Traditions that influence me

Funny story, perhaps. Today I spent some time on a fantastic blog I've heard about for years, Sara Ahmed's feministkilljoys. Had a grand time especially with the witty, queer and profound "Out of Sorts," but I have to admit where I started was "White Men." And the reason this is funny, or perhaps not, is because what finally got me to read it was a recommendation to read "White Men" from a white man. Worse, or maybe just funny, this white man was talking about decolonizing the study of religion. My crediting him is part of how the "institution" which Ahmed argues "white men" is works.

White men cite other white men: it is what they have always done; it is what they will do; what they teach each other to do when they teach each other. ...
Once on twitter I pointed out that an author had mainly cited other white men. He agreed with my description of the pattern but said that the pattern “was in the traditions that had influenced him.” To be influenced by a tradition is to be citing white men. Citing; reciting; an endless retrospective. White men as a well-trodden path; the more we tread that way the more we go that way. To move forward you follow the traces left behind of those who came before. But in following these traces, in participating in their becoming brighter, becoming lighter, other traces fade out, becoming shadows, places unlit; eventually they disappear. Women too, people of colour too, might cite white men: to be you have to be in relation to white men (to twist a Fanonian point). Not to cite white men is not to exist; or at least not to exist within this or that field. ...
I do not cite because I hope to become another point in the unfolding line of phenomenology. I hope I do not cite in this way! I have no wish to be a phenomenologist who inherits and reproduces this tradition. My aim is to queer the line that leads from one body to another.

I need to mull this over as I refashion the Theorizing Religion syllabus for 2020. While I cite (and assign) plenty of folks who are not white men, my understanding of academic work is unquestionably tied to a sense of traditions - plural and contested but still traditions.

Reflection

Even a two-and-a-half-day vacation is sufficient to reopen one's eyes to the scandal of our upside-down world.

CCCIↃↃↃIↃↃↃ

Official American fatalities topped one hundred and fifty thousand souls today. That's up 50% in just over two months, when one hundred thousand was unthinkable... as it still is. Sorrow. Shame. Grief. And another five hundred thousand souls lost in other countries. Horror.

Bliss

 

(in Bucks County, PA)

No bright lights, no big city! Nightfall over the Delaware.

Go west!

The west is calling! And while California remains out of reach, we are at least leaving town for a few days starting tomorrow ... and we're heading due west. Crossing state lines, too! Rural Pennsylvania beckons.

Scorched earth

Even under the most hopeful scenario for November 3rd and January 20th, we can expect the outgoing kakocrats to do immense damage over the next six months. Considering it may be their last chance in a while, we should expect the harm inflicted to go very deep.

A case in point of particular concern to my bicultural world is their poisoning of the already strained relationship between the U.S. and China. The Secretary of State flew all the way to the Nixon Library this week to claim it was time to declare the establishment of relations Nixon effected a failure and a mistake - as if it were an option not to have relations. This article in the Times sums up the recent onslaught:   

While the strategy has reinforced a key campaign message, some American officials, worried Mr. Trump will lose, are also trying to engineer irreversible changes, according to people familiar with the thinking. ... A state of broad and intense competition is the end goal of the president’s hawkish advisers. In their view, confrontation and coercion, aggression and antagonism should be the status quo with the Chinese Communist Party, no matter who is leading the United States next year. They call it “reciprocity.”

Sadly it's hard to imagine that repairing the many broken links - something which would take care and tact and commitment and time - will be a top priority of a Biden regime, tasked as it will be with picking up the pieces of demoralized domestic governance, a shattered sense of the common good and frayed relationships with friendlier countries (not to mention the economic, public health and social justice wasteland). One can't see the Chinese side, in thrall to its own reckless advocates of "confrontation and coercion, aggression and antagonism," making the effort either, at least not right away. And Trump and his henchmen's America first carnage has undermined the international mechanisms and relationships which might broker a truce. Dark times ahead.

It was perhaps naive of me to think I'd done my time living through a cold war, but this time it's personal. We're more than a little worried.

Skylines

Not long after this happened here in NY, this happened in Philadelphia!

