Picturing religion

With powerpoint, canvas and zoom, Theorizing Religion is off to a good start! 10 of my 13 students were there - I meet the others, those in Asia, tomorrow - and I think we're already coming together as a group. I took a page from the TESOL course (crediting it, too), having us work together in groups before introducing ourselves to the group, and so having the chance of introducing ourselves in terms of our shared project rather than prior identities. (In fact, this was the maturation of one of my assignments for that class.) Here's what we did.

After some uninteresting logistical blabla from me, I asked them to call up this spread of images from our class canvas page and take 5 minutes to choose 3 that showed the range of their interest in religion. Then we had breakout groups of 3-4 for a dozen minutes, in which they shared their views and tried to agree on a short list of 4 for the group. Then we returned to the zoom gallery and each group shared their discussions, everyone speaking! All sorts of interesting observations and comparisons were made, convergent but also healthily different, so I meant it when I said I now had a sense of what interesting people were around our virtual table, and I trust they did too. The final part of the exercise, after we'd finished our zooming, was to post a video self-introduction based in one of the images. These are warm and thoughtful and gentle in a way in which self-introductions to people you don't know can never be. Thanks, Theresa, for teaching me how to think this way!

The discussion confirmed also that I'd done a good enough job in bringing these images together. (I actually spent a long time on this.) Nobody knew what all of them were, but that wasn't the point. I deliberately chose multivalent pictures which might be read in different ways and from different perspectives. Why don't you have a go?

I don't think anyone recognized the Islamic calligraphy at the center, only one person each knew Uluru or Pema Chödrön or the Kumbh Mela at recently renamed Allahabad, one recognized the Yi Jing trigrams from the Korean flag and another the black power fist in the Radical Dharma image, and it seemed nobody was aware of context of the chill-inducing photo at lower left, though everyone could see it had something to do with "weaponizing religion" and the challenges of church and state. But there was enough for everyone to articulate what gets them about religion, from the offputting to the beautiful, the collective to the personal, the otherwordly to the struggles of this world. I was pleased that many chose the image from the cathedral in Lima, though one student recognized it as covid-related without considering that these might all be images of the dead; he said it was like a zoom service! One remarked on the weirdness of rainbow flags on headgear from a presumably homophobic biblical tradition. One of those who recognized the Maya calendar spoke of 2012 doomsday prophecies, another of colonization. Though only one recognized the kind it was, many were attracted to the altar at bottom center.

The most remarked on, unsurprisingly, was the icon of George Floyd as a saint, though there were differing views about what might be intended. George Floyd should be alive now, I said, but has become an Ancestor.

I have yet to do this exercise with my international students, but I'm confident it'll be revealing, too. And they can meet their stateside classmates "in person" in the video self-introductions, and follow suit! Prep was stressful and time consuming but the synchronous and asynchronous seem to be working together pretty nicely so far...

Gaudeamus igitur

 Can you see it? A new academic year is beginning!

Syllabus

On the eve of a new academic year, sourdough flapjacks!

Gaslit Gray

I didn't watch the Republican Convention but caught some glimpses in reports. One image won't let me go - the 1500 guests seated outside the White House for the president's acceptance of the nomination. It's not that it's at the White House - the most flagrant violation of norms separating public service from party politics imaginable - that gets me but those 1500 people. They were tightly packed together and none was wearing a mask. How could they? One expects lies from the president, and we have learned that his lies have cost an unthinkable number of lives. But these people, did they really think there was no danger? They weren't just enabling a fantasist but engaging in magical thinking themselves. If we act like all's well, all will be well.

Steven Colbert, whom I also don't watch but occasionally read reports of, had a reaction like mine. I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ve got chills, I’ve got nausea, he apparently said of this spectacle. I know Republicans like voter suppression, he quipped, I didn’t know they kicked it up to voter extinction. But I don't think the chills and nausea are at the callousness of those who would enable the enablers to risk their lives. We've seen this callousness before. What's new here, and what's getting to me, is the power of the fantasy. He shouldn't be able to do this but he does. People shouldn't be willing to be part of it but they are. It's as if, if one only entered his world, the terrors of our world would vanish. Pity the poor fools who think they need masks.

