Know it all

A reflection on the experience of Theorizing Religion by a student who's combining his BA in liberal arts with a BFA in illustration. (By "modernism" he means the assumptions of secularization theory.)

Late in the day, late in the year.

Bloggerheads

Just for the fun of it, I clicked the "Next Blog" button at the top of this page. Someone's blog of their journey as a Christian. I clicked it again; another of same. Again; same. Again; same. I stopped after fifteen youth groups, minister's reflections, faith communities, personal spiritual diaries, etc., a bit weirded out. Has blogspot been taken over by Christians? On the rare occasions when I blog-hopped this way in the past I used to find all sorts of blogs in many languages, usually chronicling the lives of families or young people and their friends, rarely religious. Or has blogspot changed its operating system it so that it's no longer a random other blog you see, but rather one which all-knowing Google in its wisdom thinks you'd be interested in, based on the blog you're clicking from? Bloggers have the option of "monetizing" their blogs - allowing advertisements to pop up between posts, which are selected for their fit with the content - so maybe it's the same program?

Officially on the Job

You might have noticed a lot of discussions of interpretations of the Book of Job in this blog over the last few months (for instance, here or here or here or here or here or here or here or here). Well, there's a reason for that. I've been asked to write a book on the history of Job inter- pretation!! And after various back and forths of proposal, reader's reviews, contract, etc., it's finally official. Best brace yourself for a lot more of Job in the new year!

Syncretists 'r us

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has just published a report entitled "Many Americans Mix Multiple Faiths" with the subtitle "Eastern, New Age Beliefs Widespread." The study finds that

large numbers of Americans engage in multiple religious practices, mixing elements of diverse traditions. Many say they attend worship services of more than one faith or denomination — even when they are not traveling or going to special events like weddings and funerals. Many also blend Christianity with Eastern or New Age beliefs such as reincarnation, astrology and the presence of spiritual energy in physical objects. And sizeable minorities of all major U.S. religious groups say they have experienced supernatural phenomena, such as being in touch with the dead or with ghosts.

It would appear that a third (35%) of the 72% of Americans who regularly attend religious services attend the services of more than one religion. Nearly half (49%) of those polled report having had a religious or mystical experience — that is, a moment of religious or spirital awakening. And nearly two-thirds (65%) express belief in or report having experience with at least one of what Pew classifies as supernatural phenomena: belief in reincarnation, belief in spiritual energy located in physical things, belief in yoga as spiritual practice, belief in the "evil eye," belief in astrology, having been in touch with the dead, consulting a psychic, or experiencing a ghostly encounter. Indeed, 29% of Black Protestants, 28% of Catholics and 25% of the religious unaffiliated believe in reincarnation.

These results are striking - and all are apparently higher than in past surveys, too. Reports of religious experience have more than doubled since 1962. (The connection with the ever more common interreligious marriage is complex: such people attend religious services less, but when they do are more likely to attend more than one kind.) Religiously at least, the US does seem to be a melting pot. This is BeliefNet's land, not Pat Robertson's or Sam Harris' - or even Diana Eck's.

Charles Blow sneers at the Pew results in his column in the Times today: Americans continue to cobble together Mr. Potato Head-like spiritual identities from a hodgepodge of beliefs — bending dogmas to suit them instead of bending themselves to fit a dogma.

I'm not sure it's as simple as that. Syncretism can be shallow, narcissistic and self-serving but it's quite possible to gesture your way through a single religious tradition without its ever affecting you very deeply, too. (Indeed, such people may be more likely to brandish their tradition as "dogma.") On the other hand at least some of these spiritually polyglot entrepreneurs may be more religiously serious (deeper or needier) than many who coast along in unreflective belief - or unbelief.

Got a second?

Had the pleasure this afternoon of attending a rehearsal of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. A motley crew of donors and friends of Ailey and City Center got to see a run-through of a new piece (before the world premiere!). And then, after notes, we had the chance to see it again, performed by the second cast - something one almost never has an opportunity to do, and certainly not back-to-back. You really see the individuality of the dancers, and the choreography, too. Strangely or perhaps not so strangely, I liked it a lot more the second time. I thought this was because I knew what to expect - it's not a piece for the ages - and because some of the dancers, notably the two leads, seemed more into it. I'd invited along my friend D, who works as a rehearsal pianist for the American Ballet Theater; he thought it was due to the fact that it was the second cast, who, he's found, consistently give more of themselves and so, paradoxically, come closer to what the choreographer intended. Interesting!

Existential crises

Some days it's hard to know what to post here, not because nothing happens, but because too much has happened to digest. So it seems a perfect time to share with you the mordant humor of my favorite Japanese snack - kakipi (a multiply compressed name: abbreviation of kaki no tane = persimmon seed, though it really refers to spicy snacks merely shaped like these + abbreviation of piinatsu = peanuts). The backs of these individual serving bags celebrate the overlooked and left behind in a manner Hans Christian Andersen would surely appreciate - things like the fake green leaves which come with bento boxes. Here we have the hole in your belt which you'd use were you to lose weight, and the paper wrapper of a drinking straw. The former's plaintive thoughts: the hole two from me gets used every day, while I'm ever waiting for our owner to go on a diet... it would be enough to be used just once before the belt gets old and thrown away! The latter's monologue is more involved and harder to render in English: it wonders just what it is; while the straw inside gets used for drinking juice, it is sometimes torn, sometimes blown off with a puff, sometimes scrunched up and then laughed at as it is placed in water and gawkily lengthens... These surely are the existential crises of late capitalism!

Update: here are eight more.

Working on your image

A colleague at school lent me an old copy of Reform Judaism magazine, which contained an interview with Rabbi and psychologist Jack H. Bloom entitled "What God Can Learn From Us." Audacious but serious. God is lonely, insecure and prone to rash and cruel judgments; he needs to be taught many things, including the difference between obedience and love. That's where we can help, since Being in a cov­e­nantal relationship offers the possibility of healing in both directions. Some more:

You have said that many Jews are “in serious denial about the nature of the Deity with whom we are in relationship.” That’s true. Modern commentators do cartwheels to make “difficult” Torah texts consonant with the idea of a benign, perfect Creator of the world who maintains a special, loving, covenantal relationship with the people Israel. One prominent rabbi wrote that “the Torah speaks of God as a parent, a lover, a teacher and an intimate sharer of our hearts.”

To the astute reader this is not even close to the whole truth. For many Jews, throughout the ages, God has been and remains a great source of strength and comfort; however, judging from the Torah, our foundation text, all too often God is anything but all-loving.

Given that the Torah teaches us that we are created b’tzelem, modeled after God, what are the implications of acknowledging the dark side of God? We have long assumed that being so modeled refers to that which is good and noble in us. However, the character traits which cause us discomfort and prompt us to seek out therapy to correct are common to God as well. Just like God, we humans can be intolerant of imperfection (our own and others), judgmental, quick to anger when things don’t go our way, and prone to act abusively and destructively. In short, being modeled after God reflects both what is positive and negative about us. To truly grasp this idea, we need to set aside the simplistic concept of a perfect God we’ve inherited from our parents and religious school teachers and come to see and accept the notion of a flawed or wounded God.

How do we begin to change our relationship with God? We start by changing ourselves. In any healthy relationship, when we change, our partner changes. So when we humans become exemplars of what it means to be fully human—often in areas God knows little about—God will have to grow and change, too. In short, by becoming fully human, we help God to become a better exemplar. And that’s no small thing. What more could any exemplar—Divine or human—want?

Post-Christian

Went to an interesting panel discussion this evening. Put on by the new journal n+1 (based at our college) it explored the possibility that evangelical Christian backgrounds might be shaping a distinctive group of intellectuals the way Jewish backgrounds did the generation of the New York intellectuals half a century ago. The speakers were Malcolm Gladwell, Christine Smallwood and James Wood.

