Fidelity

We're back at the 300 year old stone inn-turned-B&B in Kingston which is rapidly becoming our preferred getaway from the City's hustle. Our quiet attentive hosts include a pair of dogs - this is Ollie. Apparently he sounds like a much bigger dog when he barrels down those old wooden stairs!

Leap Day!

Preexisting conditions

COVID-19 seems to be making its way around the world. The question of whether it will arrive in any given place has been replaced by the questions of when and how. The toll it ultimately takes will be significantly shaped by preexisting conditions. That's what we hear about those individuals who have succumbed in China, but I'm sensing that "preexisting conditions" applies also to nations. The reactions and overreactions in county after country reflect great political and cultural differences (and some commonalities, denial and scapegoating). I fear for how we in the US will do, not only because our feckless president has so weakened the resources for coordinating a response but because so many Americans lack any kind of health insurance.

Pour-over

One of the places I occasionally caffeinate.

Impermanence

Took the "Religion and Ecology" class to the Rubin Museum today for their newest show, which is smashing - except for the title, "Measure your existence," which fails to communicate the organizing theme of impermanence (or much of anything else!). Its thoughtful, in many cases participatory works expand your sense of what it is to move through time, with and without those who are absent - including the departed. Go if you have a chance!

Next year in Jerusalem

I had a guest speaker in the Job and the Arts class today, a Baptist preacher who occasionally preaches on Job. She insisted we start our conversation by describing how we knew each other. Long long ago, when I had just started teaching, she was my TA for REL 222 “Approaches to the Study of Religion.” A historian she feared it would be drily theoretical but it turned out, thankfully, not to be! She said she still remembers my lecture on Mendelssohn; indeed she was telling someone about it just last week.

Moses Mendelssohn! A name I haven’t heard in ages! But it’s true, I had students in "Approaches" read Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem, which I used to anchor an argument about the meaning and value of ritual in religion. What my erstwhile TA remembered was Mendelssohn's observation that you can’t make yourself believe something, something I reprised for this class (without its subtle polemic against Christianity) as a basic but largely unacknowledged fact about human beings. (The only thing more absurd is the idea that you choose your beliefs.) Any tradition that demands belief can’t but make intolerant hypocrites of its devotees.

That’s why, Mendelssohn wrote, ritual is so important, especially ritual whose meaning is never fixed or final. It offers us a way to be religious without pretending. We came back to this after a wide-ranging discussion of how the Book of Job interrupts pious certainties, enjoining us to revere good questions over bad answers. Mendelssohn doesn't (I dimly recall) have anything to say about Job but thee views resonate deeply with the sense I've been inviting students to make of it. I told my guest (and the class) that my course is called “Performing the problem of suffering” because this is a problem we could never satisfactorily answer. Instead of throwing up our hands, we are invited by texts like the Book of Job us to study and interpret and reinterpret, tell and retell... and so abide with those questions we can neither answer nor leave off asking. Perhaps my whole approach owes to Mendelssohn!

April is the cruelest month but Spring is early this year. My mind is reeling at feelings of doom on various timescales - ecological, political and now Covid-19 - but those courtyard trees are just doing their thing.

Green pastures

Here's a new addition to the "Religion & Ecology" syllabus, complementing the chapter on "The Power of Place" in our textbook Grounding Religion but really showing a world-sized gap in it. (If "place" is more precious than "space," what about "land"?) The chapter introduces phenomenology, bioregionalism and cultural geography as ways of understanding "place" - valuable, but what about indigenous ways of knowing and inhabiting the land? In the light of Ojibwe writer and environmentalist Winona LaDuke's incandescent essay "In the Time of the Sacred Places" it becomes clear that all those are approaches for unsettled settler colonials, and don't come close to understanding what it is to be native to a land. LaDuke makes this clear from the get-go, with a sly reference to the time when "Christopher Columbus was discovered by indigenous peoples as he disembarked from his foreign ship and trespassed on native peoples’ land," but what really got me comes a few pages later, where she argues that the "frontier" still defines settler understandings of Turtle Island. The frontier?

Americans are also, by the social norm of the country, transient. This attitude and practice teach them the notion and enduring illusion of an American dream of greener pastures, always elsewhere. This, too, belittles a relationship to place. It does not teach responsibility, only entitlement...

