Well seasoned

Elizabeth Pérez' Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions is a great addition to "Theorizing Religion." Our first (and only) full anthropological study, it introduces participant observation as an approach to the study of religion. The way Pérez argues that new arrivals to the Lukumí house temple Ilé Laroye are themselves "seasoned" as they learn how to season foods for the orishas parallels the change of perspective afforded by participation. Cooking also proves a suggestive metaphor for many religious activities, and Pérez lets this play out even as, of course, the cooking at Ilé Laroye is as real as cooking can be, labor intensive, skill-dependent, learned through doing and through the example of experienced elders.

This is also one of the texts I added to try to make the interrogation of white supremacy a theme in our class, and it proved to do this even more profoundly than I'd expected. Black Atlantic traditions - forged and reforged in the crucibles of slavery and colonialism across the Americas and interqcting with indigenous as well as every kind of European tradition - are every bit as much products of (and responses to) "modernity" as the 18th-20th century white Atlantic constellations we usually privilege. What if, taking a page from James Cone's liberationist view that religious vision is at its most profound among the marginalized and oppressed, we let practices and communities like the one Pérez studied become paradigmatic of our predicament and our prospects?

School's out forever!

In our New School Histories class today we considered the role students should take in determining curriculum, teaching, administration at a school like ours. We read an essay about an episode of student take-over of a class at the New School College in 1968, by an instructor who found himself relegated to the role of "paid consultant" to his class. With several levels of irony he described how the students reconstituted their course with great energy and rigor - only largely to recreate what would anyway have been taught. A win for all sides" Next week we'll be looking at more radical forms of student protest, including "Disorientation," a guide put together by students in the middle of the "war" between the New School and its president in 2009. It includes this splendid account of how taking ownership of your education can be a form of subversion of the capitalism educational machine. Take that!

Veil of knowledge

An Op-Ed by Michelle Alexander in today's Times has taken me back to a moment in college I've come to think of as my turn to religious studies - but also made clear how the world has changed since then. Alexander's piece ponders how differently we might all be thinking about the unfolding climate crisis if we believed in reincarnation.

considering future lives can ... be productive, challenging us to imagine that what we do or say in this life matters and might eventually catch up with us. Would we fail to respond with care and compassion to the immigrant at the border today if we thought we might find ourselves homeless, fleeing war and poverty, in the next life?

Alexander reminds us that future people are more likely be climate refugees than Times readers: if we’re reborn in 50 years, there’s only a small chance that any of us would be rich or benefit from white privilege.

As I was reading the piece, I remembered the tutorial at Oxford (with John Gray) where I first encountered John Rawls' "original position" behind the "veil of ignorance," a thought experiment which could lead all people to realize that, if they didn't know what their social station or gifts would be, they'd choose to live in a society where the least well were not so poorly off. This was based, I argued in my bold undergraduate way, on an assessment of risk-averseness that was culturally contingent. Rawls assumed we had but one life to live. But what if one thought one would come back many times, over time presumably inhabiting many stations in society? Might this not make someone prefer a society with greater inequality but productive of opportunities for greatness they knew they'd eventually get a chance to participate in? I'm not sure what it says about my own class-consciousness that I came up with this argument; I was thinking of new friends who were Hindu. Rawls was claiming to be neutral as among metaphysical conceptions of the good, but young philosopher Mark thought he'd found a flaw in the argument. I wasn't defending the caste system more than rhetorically: like most folks, I accepted Rawls' conclusion implicitly but thought we needed a better argument for it. In any event, my argument was waved off as "religious studies, not political philosophy," and the rest is history.

Alexander came across Rawls' argument when she went to law school.

If denied basic information about one’s circumstances, Rawls predicted that important social goods, such as rights and liberties, power and opportunities, income and wealth, and conditions for self-respect would be “distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these values is to everyone’s advantage.”

