AAF FOMO

I've not been attending that many AAR Virtual Annual Meeting sessions - I'm teaching, after all - but I have managed to have the familiar experience of discovering a few jewels but otherwise getting the sense I was missing most of what was going on. One session today, on the history of the AAR no less, helped explain why nobody could hope to avoid the sense of missing most of it! (See above.) It was interesting also to learn that our predecessor, NABI (the National Association of Biblical Instructors) peeled away from the Society of Biblical Literature in 1909 for the latter's connection to the Church, as well as their resistance to scientific research - but remained focused on the same material, now called "Bible and Religion." Only in the 1960s, when we were renamed American Academy of Religion, was even a desultory effort to move beyond Christian topics made. Now a thousand flowers bloom.

One such jewel was a panel of the recently formed "Indian and Chinese Religions Compared" Unit, where four scholars considered how a globalized humanities might learn from non-Western traditions not only in content but in form and approach. I attended in part because a Sinologist I met in Shanghai was sharing his work on how the work of Tang dynasty "scholar poets" became forms of meditation, incantation and apophasis, a lovely presentation. I was excited also by a paean to the Mahabharata, a polemic against Buddhist studies' implicit acceptance of an irrelevant western distinction between philosophy (the framework for most work on Indo-Tibetan materials) and literature (template for studies of most Sino-Japanese works), and a dialogue the 17th century Indian Muslim poet Bidel of Delhi describes with a Brahmin when they were both on the road to a spring sacred to many traditions. Especially in the time of "love jihad" legislation, it was nice to be reminded of the depth and beauty of Indian religious pluralism. This presenter also shared a translation of a ghazal of Bidel's "on composure and distraction."

                  Dust of distraction

         everywhere

         the opposite

of composure.

 

         Bringing lips

         to silence

         is the aim

of the collected heart.

 

         Be

         spinebound

         for a moment

         held together

         by attentive slow reflection.

 

         Your compendium of inner meaning

         has come apart

         from all those proofs

         and heartfelt demonstrations

of composure

 

         In this ocean

         waves grow

         in search of pearls.

 

         You skim the surface

         fleeting and impatient

         seeking

a collected heart.

 

Among its beautiful merits, she observed, was the poem's acknowledgment that in this life composure usually loses out to distraction, whatever faith journey one is on.

Avian heights

 

As I bent in to take a picture of an abandoned bird's nest on the west shore of Cayuga Lake, a din overhead made me look up. Can you see?

Nw direction

All other plans to get out of town having been foiled, we're stealing away to the northwest. The mountains we drove through (not green in this season, of course) are so different from the corrugations of the Alleghenies to the south or the block of the Adirondacks to the north!

Symbiotic Bir'yun

The final weeks of a class always have a valedictory feel and today was no exception. "Religion and the Anthropocene" meets twice more (and there's much work students might or might not turn in), but it's clear things are drawing to a close. A satisfying one, though! Things are coming together. 

Today's class covered an insane amount of material - that documentary about Lynn Margulis, a gnarly piece of Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble, and Deborah Bird Rose's lovely essay "Shimmer" - but we'd also decided to skip our scheduled session on Daoism, and I became possessed of the idea of somehow squeezing that in too. Somehow, though, going from Daoist considerations of reality as liquid, all forms (including you and me) merely temporary congealings, we got to Haraway's "tentacular" thinking and Rose's commendation of practices of bir'yun. The hinge was some footage from the documentary - here's my new iPhone's recording of a subscription website's screening of the documentary's sharing of a video from a class in which Margulis was showing videos, our astonishment joining that of layers of other viewers!

With these images in mind, everything made a different kind of sense - and that's even before you get to the sym- part of the story (symbiosis, symbiogenesis, sympoiesis). If this is what's going on, then selves are not in but expressions of environments and relationships, rising and falling, hardening and softening, wiggling and entwining. Individualism crumbles, but so does anthropocentrism - though selves, including human ones, are among the forms the Dao takes. We were at the threshold of rediscovering, in Rose's words, that the shimmer of life does indeed include us. (G61) (The image at top is a recent example of the kind of Yolngu bark painting whose cross-hatching evokes bir'yun - the "brilliance" or "shimmer" of sunlight on moving water, or firelight on painted bodies in motion.) And that, as Haraway shows, we need new (or perhaps very old) ways of thinking.

