Bless this house

The move is complete! A few things need yet to be unpacked, curtains need to be arranged, art needs to go up on the walls, but these are details. A friend who is a priest came by after church today for the Blessing of a Home. It's a lovely liturgy which blesses each part of a residence, naming and consecrating what takes place there. Each room is sprinkled with water with a bit of salt in it, each of these having been first purified of dark spirits (not quite not an exorcism!); we trust that our improvised substitutes for the recommended hyssop did the trick!

Confession

Something that happened at my new neighbor, Union Theological Seminary, has apparently got the conservative twitterverse in a frenzy.

Pagan nature worship, they cried, idolatry or worse! But what Associate Professor of Worship Cláudio Carvalhaes was doing was something deeply religious, ecological in a genuinely Christian way and, it seems to me, quite profound. His introduction included these words:

Many of us have a disconnected relationship with nature and relate to nature as outside things, as "it." Today we will try to create new connections by talking to the plants, soil, and rocks and confess how we have related with them. Confessions are also forms of mending relations, healing, and changing our ways. We are all manifestations of the sacredness of life and the "we" of God's love is way beyond the human, so let us confess to “each other" including plants, soil, rocks, rivers, forests.

I need to find some way to include this in next semester's "Religion and Ecology" course! Perhaps I can invite him to come visit!

His own petard

Why does the impeachment of an eminently lawless president fill me with foreboding? Because he's the president, with enormous power at his disposal, and can be counted on to stop at nothing to survive, may it cost rule of law and the integrity of the country (and the world) what it will? Or because we'll see just how many others, for what range of bad and worse reasons, are willing to support him as he does it?

Toys will be toys

 

This actually thrills me. How better to help folks understand that gender is performative? Intended for age six and up, each doll comes with long and short hair and variously gendered and not-so-gendered looking kit, allowing 100 different combinations. I can't imagine growing up knowing this, let alone seeing it happening in my own hands. Trivializing? Perhaps. But it will make the Pope shudder.

Off the wall

The latest installment of our newer truer history of The New School (the 24th!) relates our storied murals and other works by our muralists to contemporary controversies around political art in schools. Fascinating!

Fugit

In just a month, the setting sun has moved from to the right of Grant's Tomb south... guess we won't see it hit the horizon again until Spring!

MOOC redux

This years Theorizing Religion class digesting the HDS "World religions through their scriptures" MOOCs (Islam and Buddhism) and producing outlines of courses of their own! I had little to do but chaperone...

Overpurge

Unpacking in the new apartment is nearly complete! And guess what: I was so zealous in shedding books, donating the equivalent of twenty boxes to the Brooklyn Public Library, carrying many others to my office and leaving not a few for the Brooklyn street, that this is all that's left. Overdid it a little...! But I don't doubt their numbers will soon swell.

Morningside Park, first day of Fall

Future religion course

Barely into the new academic year and already thinking about the next one. Course planning has to start early at a university where a relatively small corps of full time faculty are stretched across many programs and divisions, so the ULEC program to which I regularly contribute (Job and the Arts, and the New School History class) sent feelers out this week. As it happened, their query arrived just as I was preparing the reading from Tomoko Masuzawa's The Invention of World Religions for "Theorizing Religion."

Unlike many religious studies folks in small programs, I've never had to teach the survey course of world religions which is the staple of most programs, and a feature of many American undergraduate educations. Like folks in bigger departments, I get instead to teach how problematic any such course must be. And yet I'm aware that any course at the introductory college level must be problematic - and that that can in part be remedied by making those problems a part of the discussion. Presumably there are ways of doing this for the world religions course so many students want. (More than half my students in any given class are there because "I've always wanted to take a course on religion.") For various reasons I've toyed with the idea of concocting a world religions lecture course for the New School for years, and this year I think I got there. Here's what I proposed:

I'd like very much to design a religion course appropriate for this school and this moment for Spring 2021. It would provincialize western, especially US, understandings of religion, world religions and religious liberty; consider the emergence of new religions, secularisms and indigeneities in our own time; and look to the Anthropocene future. 

"World religions," indeed "religion," could be in the middle section of the course, engaged as compelling constellations whose rise and fall we chart! And my "Religion and the Anthropocene" questions could form the final section: what resources, in "world religions" or "new religions" or anywhere else, might help us in a time of anthropogenic climate crisis?

Working title (an homage to Alasdair Macintyre): "After Religion."

