Formations

Barely returned from China and I'm at the second half of the College for Congregational Development, picking up from last July. The handwritten newsprint posters, held up by blue packing tape, the strangely compelling windows of the Thomas Berry retreat center, the endless iterations of chicken breast concoctions for dinners... Even unjetlagged it would be déjà vu all over again. Happily, about half of the participants are familiar from last year, too!

Last year's rather wrenching program was focused on individual differences/ "preferences" and the dynamics of interpersonal relations in organizations in the midst of change, including the infamous Myers-Briggs test, which - amazingly! - noone has so much as referred to in passing this time. There were a few sessions on the particular charism of religious organizations but they were few. This year's is about the congregations all of us participants were sent by and will return to, and full of fun provocations like these twelve statements, spread along the four walls of our meeting space for us to graze among and then congregate before where there seemed a particular resonance. 

We're still given nuggets from business schools but the excitement comes in sessions on Episcopal or Anglican "temperament," the Benedictine way of life which this temperament makes accessible to laity as well as clergy, and each community's concentric circles of "mature practitioners," "Sunday sacramentalists," "occasional attendees" and the "vicariously connected," each a site of grace.

The curriculum's overall understanding of congregational development is the development of congregations of all sizes, locations, and conditions into more faithful, healthy, and effective communities of faith - one size does not fit all! - and we're asked to share all manner of perspectives on the congregations which sent us. We also got to go on a field trip to consider how congregations are known from the outside. Our team went to the jewel box of the Church of the Transfiguration. 

The focus has been on what our trainers are calling "formation," the way an organization, old or new, develops and renews itself by asking "who are we? what are we here for? who is our neighbor, and how are we related to our neighbor?" "Formation" comes from the scary model which operates in the background of the whole project to move beyond the "church in decline" diagnosis of Mainline churches like the Episcopal Church, Alice Mann's "life cycle of organizations."

Here is it, with little Xs from each CCD participant marking where we would place our congregations. It's natural that organizations live and die, but we're about ways of having the fullest life before the inevitable through various practices of "ongoing renewal, revitalization, redevelopment and outside intervention." (One of our trainers described it as "brush your teeth or they'll fall out.") This involves embracing the different "sizes, locations, and conditions" of church communities, and welcoming the reality that, in our own time, the "vicariously connected" are among our most important interfaces with the wider society. The old model of church-going, and of churches' contributions to society, is obsolete.

I'm not able to do any of this, needless to say, without thinking about my life in other institutions going through existential challenges: colleges and universities, liberal arts and the humanities, and of course our own sick puppy of a school... topic for another day.

Time warp

I've been off the grid for the last fortnight, having that vertiginous off-the-chart experience travel in China always offers me. 

This year's trip is to the relatively untouristed northeast - 辽宁 Liaoning and 内蒙 Inner Mongolia. We started in 大连 Dalian, a just century-old city on the coast. In the mountains of 赤峰 Chifeng we encountered the 辽代 Liao Dynasty, which ruled northern China for two centuries a thousand years ago, soon trumped by the 红山文化 Hongshan Culture, dating back 5000-6500 years. But even human history feels recent here, as a visit to 朝阳 Chaoyang reminded us, where we saw fossils of dinosaurs, pterosaurs and early angiosperms named after every place we'd been!

Back to grim US and New School realities on Friday. 

Involuntary separations

What we learned at a Faculty Senate meeting this morning was made known to the world later in the day. Nineteen beloved faculty colleagues are being let go. (The article doesn't mention that sixty-eight staff members are as well.) Almost all of the faculty, along with another forty-odd who have accepted various "voluntary separation" offers, are from the liberal arts divisions of The New School.

Liberal arts enrollments are indeed an ongoing challenge, for us as in other universities, but more than a few of us think university leadership is taking the opportunity of budget-forced "work-force alignment" to fundamentally to turn the ship away from the "social research" which has long defined us. Hidden within the article is the reality that many liberal arts departments are being devastated.

A university without a history department is a different animal.

Bicenquinquagenary

What to call the upcoming 250th celebrations? 

The current regime (Robert Reich argues we shouldn't defile words like "administration," "president" or even "government" to describe these lawless brigands, but "regime" is OK) has found ways to make even "1776" and "250" toxic (taxpayer-funded slush fund for paramilitary thugs? monstrous arch of vanity?), confirming their unworthiness of the history they claim to embody. What can we say worthy of that history?

Although decades of reconstruction await, I think the rest of us will muddle through. I'm heartened by Jill Lepore's wry perspective on the 1976 bicentennial ("by almost any measure, 2026 is a goat rodeo") and Heather Cox Richardson's just-unveiled "250 to 250" project, among other interventions. This history, as Richardson reminds us, is ours. 

