Sheaves

Workers repainting an exhibition space took down a month's worth of flyers, bundling them tidily in an improvised niche in the SkyBridge outside my office. I wonder if anyone noticed them while they were up?

Luncheon meat

Latest installment in our newer truer history of the New School is out!

My collaborator in all things New School J's excavation of a lost world.

Our hunt for an apartment resumes, taking us interesting new places...

Educating the educated

Had the great pleasure today of talking with four New School lifers - current members of the Institute of Retired Profes- sionals (IRP) who had been attending classes at the New School for decades before that. Three started in the early 1960s, one in the late 50s. Their first classes? Painting, non-fiction writing, speed-reading - and Egyptology with a troop of "lady dentists" from Lithuania by way of Vienna or Switzerland! (One first attended a Human Relations Workshop and dropped it as its members reminded her of her mother-in-law.)

I heard about courses with Alfred Kazin and John Cage, among others, but what came through even more clearly was the culture of the place: adults exploring interesting topics and developing new skills with other interesting adults. That's the social and intellectual world of IRP now, but, they helped me see, that of the Adult Division of half a century ago, too. "It's no longer my New School," they said, noting that the school in those days had had few degree-seeking students - or "young people." All of them had careers or families when they started. All had degrees, too, before or after that - though none from the New School! One took courses here for forty years while living with her husband in the suburbs of New Jersey - like two lives, she said, two lungs!

What was "American's original university for adults" (as it billed itself)? A culture center, an intellectual community, a social club? I heard nothing of "educated citizens" (though we did at one point deplore the bottom-line thinking of capitalism), and nothing of careers. These students - rather like their teachers - had lives and livelihoods and even degrees elsewhere, but needed this space as a second lung! How much did the New School form the experience of the generations who flourished there mid-century? Or was it itself the expression of the aspirations of those generations, "children of the depression," one noted, "and children of immigrants"?

Are there analogs today, at New School or beyond? Can there be?

Suddenly green

End times

This representation of global warming is a little different from most others. It stretches back 6000 years and forward 1000... ring any bells?

It's used by the climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, who happens also to be an Evangelical Christian - and who knows how to talk to other Evangelicals, including young-earthers. When talking to these last, she recounts, "I only show ice core data and other proxy data going back 6,000 years, ... because I believe that you can make an even stronger case, for the massive way in which humans have interfered with the natural system, by only looking at a shorter period of time.” 

We learned about Hayhoe in "Religion and the Anthropocene" from an article recommended by a class visitor. The visitor was the National Director of Young Evangelicals for Climate Action - quite possibly the first young Evangelical invited to speak at the New School - and he helped us appreciate what's behind Hayhoe's words when she argues: “In terms of addressing the climate issue, we don’t have time for everybody to get on the same page regarding the age of the universe.” 

I don't have time for a full run-down of the presentation and ensuing conversation, but the line from Hayhoe illuminates one of our main discoveries. The presentation was a version of what YECA brings to Evangelical settings with some helpful framing, which was a double gift. A large part of it was scriptural, arguing that there is a thread of concern for the natural world through the Christian scriptures. (Genesis, Leviticus, Psalms, Job, John, Matthew, Colossians, Philippians, Revelation...!) YECA and Hayhoe find that most Evangelicals are turned off bu discussions of climate change because (for an assortment of reasons) it feels inimical to their values. YECA's work is to show that climate change should matter to other Evangelicals given their values. We do this work, our visitor said, not as Democrats or Republicans, not as environmentalists, but as Christians. 

The climate crisis is thus presented in theological terms. This is in one way not so different from Lakota people speaking about the black serpent, or references to the Kali Yuga, but these biblical terms were not something we'd yet encountered in this class - or, indeed, at all. The image especially of Evangelical Christians at the New School isn't exactly positive, so the very existence of bright engaging thoughtful people like this young man was a revelation. Go, religious studies! 

