Monday, December 31, 2007
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Saddled up for spiritual warfare?
I drove to Saddleback Church this morning - the Orange County megachurch home of Rick Warren, "America's pastor" and author of the megabestseller The Purpose-Driven Life. I've been up there twice before, and wondered what if anything might be at work beyond the clean-cut shopping-mall motivational-speaking "campus" with its many flavors of worship music and small groups to suit every taste and concern. I appreciated that the congregation was finding here something the cultural desert of Southern California doesn't offer: community, and a sense that you as an individual matter. The carefully controlled small group system seemed a brilliant way of shaping people's lives - but also liable eventually to empower dissent from Warren's message.Today's sermon (delivered by winsome teaching pastor Tom Holloday) was about "How to look forward to a new year," a smart topic and engagingly delivered. As ever, there was a handout with blanks for the audience to fill in (Let go of your worries; Adjust your expectations; Take a step in faith; Hold on to God's love) and Bible quotes from a variety of translations (the lilies of the field really lose their lustre in the New Living Translation!). Interestingly, many seemed to be from the books of the Bible Philips Jenkins says are more popular in the global south and generally ignored up here - Proverbs, Hebrews, James. Warren was on the vanguard of evangelical leaders reaching out to Africa - has he been affected by Southern Christianity?
The small bookstore had the thick new African Bible Commentary with a blurb on the front by Warren...And yet Warren's Christianity is attacked by other evangelicals for being feel-good and untheological, nothing like the concerns for healing and struggles against Satan and his devils of many African churches... or so I thought. Another book in the bookstore, also with a prominent blurb from Warren on the cover, opened my eyes: Restoring a nation's Foundations: Prayer Strategies and Action Plans by Jimmy and Carol Owens, published by Foursquare, a Pentecostal publisher. This book is all about the need for spiritual warfare to save America from the devil's dominion! On a page opened almost at random, co-author Jimmy describes a vision he had on the Capitol steps in Washington, DC: That dome is a symbol of the seat of government of the country I love. Then, like a bolt, the awareness hit me: it also represents the seat of the Prince of America, the very front lines of the battle for the soul of this nation. Here he and a hierarchy of persons without bodies are working tirelessly, trying to control the minds of government officials, staff workers, lobbyists, strategists, advisers and other people of influence. There are probably more demons and angels doing their work in that building than anywhere else in the country. (93) The book calls for spiritual warfare for the soul of a "country under attack, from both inside and out" whose "Christian foundations" have very nearly rotted away!
I've known that such books exist, but had not thought Rick Warren had anything to do with such thinking. Or even if he did (I wondered what was going on behind that genial façade, and noticed that Saddleback's statement of faith is considerably more conservative than their feel-good publications), I didn't think he'd go public. But here he promotes this view (Jimmy & Carol Owens' God-given message can shape the destiny of our nation and our world). The book is there in the book shop for Saddlebackers to discover. And Saddleback's current line-by-line Bible study is looking at Thessalonians and Ephesians to "[d]iscover the truth about our inheritance, being alive in Christ, and spiritual warfare [!]."
I'm not sure what to think, but I think I'm worried. Not about Satan and "persons without bodies," but about Warren and where he's leading his flocks.
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Facing the new
Just read a lousy book and a not-so-lousy book on the "new faces" of what's sometimes called World Christianity. The not-so-lousy one is Philip Jenkins' The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South. The 
lousy one is Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement by Donald E. Miller and Tetsunao Yamamori.
Jenkins, who is credited with being the first to notice that the center of gravity of Christianity moved from the white western northern hemisphere to the non-white south (and Asia) a few years ago, here argues that Christians of the "Global South" don't just read the Bible differently than northern types, but read a different Bible. Passages and entire books which leave Northern Christians cold resonate powerfully with the life experiences of Southern Christians, who are familiar with famine, poverty, political oppression, animal sacrifice, polygamy, paganism and rumors of witchcraft. The Global South loves the Old Testament, especially books like Proverbs. In the New Testament, the Epistle of James is particularly beloved. Jenkins argues that the Bible has particular power for communities which have recently converted, especially if the Bible is translated into their language and is one of the first books they know - since they are "neo-literate," and still have the mindset of oral cultures.
The cases he discusses (mostly from Africa and Asia) are fascinating, and raise a lot of questions he carefully avoids addressing until the end, and then just barely. If Christianity will indeed be a primarily African and African-diaspora religion by the middle of this century, what does that mean? Should African and other Global South interpretations trump those of the more secularized but also more experienced North (more experienced also with Christianity, with understanding how it changes and doesn't over time)? He doesn't say so. It's hard to resist that argument that those people who read more of the Bible should have pride of place over those who leave aside much of it, but that doesn't mean that those who manage to take more of it literally - because their world is like that of the people of Israel and the early church - should have pride of place over those who read it figuratively or historically. Jenkins comes close to equating these two. And yet the challenge is real. How does one accept these changes in global Christianity and learn from them?
The other book - the lousy one - is an exercise in wishful thinking. Miller and Yamamori are Christian but not Pentecostal, and approach Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity in the Global South as social scientists. They think they've discovered a new kind of Pentecostalism which they call Progressive Pentecostalism: instead of focusing exclusively on individual salvation (since Jesus is thought to be coming back any minute now), these Pentecostals are engaging in the needs of the world, taking care of each other and the needy. While they don't do anything as nerdy as listen to the theological claims of their research subjects the way Jenkins does, they commend something like what he finds:
a "holistic" understanding of salvation which doesn't distinguish between the salvation of individual souls and the care of their bodies and communities. Now all that's missing is political and social engagement...