Their backgrounds are too diverse to allow of any conclusions - British Mennonites, conservative nondenominational New Jersey evangelicals, progressive evangelical Church of England - but close enough in their way to define an interesting area for reflection. After all, the majority of American intellectuals are some variant of Christian or post-Christian. We know all about the Catholic and ex-Catholic; why shouldn't there be a set of characteristic preoccupations of Evangelical and ex-Evangelical? Some candidates for these preoccupations suggested by the panel: an appetite for momentous metaphysical questions; a desire to reconcile faith and culture perhaps by mystifying apparently secular things like reason; an appreciation for the power of narrative, and the possibility that important truths of human experience might need to understood in narrative, in literary rather than literalist ways.

The variety of backgrounds, and the fact that two of the three traditions were not politically reactionary, was probably informative and valuable for the audience to learn about. (Yes: evangelicals are politically progressive in many places besides the US.) To me what was most interesting was hearing the different ways in which the panelists had distanced themselves from their parents' faith (while they can no longer share their parents' beliefs, all the panelists had great moral admiration for their parents), whether by slow or even regretful erosion or acts of rebellion.

As interesting in its way was the way they distanced themselves from the "new atheists," specially Richard Dawkins, who was brought out as whipping-boy many times. At one point Gladwell, with characteristic giddy hyperbole, opined that for every 15 year old boy who discovered in The God Delusion that he was not alone, a thousand others would find their faith strengthened by the thrill of persecution. How ironic that The God Delusion should be building the community of the faithful, he said, sounding rather more theist than he claimed to be! I'm not sure Gladwell's quite right here. There are surely some whose religious fanaticism is fanned by the flames of what they take to be persecution (which is why right wing nuts agree to apper on late night talk shows). But there is another group of people - like our panelists - who react against Dawkins not from the perspective of affronted faith but from that of an affronted humanism which thinks religion (although it's untrue) deserves better. (I've seen something similar in my course on the cultures of the religious right among students who have left behind conservative religious backgrounds but also feel their families are done an injustice by liberal anti-religious prejudices.) Distancing themselves from Dawkins' dismissive views of religious believers, these speakers are able to avoid a categorical distinction between intellectuals and faith, and recognize the humanity of religious believers and the human significance of their experiences, communities, questions and proffered asnwers.

What opened up was a kind of spectrum whose extremes of literalist belief and literalist unbelief are equally condemned. In the middle, a common ground of people who take religion seriously in various at least partly humanistic ways, some believers, some not. The space, I'd like to think, not of faux neutrality of "The Question of God" or the Foundation for a Better Life, but the robust democratic hope of Dewey's A Common Faith...

Trend setting

Here's the newest thing from Google. You can track apparent correlations in the frequency with which various terms show up over time. Above I've compared William James (red) with two marine animals of which he made metaphorical use. Not only does the crab (gold), which refuses to be classed as a crustacean but insists "I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone!" in the opening of the Varieties of Religious Experience, outpace him (especially in summer), but both are put to shame by the wild and unpredictable exploits of octopus (blue), though it's not necessarily the "PhD octopus" James thought was strangling American higher education, I suppose. It's just amazing what one can discover! It sure looks like information, like there's got to be a story to tell...

Veggie macho

I love buying vegetables at the Manhattan Fruit Exchange in the Chelsea Market: selection is wide, prices are good, and - best of all - their carrier bags are clear plastic. You can parade your fearless connoisseurship of fruit and vegetables down the street as you take your colorful prizes home. Here's today's trophy: my first ever stalk of brussels sprouts, most impressive rising from a bed of shiitake, shallots, kale, scallions and navels. You can bet I turned some heads on the way back to Brooklyn! Even the subway police were impressed.

Now... what do I do with it?

Elephants in the room

Made my way through the Met's charming "American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915" exhibition this afternoon. It's lots of fun, and since the website has lots of images, I'll give you a baker's dozen.There's much of interest tucked into each one, celebratory, critical, ironic or merely documentary. For instance, here's Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827) in an 1822 self-portrait, "The Artist In His Museum." (He's revered as the inventor of the modern museum at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in LA.) What is artfully concealed in this enormous painting until your eye has roamed around the collection of stuffed birds, etc. is the giant mammoth skeleton at right behind him, for which the mastodon bones in the foreground serve as a foretaste. In many of the other paintings, the elephant in the room is race. Go on, explore for yourself!