Village people

 On another trip down to the old Village stomping grounds,

 I was charmed by these wry mosaics I'd not before noticed

 at Christopher Street subway station. They were designed in 1994 by ceramicist Lee Brozgol with students from a nearby school, one of four sets of "Greenwich Village Murals" in the station. Key to this set:

Hanging in there

From the latest New Yorker. It's true, at least for me. Now it's always "how are you doing" or "holding up" and the answer, yes, is almost always a rather rueful "hanging in there" (it's partly a matter of shame to be doing okay). I ask about folks' families, too (in emails "you and yours," "loved ones" or "people you care about," since not everyone has family), and sign off "be well, be safe." But it's uncanny how such linguistic change happens. I've noticed it - resisted before giving in - with phrases like "I'm good" for "I'm fine," or "passed" for "passed away," or how the Aussie "no worries" and "concerning" have found a home in American parlance, but these particular pandemic-response changes are memes I wasn't aware I was being colonized by.

Bull in a China shop

While we're distracted by the dumpster fire in the White House and reeling from the second wind our dumpster king has managed to give the first wave of covid-19 across most of the country, some in his rabid entourage have been tearing up what remains of our relationship with the most important other country in the world. I have no illusions about the Chinese government but what these cold warriors are doing is weakening connections with everyone else, making conflict more likely,

Last week Ian Johnson, an American journalist who's also written perhaps the best book on religion in contemporary China, had his visa cancelled, as part of a tit for tat war begun by the Trumpies. In a much shared article, he shared his heartbreak at it:

Not to sound maudlin, but people like me built our lives around a premise: that the world was interconnected and that it was a worthwhile calling to devote one’s life to making other cultures a tiny bit more intelligible. And also that even if dedicating oneself to this life wasn’t going to be easy or necessarily well-paid (unless one wanted to hawk dodgy Chinese securities), it would be meaningful and was in some way safe: The world wasn’t about to return to old-style blocs, where people from one camp couldn’t enter the other’s side. This was a world of standardized visas, regular flights and some sort of career prospects, whether in business, journalism, academics or cultural exchanges. 

My whole life, and that of many of the people I love, is built on that premise, too.

Our current government relishes the moment's pandemic-induced isolation, and distrusts anyone who might be loyal to ideals or communities or relationships which go beyond it. Since their counterparts in China are suspicious of the same things, and both parties are busy blaming the other for domestic problems, it's hard to see this breakdown of relations slowing down. My hope - but it's a distant hope, given the current frenzy of bridge-burning - lies in a new government which doesn't think in blocs. I was heartened to read these words from Tony Blinken, a foreign policy advisor to Joe Biden, on CNN.

We're engaged in a serious competition with China. Competition can be a good thing, but we want to make it a race to the top, not a race to the bottom, and that's a race we'll win. ... But here's the problem. Right now, by virtually every key metric, China's strategic position is stronger and ours is weaker as a result of President Trump's leadership.

Blinken cited the power vacuums we've created in international organizations, schisms with allies, the president's "green light" to commit human rights abuses in Xinjiang and, perhaps most damaging of all, "debasing our own democracy." All true. "Race to the bottom" describes Trump's approach to everything, and his desired effect on others, and they're racing ever faster as the election approaches.

I pray for peace, and pray that we'll have a chance to restore what he and his enablers have wrecked.

Collaborative teaching across platforms

 

We're still six weeks from the start of the new academic year, but the way time slinks and slithers by in this pandemic daze, it feels like it might be just around the corner. Or maybe it's that Fall courses are pretty much the only things I am certain are happening, and over which I have some measure of control! The switch to online makes it an interesting challenge, too, though it seems unlikely anything a codger like me comes up with will seem cutting edge to Generation Z...

The above slide, with student models sportingly pretending to take it all seriously, is from a very helpful webinar I attended today on "Designing Learning Outcomes and Engaging Assessments For The Online Classroom." It was helpful in part because the instructor teaches almost entirely asynchronously - that is, not through live zoom sessions - and described all sorts of engaging ways she "puts students to work" in their learning. Asynchronous requires lots of careful setup from the instructor, far more than planning an activity in an onsite classroom, but it's dawning on me that the online context's asynchronous possibilities offer the chance to facilitate new kinds of learning, not just distantly replicating those with which we're already familiar.