Back then, I was struck by how closely Rawls’s views mirrored my own. I now believe, however, that the veil of ignorance is quite distorted in an important respect. Rawls’s veil encourages us to imagine a scenario in which we’re equally likely to be rich or poor or born with natural talents or limitations.

But of course most people in the future, as in the present, are not rich.

Rawls was right: True morality becomes possible only when we step outside the box of our perceived self-interest and care for others as much as we care for ourselves. But rather than imagining a scenario in which we’re entirely ignorant of what the future holds, perhaps we ought to imagine that we, personally, will be born again into the world that we are creating today through our collective and individual choices.

Who among us would fail to question capitalism or to demand a political system free from corporate cash if we knew that we’d likely live our next life as a person of color, earning less than $2.50 a day, in some part of the world ravaged by climate change while private corporations earn billions building prisons, detention centers and border walls for profit?

One of the common criticisms of Rawls was that his supposedly ignorant choosers - ignorant about where they would end up in society - were in fact equipped with lots of social scientific knowledge. (This is where their risk-averseness is rooted.) What if that knowledge included not just a realistic sense of how unlikely anyone would be to win the lottery and lead a life of security and privilege, but a realistic sense of how current trends make it ever more unlikely? 

That's Alexander's plea, like that of so many trying to turn the tide of ecological ruin. Some version of imagining ourselves alive in the ever more precarious future is crucial. Maybe we need to get metaphysical, too. Just as the plans of the Silicon Valley elites to flee a ravaged planet to state-of-the-art space stations and colonies on other planets are a refusal of our common life, so, too, are those religious views according to which the earth was never meant to be our home, where it could be destroyed and we could be OK. But would I dare say this to someone who endures present calamity with the faith that one day, when all this is dead and gone, "God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain" (Rev 21:4)?

Expose us to the truth

Twice the usual number of people showed up at the Service of Meditations and Sacrament at the Church of the Ascension, which we sometimes attend of a Sunday evening. It could be a coincidence, but it may be the raw existential vulnerability people are feeling approaching a culture-defining election and in a week in which frightening hate took violent form as a white man sent pipe bombs to critics of the President, another white man killed two African Americans - Maurice Stallard and Vickie Jones, may they rest in peace - in a grocery store parking lot because the black church he intended to shoot up was closed, and a third white man entered a synagogue during Shabbat services and murdered eleven, one of them a Holocaust survivor. Lord have mercy.

I prayed for the victims of these attacks and those who survive and mourn them, and for all those living in a new kind of fear because of them. But then - I guess this is part of the idea of a service which includes a long period of shared silence - I found myself praying for the broken men, white men, who committed these crimes. Where does all that hate come from, how can it be transformed?

All this was framed by a prayer from Janet Morley's All Desires Known which we had recited together (and which, picked up last at last week's Service, we've taken to reciting at the end of grace before dinner):

May the power of God this day enable me,

the nakedness of God disarm me,

the beauty of God silence me,

the justice of God give me voice,

the integrity of God hold me,

the desire of God move me,

the fear of God expose me to the truth,

the breath of God give me abundant life.

 Fall underfoot at Prospect Park

The name of the congregation attacked this morning was Tree of Life. The People of Israel is the tree of all our life, certainly of all children of Abraham. Anti-semitism is a refusal of religious roots, of the labor of tradition, of the divine gift of interdependence. Grief. Heartbreak.

Catch of the day

Dramatic Workshop Scrapbook 4/1, p 43

Surprise! There's a final phalanx of roses at the BBG!

Fall

A spray of fall color at Union Square, one of few. Most of the trees are still green, though drying out, perhaps sensing the climatic and political dread of the people who walk beneath them as if all were still well.

The trees out my office window are wending their way toward winter in an unusual way this year. Most are still in green but one's blood red.

Postwar

Meanwhile, in the archives, I found this spread from Newsday in August of 1946, of students of the Summer Theater School of the Dramatic Workshop. The 80 students of the ten-week course - most of them veterans - were rehearsing a play for performance at the Chapel Theater, in Great Neck - the town where my father was growing up.

