Prosit!

The Met's 2018 New York in Art Engagement Book ends with Thomas Hart Benton's "America Today" murals, passing the torch to the New School for our centennial year! Let's hope there's much else to celebrate, too.

Au revoir Del Mar

In the Torrey Pines Extension at day's end yesterday, a California Oxalis.

Venite adoremus

Nativity 2018

Desert getaway

Dried bloom of Nolina Parryi (wolfii) at Joshua Tree National Park,

Dale Chihuly's "End of the Day #2" (1996) at Palm Springs Museum of Art

Road trip!

Silent night

Last light

Border

One more photo from yesterday's Torrey Pines trek, evoking

the way the beach functions as a borderlands of earth and sky.

The gallery at Torrey Pines never disappoints

 

 

 

Jackpot

Near unprecedented sand dollar trove at the Del Mar Beach!

Manhattan squat

JetBlue 89 hung left instead of right on its loop out of JFK today...

The Pacific calls

RItual ending

The final class session of "Theorizing Religion" is devoted to final reflections - students each get a chance to share theirs, and I surprise them by telling them I've done one as well. This is becoming something a ritual for me, since I've taught some version of this course pretty much every year since I started teaching. I didn't point out that that is longer than many of them have been around! But, in response to a question from one student, I did reflect a little on how things have changed. There was a time when most of the students believed the secularization thesis - that religion was on the way out. Then there was a time when students couldn't understand how anyone could ever have thought religion wouldn't be here, for better or for worse. This year's class was a mix of the two - though their responses suggested that each had found their assumptions challenged. I must still be doing something right!

Other things have changed about the course too, like the inclusion of the MOOCs as a way of acknowledging students ignorance of religious traditions, and discussions of religious freedom in American law which put the "what is religion and who decides?" questions in a stark new light. But something else emerged in this year's iteration, a better way of folding "lived religion" into a theory of religion course. After lots of reading and discussion on religion and "world religions," we turned to "lived religion" as a recognition that religion is lived differently by different people, usually in ways which the systematizers and centralizers of traditions deplore. This resonates with the "DIY religion" approach Winnifred Fallers Sullivan has described as the American way in religion, intuitively right for our class. But we weren't finished: the next section of the course introduced the masters of suspicion and was centered on the question "do religious people know what they're doing?"

I think I'll keep this for next time, as it's uncomfortable in all the right ways (for me too). We'd like to think that people know what's best for themselves - the "I'm okay, you're okay" relativism which I've long seen as students' decent if flabby response to religious diversity (not to mention the premise of a "self-designed" college curriculum!). But in the real world, people are challenging others' self-understandings all the time. And not just psychologists, sociologists and the like. Consciousness raisers and social critics more generally are doing that, too, and missionaries for various faiths and unfaiths. Friends, too! Next time I want to play up the theological (in the broad sense - not just Christian) challenge. We came close to it a few times this year in discussion of "white Evangelicals," most explicitly in James Cone's claim that many white Americans' faith wasn't actually Christianity at all. We didn't do full justice to the complement later in the course, Karl Barth's argument that "religion" in all its forms is a form of faithlessness. Next time? Maybe with a Buddhist complement?

I imagine next year's reflection roundup will be enough like its predecessors. Someone will say they still haven't arrived at a definition of religion, and another will say there's value in the many different ones we encountered, and someone will wonder if this isn't true of all categories. Perhaps, as again this year, someone will opine that, in fact, everything that exists just is, beyond definition. Several will say they came in with strong views about religion and religious people and that these have been tempered by something like respect; today someone said ours has been the most "compassionate" space for discussion of religion she's ever been in. That made me happy. And another, whose response said your method of teaching has ... help[ed] me to approach the topic of religion completely unbiased and neutral, open to everything, while also accepting and being conscious of my biases and opinions and went on to say I want to know more words, I want to know more perspectives, and I want to use those new words to say exactly what I mean when I respond to those perspectives. Bingo!

Goodness

Like a movie about the present made in the past, from the future.

Winter colors

December's BBG only seems drab and colorless until you look closer...
Some of these red leaves were among the first to turn, still holding out!
Witch hazel! And among the reeds and golden berries: a mockingbird!

Library virtuoso

The newest installment in the New School Histories vertical appeared today, an account of the quite different legacies of classical music teaching at the New School and at the Mannes School of Music, which merged in 1989. It's by musicologist Sally Bick, who is ideally positioned to tell this story as she has not only an authority on music in the interwar period but was once a performer, and is now a scholar:

This disciplinary divide is rarely understood by the public, let alone the educational institutions that house music programs. I am often reminded of this confusion when, for example, I’m asked what I do for a living. My answer, “I’m a musicologist,” is invariably followed by the immediate question, “What instrument do you play?” At this juncture, I usually stop to allow a rhetorical moment of contemplation and then answer, “I play the library.” 

It's a great piece, and suggests ways in which the New School and Mannes, now together, have bridged this divide. It also helps us establish the project of the vertical, both in terms of its scope (all parts of the New School family, including the pre-New School years of units later grafted on to the New School tree, are included) and its authorship (Bick teaches in Canada, and was never a New Schooler).

