The body transformed

One of the highlights of the Met's rather precious show "Jewelry: The Body Transformed" is a 19th century golden ear ornament from the Indonesian island of Sumba. The motif? Head hunters on the prowl.

It comes around

A book of gorgeous photographs chronicling our 2016 pilgrimage has just been published, Kailash Yatra: A Long Walk to Mt. Kailas through Humla. There's one picture where you can see me (and my lamented 
backpack, too!). And there's an abridged version of the talk I gave as part of our panel presentation at the ISSRNC conference, about how to encounter the mountain without "world religions" getting in the way.

Grasping

Exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism diagramming, 2018 edition (compare 2012 and last year), with Karl Barth raining on our picnic! Maybe "religion" of all sorts is - as the Barth quote spaced unobtrusively along top and right edge of the board suggests - Unglaube, unbelief, faithlessness? Religion is an umbrella that shelters us from the truth of revelation, and even Christianity only gets it right to the extent (and only as long as) water dripping through a cross-shaped tear in the umbrella disturbs our various efforts to stay dry...?!

Last stand

Just a week ago...

Hilma!

This was the first of Hilma af Klint's 1907 Paintings for the Temple to transfix my friend J and me at the Guggenheim today. At the behest of spirits who spoke to a group of five women of whom she was one, the classically trained and gifted af Klint produced strange and stirring series of images which scoop the "fathers of abstraction." She'd insisted they not be shown for a quarter century after her death and it took even longer for them to be rediscovered. They offer, the curators note, "a rare opportunity to rethink art history." They're also trippy! The giant paintings which start the show depict the stages of the life cycle (many of her works are in series or cycles, offering journeys of evolution and transformation); the one above is the last of those showing adulthood.

Subway blues

The MTA has a new app which gives you house seats for the tragedy.

Fish tale

Long before the turducken (is that still a thing?) Jonah was swallowed by a trio of fish, attested by this mosaic recently excavated at Huqoq.

Change of season

The never get through school

When the New School was but half a century old... (Reprinted here)

Prospect Park

Ready to go

With a little sigh, the CamelBak backpack which has been my constant companion for four years (including the year in China and a Kailas circuit!) gave notice today. Its edges have been fraying for some time, but the tear in the shoulder strap makes it clear that the end is near. Thanks for bearing with me.

Foliage

 The Lang courtyard trees seen from my office window and vice versa

Saber-rattiling Times

The Times has kicked off a massive series of articles under the scary name China Rules: How China Became a Superpower which reminded me - somehow I forgot - that they have never covered China as anything but a threat. When I was living there, the Times coverage was an important balance to the dearth of news (along with the Guardian, Los Angeles Times and South China Morning Post) but on its own it is terribly unbalanced. This series seems recklessly so, playing into a zero-sum understanding of US-Chinese relations the writers claim is the only thing on which Americans of left and right now agree. I've read the headliner "The Land that Failed to Fail," and its substories, appearing one a day all this week, "The American Dream Is Alive. In China," "How China Took Over Your TV," "How China Made Its Own Internet," How China Is Rewriting Its Own Script" and "The World, Built By China." Much more is on the wayover the next four weeks, culminating in the ominous "The Road to Confrontation," which should break about the week before Christmas. Indeed, the whole series seems to be describing a road to confrontation.

The double negative of "The Land That Failed To Fail" describes the problems with the project pretty well. The story is that China has found ways to succeed which Americans didn't know existed, but the storyline never gets far beyond the aggrieved negative. I'm as disheartened as anyone at the growth of the oppressive Chinese surveillance state, angered at industrial espionage and horrified at the return of "re-education" camps in Xinjiang. But China's amazing turnaround since the 1980s, lifting more people from poverty than any society in history, happened before - and is arguably being slowed by - the recent crackdowns. The articles note the shift but wind up replicating the narrative of Xi's Chinese Dream, with a monolithic China, a monolithic Chinese Communism, and a single leader at the helm of a monolithic party and state. A few things missing from the story so far:

diversity within China

sources of Chinese vitality that are neither communist not capitalist

what we might learn from China.

And, relatedly, ways we might need to rethink our own position: by what right do we claim to be the hegemon of the "Indo-Pacific"? And didn't the American Dream die on our watch, as we allowed social mobility to be undermined by ever greater inequality? (Not long ago the story was that even Britain has greater social mobility than we do, a story of domestic social and political failure of which China was no part.) As China has "failed to fail," we have failed to succeed. A story like this lets us blame our own failings on China, and, conceding little that the two societies might learn from each other, makes confrontation seem inevitable.

Fly away

Twitter, I gather, is where it's at. Actually, someone told me that nine years ago and I set up an account ... then never returned to it. I'm back, since this is one of the main way things like our Public Seminar posts are likely to circulate. Arts as social research tweeted and retweeted!

Neighbors

To get off our island from time to time, we've been renting a car and driving to inviting-looking mainland B&Bs we scope out online. This weekend we went to Connecticut. This completes an eight-state sweep which has taken us to New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Vermont - and of course Upstate NY and Long Island. (The shells were found on Hammonasset Beach on Long Island Sound.)

Hammonasett Beach

Our bubble

While nearby 12th St showed the devastation which a heavy sticky snow can wreak on trees still in full leaf, the Lang courtyard trees are fine.

