Leap Day!

Preexisting conditions

COVID-19 seems to be making its way around the world. The question of whether it will arrive in any given place has been replaced by the questions of when and how. The toll it ultimately takes will be significantly shaped by preexisting conditions. That's what we hear about those individuals who have succumbed in China, but I'm sensing that "preexisting conditions" applies also to nations. The reactions and overreactions in county after country reflect great political and cultural differences (and some commonalities, denial and scapegoating). I fear for how we in the US will do, not only because our feckless president has so weakened the resources for coordinating a response but because so many Americans lack any kind of health insurance.

Pour-over

One of the places I occasionally caffeinate.

Impermanence

Took the "Religion and Ecology" class to the Rubin Museum today for their newest show, which is smashing - except for the title, "Measure your existence," which fails to communicate the organizing theme of impermanence (or much of anything else!). Its thoughtful, in many cases participatory works expand your sense of what it is to move through time, with and without those who are absent - including the departed. Go if you have a chance!

Next year in Jerusalem

I had a guest speaker in the Job and the Arts class today, a Baptist preacher who occasionally preaches on Job. She insisted we start our conversation by describing how we knew each other. Long long ago, when I had just started teaching, she was my TA for REL 222 “Approaches to the Study of Religion.” A historian she feared it would be drily theoretical but it turned out, thankfully, not to be! She said she still remembers my lecture on Mendelssohn; indeed she was telling someone about it just last week.

Moses Mendelssohn! A name I haven’t heard in ages! But it’s true, I had students in "Approaches" read Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem, which I used to anchor an argument about the meaning and value of ritual in religion. What my erstwhile TA remembered was Mendelssohn's observation that you can’t make yourself believe something, something I reprised for this class (without its subtle polemic against Christianity) as a basic but largely unacknowledged fact about human beings. (The only thing more absurd is the idea that you choose your beliefs.) Any tradition that demands belief can’t but make intolerant hypocrites of its devotees.

That’s why, Mendelssohn wrote, ritual is so important, especially ritual whose meaning is never fixed or final. It offers us a way to be religious without pretending. We came back to this after a wide-ranging discussion of how the Book of Job interrupts pious certainties, enjoining us to revere good questions over bad answers. Mendelssohn doesn't (I dimly recall) have anything to say about Job but thee views resonate deeply with the sense I've been inviting students to make of it. I told my guest (and the class) that my course is called “Performing the problem of suffering” because this is a problem we could never satisfactorily answer. Instead of throwing up our hands, we are invited by texts like the Book of Job us to study and interpret and reinterpret, tell and retell... and so abide with those questions we can neither answer nor leave off asking. Perhaps my whole approach owes to Mendelssohn!

April is the cruelest month but Spring is early this year. My mind is reeling at feelings of doom on various timescales - ecological, political and now Covid-19 - but those courtyard trees are just doing their thing.

Green pastures

Here's a new addition to the "Religion & Ecology" syllabus, complementing the chapter on "The Power of Place" in our textbook Grounding Religion but really showing a world-sized gap in it. (If "place" is more precious than "space," what about "land"?) The chapter introduces phenomenology, bioregionalism and cultural geography as ways of understanding "place" - valuable, but what about indigenous ways of knowing and inhabiting the land? In the light of Ojibwe writer and environmentalist Winona LaDuke's incandescent essay "In the Time of the Sacred Places" it becomes clear that all those are approaches for unsettled settler colonials, and don't come close to understanding what it is to be native to a land. LaDuke makes this clear from the get-go, with a sly reference to the time when "Christopher Columbus was discovered by indigenous peoples as he disembarked from his foreign ship and trespassed on native peoples’ land," but what really got me comes a few pages later, where she argues that the "frontier" still defines settler understandings of Turtle Island. The frontier?

Americans are also, by the social norm of the country, transient. This attitude and practice teach them the notion and enduring illusion of an American dream of greener pastures, always elsewhere. This, too, belittles a relationship to place. It does not teach responsibility, only entitlement...

I'd never thought of "greener pastures" this way, or of the American dream in those terms, but yes. We celebrate those who pick up from one place and go to another - not only without a thought to whether or not that new place is already inhabited, but also without thinking about the way relationships to land become contingent on a resident's dreams and might be put aside without a further thought should yet greener pastures beckon. My own life story is all about people moving - usually long distances across oceans and continents. And it's almost a joke in the places I have lived that next to nobody is originally "from" those places. We're all here for the time being; and though I've been fortunate to live in places where people dream of landing, who knows where life (as we say) might call any of us next? The land has next to no say in it.

How different it must be to think not of greener pastures elsewhere but of the pastures of your place as your responsibility to green! (Or watching that land despoiled, or being forced to leave it...)