But the class were struck and moved also by the coalitional nature of YECA's work, the thinking also at work in Hayhoe's "no time to get on the same page regarding the age of the universe." Can we work together with people with dramatically different frames of reference, at least some of which strike us as patently false? Can we afford not to?

Lactose intolerance

In 2019, plant milks are giving cow milk a run for its money.

Woven in

In "Religion and the Anthropocene" today, I tried to get us to think about ritual, using the fascinating ideas of Frédérique Appfel-Marglin. Human beings are part of an "inter-collectivity" with "non-humans" (plants, animals) and "other-than-humans" (the dead, spirits, gods, etc.), and the way we communicate with them is through ritual. I proposed we start our discussion with this:

What separates out ritual action from everyday action is that in the former, the patterning of actions is designed to focus awareness so as to synchronize the awareness of the different participants – humans, non-humans, and other-than-humans – enabling them to weave each other into a continuous world, a regenerated world. (164)

This comes near the end of her argument, gathering together reflections on how ritual sustains continuity of space and helps us maintain a livable experience of time, and I thought it would lead to an exciting discussion. It didn't. The issue turned out to be not only the difficulty of the idea that modern conceptions of uniform space and linear time are constructions, but the notion that there really are "non-humans" and "other-than-humans" out there for us to communicate with in the first place.

When the class drew blanks I asked them what they knew of shamanism, and learned about new age "shamans" who use various potent substances to "potentiate spiritual experiences," deal with trauma, help people connect with their "ancestry." "Experiences of what?" I asked; "ancestry or ancestors?" But the students didn't want to go there. Spiritual technologies might polish the mirror of the self's self-understanding, but not open the door to the more than human. Next week we encounter Robin Wall Kimmerer's sorrow at the "species loneliness" of western people, who think humans are the only people around. Will it fall on deaf ears, or receptive ones?

Synchronized awareness with non- and other-than-humans might be one of those topics which students are shy too talk about in class - reading responses sometimes tell of enthusiastic or deeply moved engagement with ideas which, in class, nobody would own up to even finding interesting. There was a glimmer of something as I read them an account Apffel-Marglin gives of an American student asked to participate in a ritual at the Sachamama Center for "biocultural regeneration" she started in Peru - it collects and cultivates a particularly rich form of rain forest soil, whose microbial superpower apparently traces back to precolumbian "biochar," but frames this work with rituals engaging the forest, and the soil itself.

We involve our interterm U. S. undergraduates in these rituals, asking them to speak from their hearts in their own words. Some find this impossible and decline, but many are able to speak. I recall one vivid case where the student told me she could not possibly speak to the soil. Then I saw her with a bowl of chichi at a distance speaking at great length to the earth. When she returned I commented that she seemed to have been able to overcome her reluctance. She answered that she had explained to the earth at length how and why she could not speak to her! (201) 

The class laughed at that, and again when I asked what might happen the next time: "remember me, the one who couldn't talk to you?"

Funny how my relatively new courses in religion and ecology converge with the older religious ethics classes, with their attention to wider moral communities...!

Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, Subversive Spiritualities:

How Rituals Enact the World (Oxford 2012)

Cherry spacewalk

Fern people gathering

What language shall I borrow

Part of the Good Friday liturgy in many churches is an invitation to "Adoration of the Cross." A simple wooden cross is carried into the church by the priest and rested against the altar (stripped at the end of last night's service), and held in place by a stone. As the choir sings the Reproaches, people go up and kneel beside it, touching or kissing it.

I found this distasteful when I first encountered it - it felt pagan somehow. And too public, a performance of piety. Today, at my church, which isn't perhaps quite comfortable with it, most members of the congregation didn't go up. I did. (I took the picture later, of course.)

Before we came to this part of the liturgy, we'd heard the Passion story (John's today), ending with the laying of Jesus' body in the tomb by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus - not His apostles, who had fled in fear, not to mention the throngs who celebrated his arrival in Jerusalem with palms. Even the Marys were gone. I got to thinking about His aloneness, the busy hubbub of the crucifixion followed by a desolate stillness, in the distance the low buzz of life going on. My mind did a cinematic zoom out, the cross(es) barely visible on a hilltop which became just one of many hills as it receded into the distance, the business of life going on in the unseen valleys under a thickly clouded sky. What abandonment.