Hope beyond hope

Two new faculty members at The New School are anthropocene specialists. We all recently got together and I listened in as the two of them traded stories of their courses, getting some pointers for my own upcoming class. Managing hope and despair is clearly going to be central - as if one could. One colleague described her surprise when students, in an assignment late in her course which asked them to imagine some aspect of the world in 50 years, went full dystopia. The other told us his courses often lead students to an existential crisis about a third of the way in - many arrive unfamiliar with the realities of climate change, biodiversity loss and political failure - and then builds toward an almost optimistic position. Disruption and contingency are places for creativity and resilience. Dwelling in the despair is a sign of privilege; we must learn from the indigenous and dispossessed of the world, who have been living with crisis - Kyle White says in a sci-fi world - for centuries.

Religious experts

In the propenultimate meeting of "Theorizing Religion" - which is really the last real class, as Monday will be given over to reflections, and Tuesday is an optional museum exhibition visit - we talked about "religious experts."

The assigned reading was the preface to the new edition of Winnifred Fallers Sullivan's The Impossibility of Religious Freedom, which provides an update on the last decade's religious freedom legislation and jurisprudence. It also explains why Sullivan, whose frustrating experience as a "religious expert" in a court of law was the topic of the original book, no longer agrees to serve this role.

Scholars of religion should not be testifying in free exercise and establishment clause cases (=all First Amendment religious freedom cases). We are not doing what the Federal Rules of Evidence requires of experts. We are not "helping the trier of fact." What we are doing is telling people that they don't understand their own religion. That is un-American. It is for the courts and legislatures, at the direction of the people, to sort out what religion means for law. (xxv)

"Un-American"! Much of what scholars of religion do - whether critical, comparative or constructive - is precisely, well, adding to people's understanding of themselves... if there's no place for that in the courts, what place is there for it in the broader culture? The class was (commendably) reluctant to defend "telling people that they don't understand their own religion" - we'd rather let a hundred flowers bloom, whether we think them real flowers or illusions. While queasy about the political process, we're sympathetic to Sullivan's deference in declining the role of "religious expert."

What is the place for religious studies, then? There followed a vigorous discussion of the place of education more broadly, as it impinges on people's understanding of religion or not, starting in a case Sullivan describes about the "stealth religion" of "intelligent design" (which only one member of the class had heard of) and ending with my singing the praises of Nel Noddings' Educating for intelligent belief and unbelief, most of whose examples come from Noddings' experience as a grade school mathematics teacher. Perhaps philosophical, existential, spiritual questions arise in all areas of inquiry if we let them - an unnerving prospect in many ways. Who "lets," and how?

We ended with a discussion of an Op-Ed in today's Times by Ross Douthat called "The Return of Paganism," which seems to be a sympathetic account of changes in the sociology of American religiosity consonant with things we've been discussing. Douthat discusses a new theological book which analyzes the re-emergence of an old "religious conception, which was half-buried (though never fully so) by the rise of Christianity":

that divinity is fundamentally inside the world rather than outside it, that God or the gods or Being are ultimately part of nature rather than an external creator, and that meaning and morality and metaphysical experience are to be sought in a fuller communion with the immanent world rather than a leap toward the transcendent.

Douthat follows the author in calling it "paganism."

This paganism is not materialist or atheistic; it allows for belief in spiritual and supernatural realities. It even accepts the possibility of an afterlife. But it is deliberately agnostic about final things, what awaits beyond the shores of this world, and it is skeptical of the idea that there exists some ascetic, world-denying moral standard to which we should aspire. Instead, it sees the purpose of religion and spirituality as more therapeutic, a means of seeking harmony with nature and happiness in the everyday — while unlike atheism, it insists that this everyday is divinely endowed and shaped, meaningful and not random, a place where we can truly hope to be at home.

This pretty well describes the religious leanings of many in our class, and I was half-hoping students would welcome it. But while Douthat's piece mentions and is accompanied by photos of contemporary "Neo-Pagans," the piece is really trying to reinscribe an ancient Christian theological understanding of paganism as the blindness from which Christ and the Church saved us. At work in Douthat's argument is a retrograde understanding of America as Christian, and a narrow range of civilizational alternatives which would appeal only to a reactionary eurocentric convert Catholic - Christian, heretical and pagan.

This is conservative theology, not just "opinion." The piece even ends with a hyperlink suggesting these new religious forms are not harmless New Age but consort unwittingly with sinister forces: demons! The reference is hidden in a hyperlink, but is there for those with eyes to see. Theological dog whistles in the ostensibly secular New York Times! Wasn't this what so appalled Jonathan Z. Smith in our first class reading, parsing a Times Op-Ed by Billy Graham blithely asserting that Jim Jones was demonic as though this were a category all agreed on?

Talk about telling people they don't understand their own religion! And by what right? Don't we, students of Theorizing Religion, want to claim from the pundits the mantle of the "religious expert" to call this out?