Winona LaDuke, "In the Time of the Sacred Places,” Wiley-Blackwell
Companion to Religion and Ecology, ed. John Hart (2017), 71-84: 71, 73

Break forth into singing

My first introduction to the Anglican tradition was the lovely liturgy of choral Evensong, performed as night falls at English cathedrals - and many of the Oxford colleges. I didn't make the Worcester College choir but now, decades later, I've participated in a choral Evensong at last! This was at Holy Apostles, whose choir I joined two weeks ago, and it was quite a deep dive. The choir has about a dozen members, four of them professional singers and the rest highly experienced, but even for such a group I imagine our rehearsal time was on the short side. (We'd also led the hymns and sung two anthems during the 11 o'clock service this morning.) We'd practiced bits of Stanford's opulent "Magnificat" and spare "Nunc Dimitis" at weekly rehearsals before, but made our way through Willan's wildly undulating "Lo, in the time appointed" after just a single run-through an hour before! I stumbled discreetly twice but apparently we sounded lovely.

Quite exhilarating! And bonus: the text is one I'd just been reading about as confirmation that the authors of the Hebrew Bible were more open to the personhood of the natural world than we are: the mountains and the hills shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands (Isaiah 55:12). If they can, so can I!

Holy Apostles

Today the Vestry of the Church of the Holy Apostles had a lovely, rare experience - a "retreat" in our own church! This was made possible by a visitor whose "ministry" it is to reacquaint communities with the beauty of their spaces, and our space - quiet as almost never during its busy week - was more than happy to play along. Sharing what we knew and then, after 45 minutes wandering in silence through the space with sketch pads and meditations, what we discovered, we came to know the space we so love in new ways, and to a fuller appreciation of how others deepen and broaden than love. It was illuminating (ha!) to spend time with our stained glass in a church we'd just learned had been painted in "five shades of white" after a fire in 1990 (I imagine there was no white at all before that), and deeply moving to be reminded of all those members and friends across the decades and centuries who had known and loved this space before and, it felt, know and love it still.

Unseasonal

 

Entirely too early for forsythia, but how can one not delight in them?

Teachings of plants

We cut short a wonderfully rich discussion of the "teachings of plants" in Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass to take a walk down Sixth Avenue, saluting the wintering trees as we went. We ended at the two small parks between the mouths of Minetta Street and Minetta Lane (just north of Bleecker), the creek flowing somewhere beneath us. Looking west from the lower park, someone noticed birds, others noticed the knot of branches offering them a sort of shelter; I don't think any of us paid any heed to the spire of Our Lady of Pompeii in the distance!

Midrash

One of the most exciting moments in my course on the Book of Job and the arts is when I invite students to add a speech to the text. The model is a pair of texts, one ancient (Testament of Job) and the other modern (Frost's Masque of Reason), but the point is that adding to the text is what people have been doing with it from the get-go. I have everyone write a speech for a character named or not, and where in the story it appear - and then to share it with a neighbor, before collecting some for the class as a whole. The exercise never fails to generate remarkable ideas, and the sharing of them always succeeds in giving a sense of the text as one whose potential we are far from exhausting. (One could do this with other texts too, of course.) Later I tell them we're doing a kind of midrash, filling out or filling in - and that each intervention identifies a place in the text or story where a question might arise.

Today there were the obligatory (and necessary) speeches by Job's wife, though pointing in quite different directions and appearing at different points in the story - one after Job, having heard the divine speeches, is reconciled; she is not. God and the satan got speeches too, clarifying things to each other: God in ch 2, "I have my reasons for what I'm doing, I'm not just being provoked by you"; and the satan at the end, "you think you're different from me but you're not!" Elihu was given an additional speech, telling Job that because God is merciful any sinner can be redeemed. A servant reported on the unremarked and unredeemed destruction of his whole world. New were several hauntings - the spirits of Job's first daughters, killed in chapter 2, appearing at different points in the unfolding story. Another student imagined one of Job's new daughters resisting being a replacement: "Are we just tools to prove you are just? Are we just cattle?"

For my part, I did the exercise too, as I always do, and, as always happens, I surprised myself by writing something I didn't know was in me. (So was I surprised or not?) This comes after Job's last recorded words, before his life is restored.