Then came the time to go up to the wooden cross. I knelt and placed my hand on it, just above the stone, and fancied I felt something - the busy work of cells, the consortia of consortia of life forms Lynn Margulis described to us. Wood. And suddenly the abandonment didn't seem so great at all. He wasn't alone. The wood, with all the worlds within it, pressed against His body, holding. And he felt that love, that presence.

Elizabeth Johnson has suggested that the whole history of life is included in the human form taken in the Incarnation, not some abstracted fantasy of human-rather-than-nature. I took that to be referring to animals, but the family of life is much bigger than that. Margulis' revelation of the drone of bacteria, in and around and beyond every form of life we encounter, has made that kinship palpable in a new way. I've had a thing for trees for a long time. But only today did I think of the wood of the cross - the cross not as a metaphorical tree, but an actual tree, with all its constituent communities - as kin.

The wood courses with our better nature, faithful when we humans (as the Reproaches so poignantly remind us) so abjectly fail.

Other than the sum of its parts

Latest installment of our newer truer history of the New School is out.

It's a story you've heard me tell many times, but this one's for the ages!

Perdus!

Couldn't have known, when I defied the tourist crowds to visit this old friend in March 2016, that it would be the last time seeing its treasures.

Feed for creationists!

Tried showing (much of) the long documentary about Lynn Margulis in "Religion and the Anthropocene" today. I often show a film when students are handing in work, since they're unlikely to have time for the assignment and a class reading. But for this particular class at this point in our meandering trajectory it also makes an interesting sort of sense.

Last week we finished Shock of the Anthropocene and learned about the range of monotheistic understanding of providence - and read selections from the Dao De Jing for something completely different.

"Symbiotic Earth" doesn't broach religion, but that doesn't mean religion doesn't come up. As in Shock of the Anthropocene, it comes up first as an epithet of criticism. We learn that Margulis' ideas of symbiosis were criticized by Neo-Darwinians as "feeding the creationists." But she gave as good as she got, dismissing Neo-Darwinism as "a minor twentieth century religious sect" which would soon disappear.

That's early in the film. By the time something like religion returns, we've been taken through many layers of emergent wonder. An account which began with the simplest one-celled life forms ends with the apparently self-regulating atmosphere of the Earth, what led James Lovelock to speak of Gaia. Margulis, a friend of Lovelock's, dismisses the idea of the earth as a goddess - what's going on is still bacteria doing their thing in nested consortia of consortia or consortia. But she's comfortable with the term, referring to a carpet of bacteria off the east coast of the US as the "tissue of Gaia."

Perhaps the name of a goddess is fitting after all. We'll see what the class thinks when we turn to a religious naturalism of emergence.

Out of the box

I'm given to understand that - unlike many Parsons classes - our history department doesn't require its majors to get to know the New School Archives. Shame, since it's a good place to make the discovery that the past isn't the way you want it to be.

I spent a few hours there today, hoping to learn more about the role of a famous religious studies personality in the origins of my school. I once met Jonathan Z. Smith, whose work kicks off many a theory of religion classes, including mine. When he learned I was at Eugene Lang College, he told me he'd been flown to the New School many times to help get it set up. I've confirmed that he was a member of the Commission on Undergraduate Education which the newly installed president Jonathan Fanton set up in 1982. The abridged version of the Commission's report (delivered in June 1983) lists the members - and also that one of the areas it recommended the school develop was Religion! Apparently there was an outline of a possible course of study, too. This could be a coup for the history of the history of religions, as well as for the history of the New School! So I asked the archivists to see a copy of the unabridged report. They found me four copies, from four different sets of boxes - three of them as yet uncatalogued. Exciting!