(This discovery is like the one I imagine many organizations are making. I know my clergy friends are articulating similar changes of perspective. Zoom is a lot better than expected in replicating in-person worship, for instance, but that's not so much because it replicates what we did in the past - there's much it cannot - as because it offers new forms of community. Since it may be a very long time before we can resume communal singing, peace-giving and Eucharist, it seems mete to think about these newly discovered possibilities, and to recognize and develop them not as substitutes for an old normal but as components of an emerging new one. Our rector says she "would hate to lose" the sense of a community watching and caring for each other which the zoom gallery provides, or the engagement in fellow parishioners' lives which breakout "coffee hour" affords (and learning people's names!). There's something nice about seeing into the places where people live... and how cool is it to be able to include people who can't come to church, because of illness or having moved out of town! There are downsides, of course, notably for those for whom zoom is inaccessible or offputting, but it does seem this is the time to let the "old normal" go and start to build the "new normal" in which online elements have a meaningful place.)

For my classes I've been swinging back and forth between thinking in terms of primarily synchronous discussion - isn't that what we do? - and significantly asynchronous learning which allows more students more voice (not to mention those in time zones far away), probably with online widgets added to synchronous sessions too (like the google.docs I used last semester). To be honest, part of what's pushing me toward asynchronous possibilities is the experience of being on the receiving end of synchronous online courses, however nifty: the student sits passively as breakout groups are formed, or slides are called up, all learning momentum draining away. The breakout groups themselves can be awkward and uncomfortable, and you're trapped in them until released by the instructor. More fundamentally, the more we instructors curate the students' interactions, the less active they are in their learning. And there still seems something panopticonish to me about the zoom gallery, even as I'm spooked when people turn their cameras off. Active and passive aren't where I thought they were.

So here's where my thinking is right now. Asynchronous teaching, while in one way much more directed than an in-person seminar class, allows students a variety of widely different ways of engaging with the material and with each other. Since it's available at times convenient to them, there's no dead time waiting for transitions in synchronous gatherings - indeed, the hope is they'll be more alert and engaged. Word on the street is that students take online discussions seriously, even perhaps attending more carefully to what their classmates are saying, taking more time to form their thoughts - and, of course, everyone gets a say. The synchronous session works well as gathering everyone's work together, recognizing and building on connections students have already been making, rather than counting on the alchemy of the classroom to bring them all forth from scratch.

I need to learn how to design assignments which let students go beyond what I've imagined, and to moderate discussions where genuinely new connections can be made. I usually give students considerable voice in determining where our discussions go and I don't want to lose that. We'll need longer synchronous sessions, uninterrupted by breakout rooms, to allow for that, probably with various roles for student facilitators. But I'm thinking I'll also invite them to help me construct asynchronous as well as synchronous interactions.

They will know, better than me, what works and what doesn't!

Monsoon

Meanwhile (news the Times hasn't found fit to print)... Two thousand villages inundated! More deaths and less information from Nepal.

Trapped

Today was to have been our flight to California for a family holiday, but in this time of covid it just doesn't make sense. (Thanks, Herb, for the picture; I can just feel the wave washing over my feet!) We'll have to content ourselves with FaceTime and more local pleasures, like this throng of sunflowers at the Morningside Park Farmers Market yesterday.

Ambitious, vindictive, rapacious

While the unclad emperor distracts us with his fecklessness (his charges are dying by the tens of thousands and his only reaction is to muzzle the messengers), his religiously conservative conspirators are busily at work. Since it's looking like we might not have to suffer four more years of this kakocracy, the next six months will be a frenzy of reaction. Oh to be a fly on the wall during the weekly White House Bible studies, though it would doubtless be a disheartening experience to witness their pious pacts with the powers and principalities.

One proud member of this anti-democratic cabal is the Secretary of State, who's busily undermining the international human rights regime. His "unalienable rights" construct is breathtaking in its audacity. He thinks that folks claim too many things as rights (which might even be true, especially in American culture that doesn't see rights and responsibilities as linked) and so is focusing on just two:

foremost among these rights are property rights and religious liberty. No one can enjoy the pursuit of happiness if you cannot own the fruits of your own labor, and no society – no society can retain its legitimacy or a virtuous character without religious freedom. (source)

This is a remarkably brazen gaslighting of the Declaration of Independence, from which the "unalienable rights" project dares to take its name. Remember what it says, and doesn't? We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness... Part of American Politics 101 is recognizing that Jefferson was tweaking John Locke's triad of "life, liberty and property," not repeating it. Jefferson's choice of "happiness" will have been recognized by everyone as a departure from thinking in the terms of property. It's a huge difference if you let yourself think about it, but what Jefferson opened up this twerp seeks to close again.

