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.)
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:
