"Religion and the Anthropocene" is finished. And somewhat to my surprise, the students seem to have really appreciated it. It seems to have been a course everyone's been talking to people about all semester. And while it's about something that applies to everyone, it's not, a Culture & Media senior noted, like the many courses whose materials you could just have found through a google search. ("Unshazammable music!" someone offered as an analog.) Rare to have a course about the present - and the future - and the past, one enthused. Two students who are leaving for other schools said the course has
shaped what they want to do - one studying "hard sciences" and the other
history. More surprisingly still several reported that no other course they took this semester made them happy in the same way, a happiness we decided came from acknowledging "the elephant in the room." And the special camaraderie which arises in my classes thanks to the sorts of students who find their way into them.
I had them fill in a blank syllabus is if they were teaching a course on this field - a little sneaky but a useful final exercise which will help me next time, too. But we didn't talk about the
endosymbiosis model
I'd drawn on the board. Overall, the religious studies minors noted, this course was less about religion than they expected. (For the other students, any religion is evidently new and exciting - and enough.) I admitted that when looking back on the class I too had found the religious texts to have melted away - an unwittingly and unnervingly apt
term! So is religion something which will become a mere organelle in the larger cell of anthropocene awareness, helping people cope with ecological grief, huddle together with other endangered species, etc.?
In preparation for this last class I had been trying to formulate the alternative - where anthropocene awareness lives on as a symbiotic constituent in religion - and coming up short. That would have to be the sort of unironically theological claim I have a hard time making. But then, as the last students parted, I stumbled on it! As we stood in the classroom doorway I didn't want to say "have a nice life" so I recalled the
Irish Blessing - didn't remember all the words, I said, but the one that ends "May God hold you in the palm of His hand." Everyone knew what I was referring to and the Culture & Media student, suddenly animated, gestured toward the board and said: "So
that's what that's about!
