Off!

This is sort of a silly image, but I have to mark the fact somehow that the manuscript of the Job biography is finally out of my hands The copy-editor sent me her suggestions, I vetted them and made a few changes of my own, and now I have no further say. Once it's typeset nothing can be changed except "typos and errors of fact." So be it. I'm so ready for this to be, well, done!

Skype shiva

An unsung hero died yesterday. I told you about her five years ago, the old Jewish Romanian woman who lived on the same floor as my friends J and A on the Upper West Side, whom we called "Neighbor." (Her real name was Esther, or Ernestina, shortened to Tina.) The young caretaker from Guinea-Bissau, the first careaker in years who had been able to make Neighbor smile, called J and A in Minneapolis yesterday morning, in tears. Neighbor's life wasn't easy, but she was an artist of life.

It was a long life, lived in many countries and languages with resourcefulness and wit. A wartime childhood, losing a world and most of her family to Soviets and Nazis, with an amazing story of survival up and back down Eastern Europe with her mother (who couldn't speak unaccented German) and a dwindling stock of family silver to exchange for food, shelter, protection. Years in Italy, and Israel, and then in the US, where she worked for 26 years without a rest to make a life for her son. And then at last some travel for pleasure, tours every moment of which she could recall as if it were yesterday. Books, in the many languages she knew fluently (from high school!). And, as she became infirm, a long decline in her apartment on West 90th Street.

I have no doubt the best part of its last 16 years was the care and admiration of J and A, who became like the daughters or nieces she never had. Especially happy moments were festive meals like Passover and Thanksgiving, when Neighbor made her way slowly past the elevator landing to J and A's apartment and bantered and laughed (and ate, how she could eat - only no vegetables!) with people honored to share a table with her. Otherwise she was alone, except for daily visits from J and A, which had become daily phone calls when J and A moved to Minnesota last year. Her son checked in infrequently. J and A brought her food every time they cooked. It was they connected her to cable television, to the internet (she loved learning, loved "my Wikipedia"), to a Holocaust survivors care organization, and even to a rabbi. (Neighbor wasn't religious but that didn't mean she didn't have questions for God; she picked my brain about it sometimes, too. What could I possibly say?)

We sat a kind of remote shiva for her last night; Neighbor would have appreciated the strange new world of technology which made it possible. As we communed through skype, J called up an app on her iPhone which sang the Kaddish (we had the option of Ashkenazi or Sephardic) as they followed along - the words were transliterated. Then we drank a toast - they had champagne, the only thing Neighbor would drink; I had a campari, my regular drink when visiting J and A - and shared stories, as one does, never knowing if it would end in mirth or tears (or both). We hadn't seen - even skype seen - each other in months. Remembering Neighbor brought us back together.

Neighbor had been asking God to let her die for years and years. "She won," said A. "Te deum," said I. "We mourn, but she's free."

Giant in our midst

Had he lived, Sekou Sundiata would have been sixty-five this year. A sui generis spoken word poet and musician and teacher and community activist and visionary, Sekou taught at Lang for twenty years. I didn't have a chance to get to know him well, but I saw him perform several times. The last time was at the Melbourne International Festival in 2006. (He died of heart failure the following July.) A seven-month series of commemorative discussions and performances called "Blink Your Eye: Sekous Sundiata Revisited" started today. My Jazz School colleague R read out a poem I can remember seeing (and still hear) Sekou perform in Melbourne, and before that here, with a backup of four women who took up the same words in close, phantasmagoric harmonies:

HOPES UP TOO HIGH

What if we were Life
or Liberty
or the Pursuit of something new?
Between the rocks below
and the stars above
what if we were composed by Love?

And what if we could show
that what we dream
is deeper than what we know?
Suppose if something does not live
in the world
that we long to see
then we make it ourselves
as we want it to be

What if we are Life
and Liberty
and the Pursuit of something new?

And suppose the beautiful answer
asks the more beautiful question,

Why don’t we get our hopes up too high?
Why don’t we get our hopes up too high?
High!

This evening's event, attended by many people who knew him (including a half dozen past faculty members I haven't seen in years), was a panel discussion about Sekou "Writer / Teacher / Artist / Activist." The first presenter was an alum, who's teaching a course on Sekou in the Reading NYC curriculum I administer at Lang. The next was R, who described to us Sekou's remarkable gift for creative collaboration: for him beautiful answers always asked even more beautiful questions. A professor from Michigan described his way with community artistic-citizenship events. A Jamaican economist - the surprise of the evening, for me at least - recounted how he'd put Sekou's community-building "community sings" to practice in Honduras and Jamaica, where they have helped create a stronger culture of citizenship. We finished with a small "Community Sing" of our own, led by R. We sang "Amazing Grace" together. Amen.

