Fantastic

Went with a Chinese friend I haven't seen in a year to MoMA where we enjoyed the just-opened exhibition of utopian fantasies of the Congolese autodidact-become-international-star Bodys Isez Kingelez. But of course we talked about the more dystopian turns in our own lands.

Labyrinthine

I was interviewed for a high school student's documentary on science and religion today. Lots of fun! Of course I didn't answer any of his questions. But what I gave instead interested the interviewer and his cameraman enough that we continued well past the appointed time, and they asked me about what classes to take at college so they might have more discussions like this one. So as you can imagine...

To "Are you unnerved by the things science can't explain?" I asked what was meant - dark matter and energy - and said I wasn't unnerved at all, that religion is all about things that can't be explained, about accepting that there are things unknown. Not all religion, of course...

To "Do you think religion and science can be reconciled?" I responded by observing that 'reconciled' suggests they're two static things, when neither is. Better to think of each as something that changes with time, adjusting to, responding to, deepening itself in response to new discoveries. (Not all religion, of course...)

To "How do Christians think the world began?" I responded by exploding 'Christians' and then talked about the very different ways different folks understand the very first words of Genesis. "In the beginning..." doesn't necessarily mean the very beginning, the beginning of everything (where did those waters the spirit hovered over come from, etc.) but just of this account, which may be what we need. The important thing in Genesis, to certain kinds of Christians and Jews at least, is the repeated determination of each thing called into being: it was good.

To "How do Hindus think the world began?" I of course told them about Wendy Doniger's celebration of the great multitude of Hindu cosmogonies, the better for responding to whatever we might need. Buddhism was no better, and then there's the cyclical understanding of time...

My answers kept pointing to the power of stories (contrasted both with explanation and the story"), and to rituals. The cameraman turned the focus of our attention to ethics. And we ended up talking about how good it would be if philosophy, ethics, religion were taught in schools - which, I suggested, ought to include some experiences of ritualized activity, whether it be walking a labyrinth, or slow walking meditation. (Both I described recalling experiences at retreats. Perhaps I should should set aside time for a retreat this summer, too!)

The labyrinth walk, with others snaking their own way through, leading to always surprising encounters and divergences, became the model for a life that is shared with other beings over time (at first just other people, then the rest of creation), and the demands of living into it. The slow-motion walking became the occasion for the startled discovery that our effortless shifting of bones, muscles and weight in each step is a mystery of attunement (and the slowing down a model for science and religion)... which brought us back to it is good!

Stell Dir vor!

My beautiful mother celebrates a big birthday today. With help from my father in California and sister and nephew in Australia, we made her an "intergenerational intercontinental collaborative surprise" - a video!

Everything in the forest is the forest

How will we understand ourselves differently because of what we are learning about/from trees? Richard Powers has one of his characters discover it in a northwestern forest:

The Overstory: A Novel (Norton, 2018), 144

(Yet "we" have a problem, like the Anthropocene so White one. Powers introduces eight characters in his first 150 pages: Nicholas Hoel, Mimi Ma, Adam Appich, Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Cazaly, Douglas Pavlicek, Neelay Mehta, Patricia Westerford and Olivia Vandergriff. Mimi is the daughter of a Chinese refugee scholar, Mehta the child of two Indians. Everyone else is white. (Everyone is apparently straight, though Powers lets Westerford have a brief moment with another woman, before, years later, folding her into comfortable heterosexuality - even as she's discovered the queerness of nature!) This is a settler colonist's novel about America (the Hoels are actual settlers), claiming kinship with ancient trees but barely noticing the Native peoples of the land, or the African Americans who have worked it longer than almost all his characters' families gave been here. Incomplete fusion of human roots! What's that saying about seeing the forest for the trees?)

