Out with the old

2019 is about used up, but the number 2020 intimidates me, like I should be seeing clearly now. Wishing you a new year which feels like the start of good new things, not just the playing out of bad old ones!

Paintbrush

I was told nothing was blooming at Torrey Pines. I was misinformed!

San Diego East County

Some textures of Anza-Borrego an Santa Ysabel Open Space Preserve.

Carrizo Badlands

... but the ocotillo is blooming!

California colors

Just a little to the east and up a few thousand feet... snow!

Herb's tweets

My parents' friend Herb Knufken is the great photographer of Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve. The best images in their annual calendar are always his. He has such great photos available because he spends every day in and around the California coast, his telephotos trained on buds in bloom, dolphins in waves and birds in flight. He's been posting a picture every day for sixteen years! These are just a few from recent weeks: an Annas hummingbird, a belted kingfisher, a pie-billed grebe, Torrey Pines' resident peregrine falcons, a long-billed curlew, a marbled godwit and a yellow rumped warbler blissed out at a Shaw's Agave.

Peace on earth, good will to all

As 2020 approaches, I'm realizing it'll be a bit of a challenge to return to "Religion and Ecology" next semester. It's not that I don't have a road-tested syllabus, with some timely additions, and a wonderful student assistant lined up to help lead. It's that this has become the first part of a two-class sequence whose other is "Religion and the Anthropocene." Do we cover ecology without the Anthropocene, the field of "Religion and Ecology" as it emerged before the climate emergency?

I guess what I'm wondering is whether it's right and responsible to introduce ideas premised on an ecologically stable world which no longer obtains. Wouldn't that in its way be denialism? But then I consider that most of my mostly millennial students have never experienced an ecologically stable world, have never known climate not going haywire, have never known the human relationship with the rest of nature as anything but destructive. They can hardly imagine a natural world which doesn't cringe and recoil at the thought of humanity.

My generation's memory of a stable and harmonious world, and its allied idea of human innocence, are problematic - much of the damage was already done and being done. (Settler stability was indigenous apocalypse.) But they at least offer a sense of an alternative to free fall, an image of us as other than the bull in the china shop, of relationships with our non-human kin whose rupture might be healed. Perhaps one contribution religions can make in this moment is restoring hope for the continuation of life on earth - including human life - and for the re-binding (religare) of severed relations with our earthling kin.

Behold

"In scandal, find reconciliation," a sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent I watched yesterday, opened my eyes anew to just how "scandalous" the Christmas story is. The Rev. Winnie Varghese, whom I heard at St Mark's in the Bowery and is now at Trinity Wall Street, was preaching on the apparently thankless first chapter of Matthew, a forty-two generation genealogy of Jesus (well, of Joseph) and the start of the nativity narrative. Yet if we were familiar with the names in the genealogy, she suggested, it would tell you all you need to know about the kind of story Matthew was beginning. This isn't Mary's family yet, but the genealogy, surprisingly, includes the names of four women in its cascade of male begettings: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and "the wife of Uriah." If you know what they underwent - perhaps Mary did - you know this will not be an easy story.

For his part Joseph, son of Jacob, isn't the first Joseph, son of Jacob in the family, and like his forebear (an uncle many generations before), he's a dreamer. In Matthew, Rev. Varghese recounted, Joseph sees four dreams, follows them, then disappears from the story. He never speaks. Mary doesn't either. The powerful - the Magi, the Governor - speak, but Mary and Joseph listen, and see. There's a lesson already in this. And what does Joseph see? His first dream comes in Matthew 1, as he's instructed not to cast away his unaccountably pregnant young fiancé, as righteousness would require, but rather to care for her and her child. A scandalous response to a scandal, upending a scandal-filled family history - but this, Rev. Varghese reminded us, is what the justice of God looks like. Wow... It's like hearing the story for the first time.

There are no shepherds in Matthew's telling. They come in Luke, society's lowliest the first to be told of the birth of the savior... and the only audience for a performance by the hosts of heaven! He's born in a manger, surrounded by beasts of burden? Scandalous! Venite adoremus!

Our understated Christmas decoration seems less likely to wake the baby than some, like this extravaganza at Del Mar's Dog Beach.

Weather!

