Religion at New School - Why?

The high point of the university's official centennial celebration will be the "Festival of the New" held the first week of October. It's an odd and engaging set of events - fitting for what it commemorates. Several classes are holding open sessions, including of course our "New School Histories" ULEC. But "Theorizing Religion" is getting in on the game, too!

RELIGION - WHY?

HORACE KALLEN AND THE FAITHS OF THE NEW SCHOOL

An open session of the course "Theorizing Religion," this presentation and workshop traces the presence of religious studies at The New School from its earliest years to the present. The presentation will focus on the work of the Jewish pragmatist and theorist of cultural pluralism Horace Kallen, who taught at the New School from 1919 to 1973 and whose work as educator and public intellectual helped shape the school's distinctive ethos in enduring ways. The workshop will explore the often pathbreaking ways religion has been theorized in representative New School courses and in public programs from "Religion - Why?" in the 1930s to "Queer Christianities" in the 2010s, and then engage these legacies to divine what contributions The New School might make to religious studies in its second century.

Best of all, I'll be joined (by video) by Matthew Kaufman, author of the new Horace Kallen biography and of the recent Public Seminar piece on Kallen's influence on The New School!

Don't be that guy

August beckons, and before we know it will be the start of a new academic year. High time for the annual existential ritual: finalizing the new syllabus for "Theorizing Religion." As ever I'll worry over the presence of hoary "classic texts" - and keep many of them. I'll consider whether it's worth keeping the MOOCs. I'll work to make the approach less eurocentric, and build out last year's engagement with white supremacy. I'm planning to add a recent essay from the New Yorker on mystical experience in religion, drugs and music; a chapter from a book by an evangelical historian on white evangelical Trump support; also perhaps something from a book on the Hindu nationalist concoction "Vedic science." I need something more on the ongoing weaponization of "religious freedom" in the dismantling of civil rights protections, too, especially in relation to gender and sexuality... I turned to Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, whom I have relied on for helpfully unhelpful essays on this topic for the past couple of years - her essay on the incoherence of the liberal objections to the Supreme Court's distasteful Hobby Lobby judgment, and last year the preface to the new edition of her uncompromising Impossibility of Religious Freedom. Here's her latest:

I would argue that now is a good moment to step back from the valiant efforts of legal and religious historians, sociologists and anthropologists to describe the effects of modern law on religion; we are now in a position to ask whether we are not also, like the modern state we so relentlessly criticize, victims of unintended consequences. We might see ourselves, not as well-meaning reformers, but as liberal mansplainers telling people that they don’t understand their own religion. ...
One of the many frustrating paradoxes of religious freedom as a liberal project is that having promised people religious choice, liberals cannot now, in good conscience, dictate to them what they should choose. (See my post on the Hobby Lobby decision.) Unless we are willing to start listening and speaking theologically, that is, unless we are willing to listen carefully and speak directly of the existential realities that we all face, rather than using religion as a proxy for our differences, I fear that our efforts at explanation will fall on deaf ears. 

Notice served! Time to explore the possibility that an existential form of "speaking theologically" is more humble, less "mansplaining," than the liberal "academic study of religion" I ply.

IRT

The summer's swoopy intercontinental and cross-continental travel is over - China by way of Australia, San Diego by way of San Francisco (both over Canada!), and today's flight to JFK swinging way south to avoid a long line of midwest storms. Time now for the interborough move: by end of August we'll be ensconced in our new Manhattan digs!

Extended play

Encounters expected and unexpected in the Torrey Pines Extension.

Going to seed

Flowers are just the start of the show!

Seasonal color

Drive by

The drive from San Francisco to LA is indeed lovely, from dramatic coastal drops to lovely vineyard-garlanded hills (I didn't attempt photos while driving! these images are from one of the less crowded stops on Route 1 and from Descanso Gardens) but the last part of our trip that 

took us across Los Angeles was a little surreal. As commuter traffic clotted and churned on either side, we whizzed down the HOV (high-occupancy vehicle) lane fancy free and almost entirely alone. Queasy-making to realize the throngs on the sometimes six lanes to our right weren't in the HOV lane as each was a solitary driver. (And unlike us, most weren't driving a hybrid.) New York subway misery aside I'm happy to be only a holiday driver.

我回美国来了

Back in the US, doing something I've always wanted to - driving the coast road south from San Francisco. Today we made it to San Luis Obispo!

Stop and go

Longest day of the year. It'll take me fifteen hours just to get from 16:05, when Air Canada flight 30 leaves Beijing for Vancouver, to 16:08, when Air Canada 566 from Vancouver lands in San Francisco! Weird but somehow fitting that this loopy day should mark my blog post #4800!

阴天的北京植物园

For my last full day in China, I went to the Beijing Botanical Garden.

 

Plants more than made up for Wofo Temple's being closed for repairs.

