Wonderful prospects

You may be wondering how my courses are going, since i haven't posted much about them, and we're mid-way through second week. Not to worry: no news is good news! I'll tell you more about the Job and the Arts lecture next week, when we actually get to the Book of Job!

In Religion & Ecology, this is the week we encounter the three main texts/approaches which the syllabus braids. Yesterday we read the first six entries in Spiritual Ecology: Hearing the Cry of the Earth, a bouquet of inspiring calls to action plucked from different traditions around the world. The editor, Sufi Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, provides minimal context for them, since they "speak a single note of love for the Earth." A native American chief, a Catholic theologian, a Zen monk, an African chief, scholars and scientists; it's an impressive roster. (I didn't share with the class the pages of tributes at the front of the book, luminaries from all lands and traditions.)

I registered some scholarly misgivings about this decontextualization, and tomorrow will recall David Abram's argument, encountered last week, that oral traditions don't fix things in a final form because they are organically responsive to an ever-changing reality. For Abram, to be really ecological is to forswear, ultimately to lose interest in, the specious promise of a truth divorced from ongoing relationships and processes. But we're newcomers to the discussion, and the sense of shared resolve Vaughan-Lee achieves with his assembled excerpts was welcomed by many of the students. "Are the selections wonderfully the same or wonderfully different?" I asked a little sneakily. Both, one student replied gamely. Wonderful's a place to start.

Tomorrow we read an introductory chapter each from field founders' John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker's Ecology and Religion and, representing the next generation, Grounding Religion: A Field Guide to the Study of Religion and Ecology. For Grim and Tucker, religion matters because 90% of the world's communities belong to religions. For Whitney Bauman and the other editors of Grounding Religion, religion matters but also who defines it, how, and what's included/excluded.

These different approaches overlap, of course. Tucker is excerpted (with Brian Thomas Swimme, discussing Journey of the Universe) in Spiritual Ecology, and the project of Spiritual Ecology makes more sense when you've encountered Grounding Religion's suggestion that religion may appear outside "religions" - and that the global environmental challenge may require something beyond the scope of any of them. But Grounding Religion's critical questions about who defines, who's included, etc., will be important also. Wonderful for whom? how?

We'll see how we do tomorrow. All but two of the students are new both to the theological-interfaith kind of work Grim and Tucker represent and the academic concerns and questions articulated by Bauman.

(The photo, by the way, is of the view between cars of the Q train as it crosses the 
Manhattan Bridge to Brooklyn at sunset, looking back over the Brookyln Bridge.) 

Precipitous

Snow fell overnight, but didn't last long. It was still there when I ascended to the Faculty Lounge for a meeting of the Full Time Faculty Affairs subcommittee of the Faculty Senate which, for my sins, I'm charged with chairing this year. Not very many other FT senators showed up but the seasonal scenery was oddly pretty.

Morning maneuvers

Big sky over Washington Square Park, flocks of birds loop-the-looping.

Wintry

Even in the dead of winter, Brooklyn Botanic Garden's worth a stroll.

Ready to make dinner.

Varieties 0: Overlapping things

Our single-text class on James' Varieties started today... with another text. We only get seven sessions, and I wasn't about to give one up just because nobody could be expected to have prepared! So I gave students James' famous 1896 essay "The Will to Believe" to read and discuss.

It's a dusey! This is where James provides a "justification of faith." Faith has a role in the quest for knowledge, and in particular is a proper way of engaging particular kinds of "hypotheses," more appropriate in moral and especially religious questions (where sometimes "faith in a fact can help create the fact") than the detached waiting for "objective certitude" of science. It's quite dramatic and existential, as the lines from Fitz James Stephen with which James ends show:

We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we stand still we shall be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we do?

James starts by suggesting that in matters of belief there are different kinds of "options" for any given person at a given time, and for those which are "living, momentous and forced" it is licit to go beyond incomplete evidence or even risk error... It's a little hard to make sense of, since it's presented as an objective category of irreducibly subjective apprehension. Our discussion struggled to determine whether I can change what is a 'living option" to me (and if so, how), if a decision could be "momentous" even if the subject wasn't aware of it, if an option is "forced" only because a person thinks it is.