Trying to understand my own chills and nausea I was taken back to the origins of the verb "gaslight," a term I still don't quite grasp. It's a psychological tactic in which a person or entity, in order to gain more power, makes a victim question their reality, I read, favored by abusers, dictators, narcissists, and cult leaders. The origin is a noir movie where a man drives his wife insane by getting her to doubt her own memories and perceptions. The word is used a lot about the current occupant of the White House (apparently it's one of his gleanings from the Putin playbook), but this was gaslighting of olympic proportions. Gaslighting doesn't pretend to be truthful but lies baldly and about everything. It turns realities on their heads. Its purpose is to weaken your confidence that you can make sense of things on your own to the point of breaking - so you have to rely on the gaslighter.

I don't know if those audience members had passed that breaking point. They presumably inhabit the alternate reality of Fox News in which this president has always been decent and honorable, despite the vile subterfuge of the villains whose power he threatens, and one where all bad news is a hoax concocted by these villains. Sources they trust have assured them that the numbers of covid deaths are not only small compared to what they would have been without the prescient action of the great leader, but likely vastly exaggerated. Some of them may know this to be fantasy but many probably don't. (They also know he's the bodyguard of white "civilization," but they don't say that out loud, or that they think their whiteness provides them immunity from a social darwinist virus targetting other races.) I don't think they're gaslit.

Gaslit are us in the reality-based community. We can't believe what he says, we can't believe what he gets away with, we can't believe people let him get away with it, we can't believe that people gladly lay their lives on the line to let him get away with it. Of course these are not normal times. At a time of four historic crises - The worst pandemic in over 100 years. The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The most compelling call for racial justice since the 60′s. And the undeniable realities and accelerating threats of climate change - one can see why people might want to join the gaslighters. The reality is too much to bear. If he can deny it and thrive, perhaps we can too.

Colbert apparently compared pictures of past presidents and this one, taken at the start and end of their first terms. As is well known, presidents go grey fast, looking a lot more than four years older. But not if the color of your hair has always been a flagrant lie! Trump doesn’t do any of the stuff that matures you or ages you, Colbert said, like worrying about the American people or feeling responsibility for protecting them or evidently anything else. But the fact that he's unfit for the job and hasn't tried to learn to do it might give you vertigo, not the chills and nausea of the seasoned gaslighter. The unchangingly false smile of the seasoned huckster tells another story. Genius Colbert: the last four years are like Trump is Dorian Gray and we’re the picture.

Resisting the ether

I'm putting together some tips and tricks for thinking outside the zoom boxes. What do you think?

Zoom arrays us like products in a vending machine: don't let it! Consider not sitting in the middle of your frame, and/or positioning the camera at an angle. Use your body in the screen, raising your hand, waving, applauding, gesturing. It can break zoom's two-dimensional spell when you show three-dimensional objects.

Realize that zoom makes it seem that people are seeing and speaking to you when they may not be – and that it will seem they are looking away when in fact they are addressing you.

Take advantage of the fact that everyone’s name is visible and refer to people by name often. Make sure to learn how to pronounce their names, and note people’s preferred gender pronouns.

You do not need to be looking at the screen at all times. There’s no shame in looking down as you consult a text or take notes; indeed, that's normal classroom behavior!

Find something for your hands to do. Taking notes is good. Doodling is fine, too. If your hands have something to do, your body has a release from zoom-imposed rigor mortis. If you don’t give them something to do, they may conspire with your wandering attention to seek distraction on your desktop or online.

People can tell when you have other windows open.

Consider when it might make sense to turn the camera off. When engaging in a breakout room or study group with people you don’t know well, it might work for all to turn their cameras off. This is true not only when there is some document or activity on the screen which you are working through together. (But when the camera is off, keeping your hands busy is more important than ever!)

Think about when it’s important for you to see all the people in class and for them to see you. Keeping track of all the people in Gallery View is wearing. Speaker View needs less bandwidth from your computer and your brain. Monitoring yourself can be a big distraction, too; turning off Self View is known to significantly reduce stress.

Learn how to adjust what others see when your camera is off – how to change your name, as well as how to change the image you offer when your camera is off. And do use an image – a black screen, even with a name, is impersonal. Let the rest of us see an image of you, even if it's an avatar... and why always show the same one?

Use chat to share definitions, links, references, etc. clarifying things being discussed; unless invited to, don't use it to generate a parallel conversation.