Similarly dishonest is glossing the "liberty" here as "religious freedom," especially presented thus:

Our founders knew. Our founders knew that faith was also essential to nurture the private virtue of our citizens. ... Our founders also knew the fallen nature of mankind. Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 10: “Men are ambitious, vindictive, rapacious.”

This is the same misanthropic theology which the Attorney General trumpets. Without a strong state ("law and order"!) sinful human beings will devour each other. But that's not enough: people need the fear of God - read: fear of hell - to stop them from losing it and stealing other people's stuff. "Religious freedom" here really just means social control. Far be it from me to say that this is bad theology, though I do think there's something sad about a Christianity which only seems like love to insiders. But "ambitious, vindictive, rapacious" seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Indeed it's a prophecy they've already fulfilled.

Figures in the sky

Dancing cloud creatures tonight... Tuesday we had a dragon!

Mangia bene!

Practically four months to the day from the last time we did it, we went to a restaurant tonight! Hard to say what was the nicer rediscovery - menu reading, bantering with a waiter, overhearing other guests' chatter, huge portions... and all while sitting under a canopy of leaves, a breeze on your cheek!

Village in the Village

Part II of the double header, the latest installment of our newer true history of The New School! As I was sleuthing around Tsiang, my partner J was on the trail of Albert Mayer, architect and urban planner, member of the real estate dynasty which put The New School on the map, and an early connection to India!

Freedom lives hence and banishment is here

New School history double feature today! First, here is an almost expressionist rendering of how Erwin Piscator transformed our beloved

(now shuttered) auditorium on 12th Street for his first production at The New School in 1940, King Lear - and with a revolving stage! (p37)

God exists to be shaped

I think I have an epigraph for the new iteration of "Religion and the Anthropocene," and a text.

“Books aren’t going to save us.”
“Nothing is going to save us. If we don’t save ourselves, we’re dead. Now use your imagination. Is there anything on your family bookshelves that might help you if you were stuck outside?”
“No.”
“You answer too fast. Go home and look again. And like I said, use your imagination. Any kind of survival information from encyclopedias, biographies, anything that helps you learn to live off the land and defend ourselves. Even some fiction might be useful.”

This hails from Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower (55), a brilliant and prescient piece of "realist" science fiction from 1993. I read it years ago but didn't have the chance to return to it when people recommended it for "Religion and the Anthropocene" last time. Now it seems even more clairvoyant. The beauty of it, if beauty it is, is that this was written before the "Anthropocene" discussion arrived, a reminder that people have been sensing our fatal soiling of our earthly nest for a long time. It's like one of those old books on our family bookshelves. Even some fiction might be useful. And it's all about religion! Indeed, her protagonist's "favorite book of the Bible is Job" (14)! But the book is full of citations from a work of scripture the heroine writes called Earthseed: The Books of the Living (which has become the basis for its own online religion!).

Why is the universe?
To shape God.

Why is God?
To shape the universe.

All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
Is Change.

God
Is Change. 

(72-73)

Uncommonly good

Lang's put together a super exciting common reader for incoming students, new and returning. Each major and minor was given the chance to share some materials which speak to the current moment, and student clubs will soon follow suit. It's all preceded by a section on New School history. The whole thing, which features historical and contemporary sources in a myriad of genres, faculty work, and work of students in classes and after, conveys better than anything I've yet seen the dynamic of what we do, in classes and beyond... and makes a hopeful claim on the possibilities of the online setting for continuing it.I'm pleased our New School history work frames it! Students can stumble on my piece on the prehistory of Lang, an invitation to think beyond the four-year box, can hear the many voices in our podcasts, and enjoy another piece the editors chose from the Public Seminar vertical! I hope students also make their way to our (excellent) Religious Studies selections, which highlight the work of some of our alums - an encouraging prospect for new students, I trust, and also an anticipatory response to "what can you do with a religious studies minor/major?"