Late bloomer

My last chance to make changes to the "Book of Job: A Biography" manuscript - accepting or contesting the suggestions of a very skilled copywriter. It's a new day: I'm ready to see the end of it!

Decomposition

In "Exploring Religious Ethics" today we talked about the Meditation on the Stages of Decomposition of a Corpse. Actually, we didn't talk about it - I took the class through a kusôzu, a Japanese scroll painting of the stages, screening each stage for 30 seconds. This is one of the images.

 

Grisly stuff, but helpful in understanding what happens to the protagonist of the film "The Burmese Harp" (which everyone was supposed to watch over the Break) as he encounters the uncremated remains of fellow Japanese soldiers in various stages of disintegration. Meanwhile, each week offers a different stage in the chronicle of the decomposition of Saint Vincent's Hospital at 11th and Sixth.

Dont forget us

So Pope Francis took the ceremonial foot-washing of Maundy Thursday offsite, to a juvenile prison, and washed the feet of inmates there, including two young women, one of whom was a Bosnian Muslim. (I gather the Pope traditionally washes the feet only of priests, certainly only men.) This feels like a big deal. It came reflected back to me today at St. Luke and St. Matthew, my neighborhood Episcopal church here. The young rector (raised Methodist and not someone accustomed to seeing prophetic work done in Rome) devoted most of his Easter sermon to reading aloud letters which inmates of a juvenile prison in California sent Francis on hearing about it. Here are three of those he read:

Dear Pope Francis, 
Thank you for washing the feet of youth like us in Italy. 
We also are young and made mistakes. 
Society has given up on us, thank you 
that you have not given up on us. 

 Dear Pope Francis, 
I don't know if you have ever been to where I live. 
I have grown up in a jungle of gangs and drugs and violence. 
I have seen people killed. I have been hurt. 
We have been victims of violence. 
It is hard to be young and surrounded by darkness. 
Pray for me that one day I will be free 
and be able to help other youth like you do.

Dear Pope Francis, 
I think you are a humble man. 
When you read this letter you will have washed the feet of other kids like. 
I am writing this letter because you give me hope. 
I know one day with people like you us kids 
won't be given sentences that will keep us in prison for the rest of our lives. 
I pray for you. Dont forget us. 

The priest's somewhat smarmy point was something like "if an old man with one lung can do something in Italy which touches the lives of young people in Los Angeles, think what we could do," but clearly he was touched by Pope Francis' outreach to those on the margins of society. I'm wondering how many other people have been moved by this around the world - women and men, young people and old, Christians and non-Christians - and in what ways. It is a heartening thought for Easter.

Lent Madness

Ever heard of Lent Madness? It's an Episcopal spin-off of March Madness, and invites participants to vote as scores of Episcopal saints go head to head. This year's winner: Francis Perkins, Labor Secretary under FDR and a devoted Anglo-Catholic. You can follow each heat, and learn a lot about these Christian heroes (and people's reasons for preferring one over another) here. To whet your appetite, here's how we got here.
If and when I ever teach my "Preposterous Saints" course again, I think we might do a version of this ourselves!

Tulip trees!

... or so my late friend V called magnolias, like this one, in Princeton.

あっという間に

One of the things about an academic career is the jangling temporality of things, since projects circle back at different stages of completion, and even sometimes continue circling back after that! I suppose those folks with the good fortune or lack of imagination to be working only on a single project don't experience it that much, but an academic scatterbrain like me is often concurrently in several time zones. I mentioned this last when Leibniz strode back into my life last semester, as if he'd just stepped out for a quick smoke: "where were we?" We?It's happening again. Just as we're putting together the full draft of the book we hope comes out of last year's "Queer Christianities" conference, the copy-edited draft of the Job book shows up for my approval. (Good thing i's Spring Break - and I do my real breaking between semesters!) But that's nothing compared to what tomorrow has in store: I've been invited to participate in a discussion about the Japanese ethicist Watsuji Tetsuro 和辻哲郎- remember him? We became best buds during my year in Tokyo 1992-3 and he was my ticket to Paris in 2001; I even published two essays on his ethics in 1999 (in Japanese!) and 2005 and organized a forum on him in 2004... but I haven't actively worked on him since.

(I took the above photo at the Watsuji Museum in Himeji in 2004. The post title - meaning something like "before you know it" - is a play on Watsuji's most famous concept, aida 間, tho' here it's pronounced ma.)

