Spiritual warfare

A friend posted this image on Facebook today. It's from the Jesuit Church of St. Francis Xavier's livestream Pentecost mass this morning, part, apparently, of a powerful recognition of the call of this moment. It began with names - George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery - and continued with other names - Eric Gardner, Amadou Diallo. We can all supply more, if not close to all the casualties of the institutionalized violence and structural racism which the preacher called out for what they are, sin. My friend's reflection on it ended:

I don't know where all this goes. I don't know what's happening in other churches Catholic and non-Catholic this weekend. I don't know what they're saying in the Diocese of Lincoln [Nebraska, where my friend grew up], where a building near the police station went up in flames last night. All I know is, they better be saying something, and it better be inspired by the Holy Spirit, and not the spirit of whiteness.

Lest we forget

It didn't stop at 100,000.
May they rest in peace.

Tsiang at last!

Out now: the latest installment (#32!) of our newer truer history of the New School - my piece on H. T. Tsiang! Tsiang has fascinated me since I stumbled on a reference to him in the Dramatic Workshop scrapbooks two years ago. There's not much out there but I think I found a way to take the crumbs and reconstruct a mooncake!

Transhumance

I've been having a blast reading the articles in an issue of the online journal Environmental Humanities dedicated to the emerging field of "multispecies studies." It's actually a set of studies in various disciplines and "environmental humanities" is itself a new kid on the block, but that overlappiness fits. Multispecies studies isn't just attending to the fact that human beings share the planet with other species, but is committed to understanding the human as so entangled with others as to be itself already a multispecies. As Anna Tsing puts it, Human nature [in all its myriad forms] is an interspecies relation (2).

The chapters move from the quaint and charming scene of French city-dwellers heading for the hills with sheep, both species trying to relearn too quickly abandoned practices of seasonal grazing called transhumance (29), to the unnerving discovery that hookworms (see below) are keystone species in our microbiome, "gut buddies" without whom we are vulnerable to various maladies. Jamie Lorimer quips: Living well with a stable, background, and unconsidered microbiome is possible only as a result of having a world at home in us. (72)

There's more to come but I'm already tingling. Where it will take me I don't know. The already world-changing idea that humans share a world with other species in a kind of international politics (as a famous scholar of Amazonian religion puts it) seems like the shallow end of a pool that goes deep indeed. I've come across many of these ideas before - though not transhumance (which sounds like it should have a multispecies meaning of its own, perhaps adverting to our own migratory nature!) or keystone worms. Several are adverted to in the Arts of living on a damaged planet: Ghosts and monsters of the anthropocene, and of course our pash Lyn Margulis has been teaching us to think like "consortia of consortia" in a world made of and for symbiosis for a while.

But what could this mean for religion? Indigenous "cosmo-visions" appreciate the reciprocal care of many species, as indeed - Frédérique Apffel-Marglin would remind us - does the folk wisdom of most people who have ever lived, including perhaps most people living now. One could think of Buddhist interdependence or the liquid congealings of the Dao or the inner life of the Trinity, but, really, could any of our ancestors have imagined that we have not only co-evolved with plants and other animals but, looking inward, are only 10 percent or 1 percent human, depending on whether our essential identity is pinned to human cells or genes (Lorimer 57)? Another frontier is to take the multispecies angle even beyond this to "lively" interchanges with the abiotic; this is the way some scholars bring in gods and spirits of various kinds. Can I go there?

I'm not sure what part this will play in my next year's courses but I feel it has to go in somewhere. Does it undermine religions or just the modern forms of them? Does it conjure up new ones? We'll ruminate.

Cull

Now for the hard part. Basil plants like these like 6" between them.

Our garden advisor says that one of them must go into a salad. Oy veh!

It's not the same, but I finally succumbed to the scissors today too.

Hanging gardens

 As NYC's shelter-in-place reaches Day 70,

 our plants treated us to a veritable Cirque du Soleil!

Names project

My New York Times subscription has been digital for several years now, but today's one day I miss the feel of holding the hard copy in my hands. Evidently this list of Americans lost to covid-19 continues for another two page spread within - and these represent only 1% of the victims. Still, if one could just physically touch each of the names...

Hot off the presses

Academic publishing is sooooo slow.

I can illustrate with a few things which have appeared recently, or will soon. The introduction I wrote to Horace Kallen's article on toleration for the Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal took something like a year. My piece on the reception history of Job for the just published Wiley Blackwell Companion to Wisdom Literature took more like two. As for my essay on doing philosophy of religion in the anthropocene, whose proofs I just sent back, it will end up having been more like three
- assuming it appears this year! (And that's not counting from when the papers were originally presented, at a conference in February 2016.)

