Inherit the earth

Had fun in "Theorizing Religion" today, making nice use of our online possibilities. We're most of the way through a section on 'world religions,' for which students are now three-fourths of the way through one of the Harvard Divinity School "World Religions Through Their Scriptures" MOOCs (half the class doing Buddhism, the other half Islam). They've also read Tomoko Masuzawa's critique of the very idea of 'world religions' and the "intellectual irresponsibility" of teaching them, and written lovely reflective pieces on how someone who lives where they do might go to learn about religions they didn't know. 

A lot of balls in the air! But the experience of knowingly juggling them all is really satisfying, especially when a ball you haven't seen for a while returns for a second throw: nothing is lost. So we began with a theoretical discussion of problems with teaching 'world religions,' especially in the familiar founder+foundational text+geographical spread+current adherents+X religion in America (optional) formula, then moved to considering ways one might do a better job. Once we were thinking in this more generative way, we turned to work together on a google.doc outline for a class on a 'world religion' which might face some of the challenges we'd identified. It felt good to be moving beyond mere critique, and to be doing this work collaboratively,

After a break, it was time for students to put their money where their mouths were. (I'll get my chance next semester!) In breakout rooms they had to use our class-generated generic outline to plot out a class on the religion they're learning about in the MOOC. There wasn't enough time to more than sketch this out - but enough to see the limitations of our outline, as well as the different strategic aims of the MOOCs. I called it a MEEK: Miniature Experiment in Expanding Knowledge - a pleasantly modest moniker compared to the Massive Open Online Classes, and one perhaps a little more likely to inherit the earth!

Adirondacks

Well, it's no wonder we found ourselves placed for peak leaf peeping. Our four-day escape from NYC - longest trip since January, and only the second involving overnight stays since covid arrived - took us north, and then farther north. We visited friends in Sullivan County and stayed over in Poughkeepsie before staying two nights in an Airbnb in Schuylerville, which allowed two day trips to the mighty Adirondacks. At first 4000 feet didn't sound like "High Peaks" to me but we deferred to the maples.

Prospects

Turning

When we planned a little getaway to take advantage of this long weekend (Yom Kippur) a while back, we had no way of knowing how the next weeks might disrupt the flow of time. The possibility of an ACB in SCOTUS forecloses for me either the future (she's younger than me) or the stability of the existing form of US government, its credibility fatally undermined by the past years of Republican misrule. And yet here we are on a stream, the leaves glowing even on an overcast day. Fall's always been my favorite season, perhaps because it was somewhat notional from my Southern California perch, but driving up today it filled me with an unexpected sadness. The colors are signs not of life but of death. Still, the insouciant rush of the water consoles, and the mute witness of the trees, which have seen many autumns.

We shape God

I initiated the "Religion and Anthropo- cene" students in a new religion today, or in religion in a new way. Our reading was Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, an account, among other things, of the founding of a religion called Earthseed. Each chapter begins with lines from something called Earthseed: The Books of the Living, and over the course of the narrative we learn how a young woman named Lauren Olamina start writing it, eventually collating it and teaching it to others. As part of our class I invited students to transcribe these epigraphs in a shared google.doc (above), each choosing a different chapter. Seeing a google.doc on which many are working at the same grow is always fun; this time it felt a little like seeing a scripture come into the world.

Earthseed's oft-cited central ideas are announced in the epigraph of the first chapter:

All that you touch

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God

Is Change.

We spent some time teasing out how these ideas are like and unlike those of other religions. 

But Earthseed isn't just a spirituality or philosophy. It's a community which does things together. I drew the class's attention to the epigraph to chapter 18.

Once or twice

each week

A Gathering of Earthseed

is a good and necessary thing.

It vents emotion, then

quiets the mind.

It focuses attention,

strengthens purpose, and

unifies people.

These gatherings are structured by the words we'd transcribed but sound like the weekly gatherings of American religious communities of all kinds. And tucked inside was a definition of religion: it vents emotion, quiets the mind, focuses attention, strengthens purpose, unifies people. Functional definitions have their problems but in some small way this definition cut through our students' generational suspicions of "organized religion" and even the doubts the Anthropocene question raises about whether all religion is now obsolete. 

Time was running out but I asked students what other characters in the novel found hardest to take seriously about Earthseed. Because Parable is a sort of science fiction novel they hadn't paid it particular heed:

The Destiny of Earthseed

Is to take root among the stars.