What happens when human exceptionalism and bounded individualism, those old saws of Western philosophy and political economics, become unthinkable in the best sciences, whether natural or social? ... What happens when the best biologies of the twenty-first century cannot do their job with bounded individuals plus contexts, when organisms plus environments, or genes plus whatever they need, no longer sustain the overflowing richness of biological knowledges, if they ever did? What happens when organisms plus environments can hardly be remembered for the same reasons that even Western-indebted people can no longer figure themselves as individuals and societies of individuals in human-only histories? Surely such a transformative time on earth must not be named the Anthropocene! (30-31) 

Today's readings only tangentially touched "religion." (Haraway blames our estrangement from and despoliation of the symbiotic world on the "sky gods" and their votaries.) But it was all over our discussion! It felt - I hope students would agree - like we've arrived at a point where "religion and the Anthropocene [sic!]" makes sense as a project.

I'm a little giddy that things congealed in this way, and it tempts me to try to articulate just how these things hold together for me. This is something I've felt, intuitively and inchoately, at least since seeing that documentary for the first time, but not had occasion, nor confidence, to try. Emergence and sympoiesis are the reality of life (and perhaps not just life), a reality closer to what Daoism describes than monotheism and the cascade of deadly dualisms which follow from it assert. And yet, despite the truth in the critique of sky gods, I don't feel that this is incompatible with my faith as a Christian. Just beneath the shimmer, the layers of atmosphere-regulating bacteria, in the tangle and trouble, I sense the face of God, happy to be discovered.

John Feldman, “Symbiotic Earth: How Lynn Margulis Rocked the Boat and Started a Scientific Revolution” (Bullfrog Films, 2017)

Donna Haraway, “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene,” ch. 2 of Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke, 2016), 31-57

Deborah Bird Rose, “Shimmer: when all you have is being trashed,” in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, ed. Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt (Minnesota, 2017), G51-63

Pall

Our nation is becoming a cemetery. The loss of life reported today approaches the deaths on 9/11! And the curve will go up and up. Newly reported infections topped 200,000/day. The calamity is happening everywhere, a thousand trickles turning into torrents, hard to take in, impossible to grasp. How are we able to talk about anything else?

Handy

After four years of near constant use, and holding valiantly together despite being cracked already in its very first month (subway platforms are, we learned the the hard way, not soft), I'm replacing my iPhone. I guess the decom-missioned one was already an old model when I got it, as I'm going from a 7 to a 12 in one fell swoop! Thanks...

Here and there

Because of covid-19, the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion is virtual. It's also spread out over 12 days! So I've started two weeks of weaving in and out of my usual work to hear people presenting on all sorts of subjects new and familiar. Yes of course it's on zoom, with the full assortment of technical glitches, and so far all webinars where the audience is invisible. But it's still strange and fun - like the talk (whence the image above) about divination among the precolumbian Mexica as an interlocutor for contemplative studies today. The guild persists!

Generational syncopation

Covering familiar materials in an unfamiliar way, some cool things came out. The readings were Diana Eck's classic "'Is our God listening?': Exclusivism, Inclusivism, Pluralism" (1993) and How We Gather (2015), a proposal for finding religion-like benefits in non-religious organizations and practices both volunteer and for profit. I usually assign these on different days - the former with some Karl Barth, the latter with Pew surveys on the religiously unaffiliated - but in this year's syllabus they wound up together. Interesting issues arose from the juxtaposition, perhaps most pointedly when we considered the affront of millennials told they were were being religious without knowing it, and, on the other hand, how someone identified with a world religion might feel take to being described in the religion-less terms of How We Gather ("that's what inclusivism feels like on the receiving end!").

But the really fun part came as a result of my introducing the two texts as representing the experiences of different generations. Eck reports on the changed religious landscapes of boomer pluralists, largely raised in monolithic religious worlds progressively enriched and complicated by America's growing religious diversity. Angie Thurston and Casper ter Kuile, authors of How We Gather, speak to and for the millennial "nones" living in the aftermath of this pluralizing transformation, largely raised without affective bonds to any religion at all. Really fun, though, was realizing that none of us quite resonated with either. Not surprising, perhaps, since two of us are Gen X and the rest are Gen Z!

Last splash of Fall color!

人类世学！

It's a long shot for lots of reasons, but my hosts at Renmin have asked if I'd be willing to teach there again this coming summer. Indeed I would be, committed as I am to civil society dialogue even between strategically competitive countries. I even proposed a new course!

Anthropocene Humanities

The Anthropocene names the new reality – and awareness – that humanity has become a planetary agent, the single most important factor in current earth history. The term was coined by natural scientists but has increasingly been taken up by thinkers in the human sciences. This course surveys anglophone debates about the meaning and significance of humanity’s new status within the earth system from historical, philosophical, literary and comparative, as well as feminist, postcolonial and postsecular perspectives. Conducted in English, the course employs the tools of the humanities to make sense of the Anthropocene, and uses the challenge of the Anthropocene to reimagine the work of the humanities.