Talk to each other about how zoom makes you feel.

I think that pretty picture of immobilized butterflies says a lot, too...!

Beyond words

Before dinner we say a grace adapted from Janet Morley that includes the words May the beauty of God silence us, May the justice of God give us voice. My main experience of beauty these days is the sky, enough!

Getting our feet wet

Next course page coming together!

Back(to school)grounds

Less than a week from the start of term (orientation is in full swing) The New School's sent out a set of new zoom backgrounds, including our school mascot Gnarls, the Narwal, looking more than usually grumpy in an empty Parsons classroom, and the upper edge of the west wall of the Lang Courtyard, looking serene and even contemplative. I don't do zoom backgrounds (and wouldn't even if my laptop processor were up to it!) but if so the latter is tempting, though I might seem a garden gnome!

Not one world

The power of maps, here cartograms showing the very different areas where CO2 was released 1950-2000 (above) and where the health consequences of the ensuing climate change are concentrated (below). You could try to show that with the colored-coded maps at lower left, but it wouldn't have the same impact. The bulging North Atlantic nations here, with the bloated Indian Subcontinent and Africa bearing the brunt, tell the story with irresistible force.

Lancet and University College London Institute for Global Health Commission, "Managing the health effects ofclimate change," The Lancet Vol 373 (May 16, 2009), 1703

搬家周年

New leaf on the philodendron I inherited in 2007! I think only the oldest of its confrères might remember that, one year ago today, we all moved here from another world - or maybe that's part of their plant lore!

FOMO

On our quick drive down the California coast - was it just last year?! - we almost went to Big Basin Redwoods, California's oldest state park, with coastal redwoods almost two millennia old. But the Trip Advisor pictures were so pretty we decided it merited a proper visit, and saved it for next time. Now other folks' snapshots are all we have. The redwoods, being survivors, may pull through. For me, solastalgia.

Lemon aid

 When life gives you lemons ... 

... zest!

Cartooning

When I was in high school, I attended a 1-day workshop on cartooning. I remember learning that all you need to do is pick something familiar and change something about it. The disjunction makes it funny, butf it's really smart it also makes a profound point about an incongruous world. There's a good example in the latest New Yorker, recalling an iconic image of a little fish about to be eaten by a bigger one, which, unawares, is about to be the prey of a larger, and so on. Today all fish are small fry in their own ocean, victims of our plastic predators. But this one brings back another memory too, an earlier New Yorker cartoon playing off the same iconic image, which I used in the introduction for my reader The Problem of Evil, all those years ago.

Not not religious Anthropocene!

Religion and religious studies still aren't part of the academic discussion of the Anthropocene, but sometimes they're tantalizingly close. In their manifesto for a new anthropology for a "patchy" understanding of the Anthropocene, some writers I admire even offer a place at the table ... though the name card says "nonsecular cosmologies."

A key part of the interest of many anthropologists in the natural science models of the Anthropocene is, arguably, that the “unprediction” of the Anthropocene feels—in both promising and uncanny ways—like a homecoming of sorts, namely, a return to a world of unseen forces that might just possibly also include spirits: a return to the doubt that lingers in witchcraft as much as in climate science (Bubandt 2014; Oreskes and Conway 2010), and a return to the unpredictability of a world that was not modern after all (Latour 1993). The uncanniness of the Anthropocene grows from the way this model-made reality has added new verisimilitude, new truth-likeness, to spirits, monsters, and ghosts (Bubandt 2017, 2019; Tsing et al. 2017). At the very historical juncture where modern reason declared spirits and monsters to be dead, the graphs of the Great Acceleration (Steffen et al. 2015) have helped draw the contours of the uncanny valleys of the Anthropocene in which the spirits and monster dwell … after all (Bubandt 2018).

I'm with them, but I'm amused by the indirection they feel obliged to use broaching what is clearly a sensitive subject. Spirits (something they talk about as if everyone knows what they are) "might just possibly also" be part of what's going on "... after all." What a tease! I share their sense of cracks opening up in modernist confidence in prediction, but I might just have said the future is unpredictable "... after all." But they go full negative theology, crafting a mysterious neologism, "unprediction," and intimate that "new verisimilitude, new truth-likeness" (what ontological shivers that dubious doubling sends down the spine!) have been added to "unseen forces" by that great secular spirit, the "uncanny." Unreal!!