Leunig!

Oases

We had a vestry retreat today, our first chance to gather with the new rector for a more relaxed and open-ended discussion since her arrival four months ago. An excellent moderator furnished by the diocese helped us reconnect to the bigger questions of mission and vision which had animated the long search process. Though all progressive churches are facing challenges, the sense of possibility was thrilling. We've got something great going in our progressive tradition and in the Soup Kitchen's incredible witness, with much talent and commitment to keeping them strong. The term "oasis" came up several times

In the background, though, creeping out into the open during informal breaks and lunch, was the desertifying moment we're in. People described being nearly crippled with dread about the upcoming midterms. I'm in a low-level panic all the time said one. Another described the "old ladies" she quilts with as being on edge in a way she's never seen. Oases are emerging all around. And we pray that the better angels brake the pace of the destruction of the world we love, roused by this moment of urgent need. For as long as these cruel bullies are unchecked there's literally no worst case scenario.

Teachings of trees

A friend who's a specialist in the uses of mindfulness came to the sophomore tutorial today. At one point he asked us to move our chairs to face out the window, and for a few minutes we just looked. He gave a few prompts - to focus on one object, and later to broaden our awareness from it (without necessarily moving our eyes); and to consider how we were seeing our own consciousness out there. You'd be amazed what the trees teach if you give them a chance. I know I was.

On the cusp of Fall

A smallish woman in the subway at rush hour

Do you perchance remember Emily James Putnam? She whom I put smack dab in the middle of this revised spread of "founders" in one of my very first New School history forays nearly a decade ago?

Well, she was so smack dab in the middle of things that - as an article my New School co-historian J just found - it was Emily James Putnam who published a report on the success of the New School for Social Research after its first full semester for its supporters in the New Republic. It's fascinating for all sorts of reasons, including this tidbit

The fear of the Social refers to a not unfriendly old gentleman who urged me to try to get "social" left out on the ground that "to most minds it means hostility to society" - not that clears things up. Does he fear socialism as a threat to the world depicted in the Society pages? I'm glad they kept the "social," but really: Institute for Social Technology!?!? It's a fair bet that a century ago no important word meant quite what it's taken to mean today...

But the part of Putnam's update that we've found ourselves most charmed by gives you a snapshot of Emily James Putnam in the world:

Emily James Putnam, “A Communication: The New School

of Social Research,” The New Republic February 2, 1920, 294

A neighbor

I hope you dance

When you look back at what "social research" was at the New School for Social Research after the very first efforts faltered, you find the arts everywhere. You've heard us natter on about "Arts as Social Research" because that was in fact an emergent reality at the New School! One shouldn't be surprised to find articles on arts in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, edited out of the New School, such as John Martin's on "Dance" - or to learn that his discussion parallels a course he was teaching at the New School with Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey.

This course ran in Fall 1931 (p39), the same time year the Encyclopaedia volume with Martin's "Dance" article appeared. But when you look at that, you find another thing that's constantly making an appearance:

religion! Martin finds dance all over the life of "primitive" societies, an essential expression of individual and communal experiences. And in these societies (this usage of "primitive" doesn't mean incomplete, let alone less than fully human) it's all religious, too! Martin's history of the dance parallels the histories of religion of secularization theories.

In modern societies, though, dance has accepted a marginal position divorced from the flow of life in the ultimately sterile forms of the courtly ballet and the theater. Yet there is a kind of revival going on, especially in the Protestant-shaped societies of Germany and the United States: the "new movement in the dance" whose "object is not only to develop new theatrical forms but to restore dancing as a social element to its former condition." Where better to learn about this than the New School for Social Research?!

John Martin, "Dance," Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences,

ed. Edwin R. A. Seligman and Alvin Johnson, vol. IV (Macmillan, 1949), 701, 705, 706

New School of feral arts!

Senkrecht von Ohba

I just learned that 大庭健 Takeshi Ohba has died. He was seventy-two.

Takeshi Ohba was a brilliant moral philosopher, a man of great intellectual charisma and true integrity. I last saw him and his wife not quite four years ago in Tokyo, but by that time we had already been friends for several decades. I met Takeshi (I was inclined to call him Ohba sensei but he wanted to be called Takeshi) when he was visiting Princeton for a year and gave a talk about modern Japanese thought (in East Asian Studies, not his host the Philosophy department) and I was a wide-eyed graduate student trying to find a way to go back to Japan as part of my dissertation research. A graduate of the Ethics Department at Tokyo University, Takeshi speedily got people there to answer my letters. I spent 1992-93 at Todai but even more rewarding was getting to know the exciting world of committed moral philosophers around Takeshi. For many year after that, I went to Japan each January, in part to hang out with his 現代倫理学研究会 Contemporary Ethics Research Group and to spend time with Takeshi and his family.

Takeshi was an analytic philosopher, but a convert. He came out of the continental tradition dominant in Japanese philosophy, and had tremendous breadth and depth of knowledge in the history of philosophy - and theology and religion, too, eastern and western. I was thinking of him just a week ago when Karl Barth came up in a conversation and I remembered - physically - Takeshi acting out the Barthian senkrecht von oben! (vertically from above) with his whole body. Takeshi wrote one of the first introductions to analytic philosophy in Japan not because he accepted Anglo Saxon philosophy's narrowed horizons and scientism, but because philosophical discussion in Japan was stymied by the lack of a shared philosophical language. Most philosophers worked on just one figure, whom they read in the original and for whose key terms they had their own working Japanese renderings. This seems to have suited many people just fine, safe in their silos.

One learned that Takeshi Obha wasn't like most Japanese philosophers when people introduced themselves at a seminar. I'm Suzuki, one would say, I do Kant. I'm Kaneda, the next would say, I do Hegel. (Actually it might be abbreviated: I'm Suzuki, Kant, etc.) Ohba was different, he did his own philosophizing. No silo, no special vocabulary, no authority borrowed from some past great: not philology but philosophy! He demanded as much of others, inspiring many younger thinkers too.

What inspired him was a love of argument not for argument's sake but because life, including collective life, demands self-awareness and responsibility. He wrote books (my Japanese was never good enough to read them) with deceptively simple colloquial titles like What is Responsibility? 『「責任」ってなに？』, Who(se) is the Other? 『他者とは誰のことか』, Why am I Me? 『私はどうして私なのか』and What Kind of Power is Authority?『権力とはどんな力か』 along with introductions to analytic philosophy and ethics, including a work called Why Shouldn't We Do Bad Things?『なぜ悪いことをしてはいけないのか―Why be moral?』. He also translated works of Jürgen Moltmann, Ernst Cassirer, Gilbert Harman, Amartya Sen and Niklas Luhmann - what a range! I proofread a piece he wrote in English once, but I fear he is not appreciated here.

I don't generally think of myself as a philosopher, but when I do it is with someone like Takeshi in mind, a public-minded intellectual passionately committed to the power of careful reading, reflection, conceptual clarity and open debate to make the world a safer place for human being - not that I could ever inhabit this role as as he did.

We saw each other many times over many years, in Japan and back in the US. (One of the first things I did when I got to the New School was plan the above symposium so I could invite him here.) He was a great host, loving to cook for people - his seared tuna was especially delicious - even as he claimed that one should not spoil the enjoyment of fine 地酒 jizake with food. The little house he lived in with his wonderfully grounded wife Mizuho had more bookcases nested in it than I imagined possible. I saw his children grow up, find their own voice, marry and have children too. Takeshi was delighted to be a grandfather. I didn't see the last place he lived, an apartment near where their son and grandchildren lived, many books purged but more work still being done.