Folks in the novel are perplexed by it, too - what does it mean, and why should it matter? We managed to have a little bit of discussion about why the apostle of Earthseed insisted on it. A sort of afterlife? Some future beyond this damaged world? A unifying shared project? A sense of connection with our descendants? A purpose for our existence? All of the above! (We decided that Earthseed might also satisfyingly take root on this planet, inhabited in a revitalized and sustainable way by a transformed humanity.) But this, too, is religious, nu?

All these students have signed up for a class called "Religion and the Anthropocene" but their essays so far have made little to no reference to religion, in general or to particular traditions. Perhaps letting this "made up" tradition define religion for us will get the juices flowing. 

(Class began on a more somber note, by the way. Because of the Jewish new year we didn't meet last Friday, so we'd last been together two long weeks ago. I named some of what had happened during those two weeks, each a sign of ongoing anguish and heartbreak: Two Hundred Thousand. Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Breonna Taylor.)

 

Breonna

Taylor 

Say her name.

Scholastically untenable?

Even in this most unsettled of years, the fall semester is gradually settling into a groove - and just as that starts happening, it's time to think again of the upcoming spring schedule and start girding our loins for planning the academic year following that: one semester's focus suddenly widens to four. So it felt entirely fitting to happen again on the passage in Tomoko Masuzawa's The Invention of World Religions which inspired me - this time last year - to take on a university lecture course in world religion for what was then a distant future, Spring 2021. 

In the passage in question, Masuzawa starts out sympathetic to the poor professors of non-western traditions conventionally charged with teaching the popular "Introduction to World Religions" courses which keep religious studies programs solvent, but her fellow feeling runs dry. 

These non-Western specialists turned teachers of "world religions" not infrequently complain that such a comprehensive treatment of the subject in one course is bound to be too broad a survey, too flattening an analysis. It would be an unmanageable survey indeed, unless, perhaps, one begins with the scholastically untenable assumption that all religions are everywhere the same in essence, divergent and particular only in their ethnic, national, or racial expressions. Of course, this is an assumption alarmingly prevalent among the world religions books now available on the market. And it cannot be denied that this well-meaning yet uncritical assumption is what brings a large number of people into our classrooms year after year.

She grants the difficult realities of neoliberal university budgets but concludes, darkly, one cannot assume that this line of work is intellectually responsible just because it is economically viable. I was so put off by this condemnation last year that I vowed to take on constructing a course in world religions, something which I had so far (as she has been) been spared having to teach. But that was then, this is now. In a couple of months I need to put my money where my mouth was! I've had some nifty ideas since then but all pretty vague. Confronting the sharpness of Masuzawa's critique again I realize it's going to be a heavy lift. Defaulting to the idea that religions are in some respect comparable will be hard to resist. Notice served, again!

Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (University of Chicago Press, 2005), 9-10

Academic

One of the students in "Theorizing Religion" asked me a stumper of a question yesterday. She's a returning student, who's spent years doing other things before coming back to complete her BA, and always brings a remarkable freshness and thoughtfulness to discussions. Her question was about a word she'd seen crop up in several of our articles which she realized she wasn't sure about. What, she asked, is "the Academy" - presumably not the training place for Jedi?!

The term has indeed featured in everything we've read so far. Winnifred Fallers Sullivan warned that where ordinary believers' understanding of religion of differs from that of the Academy it's not clear the latter should be deferred to. Jonathan Z. Smith argued that religious studies only deserves its place in the Academy if it lives up to Enlightenment ideals of intelligibility. Saba Mahmood suggested that the Academy is a privileged and precious place space where, unlike others, difficult questions can and should be left open.

So what is the Academy. you know, where they do the self-conscious thing called the "academic study of religion"? Once posed it's not so easy to answer! I said something about scholarship and was grateful when another student mentioned peer-review, but then felt obliged to add something about the academy's value so society at large. Which is? Preserving old knowledge and forging new? Providing materials and contexts for the education of a free citizenry? A space where the demands of the day are kept at bay, where long and short-term denizens can participate in the conversation of humankind? 

Each of these raises questions of its own... many of which resonate with the particular questions the "academic study of religion" poses itself. Are theological schools part of the Academy? Monasteries? What about other professional and vocational schools? Law schools? Art schools? Research institutes in science or humanities? Think tanks? Liberal arts colleges? Continuing-ed curricula? A New School for Social Research?