First snow

By any means

The latest in our contributions to the Public Seminar "vertical" on New School Histories is out, a story you've seen many a time in this blog but meeting the wider public for the first time today! I'm a little miffed that an editor found a zingier title than my "Arts as Social Research," but she's internet savvier than I am. She's updated Public Seminar's byline,

too, you'll notice. How much pithier is Informing debate by any means necessary than the shapeless run-on predecessor open, critical, challenging, confronting the pressing issues of the day and fundamental problems of the human condition, expanding the project of the New School for Social Research! Best of all, she's a religious studies major.

Independent College of Political Science

The New School was concocted in the office of the New Republic but The Nation was kept abreast of the "New Educational Adventure" too:

The Nation Vol. 106, No. 2758 (May 11, 1918): 559-60, 560

This piece, called “An Independent College of Political Science" and probably by James Harvey Robinson, adds to the mystery of how we ended up with the quixotic name New School for Social Research. In the air as the founders discussed it evidently were "Independent School of Social Science" (in the original proposal), "Institute of Social Technology" (favored by Emily James Putnam), "School of Social Research" (Herbert Croly) and this "College of Political Science" which aspires to becoming a "genuine university of social science." All over the place!

Religious studies scriptures

In this year's iteration of "Theorizing Religion" I haven't just included the MOOCs again and added readings which speak to recrudescent imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (to borrow bell hooks' phrase) but also brought back some of the old texts I put aside last year. You know, the eighteenth century guys: David Hume and Friedrich Schleiermacher! I thought a mini-lecture was enough since who really wants to slog through a text so obviously written for a different time?

Well, it turns out, we do. My academic fellow conducted a midterm survey of the class and found that these gnarly old texts were particularly appreciated. Unlike some of the other classic writers whom students have heard but never read before my class (Marx, Weber, Freud) these aren't people they'd heard of before. Nor is the eighteenth century a place they're been to, let alone what preceded it. The curriculum we offer them at this school is pretty relentlessly presentist; even the early twentieth century is hazy. What a pleasure to be offering them some sense of historical depth, distance, perspective.

The image above is of an artifact of Theorizing Religion past - 2010, when we had a particularly close cohort of majors whom I invited over for a party each semester. One proposed we have a "hat party" so I fashioned this "religious studies hat" of papier mâché, inspired by the cluster of heads atop a statue of the bodhisattva Kuanyin.

Armistice

At 11 this morning, church bells around the city rang in remembrance of the end of World War 1 one hundred years ago. At least I think they did - we were caught in one of the subway snafus which are rapidly becoming the norm on weekends. No matter. I knew that the Church of the Ascension, among others, was tolling the bell, and imagined its sound and that of other bells, echoing back and forth along the Avenue (a soundscape I associate with Europe). Perhaps it's even better I was stuck underground, as the reaction of people in the streets might have depressed me. Bells for what? Oh, that? Ancient history.

Europe has been reliving the "Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red" anniversaries on a daily rhythm these last four years. Some in the US marked the 150 year anniversary of the Civil War with a similar daily beat, so it's not that a century is too long ago to remember even for this historically rootless society. But Civil War aside, our wars tend to soak other lands with blood, so we have the luxury of remembering veterans but not the civilians who've been the main victims of 20th century wars.

Or perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps we're aware of being awash once again in history's blood-rimmed tide. Maybe, had I been on street level when the bells tolled, I'd have found more than surprise and indifference.

Beach sculpture

 

 

We found the wind artist busily scraping away on Rockaway Beach.

Cold snap

Dusting off

I had a chance to take my "Dust and Ashes in the Anthropocene" talk for another spin today. It was perfect timing, as the Sophomore Tutorial ended last week, and I have to start thinking about next semester's classes, one of which is called "Religion and the Anthropocene." My hosts were an almost secret dinner society on the Upper West Side. The audience of eight, including sociologists of New York religion, a pair of retired university professors, and a few people from less well-known seminaries, turned out to be the perfect size for a great discussion.

The most interesting question was whether my "conjectural future exegesis" was really eisegesis - and if that was a problem: "fifty years ago I would have said it was," the questioner observed. Does the Anthropocene change the rules? I qualified that when new questions were put to a text which enabled us to make sense of things in it which didn't make sense before, that seemed like exegesis to me. But at least one of the things I mentioned in my talk - Deborah Bird Roses' interpolating a stray dog into the scene of Job's abandonment, changing everything - was clearly adding to the text!

In fact my argument, closer in approach to the sociologists than to the theologians, was never really about "the meaning of the text" so much as the meaning different people make of the text. I certainly have ideas about the "meaning of the text," and can poke holes in many other interpretations, but I still don't feel quite qualified simply to interpret the text. Interpreting it for the Anthropocene I can perhaps do. But do I really dare say that Job now calls us to ecological conversion, to ask the beasts and learn from the trees, to make kin with the non-human world? Or is it the moment calling, with old texts falling in line or destined to fall by the wayside?

Eisegesis or exegesis - do we have time for the distinction any more?

Biggest crowd he's seen since he moved to the neighborhood in 2001,

said the man ahead of me in the scanning queue. Despite heavy rain.