"Progressive Pentecostalism" makes Miller and Yamamori happy - it looks more like the kind of Christianity (liberal Protestantism) they are familiar with, and they can't help predicting that the rest of Pentecostalism will soon go that way too, though their evidence is still sketchy. (Jenkins on the other hand describes social outreach as a normal part of the Christianities of the Global South.) If Pentecostalism does indeed take up some of the causes abandoned by the withering away of liberal Protestantism and the eclipse of Liberation Theology, Miller's and Yamamori's kind of Christianity has a future! Their relief at this discovery is so palpable it undermines their argument.
What's annoying about their book is its vague assertion that the phenomenon of Pentecostalism shows that secular social scientists are "ideologues" for ignoring what they coyly call the "S" factor (is the spirit visible in Pentecostal life the [capital-S] Spirit?). Pentecostalism suggests to them that there are religious "realms of experience" which secular accounts of human nature don't take into account and can't explain. What's infuriating is not that they're making this argument, but that they are so wimpy about it - they hardly seem persuaded themselves. A case in point: [s]imply reducing the animation that occurs in ecstatic worship to what Émile Durkheim called collective effervescence … seems to us to be highly reductive, or at least a bit arrogant (219) Don't the words "or at least" imply that the argument is not excessively reductive? And the phrase "a bit arrogant" is no argument - it's a way of resisting an argument. (My students do it all the time when they can't find a flaw in an argument whose conclusion they don't like: "Hume is so arrogant!") In fact, Miller and Yamamori don't really show any need for a religiously-open social science:
[sociological accounts] fail to address the issue of whether individuals in the movement sometimes encounter a reality that is more than compensation for the trials of life or more than the ecstasy of group celebration. ... scholars within the social sciences often write as if they have offered comprehensive explanations when, in fact, sociological generalizations are just that—they are generalizations about trends and causation that avoid specific cases, which of course are where the Spirit operates (i.e., in deep encounters with individuals). (220-21)
"Of course" is another of my bugbears - it points as clearly as "obviously" or "plainly" or "simply" to a flaw or gap in the argument. Miller and Yamamori feel the Spirit at work "deep" in Pentecostalism, but are content for its workings to remain below the radar of secular social science. How very discreet of the Holy Spirit to leave our secular social scientific pieties intact even as it whispers our name. It'll change your life but none of your social scientist friends need ever know. Miller and Yamamoti claim too much for the Spirit and too little! Why bother?
Obviously (sic!) their argument gets me so upset because I am struggling with the same questions. It's easy to accuse others of lacking nerve when they don't make the argument you haven't the nerve to make yourself... I picked these books up hoping to be swayed, moved, turned around by the Spirit at work in global Christianity. It's harder than I realized, too many potentially mitigating factors. They do, however, show the excitement of the challenge of world Christianity (Jenkins) and the difficulty of really being changed by what one thinks one has learned from it (Miller and Yamamori).
lousy one is Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement by Donald E. Miller and Tetsunao Yamamori.Jenkins, who is credited with being the first to notice that the center of gravity of Christianity moved from the white western northern hemisphere to the non-white south (and Asia) a few years ago, here argues that Christians of the "Global South" don't just read the Bible differently than northern types, but read a different Bible. Passages and entire books which leave Northern Christians cold resonate powerfully with the life experiences of Southern Christians, who are familiar with famine, poverty, political oppression, animal sacrifice, polygamy, paganism and rumors of witchcraft. The Global South loves the Old Testament, especially books like Proverbs. In the New Testament, the Epistle of James is particularly beloved. Jenkins argues that the Bible has particular power for communities which have recently converted, especially if the Bible is translated into their language and is one of the first books they know - since they are "neo-literate," and still have the mindset of oral cultures.
The cases he discusses (mostly from Africa and Asia) are fascinating, and raise a lot of questions he carefully avoids addressing until the end, and then just barely. If Christianity will indeed be a primarily African and African-diaspora religion by the middle of this century, what does that mean? Should African and other Global South interpretations trump those of the more secularized but also more experienced North (more experienced also with Christianity, with understanding how it changes and doesn't over time)? He doesn't say so. It's hard to resist that argument that those people who read more of the Bible should have pride of place over those who leave aside much of it, but that doesn't mean that those who manage to take more of it literally - because their world is like that of the people of Israel and the early church - should have pride of place over those who read it figuratively or historically. Jenkins comes close to equating these two. And yet the challenge is real. How does one accept these changes in global Christianity and learn from them?