William Sidney Mount (1807–1868), The Painter's Triumph, 1838

William Sidney Mount (1807–1868), "The Power of Music," 1847

Richard Caton Woodville (1825–1855), War News from Mexico, 1848

Lilly Martin Spencer (1822–1902), Kiss Me and You'll Kiss the 'Lasses, 1856

Thomas Le Clear (1818–1882), Young America, ca. 1863

Seymour Joseph Guy (1824–1910), Story of Golden Locks, ca. 1870

Winslow Homer (1836–1910), Dressing for the Carnival, 1877

John George Brown (1831–1913), The Card Trick, 1880–89

George de Forest Brush (1855–1941), The Picture Writer's Story, ca. 1884

William Merritt Chase (1849–1916), The Open Air Breakfast, ca. 1887

William McGregor Paxton (1869–1941), The Breakfast, 1911

George Bellows (1882–1925), Cliff Dwellers, 1913

The human terrain

It seems the Pentagon's 2-year-old program embedding social scientists - especially anthropologists - in military units in Iraq and Afghanistan has been condemned by a committee of anthropologists. The program, with the rather mind-blowing name Human Terrain System, was criticized as "dangerous, unethical and unscholarly" at a panel at the recent meeting of the American Anthropological Association, reports the Times.

The report cited insufficient training to prepare scholars for work in the field, concern about confidentiality and obtaining informed consent from the local population, and the possibility that collected research could be used to select military targets. Scholars are supposed to refuse to hand over any data they suspect will be used for choosing targets.

Is this conflict of values surprising? Not really, I suppose. But it's probably too easy for us academics to think we can avoid dirty hands altogether. The work of anthropologists with the military goes back at least to Ruth Benedict's Chrysanthemum and the Sword, which became the Bible of the American occupation of Japan after WW2. The philological work of old-style Orientalists was so definitively linked with the imperatives of imperial occupation by Edward Said that the very word Orientalism changed meaning. Much of political science, economics and area studies aimed to influence policy in the cold war and towards the third world. In our own time, lots of scientific work meets the interests of funding agencies, private and public (including the military). Not all academic work is directed this way, but it's naive to suppose none of it will be, or should be.

And yet a certain discomfort seems appropriate. The results of scholarship might well inform policy - and make it more insightul and effective - but this can't be the purpose of the scholarship. Or at least I'd want to say that scholarship serves the public interest best by not aiming to aid any particular agenda. In fact particular agendas will get more from scholarship that - if not as "value-neutral" as Weber thought it can and should be - at least seeks to be objective or impartial. I won't be able to persuade you that my policies are worth supporting if all the evidence I offer is the work of scholars for hire, laboring away at my party think tank. Indeed scholarship isn't worth supporting in general if it isn't useful in this general way, if it doesn't (to use a fashionable term) speak truth to power, or (to use the phrase from Weber's "Wissenschaft als Beruf" that is the lodestar of my own teaching) provide "inconvenient facts" for every party opinion.

These issues can seem far away at a liberal arts college, since liberal arts are understood as aiming for just this level of generality and common good. This generality permits free inquiry and attention to larger questions but it can also cover a multitude of sins. Liz Coleman's making such waves because colleges have become factories of knowledge so specialized and arcane as to seem untranslatable into the more general concerns they're supposed to be illuminating. As Coleman (who worked at The New School for a period, before ending up shaking up Bennington) makes clear, these issues come up in interesting ways especially in schools that think themselves "progressive," as ours does. Is "progressive" a subset of liberal arts, the superlative form of liberal arts, or, to the contrary, a kind of defection from it? (On these questions I'm more liberal than some of my colleagues, whose self-understanding is more politically engaged where mine is more, well, academic. They'd smile or grimace at my use of words like objectivity and impartiality.)

The relation of academic work to service is an old set of problems, still far from clearly solved, but recently it's coming up in a new way, too, as our new provost contemplates developing new curricula in something he's calling "applied liberal arts." Designed for application in general, or for particular applications? Maybe we can get a better purchase on the broader questions by working through what keeps "applied liberal arts" liberal...

Last flash

My Brooklyn life is by now nearly leafless, but West 12th Street in Manhattan, which I walk along when I go to school, has managed to protect a cluster of Japanese maple trees from the elements and they're going strong.