Job doesn’t speak at the end, not to others. But to himself? As he conducts the sacrifice for his friends. 
"I’m not sure I know what is going on. Perhaps I should be gratified that God, having shown His magnificent back to me, has undertaken to restore my image among my friends, gives me a role as a priest. You have not spoken rightly of me as has my servant Job, he said (they told me). Not spoken rightly. So I spoke rightly? I don’t even know what I said, I was beside myself, I was hardly myself, I said things I didn’t know until I said them. Yes, my friends' efforts to help – not so different from what I would have said, I own – bothered me (in part because they’re what I would have said). Did I misspeak? Is it what I said or how I said it that was right – that I was always talking also to God, a God I thought refused to hear me? They (as I said) talk like they’re worried God will punish them as he was punishing me – I can understand their worry, since they weren’t paragons either. But I was speaking to God. It wasn’t right that I demanded he meet God in court, was it? Or maybe it was right in its way: it’s an impossibility, if not for the reasons I thought (he wouldn’t deign). But maybe it’s right for me to think that, if he were human, he should meet me. And He did meet me. Not as a human, because he’s so different from that, so. So. But I’m praying for my friends so they don't have to learn as I did, nobody should have to. (And did I need to lose all that to learn, all my heart, my love, my trust in people?) Oh, oh. Trust in people. In having me do this God is forcing me – inviting me, letting me – trust my friends again, trust that they will be my friends again, that our friendship can survive this. I don’t quite know how we can, I don’t know how they can trust themselves. So we conduct the sacrifice. See what happens. Perhaps that’s my future, as a priest. No family, the solitude of those God calls to Himself. Not alone, but no longer part of the family-based world. Is God my family? The mountain goats are..."

As in the Talmud, as in the history of art, these interventions have expanded our sense of the text, not distended it. That they're conjectural and mutually incompatible doesn't matter in the slightest. The more, in fact, the better. We've added a depth dimension to the text, and an appreciation of a history of interpretive interventions which includes us.

#30

Latest brilliant install- ment of our newer truer history of The New School - don't think we've given up! Only the subtitle, furnished by some last minute editor, misses the mark.

Vertical

What do thirty articles on New School histories look like?

#30 “The New School’s Forgotten President: The controversial tenure of John Everett” (Anna Robinson Sweet, 2/18/20) #29 “When Two Become One: How The New School and Parsons Merged” (Molly Rottman, 1/17/20)  #28 “The New School’s Secular Faiths: At a progressive institution, religion hid in plain sight” (Mark Larrimore, 12/20/19) #27 “The Ad Paradox: Writing Advertising for a University that doesn’t Believe in it” (Ricky Tucker, 11/21/19) #26 “Sex and The New School: The Case of Henry Cowell” (Julia Foulkes 11/11/19) #25 “Alvin Johnson on the Importance of Lifelong Teaching and Learning” (Judith Friedlander, 10/17/19) #24 “The Writing on the Wall: Orozco, Benton, Arnautoff” (Jennifer Wilson, 9/25/19) #23 “The New School’s Long Road to a Four-Year College: 100 year in, The New School’s experimental ethos lives on” (Mark Larrimore, 9/12/19) #22 “True to the Paradox: An Exhibition for the Centennial of a Contradiction” (Macushla Catherine Robinson, 8/22/19) #21 “Sex for Fun: Reflections from Ann Snitow’s Przegorały Classroom” (Agnieszka Kościańska, 8/7/19) #20 “Horace Kallen and the Jewish Roots of the New School” (Matthew Kaufman, 6/27/19) #19 “A Case of Contested Visions: Academic Freedom at The New School” (Wendy Scheir, 6/7/19) #18 “A Secret Invasion: The University in Exile and Conspiracy Theories” (Andrew Woods, 5/20/19) #17 “Dynamic Symmetry: A Mathematical Structure in New School History” (Jennifer Wilson, 5/15/19) #16 “Centering Human Relations in Learning: Human Relations Center at the New School: a place for women to come learn and to socialize” (Julia Foulkes, 4/29/19) #15 “New School Gestalt and its Hidden Sociology: Anatole Broyard at The New School” (Mark Larrimore, 4/16/19) #14 “Nurturing Subversive Seeds: What the New School’s Mobilization Taught Me” (Judy Pryor-Ramirez, 3/14/19) #13 “A Multi-Campus University in Exile: Then and Now” (Judith Friedlander, 2/21/19) #12 “What’s so ‘Jewish’ about The New School? Inventing a parable of pluralism” (Val Vinokur, 2/7/19) #11 “New York is the Place: How the city has defined the school” (Julia Foulkes, 1/31/19) #10 “How to Mark a Centennial: Telling the Story of the New School at 100” (Mark Larrimore, 1/28/19) #9 “All of a Sudden: Reflections from the Classroom of Sekou Sundiata” (Brian Lewis, 1/25/19) #8 “What We Know About Parson School of Design’s Namesake: The story behind Frank Alvah Parsons, the man who made art and design accessible to New Yorkers” (Molly Rottman, 1/4/19) #7 “A History of Innovation: The first history of the New School for Social Research recalls its originality” (William Rutkoff, 12/26/18) #6 “Uncovering the Musical Divide: The tale of two cultures at the Mannes School of Music and The New School” (Sally Bick, 12/14/18) #5 “The New school’s Paradoxical Archive: How a school focused on the future has learned to love its past” (Wendy Scheir, 12/5/18) #4 “Are the Arts a Critical Facet of Social Research? At The New School, artists have shaped the institution’s agenda” (Mark Larrimore, 11/14/18) #3 “What Does It Mean to Educate Adults? The Case of the New School”(Julia Foulkes, 11/6/18) #2 “The Majority Finds its School: The Lessons of Gerda Lerner” (Julia Foulkes, 10/11/18) #1 “Exiled Knowledge Salvaged for World Use: Or the histories hidden in the New School digital archives” (Mark Larrimore, 10/10/18)

Can it be?