I'd never thought of "greener pastures" this way, or of the American dream in those terms, but yes. We celebrate those who pick up from one place and go to another - not only without a thought to whether or not that new place is already inhabited, but also without thinking about the way relationships to land become contingent on a resident's dreams and might be put aside without a further thought should yet greener pastures beckon. My own life story is all about people moving - usually long distances across oceans and continents. And it's almost a joke in the places I have lived that next to nobody is originally "from" those places. We're all here for the time being; and though I've been fortunate to live in places where people dream of landing, who knows where life (as we say) might call any of us next? The land has next to no say in it.

How different it must be to think not of greener pastures elsewhere but of the pastures of your place as your responsibility to green! (Or watching that land despoiled, or being forced to leave it...)

Winona LaDuke, "In the Time of the Sacred Places,” Wiley-Blackwell
Companion to Religion and Ecology, ed. John Hart (2017), 71-84: 71, 73

Break forth into singing

My first introduction to the Anglican tradition was the lovely liturgy of choral Evensong, performed as night falls at English cathedrals - and many of the Oxford colleges. I didn't make the Worcester College choir but now, decades later, I've participated in a choral Evensong at last! This was at Holy Apostles, whose choir I joined two weeks ago, and it was quite a deep dive. The choir has about a dozen members, four of them professional singers and the rest highly experienced, but even for such a group I imagine our rehearsal time was on the short side. (We'd also led the hymns and sung two anthems during the 11 o'clock service this morning.) We'd practiced bits of Stanford's opulent "Magnificat" and spare "Nunc Dimitis" at weekly rehearsals before, but made our way through Willan's wildly undulating "Lo, in the time appointed" after just a single run-through an hour before! I stumbled discreetly twice but apparently we sounded lovely.

Quite exhilarating! And bonus: the text is one I'd just been reading about as confirmation that the authors of the Hebrew Bible were more open to the personhood of the natural world than we are: the mountains and the hills shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands (Isaiah 55:12). If they can, so can I!

Holy Apostles

Today the Vestry of the Church of the Holy Apostles had a lovely, rare experience - a "retreat" in our own church! This was made possible by a visitor whose "ministry" it is to reacquaint communities with the beauty of their spaces, and our space - quiet as almost never during its busy week - was more than happy to play along. Sharing what we knew and then, after 45 minutes wandering in silence through the space with sketch pads and meditations, what we discovered, we came to know the space we so love in new ways, and to a fuller appreciation of how others deepen and broaden than love. It was illuminating (ha!) to spend time with our stained glass in a church we'd just learned had been painted in "five shades of white" after a fire in 1990 (I imagine there was no white at all before that), and deeply moving to be reminded of all those members and friends across the decades and centuries who had known and loved this space before and, it felt, know and love it still.

Unseasonal

 

Entirely too early for forsythia, but how can one not delight in them?

Teachings of plants

We cut short a wonderfully rich discussion of the "teachings of plants" in Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass to take a walk down Sixth Avenue, saluting the wintering trees as we went. We ended at the two small parks between the mouths of Minetta Street and Minetta Lane (just north of Bleecker), the creek flowing somewhere beneath us. Looking west from the lower park, someone noticed birds, others noticed the knot of branches offering them a sort of shelter; I don't think any of us paid any heed to the spire of Our Lady of Pompeii in the distance!

Midrash

One of the most exciting moments in my course on the Book of Job and the arts is when I invite students to add a speech to the text. The model is a pair of texts, one ancient (Testament of Job) and the other modern (Frost's Masque of Reason), but the point is that adding to the text is what people have been doing with it from the get-go. I have everyone write a speech for a character named or not, and where in the story it appear - and then to share it with a neighbor, before collecting some for the class as a whole. The exercise never fails to generate remarkable ideas, and the sharing of them always succeeds in giving a sense of the text as one whose potential we are far from exhausting. (One could do this with other texts too, of course.) Later I tell them we're doing a kind of midrash, filling out or filling in - and that each intervention identifies a place in the text or story where a question might arise.

Today there were the obligatory (and necessary) speeches by Job's wife, though pointing in quite different directions and appearing at different points in the story - one after Job, having heard the divine speeches, is reconciled; she is not. God and the satan got speeches too, clarifying things to each other: God in ch 2, "I have my reasons for what I'm doing, I'm not just being provoked by you"; and the satan at the end, "you think you're different from me but you're not!" Elihu was given an additional speech, telling Job that because God is merciful any sinner can be redeemed. A servant reported on the unremarked and unredeemed destruction of his whole world. New were several hauntings - the spirits of Job's first daughters, killed in chapter 2, appearing at different points in the unfolding story. Another student imagined one of Job's new daughters resisting being a replacement: "Are we just tools to prove you are just? Are we just cattle?"