Cabin fever

While looking for something else I stumbled on this spread of photos in my diary, taken this very day 15 years ago! I was spending a few weeks hiking alone in the Swiss Alps, first in a smaller place called Flims and then in justly world-famous Interlaken, each night logging what I'd seen. This was the photo report from a day walking above Grindelwald.


The googly-eyed Ionic columns are, I think, thistles whose tops have been cut off—perhaps munched by a cow! The big picture shows our trusty Postauto on its way back down, the Eiger dominating the view; notice how the clouds which will soon knock out all view are already coming in from above and right. The little cricket wasn’t much more than 1cm long. The Obere Grindelwaldgletscher has seen better times, but is still mighty impressive, if hard to photograph. The picture at lower left shows the rays of the morning sun coming through the top of the Wetterhorn. The entire mountain seems to be made of 1-2mm thick layered shale; a wonder it does not just fall apart! The grass which has suddenly let loose is silhouetted against the kind of sky which came once clouds came over the Scheidegg. The dried sun is the top half of a kind of giant dandelion a good two inches in diameter. 

It seems kind of insane, now, that I was keeping such a log (there was more than this explanation of the pictures, assiduously describing how I got to Große Scheidegg and the amusingly named First and Bort), but I'm grateful, especially in this summer of no travel! And it's fun to see me working with text and images, a year before I started blogging...

Past present

I did the most ordinary of things today. I hopped on the subway to go pick up some books from my office, swinging by some shops on the way for specialty groceries Italian and Japanese, and met a friend for a chat on a bench on Union Square. At school I bumped into a colleague I hadn't seen in a while and heard her news: she just got married!

Except of course this is one of the most extraordinary thing I've done in months, triggered by the first day in a month that the building housing my office was briefly open. The colleague came back to NYC for the same reason. In Pittsburgh since Easter she expects to be there through Christmas.

The campus seemed frozen in time. My office was as I had left it (a relief, actually; in the past my windows have leaked, and we've had some pretty impressive storms lately). But the empty spaces in classrooms and public areas were creepy, a ghost town.

It's indeed creepy to consider that it will stay this way through the end of the year, class and campus communitas displaced to the suburbs of zoom, which we have to hope get close enough to what we do to satisfy students, and teachers too. I felt acutely the challenges of virtual campus community.

My friend and I talked about the things we've learned in our zoom exile - things we hope to carry with us going forward. Focusing on them can help us experience this moment as more than one of loss, especially as it's become clear (in the words of our provost) "we have to take the status quo off the table as an option" for the future. What's next?!

Inessential

Well, this is as close as we're going to get to the Pacific this summer. We'd thought there was a window of relative safety, but, never very big, it's closing fast, with infections rising rapidly across California. In San Diego County, once again, "All people must remain in their homes unless they are traveling to an essential or reopened business, an essential activity or are participating in an allowed individual or family outdoor activity." Even after self-quarantining after the dramas and uncertainties of flying, there would be nowhere to go! Maybe in winter then? Meanwhile, thank goodness for family FaceTime and for Herb Knufken's picture galleries!

Peek-a-boo

The sun is working on some pretty involved new shadow tricks with some cloud heavies. (You'll notice some drops on the window below; between these performances we had an intense if short-lived storm.)

Onlining up

Proceeding through our mandatory course on conducting an online class I'm learning lots - like the limitations of quizzes (right)! Actually it is very helpful, but I'm so grateful to have had the chance to learn about online learning more dynamically with last month's TESOL Methods intensive. Speaking of which, I found the picture the instructor took of our class at the end of our last session, the one where I didn't follow the instruction to write only one word on a piece of paper. Fun to look back at it, though, and realize that "ADAPTIVE" is easier said than done.

Uptick

And now, as we knew to expect, an uptick in deaths. O sorrow.

Colleges under assault!

I've known this for a while, I guess, but we are the enemy. The news consolidator RealClearPolitics, which I check regularly to see how folks outside my media bubble think (I trust them because their bent is conservative but their selection of liberal pieces is good and fair), led me yesterday to an article called "Defund The Police? What About We Defund Universities" by a retired anthropologist of tribalism from McGill named Philip Carl Salzman. It acquainted me with a meme that's apparently been going the rounds for a few weeks now. "Defund colleges, not cops" written for the (American) Spectator by Peter Wood, president of the American National Association of Scholars, a conservative higher ed advocacy group, seems an earlier version.