Who said it never rains in Southern California? We got an inch yesterday!

O Tannenbaum

About 386 million years ago, a forest stretched from what is now New York State to Pennsylvania, and part of it got itself fossilized, in a place just discovered near a Catskillls town called Cairo. The oldest known fossil forest in the world! (What had been the oldest known before, a few million years younger, is just a few miles away, also in New York.) The trees were not like ours today but closer to tree ferns, one with a conifer-like trunk, and reproduced by spores rather than seeds. Remarkable are their extensive root systems - one is 11 meters across!

It is these long-lived woody roots, with multiple levels of branching and small, short-lived perpendicular feeder roots, that transformed the interactions of plants and soils and were therefore pivotal to the co-evolution of forests and the atmosphere

Long long before the human story began but indispensable to that story, since it was the scaling up of carbon dioxide processing effected by trees' verticality which made an atmosphere hospitable to animal life.

Scandals of the Evangelical mind

You might have heard that the outgoing editor of the Evangelical magazine Christianity Today (founded long ago by American Evangelical saint Billy Graham) penned an editorial in support of removing Donald Trump from office. Looking back at the magazine's response to the House of Representatives' impeachment of Bill Clinton, Mark Galli found words that perfectly describe the present president:

The President's failure to tell the truth—even when cornered—rips at the fabric of the nation. This is not a private affair. For above all, social intercourse is built on a presumption of trust: trust that the milk your grocer sells you is wholesome and pure; trust that the money you put in your bank can be taken out of the bank; trust that your babysitter, firefighters, clergy, and ambulance drivers will all do their best. And while politicians are notorious for breaking campaign promises, while in office they have a fundamental obligation to uphold our trust in them and to live by the law. ... Unsavory dealings and immoral acts by the President and those close to him have rendered this administration morally unable to lead.

In consistency with that time but also in consistent commitment to the values there stated, Galli argues:

Whether Mr. Trump should be removed from office by the Senate or by popular vote next election—that is a matter of prudential judgment. That he should be removed, we believe, is not a matter of partisan loyalties but loyalty to the Creator of the Ten Commandments.

To the many evangelicals who continue to support Mr. Trump in spite of his blackened moral record, we might say this: Remember who you are and whom you serve. Consider how your justification of Mr. Trump influences your witness to your Lord and Savior. Consider what an unbelieving world will say if you continue to brush off Mr. Trump’s immoral words and behavior in the cause of political expediency. If we don’t reverse course now, will anyone take anything we say about justice and righteousness with any seriousness for decades to come? Can we say with a straight face that abortion is a great evil that cannot be tolerated and, with the same straight face, say that the bent and broken character of our nation’s leader doesn’t really matter in the end?

We have reserved judgment on Mr. Trump for years now. Some have criticized us for our reserve. But when it comes to condemning the behavior of another, patient charity must come first. So we have done our best to give evangelical Trump supporters their due, to try to understand their point of view, to see the prudential nature of so many political decisions they have made regarding Mr. Trump. To use an old cliché, it’s time to call a spade a spade, to say that no matter how many hands we win in this political poker game, we are playing with a stacked deck of gross immorality and ethical incompetence. And just when we think it’s time to push all our chips to the center of the table, that’s when the whole game will come crashing down. It will crash down on the reputation of evangelical religion and on the world’s understanding of the gospel. And it will come crashing down on a nation of men and women whose welfare is also our concern.

The response to this act of witness was swift and predictable. The unspeakable one condemned it, and so did his coterie of Evangelical supporters. The noxious Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, assured that his late father "believed in Donald Trump" from beyond the grave.

The hacks don't interest me. But you get got a sense of more thoughtful responses in the twitter responses to Christianity Today's managing editor, Ted Olson, which a colleague directed me to. Though someone along the way warns of Russian bots, I feel that in most of them I'm finally hearing the voices of real people thinking theologically. Here are a few. (I've left out those who identify as not Evangelical.)

Some are grateful:

Thank you for (finally) writing the piece that needed to be written. It took too long but we are grateful nonetheless. This political situation is not just dividing the nation but families and those of us that cannot support Trump's behavior needed the church to back us up.

When the church abandons it’s prophetic voice in the world we become part of the problem. 