So much for academic publishing! By contrast the foreword my friend J and I wrote for the e-Book reprint of Alvin Johnson's autobiography, Pioneer's Progress, which we submitted Thursday, is out already. Two days! (You can buy it here, or just read our introduction here.) Whiplash!!

Basically

In other news ...

Aerial

Two remarkable images found their way to my computer screen today and buoyed my spirits. One is a photo taken by Herb Knufken, the great chronicler of Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve not quite a week ago. A glory of elegant terns in flight - and an insouciant seagull acting as if nothing's happening. The other is one of the earliest depictions of the Ascension, the Feast Christians celebrate today, an exquisite carved ivory from c. 400 CE Milano, now in Munich. Combining the Ascension (with a classical hand-up) in the background with the women at the rather Constantinian tomb in the foreground, it takes us back to the early days of Christianity... even scroll-bearing Jesus looked young!

Protocols

Participated Tuesday in "Training for the Not-Yet: Protocols in the Making," an online event sponsored by our Vera List Center for Art and Politics in which about one hundred and fifty people around the world were led playfully to form a different kind of zoom community. Our cameras and microphones switched by turns on and off, we hummed along with chants, jammed with noise makers, sketched and posted pictures, all in an effort to make clear the unspoken "protocols" of online meetings and reimagine them. We were led by musicians and artists, one a specialist on invisible disability.

The screenshot above is from a moment when we were asked to do a kind of surrealist-inspired automatic drawing. We were to scroll through the stamp-like pages of participants and pay attention to the backgrounds of our fellow participants, then choose one to try to sketch with a marker pen on a piece of paper not in our line of sight. The screenshot is from when we held our drawings up, ostensibly to see if we recognized ourselves in someone else's sketch, but really to hack the panopticon of the zoom grid, interrupt its unquestioned sharing of our living/working spaces with our interlocutors. Restoring human seeing and being seen.... it was a really lovely moment.

In a complementary directive fewer people followed we were asked to post in the chat photos of what we saw when we were facing our computers - what our online interlocutors could not see about the spaces we were in, what we were seeing while we looked at them. (I posted the picture at right, taken a day before but precisely what I see beyond the laptop when it sits on our dining table and the balcony door is half open.)

All in all it let us gently push the limits of zooming. It made me realize that, while I've wanted to push these limits myself, I haven't dared! Specifically what I wanted to do was to make clear that each person in a grid sees a different constellation of participants. What if I had people write the name of someone they thought was in one of the neighboring boxes on a piece of paper and hold it up, with an arrow pointing to the person? (The confusion would be compounded by the fact that zoom shows each of us to ourselves - but only to ourselves - in mirror image.) I suppose I haven't had the nerve do that because the doubtless largely wrong signage, at first confounding and hilarious, would break a spell we couldn't recast - and not just for that meeting but for all future meetings. We'd realize that to zoom we are just random blocks, never actually stacked in any fixed way. The illusion of being somehow connected spatially in a fixed grid would be punctured. Seems I'd rather not experience what I intuitively know about this...

But the workshop has given me hope that I'll be able to think of something before my next online classes begin, something akin to the ground rules (=protocols) with which we form any learning community but attuned to the particularities of zoom gathering. Better to be intentional about them!

GFPJ

The special issue of the Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal dedicated to the New School centennial is finally out! (Actually GFPJ's very title enshrines history: the Graduate Faculty of Social and Political Science was the name of philosophy's home from 1934 to 2001, before that division poached the name of the original 1919 New School for Social Research in one of our renaming blitzes, generating perpetual confusion about the school's origins.)

It's a slightly random but fun mix of unpublished essays, letters, lecture notes and a few new essays. (I wrote the preface for the one republished work, by Horace Kallen.) I was delighted to learn from the editor's introduction that The cover design for this issue is based on a cover that was used by the GFPJ during the early 1980s. The design was by Québécois painter Louis Comtois, who was also Reiner Schürmann’s partner. Schürmann was one of the philosophy department's stars in the 1970s and 1980s, a Heideggerian ex-Dominican priest who wrote in French and lectured on medieval philosophy; he was lost to AIDS, the whole department apparently tending to him in his illness.

After Religion in the Anthropocene

As the academic year 2019-20 comes to a close, and without the diversion of summer plans (Canada? France? China? California? Kingston?), academic year 2020-21 is already making eyes at me.

