The buzz

BBG at September's end: floppy Fall crocuses, and... a hummingbird!

Natural

I'm pulling out all the stops, trying to deal with a cough which has been bothering me for weeks. Antibiotics have been tried, numberless lozenges consumed, and buckwheat honey, too. I have higher hopes for this more pleasing natural remedy (buckwheat honey smells like a barnyard), a honey-filled black turnip.

渋くなくなる

Another tidbit from the Buddhism MOOC, whose instructor - a white guy, not explicitly connected to any Buddhist practice or tradition (...) - is free to be more pedagogically playful than the other instructors.

It's part of his argument that what religious texts do - and not just in Buddhist traditions - is "scripture" people and communities, shaping and forming them. He's not quite said that sutras are agents, but he's close.

Lecturette

The world religions MOOCs experiment seems to be working, filling our "Theorizing Religion" room with lots of fresh, specific knowledge about religious traditions in their complexity and diversity. But what about the theory part? To make room for the MOOCs, I've folded what would have been two weeks of reading early classic texts into two "lecturettes," where a mini-lecture from me and a single excerpt from each text distributed in class is supposed to make do as we glance at Hume's Natural History of Religion (1757), Schleiermacher's Speeches on Religion (1799) and Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity (1841) over two Wednesday classes interleaved with the students' MOOC reports. Did today's Hume-in-an-hour-plus-a-first-taste-of-Schleiermacher work? It might have, and might do so even better next time round. I left out a lot of what I usually try to cover, but will need to trim even more, I fear. In exchange, we get the clarity which caricature forces.

Hume, as I presented him today, shared with other empiricists the idea that the mind is an empty slate, filled only with contingent and finite experiences; we induce generalizations from these impressions, ideally drawn by sympathy to collate them with those of others, but never arrive at the certainty we think we need and are capable of. Come religion, we find that it's more varied and less universal than ideas of a religious sense require; in fact, it's a secondary effect as human nature - the same everywhere - ignorantly encounters an uncertain world, producing different religious formations in different times and places; all these formations seem to fit within an endless swinging back and forth between monotheism and polytheism, hard to choose among as the former seems more rational but the latter brings out humanity's better qualities; the growth of knowledge might seem to promise respite from religion but passional human nature isn't going to change; it's best to practice a sort of skepticism, weaning oneself and one's society from the fallacious idea that we need and are capable of religious knowledge - in part through a judiciously plotted "natural history" of "religion."

(Whew!) We only just got a taste of Schleiermacher's attempt to coopt and go beyond enlightenment critiques like Hume's. I had students read a few pages of the Speeches to give them a rest from me (we'd started with a cold read of the preface to Natural History of Religion, so they'd have a little sense of what actually reading an eighteenth century text might feel like), then boiled our German Romantic down to "chemistry" - the argument that "metaphysics" and "morals" have essences, as clarified by the enlightenment, but "religion" turns out to have one too, one contrasting but complementary. I'll start next week's theory class (which finishes Schleiermacher and turns to Feuerbach) by seeing if anyone can imagine how Hume could reply to Schleiermacher's essence argument (didn't we show it's not universal?), and how Hume-Schleiermacher parallels the contrast we started our class with between Jonathan Z. Smith and Caputo. Much more world religion will happen between now and then, though - let's hope it spills over!

America / democracy ?

The newest columnist for the New York Times comes out swinging in a hard-hitting piece on how the structure of US federal governance makes outcomes like a victorious president who lost the popular vote more and more likely. More than the Electoral College is a problem.

Our Constitution has always had a small-state bias, but the effects have become more pronounced as the population discrepancy between the smallest states and the largest states has grown. “Given contemporary demography, a little bit less than 50 percent of the country lives in 40 of the 50 states,” Sanford Levinson, a constitutional law scholar at the University of Texas, told me. “Roughly half the country gets 80 percent of the votes in the Senate, and the other half of the country gets 20 percent.” 