1. Introduction: What is the Anthropocene?

Steve Bradshaw, “Anthropocene: A Documentary” 

Jill Schneiderman, “Awake in the Anthropocene” 

2. The Anthropocene and the environmental humanities 

Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses” 

Jeremy Davies, Birth of the Anthropocene 

3. Philosophical challenges of the Anthropocene 

Clive Hamilton, Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene

Roy Scranton, “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene” 

4. Queering the Anthropocene 

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “A Feminist Approach to the Anthropocene: Earth Stalked by Man” 

Whitney A. Bauman, “Climate Weirding and Queering Nature: Getting Beyond the Anthropocene 

5. Decolonizing the Anthropocene 

Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, “On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene”

Françoise Vergès, “Racial Capitalocene: Is the Anthropocene Racial?” 

6. Desecularizing the Anthropocene 

Bronislaw Szerszynski, “Gods of the Anthropocene: Geo-Spiritual Formations in the Earth’s New Epoch”

Fabrice Monteiro, “The Prophet” (photo series)

7. A Chinese antidote to the Anthropocene? 

James Miller, China’s Green Religion: Daoism and the Quest for a Sustainable Future 

8. Writing Anthropocene futures 

Donna Haraway, “The Camille Stories”

Precolombian

Imagine discovering this! Extinct animals suggest 12,500 years old...

Well Met

First expedition to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in almost a year!

The "aura" of artworks made every work veritably leap off the walls.

Disbelief and dread

Oak Flat

That book I started reading, Lauren Redniss' Oak Flat: A Fight for Sacred Land in the American West, couldn't, alas, be more timely. Or out-of-timely. Among the outgoing (fingers crossed!) Trump administration's efforts to rush or jam through changes the Biden administration won't be able to change are assorted moves of environmental plunder. You've heard about their proposed sale of rights to the Arctic national wildlife refuge, but the news just broke today (for me at least) that they're trying to do in Oak Flat, sacred to the Apache in Arizona, too.

Last month tribes discovered that the date for the completion of a crucial environmental review process has suddenly been moved forward by a full year, to December 2020, even as the tribes are struggling with a Covid outbreak that has stifled their ability to respond. If the environmental review is completed before Trump leaves office, the tribes may be unable to stop the mine.

“The Trump administration is cutting corners and doing a rushed job just to take care of Rio Tinto,” said the Democratic Arizona representative Raúl Grijalva. “And the fact they are doing it during Covid makes it even more disgusting. Trump and Rio Tinto know the tribes’ reaction would be very strong and public under normal circumstances but the tribes are trying to save their people right now.”

Changing views

 

A few days ago - it was November 19th - we noticed some strange objects parked on the street below. What the? You couldn't see them

when I snapped a picture of nightfall for a friend the following day... But by the next day it became clear what was going on. Union's tower!

Reading pleasure

It's not quite Thanksgiving break but some of my leisure reading for the holiday has arrived and I couldn't resist diving in.

North Woods, Central Park

 

Stay home for Thanksgiving

Covid is out of control in the United States (almost 200,000 new infections in the last day!), affecting people who know its danger and - perhaps even more - those who don't. One of my students told me about an interview they saw with a nurse in South Dakota describing tense conversations with gravely ill patients about to be intubated who refuse to believe Covid is real and that they are dying. “It’s not one particular patient; it’s just a culmination of so many people and their last dying words are, ‘This can’t be happening, it’s not real.' And when they should be spending time FaceTime-ing their families, they’re just filled with anger and hatred. I just can’t believe those are their last words.” 

Anger and, yes, hatred is what I feel towards those who have filled these heads with misinformation, but for these victims an aching compassion and mute sorrow. Denial is understandable. People they trusted lied to them about the danger, endangered them. And part of denying they have Covid - the nurse told of people who wanted to believe it was flu or even lung cancer - is denying that they caught it from someone, and that they may have passed it on to someone else.

I've thought a lot about about the loneliness and terror of those dying, in pain and isolation with no chance of the touch or even the presence of those they love, and about the grieving that hasn't been able fully to take place in response to these deaths, on every level from the personal (Joe Biden's empty chairs at the kitchen table) to the national. But another deep existential wound this pandemic will leave is the horror and shame of having potentially exposed another to a death-dealing virus. Too many of those who refuse masks and other measures don't know these feelings, but, sadly, will.

Hot spots

Death cult

 250,000  

are dead and this moral midget thinks he's entitled to another term

image chart