Blueskying it

I was surprised this morning by the clear blue reflected in some of the buildings you can see looking down Sixth Avenue toward the financial district. 

This reminder of open horizons in unexpected directions was welcome on an otherwise pretty grim day. 

It wasn't just the November weather, and the daily litany of political lawlessness and economic distress. Some of the details of our university's urgent cost-saving measures became clear today, knock-on effects of enrollment shortfalls that will affect classes and programs and faculty appointments already this coming semester. And all this on top of the ongoing reorganization demanded by structural issues! Higher ed in America isn't well, and we aren't either. 

And then I went to an India China Institute panel discussion on "News Media in an Authoritarian Age," where speakers on India, China and the US described what seemed a shared playbook used by authoritarian regimes across all three countries threatening the freedom of the press and the livelihoods - and lives - of journalists. The moderator observed, ruefully, that when ICI was started two decades ago, one would not have expected the three countries to be on a continuum like this.

The only reflected blue was the India speaker's confidence (based on the aftermath of the press repression of the Emergency) that the "hunger for truth and debate" cannot be extinguished, and only grows in times of propaganda and censorship. Once this authoritarian phase is over, that hunger will call into existence vigorous new forms of investigation and dialogue. May it be so, and soon!

Exhibit A

In "Theorizing Religion" today, students had 20 minutes to design a non-ideological exhibition on world religions. We'd all been to see religion-related exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History, and taken a virtual tour of the Museum of World Religions in Taiwan. We've also read critiques of the very category of "world religions." But it's easier to poke holes than to build up. If given the chance to design an exhibition of their own, how would they avoid these pitfalls? 

I suggested it would be good to agree on the kind of space to fill and someone suggested a circular hall, which I gave a single entrance.

Twenty minutes later we had three compelling and compellingly different exhibitions. One let viewers choose whether to start with "Practices" or "Death, Rebirth, Afterlife," or head straight toward "Divinity, Higher Powers," or intervening shows of texts and places of worship - each a medley of multiple traditions. In the middle of the room is an area for sitting and engaging the other senses, from scent to sound. Entirely optional pamphlets with analyses by scholars and theologians are available as viewers enter. The space has a dome-like ceiling across which various cosmic and celestial images play.

Another group imagined a constantly changing space, with semi-translucent screens hanging from the ceilings which viewers can move around at will. Each screen carries images of various elements of traditions and practices from around the world on both sides, photographs as well as artworks, some moving, which each viewer encounters in a different maze-like configuration. It is hoped that viewers feel free to rearrange images. Near the center of the space is a spiral staircase to a platform from which viewers can watch the constant dance of images and people below. The students also added new doors: the exhibit can be entered and exited from any side.

A final group went in the opposite direction. Visitors to "PATH" traverse a single tunnel-like trajectory, and see exactly the same things as every other visitor, in exactly the same sequence. On the way into this labyrinth, they see art works inspired by religious experiences, arrayed chronologically. No work is marked in terms of ethnicity, nationality or geography, but mixed among the works are descriptions of historic overlaps. At the labyrinth's center, viewers arrive at the present day, then wind their way out, this time encountering videos of contemporary phenomena. Images would again be hung from the ceiling, allowing viewers to see the feet of other visitors to the labyrinth. 

Which would you like to visit - or curate? 

Fenced off

Makes a cool picture, though... 

Autumnal apparitions

Native and interloper, at Blauvelt State Park, each a little otherworldly

Windfall

It's called "red maple" for the stems, not the leaves, dontcha know

Walled garden

 

Seen from above you almost don't notice the trees are now off limits

Sudden shower

There's a gorgeous arboreal cover on the newest New Yorker, Sergio Garcia Sánchez's Hiroshige-inspired "Sudden Shower." 

I love how the tree keeps growing upward and out of the frame on the right, too venerable to be concerned with symmetry. It must have been drawn from life!

The people still speak

Forbidden garden

We received word today that the Lang courtyard will be closed off for three to four months due to facade repairs and renovations. In the next days, barriers will block ground-level access, leaving only window views.

Canonize this!

For the Feast of All Saints, behold this glory, a new work of the queer Episcopalian illustrator Andrew Freshour, "Jesus Christ and the Saints."

In total, I painted fifty saints. It was quite the journey picking them all. I included saints from the Anglican/Episcopal Church, Lutheran Church, Roman Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox Church, and various Protestant reformers. I also added important Christian civil rights activists and martyrs, like MLK Jr, Jonathan Daniels, and Matthew Shepard.  

I think I've puzzled out another dozen. How many can you divine?

November!