The rumor is that we could get snow over the weekend...

Get on the bus, Gus

The American Humanist Association has put ads on buses in Washington, DC which take the now familiar Christmas culture wars (from "Jesus, the reason for the season" to attempted boycotts of department stores advertising "holiday" rather than "Christmas sales") to a whole new level:While it wittily refers to the non-religious carol "Santa Claus is coming to town," it's not quite as snappy as the work of the Atheist Bus Campaign in Britain on which it's based (and which communicates a different set of values: not the moral high ground, but a grounded humanist hedonism): And it's produced pretty unsnappy responses - though they do get the font and snowflakes right. Actually, the ad war between atheists and Christians is full of cases where the rhetoric or look of one is coopted by the other; best is the billboard campaign which has, in white letters against a bright sky, the words: "Don't believe in God? You are not alone."

Notification

You know how a film can take you to new worlds, show you other times and places? Well, it can also show you your own time, your own place, your own world. Oren Moverman's "The Messenger," a film about two soldiers charged with bringing the news of loved ones lost in battle or accidents to the next of kin, does that - and (because) it's an amazing film. Well shot, powerfully written, brilliantly acted. A view of the America scarred and sorrowed by war's toll - including those who survive. A sobering thing to have seen the day of the President's announcement that 30,000 more troops will see duty in Afghanistan.

Can't do this alone

Just learned that Diana Eck gave the 2008-9 Gifford Lectures, entitled "The Age of Pluralism" - just in time for the session of Theorizing Religion for which we read her essay "Is Our God Listening? Exclusivism, Inclusivism and Pluralism." The argument of the six lectures seems to be essentially the same as that of the 1993 article: We find ourselves in an age of unprecedented religious plurality, and the challenge and opportunity of our time is to learn to be pluralistic about it. Pluralism is not a given but an achievement, not just tolerance but an active seeking of understanding, not a "free-form relativism" but an encounter of commitments in dialogue, not an ideology but the creation of new, bridging relationships. She quotes her teacher Wilfred Cantwell Smith's claim a generation ago: One must be a new kind of person to live aptly in the new world community that is struggling to come to birth.

What does this mean, exactly? How does pluralism really differ from "inclusivism" on the one hand, and "syncretism" on the other? I described these terms and their difficulties for Eck's view in a post from when we read the article last year: while pluralists actively seek to understand other traditions (unlike smug inclusivists), they aren't supposed to assimilate anything from them, at least not in a "syncretic" way. We tried to puzzle out what this meant in class today and came up with this: Nobody can transcend her own tradition on her own, even if she thinks she can. Her attempts to honor other traditions, being inevitably in some version of her own language, are doomed to being mere inclusivism. And her efforts to learn from the others, by fitting them into her inclusivist views, won't be transformative either, will miss the true significance of the other view. To be a pluralist, you need to be in dialogue: you can be an exclusivist, an inclusivist on your own but you can't be a pluralist alone - and the minute your dialogue ends, with conclusions or collaborations, you've betrayed your pluralism. Pluralism isn't a stance or an attitude, but a specific practice, with specific interlocutors. That's why, as Eck insists in the 1993 article, "there is no such thing as a generic pluralist": you have to have specific commitments to start, and you have to have specifically committed interlocutors to proceed. Pluralism is a culture, a form of shared life.

It's a pleasing view - and second nature to anyone who's had transformative experiences in cross-cultural settings, or across languages, not just religions. But Eck's view is a religious, a theological one, based in ideas from the theology of religions of Wilfred Cantwell Smith (above). From Smith Eck has absorbed the idea that it is religiously valuable to engage other religious traditions in dialogue - the best way to stop your own tradition from limiting you, becoming an empty idol. (And every tradition worries about this, conceives of ultimate reality as greater than we can yet or perhaps ever grasp.) God speaks through many traditions, and we may be best informed and transformed when we encounter God in the (to us) unassimilable aspects of other traditions. We should not then make that other tradition our own; the value is in the Wholly Other speaking to us through the religious other. Triangulation gives a better sense of Ultimate Reality but also of the non-ultimate character of one's own (as of every human) location. So ever ongoing dialogue is called for, not agreement or closure, for closure is always premature in the encounter with the Wholly Other.