Goldberg articulates the confusion and consternation - likely in coming years to morph into rage - of the underrepresented majority. I've been trying to grapple with how the other side feels - not those who for bad and good reasons feel that their "America" is being displaced - but the politicians who take up their cause, people who have been working tirelessly to ensure that what they know to be a minority should nevertheless stay in power. The way we describe our democracy doesn't make individual voters think they should be voting with the whole nation in mind, as opposed to whatever party or faction or interest group they belong to (alas), but what about those elected to office by system-favored minorities? Have they no sense of responsibility to the common good? By what right do they think their minority should rule? How do they convince themselves a career committed to minority rule is worthy, not to mention worthy of being considered "public service"? I'm having a hard time coming up with anything that's not frightening.

Moses supposes

Our second MOOCfest happened today, teams of students giving presentations on "world religions" from the "Scriptures and Traditions" module they're following. Reporting on the second fourth of each course, they shared the discovery that these traditions are big, unwieldy, complicated, overwhelming. A theme going through this section of all of the modules was how these traditions had come to terms with their canons - whether "open" or "closed" or "dual" - and the inescapability of interpretation. Making things more complicated still were oral traditions (some of them later written down, go figure) found necessary to explicate the meaning of written scripture. How do we know which parts need interpretation? are different texts addressed to different audiences? are there passages nobody should hope or claim to understand? and how can one know which later interpreter or interpretive strategy is legitimate in the first place? What fun!

Here's a taste from the Judaism module. (FYI Akiva ben Yosef lived c. 50–135 CE. The course dates the Bavli/Babylonian Talmud to 500 CE.)

When Moses ascended [on Mount Sinai] he saw God attaching crownlets to the letters [of the Written Torah]. Moses said to God, “Master of the Universe, why are you bothering with this?” God replied, “There is a man who is destined to be born at the end of many generations, named Akiva ben Yosef, who will learn heaps and heaps of laws from each crownlet.” Moses said to God, “Master of the Universe, show him to me.” God replied, “Turn around.” Moses went and sat in the eighth row [of students in Rabbi Akiva’s academy] but he could not understand what they were saying. He became faint. But when they came to a certain topic and the students said to Rabbi Akiva, “Rabbi, how do you know this?” He answered them, “It is a law given to Moses at Sinai.” And Moses was comforted. 

Talmud Bavli, Tractate Menahot 29b

Sock it to 'em, olde New U!

It's official! We're celebrating our near-century of newness! The centennial campaign, being spearheaded by folks from Marketing & Communications and from Development, was announced at today's university town hall. I was more excited by the president's socks.

Trump's Katrina

While our feckless president rattles nuclear sabers, excludes refugees and brings his divisive racist bile to yet more American institutions, 3.5 million American citizens in Puerto Rico face unprecedented loss and months of hardship and danger. Has he noticed? (Pic)

tyd tyy

A tasty morsel from the Buddhism MOOC, offered right after the famous "tolle, lege!" scene from Augustine's Confessions. It's from the autobiography of the famous Thai forest monk Phra Ajaan Lee (1907-61):

I was very ardent in my efforts to practice meditation that rainy season, but there were times I couldn’t help feeling a little discouraged because all my teachers had left me. Occasionally I’d think of disrobing [ie leaving the monastic order], but whenever I felt this way there’d always be something to bring me back to my senses. One day, for instance, at about five in the evening, I was doing walking meditation but my thoughts had strayed towards worldly matters. A woman happened to walk past the monastery, improvising a song—‘I’ve seen the heart of the tyd tyy bird: Its mouth is singing, tyd tyy, tyd tyy, but its heart is out looking for crabs’—so I memorized her song and repeated it over and over, telling myself, ‘It’s you she’s singing about. Here you are, a monk, trying to develop some virtue inside yourself, and yet you let your heart go looking for worldly matters.’ I felt ashamed of myself. I decided that I’d have to bring my heart in line with the fact that I was a monk if I didn’t want the woman’s song to apply to me. The whole incident thus turned into Dhamma.