I’m very grateful that CT had the courage and integrity to make this stand. The self-proclaimed but not self-evident “Christian evangelical” leaders that so freely & loudly bully and name-call as Trump’s mouthpieces are preventing so many souls from ever finding God.

This SHOULD be a wake up call that doesn’t just live on Twitter & isn’t just prayed about but is PREACHED about. People have substituted Trump for Jesus. Talk about his past, his crimes, his meanness in the open!! Amoral. Develop SS lessons on this bad man in power. Take action.

Thank you for saying what so many of us have been thinking. I am terrified by the “Christians” who are idolizing and equating Trump to Jesus. Your courage is inspiring.

When I watched people who I had used as lifetime examples of true Christians follow this immoral man, my heart broke.

My prayers and support are with Christianity Today and all of my fellow Evangelicals who have had the courage to speak out against the Trumpist warping of our faith. "Be on your guard; stand firm in the faith; be courageous; be strong." 1 Corinthians 16:13

Praying for you and the entire CT team, lifting you as great servants of Jesus and his teachings and asking that he protect you from those not aligned with Him and that He continues to be present with you. I hope you enjoy this great week of waiting for our Lord to come. 

But many are scornful:

The “bent and broken character” you allege against our nation’s leader is for God (who chooses them) to judge, just as He will those who mock & ridicule Trump & his Christian supporters who fight for the unborn.

For years biblical Christians have watched churches and Christian universities walk away from biblical truths. I don’t remember seeing CT or these names out there now speaking out against it. But now suddenly everything is Trump’s fault. Suddenly being mean is worse than abortion, the wrecking of God’s order in sexuality and identity, persecution of Christians, sacrificing the safety and respect of women and girls in the privacy of bathrooms and shower rooms, and abandoning Israel. Trump hurts your feelings and fights for America.

"Character counts" unless it's a Dem, right? You use Christ as a weapon and shield, but not the way He intended. It's taking His name in vain. I hope you enjoy your backpats from the World for they are your reward.

Ted, you went to far. Politics is messy, and candidates like pastors are far from perfect. CT will never completely recover from "Opinion" news vs so many quality articles it has produced. I gain great insight from so much of your mag but this rests squarely on your shoulders. 

I've never been more in for Jesus or more upset with Democrat Christians who think they are righteous for voting for Obama. The Truth is Obama nearly took our country over the cliff & Trump is here to change that direction. Jesus is leading us. We follow him. Thk Jesus 4 Trump!!!

Those who accuse others of being morally insufficient should have their body examined to see if they have the mark of the beast themselves. Pray for yourself and don't concern yourself with praying for me, I'm already in good hands.  

The most interesting are nuanced:

Trump doesn’t always handle things the right way but he supports Christians and promotes life. We believers are imperfect! I love our President and we as Christians are tp pray and support hom. I did the same for Obama.
 
My honest question that no one seems to answer is what are we supposed to do as Christian's? Not vote? Stay home? The choices for president have been deplorable lately. I haven't been able to tell the difference in Christian's and non Christian's in the hatred for this president

Not sure I agree with the conclusion of your editorial but I do recognize (and have struggled with) the dilemma this president puts Christians in. Ultimately, God will decide what happens here. Your voice has stated, as you did in 2016, what many of us have felt.

No one is putting their faith and trust in Trump. Our faith and trust is in God only. Trump happens to be the tool that God is using at this time. That’s all it is. Unless, Ted, you deliberately want to muddy the water

Hi Ted. Here's the deal. I'm a Christian who was very troubled by Trump in 2016. I voted independent. Since then I'm still troubled by his immorality but pleased that he has done much to end legal abortion, help the economy, put good people on the judicial bench, so... I'm probably going to vote for him next year. I wish he was a better man. I wish he did more than pay lip service to Jesus and the Gospel. But I also know zero Democrat candidates are any better. This is our lot. I wish Cruz or Rubio had gotten the nomination. They didn't... And if they had, we might have President Hillary Clinton and there's no way you can convince me that she had the superior morality. @CTmagazine was wrong and I'm very offended that they went this route