The encounter with others doesn't round out or complete your knowledge of Ultimate Reality; it keeps you aware that Ultimate Reality is transcendent. You can't be a pluralist on your own. But then, Eck and Smith seem to be arguing that you can't even be really religious - humbly open to the mystery - on your own either. Is that right?

Old Europe

Interesting article in the Science Times about one of the oldest civilizations in the world - what's new is that enough has been found to categorize it as a civilization - in the Balkans. It's referred to as Old Europe. The architectural model above (some of their structures did indeed have two stories) dates from 4600-3900 BCE, the pot below (with patterns remarkably like those of Pueblo pots!) from 3700-3500 BCE.

Pulling out all the stops

I suppose I shouldn't say that the best film I've seen in a while is Roland Emmerich's "2012" but it really was a blast. Too long by half, and repetitive (first a car races away from streets cracking and buckling from earthquake, then it's a trailer, then it's a small plane, then it's a really big plane...), and the hammiest of dialogue.

But who goes to a big-budget disaster film for the dialogue? You go for the special effects! 1000 people worked on the computer-generated cataclysms here, and it shows. Los Angeles has never been chopped, diced, vigorously shaken and then poured into the Pacific quite as vividly. (I first saw the poster above as a billboard-sized cardboard sign at a cinema in California, where you could see the individual cars and people...) And then onward, past toppling monuments from around the world (the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel cracks open in the space between Adam's and God's fingers) until cataclysmic tsunamis wash over the Himalayas. What breathtaking nerve! It's all a sight to behold (and to be seen on the biggest screen you can find). Emmerich's done several disaster movies before - I saw "Independence Day" and "The Day After Tomorrow" the days they opened (!) - but in this one Emmerich evokes not only those but a dozen other movies, too, from "Poseidon Adventure" through to "Battlestar Galactica."

So why does one - why do I - enjoy such spectacles? (I avoid films of violence on a smaller scale.) The near-profound rush of the sublime? The prophylactic sense that if we imagine worse things than could ever happen, we might be spared the worst than can?

Noh way

Isn't it great when you learn to appreciate something you at first couldn't appreciate at all? Had that experience this afternoon listening to Benjamin Britten's Curlew River. I saw this "church parable" - a kind of chamber opera intended for performance in a church - performed in Berlin years ago (not in a church but in a culture center in a converted brewery), but it seemed to me then neither fish nor fowl. I went to see it because it was described as an adaptation of the Noh drama Sumidagawa, which sounded intriguing. (Like Britten, I saw Sumidagawa performed in Japan, looking like the scene below.) But the costumes were low-budget samurai movie and the music didn't sound right: was this supposed to sound Japanese? It just sounded weird. This time, listening to a recording with Peter Pears (in the picture above) and knowing that the story was not supposed to be Japanese but to take place in the Christian middle ages, I found it to be fish and fowl. It's haunting and wondrous, with the eeriness and sorrow of the Noh and the pathos and hope of a medieval mystery play. Dramatically, musically and even religiously it's a fascinating adaptation - which is why I was listening. For it's time again to think about Religion & Theater, which my friend C and I teach again this coming semester! I'm pushing for a refined structure from last time, which for all the fascinating material we covered proved too episodic for many students. Instead, we'll have thematic units, each on a religious studies theme but centered on a particular play. Over three or four classes we'll discuss the religious and dramatic background of the play, religious issues it explores, how the play was understood and performed at its time and in our own - and how it has been adapted or emulated or transformed by later artists. This is where Curlew River will come in. (Several interesting new productions, true to Britten's intention, are available online, including the one from Festival Retz 2006 below that's actually performed in a church.) It's not only a remarkable amalgam, and a reminder that medieval religious traditions are still powerful, but it raises fascinating questions about the way ideas or traditions move from one religious world to another. Sumidagawa is a Buddhist story; Curlew River a Christian one. What are we to make of the replacement of Amida and the Pure Land with Christ and heaven? Is the message the same in both traditions? Or perhaps what's shared is a mood...! Should make for a good discussion!