But what to call the whole thing? The official moniker "semiquincentennial" - half of five hundred - gives me thousand year Reich vibes. A long view of history suggests that two hundred fifty years is a pretty impressive achievement. Most empires don't last that long, let alone longer. Invoking five hundred years sounds grandiose and presumptuous. (Most trees don't live nearly that long, for instance.) 

I'll settle for bicenquinquagenary (a term I encountered first at Princeton's 250th in 1996). If that sounds a little wobbly and weird, so much the better. At its best, the United States of America has always been a little loopy and piety-challenging.

Pea tangle

Camera lucida

Just sun and a tree dancing this morning. Eat your heart out, Man Ray! (But don't ask me why this magnolia, alone among the trees along West 12th St., freed itself of the sharp edges of every other's shadows.)

New School upon New School!

The New School aged a quarter century in a day! At the university's 90th commencement at the Barclay Center in Brooklyn today, our president referred to ours as a 130-year-old institution. A new story of the New!

It makes sense to start our institutional storytelling with the origins, 130 years ago, of the oldest part of the present institution - the pioneering school of fine and eventually applied art much later (1942) renamed Parsons School of Design. Parsons was saved from collapse by the briefly solvent New School in 1970, before rapidly becoming the most successful and lucrative component of the ensuing hybrid university, but what was happening there before 1970 fits awkwardly if at all into received New School stories. 

It would be good to weave our stories together better. Each is a bit of a shaggy dog story, though. What William Merritt Chase concocted in 1896 is nothing like what the school now named Parsons was to become. And of course the same could be said for the New School for Social Research, started in 1919, which my co-historian J and I have long argued spent a century trying (ultimately unsuccessfully) not to be a university. For its part the serendipitous 1970 merger - a surprise to both parties - only started to make any kind of sense in the last twenty years.

So it's passing strange to think that proto-Parsons was in some sense New School before New School was! It's the sort of thing folks say when they marry into families, but nevertheless more than a little odd. 

When The New School (the one kicked off in 1919) celebrated its centennial seven years ago, we saw first efforts really to combine the two stories. (You'll recall I found that no comparable efforts were made in storytelling around New School's 75th or Parsons' own centennial in 1995 and 1996.) These recent efforts mainly took the form - familiar, too, from marriages - of suggesting that TNS and PSD were meant for each other. The long years spent on their own - half a century for one, three-quarters of one for the other - were a kind of wandering in search of the unexpected partner who was destined to complete them. It was forced but the giddy conventions of centennial celebrations excused it.

If one hundred and thirty, it's funny to think that The New School is in fact a nineteenth-century institution! But it's less fun to think about these differently nested stories at a time when the Graduate Faculty, the distinctive key to The New School for a long time (though only starting in 1934, and never exclusively), seems about to be restructured nearly out of existence. I'm not quite ready to imagine that The New School existed in some nascent way before the New Schools of the twentieth century - and might somehow continue after them, too.

National rededication

The Christianist nationalists are staging a jamboree on the National Mall today to "rededicate" the United States to their God. I feel, not to be frivolous, like the indigenous Taino must have felt when Columbus claimed to claim their land for his God and the king who had sent him. As many of us learned from Sylvia Wynter, one Taino, invited to endorse the new regime, is reported to have said "The Pope must have been drunk, the king of Castile a madman!" I want to say, too: this isn't theirs, isn't theirs to take, and the God whom they claim entitles them to is not the true God!

But of course it's more complicated, especially for someone descended from Columbus', not the Tainos' world. 

The easy thing would just be to say - and with justification - that the story the Christianist nationalists are telling about the Founders 250 years ago is untrue. The Founders, though some were inspired by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, were part of an imperial European Christian world uninterested in other cultures. But they did not dedicate their independence to the Christian God, and certainly not to an Evangelical one who hadn't even been invented yet. Most of the thirteen colonies had their own established church, but the federation of rebelling colonies who called themselves the "united States" was to establish none. The First Amendment made explicit what was implicit about religion in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

That said, the Founders didn't have the pluralistic religious panorama that the United States has become in mind, either. (I've been wanting to find a way to say this for a while.) We need to tell a story that admits and embraces growth, maybe one that shows how, over time, the US comes more fully to embody its founding ideals, "a more perfect union." A ship, one might quip, founders if it doesn't move. (The Catholic in me says that the Protestantism of many Christianists makes them unable or unwilling even to imagine such development.) 

But as I contemplate what's being said on the Mall, I balk at the very framing. How dare we start the story we tell - however the last two and a half centuries are narrated - in 1776, as if if nothing preceded it? That's the drunk madness of the Doctrine of Discovery/terra nullius Wynter's Taino named. The story of the US unfolded on stolen land, building wealth and clearing swamps and forests with stolen labor. And it was never the only story unfolding here, nor itself a single story.