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Andrew S. Mathews and Nils Bubandt,

"Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology: An Introduction to Supplement 20," Current Anthropology Volume 60, Number S20 (August 2019): S186-197, S191

Setting a distributed table

Imagining a class homed wholly in a LMS (Learning Management System) like Canvas rather than a physical room is a whole new world... (image)

Mid-August skies (from our window!)

Letting it all hang out

Gezielt geschielt

I was discouraged that the cool flowers I'd picked up at the Morningside Park Green Market yesterday (named Rudbeckia "Henry Eilers," apparently) were looking so very glum until it occurred to me to seek out one of Egon Schiele's unbeautiful flower pictures to send a friend to express my dejection. 

The startling similarity between Schiele's sunflowers and my coneflowers suddenly made everything seem alright! 

There's some kind of lesson in this about the power of art... !

Retrieval

After keeping it at a low simmer for the last weeks, I think I have a syllabus for "Religion and the Anthropocene," 2020. I'm actually glad I left the nitty gritty until now. Accommodating students in various parts of the world has required thinking way outside the 100-minute seminar box, but their placement beyond this hemisphere has also affected the choices I've made as to what we read and do. Considering how to engage students where they are has helped me "provincialize" the American and North Atlantic focus of my class. The same has happened for "Theorizing Religion," too, but for a class exploring what it means for human beings to be a "planetary agent" it's especially relevant. I realize I've become persuaded that what needs to be confronted and replaced if anthropogenic calamity is to be contained is a set of cultural, economic and religious practices crafted in the North Atlantic and visited on the Americas over the past several centuries; the global reach of our online class community turns out to be an exciting opportunity. We'll be looking to religious ideas from Asia and the premodern West, among others, as ways of reimagining what it means to be the human part of the great tangled assemblage which is Earth.

Global heating is an acute crisis for the planet, but the particular hysteria of the Anthropocenologists now seems to me unhelpfully ahistorical. Yes, humanity has become a menace since releasing the carbon stored in fossil fuels into the atmosphere, and so turbocharging the human impact on the rest of nature. Yes, that was fed by and in turn feeds exploitative forms of racializing capitalism and conquest. But it's a mistake to see this as no different from earlier and other human ways of participating in the world, and foolishness to think this means that there's no (longer a) way for human beings to live at peace with the rest of our planet. As Vandana Shiva puts it, we need to reject the options the anthropocenologists think are the only ones left - extinction or escape (to another planet!). All human agency is not a menace. Those of us raised in the particular human formation which has messed things up need to learn about other formations, including formations within our own cultures which are sustainable, collaborative and caring.

Looking over what I came up with I noticed that my syllabus is a work of what folks in the biz call the hermeneutics of retrieval - though I'll be presenting it in terms from Parable of the Sower:  

"Is there anything on your family bookshelves that might help ... ?”

We don't have time to reinvent humanity; desperate reinventions tend not to think very far beyond the circumstances they seek to escape. But if we look and listen we can learn from those (and not just humans!) who knew - and know - how to live in and with and for the Earth.

Study in green, blue and white

Stamp of approval

Just look at these exquisite Ruth Asawa stamps, just released yesterday! Ever the philatelist, I ordered myself a sheet; you should get one too. There's never been a better time to support the US Postal Service.

Wake up call

The only thing more disturbing than this video of a hermit crab which has found a retro doll's head for a home, shot last May and recently making the rounds again on the internet with the caption "Welcome tothe Anthropocene," is where it was filmed. Ever hear of Wake Island? 

All over the map

I've started hearing back from the students enrolled in my classes. Half of those in "Theorizing Religion" have replied, and a third of those in "Religion and the Anthropocene" (I only wrote to them yesterday). 

For both classes it's already clear that we won't be able to come together for synchronous sessions, at least not as a whole class. A whole new teaching experience beckons! (But also: what a range of students!)

Remember!

Look what came in the mail today: the "Religion and Ecology" class anthology, Remembering What It Would Be Like To Love The World. Lovely essays, beautiful design... You can get yourself a copy too! Editor (in Texas) and cover designer (in Pennsylvania) got theirs, too!

Theorizing online!