The sacred, progressively enlarged

Benoît Vermander uses Confucian tradition to beautifully balance the rigid sacred/profane dichotomy in modern western theory of religion:

The Latin-based lexicon Durkheim used draws a sharp distinction between sacred and profane. … In ancient Chinese thought, the meaning of any concept deemed central to the understand of human and cosmic realities will be progressively enlarged. Going one step further, the relationship between the cardinal Confucian virtues of ritual (sense of propriety, ritual expertise) and benevolence (ren) suggests a corrective to the sacred/profane dichotomy: While the sacred/profane dichotomy is about discontinuities, Chinese texts and terminology stress necessary continuation in life processes Different orders in collective existence are associated with different models of conduct. There are different space-times (including the ones induced by the distinction between sacrifices and festivals, on the one hand, and everyday work and life, on the other), but their alternation and combination are indispensable for ensuring the community’s sustainability as a whole. Ritual observance allows one to lead life based on benevolence, while the deployment of benevolence enables one to express to the fullest the inner meaning of ritual. Then the distinction between the sacred and the profane is better perceived as a continuum.

Shanghai Sacred: The Religious Landscape of a Global City
 (University of Washington Press, 2018), 9-10

Id

There's nothing this man will not do, or at least try. (As ever, Tom Toles' second punchline, tucked in the lower right corner, as just as good.)

Arboreal

Next on my tree-hugging reading list. The book's first 150 pages tell of human lives, in which trees play significant, sometimes symbolic, parts. The remaining many hundred are apparently about the trees.

End of the rainbow

Two books I have a very peripheral connection to have appeared recently. Shanghai Sacred is an ethnographic study of Shanghai religions with gorgeous photographs; I provided some comments of some early drafts during my year there. Benoît, the main author, was effectively my host at Fudan, and Liz, the main photographer, became a friend too. They took me on a few of their expeditions (including Jinze), and I also provided them one connection - to the Rainbow Witness Fellowship, a gay Christian group I'd become involved with. Liz' discreet photo from a Rainbow event, taken after I'd left Fudan, is characteristically lovely:

Rainbow is also where I met Eros, the editor of May your lips kiss mine, an anthology of writing by and about LGBT Catholics in China and the broader Chinese diaspora. I think I planted one of many seeds for it when I told Eros I thought there'd be interest in the sorts of stories shared at Rainbow meetings well beyond China. He pulled it together in record time, and has apparently already found many grateful readers - including Catholic priests, who have received no guidance for ministering to the tongzhi in their congregations. I'm helping smooth out the translations for an English version, moved by each chapter I read.

Songs of hope

At the recent conference on religion and the Anthropocene, the only reference to trees - at least the only explicit one - was made by me. So consumed were we with coming to terms with the human - itself a morally problematic simplification - as a "planetary agent" that our discussion touched only peripherally on non-human life, even as it is the biosphere as a whole we now realize we're affecting. There was much talk, of course, of the extinction of species, but when spelled out these seem always to have been animals - along, of course, with their habitats.

I can't claim to have contributed much: it was just a question to a panel, wondering if they found the recent literature on plants significant (they did not). I also asked a plant biologist turned Catholic theologian about it informally, and was told that the anthropomorphism involved in speaking of "the intelligence of plants" is unhelpful.

But I'd just finished David George Haskell's The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Communicators, and it seemed unconscionable - and foolish - not to heed the voices of trees. Haskell's is a wonderful book in many ways, not least for its gorgeous writing. Hear him sing:

Ponderosa pine senses, integrates, weighs, and judges the world in a manner that combines external and internal intelligence. The ponderosa is networked to bacteria and fungi through every leaf and root. The tree also possesses its own hormonal, electrical, and chemical network. The trees' communicative processes are slower than animal nervous systems and they pervade branches and roots, rather than knotting themselves into brains. Like bacteria, they inhabit a reality alien to our own experience of the world. But trees are masters of integration, connecting and unselfing their cells into the soil, the sky, and thousands of other species. Because they are not mobile, to thrive they must know their particular locus on the earth far better than any wandering animal. Trees are the Platos of biology. Through their Dialogues, they are the best-placed creatures of all to make aesthetic and ethical judgments about beauty and good in the world.

Better than Plato, in fact:

Unlike Plato, who sought through beauty to find invariant universals that exist beyond the caved-in mess of human politics and society, ecological aesthetics and ethics emerge from relationships within life's community. They are context dependent, but a contingent near-universality may emerge when many parts of the network converge on similar judgments. (152-53)

Trees, it seemed to me at the conference, might be mediators - arbiters, even - between the time of humans and geological time. In any case, their thoroughly networked existence explodes the pretensions of species autarky, and, indeed, of individuality. His book, divided into chapters each dedicated to a particular tree with which he spent extended time over several years, starts in the Amazonian rainforest with the towering ceibo, home to a world of separate ecosystems.