Centuries past

Here's a blast from the past - a call for applications for fellowships at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfen- büttel! I was there 21 years ago (!) when I fancied myself a sort of dix-huitièmiste. I was working on the contexts for Kant's "anthropology," especially the theory of the temperaments. This was a slight mismatch - I have a way of always being a little out of step wherever I go - as HAB is the part of the German National Library devoted to the 17th century! No worries, Göttingen, the 18th century hub, was a pleasant local train ride away. And in Wolfenbüttel I got to consort with the spirit of Leibniz, who established the library. But this ad takes me back to the main reading room, which turns out to be a marvelous space for concerts, the velum of the old book covers creating a warm almost buzzing resonance I think I'm still remembering. Highlight was a recital by Pieter Wispelwey of Bach's suites for solo violoncello. I can feel it still, across the centuries.

O holy night

It's Advent! In fact, we're two weeks in already. To get in the spirit, a friend invited us to a performance of Olivier Messiaen's "Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant Jésu"(1944), a monumental suite of madly dissonant pieces for piano. The event organizer spread the twenty pieces among five pianists, which was interesting but added a perhaps unneeded texture - and made for a three hour concert! Also an addition which may or may not have detracted from the integrity of the experience were projections of art works, one for each piece. Still, it was wonderful to spend time with Wassily Kandinsky's "In Blue," and to experience it together with the delirious tenth piece, "Regard de l'Esprit de joie."

Tip of day

Here's hoping he doesn't take us all down with him.

Winter's coming

Silent no longer!

The New School Histories vertical's latest post went up Tuesday - our first piece by a guest contributor. Appropriately it's the university archivist, Wendy Scheir, who offers the unexpectedly gripping tale of how the New School was an archive in itself long before it came an archive for itself. Along the way she confronts the myth that a commitment to the new requires a distancing from one's own past.

The delightfully witty image she picked for the headline has alas been chopped by Public Seminar's template. Here's the whole thing.

Graue Eminenz

At an event for alums this evening, I reconnected with one of my first students at Lang. I've seen him recently, but since the last time he's grown a beard - and it's touched with grey! I have Lang ex-students going grey?! On the other hand, it was great to hear him describe what he remembered of studying with me. I assigned tough primary texts, but provided enough context that students were confident interpreting them - and felt they were entering the great conversation. That is what I was trying to do - how exciting to hear it so compellingly described. And to hear that it lives on, informing his own practice as a teacher of school teachers.

Eggheads

Throughout the 70s and 80s, the New School's telephone book-thick course catalogs sported striking artistic covers. Fall 1973's cover, by R. O. Blechman and spilling into the first page, may be the sweetest.

The campus that wasn't

We like to say that the merger between Parsons and the New School was something neither party would ever have expected, and that is certainly true. The merger's impact took a long time to be felt, too, especially on the New School end. Now it seems destined, even visionary. Our imagination of the pasts of both schools is distorted by retrospect.

Reconstructing where the two schools thought they were heading at the time is a fun challenge. Here's an image of a New School future that wasn't: replacing the buildings between the New School and Sixth Avenue with a Center for Creative and Performing Arts (!), with a dedicated home for the Center for New York City Affairs planned, too!

分楽学び熟

An unexpected pleasure - and unexpected grief. My friend H is visiting from Japan, and in her work managing an arts center has got to know Kanya Yoshida, a bunraku (puppet theater) master who sometimes gives performance- demonstrations of the craft. He was in NY this week for a first such presentation, and we scored tickets!

Kanya and the two men with whom he works to animate a puppet (since the early 19th century three puppeteers per puppet has become the norm) opened the evening with Sambaso, a dance, performed by a male puppet at the start of every performance (sometimes before the audience comes) as a sort of blessing of the stage. The usual barrier which obscures the puppeteers' feet was removed so we could see the puppet hovering in mid air, running, gesticulating, prostrating, dancing. Then Kanya showed us how it was done, how each part of the puppet is moved - assembling it bit by bit, starting with just the head - and, more interestingly, how the puppeteers wordlessly communicate with each other to make the puppet move as one, an art that takes decades to master. The demonstration first took apart some of the movements of the male puppet's dance we'd seen, then introduced a female figure, whose movements were more fluid and eloquent,

The climax of the evening was the performance of a scene ("Fire Lookout Tower") from the famous Bunraku play Datemusume no koi no higanoko, where the female doll played a grocer's daughter who gives her life to save her lover's by sounding a false fire alarm. This is so the city gates will be opened and her lover be able to retrieve a lost sword for whose disappearance he's supposed to kill himself the next morning, but the pathos comes from her knowledge that sounding a false alarm is a capital offense. He will live but she will be burnt at the stake - but living on without him is unimaginable.

An absurd story, but just the kind of celebration of the nobility of ordinary people bunraku is about. The play was in fact based on a true story, we learned (a genre called "overnight pickles"!). A grocer's daughter's shop burnt down and she found refuge at a temple, where she fell in love with a page; when the shop was rebuilt she set the shop ablaze again to be able to be with him. But somehow everything came together, the artifice of the dolls, the symbiosis of puppet and the puppeteers, literally joined at the hip (all male, though the character is female), the contrived story...

I didn't expect to be moved but was in fact devastated. What love!