(Unrelated) image: caladiums from idyllic Jefferson Market Public Library

Beyond measure

At some funerals the churchbell tolls once for every year of the lamented person's life. With five or six seconds between peals it's strangely long and short as one listens, suspended in the resonating memory of time past, seeing the ages of our lives and those dear to us in our mind's eye. (On Good Friday, the bell tolls thirty-three times.) 

There would be no end to the tolling were we to mark the years of the lives of all those who have fallen to Covid-19. Indeed there would be no end to the tolling even were we to ring a bell just once for each of the nearly one million souls so far lost globally, one fifth of them in this land. Yesterday the bell of the National Cathedral in Washington, DC pealed for twenty long minutes. American casualties only, but each tolling of the bell bore the weight of one thousand whole lives.

How I volunteer to promote a healthier democracy

Writing these Postcards To Voters - I've sent batches of thirty to voters in Florida, Kentucky, Colorado and now North Carolina - is therapeutic as well as patriotic. I trust that getting a handwritten scrawl will be unusual enough to mean something to these recipients; it's certainly unusual for me, who hasn't hand written this much in years! Postcards for Voters gives me the main text ... 

Never miss an election when you vote in comfort at home. To enroll in Vote by Mail, call (561) 656-6200 or email info@PBCElections.org. When Palm Beach County Dems vote by mail, Dems win! 

Elect Democrat Amy McGrath for U.S. Senate to expand health care coverage. Kentuckians can count on Amy to fight for their freedom to lead the lives they choose. It's your right to request an absentee ballot today by visiting GoVoteKY.com.

Save this note to vote for Democrat Diane Mitsch Bush for Congress. Diane is a seasoned, tested, trusted leader who listens to you. Mail your ballot or place it in a drop-box as soon as it arrives in mid-October. 

There are Democrats you know on a first name basis: Joe, Kamala, Cal, and Roy. Please vote for them and all other Democrats on your ballot. NC begins Early Voting October 15th for the Nov. 3 election.

... and I customize, usually with "Thank you for being a voter" and smiley-face next to my name (always first name only). I tried adding "This is a Democrat to Democrat note to vote," "This card and stamp are how I volunteer to promote a healthier Democracy" and a few other recommended add-ons at first but my wrist protested. For the address (we get street addresses but no names) I made my way through "Patriotic Voter" and "Valued Voter" to land with "Fellow Voter."

I selected the design of my postcards, ordered (and paid for) them along with the stamps, but I didn't choose the design of the stamps, the only  postcard rate stamps currently available. Finishing up this latest batch of postcards I was struck by the irony - actually I'm trying hard not to be struck by the irony - that the stamps celebrate the glorious diversity of life in coral reefs, another gravely endangered habitat.

Shedding

Here's what happens when you go to the beach without sunscreen - after having been pretty much housebound for half a year! There's an ambient acclimating to the summer sunlight from time spent in short sleeves outdoors which my skin hasn't had the chance to do this year. Better late...!

Zoom out

It is getting to be a bit much to be doing everything by Zoom these days! So I was amused to notice my eye misread a line from a psalm

during the service of Compline with which the fall's first Vestry Meeting of the Church of the Holy Apostles ended. I imagined it said

the LORD who made heaven and earth bless you out of Zoom!

Decolonial

I've discovered a fun new map, water vapor - even more fun if you animate it. You can see things stream and flow and swirl, nothing stable, everything connected. It's uniting and unnerving at once.

Fun to peruse in a new way this semester where I have students spread so far - this map conveniently names where we all are: United States, Nigeria, Georgia ("in Eastern Europe," they explain), India, Malaysia, China. I suppose I've had students from across the seven seas before, but not as they were across these seas. It's more than time-zone troubling.

I expected this international spread to matter for what went on in the "Religion and the Anthropocene" course (a Hindu Indian told us their father calls the Anthropocene the Kali Yuga and assures them it's happened twenty-seven times before!) but not "Theorizing Religion." Yet it's in the latter course that I'm feeling most acutely provincial. I find myself saying "western religious studies" and "European and American scholarship" and "religious studies in the United States" where I would in past years have just mentioned scholars and disciplines - even as I was trying to contextualize them. It's a great reality check. No more unquestioned center for understanding the human, these are ideas developed in one region of the globe at one recent point in history, in part to buttress delusions of a more than local significance fleetingly anchored in colonial and neocolonial power. Absent that power, how do we justify focusing on them?