The Autobiography of Phra Ajaan Lee, trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu, 9-10

MOOCs day 3

Continuing to cram the Traditions and Scriptures MOOCs! I've now completed 3/8 of each of them, and my head is swimming with world religions. Did I ever know what Tatian's Diatesseron was, one of the first Bible harmonies? actually read from the Dharmashastras with their slightly conflicting accounts of gender relations? learn about the mevlud tradition in Turkey, where the Nativity of the Prophet is celebrated with song? encounter the argument against using the phrase "Hebrew Bible" since it glosses over vital differences between the Jewish and Christian textds? hear the Sutra of Golden Light's account of the expedient means of generating Buddha relics?

Truth to tell, all of this is new to me. I never had the chance to take a course in world religions, or even an "intro to" any of them. (Long long ago the redoubtable Mrs. Sleigh had me read Huston Smith's The Religions of Man.) I've picked up a sense of each of them in bits and pieces over the years from a diversity of contexts, many quite sophisticated and advanced, but haven't been through a concerted effort to make sense of them as traditions for new learners. Indeed I've probably spent more time reading and reproducing the arguments against the very idea of "world religions" than learning about them!

So this is refreshing and not a little humbling. Of course I'm still a card-carrying member of the guild of teachers of religious studies, so I'm also noticing what these five instructors are doing, often but not always with admiration. Where I'm tempted to object - as when Karen King includes Latter Day Saints, indeed giving them a longer description than Pentecostalism, in a survey of Christian communities - I stop and think that these instructors have presented this material many times before and know what works and what doesn't in laying out a "world religion" in a reflective way... then ask myself what they might be up to.

I have five more lessons to do before class on Monday... wish me luck!

Primary colors

Truth of tears

Well, my "Theorizing Religion" students not only didn't object to enrolling in a MOOC but were excited to be learning about "world religions," groups of students vying to be the most enthusiastic in describing canons, creeds and interpretive strategies for the scripture traditions they were responsible for (Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism), hermeneutics of suspicion forgotten. Go figure!

And here's something even more surprising. More students listed Islam as the tradition they hoped to be working on than any other, and the four who presented on it today all were not only taken by the course's approach to the Q'uran as an aural text - heard in recitation (including perhaps your own) - but really wanted to share a particular video instructor Ali Asani included in the course. This is it: watch, listen.

Among the readings Asani assigns was al-Ghazali's directive that weeping is the appropriate response to q'uranic recitation, but reading about that is one thing; seeing and hearing it is quite another. I take the students' insistence on sharing it to be more than a report on being moved. I think it's more like the discovery that Islam is, as they have hoped but little in our media tells them, a religion of tenderness, a moving discovery they were sure their classmates would be grateful to make, too. I can say: I was moved.

Maxi the MOOCher

"Theorizing Religion" has entered its MOOC experiment, which means that the instructor is trying to make his way through all five Harvard "Traditions and Scriptures" modules at once. (I admit it: I skim a little.) So far it's eye-opening, teaching me lots of interesting things and angles on things. It's fascinating to approach the Q'uran first as an experience of transportingly beautiful sound, for instance, recited in carefully structured ways: tears are appropriate in reciter and listener, for instance, and one style requires improvisation. I appreciate the pedagogical work of the instructors, and their efforts to work within the constraints of a MOOC. (Since the courses are no longer live, one can't participate but is able see the discussions of the students who participated - differently self-selecting populations for different traditions, as one would expect, though likely none of these happy Andeans giggling as students in the Christianity course are asked to introduce themselves with a photo.) MOOCs have to provide all their teaching materials, so I'm accessing troves of pdfs, websites, videos, ranging from the very scholarly to popular music. My only complaint so far regards the "X in brief" videos produced as opening overviews for each tradition, evidently without consulting the course instructors. Besides questionable editing decisions (like including Persian miniatures of scenes from the Prophet's life, but with the face blurred) they include some misleading things, like this slime-like - and historically meaningless - representation of the global spread of Buddhism.