The other book - the lousy one - is an exercise in wishful thinking. Miller and Yamamori are Christian but not Pentecostal, and approach Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity in the Global South as social scientists. They think they've discovered a new kind of Pentecostalism which they call Progressive Pentecostalism: instead of focusing exclusively on individual salvation (since Jesus is thought to be coming back any minute now), these Pentecostals are engaging in the needs of the world, taking care of each other and the needy. While they don't do anything as nerdy as listen to the theological claims of their research subjects the way Jenkins does, they commend something like what he finds:
a "holistic" understanding of salvation which doesn't distinguish between the salvation of individual souls and the care of their bodies and communities. Now all that's missing is political and social engagement..."Progressive Pentecostalism" makes Miller and Yamamori happy - it looks more like the kind of Christianity (liberal Protestantism) they are familiar with, and they can't help predicting that the rest of Pentecostalism will soon go that way too, though their evidence is still sketchy. (Jenkins on the other hand describes social outreach as a normal part of the Christianities of the Global South.) If Pentecostalism does indeed take up some of the causes abandoned by the withering away of liberal Protestantism and the eclipse of Liberation Theology, Miller's and Yamamori's kind of Christianity has a future! Their relief at this discovery is so palpable it undermines their argument.
What's annoying about their book is its vague assertion that the phenomenon of Pentecostalism shows that secular social scientists are "ideologues" for ignoring what they coyly call the "S" factor (is the spirit visible in Pentecostal life the [capital-S] Spirit?). Pentecostalism suggests to them that there are religious "realms of experience" which secular accounts of human nature don't take into account and can't explain. What's infuriating is not that they're making this argument, but that they are so wimpy about it - they hardly seem persuaded themselves. A case in point: [s]imply reducing the animation that occurs in ecstatic worship to what Émile Durkheim called collective effervescence … seems to us to be highly reductive, or at least a bit arrogant (219) Don't the words "or at least" imply that the argument is not excessively reductive? And the phrase "a bit arrogant" is no argument - it's a way of resisting an argument. (My students do it all the time when they can't find a flaw in an argument whose conclusion they don't like: "Hume is so arrogant!") In fact, Miller and Yamamori don't really show any need for a religiously-open social science:
[sociological accounts] fail to address the issue of whether individuals in the movement sometimes encounter a reality that is more than compensation for the trials of life or more than the ecstasy of group celebration. ... scholars within the social sciences often write as if they have offered comprehensive explanations when, in fact, sociological generalizations are just that—they are generalizations about trends and causation that avoid specific cases, which of course are where the Spirit operates (i.e., in deep encounters with individuals). (220-21)
"Of course" is another of my bugbears - it points as clearly as "obviously" or "plainly" or "simply" to a flaw or gap in the argument. Miller and Yamamori feel the Spirit at work "deep" in Pentecostalism, but are content for its workings to remain below the radar of secular social science. How very discreet of the Holy Spirit to leave our secular social scientific pieties intact even as it whispers our name. It'll change your life but none of your social scientist friends need ever know. Miller and Yamamoti claim too much for the Spirit and too little! Why bother?
Obviously (sic!) their argument gets me so upset because I am struggling with the same questions. It's easy to accuse others of lacking nerve when they don't make the argument you haven't the nerve to make yourself... I picked these books up hoping to be swayed, moved, turned around by the Spirit at work in global Christianity. It's harder than I realized, too many potentially mitigating factors. They do, however, show the excitement of the challenge of world Christianity (Jenkins) and the difficulty of really being changed by what one thinks one has learned from it (Miller and Yamamori).
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Wave tapestries
From the Guy Fleming Trail, high above the Pacific, and on an afternoon of high tide and bright winter sunlight, you get a stunning view of the waves on the beach below. Each set of waves makes a different pattern, interacts differently with its predecessors and the sand and stones of the beach. I find this series sort of fits one's mood at the end of a year as one looks back on its ebb and flow...
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Exotic dancing slug (?)
Found this remarkable fluorescent creature in a tide pool this afternoon. It's about 3-4cm long. Anyone have any idea what it is?
[In fact it appears to be a Spanish Shawl nudibranch (Flabellina iodinea), well-represented on the California coast, and in online photo galleries - small wonder!]
[In fact it appears to be a Spanish Shawl nudibranch (Flabellina iodinea), well-represented on the California coast, and in online photo galleries - small wonder!]
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Monday, December 24, 2007
Jet blues
Flew back to California last night. I arrived in San Diego at 2:45 am rather than 9:25 pm, but still count myself lucky. Our plane, scheduled to depart at 5:50, boarded at 7:40 and sat on the runway for another hour, the northbound runway at JFK closed because of weather. I thought we had it made when we finally departed, and marveled at snowy landscapes dully luminous in the light of a full moon... Then, just west of Denver, our pilot informed us that we were heading for an 11:45 landing in San Diego, but San Diego has an 11:30 curfew, so we would instead be landing at Ontario, one of Los Angeles' regional airports, and complete the final stretch by bus (2 hours).The flight attendant assured us that we were lucky to be flying Jet Blue; other airlines would have canceled the flight. Maybe so. But other airlines might have flown into San Diego: turns out the curfew is only for take-offs, not landings. We were diverted to Ontario so that the plane could pick up a new load of passengers, and fly them, red-eye, to Washington, DC! I'm happy those folks got to their destination in time for Christmas, but a bit resentful that this was at my expense in time and mid-night taxi fare.
Oh well, clouds have silver linings. Thanks to the delays I did get to hear a fine jazz combo play "In a sentimental mood" at the terminal at JFK (how I love Ellington!), see sparkling Las Vegas from the air, and experience San Diego's fourteen-lane freeways empty of cars.