For my part, I did the exercise too, as I always do, and, as always happens, I surprised myself by writing something I didn't know was in me. (So was I surprised or not?) This comes after Job's last recorded words, before his life is restored.

Job doesn’t speak at the end, not to others. But to himself? As he conducts the sacrifice for his friends. 
"I’m not sure I know what is going on. Perhaps I should be gratified that God, having shown His magnificent back to me, has undertaken to restore my image among my friends, gives me a role as a priest. You have not spoken rightly of me as has my servant Job, he said (they told me). Not spoken rightly. So I spoke rightly? I don’t even know what I said, I was beside myself, I was hardly myself, I said things I didn’t know until I said them. Yes, my friends' efforts to help – not so different from what I would have said, I own – bothered me (in part because they’re what I would have said). Did I misspeak? Is it what I said or how I said it that was right – that I was always talking also to God, a God I thought refused to hear me? They (as I said) talk like they’re worried God will punish them as he was punishing me – I can understand their worry, since they weren’t paragons either. But I was speaking to God. It wasn’t right that I demanded he meet God in court, was it? Or maybe it was right in its way: it’s an impossibility, if not for the reasons I thought (he wouldn’t deign). But maybe it’s right for me to think that, if he were human, he should meet me. And He did meet me. Not as a human, because he’s so different from that, so. So. But I’m praying for my friends so they don't have to learn as I did, nobody should have to. (And did I need to lose all that to learn, all my heart, my love, my trust in people?) Oh, oh. Trust in people. In having me do this God is forcing me – inviting me, letting me – trust my friends again, trust that they will be my friends again, that our friendship can survive this. I don’t quite know how we can, I don’t know how they can trust themselves. So we conduct the sacrifice. See what happens. Perhaps that’s my future, as a priest. No family, the solitude of those God calls to Himself. Not alone, but no longer part of the family-based world. Is God my family? The mountain goats are..."

As in the Talmud, as in the history of art, these interventions have expanded our sense of the text, not distended it. That they're conjectural and mutually incompatible doesn't matter in the slightest. The more, in fact, the better. We've added a depth dimension to the text, and an appreciation of a history of interpretive interventions which includes us.

#30

Latest brilliant install- ment of our newer truer history of The New School - don't think we've given up! Only the subtitle, furnished by some last minute editor, misses the mark.

Vertical

What do thirty articles on New School histories look like?