Covid

The news out of China is mind-boggling. Numbers keep changing - these are from the South China Morning Post, the only updates I've seen which include recoveries - but almost two thousand deaths of Covid-19 are confirmed (how many more uncounted we may never know), and many more infections. The spread seems to be slowing but this is in part the result of other mind-boggling numbers. In China itself five hundred sixty million people are in lockdown and as the virus makes its way to other countries, who knows how many more will be affected in how many ways? The scale of the fear is overwhelming. This looks to me like something which might end up in every Chinese life story... but just what role it plays in all these lives remains to be seen. One hopes still that the virus subsides. But in the meantime half a billion people are living their lives in new ways. Those who can, work from home. Parents tutor children who can't go to school, as indeed lots of things otherwise entrusted to other (like other kinds of medical care) has to take place at home. Lots of television is watched and video games played as families confront new kinds of cabin fever. But one can expect new things to emerge, too, and new kinds of sociability. I'm told of a new app which allows people stuck in their apartments to go dancing together virtually!

Aware?

Something a student said in class last week has been haunting me. I'd put on the board the question which Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim use to distinguish "religious ecologies" (in their special but very influential understanding) from other ways of approaching religion, e.g., philosophical, sociological, anthropological, theological:

What is the role of religion within the

processes of the Earth and its ecosystems? 

John Grim & Mary Evelyn Tucker, Ecology and Religion (Island Press, 2014), 35 

Their idea is that much of religion has long been enmeshed in human understandings of the rest of nature and of the place of the human in natural cycles and processes, a reality obscured by anthropocentric modern western understandings of religion. To understand past religion better, and to reconnect with religion as a resource for weaning ourselves from destructive understandings of human-nature relations, we need to rebuild our understanding of religion from the ground (as it were!) up. Far from pointing away from the Earth, religious cosmologies are all about human participation in ecosystems of various kinds, if only we learn to pay attention.

But the student saw something different in the words I put on the board. The very words used filled them with anger. In societies like ours, they said, the human role in the Earth's processes has always been outsourced to people of color. Are Grim and Tucker even aware of that?

I've been haunted by this question because it was a question also to me. Aware of the outsourcing, yes, but not as I was thinking with Tucker and Grim. So perhaps not aware of it, not really. (That's how privilege works, how white supremacy works: we alone can be unaware of it.) Of course decolonial thinking doesn't pertain to all religion across time and space, but it surely does to North American religion and religious studies. Refusing to acknowledge this specificity is part of the settler colonial mindset of American religion, as is the blithe assumption that "our" religious ecological imaginings - Henry David Thoreau say, or John Muir, or Annie Dillard - are of a piece with what the ancients of the Old World were doing, or the religious wisdom of Asia, let alone the indigenous traditions fighting for their lives throughout the world. And don't let's get started on the other outsourcing, which has tethered the exploitation of nature to the exploitation of women.

Framed by these questions, the project of "religion and ecology" seems in need of scrutiny. Arguing for the role of "religion" to reconnect a settler society to the Earth it has coopted and compromised risks mystifying the processes by which that usurpation took - and continues to take - place, processes including the theft of land and human bodies of 400 years of inequality. As there can be no peace without justice, there can be no reclaiming of a healthy role within the processes of the Earth and its ecosystems without acknowledging the interconnection of the processes which dehumanized non-western peoples and those which have ruptured the bond of (some) western people with "nature."

How would this look in a course on Religion and Ecology? Some of the readings I've pulled together (like Grounding Religion) are germane, some (like Grim and Tucker's Ecology and Religion) less so. This is one of the courses where I tell students the syllabus is just a proposal and the second half, especially, is likely to wind up looking entirely different. It doesn't always happen but this time I think it will. I'll keep you posted as it grows!

On thin ice

Much has been made of the "oriental fable" Tolstoy recounts in his Confessions and James quotes in the "Sick Soul" part of the Varieties:

“Seeking to save himself from the fierce animal, the traveler jumps into a well with no water in it; but at the bottom of this well he sees a dragon waiting with open mouth to devour him. And the unhappy man, not daring to go out lest he should be the prey of the beast, not daring to jump to the bottom lest he should be devoured by the dragon, clings to the branches of a wild bush which grows out of one of the cracks of the well. His hands weaken, and he feels that he must soon give way to certain fate; but still he clings, and see two mice, one white, the other black, evenly moving round the bush to which he hangs, and gnawing off its roots. 
“The traveler sees this and knows that he must inevitably perish; but while thus hanging he looks about him and finds on the leaves of the bush some drops of honey. These he reaches with his tongue and licks them off with rapture."
“Thus I hang upon the boughs of life, knowing that the inevitable dragon of death is waiting ready to tear me, and I cannot comprehend why I am thus made a martyr. I try to suck the honey which formerly consoled me; but the honey pleases me no longer, and day and night the white mouse and the black mouse gnaw the branch to which I cling. ..."