I think you need to get a historical perspective and see how sovereign God is over human affairs. Remember Cyrus, Constantine, Charlemange & Martin Luthers political protector. God used them all without endorsing all aspects of their personal lifestyle. What would you do with FDR

Let’s get real here Ted & Mark. Scripture graphically illustrates He used some pretty disreputable people to outwork His will. Most of the Bible was written by 3 forgiven murderers. Even Abraham led Sarah to commit adultery with Pharaoh & then there was the Hagar episode 

What these last help me understand is how Evangelicals can support Trump. For some it's apparently a gut thing, transactional, thoughtless, culture war reflexive, panicked loss of white "God's own country," Fox- and Breitbart-addled. Abortion and traditional sexual norms are lodestars for many. But for others the support is hard won. While it must in some way be thrilling to feel God at work in your time, seeing in Trump a Cyrus isn't easy and it does anything but gloss over his obvious faults. He wouldn't seem a Cyrus if he were thought a Christian. But he also wouldn't seem a Cyrus if he weren't offering astonishing victories to conservative Christians. 

It's the jaw-dropping mismatch between the victories and the vessel that calls forth biblical analogies. And the scale: if the vessel is unsurpassed in its sulliedness, the victories are overwhelming too - victories no earlier president, including the professing Evangelical ones, delivered. None of it makes any sense in ordinary secular terms. The sheer abundance of the gifts this heathen vulgarian has been able to give (two Supreme Court justices in two years?!), snatched from the jaws of what seemed sure culture-war defeat, is mind-blowing. It's the obverse of the vertiginous loss of world that folks on my side have felt and continue feeling. It makes no sense that anyone, let alone this godless monster, should be able to wreak such havoc in so many spheres. It's too much, too cruel. I've felt that yawning mismatch since the day of the election. I can see why it feels biblical from the other side. 

But I'm not ready to see some other superhuman agency at work.

Thank you for this and I’m so sorry. It breaks my heart to see people so mislead by this charlatan. If satan were returning to earth, he sure seems like he’d be the red faced, mean, yelling guy turning people away from love.

Trump needs to be revealed as the human Anti-Christ he is. He and his propaganda machine and business interests have even convinced church leaders to overlook the evil and profess he is the chosen one. How? And seemingly so fast?

Trump is the Antichrist. It is as clear and daylight if people have ever read the bible. I mean, he even has his right-hand man marked with 666!

I don't do Antichrist, although I confess that this man's unusual powers have at several points along the way struck me as demonic. But I'd rather not think that way. Perhaps a more modest biblical analogy might be in order, and the sort of argument which might be heard. He's not a Cyrus but a Goliath. Where's our David?

Beach art

 

Two trippy landscapes from Leucadia

Religion of religions

Just in time for the holidays, the latest (#28!) installment in our newer truer history of The New School at Public Seminar - my reckoning with our relationship with religion! It builds on my presentation for the Festival of New, but has a more interesting argument. It took me a while to realize that the New School religion story is really about secularism, whose potential we've contributed mightily to understanding. There have been many New School ways of approaching the secular, some of them explicitly religious! Can I get an Amen?

Ethereal pinks and greens atop yellows and reds and blues...

Decadence without nihilism

Saw the Met's newish production of the old warhorse "Der Rosenkavalier" last night, and, despite a rare and wonderful appearance of Simon Rattle at the helm and a brilliant cast (why hasn't Camilla Nylund sung at the Met before?) went from charmed to bemused to incensed by what director Robert Carsen has done to it. It is of course a rather decadent story to start with - a decadence I'm susceptible to thanks to having spent impressionable formative years in Vienna - but Carsen's vision (first developed for the Salzburg Festival in 2004) is cynical.

Setting the story in the year the opera was created, a few years before the outbreak of World War 1, offers many pleasures, but I object to enjoying them at the expense of Strauss and Hofmannsthal, as if they cluelessly thought life in Imperial Vienna was fine and dandy and not in profound ways morally rotten. They couldn't know how awful the impending war would be - nobody did - but they knew the world they described was on its last legs. The old Met production offered a sentimental fantasy of olde Europe (isn't that what seeing klunkers at the Met is usually about?) but the Marschallin's 18th century Vienna was already dead, Strauss' Vienna living on its fumes: everyone knew.

