Recognition

Rereading Robin Wall Kimmerer's wondrous Braiding Sweetgrass for class on Tuesday. I'd forgotten or missed that she knows who's reading her.

It takes real effort to remember that it's not just in a wigwam that the earth gives us everything we need. The exchange of recognition, gratitude, and reciprocity for these gifts is just as important in a Brooklyn flat as under a birch bark roof. (240)

I was there

It's that Friday Christians call Good. I went to the Church of the Holy Apostles for the suitably spare service, which was good for all sorts of reasons.

It's my home church, but since I celebrate the Easter Vigil there I tend to take in the other parts of the Triduum elsewhere. (True to form, last night we were at our neighborhood Catholic Co-Cathedral of St. Joseph.) But if there's something right in welcoming the Easter light with your regular people, in your regular place, it's no less appropriate to commemorate the Passion here, to face the Reproaches exquisitely sung by a choir of familiar faces, to adore the bare wooden cross leaning on the altar you face at a distance all year, to sing "Were you there...," your voice breaking in the final hush-voiced verse, to hear the bell that calls you to worship all year peal those thirty-three times.

Interactive

After a few months away, paid a visit to that savviest of museums, the Rubin, today. Interlaced with multimedia it's as thrilling as this ingenious portable mani shrine (tashi gomang) of Padmasam- bhava's Palace on the Copper-Colored Mountain (18th/19th century) must have been back in the day...

Swaddling

A new leaf unspools

Fonts of wisdom

This week saw the completion of Lang's first floor redesign, which includes this splashy spread of the areas of study we offer. It's rather busy when you look closely - each one appears three or four times superimposed (most jarringly in Politics). Sandwiched between Philosophy and Sociology, Religious Studies appears to be the only field that has the keys too the kingdom - or at least the keyhole...!

Hermeneutic community

My friend M guest lectured in "Performing the Problem of Suffering: The Book of Job and the Arts" today, to excellent effect. His charge was to talk about the use of Job in the Liturgy of the Dead, but he managed to do a lot more. He introduced the students to the role of scripture in liturgy as communal performance, first in the Mass (hence the lovely liturgical calendar above), in the Liturgy of the Hours, and finally in the Office of the Dead. This was in service of a generalizable understanding of the Church as a "hermeneutic community," and some broader points about reading. Nobody, he exclaimed, ever reads alone (whatever they may think!). And the communities of interpretation which make our reading possible are ones in which we bear a responsibility to listen to each other - even, indeed especially, those who we find "irritating." And these are communities which include the dead. Some things he offered us to think about:

1. No book of scripture is ever read in isolation. It is always read in conjunction/dialogue with other parts of the scripture. 
2. The scripture is not only presented to the ear – it is often put into the mouth (i.e. embodied) by the congregation. 
3. The reading is not individual, but communal. 
4. The reading is not chosen by the individual, but mandated for the community. 
5. A religious community is often though of as a group of people who agree about things. It might better be described as a group of people who agree about what is worth disagreeing about. 
6. The readings are set according to the Liturgical Calendar, but there are moments in the community in which the calendar is interrupted and/or supplemented by extraordinary events – like the death of a member of the community. 

In between naughty and self-deprecating asides he made it all dovetail beautifully with the Book of Job - itself a depiction of a hermeneutic community in crisis, he reminded us (they disagree but nobody leaves) - and the stuff of an Office in which the dead and the living grieve, rage and pray for each other. A marvel, and everyone was paying attention!

I've long known that M is a master teacher (he taught for a long time at Lang) but this was my first time seeing him in action, and with a group of students he didn't know to boot. I learned a lot, too!

Not too cheesy

What to serve to balance the richness of cheese fondue? We found the answer in a column with the wonderfully British name "Yotam Ottolenghi's recipes for tinned pulses." These caramelized onions joined quinoa (red and white), pepitas, avocado, lemon juice, parsley, basil and (tinned!) chickpeas.

Spring snow frolics

Back on the grid

Home sweet home

Morning beachcombing

 

At the Del Mar beach, shells which tell stories...

Most of them were in fragments... until this one

Definitely Springing

Early Spring

My father and I counted twenty-three kinds of plants already in bloom

as we strolled along the Guy Fleming Trail in Torrey Pines State

 

Nature Reserve this afternoon - not including the ferns!

Jet Blue

Looking for all the world like the landscape in the background of a Netherlandish Madonna, an early morning aerial view of the winding Hudson River and the shining city where it meets the sea.

Aspiration

This is the Church of the Holy Apostles. Like many an older New York church, its spire used to be the tallest thing in the neighborhood... no longer! The new Hudson Yards district is rising just to its northwest.

Times a'changing! What I really want to tell you that is that Holy Apostles has a bright future because its Vestry (of which I'm a member) has unanimously chosen a brilliant new rector... but that's all I can say.

UPDATE: It's official! Holy Apostles has called the Rev. Anna Pearson to be our new rector.

Landscape stroll

Went on a bit of an art binge this morning. It started in the Met's China galleries with students from "Religion & Ecology." Hard to imagine a better way of communicating the "liquid ecology" we'd read about than a scroll painting like "Remote Buddhist temples among autumn mountains" above (14th-15th C., unidentified artist). Since I had time I stayed on at the Met, encountering further landscapes in an exhibit of mountain paintings from Korea, and a lovely exhibition about Thomas Cole, one of the US's most famous landscape painters. This show,

which feels a little like the scene in the tiny work above (from the Ashmolean), lets us see paintings (Turner! Constable!) which Cole saw when traveling in Europe, and then experience anew his imaginings of the Hudson river landscape, and the famous "Course of Empire" (from the New-York Historical Society). Enough never being enough, I popped into the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, where I found a 15th century Iskander (Alexander) lecturing the seven great philosophers of Greece, with two onlookers tittering behind the hill. Delights!

Reddy for Spring

Museuming

In "Religion and Ecology," we're making our way through James Miller's China's Green Religion.

To help the students understand the profoundly different cosmology of Daoism, where "liquid vitality" streams and flows, pervades and condenses, sometimes into solids (like human bones or mountains), sometimes into liquids (like organs or spittle or waterfalls), sometimes into liquids that then congeal (like ink), and always in specific locales, I'm taking the class to the Met to spend time with Chinese ink landscape paintings.

But at MoMA today (a friend is visiting from Japan, so I had an excuse to go again) I found a lovely evocation of the "porous" selves Miller recommends we accept we are: Louise Bourgeois's "Articulated Lair" (1986), a circular enclosure of folding screens (with two small doorways for passing through), with mysterious pendants swaying almost imperceptibly as air is pushed by the bodies of passing viewers. Wow!

The view down over the Lang courtyard, south from the president's office's small conference room. Even from five stories up you can see that the trees are budding!

Something's happening