What story should one then tell? As a partisan of democracy (unlike those on the Mall whose false God enjoins them to subvert it in a great spiritual war), I'd like to say that the Founders stumbled on something remarkable and of broader significance than they could have imagined - the idea of a political community in which everyone matters. If everyone really has a voice, who knows what glories might emerge from their collaboration? (This is the dream the Equator editors see the present regime as having fatally dashed.) And what possibilities of collaboration, across and within every kind of difference, it opens up!

Hold the Norman Rockwell images: The telling of this story can't abstract from the story of a hemisphere ravaged by the very unequal "Columbian exchange," the centuries-long enslavement of people from Africa (and indigenous people too), and the religion of "whiteness" which sanctioned them. The US became the dominant world power we still fitfully are not because of divine blessing but because of the cushion of two oceans around land taken from peoples decimated by our diseases. 

What about the blessings of liberty? Is it self-delusion to think that democracy may have played some part in the success of the US? The "us" of enfranchized citizens always projected an excluded "them," it is true. Is it vainglory nevertheless to think democracy is still the best way of naming, minimizing, maybe even overcoming these exclusions? If not the best or only, a way? This wouldn’t erase the crimes of the founding and the expanding and their long shadows, but might it redeem them?  

"Redeeming" - that’s Christian language. Do I dare say anything to all this as a Christian? (Not because Christians have a privileged say here - those who say so are those I'm calling "Christianist" - but because I am an American and a Christian, or strive to be.) 

As a white Christian I can say one must begin with repentance, that our chances for transformation - as individuals or communities - are unmerited and yet real. Taking these chances may be a way to begin atoning for this history of plunder and presumption. But I wouldn’t have the effrontery to tell a non-white Christian to think this way. 

As a Christian I feel I should say that we are called and sent to the lands of others to recognize them, as we have been recognized, as all of us children of God. Christianity may not be the only or best way to do this; arguably the potential for it within Christian culture was developed only through encounter with other traditions. Christians (as I've learned from Willie James Jennings) should remember we are guests in the story of redemption, naturalized to it, not native. And we were invited into the covenant community along with the whole of humanity. There is no subset of humans for whom there is a special place, most certainly no special nation. Christianity most be universal or it is not Christian. 

What story can a Christian tell about the experiment launched by the imperfect and unrepresentative white men gathered in Philadelphia 250 years ago? It can tell that despite human imperfection religious liberty is a good thing, that diversity of every kind is a gift that keeps giving, that the shape of the human story isn’t fixed or finalized. The American way isn't the only or necessarily the best way of realizing all this but enough of it may serve toward this end to merit continuing the experiment, learning to do it better. (Indigenous sovereignty now, reparations for enslavement, and fearless history for all!) 

The American flag was cut from cloth of a Christian civilization but it flies for all God’s children, of all faiths and none. If it flies only for some, it doesn't deserve to fly at all. 

An "unamerican" thought? If I spoke those words in the Mall, and the Founders had to choose which words spoken on the Mall today were truest to their better natures, I hope they'd endorse mine.

Pins and needles

The academic year's over. Someone's taken down all the flyers for events and opportunities on campus and off; student research projects, senate candidacies, casting calls and recitals; faculty plugs for fall classes that weren't filling. Now we wait to see who gets to be part of the school's next chapter.

Unguarded

Today was a good New School day. 

I had lunch with the TAs from the just-completed iteration of "After Religion" (in the dappled light of the courtyard maples, despite the barriers), happy to learn how the experience has been useful for them. Before and after that, I had zoom interviews with potential TAs for next year's iteration, and, wow, what a cavalcade of talent - and in areas entirely different from this year's two stars. It's exciting to think about how the course will be reshaped in consultation with a new crew. (Choosing just four of the ten I spoke to won't be easy.)

There's something more than usually bittersweet about perching between past and future at this end-of-the-schoolyear moment, since so much is uncertain about next year. Several of the potential TAs face the loss of an advisor or even their school. And who knows what world we'll be teaching in (if we're still there) in January 2027?! Scare quotes-framed though it is, it feels a little like cheating on the pain of the present moment to make even provisional plans for next year.

But I sure do hope The New School makes it through, and as much like the fabulous if flawed beast that it has been as possible. I felt that in the worlds of curiosity and commitment of these graduate students, and again when I rounded out my day with a visit to the senior show in the BFA Fine Arts program, which included work by two of the "After Religion" students. The array of gifts on display was overwhelming! 

This picture isn't from that show, but from one I found my way in accidentally: MFA Textiles. These works are (I think) part of a project of found materials called "Fibres of Thought" by one Vidushi Parashar, whose description includes the words:

In a world that's attracting us to the constant chatter and noise, this project focuses on the tender mutation that one goes through to release the feeling of overstimulation. ... The aim is to let each form ask people to loosen their grip. To soften. To laugh. To linger. To remember what it means to be unguarded. I am interested in what happens when we are disarmed by delight. When laughter opens the body. When something playful can hold something devastating. When wonder becomes a method of survival.

How much we give each other in this school...!!