't happening. But here, we knew and cherished each other!

The fondness which filled our final hour was perhaps strange in a class on such profound and paralyzing problems as we had studied together, but, some students suggested, that made it the more meaningful. Of all my classes this semester, one quipped, this is the one that helped me imagine more futures! In 2020 that's no mean accomplishment. 

By the way, that's the student sketcher at top right. Ours was also her very last class in college: she's one of our December graduates. It can't be easy to finish college in these disembodied times. Congratulations!

No man

The New York Times breaks down US states and territories as covid spreads. The categories have changed with the pandemic's waves. Currently there's "Where new cases are higher and staying high," "Where new cases are higher but going down," and these two.

Feels like reaching for straws, huh... Community spread has engulfed everyone else, and the aggregate numbers for the day are eye-popping: 254,044 new cases, bringing the total to 17 million. And another three thousand six hundred eleven souls lost, for a total of 307,642. Horror.

Nor'easter!

Stumbling along between the Immensities

 

"Theorizing Religion" wrapped up today, a small group of zoom-weary students savoring our final time together. The final assignment, as ever, was a reflection/synthesis on what they'd taken from the class, and, as per usual, we heard about ignorance overcome, biases revealed, permissions granted - and, of course, questions unanswered! As a parting gift I shared these two nuggets from Kimberley Patton's "'Stumbling along between the Immensities': Reflections on Teaching in the Study of Religion," to which an AAR panel I attended last week had taken me back. Patton's point in the essay is that, despite our theoretical scruples and specialist efforts to avoid generalizations (not to mention the professional pressures of our academic guild), in undergraduate classes scholars of religion face students who are asking the big questions and seeking answers to them in what we offer them. 

 

I'd like to think I provided a venue for reflecting on big questions as well as questions about those questions, and students seem to have appreciate it. One put it particularly eloquently:  

Upon starting the course, I was struck anew by something which had often bothered me in a weaker form: the way that religion is a subject both academically crucial and personally captivating, but it seemed to demand a generalizing of the ungeneralizable. ... In reading the work of some of the consummate professionals included in this course, there are two immediate effects. One is the appreciation for the beauty and intrigue of any given topic when illuminated by a loving scholar, the other is seeing where this light ends, how far the surrounding unknown goes.  

Not sure what the Academy thinks of "loving scholars" but I say Amen.

Kimberley C. Patton, "'Stumbling along between the Immensities': Reflections on Teaching in the Study of Religion," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65/4 (Winter, 1997): 831-49, 836, 840