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Yule (b)log
This is a famous part of Christmas in New York, the WPIX yulelog, played for twenty-four hours on Christmas by a television station for people who don't have fireplaces but don't want to forego the traditions of Christmas around the fireplace. (The TV's probably already the focal point of your living room.) Quite ecological too, in its way, I suppose. Now you can download it onto your PDA or i-Phone - or blog! (Remember to press play.)
If you play it, youtube will connect you with many imitators. I experienced one, an updated (not improved) version on DVD, with my friends J and A yesterday - theirs looked more like something from a horror film, and the "crackling" soundtrack occasionally slipped into a brief Christmas carol and back out again, but it was in high-res and letter-box format! This fire never changes, never burns down. Even so, A had us when, at a certain point, she leaned forward and said "this is my favorite part!" and we all leaned forward expectantly...
If you play it, youtube will connect you with many imitators. I experienced one, an updated (not improved) version on DVD, with my friends J and A yesterday - theirs looked more like something from a horror film, and the "crackling" soundtrack occasionally slipped into a brief Christmas carol and back out again, but it was in high-res and letter-box format! This fire never changes, never burns down. Even so, A had us when, at a certain point, she leaned forward and said "this is my favorite part!" and we all leaned forward expectantly...
Saturday, December 22, 2007
MoMA rocks
Went to MoMA today to see an exhibition which closes in a few weeks on Seurat's drawings. Very interesting. But I also got to see an exhibit of sculptures 
by Martin Puryear, an artist I did not know. The objects are large and beautifully crafted, mainly of wood, often hollow. (The whole exhibition's viewable here.) The piece at right, C. F. A. O. (Compagnie Française de l'Afrique Occidentale), is uncharacteristically figurative and spiky - an inverted African mask, behind which a dizzying maze of pine struts evoke at once the nails and other objects hammered into the heads of masks, a construction site, and Piranesi (wonderful plays of light and shadow back there), all in a wooden wheelbarrow... It's magnificent and terrifying.
And since I was going to MoMA anyway I had an excuse to check out their films series, where I was delighted to discover they were screening Lloyd Bacon's 1933 "Footlight Serenade," one of the most spectacular of the Busby Berkeley extravaganzas. I brought along
my housemate and his Finnish girlfriend, and it blew their minds. How racy the early 1930s were - "honeymoon house" sure seems like a brothel, for instance! And what an extra- ordinary mind Busby Berkeley had, building castles in the sky of women's bodies... though the "Shanghai Lil" sequence (check it out!) is pretty amazing, too, cinematographically but also as a historical document about the American view of China... and what to make of the fact that the soft-porny fountain of women in "By a waterfall" (also available on youtube) is followed by these military formations of American sailors? The first time I saw this film I was working on Watsuji, and a Pan Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere made a lot of sense as a bulwark against the threatening tide of titillating triviality from America...
by Martin Puryear, an artist I did not know. The objects are large and beautifully crafted, mainly of wood, often hollow. (The whole exhibition's viewable here.) The piece at right, C. F. A. O. (Compagnie Française de l'Afrique Occidentale), is uncharacteristically figurative and spiky - an inverted African mask, behind which a dizzying maze of pine struts evoke at once the nails and other objects hammered into the heads of masks, a construction site, and Piranesi (wonderful plays of light and shadow back there), all in a wooden wheelbarrow... It's magnificent and terrifying.And since I was going to MoMA anyway I had an excuse to check out their films series, where I was delighted to discover they were screening Lloyd Bacon's 1933 "Footlight Serenade," one of the most spectacular of the Busby Berkeley extravaganzas. I brought along
my housemate and his Finnish girlfriend, and it blew their minds. How racy the early 1930s were - "honeymoon house" sure seems like a brothel, for instance! And what an extra- ordinary mind Busby Berkeley had, building castles in the sky of women's bodies... though the "Shanghai Lil" sequence (check it out!) is pretty amazing, too, cinematographically but also as a historical document about the American view of China... and what to make of the fact that the soft-porny fountain of women in "By a waterfall" (also available on youtube) is followed by these military formations of American sailors? The first time I saw this film I was working on Watsuji, and a Pan Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere made a lot of sense as a bulwark against the threatening tide of titillating triviality from America...
Friday, December 21, 2007
Our better angels
The performances of the final scenes in Religion & Theater really bowled me over: 
such rich material, such serious issues, so well done. Seminars just peter out - in a class like this the class gives itself to itself at the end, with all the powers of theater! You could do a lot worse than read just the scenes they had picked to see the value of a course on religion and theater! (And these were largely plays we didn't read!)
I took a few pictures; here are some. (You know that I usually don't post pictures of people I care about. It's not that I don't care about these students - I find that I care very deeply, and mourn the end of our adventures together. But I'm not telling you their names.)
However I will tell you the plays from which these scenes are taken: Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" (Joe and Harper at right; Prior and the angel below); Archibald MacLeish's "J. B." (J. B. in anguish as Mr. Zuss/God and Nickels/Satan play chess); Jean Paul Sartre's "No Exit" (they realize
they are each other's torturers in hell); José Rivera's "Marisol" (Marisol overwhelmed as an angel tells of the rebellion she is leading); and Steven Adly Guirgis' "The Last Days of Judas Iscariot" (Satan is called to testify in the trial of Judas). I don't have pics of all the scenes, including two more from Guirgis and one from "Inherit the Wind" (where I made a brief appearance as a bigoted judge with three lines).