I think of Takeshi Ohba whenever senkrecht von oben happens (the Christian theological underpinnings of his vocation were something I never quite plumbed). And, a more frequent thing, whenever a kindred concept comes up: the irreducible value, the irreplaceability of each individual. He thought this the core of ethics, and something ill served by the history of Japanese thought and politics. (Western thought took it for granted too quickly, but at least knew what it was.) Takeshi Ohba's life demonstrated the value of this awareness, and our sacred duty to articulate and defend it.

Irreplaceable as all are, may Ohba Takeshi, sensei, friend, rest in peace.

Spirituality of Islamic geometric design

A journalist friend (through my late uncle Don) has been posting pictures from a trip to Iran. He's got a great eye. This shows "repair work on the cupola of the [17th century] Masjed-e Sheikh Lotfollah, the private mosque of the shah on Naqsh-e Jahan square in Isfahan."

Rest in Peace

pic

Can it have been twenty years since Matthew Shepard was murdered? Twenty years that his parents didn't bury him for fear his grave would be desecrated, carrying his ashes with them wherever they went? May he rest in peace, at last, among the better angels of this troubled land.

New School Histories!

And now my co-conspirator J's first article is up, too! Read them here!

Vertical

Extra, extra, read all about it! The first article in our "vertical" series on New School histories in the university's online journal Public Seminar was published today! The formatting leaves a little to be desired (I'd really hoped the whole clipping would be shown, not just a slice), but at least the Thomas Hart Benton room is seen again as New School's own.

Schutzmantelmadonna

Talking to a student about the identification of Guanyin and Jesus in Chinese American Catholic Gene Luen Yang's Boxers and Saints the other day, I was reminded somehow of a statue I always loved in the Stephansdom in Vienna, of the Virgin Mary protecting all kinds of people under her cloak. The web helped me find a nice image, though not to learn more about the particular statue. (But the cathedral apparently has three representations of the Schutzmantelmadonna!). Lovely!

Scrapbook Motherwell

The first time we assigned the New School publicity scrapbooks (digitized, of course) to students to peruse, one of my students - a communications design major - praised them for their composition. It's hard not to see them as constructed with an intention beyond including as many clipping as possible (since pay was per clipping) in as few pages as possible, and to read them like a story is unfolding - perhaps a detective story, where clues and connections are revealed in apparently accidental ways to the truly attentive. Odd juxtapositions, crumbling originals and the shadows of clippings long lost make the mystery that much more exciting to follow. And sometimes, as for this part of a page from the Dramatic Workshop scrapbooks (I.59), they just look like art!

Religious Studies

In Theorizing Religion today, trying to refer back to our Cone discussion, engage students' papers on the problematic discourse of "world religions," and set the stage for Hume's Natural History of Religion, I tried something new. Several things. Not sure they worked quite.

From the Cone discussion I had us explore the differences between theology and religious studies on the question of who's Christian. Is it enough to take people's self-ascription for it? Cone, like most theologians, is making normative claims about who's really Christian - as is his job, as a theologian. Building on his understanding of the Gospel he can reject the self-ascription of white supremacist Christians. (Some of them would, no doubt, return the favor.) Politically, personally, religiously I want to draw the line where Cone does - but can I as a scholar? I will inevitably need to make some sort of claims about what makes someone an X, but I can't base it in theology, though some theological categories and distinctions will inevitably be used. Difficult. In any case, I should let my little Jonathan Z. Smith daemon nag me every time I exclude something or someone from my field of study. Am I not just making things easy for myself by ignoring the hard cases?

Of course, there are more options than "Christians" and "scholars of religion" defining and interpreting "Christians." Christians have ways of understanding other religious traditions, too - and, if they're operating as theologians, legitimately so. That's a whole other kind of study of religions! Could you imagine, I asked the class, a Buddhist religious studies? An Islamic one? My Islamic example was al-Shahrastani, my Buddhist David Loy, though students imagined others - a prophet for each society, bodhisattvas manifesting in all sorts of traditions.