To get a sense of how many students are likely to show up for "Theorizing Religion" this fall - sixteen are registered - as well as to find out where they are, since synchronous classes are hard when people are dialing in from abroad, I sent out individualized e-mails today.

Dear ____,

 

We’re three weeks from the start of the new academic year, and from the first meeting of “Theorizing Religion.” I’m delighted that you’ve signed up for it. It’s a course I’ve taught in one form or another since arriving at Lang almost twenty years ago, and it changes every year as the field of religious studies changes – and as the world around us changes. This year we will be particularly attentive to the ways that categories of religion play in the environmental and social justice crises of our time. In what ways can religious practices and ideas help understand and address these challenges? In what ways have they contributed to entrenching them?

 

This year’s course will be different from its predecessors also in being online. Like the rest of the New School faculty I’ve spent the summer familiarizing myself with the possibilities of online instruction. (I even took two courses so I’d have a better sense of what it’s like to be a student in such a class, an eye-opening experience!) I’ve made discoveries which make me not only confident that we’ll be able to have a genuinely Lang experience but excited at a broader range of forms of interaction than in-person seminars, for all their many virtues, can easily accommodate. I hope we’re all safe and together on campus in the spring, but I plan to keep some of these online tools even once all this is over. They offer us more, and more varied, ways to learn from each other.

 

    In order to make sure we get everything we can from each other, it would be helpful for me to know who you are, where you are, and if there are technical constraints you are likely to face. We’ll have many chances to get to know each other as the semester begins… For the moment, can you let me know which time zone you are in, and any limitations on your ability to join a synchronous zoom class, contribute to a google.doc, etc.? I want to ensure that everyone is able to participate fully.

 

I look forward to theorizing religion with you!

I was imagining most students were in North America, making default synchronous meeting in our scheduled 16:00-17:40 EST timeslot a cinch, but whaddaya know: the very first reply (I've got three so far, three hours in) is from a student in India! That's a -9.5 hours time difference! On the other hand, she wrote to me at 15:15 EST and doesn't see the time zone gap as an issue. As for me, the thought of a literally intercontinental gathering is actually quite exciting!

The gall!

Strolling Riverside Park yesterday, I noticed an unusually mottled leaf.Turning it over I discovered a world! It looked like something from a sci-fi movie. I went back today to take a picture and found that a few other leaves on the same tree had tiny little sci-fi colonies too!Only one leaf was weakened to the point of falling. With the help of iNaturalist, I was able to learn who I was dealing with: a Hackberry Nipplegall Psyllid! In plainer English that's the nymph of a mini-cicada, or rather, the growth the hackberry is induced to produce around it.Apparently it's not harmful to the tree - not surprising when you consider that this particular insect can live only in this kind of tree. But word is that this isn't just a two-species condominium. There's a particular kind of parasitic wasp that lays its eggs only in the nymphs inside these galls... and then there's whatever fungi are lacing the leaf veins and giving the maturest galls I found their Doctor Seussian tufts!

Evangelical family romance

An imperfect contribution to a question many of us are asking - whether the white Evangelicals will again vote for Donald Trump - in this morning's Times argues that Evangelicals did not support Mr. Trump in spite of who he is. They supported him because of who he is, and because of who they are. The people from Sioux Center, Iowa whom author Elizabeth Dias quotes (chosen how she does not say) give a more nuanced, or at least more complicated, view. One is Micah Schouten:

“Trump’s an outsider, like the rest of us,” he said. “We might not respect Trump, but we still love the guy for who he is.” 

“Is he a man of integrity? Absolutely not,” he went on. “Does he stand up for some of our moral Christian values? Yes.”

The most interesting exchange, I thought, came later, with Schouten and his wife Caryn at home, and concerns not Trump but his vice president.

[Caryn:] “Or there are people who think that because we have conservative values and we value the family and I value submitting to my husband, I must be against women’s rights.”

Her voice grew strong. “I would say it takes a stronger woman to submit to a man than to want to rule over him. And I would argue that point to the death,” she said.

She felt freer as she spoke. “Mike Pence is a wonderful gentleman,” she said. “This is probably a very bad analogy, but I’d say he is like the very supportive, submissive wife to Trump. He does the hard work, and the husband gets the glory.”

She turned to her husband. “Let’s be real, Micah, do you have any clue what goes on in our children’s lives on a daily basis? No.” They laughed.