There is indeed a Religion curriculum mapped out in an Appendix to the Report, designed to fit the Commission's most radical proposal - that New School undergraduates specialize in their sophomore and junior year, returning to a full diet of interdisciplinary seminars as seniors. That daring 1+2+1 way of carving up a four-year college career, a visionary anticipation of later ideas, is a lost opportunity I deeply rue.

The proposed Religion curriculum is a little staid, a little Eurocentric - it was 1982. (One of the topics proposed for the senior seminars was "Genesis.") I suppose I should be grateful that someone argued for religious studies at all. Classics was recommended, too, as was a kind of pre-law degree, and nothing came of them. But religious studies at what became Eugene Lang College isn't J Z Smith's greatest legacy.

It turns out what J Z Smith was referring to when he told me he'd been flown in regularly was what happened after the Commission's report was published, and even after the dean of the Seminar College, the long-time director of undergraduate experiments Elizabeth Coleman, resigned. (He may have been invited to do so in the aftermath of this unexpected resignation.) J Z Smith was asked by president Fanton to serve as a consultant to the university, leading discussions of the Commission's report and drafting an action plan based on these discussions. With a sinking heart I learned that it was J Z Smith's March 1984 report which pulled the plug on the Commission's most exciting idea - the 1+2+1 year curriculum.

Presumably J Z Smith's task was to reconcile the Commission's idealism with realities on the ground; in his report, he indicated he was being "conservative," thinking about what could most feasibly be achieved given the existing lay of the land. It may be that part of that lay of the land was a directive from the president to recommend a more conventional curricular structure - or through the president from the Board of Trustees. (J Z Smith's report also cut the legs out from self-government by the seminar college, recommending "the college" be taken to be a university-wide commitment governed by all parts of the university.) Maybe it was the best thing to do under the circumstances.

But it was still a shock to go in thinking I would uncover forgotten heroism only to find something more like villainy! J Z Smith helped the New School be more conventional in building its undergraduate college. Working with what the university's strengths already were, he recommended a curriculum composed of seminars (the existing seminar college), disciplinary foci (building on university strengths, they needn't be everyone else's disciplines), general liberal studies courses (feasting on the offerings of the adult division) and a "practicum" (internship, participation in a research project, etc.), the particular mix of which would be up to each individual student. Interesting in its own way but quite different from the seminar-centered vision of the Undergraduate Commission!

Perhaps I shouldn't grumble... what J Z Smith proposed is sort of what we're doing now (though the college has more autonomy than his proposal envisioned), and to general acclaim: it's what many other liberal arts colleges have come round to doing, too. Two cheers for JZS.

Pure Land

Selfie in my office taken by Nishimura Kodo, a Japanese Pure Lang priest and Parsons Fine Arts graduate who happen also to be a trained makeup artist and openly gay - in many ways an unprecedented combination. (He may well be the first openly gay Buddhist priest in Japan.) My friend and fashion-religion collaborator Otto arranged for the two of us to interview Nishimura. A fascinating conversation which started rather formally but ended with smiles all around, I felt we were in the presence of one of the Figures of Buddhist Modernity in Asia that we read about in my Buddhist Modernism class. (We also read an interview with him.) His is such a marvelous story, we'll try to plan a public event around his next visit to NYC. Queer Buddhisms? At Lang, of course!

Indigenous western wisdom

"Religion and the Anthropocene" has devoted two weeks and a paper to The Shock of the Anthropocene, even though it barely mentions religion, but it's been time well spent. I don't have time to give a blow by blow, but here are two highlights of our final discussion, bringing the book into conversation with religion.

Religion appears explicitly in Shock of the Anthropocene only as a polemical concept. "Anthropocenology," the shibboleth the book critiques, is likened to a religious master narrative. Humanity has gone unwittingly wrong, the "Anthropocenologists" tell us, but there is time - just - for conversion. If we repent and have faith we may yet be redeemed. Luckily, saviors are at hand: the earth systems scientists and geoengineers who alone can understand the nature of the problem, and who alone can save us from ourselves. Absolution is offered by their narrative, "They knew not what they did" (72), they tell us of our forebears, and if most of us "still don't know what to do" (83), the Anthropocenologists do. Altar call?