The segue to Hume was his resolute rejection of the biblical study of religions which asserts that the first human beings were monotheists (as is revealed to us in Genesis), and that the story since then (also narrated in Scripture) has been a sad tale of idolatry and superstition leading generations to lose sight of that truth, until God speaks again to call his people back to the truth, which they or their progeny proceed to lose sight of... Hume's view that polytheism arose organically from primitive human ignorance and fear, eventually building up into a sort of monotheism before falling back into polytheism, knocks the biblical view on its side, the wheels still spinning but going nowhere.

What I was getting at, a little fumblingly, was that there is no one stance for "religious studies," detached from views of the human story (or absence of story), theological or otherwise. I might have invoke my mantra - that religious studies is the discipline that reminds us there is no consensus on the real. We can't just study religion (or anything else) without some assumptions about what we're studying. How can we determine what's religious, or who's Christian then? With fear and trembling. And awareness of the different accounts to which human religious history lends itself. We can start with self-ascription, including our own. What kind of study of religions are we committed to?

One might capitalize here on the vagueness of the name "religious studies" (not present in Religiouswissenschaft but I think quite present in sciences religieuses). Is it studies (of various sorts) of religion? Or is it religiously-informed studies of something - religion, even!?

Tom Toles...

Kavagnawing

Snapshots from a dark day.

One friend responded: If he were that person we would not be in it.

Another: Don't retreat to fantasyland. Hit the phones, hit your checkbook and VOTE. And organize, write, it's still got to be all out.

Another: Fantasies can shine light on the gap between our professed values and those that dominate present life. Not a retreat but a sharpening of focus.

And one more: Those are much nicer than my fantasies.

I am thankful for friends. I think we'll need all these modes of response and engagement to prevail over the unscrupulousness of those who feel so entitled to rule that they think they can bend the rules to get there.

Autumn left its calling cards today...

Voices of my city

Had the chance today to spend some more time in the exhibition my friend J has curated, "Voice of My City: Jerome Robbins and New York," at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. It's a remarkable selection of documents from a remarkable life, including videos of dance (Robbins, too) and also home videos shot by Robbins himself, inviting us to learn to see the city the way he did. Organizing the show around New York as Robbins' muse is effective as tribute both to a great choreographer and to the city he set in motion, letting us see both with new eyes. I can't do it justice with a handful of images - luckily it's up through next March! (Above are drawings of Robbins' to Bach's Goldberg Variations, when he'd snapped an achilles' tendon and couldn't dance in late 1969.)

What took me up to Lincoln Center was in fact opera - I bought tickets for when my Japanese friend H arrives end of next month (Pêcheurs des Perles, Traviata) - and opera awaited at the end of the day too, a different experience of the voice of this city. It was the "Mile-Long Opera," a work conceived by the architects of the High Line, which brought together poets Claudia Rankine and Ann Carson, composer Peter Lang, and one thousand singers from choirs from across the five boroughs to offer "A Biography of 7 O'Clock." Tickets were scooped up quickly - I got ours five minutes after they became available, when most had already been claimed - but you can experience it vicariously here.


It too defies summary, an immersive experience of walking past singers, their faces variously illuminated, singing or speaking, generally softly, a few times in a sort of chorus. The words, distilled from interviews with New Yorkers, rippled and repeated, reappearing in a new voice to a new face, close enough that eye contact was hard to avoid... and one didn't want to avoid it. A sometimes overwhelming intimacy characterized the experience, a sense of what it would be like if we could truly connect with all the people we encounter, trust them with ourselves. A recurrent refrain, heard always across several singers:

No, we don't talk but people get to know each

other just by walking past each other all the time

On a warm night after rain in the already surreal environs of the High Line and the futuristic city growing around it, it was deeply dreamlike. It took about ninety minutes, moving slowly but steadily with the crowd, and at the end we received the program, with the whole text. I'd ambiently picked up much of it - enough of it, it turns out! - except for the final section (left), ironically rendered inaudible by a helicopter landing by the river.