Carsen assumes we don't know that so he has to kill it for us. His production ends with the opulent set, which has had the same triangular form in all three acts, opening up like a jaw. As Octavian and Sophie get it on in a brothel bed (!!!), oblivious, we see a void in the distance, then a line of soldiers collapsing, presumably shot dead in Flanders Fields. Breaking open the set this way ruptures any bond we may have had with the characters or, it is implied, the creators of the "Rosenkavalier": we know too much to believe, as they apparently did, in the fantasy of pure love or the innocence of farce. But the Marschallin knows that the ceremony of the knight of the roses is an illusion. Strauss and Hofmannsthal achieve something transcendent because the opera starts with this awareness, rather than ending with it.

Last breath

Leunig well describes the energy level at the end of a long semester.

Skyscrape

Walking across Central Park from the Met last night after a rain, the air clear as glass, we were amazed to see a city that couldn't be New York and yet is, pencil thin new skyscrapers stretching high, high above what was the skyline. It felt like something out of a dystopian sci-fi movie!

End of story?

As a once great political party makes clear its soul is signed, sealed and delivered to an authoritarian demagogue, a once great kingdom welcomes a shameless liar to complete its demotion to sad has-been, it's easy to recognize what Michelle Goldberg dubs "democracy grief."

The despair felt by climate scientists and environmentalists watching helplessly as something precious and irreplaceable is destroyed is sometimes described as “climate grief.” Those who pay close attention to the ecological calamity that civilization is inflicting upon itself frequently describe feelings of rage, anxiety and bottomless loss, all of which are amplified by the right’s willful denial. The young activist Greta Thunberg, Time magazine’s 2019 Person of the Year, has described falling into a deep depression after grasping the ramifications of climate change and the utter refusal of people in power to rise to the occasion: “If burning fossil fuels was so bad that it threatened our very existence, how could we just continue like before?”

Lately, I think I’m experiencing democracy grief. For anyone who was, like me, born after the civil rights movement finally made democracy in America real, liberal democracy has always been part of the climate, as easy to take for granted as clean air or the changing of the seasons. When I contemplate the sort of illiberal oligarchy that would await my children should Donald Trump win another term, the scale of the loss feels so vast that I can barely process it.

I'm struck particularly by the collapse of a shared commitment to what we used to call rule of law. Political lies are nothing new, but the lies of our blond beasts are brazen in a new way: they don't even pretend to care about the truth, and invite their followers to share the thrill of lying with impunity. The collusion of an entire political party in these lies shocks me still. But what's most depressing is popular support for such nihilism. This brings back echoes of Karl Popper's paradox of democracy: democracy consumes itself when it loses confidence in itself. Someone running on a platform of abolishing democratic governance can win an election entirely legitimately - several did in Europe not quite a century ago, and other are doing it in Eastern Europe, India and elsewhere as we speak.

The Republican argument against impeachment is taking on this flavor, too: the president promised to break rules, the people elected him to do that, end of story. This is the way the story of democracy ends but we mustn't let it happen. When they go low we have to go high.

Democracy grief isn’t like regular grief. Acceptance isn’t how you move on from it. Acceptance is itself a kind of death.

It lives!

Speaking of the Spring 2020 iteration of "Performing the Problem of Suffering: The Book of Job and the Arts," here's the working schedule.

A remarkable roster of guest speakers, and some new readings too - including Yu Hua's To Live, thanks to the course's travels in China.

Missing megafauna

The Guardian had two pieces on cave art in the last two days. One reports on the discovery in Indonesia of figurative art twice as old as any yet known. Can you believe this giant animal being harangued by tiny human figures, as well as therianthropes (mixing human and animal features), is 44,000 years old? That makes the 12,000 years of the Holocene, whose end we've been hastening, seem a mere afternoon! The other, appearing today, is an essay by Barbara Ehrenreich trying to make sense of the absence or insignificance of human forms in decorated cave around the world. Noting that most of the animals depicted were megafauna now extinct (yes, we did that), she observes:

The marginality of human figures in cave paintings suggests that, at least from a human point of view, the central drama of the Paleolithic went on between the various megafauna – carnivores and large herbivores. So depleted of megafauna is our own world that it is hard to imagine how thick on the ground large mammals once were. 