“Pence you can picture as your father, as your dad,” he said. 

But Mr. Biden as president really worried her: “Biden is a few fries short of a Happy Meal.”

Even without Dias's overbearing omnipotent narrating, this is fascinating. For one thing, the gendering of Christian devotion which some of us call queer is on full display: the Christian church, with all its men, is the bride of Christ, and calls its members to wifely virtues. Meanwhile submission, which Christ himself modeled, isn't weakness but strength. (Indeed it's why Christian womanhood is seen as the foundation of social order; men are in fact the weaker sex, though you gotta love them for who they are.) But aren't Caryn and Micah saying different things? She sees Pence as like herself, an omnicompetent but self-effacing wife, while he sees him as like himself, a loving but fallible father! 

Was Micah not listening to what Caryn said? I think they may in fact be describing the same thing from different vantages, the strange and wondrous life of the classic Christian virtue of obedience. “God’s standard requires absolute, total, perfect, obedience," Dias quotes from a sermon at the Schoutens' church. But the virtue of obedience, which makes order (understood always as hierarchy) possible, is best exemplified in unquestioning service of an imperfect superior. Living that paradox is part of Christian adulthood, all of us defined by our obediences, whether to parent, husband, or God (or all of them), most complicatedly where you are also called to the servant leadership of others obedient to you. You can obey, even love, someone you don't respect, not because of who he is but because of who you are. (Also significant but secondary: the quality of your obedience might change them.)

Obedience is one of the Christian virtues which seems antithetical to democracy, but democracy relies on something very like it at its most challenging point: in accepting the outcomes of elections, even when the system fails. Democrats, from Al Gore to Hillary Clinton to Stacey Abrams, have embodied that virtue in accepting democratic outcomes, even when unfair. But Trump has shown his absolute, total, and perfect rejection of that virtue, and is indeed doing his darndest to reject a fair rout in advance. (That's doubtless one source of Caryn's infantilizing view of Biden.) 

Is it too much to hope that these white Evangelical supporters will see how obedience to one who is obedient to none tempts the demonic?

Storm damage II

I was a bit pollyannaish yesterday but I confess I was feeling pretty discouraged about things. Our university president sent out an update on its parlous financial condition and confirmed that significant restructuring lies ahead; we must "disenthrall ourselves from any specific allegiances to programs, to colleges, to structures, or even to individuals." Those rather overwrought words have predictably sent everyone into a tizzy! But I was also reeling at another president, the White House grifter who signed an executive order banning not just silly TikTok but WeChat, the main vehicle for communication with people in China. The wholesale destruction of American-Chinese relations continues. (I'm also really annoyed that the spacy new blogger is forcing my style!) With yesterday's caption I was trying to be hopeful since the New School has made it through crises before, and it's not clear that or how one could ban an app in the US (and the one thing all Chinese internauts know is how to get around a ban). Still, our future feels a lot more fragile, more embattled. The holes we have to dig ourselves out of feel deeper and deeper. Hence these images of damage from Tuesday's storm we saw today along the top of Morningside Park, an iron railing knocked off its pedestal by a toppled tree and the curling leaves of a tree which has evidently lost access to its roots. A little grim; sorry.

Yesterday's sky

18:41, 19:31, 20:15: a reminder that things aren't always as they seem!

Back to school blues

We're three and a half weeks from the start of the new academic year, but still don't know how many students will actually be showing up in our online classrooms. A good third of the new students who "deposited" at the start of the summer seem to be choosing to defer for a semester or a year - understandable - but we don't have figures for continuing students. I'm cautiously unoptimistic. I generally don't keep in touch with students over the summer but I recommended four from the past year's classes for a special honors program a few weeks ago, and when I let them know I learned that only one of them will be here this coming semester. Two are taking the semester off (though they're still coming to NYC, from California and Missouri), and the fourth has decided to continue her studies at a university nearer her California home. Another student, a Virginian who was to serve as an "academic fellow" for one of my fall classes, is also sitting the fall semester out. Ouch.

Breathing new life into the Anthropocene

Some interesting things are happening to the "Religion and the Anthropocene" syllabus as I start thinking about what I can and should include, how to sequence it, etc. Much must needs be different from last time in any case, since this time it's meeting once rather than twice a week - and of course it's meeting online. But since the first iteration we've also passed the tipping point predicted in one of our readings, and the endemic inequalities brought to new light by the pandemic demand a new framing of the question, too.