Bonneuil and Fressoz are historians, and their aim, brilliantly achieved, is to challenge every part of this narrative, starting with the uncomfortable fact that people have been aware of anthropogenic climate change for more than two centuries, their warnings unheeded. Where the Anthropocenologist story has us stumbling ignorantly but perhaps invietably into being a disruptive "planetary agent," Bonneuil and Fressoz confront us with myriad decisions, choices, risks, failure taken over the past two and a half centuries. Initially it's deeply depressing to learn about missed opportunity after missed opportunity, the myth of our exculpatory ignorance dissipating. But the more human-scaled stories they tell instead (all those other -cenes) somehow end up restoring a sense of empowerment which the more-than-human scale of Anthropocenology has devastated.

Part of the way they restore this sense of agency is by describing the forms of ecological awareness which have been displaced in the past quarter millennium by the juggernauts of the economization of nature, the ecological devastations of colonialism, neoliberal globalization, the vast demands of wasteful consumerism, the havoc wreaked by militarization and war, all undergirded by abstract conceptions of limitless resources and growth. They call these "grammars of environmental reflexivity" and in several of them we find religion again - a religion attuned to the more harmonious ways Europeans once lived in their environment. In Christian terms, it was a natural theology accepting the diversity and interconnectedness of life as divinely mandated, itself doubtless grounded in the greater environmental awareness of agricultural societies.

Anthropocene-religion discussions tend to think of the religious teachings of "indigenous ecological knowledge" which might lead us back into truer relationship with the earth in terms of the non-Western cultures destroyed or undermined by western colonialism. Bonneuil and Fressoz remind us that there was indigenous ecological knowledge destroyed or undermined in the colonial metropole, too. And contrary to those who think Christianity was the original destroyer and underminer, the drum to which western colonialism was marching as it devastated cultures and natures across the glove, western indigenous knowledge isn't just ancient paganism. Much of it is Christian.

This is not an argument Bonneuil and Fressoz make. Perhaps they think most Christianity is like Anthropocenology - and you can see why. Time to tell the story of how an ecological Christianity of stewardship was displaced by an extractionist theology of dominion and doom! Carbon Christianity?

Just in time for Holy Week...!

Cene work

Took the occasion of groupwork to sneak a pic of the "Religion and the Anthropocene" class dissecting Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz's brilliant but dense book The Shock of the Anthropocene as it supplements and challenges the Anthropocene master narrative with provocative further stories of a thermocene, anglocene, thanatocene, phagocene, phronocene, agnatocene, capitalocene and polemocene.

Where to look?

Spring's an exponential thing, all of a sudden it's happening everywhere.

Burning bridge

I had the pleasure today of talking a little about religion and the Anthropocene at the meeting of the Mid-Atlantic section of Science Education for New Civic Engagements and Responsibilities, which the New School was hosting. SENCER is a society for science educators committed to social justice, and a dozen came to a "fireside chat" on the daunting topic “Religious Studies as a Bridge Between STEM and Humanities in the Anthropocene." We had a little less than 30 minutes, so barely got through the title! But all was well. I'd brought a small stack of books, all identified on a handout (much appreciated all around). But mainly I had a great visual aid, inspired by the to me unfamiliar format of a "fireside chat." I looked up the famous Yule Log video made for suburbanites with TVs rather than fireplaces. My colleague K expanded it to fill the every large screen, making for an experience more terrifying than cosy. The cherry on top was an error message which suddenly popped up at the top of the screen: DISK NOT EJECTED PROPERLY. I remarked on all this as I opened the discussion. "Welcome to the Anthropocene!"

The Spirit listeth

Some folks I met in China were recently in the Holy Land!

Spring anyone?

Boom!

Monet shot

Opulent photo by an artist friend, posted on FaceBook with the caption

The trees take on the color of the roses