It is perhaps no coincidence that the ceibo tree is the tree of life in the Waorani creation story. The tree is a hub for so many forest creatures, and it saves lives be maintaining and reconnecting life-giving threads.
This dissolution of individuality into relationship is how the ceibo and all its community survive the rigors of the forest. Where the art of war is so supremely well developed, survival paradoxically involves surrender, giving up the self in a union with allies. (16)

This "surrender" or "unselfing" (a term he borrows from moral philosopher Iris Murdoch) is at the heart of the stories Haskell tells, whether of social insects, symbioses of plants, animals and fungi, or - most provocatively - of the mysteriously emergent cooperation of individual (sic) components of plants, from roots and branches to the pores of leaves. Has it something to teach us about being human? It certainly has something tell us about life on earth, and how estranged from it our knotted brains and wandering hearts may have made us.

As I fiddle with making something more of my own presentation - a guess at how the Book of Job's song will be heard once people have accepted the realities of the Anthropocene - I'm tempted to make trees the hinge of the story. Most contemporary readers, if they attend to the many nature references in the text at all, focus - as the voice from the whirlwind does - on animals. Job seems to, as well, when he enjoins his friends to "ask the beasts" at 12.7. (12.8 might refer to "the plants of the earth," too, but has historically been rendered "speak to the earth" [KJV].) In any case, that's before his ecological conversion. Perhaps future interpreters of Job will not just find that God led him to learn from the wild animals but also from plants! You'd have to interpolate. But there's grounds for it in these pre-conversion words of Job 14:

⁷ “For there is hope for a tree,
    if it is cut down, that it will sprout again,
    and that its shoots will not cease.  

⁸ Though its root grows old in the earth,
    and its stump dies in the ground,  

⁹ yet at the scent of water it will bud
    and put forth branches like a young plant.  

¹⁰ But mortals die, and are laid low;
    humans expire, and where are they?  

¹¹ As waters fail from a lake,
    and a river wastes away and dries up,  

¹² so mortals lie down and do not rise again;
    until the heavens are no more, they will not awake
    or be roused out of their sleep. (NRSV)

On a flat-footed reading, Job is proved wrong by the restoration of his health and, especially, his new family - new shoots from his stump. (Flat-footed in another way is to see this just as an intimation of immortality, that death is not final.) But suppose that future readers have come to know what Haskell has taught us about the relational individuality- and species-transcending life of plants. What might Job's post-ecological conversion understanding of his own life then be?
Might we learn what to hope for in the Anthropocene from the trees?

Late afternoon bluebells

Leafy

Not flowers, the white undersides of leaves! (In Prospect Park)

Anthropocene so white

The Bloomington conference on religious perspectives on the "age of humans" has finished. Is there a new field of Religion and Anthropocene whose birth I got to be part of? I'm not sure. Lots of religion wasn't represented (narry a non-North Atlantic tradition mentioned, if I can include Native North American traditions in that rubric). And we didn't really get into the argument about good or bad Anthropocene. So what did we do? We discussed industrial food production, paradigms of environmental ethics, science fiction, TEK (traditional ecological knowledge), transhumanism, ecological grief, eco-anxiety and hope, with scattered references to Donna Haraway, Clive Hamilton, Bruno Latour and - why not? - Hannah Arendt. (I mentioned Haraway in my futurist Job, too.) We also watched a rather appallingly fun movie.