Do notice, please, how creative the students were, staging their scenes without lighting, without props, without, indeed, a theater! (We do a kind 
of "poor theater" here, faute de mieux!) Students made use of every part of the large hall where the class met. Particularly ingenious it 
was to make use of the elevator - as Prior in "Angels in America" flees the angel brandishing the book of death) she runs down the aisle to the elevator, frantically pressing the button, and somehow they manage to keep the scene going until the elevator door opens! 
A few interesting points in common across the scenes (which tells you something about the way religious themes or images lend themselves to theater, or are borrowed by it): lots of angels, several scenes in hell (or purgatory), and the inescapability of the problem of evil. So much more to learn! Hope they let us do this again, and again!!
such rich material, such serious issues, so well done. Seminars just peter out - in a class like this the class gives itself to itself at the end, with all the powers of theater! You could do a lot worse than read just the scenes they had picked to see the value of a course on religion and theater! (And these were largely plays we didn't read!)I took a few pictures; here are some. (You know that I usually don't post pictures of people I care about. It's not that I don't care about these students - I find that I care very deeply, and mourn the end of our adventures together. But I'm not telling you their names.)
However I will tell you the plays from which these scenes are taken: Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" (Joe and Harper at right; Prior and the angel below); Archibald MacLeish's "J. B." (J. B. in anguish as Mr. Zuss/God and Nickels/Satan play chess); Jean Paul Sartre's "No Exit" (they realize
they are each other's torturers in hell); José Rivera's "Marisol" (Marisol overwhelmed as an angel tells of the rebellion she is leading); and Steven Adly Guirgis' "The Last Days of Judas Iscariot" (Satan is called to testify in the trial of Judas). I don't have pics of all the scenes, including two more from Guirgis and one from "Inherit the Wind" (where I made a brief appearance as a bigoted judge with three lines).
Do notice, please, how creative the students were, staging their scenes without lighting, without props, without, indeed, a theater! (We do a kind 
of "poor theater" here, faute de mieux!) Students made use of every part of the large hall where the class met. Particularly ingenious it 
was to make use of the elevator - as Prior in "Angels in America" flees the angel brandishing the book of death) she runs down the aisle to the elevator, frantically pressing the button, and somehow they manage to keep the scene going until the elevator door opens! 
A few interesting points in common across the scenes (which tells you something about the way religious themes or images lend themselves to theater, or are borrowed by it): lots of angels, several scenes in hell (or purgatory), and the inescapability of the problem of evil. So much more to learn! Hope they let us do this again, and again!!
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Final scenes
Today's the last day of class - our Religion & Theatre students are performing scenes from a number of plays. They've even cast C and me in bit parts. C is a jailer in a prison play, and I'm the bigoted judge in "Inherit the Wind." I'm sure they're not trying to tell us something...
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
This yoke ain't easy, or burthen light
I went to the 40th annual Messiah Sing-In at Lincoln Center tonight - I'd forgotten how hard Handel is to sing! Even when the words are "his yoke is easy and his burthen is light," the voices are like swimmers doing some busy bobbing stroke in a long swimming pool, each in their own lane. We were in the top back so the expected sense of getting lost in a loud crowd didn't quite happen... But I still like the idea of it all, and the intro reminiscing about the creation of the "sing-in" in the age of the "sit-in," the "teach-in" and the "love-in" was sort of cool.
But the point today at which I was ready to cast off the yoke was this morning, when a process my fellow faculty senators and I had come up with to allow faculty participation in the choice of a new dean seemed to be turning into a nightmare of bitterness and recrimination... Not among us four senators, thank goodness, but we still thought that a meeting we were running this afternoon would be a big scapegoating bonanza with everyone else turning on us. And this just a week after we received a volley of e-mails thanking us for creating a rare moment for faculty participation!
I suppose I should back up a bit. Our university has a reputation for being progressive, but this doesn't mean we're very democratic. At the faculty senate, where representatives of the several divisions meet to discuss issues of common concern, we noticed last month that faculty seemed to have no voice in the selection and reappointment of deans - something some divisions at least had once had. So we passed a resolution demanding a role. For us Lang representatives, the issue was more than theoretical: our dean comes to the end of his term in June, and has indicated informally that he will not be staying on. And yet no public announcement was made, so no decisions about composing a search committee or whatever were made or even discussed. By the time the faculty senate passed its motion in mid-November, it was already too late to hope for a national search, and one member of our faculty had been quietly taking people to lunch and letting on that it seemed he was soon to be appointed interrim dean, and what did we think of it... He would make a good dean, but this was no way for him to be appointed.
So we senators proposed a process (which I borrowed from a similar case at another division a few years ago), where (i) all faculty eligible to vote in faculty meetings would be sent a list of all faculty eligible to be dean in terms of seniority and rank; (ii) faculty could nominate people from this list; (iii) those nominated would have the option of running or withdrawing their names; those interested in standing for election would distribute a vision statement; (iv) there'd be an open meeting for the faculty to consider the needs of the college and the various vision statements [that's today's meeting]; and (v) after an electronic vote, the top three names would be sent to the university president (unranked). We ran this proposed process by the president, the provost, the Lang council of chairs and general faculty meetings, and it was approved by all. Then we had exactly two weeks for the whole process to happen - crazy, but the late start was not our fault - and we acted with amazing speed and integrity, not to mention before anyone else even started thinking about this.