James' thought always confounds in this way: too crisp-seeming contrasts are pressed into the service of articulating a humble, experimental, growing consciousness, of an experience where everything overlaps. The contrasts can start to crumble under this pressure but it doesn't matter (Jamesians aver), as they've done their work helping us move and change.

This slipperiness isn't just a feature of experience. James' universe isn't a fixed one, where our categories might come to rest if, per impossibile, they stopped revising and resolving. It's not just that our apprehension of it is incomplete and ever evolving: James' universe, too, is on the make. And it is in some way changed by our apprehension of it. This thought show up in one of this essay's famous lines:

This feeling, forced on us we know not whence, that by obstinately believing that there are gods (although not to do so would be so easy both for our logic or our life) we are doing the universe the deepest service we can, seems part of the living essence of the religious hypothesis.

...which is no longer talking about those situations in which believing the life has meaning keeps us from "freezing to death." In this line, I noticed today for the first time, it is the universe which is reassured. It would be "easy" for us not to give it that encouragement, not "obstinately" to persist in "believing there are gods." Ultimately is is better for us to believe this, too, but James' suggestion here is that this isn't just good for the individual believer. There is a deep "service" we do the universe by believing it meaningful.

Perhaps this stuck out to me today because the question if the universe has meaning, if our existence within it does, came up in "Religion & Ecology" yesterday, and we encountered three kinds of answer. One, dismissed rather quickly out of hand by the class: it's all an accident. Second, that, au contraire, life and even consciousness were destined to emerge (the argument of "Journey of the Universe"). Finally (in Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass) that it is all a gift, and so the start of a relationship of reciprocity. Perhaps crisp contrasts like accidental/necessary distract us from the contingent - but for that only more miraculous gift of a relationship with all that is.

Going with the flow

"Religion & Ecology" was a blast today. Tuesday's ten students swelled to thirteen, a group from a nice spread of backgrounds and educational trajectories. So engaged were our discussions of "Journey of the Universe" (which we saw Tuesday), David Abram's "The Commonwealth of Breath" and the first chapters of Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass that - no surprise really - there wasn't time for the walk along Minetta Creek the syllabus promised. We managed, using this interactive map to see that a creek used to run under the block where The New School sits, 11th & 12th Streets, Fifth & Sixth Avenues. Turns out a branch also ran beneath the block where we are holding our class, 15th & 16th Streets, University Place & Fifth Avenue! We walk along its flow unawares all the time, shuttling between New School buildings. Indeed, Minetta Creek might well be flowing still. Though it's been paved over for well over a century, water sources don't just disappear. And a journalist who happens also to be an alumna claims to have heard it flowing along the course described in this map as recently as 2015 - in the basement recording studio Jimi Hendrix set up along 8th Street! I'll ask students if they felt its flow when we gather next week.

Super natural

The view from the Balcony in Carnegie Hall, always confusing: the orchestra (here the great Cleveland under Franz Welser-Möst, celebrating their centenary) and an even more massive choir seem miniatures. They look and sound so close your senses tell you they're tiny rather than distant. We were there to hear Haydn's "Seasons," a strange period piece though marvelously musical - a vision in overlapping tableaux in every register of the agricultural order of the Enlightenment, though there were rumbles of thunder and threats of drought and freezing to death in winter snow, too, all leading to an unexpectedly moving and satisfying vision of the heavenly mountain, offering eternal Spring to those who live with virtue, effort and charity.

This picture makes it look like a snow globe, and for this particular piece of music, that is fitting. Haydn's "Jahreszeiten" purports to depict an entire world, with all its changes, pleasures and dangers, the whole life cycle of nature, and of humans, destined for more. The world depicted is a specific one, though, and a reminder that as recently as two centuries ago, western society was still mainly agricultural. The city sophisticates who would have gone to hear a piece depicting rustics still knew of the cycle of food production (and wine).