All in the family

 

Today might turn out to have been the beginning of the end for DOMA. I'm not usually a joiner on internet memes but I had to be part of the HRC's campaign to "paint the town red," replacing my facebook profile photo with the red equals sign. (The only other time I've done that was for Trayvon Martin last year.) See what fun people are having with it!

Buds

 

Here we go!

Wider!

This seems to be my lucky year professionally! For the November Annual Meeting, the American Academy of Religion's Comparative Religious Ethics and Teaching Religion Groups are co-sponsoring a session - and mine is one of the proposed papers they've selected. "Exploring Religious Ethics" gets its fifteen minutes of fame! I won't tire you with the detailed proposal, here's the abstract.

Wider moral communities: A framework
for teaching comparative religious ethics 

A course in religious ethics has to be a course about religion too, otherwise it risks reproducing secular western understandings of ethics which render much of religious practice unintelligible or merely symbolic. Especially in courses for non-majors we face students who think that all religions are flavors of “compassion” or iterations of moralistic therapeutic deism - or, if not, are dangerously (or perhaps excitingly) irrational. This paper describes a way of exploring religious ethics which challenges the idea that ethics is preeminently about what living adult human beings owe each other. A focus on the bounds of the moral community in different religious traditions – we are part of larger communities including the dead, spirits, God(s), animals, etc. – allows a richer appreciation of the nature and norms of religious action (including ritual) across traditions and a deeper understanding of human participation in religious worlds.

It takes my thinking in "Exploring Religious Ethics" to a further level, considering the different forms of agency of non-human members of our moral communities. This, I propose to explore, will make clearer the specific obligations and opportunities of human existence, but also broaden our sense of agency in such a way as to reassess the different sorts of things different sorts of human beings do. Are some of our actions more like the actions of ancestors or mountains or God? I'm excited: a chance for me to bring to reflection (and pedagogy) some of what I have learned from trying to teach about Australian Aboriginal traditions, as well as from Everyday Religion and Sustainable Environments in the Himalaya; I think there's things from work with Parsons colleagues to be explored here, too.

Passion Sunday

Learned today that it's a relatively new thing for Palm Sunday also to be Passion Sunday - that is, for us not just to celebrate Jesus' triumphant entry in to Jerusalem but to enter into the brutal rest of the story, with a reading of one of the passion narratives, the turning point marked by the terrible hymn "The King's majesty." Not so long ago, our rector reminded us in his homily, Sunday churchgoers could do a "shortcut" going straight from the joy of Palm Sunday to the joy of Easter.

It's our Spring Break, which falls only occasionally on Holy Week. I'll have a chance to enter more fully into this culmination of the Christian year.

Slowly Springing

Up in Ossining, about an hour's train ride north of the City, for a working weekend with the rest of the Queer Christianities editors. Even a few hours spent out of town change one's sense of possibilities - in the woods here there's still snow on the ground, but there are snowdrops, too!

Centers of economic gravity

I suppose one advantage of having high school classmates who've gone into quite different sectors than you have (and Facebook) is that you learn about projects like this one, of the McKinsey Global Institute. I'm a bit skeptical about the 1000-1500 bit, and, since they work from a globe, wonder how Latin America economic activity would register against Chinese. Still, it's sort of fascinating...

Kailash!

I really didn't think one could top Shangri La, but this most sacred of Himalayan mountains may be on my horizon. Details when I get them!

Pass the matzah

Facebook ads have me pegged for Jewish! I'm flattered but a little confused. What's happened - what have I done - to get rid of that scarily dim looking coed in the "Meet Christian Singles" ad that used to pop up? Now I get recipes for matzah and an ad for a Passover Seder karaoke app. (That last one is so intriguingly awful I'm tempted to check it out - but who knows what other things that would bring on?)

I remember that one of the characters in M. T. Anderson's fantastic young adult sci-fi novel Feed made an art of messing up the programs trying to typecast her buyer profile by deliberately going to the most random shops and feigning interest in products of radically contrasting lifestyles. In the end, she's hunted down as an anarchist threat, but Facebook's just for fun, right?

Muzak dance

Went last night to see Paul Taylor Dance Company at Lincoln Center. Taylor used to thrill me, but the thrill has worn off, and the last few times I've gone I've been underwhelmed. (Even when I took my friend H from Japan, who had claimed she didn't "get" modern dance, and after the performance finally did.) I had a chance of some cheap tickets, so I felt I should give them another chance. I'm sorry to say the verdict was, again, "meh."