#30 “The New School’s Forgotten President: The controversial tenure of John Everett” (Anna Robinson Sweet, 2/18/20) #29 “When Two Become One: How The New School and Parsons Merged” (Molly Rottman, 1/17/20)  #28 “The New School’s Secular Faiths: At a progressive institution, religion hid in plain sight” (Mark Larrimore, 12/20/19) #27 “The Ad Paradox: Writing Advertising for a University that doesn’t Believe in it” (Ricky Tucker, 11/21/19) #26 “Sex and The New School: The Case of Henry Cowell” (Julia Foulkes 11/11/19) #25 “Alvin Johnson on the Importance of Lifelong Teaching and Learning” (Judith Friedlander, 10/17/19) #24 “The Writing on the Wall: Orozco, Benton, Arnautoff” (Jennifer Wilson, 9/25/19) #23 “The New School’s Long Road to a Four-Year College: 100 year in, The New School’s experimental ethos lives on” (Mark Larrimore, 9/12/19) #22 “True to the Paradox: An Exhibition for the Centennial of a Contradiction” (Macushla Catherine Robinson, 8/22/19) #21 “Sex for Fun: Reflections from Ann Snitow’s Przegorały Classroom” (Agnieszka Kościańska, 8/7/19) #20 “Horace Kallen and the Jewish Roots of the New School” (Matthew Kaufman, 6/27/19) #19 “A Case of Contested Visions: Academic Freedom at The New School” (Wendy Scheir, 6/7/19) #18 “A Secret Invasion: The University in Exile and Conspiracy Theories” (Andrew Woods, 5/20/19) #17 “Dynamic Symmetry: A Mathematical Structure in New School History” (Jennifer Wilson, 5/15/19) #16 “Centering Human Relations in Learning: Human Relations Center at the New School: a place for women to come learn and to socialize” (Julia Foulkes, 4/29/19) #15 “New School Gestalt and its Hidden Sociology: Anatole Broyard at The New School” (Mark Larrimore, 4/16/19) #14 “Nurturing Subversive Seeds: What the New School’s Mobilization Taught Me” (Judy Pryor-Ramirez, 3/14/19) #13 “A Multi-Campus University in Exile: Then and Now” (Judith Friedlander, 2/21/19) #12 “What’s so ‘Jewish’ about The New School? Inventing a parable of pluralism” (Val Vinokur, 2/7/19) #11 “New York is the Place: How the city has defined the school” (Julia Foulkes, 1/31/19) #10 “How to Mark a Centennial: Telling the Story of the New School at 100” (Mark Larrimore, 1/28/19) #9 “All of a Sudden: Reflections from the Classroom of Sekou Sundiata” (Brian Lewis, 1/25/19) #8 “What We Know About Parson School of Design’s Namesake: The story behind Frank Alvah Parsons, the man who made art and design accessible to New Yorkers” (Molly Rottman, 1/4/19) #7 “A History of Innovation: The first history of the New School for Social Research recalls its originality” (William Rutkoff, 12/26/18) #6 “Uncovering the Musical Divide: The tale of two cultures at the Mannes School of Music and The New School” (Sally Bick, 12/14/18) #5 “The New school’s Paradoxical Archive: How a school focused on the future has learned to love its past” (Wendy Scheir, 12/5/18) #4 “Are the Arts a Critical Facet of Social Research? At The New School, artists have shaped the institution’s agenda” (Mark Larrimore, 11/14/18) #3 “What Does It Mean to Educate Adults? The Case of the New School”(Julia Foulkes, 11/6/18) #2 “The Majority Finds its School: The Lessons of Gerda Lerner” (Julia Foulkes, 10/11/18) #1 “Exiled Knowledge Salvaged for World Use: Or the histories hidden in the New School digital archives” (Mark Larrimore, 10/10/18)

Can it be?

Covid

The news out of China is mind-boggling. Numbers keep changing - these are from the South China Morning Post, the only updates I've seen which include recoveries - but almost two thousand deaths of Covid-19 are confirmed (how many more uncounted we may never know), and many more infections. The spread seems to be slowing but this is in part the result of other mind-boggling numbers. In China itself five hundred sixty million people are in lockdown and as the virus makes its way to other countries, who knows how many more will be affected in how many ways? The scale of the fear is overwhelming. This looks to me like something which might end up in every Chinese life story... but just what role it plays in all these lives remains to be seen. One hopes still that the virus subsides. But in the meantime half a billion people are living their lives in new ways. Those who can, work from home. Parents tutor children who can't go to school, as indeed lots of things otherwise entrusted to other (like other kinds of medical care) has to take place at home. Lots of television is watched and video games played as families confront new kinds of cabin fever. But one can expect new things to emerge, too, and new kinds of sociability. I'm told of a new app which allows people stuck in their apartments to go dancing together virtually!

Aware?

Something a student said in class last week has been haunting me. I'd put on the board the question which Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim use to distinguish "religious ecologies" (in their special but very influential understanding) from other ways of approaching religion, e.g., philosophical, sociological, anthropological, theological:

What is the role of religion within the

processes of the Earth and its ecosystems? 

John Grim & Mary Evelyn Tucker, Ecology and Religion (Island Press, 2014), 35 

Their idea is that much of religion has long been enmeshed in human understandings of the rest of nature and of the place of the human in natural cycles and processes, a reality obscured by anthropocentric modern western understandings of religion. To understand past religion better, and to reconnect with religion as a resource for weaning ourselves from destructive understandings of human-nature relations, we need to rebuild our understanding of religion from the ground (as it were!) up. Far from pointing away from the Earth, religious cosmologies are all about human participation in ecosystems of various kinds, if only we learn to pay attention.

But the student saw something different in the words I put on the board. The very words used filled them with anger. In societies like ours, they said, the human role in the Earth's processes has always been outsourced to people of color. Are Grim and Tucker even aware of that?