Sooooo the list of eligible candidates went out (about twenty). Thirteen were nominated (including yours truly). And then ... twelve of these (including yours truly) declined the nomination for various reasons, and the thirteenth - our able faculty friend - produced the only vision statement. It was a very good vision statement, but now what were we to do? The process we'd designed hadn't envisaged this outcome, and in a sense had become moot: if our purpose was to construct a list of up to three names of faculty members who were nominated and willing to serve, we had succeeded.
Which left, however, today's meeting. And this morning, as everyone weighed in on what should or should not happen at the meeting, we senators were all ready to give up even this gentle involvement in politics forever! The irony, I suppose, is that things seemed to be getting so wildly out of hand because we didn't really need the meeting for our process, so people thought of a hundred other things a meeting would be good for or, if run the wrong way, would be bad for. All sorts of people weighed in on what our agenda should be, who should be invited, if the dean should be present, if there should be a vote, etc., etc. Meanwhile others were insinuating that we had rigged the whole process in order to arrive at this result, or, to the contrary, that we were incompetent for not having forseen this result. We were giving our colleague too strong a mandate, said some; too weak or ambiguous a one, said others... On and on and on, all through yesterday and into this morning - and remember that there are four of us senators, so everything had to be sent back and forth between us. And it's the last week of classes, and we all had classes today, meetings with students, etc.!
Well anyway, amazingly, we survived. More than that, it was a really good meeting! And now everyone is clapping us on the back again for designing such a good process. What happened was simply this: we had a three-point agenda and said so. The dean came for the first, and explained the demands of the deanship - very interesting. Then the likely next dean took questions on his vision - and convinced the remaining doubters that he's up to the job. Finally, we decided whether or not we still needed a vote of some kind, and passed a resolution recommending our colleague for a three-year term.
In relief, like prisoners who've escaped execution, we senators fled to a bar for a drink and rubbed our eyes. Could the meeting from hell have actually turned out to be an important moment of faculty governance? In one sense we're just where we would presumably have been without the process - same single candidate likely to be the next dean. But in other senses, everything's different. The nomination process showed both that there are many able and that there are few willing to take up the thankless position of acting dean, and today's meeting provided an endorsement of our best bet. And by fashioning a vision statement he's already begun a relationship of accountability to the faculty which we've never had with past deans.
The best thing might actually just have been the drama of it. For today's meeting, for the first time ever (or in a long time), was run by the faculty: we senators sat at a long table, and invited the dean to join us for a report, and then he left the room; then we invited the candidate to join us and he then left the room; finally, we presided over a discussion concerning the faculty's views on the deanship. Isn't that what faculty governance looks like?
What felt best was knowing that we had, in the end, done our job: designing a good democratic process.
In any case: whew. Academic politics can be like a refiner's fire!
But the point today at which I was ready to cast off the yoke was this morning, when a process my fellow faculty senators and I had come up with to allow faculty participation in the choice of a new dean seemed to be turning into a nightmare of bitterness and recrimination... Not among us four senators, thank goodness, but we still thought that a meeting we were running this afternoon would be a big scapegoating bonanza with everyone else turning on us. And this just a week after we received a volley of e-mails thanking us for creating a rare moment for faculty participation!
I suppose I should back up a bit. Our university has a reputation for being progressive, but this doesn't mean we're very democratic. At the faculty senate, where representatives of the several divisions meet to discuss issues of common concern, we noticed last month that faculty seemed to have no voice in the selection and reappointment of deans - something some divisions at least had once had. So we passed a resolution demanding a role. For us Lang representatives, the issue was more than theoretical: our dean comes to the end of his term in June, and has indicated informally that he will not be staying on. And yet no public announcement was made, so no decisions about composing a search committee or whatever were made or even discussed. By the time the faculty senate passed its motion in mid-November, it was already too late to hope for a national search, and one member of our faculty had been quietly taking people to lunch and letting on that it seemed he was soon to be appointed interrim dean, and what did we think of it... He would make a good dean, but this was no way for him to be appointed.
So we senators proposed a process (which I borrowed from a similar case at another division a few years ago), where (i) all faculty eligible to vote in faculty meetings would be sent a list of all faculty eligible to be dean in terms of seniority and rank; (ii) faculty could nominate people from this list; (iii) those nominated would have the option of running or withdrawing their names; those interested in standing for election would distribute a vision statement; (iv) there'd be an open meeting for the faculty to consider the needs of the college and the various vision statements [that's today's meeting]; and (v) after an electronic vote, the top three names would be sent to the university president (unranked). We ran this proposed process by the president, the provost, the Lang council of chairs and general faculty meetings, and it was approved by all. Then we had exactly two weeks for the whole process to happen - crazy, but the late start was not our fault - and we acted with amazing speed and integrity, not to mention before anyone else even started thinking about this.
Sooooo the list of eligible candidates went out (about twenty). Thirteen were nominated (including yours truly). And then ... twelve of these (including yours truly) declined the nomination for various reasons, and the thirteenth - our able faculty friend - produced the only vision statement. It was a very good vision statement, but now what were we to do? The process we'd designed hadn't envisaged this outcome, and in a sense had become moot: if our purpose was to construct a list of up to three names of faculty members who were nominated and willing to serve, we had succeeded.