Fall 2020

Religion and the Anthropocene

Theorizing Religion

Spring 2021

After Religion (ULEC)

Writing the Environment (team-taught ULEC)

Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue at 40 (single text)

Now there's a good chance things will not go as planned next year, but I'll take advantage of this early summer lull to try to think these through. They're actually a coherent set, in an intriguing set of ways it might be useful for me to try to spell out. Hey, making the connections explicit might be good for my research as well as my teaching program.

The Fall '20 courses, both Lang seminars, are courses I've taught before, though "Religion and the Anthropocene" only once and with great trepidation. Most familiar of all will be revising "Theorizing Religion," the one constant in all my years teaching, which has become my annual way of taking stock of what seem to me emerging and abiding concerns of the discipline I represent.

The Spring '21 courses are in different formats. "After Religion" is the biggie - Mark's finally, after a quarter century in the biz, biting the bullet and trying to offer the general intro to religion lecture course that most universities offer! I've not taught it before because I didn't have to, but also because I'm aware of so many ways of doing it badly and none of doing it well. Still, there's much interest among students in such a course, and something finally prompted me last Fall to commit to trying to think of a way to do it with integrity and speaking to our current moment. (It might have been recognizing my self-satisfied condescension for the poor schlubs who have no choice to but to teach it in Tomoko Masuzawa's The Invention of World Religions, which reentered the "Theorizing Religion" rota last Fall.)

It's a bit of an exaggeration to call myself a co-teacher of the other university lecture "Writing the Environment," the literary studies course which is anchoring the university's new commitment to environmental humanities, but my part in it the semester just past make me want to find ways to be involved - and that class' students enthusiasm for the course's religion section makes me feel a call to proselytize!

"Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue at 40" will take ten weeks to read a foundational work of virtue ethics published in 1981, which has shaped my approach to religion (and many in my generation) but which I haven't had an occasion to revisit in, well, in a very long time. The 40th anniversary of its appearance provided an impetus for a return to it, but so did its resonance with the dark horizon of our moment; come Spring 2021, the barbarians might still be in the White House, whether they won the November election or not.

So what makes all these fit together? Well, let me start from the end. After Virtue, its title a reference both to the virtue-less modernity MacIntyre deplored and the teleological nature of the forms of thinking he hoped to revive, is invoked also in the title of my new course on religion. The valences aren't exactly the same but similar enough to be interesting: most secularists assume ours to be an age after religion, for better or worse, even as newer critics argued that the same religious needs animate what supposedly succeeded it. We're also living in the aftermath of the imperialism-era construct of the world religions, and in a time when these and other traditions are being revived and reinvented in unforeseeen and often disturbing ways. The operating course description might make the connections with other things patent: 

In the time of the Anthropocene, religion is resurgent - but not in the forms most observers expected. Westernized young people reject religion in favor of "spirituality" while inherited traditions throughout the world are being displaced by charismatic new communities often at violent odds with the institutions of modernity. The mythology of "world religions"obscures the religious past as well as modern religion's relationship with the structures of the liberal state and imperialism. An increasingly unpredictable climate undermines political and cultural structures once taken for granted, bringing new visibility to the wisdom of indigenous traditions, and even perhaps creating new gods. Meanwhile, most cultural theorists rub their eyes that religion still hasn't disappeared! This course surveys the contemporary religious landscape to consider what part religious discourses, practices and communities may play in an increasingly unsettled future.

To be honest I have no idea how I'm going to do that! I've told the graduate students who've applied to be TAs for it that I intend to do something like the inverse of most world religion courses: we'll start with the messy current landscape of religion, sojourn for the middle of the course with the "world religions" and the world in which they made sense, and wind up (somehow!) with the new claim of indigenous ways of being on and with the earth in the Anthropocene.

If it sounds, in parts, like the two Fall courses, that's not exactly a coincidence. While the material won't be duplicated I'm hoping that the influence of the longer-term purpose of "After Religion" (to put it in a way consonant with what I recall of MacIntyre's Aristotle) can help me in sprucing up "Religion & the Anthropocene" and "Theorizing Religion" for 2020, too.

So they're all connected, you see? Stay tuned as I work out just how!

(The image is a snaggle-toothed nasturtium I picked up at a farmer's market Sunday.)

Sprouting

Our sprouted seeds have entered phase two; the differently

 

shaped new set of leaves are starting to look like what's coming!

Not all that glitters

From a sermon today I learned that there's a cynical version of the Golden Rule:  

Do unto others before they do unto you.