Job seekers

Attended a presentation on trends and challenges in higher education today, from one of the sources of the materials which were keeping my Provost's Office colleague up at night. Nightmarish indeed was this slide on changes in work. My colleague had mentioned hearing the half-life of job skills keeps shortening part: most workers will need on the job retraining every five years. But the research indicates many workers will not be on the same job at all: Today's workers have not just 12-30 jobs over a lifetime, but multiple careers as well. Twelve to thirty?! Many sectors are included here, but still, wow.

I can't wrap my head around this. The implications for higher ed, the focus of the talk, are perhaps clearer: workers will be regularly needing retraining in and between jobs - a market for adult education, albeit focused on short shelf-life job skills. Us liberal arts types might be the only ones also to see an enhanced need for the "durable skills" of critical thinking, research, communication, ethical reflection, collaboration, etc., too. But what of the workers themselves?

Beyond the matter of commuting and health care, lodging and schools (no small matter any of them!), does this mean most workers will always be on the market, always looking for the next opportunity given the likelihood their current employment won't last? (Is this what young folks mean by learning to "brand yourself"?) How nerve-wracking, how exhausting, even for those who manage to stay ahead of the game, securing a satisfying next gig before the last one peters out. 

But I wonder also what this means existentially, spiritually, since meaningful work is central to a full life. In Theorizing Religion a few weeks ago we reviewed Marx's claim that the forms of personal spirituality emerging already in his time were the sign of a thorough alienation of laborers from their labor. 

Marx worried that work harnessed to the caprice of a commodity market decoupled from actual human need and meaning - manufacturers pay laborers to make whatever sells, workers take whatever jobs are avaiable - voided labor of its meaning to the laborer. A restless and unending calibration of your skills with an ever changing market seems like a more extreme form of this abstraction. 

What religious world would be the "reflex" here? (Reflex isn't a good thing: it's smoke showing there's a fire.) A restless accruing of ever more means to spiritual balance and control? An eclipsing of even a shred of meaning in one's human agency, seeking release instead in mystical, perhaps psychedelically mediated other worlds? The presentiment that this whole world is run by spiritual forces inimical to human values, who can be resisted only through a warfare of charismatic extremity? A quasi-religious exaltation of the apparently unchangeable realities of biological reproduction? A seeking of kinship in forms of life radically unlike the human, from the fungal to the digital to the, well, arboreal?

I think I might take advantage of the relationships with alums I've rekindled for "DIY Religion" to pick their brains about this... 

All souls

 Someone's kitted out the courtyard for Dia de los Muertos!

LREL S26

We do a lot with a little! 

Please invoke such powers as you know to ensure we get enough students to sign up for these great courses! In the current austerity, the threshold for cancellation is higher than it's been before, and non-major programs like ours need all the help we can get.

VOTE!

Palimpsest

I've been through the exhibition now with alums of various generations - one over zoom! - and all concur that it captures the spirit of the place: always changing (indeed, in crisis!) but also reassuringly the same. And each alum made at least a few delighted (re)discoveries! The team that put this together done good! This interactive multi-site narrative about the life of the liberal arts is "unbound" in all the right ways. Bravi us! 

Trunk line call

4 eyes: better than 2! Look at that tree in the river, I said as we crossed a stream on a visit to friends in central Pennsylvania, wondering how its carcass had been moved into the middle. But my companion thought I meant the other tree, which I had entirely missed, the new one!

Buzz

Did you know most native bees are not social but solitary? This is a "bee hotel" for them at the Penn State Arboretum's pollinator garden. Cool!

Gone

One of the most important ideas in Timothy Snyder's warnings about tyranny is "don't obey in advance."

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do. 

I found a chilling example of this in today's Times. From this A Pile of Rubble headline you'd never guess that the president has trashed a wing of the people's house not only without permissions and precautions but without even admitting he was doing so. He said his vanity ballroom would leave the existing structure untouched. Oops. 

The formulation Critics are enraged (as critics always are) while Others say it was time for a change is what anticipatory obedience looks like. It frames a crime against history and tradition as fodder for "X was right about everything." 

But there's even more anticipatory caving to abuse of power in the ratification of his crime. Just a day ago his $300 million ballroom, for which no formal plans have been publicized, let alone reviewed or approved, was a "$250 million ballroom" and just last week it was a "$200 million ballroom." This Makeover will be a temple to bribery!

Full circle

My series of alumnae/i-led classes in the "DIY Religion" first year seminar came full circle today! 

Our speaker was an anthro-pologist who's just defended a fascinating dissertation on non-Turkish Muslim ummah in Istanbul. But fifteen years ago he was in a first year seminar here himself. It was called "Religion in Dialogue" - with yours truly!