The fable turns out to come from the legend of the saints Barlaam and Josaphat, and has been traced across many centuries, languages and even religious traditions: the origin appears to have been in a story about a Bodisaf, the Buddha-to-be. But by the time James presents it, he's offered two stories structurally similar enough to resonate interestingly. The first appears in the discussion of "Healthy-Mindedness":

A story which revivalist preachers often tell is that of a man who found himself at night slipping down the side of a precipice. At last he caught a branch which stopped his fall, and remained clinging to it in misery for hours. But finally his fingers had to loose their hold, and with a despairing farewell to life, he let himself drop. He fell just six inches. If he had given up the struggle earlier, his agony would have been spared.

The other appears between these two, and it's in James' own voice. It comes early in the discussion of the "Sick Soul," where James makes common cause with his presumably dour Scottish audience in finding healthy-mindedness misses the centrality of evil to human life.

For naturalism, fed on recent cosmological speculations, mankind is in a position similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake, surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that little by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawing near when the last film of it will disappear, and to be drowned ignominiously will be the human creature’s portion. The merrier the skating, the warmer and more sparkling the sun by day, and the ruddier the bonfires at night, the more poignant the sadness with which one must take in the meaning of the total situation.


I kind of like that one for its sense of collective doom, and for the cruel detail that every sunny day, every bonfire, and every cut of an ice skate will hasten this doom. (There's no suggestion here that, in fact, the lake is only six inches deep!) The other cases are stages on the journey of a soul - everyone knew that Tolstoy didn't stay in that deep funk.

I drew a picture of the scene, complete with ice skater and sun, as students shared responses, but it turned out they didn't like the story as much as I did, let alone relish the polyphony of James' stories as did a class a decade ago. I still saw a beautifully crafted fable, but in 2020 the ice melting doom scenario isn't just a fable. Rather is one inclined to say of it what Tolstoy said of the "oriental fable":

This is no fable, but the literal incontestable truth which every one may understand.

After the rain

Connecting the dots

Meanwhile in the Job course, building on last week's riveting experience of hearing the words of Job, today I had students speak words of Job themselves. First, as part of explaining the pros and cons of separating the "impatient Job" of the poetic center from the "patient Job" of the frame story, I had them read aloud David Rosenberg's version of Job 3 in the style of William Carlos Williams and John Coltrane. Later, as we explored further textual complexities, they got to read aloud the King James Version translation of Job 28, first as the sort of disembodied "interlude" as which it is usually marked in Bibles today, and then again, with a lead-in from the end of Job 27, as the continuation of the words of the person speaking before (there's not indication in the text itself of a change of speaker) - which would be Job himself. How the story changes, how the character of Job changes, how the dialectic of patience and impatience changes!

This left us ready, I thought, to try to formulate some words of our own. Carol Newsom, our guide through the texts' perfectly calibrated challenges, suggests that the Book of Job works its magic as a "polyphonic" text because its different parts keep each other in a kind of constant check. Far from forcing us to choose one as authentic, they are incommensurable, operating simultaneously to remarkable dialogic effect. She introduces this way of approaching the text with a better take on the contrast between the folk tale-like frame story and the jagged brilliance of the poetic speeches. The frame story leads us to expect a certain kind of story, an expectation which is shaken but not replaced when the dialogue intervenes. The speeches don't offer an alternative narrative shape, and in fact rely for their continued shock value on their continued pushing against the frame's story expectations.
 

Newsom illustrates this with a cool illustration (The New Interpreters Bible, IV:324). The frame story continues in the background even as the poetic dialogue grabs the mike. But - and this is where it gets really fun - there must have been a dialogue between Job and his friends displaced by the poetic dialogue, and we can, with a little effort, reconstruct what kind of dialogue it must have been. So I asked the class to try to do just that, giving them for orientation Job's last words before the intrusion of the poetic dialogue

Shall we receive the good at the hand of God,

and not receive the bad? (2:7)

and the God's works after the intrusion ends

My wrath is kindled against you [Eliphaz] and your two friends;

for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has. (42:7)

I'm not sure everyone understand what we were doing but enough got it so we could have a useful discussion afterwards. This Job is more like chapter 28. He doesn't complain that things don't make sense, and certainly does not protest or wish he had never lived. As Newsom and other intepreters have pointed out, the Job of the frame story doesn't have a retributive view of divine justice, where good behavior is rewarded and bad punished. This is the Job, rather, of 1:21's “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” He could easily have said wisdom is inaccessible to mortals except as the fear of the Lord and leading a good life (28:28). It makes perfect sense that God should, in the aftermath, commend this way of speaking which, when you think of it, even squares with the divine speeches.