Nutty

My friend - erstwhile housemate - V made chiles en nogada that looked so much like the image from an article she showed us that I wondered if she'd snuck her own photo on the website. Oh ye of little faith! (This pic's doubled since the camera could focus only on one nogada.)

New arrival on the block

Words words

Always learning new words - which doesn't mean I'll remember them!

Negentropic 

"Negative entropy" - a term for order apparently used in psychoanalysis, originally coined and them, perhaps, dropped by Erwin Schrödinger.

According to Ward's ["Medea Hypothesis"], the history of life and mass extinctions on Earth demonstrates that vital processes have effects on the environment that are destabilizing rather than homeostatic. ... we should bear in mind ... that what led Lovelock to Gaia was precisely the incongruity and fragility of this niche of negentropy that is living Earth - which can of course cease to exist in its present form at any moment.

Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World,

trans. Rodrigo Nunes (Cambridge & Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2017), 39

Deodand 

An archaic legal term which seems to have gained a new following.

Agentic capacity is now seen as differentially expressed across a wider range of ontological types. This idea is also expressed in the notion of "deodand," a figure of English law from about 1200 until it was abolished in 1846. In case of accidental death or injury to a human, the nonhuman actant, for example, the carving knife that fell into human flesh or the carriage that trampled the leg of a pedestrian - became deodand (literally, "that which must be given to God"). In recognition of its peculiar efficacy (a power that is less masterful than agency but more active than recalcitrance), the deodand ... was surrendered to the crown to be used (or sold) to compensate the harm done.

Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things

(Durham, NC & London: Duke University Press, 2010), 9

Magga (not MAGA)

In "Buddhist Modernism" we're making our way through Walpola Rahula's What the Buddha Taught. As I discovered the last time I used this text, it's great - not just for what it constructs, but for the way it also deconstructs it. And so the book has a conventional enough structure

I The Buddhist Attitude of Mind 
II The First Noble Truth: Dukkha 
III The Second Noble Truth: Samudaya: 'The Arising of Dukkha' 
IV The Third Noble Truth: Nirodha: 'The Cessation of Dukkha' 
V The Fourth Noble Truth: Magga: 'The Path' 
VI The Doctrine of No-Soul: Anatta 
VII Meditation or 'Mental Culture': Bhavana 
VIII What the Buddha Taught and the World Today

The "four noble truths" are where most outsiders starts (even the Buddha is said to have made them the subject of his first sermon), but Rahula knows the tradition better. And so, tucked into his Preface, there's this;

I would ask [the Western reader] ... to take up on his first reading the opening chapter, and then go on to chapters V, VII and VIII, returning to Chapters II, III, IV and VI when the general sense is clearer and more vivid. (xii)

I'd drawn the class' attention to this directive, but nobody had followed up on it. What difference could it really make what order one took things in? Well, all the difference... but none until you try.
So today we tried to make sense of the four noble truths, in sequence. I offered colloquial translations of dukkha, which Rahula insists should stay untranslated (I can't get no satisfaction, everything comes to an end, bummer), and asked annoying questions like "why do we need more than the first noble truth?" "what does the third one add that's not already in the second?" and "Aren't the third and fourth really the same?"

They're not, of course, and that was our segue to Rahula's other sequence, which leapfrogs over the first three noble truths, skips on to meditation and lands in Buddhism's role in modern society, with no urgency to return to the rest of the noble truths, let alone the fearsome doctrine of anatta. Do we perhaps not need to define dukkha then? Or perhaps the point is that we won't be able to grasp its significance until we're on the Noble Eightfold Path - until, that is, we have experienced our own capacity to structure and change our behavior and attitudes, however incrementally?