Is this a new thing? It amazes me that I should never have heard it before - not that I'm happy to have encountered it now! Is nothing sacred? The vulgarization feels a little like what happened to us in 2016.

Green city

 

Since we mainly face west I don't think I've shown you the view to our southeast. (You have to crane your neck a little...) Here it is, this morning, and below is the view back up from beneath that blooming pink chestnut tree, as I went to pick up a Chinese dinner last night.

Commence!

Commencement for the class of 2020! It's not the same on a screen... 
but all of our well wishes are, if anything, more intense. Congrats!!

Red light green light

Since I last posted about it three days ago, the US death toll to COVID-19 has rise by another five thousand souls, The Guardian has redesigned their COVID-19 page, and the Abandoner in Chief has walked away. In full reelection mode he and his minions are busy trying to falsify the past - and the present. As this map moves into tan, expect them to question the numbers of deaths on the U. S. mainland with the same cynicism they brought to the victims of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. (Remember when 3000 American deaths was unbearable? It still is...) In capitalist America, nobody who dies deserved to live.

Cultivation

The academic year is over, commencement is tomorrow!

Time to attend to another kind of seed-planting. 

New School's enterprising friends

Someone's decided to produce an e-book of Pioneer's Progress, the 1952 autobiography of the New School's most important early president Alvin Johnson, and my friend J and I get to write a foreword for it. That meant rereading its account of the establishment of the New School and reading, for the first time for me, much of the rest of it. It's quite a storied life, though Johnson's a little tediously the hero of every story. But even in the bits I'd read before there were things I'd forgotten.

The most embarrassing oversight - what am I saying, a most welcome rediscovery! - was the name of the person who nudged the New School into becoming a center for education about the arts in the mid-1920s. She (of course!) appears in a paragraph detailing how important student initiative was in arranging courses in the school's early years.

To return to the activity of the students. A committee called on me to urge an invitation to Alfred Adler, then in the country. He too gave a course that was immensely popular, the attendance consisting largely of teachers and social workers. Another committee asked me to bring over Leo Stein to lecture on art. An enterprising friend of the New School, Mrs. Otto C. Sommerich, proposed a series of lectures on modern art, poetry, music. I hesitated, because the course would cost a lot and I did not know where to find students. Mrs. Sommerich proceeded to find students enough to make the course a great success. This was the beginning of the New School series of lectures and performances in painting, poetry, music, the dance, the theater. (285-6)

Edith Wise Sommerich was in her late forties at the time: typical New School! She continued to be important at the school for some time as head of the New School Associates, a student/benefacter group which offered luncheon talks and proposed classes. Articles from 1926 and 1974 and a portrait from 1962 confirm her formative role was no secret. Nice to meet you!

Come celebrate with me

University commencement is Friday but the 3,390 new New School grads will have to celebrate online. Organizers are planning a virtual extravaganza, but I know many graduates are heartbroken. For many, the ritual of graduation is essential in marking - making - their transformation into graduates. Can one really graduate on one's own? Acknowledging this and speaking to it in truly heartfelt fashion, our new president Dwight McBride shared a poem by Lucille Clifton:

won't you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

Behind glass

Behold, the Lang courtyard trees! I haven't seen them in eight weeks, and didn't see them yesterday either. My friend J sent me this picture when she drove in from New Jersey to pick up some books: our buildings are being officially sealed off until August. Most of my books are still there, too; I've missed my chance to retrieve them. But I don't know which ones I would have picked up. Just as we're learning how much of teaching can be done online, I'm learning a lot of research can be, too.

Four score thousand

Eighty thousand Americans have now died because of COVID-19, a third of them here in New York. The numbers boggle the mind, the heart doesn't know how to break anymore. Some think we're over the hill (New York does indeed seem to have passed its peak, but this conceals the continuing rise elsewhere, sure to accelerate further with premature "reopening"), but the numbers suggest we still barely have a grasp on how far it has spread. Because testing is so sparse, you'd think the fatality rate was almost 6% (8% in New York), which can't be right.

Pining away

Let me tell you a story...

Thought experiment

One has gotten numb to the endless superlatives, real and contrived, of the Trump era, but it's worth wondering if yesterday's vertiginous New York Times Page One would have come even if the person who won the most votes in 2016 were president. Might we be world number one in infections, deaths, and job losses anyway?

The societal dysfunction COVID-19 is revealing for all the world to see would be there still, from shocking and pervasively racialized inequality to the grotesqueries of a for profit health care system - though these might have been mitigated rather than exacerbated by presidential initiatives. Political polarization would not have gone away, surely, and suspicion of institutions and expertise, as well as resistance to thinking in terms of the common good and public health, might possibly be even stronger. The Trump virus has been able to wreak such havoc in this land in no small part because of abundant preexisting conditions like these.