Which left, however, today's meeting. And this morning, as everyone weighed in on what should or should not happen at the meeting, we senators were all ready to give up even this gentle involvement in politics forever! The irony, I suppose, is that things seemed to be getting so wildly out of hand because we didn't really need the meeting for our process, so people thought of a hundred other things a meeting would be good for or, if run the wrong way, would be bad for. All sorts of people weighed in on what our agenda should be, who should be invited, if the dean should be present, if there should be a vote, etc., etc. Meanwhile others were insinuating that we had rigged the whole process in order to arrive at this result, or, to the contrary, that we were incompetent for not having forseen this result. We were giving our colleague too strong a mandate, said some; too weak or ambiguous a one, said others... On and on and on, all through yesterday and into this morning - and remember that there are four of us senators, so everything had to be sent back and forth between us. And it's the last week of classes, and we all had classes today, meetings with students, etc.!
Well anyway, amazingly, we survived. More than that, it was a really good meeting! And now everyone is clapping us on the back again for designing such a good process. What happened was simply this: we had a three-point agenda and said so. The dean came for the first, and explained the demands of the deanship - very interesting. Then the likely next dean took questions on his vision - and convinced the remaining doubters that he's up to the job. Finally, we decided whether or not we still needed a vote of some kind, and passed a resolution recommending our colleague for a three-year term.
In relief, like prisoners who've escaped execution, we senators fled to a bar for a drink and rubbed our eyes. Could the meeting from hell have actually turned out to be an important moment of faculty governance? In one sense we're just where we would presumably have been without the process - same single candidate likely to be the next dean. But in other senses, everything's different. The nomination process showed both that there are many able and that there are few willing to take up the thankless position of acting dean, and today's meeting provided an endorsement of our best bet. And by fashioning a vision statement he's already begun a relationship of accountability to the faculty which we've never had with past deans.
The best thing might actually just have been the drama of it. For today's meeting, for the first time ever (or in a long time), was run by the faculty: we senators sat at a long table, and invited the dean to join us for a report, and then he left the room; then we invited the candidate to join us and he then left the room; finally, we presided over a discussion concerning the faculty's views on the deanship. Isn't that what faculty governance looks like?
What felt best was knowing that we had, in the end, done our job: designing a good democratic process.
In any case: whew. Academic politics can be like a refiner's fire!
Monday, December 17, 2007
Got it!
I think I've cracked this sticky date pudding thing. Today's attempt (just take two), somewhat tweaked from last week's, turned out simply divine, moist, rich, delicious. And it looks like the Bungle Bungles, besides!
(Okay so maybe it doesn't look as good as it tastes!) Here's the recipe, slightly amended from one I found on a website of the Far North Queensland ABC:
1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees (375).
2. Coarsely chop dates. Pour over boiling water, and stir in baking soda. Let stand for 5 minutes.
3. Pour date mixture in blender, add butter and sugar; chop (don’t puree).
4. In a mixing bowl add eggs and flour to date mixture; whisk.
5. Pour mixture into Bundt cake mold sprayed with Pam. Cook for one hour (when a toothpick comes out clean). Let stand for 10 minutes, then turn onto a serving plate.
6. As it cools, combine butterscotch sauce ingredients in a saucepan, stirring over low heat till sauce is smooth, and thickened slightly.
7. Cut cake in slices and pour sauce over it. Ready to serve!
Optional: serve with vanilla ice cream.
I've a hunch this will become the house dessert here at 265 Prospect Place, though now that I've crossed the baking threshold, who knows what comes next! Cheesecake? Sachertorte? Baba au rhum? Kalter Hund?
(Okay so maybe it doesn't look as good as it tastes!) Here's the recipe, slightly amended from one I found on a website of the Far North Queensland ABC:300g seeded dry dates
475ml boiling water
1.5 tsp baking soda
50g chopped unsalted butter
150g brown sugar (= 3/4 cup)
3 eggs
1.5 cups self-raising flour
For the Butterscotch Sauce:
150g brown sugar (= 3/4 cup)
300ml heavy cream
80g chopped butter
475ml boiling water
1.5 tsp baking soda
50g chopped unsalted butter
150g brown sugar (= 3/4 cup)
3 eggs
1.5 cups self-raising flour
For the Butterscotch Sauce:
150g brown sugar (= 3/4 cup)
300ml heavy cream
80g chopped butter
1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees (375).
2. Coarsely chop dates. Pour over boiling water, and stir in baking soda. Let stand for 5 minutes.
3. Pour date mixture in blender, add butter and sugar; chop (don’t puree).
4. In a mixing bowl add eggs and flour to date mixture; whisk.
5. Pour mixture into Bundt cake mold sprayed with Pam. Cook for one hour (when a toothpick comes out clean). Let stand for 10 minutes, then turn onto a serving plate.
6. As it cools, combine butterscotch sauce ingredients in a saucepan, stirring over low heat till sauce is smooth, and thickened slightly.
7. Cut cake in slices and pour sauce over it. Ready to serve!
Optional: serve with vanilla ice cream.