Except for the middle piece, "Lost, found and lost" from 1982, which is about, I think, boredom. It's choreographed to "elevator music" and mines the gestures of ordinary life, including postures you see in elevators, when people are waiting in line, bored, impatient, making something delightful out of them, witty and even beautiful. (Apparently the movements are from a piece choreographed a quarter century before, which scandalized all but a few critics.)

Or was it the muzak, with it soaring strings, its improbable solos of harmonica, accordion, solo violin or guitar, its ethereal timelessness? (You can listen to a snatch of the music here.) I was transported back to 1982, when Lawrence Welk and Liberace were still current, and - this is the key - when background music didn't always have a beat. Even as we floated along chintzy versions of "Laura" and "As time goes by" (missing was only "Moon River"), I found I missed that gauzy tempoless world.

Sojourners

In "Exploring Religious Ethics" we've started reading Wayne Meeks' Origins of Christian Morality, which tries to find what united the disparate communities of the early Christian movement. It's not the New Testament, he reminds us, because in the first two centuries of the common era, his subject, there was no such. Different communities had quite different, if overlapping, libraries of texts, and different theologies and metaphysics, too. (His argument will be that what they had in common was a moral culture.) It was fun to be able to pass around A New New Testament, the arrival in churches (perhaps) of the discoveries discussed in a more scholarly way in Meeks.

We had fun also with a text Meeks cites, the Epistle to Diognetus (c. 130-200 CE), which lays out Meeks' problem - who did Christians think they were, and how did they explain it, live it? - and then moves into Pauline paradoxes, before moving into not yet non-canonical ideas about souls imprisoned in bodies. It's not one of the 20th century discoveries A New New Testament is concerned with, having been reprinted already in the 16th century. (The original manuscript was apparently destroyed during the Franco-Prussian War.)

CHAPTER V -- THE MANNERS OF THE CHRISTIANS.

For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity. The course of conduct which they follow has not been devised by any speculation or deliberation of inquisitive men; nor do they, like some, proclaim themselves the advocates of any merely human doctrines. But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. They marry, as do all [others]; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven. They obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives. They love all men, and are persecuted by all. They are unknown and condemned; they are put to death, and restored to life. They are poor, yet make many rich; they are in lack of all things, and yet abound in all; they are dishonoured, and yet in their very dishonour are glorified. They are evil spoken of, and yet are justified; they are reviled, and bless; they are insulted, and repay the insult with honour; they do good, yet are punished as evil-doers. When punished, they rejoice as if quickened into life; they are assailed by the Jews as foreigners, and are persecuted by the Greeks; yet those who hate them are unable to assign any reason for their hatred.

CHAPTER VI -- THE RELATION OF CHRISTIANS TO THE WORLD.

To sum up all in one word--what the soul is in the body, that are Christians in the world. The soul is dispersed through all the members of the body, and Christians are scattered through all the cities of the world. The soul dwells in the body, yet is not of the body; and Christians dwell in the world, yet are not of the world. The invisible soul is guarded by the visible body, and Christians are known indeed to be in the world, but their godliness remains invisible. The flesh hates the soul, and wars against it, though itself suffering no injury, because it is prevented from enjoying pleasures; the world also hates the Christians, though in nowise injured, because they abjure pleasures. The soul loves the flesh that hates it, and [loves also] the members; Christians likewise love those that hate them. The soul is imprisoned in the body, yet preserves that very body; and Christians are confined in the world as in a prison, and yet they are the preservers of the world. The immortal soul dwells in a mortal tabernacle; and Christians dwell as sojourners in corruptible [bodies], looking for an incorruptible dwelling in the heavens. The soul, when but ill-provided with food and drink, becomes better; in like manner, the Christians, though subjected day by day to punishment, increase the more in number. God has assigned them this illustrious position, which it were unlawful for them to forsake.

Trans. James Donaldson and Alexander Roberts in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1 

http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/diognetus-roberts.html

Colors!

Most ambitious thing I've ever cooked - most ingredients, too (and this isn't all of them - squash, apricots, chickpeas, preserved lemon, harissa and cilantro are yet to come). Blame Yotam Ottolenghi, or rather, thank him! The final product is orange but the flavors are a riot of color. These roasted eggplant with buttermilk sauce, za'atar and pomegranates are Ottolenghi, too, and, unlike the "Ultimate winter couscous" above, not seasonal at all. I usually try too cook seasonal but made an exception because we were celebrating - one of our number is heading off in a few months for a new life in Australia, where it is late summer!