It was interesting to hear this after reading the texts I've assigned for tomorrow's meeting of "Religion & Ecology." In one Robin Wall Kimmerer tries to reacquaint us with an awareness of an interconnected animate world, not the world of lifeless things modern philosophy describes. In the other, David Abram laments the way writing has - since the Greeks fatefully created letters for vowels - effaced even the memory of the great spirit/wind/air/breath that traditional oral societies know flows through and connects all things. But hear this (from "Spring"):

Come, companions, let us wander in the fragrant air. 
Come, good fellows, let us wander through the greenwood fair. 
See the lilies, see the roses, see the mingled flowers. 
See the valleys, see the meadows, see the verdant bowers.
See the woodland, see the waters, see the azure sky! 
All is living, all is stirring, while the landscape laughs around! 
See the lambs that frisk and gambol; see the fish that swim and tumble. 
See the bees that swarm together; see the birds that soar and flutter. 
What enchantment, what enjoyment, swells within our hearts! 
Sweetest longings, softest passions, stir within our breasts! 
Every feeling, every rapture, is the mighty, the mighty Creator's breath.

Or, in the German version (Haydn had it published in both languages):


MÄDCHEN 
Welche Freude, 
Welche Wonne 
Schwellet unser Herz! 
BURSCHE 
Süsse Triebe, 
Sanfte Reize 
Heben unsre Brust. 
SIMON 
Was ihr fühlet, 
Was euch reizet 
Ist des Schöpfers Hauch. 

Folks weren't breathlessly despoiling the natural world yet. The recentness of our turning on the living world makes the extent of the despoliation that much more awful.

Full deck

Hey, it's my birthday! Not that I'm keeping track, but if I were, and were doing so with playing cards, it'd be time to lay in a new deck...! (Not counting jokers!) The sky over Brooklyn treated me to a light show.

Charting new course

My two main classes of the semester have begun, and with good vibes! 

The syllabi look a little conventional (but for The New School's proprietary font Neue) but there are exciting adventures ahead in both. This second iteration of "Performing the Problem of Suffering" has nearly a hundred students in a nice mix from all the university's divisions, and four TAs similarly varied. "Religion & Ecology" is a new one for me, with ten students (twelve registered) also from varied backgrounds. In both classes we actually broke new ground in the very first class, with students engaging each other and me in vigorous discussion. Nice!

Disposable furnishings

A friend of mine is working as a substitute teacher for private schools, which takes him to interesting places. Today he was minding a class of sixth-graders whose classroom décor included this beautiful poster about the Anthropocene! I'm impressed at how thick the layer called Anthropocene epoch? already is. And that it includes not just broken bottles, tires, toilets, washing machines and laptops but a grand piano, and an IKEA Poäng chair! Touché.

Brrraid

(pic)

New semester begins tomorrow! I'm set up for the lecture course that begins tomorrow - "Performing the Problem of Suffering: The Book of Job and the Arts" - but still fiddling with the syllabus for the seminar that starts Tuesday - "Religion and Ecology."

It turns out that all the texts I might have assigned for this new course are available as e-books from the library (I ordered several of them), so students won't have to purchase any. Ecological! That also gives me flexibility on what parts of each to assign... Early on we'll be reading the account of the emergence of this field of research by the people most responsible for it, John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker. Their valedictory Ecology and Religion (3rd ed., Island Press, 2014) offers a handy roster of ten words, all starting with r, to name the "values" they find in common among world religious traditions regarding nature (8)

reverence

respect

reciprocity

restraint

redistribution

responsibility

restoration

and the emphases of the emergent field of religion and ecology (86) 

retrieval

reevaluation

reconstruction

That's a lot of r's (actually re's)! I'll help myself to them, but Grim and Tucker's narrative, rooted in the world religions (and the "indigenous") and their dialogue, is only one of three I'm going to try braiding. The second is the emerging "spiritual ecology' movement, which seeks to articulate a single ecological ethic and spirituality for our shared planet from insights of religious and nonreligious and scientific leaders. The third thread is the more ambivalent academic field of religion and ecology, which is suspicious of alleged commonalities across traditions and dares to wonder if religion and spirituality are categories worth working with at all; Anthropocene worries will come in here, too.

The "braiding" comes loosely from one of my favorite books of recent years, Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed, 2016), ix:

Back to the fray

Rose with the sun in California, back in busy New York at night.

Beach art

Low tide with strong waves makes for amazing patterns in the sand at Torrey Pines Beach, replaced and rearranged with each long wave.

It boggles the mind, more than a little: the same beach, the same kinds of sand grains, the same waves, and yet, and yet, and yet.