I've a hunch this will become the house dessert here at 265 Prospect Place, though now that I've crossed the baking threshold, who knows what comes next! Cheesecake? Sachertorte? Baba au rhum? Kalter Hund?
All theorized out
While I'm sharing end-of-semester reflections with you, here's the skeleton of what I told my Theorizing Religion students I hoped they had got from the class:
We’ve covered:
A history of an idea ("religion")
A history of a conversation (texts refer to each other, and we can intervene in their dialogue)
A history of a discipline (religious studies)
But also:
A history of other concepts and their interrelation (what religion is contrasted with: superstition, magic, science, morality, politics, art, etc.)
A history of disciplines (religious studies was in the vicinity at the birth of many others - and the disciplinary landscape is changing still)
A history of modernity (and our ways of understanding it/ourselves)
By understanding how we got here - why we think as we do about religion - you're able to think beyond the prejudices of the age, and well-prepped to recognize and respond to the challenges of a new world that is post-modern, post-colonial, post-secular, and globalized
In your responses and discussion you’ve found language for your own views of religion, whether you think it or its varieties true or false, good or bad. Keep testing it out on new experiences and traditions!
My tip is to keep an eye especially on:
Religion and politics, which are being renegotiated as we speak
Religion, privatization and gender; each of these affects the others, don't think you can understand any with all of them!
We’ve covered:
A history of an idea ("religion")
A history of a conversation (texts refer to each other, and we can intervene in their dialogue)
A history of a discipline (religious studies)
But also:
A history of other concepts and their interrelation (what religion is contrasted with: superstition, magic, science, morality, politics, art, etc.)
A history of disciplines (religious studies was in the vicinity at the birth of many others - and the disciplinary landscape is changing still)
A history of modernity (and our ways of understanding it/ourselves)
By understanding how we got here - why we think as we do about religion - you're able to think beyond the prejudices of the age, and well-prepped to recognize and respond to the challenges of a new world that is post-modern, post-colonial, post-secular, and globalized
In your responses and discussion you’ve found language for your own views of religion, whether you think it or its varieties true or false, good or bad. Keep testing it out on new experiences and traditions!
My tip is to keep an eye especially on:
Religion and politics, which are being renegotiated as we speak
Religion, privatization and gender; each of these affects the others, don't think you can understand any with all of them!
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Touché
You really never know who's reading your blog... Remember my little rumination on why the audience at a performance for the Feast of Virgen de Guadalupe in the cathedral in Los Angeles might have wanted to touch Suzanna Guzman, the soprano who played the part of the Virgen, while she was in costume? Well, Suzanna Guzman read my blogpost (!) and has written a really beautiful response to it. Check it out - and feel free to join the conversation!
Saturday, December 15, 2007
1000 tongues
Ever heard of the 1979 film "Jesus," also sometimes referred to as the Jesus film? Well, it's been seen six billion times, and is available in many languages. Many many languages - they're charging ahead, looking forward to their thousandth language. You can watch it in hundreds of language online.I learned about the film from Philip Jenkins' The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South, a book I'll be using as a complicating coda to next semester's course on the religious right in America (to break free from the secular/religious and American-centered approach the topic seems to invite, but also to show the parochialism of these approaches). Jenkins' argument, in a nutshell, is that the Bible is read differently in the two-thirds world than in the historic centers of Christianity, and, even more significantly, that different passages and books and stories and proverbs are most prized. (The Old Testament is more real to believers in the South because the world it describes, hopelessly foreign to modern Europeans and Americans, resonates powerfully with the lived experiences of many Africans, Asians and Latin Americans.) And once the Bible is translated (and Jenkins notes that much depends on the sequence in which they're translated) it becomes the property of those whose language it is in; they see it not as coming from Europe, the US or wherever, but directly from God.
Jesus may look like an American from the 1970s, but he talks like one of you: in Aari, Aceh, Rabinal Achi, Acholi, Adangme, Adi, Adygey, Afar, Afrikaans, Aja-Gbe, Akha, Aklanon, Alaba, Albanian, Kosovar Albanian, Alur, Amharic, Amoy, Guerrero Amuzgo, Oaxaca Amuzgo, Anuak, Anyin, Apinaye, Chadian Spoken Arabic, Egyptian Colloquial Arabic, Hassaniya Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, Modern, Standard (Egyptian) Arabic, Moroccan Spoken Arabic, North African Arabic, Sudanese Spoken Arabic, Aringa, Eastern Armenian, Western Armenian, Assamese, Assyrian, Ateso, Atitlan Mixe, Aukaans, Avar, Awadhi, Central Aymara, Nahuatl Guerrero Aztec ... and that's just the languages starting with A.
As Jenkins puts it, the Anglo-American captivity of the church is over. Should I not be sharing this good news, these thousand new things that God is doing, with students? In fact I'm putting it side by side with some material on the youth-oriented "emerging church" in the USA, which has left the fundamentalists behind and is reimagining Evangelical religion in conversation with our culture, scientific, secularized, sexually liberated and all. Translation continues!
Kant in America?
A friend send me this hilarious spoof on the attack ads which start flooding American television stations as elections approach. The pacing and background music are spot-on, and it's pitch-perfect right to the very end!
Friday, December 14, 2007
Saxton Freymann
Just found a calendar for my sister (don't tell her) of food art by someone named Saxton Freymann. These are earlier pictures of his. Adorable, no?
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