Sympoeisis

We didn't quite get to life, the universe and everything (time was limited) but the student-led discussion after a screening of the Lynn Margulis documentary tonight was pretty exciting - and left us all with an appetite for more occasions to talk about science (especially evolutionary biology) and religion (or perhaps spirituality). My interdisciplinary science colleagues were there, too. The chair, K, a molecular biologist, said the film was like six semester's of biology in two hours. My co-conspirator in planning this event, D, also a microbiologist, explained to us that Margulis "thinks like a microbe."

Trophy

What is this marvelous thing? It's from the 1928-29 catalog of the New York School of Fine and Applied Art (soon to be renamed Parsons School of Design). A caption explains: Poster design advertising hardware implements. The design is based on Research study of 17th Century historic trophy panels and rendered in the modern manner. Who is this advertisement for? Were there ever folks conversant with 17th century trophy panels and modern art movements (like Dynamic Symmetry) and able to connect them to the pleasures of tool ownership? For Frank Alvah Parsons, advertising, like everything else, should be artful - responding to and cultivating the appreciation of beauty and sense of inner harmony which a full life and engaged citizenship required. Golly!

Garden State

Back to the City by way of a lovely arboretum in Morris County, NJ.

Jerseyed

We're wrapping up our week in New Jersey, which was mostly leafy

suburbs with only the occasional mall or post-industrial wasteland view,

 out in the rolling hills beyond the burbs, where you can smell Fall.

Slide

We followed in the footsteps of Harold and Kumar, subjects of a famous New Jersey movie celebrating its 15th anniversary this year. Back when

it was filmed White Castle didn't yet offer the Impossible Burger, so they had prophetically to improvise: the actor playing Kumar was vegetarian.

Anabolism!

The latest installment of our newer truer history of The New School is up on Public Seminar - one of mine. The prehistory of the school I teach at, it brings together questions and discoveries of many years trying to figure this place out. I'd originally entitled it Experimental Colleges: The New School's Long Road to a Four-Year College, but the PS editors bumped my subtitle to title and added a slightly more boosterish subtitle of their own, 100 years in, the New School's experimental ethos lives on. That sounds rather more coherent and consistent than the story warrants! No matter, anyone who actually reads the piece will discover that the prehistory of our 4-year college is full not only of cool ideas but also of false starts and abandoned experiments.

Portrait galleries

The semester's classes are unfolding nicely. Theorizing Religion has entered the world religions MOOCs, filling students' heads with knowledge of Islam and Buddhism before we get into the otherwise too self-referential discussions of the definition of religion. And in New School Histories, one of our teaching assistants, who's been working with the "Women's Legacy at The New School" project, gave a lovely mini-lecture which included portraits of all the ten women who were on the organizing committee of the New School, and raised new questions (at least to me) of how the New School's vision might be shaped by different movements in progressive era women's education. Exciting starts!

Commuting life

(minus the other commuters...)

Leafy suburbia

Painters are coming in to do the walls of our new place. To assist them, all our stuff, half unpacked, has been glommed into islands in the middles of rooms. And we've escaped in a rental car to an Airbnb in Montclair, NJ. Montclair's very pretty (it was one of the places people recommended we look at) and trains to NYC are convenient. In the next days I'll get a taste of the commuting life which might have been mine!

New neighbor

Riverside Park, one of our nearby parks, has some sections marked "forever wild," which are full of fallen branches and thick with weeds. I find it charming but I guess it needs a little thinning out, especiallu of invasive species. Enter the Riverside Park Conservancy's "Go(a)tham" project!

High rise

The Brooklyn philodendron has put out its first Manhattan leaf.

Purpling

The sky at the horizon was greener, but the color of the river is true!

New view

Symbiosis!

The first Lang Religious Studies event of the year is also our first to be co-sponsored with the Inter-disciplinary Science program in a while. It's that film we were all so wowed by last semester. I'm especially looking forward to the discussion with science students and faculty.

Upper upper west

Went to visit some of our new neighbors sixty-odd blocks to the north.

Blessing

I know these lovely gentlemen! John was the rector of St Peter's Eastern Hill, the historic Anglo-Catholic church which I attended while in Melbourne in the early days of this blog. Rob - a fellow Californian - became a close friend. I saw them last in 2013 when I stayed with them in their new home in Wangaratta, but FaceBook keeps us connected.

John and Rob are about to become the first gay couple to have their marriage blessed by the Anglican Church of Australia! I am so happy their love can be an inspiration more broadly, and a beacon of God's inclusive love to those, young and old, with questions about sexuality - and about the church. But Rob and John are likely to get more than friendly attention now they've "stepped up"; keep them in your prayers.