But what, then, might Job's friends have said - something God instead condemns in anger? To perform this exercise we had to take seriously what the text tells us but people routinely dismiss, that they were truly friends. (You know this is an old refrain of mine.) A student nailed it: "what's happening to you isn't fair!" and we were off. We didn't have as much time as last time I tried all this but I think I explained Newsom'e argument better today...

Trunk calls

 

I let class out early to tell some of our neighborhood trees about "Plantgate." I spoke to two across the street from our classroom. One, secure in the old cemetery of Shearith Israel across the street, patiently

if a little distractedly listened as I stroked one of its soft piney fronds. The other, on the sidewalk facing the cemetery, was busy with its own midwinter stuff; some peeling bark seemed a window into its soul.

Getting into the weeds

Rush Limbaugh's discussion - or whatever it is - of the confession to plants at Union is actually quite fascinating. I already mentioned the startling way in which he derides climate crisis thinking as "religion," going so far as to suggest

we have been trying to defeat this. We’ve been trying to defeat this with logic. We’ve been trying to defeat this with science. We have been trying to defeat it with common sense, with adulthood. We’ve been trying to talk sense into people, and still it overwhelms them. It does become a religion to them. And I know why. I know how they’ve done this. It’s very simple. 

Everybody wants meaning in their life. Everybody wants to matter. Everybody wants to think they are important. That’s the starting point, that’s the psychological realization that the advocates of this particular movement have. They know that your average Tom, Dick, and Harry out there who are anonymous, even on Twitter or not, they want to be relevant. They want to think they matter. They want to think they’re making a difference. 

But they’re not. So how do you bring ’em aboard? Well, the first thing you do is you tell them that the very place they live is threatened and they might die, but they can save it, even though they are part of the problem. 

Some of that may be true - activists and scholars alike have for some time discussed the ways in which environmentalism is a religion - but, um, Rush, haven't you accidentally given us the pluybook of the religious right? Isn't this how you've inoculated millions of people you've scared the hell out of against logic, science, common sense etc.? Or is your religion different from this kind of religion?

So that's interesting, in all sorts of ways. But revealing in another and perhaps more troubling way is something else in his mocking gloss of the original tweet about the plant liturgy:

“Students at Union Theological Seminary prayed to a display of plants” – weeds! – “set up in the chapel of the school, prompting the institution to issue a statement explaining the practice[”] as many on social media were making fun of it. 

and a few minutes later:

my friends, sadly this is very real. These are seminary students. They’re at an institute of theology. Supposed religious people praying to weeds. 

You may have legitimate theological questions about what went on at Union, but it should be clear from every account of what went on (and even the initial tweet, on which most of the response built), that these are not weeds. What does it reveal that Limbaugh glosses all plants as weeds?

Weeds are plants that shouldn't be somewhere, interlopers in our garden. Call them illegal aliens, if you wish. But what would it mean if all plants were interlopers? How twisted must the understanding of nature, and of our place in it, have become, how distanced from our elemental dependence on plants, to allow this glib move? I dare say it shows that, to some extent, the whole natural world is an illegal alien in the imagination of a certain kind of evangelical Christian. (It might start with seeing human nature is weedlike, gone feral.)

But what a terrible alienation from our existence as terrestrial beings!!

Groves of academe

We approach "Plantgate" in "Religion & Ecology" tomorrow. We're reading not only Cláudio Carvalhaes' acc of what he was doing, "Why I Created a Chapel Service Where People Confess to Plants," but a vituperative attack on it by Rush Limbaugh (recently awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Principle), "It's true! Leftists are praying to plants." The Limbaugh piece is interesting, actually, as a snapshot of the the denialist view of climate change: environmentalists won't listen to reason, science, common sense or even adulthood, he laments, because their view of the climate crisis is - get this - a religion! There's a good chance our discussion will wind up focusing on it, too, since it's easier to mock than to risk a new engagement... and the "Temple of Confessions," as Cláudio called his plant liturgy, demands more than polite interest:

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. 

Cláudio wouldn't be content with our just reading and talking about it - but I'm not comfortable concocting rituals. Besides, he's coming for our Spring Roundtable (and we might do some confessing under his guidance). So I've thought of something more suited to seminar pedagogy. Weather permitting I'm going to end class early and ask students to go out and address a plant. Not to confess to it, but simply to spend some time with it ... and, I'll say, "Tell it about our discussion."

A mother owl shelters her young from Greg Wyatt's more than a little disturbing "Peace Fountain" at our local neighborhood cathedral.

加油湖北

A Chinese friend posted this picture she took in Times Square recently on WeChat.