Stories in stone

Stumbled on one of Beijing's stranger Buddhist relics, the Diamond Throne Pagoda built in 1473 for the Indian teacher Pandita, and modeled on the Mahabodhi Temple in Bodhgaya. The round Chinese

tower was added in the Qing dynasty. The temple fell on hard times but the pagoda was preserved for its uniqueness. It's now the centerpiece of the 北京石刻艺术博物馆 Beijing stone carving museum, surrounded by a

forest of stele from other defunct temples, perched on impassive tortoises. But there are also memorials relocated from the foreign missionaries cemetery, one for Leibniz' correspondent Joachim Bouvet!

Final photo

My class finished today - not one of the most memorable teaching experiences, though perfectly pleasant. Even if you didn't know I could count my students on the fingers of one hand you could guess it wasn't the group above: most students at the International Summer School are
women. We were few enough that we finished with a shared meal, the assistant ordering food to our classroom. But the photo above has its truth, too. Our classroom was in Renmin's new signature building, 明德楼, and overlooked the plaza where all manner of visiting groups took photos, special bleachers being conveniently available for groups large and small... you'll notice another group in the picture I took the first day of class, below. (The hotel where faculty are staying is just across the plaza, entrance in that cylindrical tower.) But the picture at top captures my feelings of the moment in another way. This summer school's felt for our liberal arts crew like something was going on that we weren't really a part of.

Chinese Buddhism

Feeling I've been neglecting Buddhism a little, I took today to visit 潭柘寺 Tanzhe, the oldest temple in Beijing. Older, in fact, than Beijing  - 3rd century CE - it's in the western hills, not quite two hours by public transit from here. If there are monks around, I didn't see them, but there were plenty of stands selling incense and candles, pendants, etc, and a full suite of buddhas, bodhisattvas and others to receive them.  Here is 文武财神 Wenwu, one of several gods of wealth on the premise:

A historic ordination platform has been recently restored with hopes of spreading 中国佛教文化思想 "Chinese Buddhist thinking," whatever that might be. Like any monks, the "塔林 pagoda forest" was off limits to tourists, so on my way back I decided to check out 16th century 慈寿寺 Cishou, the temple for which my subway transfer station was named; a mural (above) recalls that Beijing was known as the city of pagodas. The pagoda stands in a lovely park; no trace of the rest of the temple.

Household gods

天津 Tianjin is one of China's four "first tier" cities but not a tourist destination - at least for international tourists. The city seems to produce no tourist information, at least none I could find. I improvised an itinerary from assorted websites, learning on my way. Like many a Chinese city it has bleakly vast public plazas, messy-looking low-rise neighborhoods, shiny skyscrapers which shimmer with light shows in the evening, megamalls and forests of identical residential towers. But, like Shanghai, it also has a significant number of western-style buildings,

erected during the time when many western powers (and Japan) carved out colonial "concessions." (Above is 起士林 Kiessling, the oldest western restaurant and bakery.) At least in the Tianjin Museum's exhibition on 中华百年春天津 Tianjin's representative century (before the revolution), however, this is presented mainly in terms of the national humiliation narrative. (In the big diorama below you can relive an 1859 battle when the Qing army sank four British warships, a won battle in wars lost until liberation.) But Western-style buildings seem to be Tianjin's main

attraction now. (As in Shanghai they may be the only ones protected from demolition.) In the 五大道风情旅行区 Five Great Avenues tourist area (the former British concession) many have signs commending the harmonious combination of western and Chinese styles. I'm not sure what the exclusively domestic tourists I saw here made of it. I didn't venture into any of the villas except one, the 天津瓷房子博物馆 Porcelain House which is, er, western-style with Chinese characteristics! Since 2000, one Zhang Lianzhi has been encrusting a French-style villa with shards of broken antiques, and wrapped it in 200m dragons. Every surface is covered in old china or crystals, including the roof!
It's more gaudy than Gaudí, but all the visitors were clearly enchanted by it. I seem to have been the only gripped by the screen of headless Buddhas (presumably victims of the cultural revolution) protecting the house from the street, its back side coiling with a snarl of dragons (above), but there was definitely a strange spiritual energy flowing through this manic project. On entering the house I found it jam packed with antique Chinese furniture, some of it family legacy but the rest - like most of the plates and cups and vases - presumably castaways. Among these were many religious objects, household shrines, etc., and every one sat atop a large pile of fresh 1 yuan bills left by visitors.

What was going on? While I didn't feel the place was haunted, I found myself haunted by the thought of the long forgotten lives of all these household objects - including, of course, the porcelain. (I sensed the hands which had held them, the lips which drank from them: very intimate.) The houses in which all these things resided are surely long since gone along with the people who used them. Their current reincarnation engulfing a French colonial house with the characters 中国梦 "China dream" over the door is at once magical and grotesque. What intentions will have attended those bills left for the household gods of lost houses, anonymous ancestral tablets, compassionate bodhisattvas?