In that other media bubble, "academia" is the root of all evil. According to Wood, it indoctrinates students in an ideology of "Despise America First" and abuse[s] its authority by beckoning students into political activism. Excoriating the statement in support of BLM from the president of his alma mater Haverford (of course!), he likens demands to move funds from policing to social programs to another form of looting. Worse, it is clear that American higher education is in the hands of a clerisy, the members of which apparently all went to the same seminary and worship the same color-coded god, Lord Diversity, and his attendants, Black Resentment and White Guilt. Great God almighty!

For his part Salzman arraigns colleges and universities for a cultural revolution culture administered by the many "diversity and inclusion" commisars whose salaries could have funded many scholarships and professorships in STEM fields. This extreme radicalism ... claims that America and Canada are evil, beginning life in sin as slave owners and colonial settlers who engaged in genocide, and continuing on those paths until today. But even in this theory all Americans and Canadians are not evil: only whites, males, heterosexuals, and Christians and Jews are evil oppressors. Females, people of color, LGBT+, indigenous natives, and Muslims, in contrast, are virtuous victims, and deserve to take the reins of control. To the barricades!

It's about control, clearly. As a card-carrying member of the academic cult, I feel obliged to acknowledge that academia is no utopia, and our research and teaching is more inclined to be critical than edifying. That's what we do, especially in the face of entrenched problems and their know-nothing defenders. (That's also why I feel obliged to read the views of the other side, which I know not all of my colleagues do.) We can get a little full of ourselves, become our own kind of bubbles, practice exclusions of our own. But we also help clarify what values matter and why, and what it would take to live them out - for our students and for society as a whole.

Could we be a society which is more
than a fight for control? 

We try to see America for what it is first because we are committed to values of truth and justice and participation for all which have been articulated particularly powerfully in American history. (Our patriotism is to judge America by its ideals rather than to idealize its stumbling reality.) We think These Truths might have merit beyond these shores and might be achievable for more than a select few, too, if we really committed to them. Jill Lepore: To study the past is to unlock the prison of the present.

Speaking of "beyond these shores," we are being "defunded" as we speak. ICE's policy to revoke the visas of all international students whose colleges have moved instruction online (building on other efforts to use visa restrictions to make coming to the US more difficult and more costly) are a body blow to the many schools dependent on foreign students. (No, students don't need to be in the US to take online courses here, but they come here to study in the United States, something heretofore welcomed and celebrated.) If the administration succeeds in pressuring more schools to open campuses despite the unchecked spread of covid (as it is trying to do with K-12 education too, heartless monsters they), we may actually become centers of infection.

Worldmaking

I'm starting to think about my Fall classes - not just the what but the how. I had some fun ideas while doing the TESOL Methods intensive, using photographs and quizzes and breakout groups and even some meditation, but that was before it was certain that we would be online. Now that's settled I'm realizing that the what and the how have to be connected to be optimally effective. So here's an idea for the "Religion and the Anthropocene" class:

clay !

Inspired by a friend who, over zoom, showed me an adorable stegosaurus they'd fashioned for a little friend, I'm thinking of sending each member of the class some clay. During class sessions, they'll be permitted, indeed encouraged, to "doodle" with clay, and at some point we'll share what we've been doing with the class. Beyond activating our creativity, keeping hands busy this way might help students resist the surf the net, and the tactility and three-dimensionality of it might break zoom's 2-D curse when we show each other what we've done. I'm thinking of calling it

"breaking the third wall" !

But there's a further reason this makes sense in a class called "Religion and the Anthropo- cene." We humans are ourselves made of clay, according to many traditions, but we are also sculptors. While I'm not planning to spend time on The God Species I think owning the fact that we are makers will deepen our reflection on the anthropocene. (We make worlds and can even make extinct things, like dinosaurs! Gods, too.) My working name for the practice comes straight from anthropocene sci-fi:

"terraforming" !

 

(These images are of course not of clay but they are something I made: my latest, and most successful, expedition to planet sourdough.)

Neighborhood flowers