武

汉

加

油

Wuhan jiayou means something like "Wuhan, stay strong!" It's the slogan for supporting the city where the novel coronavirus has affected the most people as they work to tame it. But it may have an additional, darker resonance. The quarantine-happy Chinese government seems prepared to sacrifice Wuhan (and indeed the entire province of Hubei) for the safety of the rest of the country, and is busy reminding folks that that accepting that kind of sacrifice is what Chinese culture is all about.

Out on a limb

At the invitation of a colleague in fashion design, a bunch of us New Schoolers went to a dinner-discussion a few days ago with the portentous title "Is there hope for humanity's future? A scientist and theologian discuss the possibility of near-term societal collapse." The discussion was framed by the provocative paper "Deep adaptation: a map for navigating climate tragedy" by one Jem Bendell, who argues that we need to stop denying the accumulating evidence: our society faces "inevitable collapse, probable catatrophe and possible extinction." Scientist shy away from such claims in part because they're told the grim truth would lead to public despair, but - even if we could afford to prevaricate - Bendell wonders if this fear is misplaced.

“hopelessness” and its related emotions of dismay and despair are understandably feared but wrongly assumed to be entirely negative and to be avoided whatever the situation. Alex Steffen warned that “Despair is never helpful” (2017). However, the range of ancient wisdom traditions see a significant place for hopelessness and despair. Contemporary reflections on people’s emotional and even spiritual growth as a result of their hopelessness and despair align with these ancient ideas. The loss of a capability, a loved one or a way of life, or the receipt of a terminal diagnosis have all been reported, or personally experienced, as a trigger for a new way of perceiving self and world, with hopelessness and despair being a necessary step in the process (Matousek, 2008). In such contexts “hope” is not a good thing to maintain, as it depends on what one is hoping for. When the debate raged about the value of the New York Magazine article, some commentators picked up on this theme. “In abandoning hope that one way of life will continue, we open up a space for alternative hopes,” wrote Tommy Lynch (2017). 

Provocative indeed! The speakers, it turned out, were both Evangelical Christians. (Bendell is an atheist, we were told.) The theologian was an eloquent Sri Lankan, trained originally as a nuclear physicist, who started by asserting that "societal collapse is not necessarily a bad thing." He referenced the book of Revelation's prediction of the fall of the Roman Empire and the hope he shares that the American Empire will fall, too. The Anthropocene's victims are mostly in the global south, as are most Christians: climate-denialist white Americans are an unrepresentative aberration. True Christian hope, he went on to argue, lies beyond secular optimism in the death and resurrection of Jesus, and the biblical traditions' assurance of God's love for the whole creation. The scientist, a white American evangelical but also critical of his ilk, said that as long as God is God there is hope.

The dinner was free (funded by the always generous Templeton Foundation), but of course it became clear that we had to sing for our supper. After the speakers spoke we were instructed to discuss some questions at our tables in a highly structured form of active listening:

Our conversation - a few non-New School people were mixed in, including a deeply cynical professor from Columbia's engineering school - dispensed with the structure. It was animated, and many remarked that we never have occasion for this sort of discussion, but we didn't really face the hope question seriously. It occurred to me that folks not anchored in a religious tradition may not have the confidence to face the issue - at least over dinner.

Nobody asked me what gave me hope. When the event was over, I sprang my answer on a few people, who were dumbfounded, whether Evangelical or atheist. Trees! Or rather, the way our self-understanding as human parts of the earthly community will be changed as we come to appreciate the sociability of trees. Only then, I offered, would we step away from our exploitation and destruction of the natural world. It didn't sound like much of a hope to my interlocutors, but saying it I realized it was true. Not technology, not repentance, not God's mysterious ways give me hope (such hope as I have) but confidence that we can and will change how we understand our relationship to the rest of creation. I'm grateful to this event for making this clear to me.

Pharisees

“I don’t like people who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong," said the faithless president at the National Prayer Breakfast today. I'm sure I'm not the only person to have thought:

Wait, that's my line.

Mitt Romney, in the president's sights as he said this, was the rare conservative Christian Senator who wasn't guilty of the charge. One has long since stopped expecting decency from the Donald, and the National Prayer Breakfast has always been a somewhat shady event (although its members at least professed never to judge the sincerity of the faith of others). But still: those words took my breath away.

How could so many self-professed Christians allow this obviously godless figure to claim the mantle of piety? The demonic genius of it was that he named precisely what they were doing in supporting him, and that they let him coopt them in saying it. Brood of vipers!