What stayed with me was a talk by a British geographer Kathryn Yusoff, who pointed out that discussions of the Anthropocene are almost exclusively the province of white people. Every speaker had problematized "Anthropocene" for a thoughtless universalizing, lumping together the privileged few who are the drivers of anthropogenic change with the powerless many who suffer the brunt of the damage. We'd heard from Native scholars who observed that the dystopic lifeworld collapse the Anthropocene may portend for all of humanity has already been lived by colonized, indigenous and enslaved people for centuries. These were familiar arguments, but Yusoff framed her comments shatteringly with lines from Audre Lorde's poem "Litany for Survival":

And when the sun rises we are afraid 
it might not remain 
when the sun sets we are afraid 
it might not rise in the morning
... and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid

So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive

The Anthropocene theorists I've been engaging all assume we were meant to survive. But we're the same people who didn't mean for everyone to survive, who accepted the displacement and impoverishment of many others as the price of progress. We beat our breasts about the many others who will suffer more displacement and impoverishment because of climate change, extinction cascades, rising seas and the like. (Ugolino uncannily appropriate, indeed!) But in discussing the Anthropocene we assume the place of the future scientist looking back on this stage in earth's history (a morally chilling detachment we got to witness in the film's interviews with members of the stratigraphic commission): we assume we'll be among the survivors, or at least that the survivors will be like us.

And I was giving a talk presuming that the Book of Job will still be read, that there will still be people who identify with Job's story! As D. J. A. Clines has observed, there is hardly any text which more perfectly speaks of and to rich people trying to face down the thought that they might one day no longer be lords of the earth. While my projected future Job made room for others - animals (my Harawayan moment was "make kin, not babies"), and the hidden laboring classes of the world, symbolized by Mrs. Job - but the last, especially, sound like an afterthought. While claiming to mourn them as others don't, I still defaulted to the view that Job's first children were never meant to survive. I was still assuming that the story that matters is Job's. I have work to do!

(The picture is the cover of a book by a Finnish speaker. The title translates as Going to Hell? Environmental Attachment and Hope.)

Pentecost

Nice stained glass in a little chapel next to the Indiana Memorial Union

Murals

Indiana has a set of Thomas Hart Benton murals, too! An originally 230 foot tableau of the 'Social History of Indiana' for the 1933 Chicago International Exposition is now spread over three buildings at IU, most of them in the 1941 auditorium whose vestibule was designed to house them. Hard to snap!

Dantesque

At the entrance to the Indiana Memorial Union, where our conference is taking place, a rather disturbing statue by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, sent from France in 1948 as thanks for postwar assistance of some kind. It's Ugolino and his sons - just right for a conference on religion and the Anthropo- cene...?

Unmanned

I've arrived in Bloomington, Indiana for a conference called "Religious Perspectives and Alternative Futures in an Age of Humans." The somewhat awkward age of humans is a way of referring to the Anthropocene mindful of charge that the term homogenizes a state of affairs for which only some anthropoi are mainly responsible. In any case, I'm excited by the way the conference is framed:

Discourse of the Anthropocene resonates strongly with mythic and religious genres—declensionist or ascendant storylines; tales of hubris, forbidden knowledge, theodicy and eschatology—making the Anthropocene ripe for analysis by religion scholars. The Anthropocene raises religious and ethical questions about how to understand humanity’s place within planetary evolution, and how to envision the future trajectory of human societies. Scholarly debates arise over dystopian and utopian visions; whether some human groups bear greater moral responsibility than others for environmental harms stemming from colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization; and whether the Anthropocene represents a spiritual aggrandizement or condemnation of humanity. Our project assumes that these debates about what it means to be human in an “Age of Humans” fall within the purview of religion, philosophy, theology, and ethics.

I'm one of thirty-odd presenters, and we have enough time through Sunday to get to know each other at receptions (like the one where I found gingerbread anthropos). In my talk I'll be speculating about how the Book of Job might be read as our consciousness absorbs the significance of the "age of humans," offering these projections as an example of a sort of a semi-scifi "conjectural exegesis" of sacred texts which might help us make sense of what's going on and who we are in it.

Flow of history

Something's going on beneath the surface of Indiana.

Groves of academe

Self portrait with Lang courtyard trees as another academic year ends.

In depth coverage

We're always told not judge a book by its cover, but consider the poor cook cover designer! Judged by the cover and by the book. A student in "Performing the Problem of Suffering: The Book of Job and the Arts" 

took on the challenge of designing a new cover for the Book of Job (in the translation I recommend) and it's a dusey. As it leads you into the book, the cover unfolds and unfolds in a brilliant - and profound - way.

And into summer we go