The ends of semesters, especially Fall semesters, are jam-packed with projects new and old, but today has been an unusually rich confluence of things. Started the day trying to get my first years to rise to Robert Orsi's challenge (in "Snakes Alive!") to recognize how our fears and desires lead us to privilege things we're comfortable with and marginalize or even demonize those which bother us. At the weekly lunchtime confab with faculty interested in religion I told an India China Institute colleague about conversations I had at the 90th anniversary banquet of the United Board for Christian Education in Asia on Saturday and was invited to talk about American mizuko rituals at an upcoming event of a Fashion and Social Justice class. Over a quick coffee at Joe a seminar fellow pitched a radically new and quite wonderfully engaged way to reconceive the First Year Workshops next Fall. At the office of NYU Press my fellow Queer Christianities editors and I gave a progress report on our book and received helpful and very encouraging advice. (It reminded me that I owe my Princeton editor a 350-word blurb for the Job project.) Home to prepare for tomorrow's Theorizing Religion class and a strategy session on the Fall 2013 iteration of our New School history class - there'll be a bit less prep time tomorrow than usual as I'm meeting a friend from Delhi for coffee and observing a class by an alumna in the morning - and some other odds and ends: invitations and clarifications regarding the 2013-14 Religious Studies and First Year curricula, and laundry. And as if all that weren't already plenty, the proofs of "Unsettled," the article on my adventure teaching about Australian Aboriginal religion, have arrived to be checked. Whew! At least there were leftovers in the fridge from Sunday's dinner for nine!