Greta of Uz

We had some powerful theater in the course on the Book of Job and the Arts today! As in the first iteration of the course, Bryan Doerries, director of Theater of War Productions (earlier name: Outside the Wire), was with us, telling us about their experience performing the Book of Job for communities who had been devastated by natural disasters in Missouri, New York, Japan, Mississippi. But this time we were also again able to recreate the experience with a performance of the version of Job Theater of War uses, a condensed version of Stephen Mitchell's poetic rendition, read powerfully by four gifted students from our own School of Drama, and seamlessly integrated into a far-reaching discussion by Doerries. The young woman who read the part of Job, Sophia Rizzulo, was especially compelling. Watch this:

In the discussion which Doerries led afterward, one of the students articulated what many were surely feeling. Seeing and hearing Job as a young person, a woman, utterly transformed the Book of Job, whom the student had of course pictured as an old man. The founding premise of Theater of War is that, if we but encounter them in the right way - not in a theater but in a place that's already part of our lives and together with others in our community - the words of ancient plays will speak directly to us across gulfs of time and culture. That's what happened today. Job wasn't from Uz but our contemporary, her anger and pain that of the generations who find a world in ruins, while those who should have taken care of it deflect and equivocate and cynically blame her for her own suffering. One of the teaching assistants told me he was reminded of the transformative anger of Greta Thunberg. How dare you?

Flowing

Religion & Ecology continues to try to be a tributary of Minetta Creek!

Today we looked at these images from Eric W Sanderson's 2009 Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City, a book mainly dedicated to reimagining New York in 1609. But near the end (pp 240-41) he imagines a little fancifully how New York might look in another 400 years. Minetta Creek is back! But looking at this book merely a decade old today, one is struck also by what now seems a naive assumption that the shapes of islands wouldn't change; the certainty of sea level change wasn't yet common knowledge, I guess!

Foundations of the earth

My Job book is coming out in paperback! They've commissioned new covers for the paperback series (the book's somewhat larger format, too, chunkier) and mine's a sort of muddy color. Can't say I love it.

#5000

Can it be? 5000th blogpost?! Die Zeit, die ist ein sonderbar Ding.

Uninfected but not unaffected

A friend in Canada posted this helpful table, which I think may have originated in Canada, too:

Nothing justifies 
being rude 
to others!

I guess we don't actually know how lethal Corona is, but given how far it's likely to have spread already (five million people left Wuhan before the quarantine, and WHO expects it will prove a global pandemic), it's looking much milder than SARS, MERS, etc. That hasn't prevented panicked overreactions, from the quarantining of tens of millions of people in Hubei by a Chinese government fighting for a credibility it has already lost to the attempted quarantining of the whole country by other governments, like our own, through travel warnings, flight suspensions and barring access to any non-citizen who's been anywhere in China recently. By now hundreds of millions of people are affected by the hysteria, if not by the virus, and the hysteria is likely to have a higher cost in lives lost and disrupted than the virus, too.

Easy to say, I suppose, from the safety of February in New York. I wasn't as calmly rational a week ago. We were in China as the virus was starting to make the news, and Nanjing (where we spent the nights of January 12th and 13th) isn't that far from Wuhan by high speed train - a mere 500km! At one point, twelve days after coming home, the media frenzy gave me the panicked idea that I could be a carrier - not everyone has symptoms right away - and I thought of all the people I might have unwittingly infected at school, at church, on public transportation, at the birthday party for a 1-year-old, and at a Broadway show called, of all things, "The Inheritance."

It's nonsense, of course. Everyone's fine, and so am I. But I'm jittery nonetheless, and still quickly change the subject when people ask what I did over the winter break. Were I in China I don't know that I wouldn't be barricaded in my room, swathed in face masks and laminated in antibiotic hand sanitizers, jumping at the tiniest hint of a cough or sniffle - my own or another's - and obsessively feeling my forehead for potential fever. Imagine the creeping dread of an entire nation in suspended animation, afraid to believe anything it hears.

So I can't blame people for overreacting, but I can regret how overreaction-prone most of us human beings are, and can marvel at those who find ways of getting calmly on with their lives. (Would I be able to be one of them? Perhaps going to Beijing to teach again this summer would count; I went to Japan after Fukushima in part to show solidarity with my friends there.) So deep the spreading harm. I can feel understandable worry morphing with anti-Chinese sentiments, entwined with scary fantasies of decoupling China from the world. I can feel the resonance between the argument given for quarantining Wuhan and the rationale contrived for the internment of a million Uighurs in Xinjiang. I know how hard it will be to dial back these overreactions, fueled as they already are by more than medical concerns.

Let's hope the virus soon proves to be mostly bark and little bite, and that the waves of relief at this discovery will help heal some of the ruptures our frenzied first reactions to it have caused. Nothing justifies being rude to others. To have friends come from faraway places, is it not a joy?  (Analects 1: 有朋自遠方來，不亦樂乎？)

Presentation in the temple

Some changes in my life at the Church of the Holy Apostles. My term on the vestry finished, I've been "installed" as one of the Wardens (!). And my ushering days are over too: I've finally joined the choir! What joy this morning to be singing Johannes Eccard's motet "Maria wallt zum Heiligtum."

Patterned

This blighted pavement, on the walk above Riverside Park, somehow struck me as a thing of exquisite beauty. A complement to the slow dance of the trees curving their leafless arms into the sky overhead?