Who's Christian?

I haven't posted much about this year's iteration of "Theorizing Religion" yet. That's partly because the class hasn't met that many times yet - what with various holidays, we saw each each other only once a week for weeks 2-5 of the semester. This week (yes, this is already week 6!) we're finally back to the twice weekly rhythm of a Lang class.

These past weeks have not been without learning, though! Each student is now an alumnus of one of the HDS World Religions and their Scriptures MOOCS, Islam or Buddhism, and has worked with fellow students in that MOOC to share what they've learned with the rest of the class. Over the last week they've also met in small groups, bringing Buddhist MOOCers and Islam MOOCers together to generate comparative questions. All this has been braided together with a series of powerful theoretical pieces - Jonathan Z. Smith on the speciousness of the cult/religion definition, Saba Mahmood on problems with the assumption that secularism is reasonable while religion is emotional, Whitney Bauman on the need to have a definition of religion - perhaps several - as one proceeds, and Tomoko Masuzawa on the distortions of Buddhism and Islam by western "World Religions" discourse in the 19th century. I'm hoping these theoretical questions will have had a new kind of purchase encountered in the throes of a course providing more information about a particular tradition than anyone in the class imagined there was to know.

Today we read selections from black liberation theologian James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, part (along with Mahmood and Masuzawa) of my effort to bring awareness and critiques of white supremacy in religious thinking into our discussion. I was lucky that a young scholar of black religion who's just arrived as a Faculty Fellow at NYU - working on Cone! - came to the class to help us understand. As we proceeded we realized that this was not only the first black theology the class had encountered, but the first Christian theology of any kind. This made for more questions, on more scales, than we could deal with in the hour that our visitor was able to spend with us, but all for the good. One of the reasons I placed the Cone reading right after the completion of the MOOCs was as a first installment of a complicating engagement with Christianity, rendered misleadingly monolithic by both comparative scholarship and general ignorance.

In the traditions Cone raised up, we encountered forms of Christianity none in the class had been exposed to - not just black liberationist but bluesy and Cross-centered. We also faced the question, raised from the start by Cone's work, whether many white Christians are really Christian at all. What had those who participated in lynching or implicitly accepted it - didn't see that Christ was being recrucified across the nation - understood of the message of the Cross? Perhaps most "Christians" are not Christian at all.

The theoretical questions arising here were focused around a formula we'd first encountered in Bauman, whose discussion of definitions of religion is called "Religion: What it is, who gets to decide, and why it matters." Last week I used that structure to engage Masuzawa's challenge: What are world religions, who gets to decide, and why it matters. On the board today I wrote: What is Christianity, who gets to decide and why it matters. I'd been planning to use this as a moment to distinguish the roles of theologians and scholars. It's appropriate, even necessary, for a Christian to decide, but not for a scholar, whose work is not normative in that way but descriptive. Much though I'd personally like to write off folks like those who (this was the example I gave) created and are watching the "Trump Prophecy" documentary as Christians, as a scholar I can't just ignore them (the lesson we learned from Smith), nor even that they would dismiss Cone as non-Christian!

In the event, we got as far as saying that the MOOCs did a commendable job of presenting their "world religions" as not only internally diverse but aware of and in various ways committed to that internal diversity, but that talking about diversity is inevitably homogenizing. Few of the people discussed in the MOOCs were interested in the big umbrella of the world religion. Most are not only unaware of the extent of "internal diversity" but would probably dismiss much of it as, well, not Buddhist, not Muslim. If the religions are families, they are fractious riven families, as full of distrust and condemnation for what scholars see as their co-religionists as for those in "other" religions. Or is that a projection, too, generalizing from the history of Christianity?