Here's the course description, as before and too late to change:

The dawning awareness that humanity is a planetary force, effecting changes in earth systems disruptive to other life forms and even leaving geological traces, has religious resonances. Are we now the “god species,” or confronted with the non-metaphorical reality of karma, of hubris, of original sin? This course explores emerging discussions of religion amid the ghosts and monsters of the Anthropocene. Are the insights of the world religions, fruits of the Holocene we’ve set on terminal wobble, obsolete? Must new religious narratives and rituals be crafted to articulate our new reality? We will also look at the way ostensibly secular discussions of the Anthropocene (including the many challenges to the term and its scope) engage in religion- and mythmaking, from Gaia to Chthulu. Finally we’ll ask if discussion of the “age of humans” takes us more deeply into pressing spiritual and ecojustice challenges or distracts from them.

What's changing? Last time we spent rather more time on Anthropocene, and less on religion, than I had intended - not that students complained! This time I'm planning for each of the fifteen weekly sessions to include something explicitly religion-related. I'm trying to include materials from indigenous American traditions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and perhaps Daoism, and nods to some African and Indonesian traditions. We'll also consider Earthseed, the religion created in Octavia Butler's Parable books, and Szerszynsky's "Gods of the Anthropocene."

But how and why do we engage them? The question can't be the one posed by the "Anthropocenologists" critiqued by Bonneuil and Fressoz, those generalizations about the species as a geological agent which don't just occlude the vastly different ways different peoples affect and are affected by anthropogenic natural change but invite us to continue thinking in the very universalizing commodifying ways which have brought things to this head. With that, I need to find a way to shed the "we" of my course description, or complicate it. Some of us (like me) are just now confronting the world-destroying effects of certain western ways of thinking and acting, reeling with Roy Scranton's discovery that "this civilization is already dead!" But for many others, the destructiveness has never been a secret. And many other civilizations have had near-death experiences, thanks to us. The settler's fantasy, Kyle Whyte writes, was the native's apocalypse. "The white utopia," Kathryn Yusoff quotes Sylvia Wynter, "was a black inferno." They've been there as we've done that.

We read Whyte and Yusoff last time, and rehearsed ecojustice critiques of the too "easy story" the Anthropocene offers, as Françoise Vergès has put it, when she argues "racial capitalocene" is a more fitting name:

Easy, because it does not challenge the naturalized inequalities, alienation, and violence inscribed in modernity’s strategic relations of power and production. It is an easy story to tell because it does not ask us to think about these relations at all.

But last time these critiques were not central, as the embarrassing placement of "ecojustice challenges" at the very end of my course description confirms. I accepted the anthropocenologist's giddy framing: something from the natural sciences seemed to offer a new dimension to humanistic reflection. Oh boy, it seems like we're leaving a trace in the geological record! What does that say about us as an apex species? What cosmic judgment or responsibility does it portend? It seems inescapably true that something about western (especially anglophone) modernity is leading to the sixth extinction, and understanding what that something is is crucial to the survival of not only other species. (This includes understanding Christianity's handmaiden role in the "racial capitalocene.") But the site of my question has to lie outside of this complex of dysfunction. I thought I was doing something like that gesturing toward "religious resonances" but I need to make sure these, too, aren't understood in the terms of this worlds-destroying culture.

I'm not there yet, but getting somewhere. The Anthropocene temptation, to which I defaulted, is to think this new "age of man" makes everything else obsolete - perhaps especially religion. Religions as I introduce students to them must be plural and localized, and I need to foreground their resonances with the interdependence of species, and the bonds of reciprocity of all life, which "Anthropos" denies, along with wisdom about the value of ritual, myth, and penance. In reality, as Frédérique Appfel-Marglin argues, most humans past and present live in potentially sustainable "inter-collectivity" with the other-than-human world, inhabiting spiritual worlds only more urgently relevant in this moment as we (sic) learn to see past falsely naturalized patterns of inter- and intraspecies violence. "Ecojustice challenges" remain but this is sounding like a religious studies class after all!

(Top image from the Afrofuturist film Pumzi)