Questio mihi factus sum x 17

A new "Theorizing Religion" class become a question to themselves.

DACA and cover

Beautiful day for a protest at the moral ugliness of the current regime.

Blank slate

I'd love to think that everyone in "Buddhist Modernism" got everything on this map - I'd given the class a blank map and asked them to locate a dozen Buddhist countries represented in Figures of Buddhist Modernity in Asia as well as three famous historic sites, Bodhgaya, Bamiyan and Borobodur. Confronted again with the way American education makes geographical ignoramuses of us - although one student knew everything, another pair of students were pretty sure only of where China was, and most others didn't do much better - I'd be happy if some of them got something. At least a sense that Buddhism has tangled with many cultures over a long time? And, once we placed our historic sites (in India, Afghanistan and Indonesia) that it hadn't just spread outward like a melting blob of butter but was no longer a significant presence in places where it had once been important, including the land of its birth.

But I'm afraid for some of the students the particulars of this story won't have stuck, because there was nothing for it to stick to - not just a map of Asia means nothing but maps tout court. Kant was right about this at least: without a knowledge of geography how could you have an understanding of the world and history and your place in it?

Early adapter

One small branch out my office window seems to think summer's over.

Children of the stars

In Religion & Ecology circles one often comes across references to the thought of Thomas Berry, and to a project inspired by his ideas, Brian Thomas Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker's "Journey of the Universe." A cluster of courses, a book and a documentary film, "Journey of the Universe" tries to use recent scientific discoveries to fashion a new story, a myth comparable to those of world religions. It seeks to provide answers to the great questions like: Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? - and of death? and How are we to live?

The "epic story" offered is a sort of immanent Intelligent Design. The 14 billion year story which we see through the lens of life and awareness, in some sense was bound to produce life and awareness, since it is "intrinsic to matter" to generate patterns, to self-organize into more complex assemblages. There's no suggestion (as in ID) that the universe was set up this way for this purpose, though there's some ID-ish amazement that had the Big Bang been just a smidge faster or slower none of this would have arisen. There's no designer but wonder at the cosmic fact of self-organizing design. The documentary is filmed on the Greek island of Samos because Samos was the home of Pythagoras, who thought the principle of matter lay in numbers and patterns.

Stars, we learn, are our ancestors, our planet alive, and all life our kin... but we may be the only ones in this whole vast history to be able to bring "insight" into it all. Inspiring, humbling, galvanizing? Not for me. Like "Big History" it seemed like some kind of sleight of hand to go from the scale of the cosmos, in time and space, to human history, not to mention a familiar anthropocentrism to suppose we play some cosmic role. Might not every mote in this vastness look the wrong way down its telescope and tell a similar story - similar at least in slowing down and zooming in as it approaches its brief moment of existence?

I suppose "Journey of the Universe" doesn't disallow such other stories, just suggests that this one might work for us. Work, that is, anchor us in our world with truthful understanding of what's going on, and anchor an ethics in our membership of the reality of the "earth community." (I can dig that.) Should the constellation of materials and events which made us possible have made all manner of other things possible, too, inaccessible to our little Pythagorean minds, the more the merrier!

Fasten your seatbelts

Spirit of Transportation, 1895 and today...

Gables

Quick little trip by MetaBus to our favorite nearby town, West Philly! Our fabulous Victorian B&B is under new management, but in good hands still. Tchotchkes are fewer (slightly) but the feeling of stepping out of time persists. You wouldn't want to live here but great for a visit!

Met matches

One of the pleasures of a great museum like the Met is that you can take in things from such very different times and climes. Today was no exception. We'd gone knowing we'd see Cristobal de Villalpando’s 1683 altar painting from Puebla, and take a peek at the Costume Institute's Rei Kawakubo show, already worlds apart in so many ways, but we didn't know we'd be most charmed by a little exhibit of treasures of the northern Renaissance.