The function of education

The great Julius Lester has passed away. My colleague K shared these words of his, which she has used as one of the epigraphs for her course on Spiritual Autobiography: a marvel.

The function and purpose of education is not only to confirm you in who you are, in the broadest sense; it is also to introduce you to all that you are not. Education should overwhelm you to such an extent that you will never again assume that your experience, individually or as part of a collective, can be equated with all of human experience. In other words, education should impress you with how vast creation is and how small you are in the midst of it. In the acceptance of that is the beginning of wisdom.

It is the function of education to introduce the student to the terrifying unknown and give him and her the intellectual skills to make known the unknown and the emotional stability to withstand the terror when the unknown cannot be made known. Such an experience gives the student the self-confidence to go forth and face that mystery which lies at the core of each of us: Who am I?

from a speech entitled “Core Knowledge,” 1995

Unfamiliar beach

Big surf and a very high tide at Del Mar this morning - this pic was taken at 8:30, a little less than an hour before high tide. The lifeguard house is behind a protective barricade of sand. The folks in the foreground are thrilled to have found a buoy which was torn loose from its anchor somewhere and washed ashore.

New York --> Minneapolis --> San Diego

Brooklyn bir'yun

My painting by Birrinbirrin (remember him?) shimmered the other day.
Wait, can it be I never mentioned that I acquired a painting by the Yolngu elder who plays himself (or someone of the same name) in "Ten Canoes," and plays a central role also in the article I wrote about trying to teach a course on Aboriginal Australian religion? I've had it since 2012, and up on the mantlepiece in the living room for several years. 

Making kin with Job

There's a conference in May on religion and the Anthropocene! I've submitted a proposal for a paper. It would be a perfect occasion to present my thinking about the Book of Job in the Anthropocene...

Tweaking the proposal (300 word abstract, 800 word description of arguments, methods and sources), I found myself making a new argument. (This often happens to me, part of why writing is such a drag; when I revise something it changes, though not always for the worse.)

In the “age of humans,” the Book of Job may be valued as a guide to the importance of better relations between humans and the rest of what is, as well as with each other. That human beings are never mentioned in the theophany (although the fearsome beasts Behemoth and Leviathan are) will resonate with the experience that Isabelle Stengers calls the “intrusion of Gaia.” Yet here Gaia is reaching out to humanity after all, or at least addressing us across the breakdown of our efforts at understanding. Perhaps the Book of Job will become the foundation again for an apophatic theism. It will in any case direct us to a restoration of earthly bonds: Job’s relationship with his friends is, at God’s urging, the first part of his life to be restored. And, given what Job has learned of the more-than-human, surely not just human bonds. A part of the story’s end which has particularly rankled modern readers is the disconcerting suggestion that Job’s dead children can be replaced. In the Anthropocene all know that what is lost cannot be brought back. The folktale return-to-start of the Book of Job will be dismissed, the lesson in Job’s new life found in its unfamiliar newness. Job’s acceptance of a new terrestrial family, while holding the memory of the lost, will be seen to demonstrate the necessity of “making kin” – perhaps in Donna Haraway’s most radical sense – in the face of cascading extinctions.

It's not just that Job's lost children might be read as representing other species, extinct in part because of us. Maybe Job's new family is more than human, too. Maybe that's what he learns from the theophany: that he is part of a more-than-human family already.

(The pic above, from Buck Denver's "What's in the Bible," is for coloring! But where o where have they put Job's wife?)

New colors ahead

Some workers were on the roof of our building today. Through the trap door I noticed that we have received a new graffito. (Here's what our local artists offered in 2012, 2013, 2015, 2017.) Will check it out soon.

Rain after snow

James II

A fortnight from today I'll put my trusty grad student copy of James' Varieties aside and embark on the single-text tutorial with a clean copy. The other, which I've taught from for two decades, is full of all sorts of notes and underlinings which I'd be lying if I said didn't shape my rereadings... I discovered (or perhaps rediscovered) things each time, but my earlier engagements guided my attention. Clean slate!

Abstract snow expressionism after storm, freeze, dirty rain and melt.

Local scenery

Scenes from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden - all indoors, from desert, tropical, temperate and bonzai areas. And a pretty Brooklyn sunset.