Evangelist of beauty

It was time to acknowledge the biggest gap in our New School story today - Parsons School of Design, and the man it was posthumously named after. Frank Alvah Parsons (1866-1930) took over the New York School of Art (originally named after its founder William Merritt Chase), renaming it New York School of Fine and Applied Art as he added path-breaking departments in interior design, costume and advertising. By the 1920s the school was informally known as the Parsons school - a fact acknowledged in catalogs starting in 1928. A dozen years after Parsons passed away, the school was renamed in his honor by his successor (and, it seems, partner) William Odom. What do we know about this man, endowed by nature with a buoyant disposition and an engaging personality, as an obituarist wrote, and so singularly fitted to preach the gospel of beauty to a people hitherto indifferent to the arts?

Our reading was an address Parsons delivered in 1911 at the Annual Convention of the American Federation of the Arts, entitled "Art in Advertising." It's a more interesting, and stranger, argument than you might expect. Advertising, too, can be art - we must stop supposing art is only pictorial, only pictures, only decorative - and it is art when it achieves both fitness and beauty. So far so good. But advertising that is good art is also good advertising, helping accomplish the aims of every advertisement: seizing and holding a viewer's attention, convincing them of the product's merit and inducing in them a desire to acquire it. Fair enough. But how does it do that, and is it really more likely to do that when it is also art? Here the argument gets a little gauzy. Art moves us because the harmonious consistency of an object resonates with an inner harmonious consistency in the viewer, defining a sort of virtuous circle of aesthetic appreciation and consumption. Ideally, aesthetically sensitive citizens would be moved (only) by artistically meritorious advertisements (only) for products themselves aesthetically fine, the acquisition of which would in turn reinforce the citizens' characters and those of all exposed to their tasteful possessions.

for the finest art known to men is the art of right living. To live right one must think right. Let us begin, then, to think in terms of fitness and beauty from the foundation up, then will these qualities appear in our work and the public will grow with us.

How much the civic part is just what you'd say at a national convention I need to find out, and whether the concerns about harmony and fitness are reactionary or potentially progressive. Parsons gave a lot of talks and published a lot of books, as well as running what became a very successful school or art and design. Lots to read!

(Top image, c. 1925, from New School Archives; this credo is from the start of Parsons' Principles of Advertising Arrangement, 1912)

Crime Scene

 Something bad happened to a tree along West 10th Street, but what?

Earthly pleasures

I went back to "Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination" at the Met Fifth Avenue this morning, armed with insider scoops on the aims and curation of the exhibit. I carefully followed the prescribed route and noticed works I had missed last time I came. Yes there are 
extraordinary pieces beautifully displayed, always in some sort of conversation with the glorious "artworks" of the Byzantine and Medieval Galleries, but I still don't quite get it. Yves Saint Laurent dressing the Virgin of El Rocio (above) is one thing. Coco Chanel recreating a Byzantine pendant cross she received as a gift is another (left). But another again is its further circulation as described in the caption:  

Just as pendant crosses were one of the most persistent forms of jewelry in Byzantium, serving as a marker of the wearer's faith, Chanel's versions were highly sought after by her clients, worn as a sign of loyalty to her particular brand of modernism.

Say whay? Sillier still is the "procession" of figures in flowing black, crimson and white (= priest, cardinal, pope, get it?), though the spectacular garments are as lascivious as their models in the "ecclesiastical fashion show" of Fellini's "Roma," on view nearby.

Service, devotion, homage, lampoon, travesty, sacrilege - all these have their place in the "Catholic imagination," and there's a showy haute couture in luxury devotional objects, as in this dance of death rosary. But the gothic and rather sadomasochistic works next to it surely lack

even the pretense of depth. What are they doing in a "sacristy"? There were pieces I liked - like the 1950s "Pretino" dress - but in general the show skims surfaces, gesturing at decadence but turning away in feigned chasteness (or gesturing at chastity but turning away in feigned decadence). There's surely a lot one might do with the queer Christianities at play here, from the homosocial worlds of celibate communities and the variously sordid things that happen beneath the robes of men in dresses to fantasies of and about Catholic schoolgirls and the sacerdotal dreams of designers.