Turns out the animals depicted on cave walls (like this one at Lascaux) weren't the ones ancient humans (and Neanderthals) were able to kill and ate; we were more vulnerable to megafauna than they to us. Pushing back at interpretations of cave art as necessarily magical or religious, as well as that it shows the triumph of humans over other animals in the hunt, she suggests that it may also contain play and humor (like the Cueva de los Manos in Argentina, bottom), and builds from that toward a conclusion at once amusing and a warning:

Our Paleolithic ancestors ... knew where they stood in the scheme of things, which was not very high, and this seems to have made them laugh. I strongly suspect that we will not survive the mass extinction we have prepared for ourselves unless we too finally get the joke. 

I'm not sure we can imagine not being the dominant species (well, non-bacterial species) on the planet. Though folks in the Sundarbans genuinely fear the Bengal tiger, to an urban American like me (or the gents in suits in Altamira, above) rhinos and whales, like ancient redwood trees, seem the vulnerable ones. Like flies to wanton boys are they to us, we kill them for our sport - and even more by accident.

Assorted tables have been turned since Yahweh silenced Job by rhapsodizing about the megafauna Behemoth and Leviathan. (Yes, I have Job on my mind again, as next semester's "Book of Job and the Arts" approaches.) We become impatient at the attention lavished on these ungainly also-rans, knowing their very size marks them for extinction. It makes God seem quaintly out of touch too. But perhaps there's a way back in through Ehrenreich's musings? What if Job's final words were spoken laughing? Perhaps Job contains a memory of an earlier time when humans jestingly but also seriously reminded each other of their middling place in the foodchain. Hang with us, the Book of Job may be telling us, not with Behemoth, the first of the works of God (40:19).

Who? what? where? when? how? why?

For the penultimate session of this year's "Theorizing Religion," I sprung a quiz on the class. I assured students it was for their own use, "diagnostic." If they got most of the questions right, congratulations: they were entitled to a feeling of satisfaction. If instead they found they hadn't retained much (which I expected to be the case), I felt I owed it to them to confront them with this as something to work on in future classes - and maybe give some key points one more try. I also wanted to make a final plea for the value of learning your classmates' names.

So they had half an hour to take a stab at these questions, and we spent the next hour going through them, a fun way to review the course. The final question, about students' names, became a big bonding experience (cheaters!), just in time for the end of our time together. I'd been mystified that these students - 14-16 most class sessions - clearly enjoyed each other's company, listening closely to each other, but had never bothered to learn anyone's name. (I make a point of always addressing all by name.) An anomaly, a trend, or perhaps nothing new?

On our way to the joyful final recognition scene, I confirmed the less joyful reality that these students were good with ideas but not with facts. Most had no clue what sequence our texts were written in (one thought by chronological order I meant the sequence in which we read them), so no sense of who could be responding to whom. Most lacked also a sense of the distinct disciplinary approaches we had been canvassing, so little sense of what conversations our texts sought to participate in. Despite my insistence that we begin each discussions with the old journalist's who-what-where-when-how-why, only one did what most students did once upon a time, googling authors before reading them. I was clearly unsuccessful in persuading them (not for want of trying) that you can't really begin to understand a text without knowing who wrote it when, for whom, why and how. Their classmates weren't the only ones they listened to without trying to get to know.

Things I'll have to make a point of making more of a point of next time!

Hidden agenda

For the final meeting of our New School History ULEC, students, in teams, were tasked with generating an "agenda for the new president" rooted in our history. Not many did. We'd thought this was a way of making the history matter, that by raising the stakes (we will offer a

report to the incoming president) we might feel empowered and engage more. But a ULEC is still a ULEC, lowest priority for busy students. And inciting them to think not only historically but institutionally proved too hard an ask for them even to fake it. Some cute slides, slim pickings.

Misty moisty winter morning

Going or coming?

Blind spots

I told you about the Vija Celmins exhibition I saw at the Met Breuer with my mathematician friend J yesterday: an education in really seeing. Above is "Reverse Night Sky #4" (2015-17), which makes the aspiration to take verisimilitude beyond verisimilitude clear - we never see the sky in negative. Or the ocean without movement as in "Ocean," 1973, below.