I'm pretty confident COVID-19 deaths and infections would be lower, maybe very much lower. But still not as low as they could be: one would probably have also had a national movement of armed white men - think of those nice folks in Michigan, spread nationwide - claiming social isolation requirements violated their civil liberties. That movement would surely be led by a twitter-spewing Donald Trump, crowing from the top of the media empire he was actually aiming to establish in 2016. A Hillary Clinton administration would have done what every other functioning government has done, establishing national prerogatives and policies rather than the ducking, dodging and dissembling we continue to be subjected to. Testing and PPE would have been made priorities, and in a timely fashion. International coordination would have been emphasized, and would have informed tough decisions and helped explain them - but only to those willing to listen.

More of the economy would have been shut down sooner, though fewer people might have lost their jobs rather than been furloughed with pay. But with far fewer deaths, economic objections to public health measures would be even stronger. In the face of vile criticisms one can only begin to imagine, would the president have found a way to talk about balancing the needs of those particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus and "the economy," instead of pitting them unthinkingly against each other - you know, actually taken responsibility and led? Nobody's perfect and mistakes would have been made on her watch too (I fear she might have been tempted to play the China card as well), and the impact on the election of 2020 is painful to consider. But I'd sure love to be living that reality instead of this absolute chaotic disaster.

Unseasonal

A polar vortex brought snow flurries into our neighborhood. We didn't see them, but a friend in Inwood, not far north, did. In May!!

Fin(ish)

Today marks the end of an upended semester. Classes which began in the seminar rooms and lecture halls of New York City dispersed to the four winds, forced by the onset of pandemic to migrate online - at first, we thought, only for a few weeks. (Now we wonder when one of our higher-ups will give the official word that the Fall semester will have to be online from the start.) The shift, mid-course, to online instruction was a heavy lift for faculty with little to now experience in online instruction (in my case: none) and perhaps heavier still for students, who had to leave their dorms and college lives and return home - if they have a home, and it still has a space for them. Classes met in the grid of zoom, initial resistance to the new medium giving way to a tempered embrace - look at us, in this new configuration! - before fading into a kind of numbness, as every other relationship in our lives moved to the same ultimately wearying platform. For various reasons some students (and faculty in our many faculty meetings) experimented with novel backgrounds, while others chose to turn their cameras off. The university, aware that students were facing widely different challenges, decided (after a hiccup) that no student could be expected to participate and submit work as they otherwise would have, so the usual structures of grading would be unfair; all students who had not withdrawn would get an A or A-. In the end, this freed some students from pressure to participate at a time when family needs, economic and housing insecurity radically changed their capacities and priorities. Others, blessed with more stable circumstances, leaned into their classes, grateful for a way to feel active and maintain their identity as college students. I had the queasy pleasure of receiving work from many of my students through the end, much of it very good, while others flickered in and out, and some simply disappeared. Usually classes end with the bittersweet sense that we've had a powerful experience together, in this space and time, a commuitas which cannot survive our final dispersal. This semester's class relationship have (to some extent) already survived beyond that point of no return. Will they fade faster, one more zoom spread in a blur of zoom spreads, or linger longer?

Strange Spring

Job and the Arts 2020

As promised, some final projects from the Job and the Arts course.

 

Job's wife by Serina Clemente

Untitled by Rhea Mehta

 

A scene from "Home, Father, and Disease" by Rain Sheng

Untitled by Nathaniel Leshem

 

Untitled by Mino Shih

 

Pinchpots made, smashed and put back together by Juno Stilley

 

A wind chime by Joana Liu; Job in brass, friends frosted glass 

A fashion collection called "Destruction" by Isaac Robertson

 

A hand-made book by Gou Lee Kim

Two scenes from "八苦/The Eight Sufferings" by Freeze Shih

"Space between triangles" by Beatriz Cifuentes

 

"Job Confronts God," a scarf by Asa Sanon-Jules

These are only a few from among those willing to let me share their work with the wider class. (Yes, we zoomed it!) There were plenty of others, including powerful stories and essays and some truly remarkable work in sound. It's amazing and humbling that students put so much thought and effort and feeling into a class which was outside their majors - and put such work into final projects in a semester when everyone's guaranteed an A or A-. But of cours this is also the semester things came apart at the seams; the Book of Job witnessed it with us.