I've been haunted by this question because it was a question also to me. Aware of the outsourcing, yes, but not as I was thinking with Tucker and Grim. So perhaps not aware of it, not really. (That's how privilege works, how white supremacy works: we alone can be unaware of it.) Of course decolonial thinking doesn't pertain to all religion across time and space, but it surely does to North American religion and religious studies. Refusing to acknowledge this specificity is part of the settler colonial mindset of American religion, as is the blithe assumption that "our" religious ecological imaginings - Henry David Thoreau say, or John Muir, or Annie Dillard - are of a piece with what the ancients of the Old World were doing, or the religious wisdom of Asia, let alone the indigenous traditions fighting for their lives throughout the world. And don't let's get started on the other outsourcing, which has tethered the exploitation of nature to the exploitation of women.

Framed by these questions, the project of "religion and ecology" seems in need of scrutiny. Arguing for the role of "religion" to reconnect a settler society to the Earth it has coopted and compromised risks mystifying the processes by which that usurpation took - and continues to take - place, processes including the theft of land and human bodies of 400 years of inequality. As there can be no peace without justice, there can be no reclaiming of a healthy role within the processes of the Earth and its ecosystems without acknowledging the interconnection of the processes which dehumanized non-western peoples and those which have ruptured the bond of (some) western people with "nature."

How would this look in a course on Religion and Ecology? Some of the readings I've pulled together (like Grounding Religion) are germane, some (like Grim and Tucker's Ecology and Religion) less so. This is one of the courses where I tell students the syllabus is just a proposal and the second half, especially, is likely to wind up looking entirely different. It doesn't always happen but this time I think it will. I'll keep you posted as it grows!

On thin ice

Much has been made of the "oriental fable" Tolstoy recounts in his Confessions and James quotes in the "Sick Soul" part of the Varieties:

“Seeking to save himself from the fierce animal, the traveler jumps into a well with no water in it; but at the bottom of this well he sees a dragon waiting with open mouth to devour him. And the unhappy man, not daring to go out lest he should be the prey of the beast, not daring to jump to the bottom lest he should be devoured by the dragon, clings to the branches of a wild bush which grows out of one of the cracks of the well. His hands weaken, and he feels that he must soon give way to certain fate; but still he clings, and see two mice, one white, the other black, evenly moving round the bush to which he hangs, and gnawing off its roots. 
“The traveler sees this and knows that he must inevitably perish; but while thus hanging he looks about him and finds on the leaves of the bush some drops of honey. These he reaches with his tongue and licks them off with rapture."
“Thus I hang upon the boughs of life, knowing that the inevitable dragon of death is waiting ready to tear me, and I cannot comprehend why I am thus made a martyr. I try to suck the honey which formerly consoled me; but the honey pleases me no longer, and day and night the white mouse and the black mouse gnaw the branch to which I cling. ..."

The fable turns out to come from the legend of the saints Barlaam and Josaphat, and has been traced across many centuries, languages and even religious traditions: the origin appears to have been in a story about a Bodisaf, the Buddha-to-be. But by the time James presents it, he's offered two stories structurally similar enough to resonate interestingly. The first appears in the discussion of "Healthy-Mindedness":

A story which revivalist preachers often tell is that of a man who found himself at night slipping down the side of a precipice. At last he caught a branch which stopped his fall, and remained clinging to it in misery for hours. But finally his fingers had to loose their hold, and with a despairing farewell to life, he let himself drop. He fell just six inches. If he had given up the struggle earlier, his agony would have been spared.

The other appears between these two, and it's in James' own voice. It comes early in the discussion of the "Sick Soul," where James makes common cause with his presumably dour Scottish audience in finding healthy-mindedness misses the centrality of evil to human life.

For naturalism, fed on recent cosmological speculations, mankind is in a position similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake, surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that little by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawing near when the last film of it will disappear, and to be drowned ignominiously will be the human creature’s portion. The merrier the skating, the warmer and more sparkling the sun by day, and the ruddier the bonfires at night, the more poignant the sadness with which one must take in the meaning of the total situation.


I kind of like that one for its sense of collective doom, and for the cruel detail that every sunny day, every bonfire, and every cut of an ice skate will hasten this doom. (There's no suggestion here that, in fact, the lake is only six inches deep!) The other cases are stages on the journey of a soul - everyone knew that Tolstoy didn't stay in that deep funk.

I drew a picture of the scene, complete with ice skater and sun, as students shared responses, but it turned out they didn't like the story as much as I did, let alone relish the polyphony of James' stories as did a class a decade ago. I still saw a beautifully crafted fable, but in 2020 the ice melting doom scenario isn't just a fable. Rather is one inclined to say of it what Tolstoy said of the "oriental fable":

This is no fable, but the literal incontestable truth which every one may understand.

After the rain