But I didn't mention that we saw another exhibition, too, "Home is a Foreign Place: Recent Acquisitions in Context," and not because it wasn't satisfying - it was altogether fantastic, brilliant work from every part of the world. I hesitated to mention it because, as we went through it, I kept saying "I've seen this one before" and even "I've seen this before here at the Breuer," before finally realizing that I must have seen this very exhibition! Funny, until it isn't. I still don't really remember the experience of being there. I recall racing through some shows here before I left the City for the summer, but am mortified that I seem to have seen so little. Pardon the lilt of my walk and Blogger's lo-res and and look with me again at Elias Sime's Tightrope (2009-14), Kazuo Miyamoto's Untitled (1977), Anwar Jalal Shemza's Love Letter I (1969.)

Endless repetition

Went to the Via Celmins show at the Met Breuer. I was familiar with her images of water images (detail of one from 1973 below) and star-filled sky, though I'd not spent time trying to understand how she achieved them with oils or with graphite. Making you look closely is what she's all about, and part of what you find yourself seeing is her own looking and her slightly maniacal dedication to replicating it in art. The exhibition borrows the name of "To fix the image in memory" (1977-82), below. She'd picked up a series of stones over the years in the Southwest, one day realizing all had starscapes in them, further realized they could be assembled as a constellation of their own - and then had a friend cast bronze replicas which she then lovingly painted to look like the originals. As you inspect them trying to determine which is which (only the tiny crystals give away the originals) - what is it you're seeing?

Rivers

Water's such a wondrous thing, different in every kind of light.

Potluck

It was time for diagramming exclusivism/inclusivism/pluralism in "Theorizing Religion" today. There was much creativity on display - the heads sprouting plants were intriguing - but only the group whose work is at lower right clearly got that the pluralism involves plurality. That pluralism is essentially about ongoing dialogue seems hard to grasp.

Loyalty to loyalty

The new issue of Social Research is out. Dedicated to the theme of loyalty, it includes a piece my friend Hannah and I wrote, mainly about her longtime crush Josiah Royce, the philosopher of loyalty - though we threw in some Anthropocene reflections to make it more timely. We seem among the few not to be focused on perils of political loyalty.

Flurry

The season's first real snow, from above and from below.

Unrapt

In church today, an epiphany: a revelatory new reading of a troublesome text. The text is one of those cited by Rapture-minded folks.

⁴⁰ Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. ⁴¹ Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. (Matthew 24, NRSV)

This sounds like some people will be zapped - presumably right into the bosom of Abraham - vanishing into thin air, their erstwhile companions flummoxed. That's the premise of the Left Behind books, which begin with an extended account of how the sudden disappearance of the blessed (leaving behind only clothes, glasses and tooth fillings!) will leave chaos in their wake - some of those "raptured" were airplane pilots - though it's only a foretaste of the Tribulation to come.

But is that really what's going on? Mother Susan Hill suggested that Rapture readings get it backwards. Jesus is telling us not to be the ones taken away. We should hope to be the ones left behind. Consider, she said, the context. Here's the passage in context:

³⁶ “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. ³⁷ For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. ³⁸ For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, ³⁹ and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. ⁴⁰ Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. ⁴¹ Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. ⁴² Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. ⁴³ But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. ⁴⁴ Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.

The parallel with the time of Noah is the key. Those who lose themselves in mindless dissipation are the ones swept away by the flood. The implication seems to be that we, too, could let ourselves be swept away by the tide of sinful temptation - so we'll be gone when Jesus comes as a thief in the night - or remain awake, so we'll be there. 

It's a glorious piece of interpretation, consonant, too, with understandings of apocalypticism as not about destroying the world but redeeming it. And it has an additional benefit. Eager as they are to be spirited away, Rapture-ready Christians are among those most likely to ignore or even contribute to the destruction of life on earth. For them this world is like a ladder you kick away on your way up to something better - unless it gets its claws into you, dragging you with it to destruction. 

A new heaven and a new earth are promised, but they're promised here. Stay.

Counting the days

Chafing at the Christmas music playing at Fairway and aware it will be inescapable for the foreseeable future I experienced a theological innovation: Jesus is coming in 25 days to save us from Christmas.