The realities aren't always happy ones. It's fun when a Nigerian Christian runs with a Buddhist-inflected definition of religion from D. T. Suzuki or a student in Malaysia tells me about discovering Shusaku Endo's Silence (even of that's in lieu of the actually assigned reading). Less fun when a Muslim student in India describes the terror of the Hindu nationalist government's short-circuiting of the secular commitments of the Indian state. (Not the time to focus on the conceptual confusions of secularism...) And what about us in the Untied (sic!) States? A student north of San Francisco can taste the ash on his tongue, as many of the rest of us see it giving our sunsets an end of the world aura; the religious language of a "time of reckoning," too, blankets the land. 

Squalls and storms of demagoguery, religious chicanery and violent vigilantism stream and swirl across the seven seas. God help us all.

Monet

Smoke gets in your eyes

The setting sun tonight was a pale opal glowing against a milky sky of tangerine grey, almost like smoke from distant wildfires. Almost?

The Light of the World!

While everyone's itching to get back into church together, it's a great comfort to know that our space is still over-flowing with works of love. Don't our windows sparkle especially brightly as 20,000 meals are shared each week?

Of coarse

Friends invited us to go to famous Jones Beach today - my first time! Six days after Labor Day, crowds were few, surf was high - and some of us, after a summer spent indoors, got very sunburned. New to this beach I was intrigued by the patterns the wind made with the many, mostly quite coarse, kinds of sand and broken shell. My only beach in months!

West Coast on fire

source

Satori

Somehow I set up "Religion and the Anthropocene" to introduce the Anthropocene and Buddhism at the same time. Partly this is because earth scientist and Buddhist environmental justice activist Jill Schneiderman's essay "Awake in the Anthropocene" links the two, and I had students prepare that for our first meeting last week. Partly it's because introducing broader debates on the "Anthropocene" - this week's topic - is hard without essayist Roy Scranton, and he grounds his recommendations for learning to accept the death of our civilization in Buddhist ideas in an essay in Tricyle, the Buddhist magazine. 

Neither Schneiderman nor Scranton claims to be an authority on Buddhism (to balance them out I gave students the link to a guided meditation by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche), but the differences in their uses of Buddhist traditions are helpful for fleshing out what "religion" will mean in our class. For Scranton, Buddhism is accepting that everything, including the "I," is bound to die, if not already dead. For Schneiderman, who cites stories, the Noble Eightfold Path, Dogen's Mountains and Rivers sutra and the age of Kali yuga (among others), it's connected to cycles of decay and rebirth. For both, meditation practices connect one to the rest of suffering life in compassion, but this geologist's horizon is life, while the humanist's is death.

These intersected interestingly with two essays I assigned to give students entree to the scientific discussion, a review of the geologists' debates about whether to recognize the Anthropocene as an official epoch, and a synthesis of earth systems work by Will Steffen. Students were indignant at geologists' reluctance to go beyond stratigraphic evidence, several likening the "bureaucratic" scruples of these "old white men" to - you guessed it - "religion." Why do we need their imprimatur anyway, I asked? Whether it leaves a discernible geological trace or not, the destruction of so many other life forms by recent human interventions is a tragedy, and demands our response. We get a better, and more actionable, understanding from earth systems science.

Perhaps earth systems science gives us a better take on Buddhism (and religion!), too. The point isn't that everything is transient but that everything is interdependent. No particular thing persists, but this discovery conduces right to compassionate engagement with every other transient thing as it suffers and, sometimes, achieves satori. The humanist, heartbroken at the dead end of "civilization," decides everything was marked by death from the getgo. The earth scientist, attuned to cycles and systems, reminds us that even rocks aren't dead.

Realization

A collection of the essays J and I wrote for the Public Seminar vertical is available as an eBook! While we wrote the essays before the existential crisis currently facing the university, they may be only more useful now. Our concern during the centennial was that The New School not rest too smugly on its laurels, think too conventionally, forget its shape-shifting past. Well ... history is back for a new chapter.

Bread textures

  

What a lot sourdough goes through on its way from starter to loaf!

Teach-In!

 

Today was the second day of the 2-day "Scholar Strike" called by UPenn professor of religious studies Anthea Butler, and a great opportunity to connect the concerns of "Theorizing Religion" with the Movement for Black Lives. Where many of my colleagues actually struck, cancelling their classes, I invited students to watch some of the excellent Scholar strike "teach-in" videos and discuss them during class time. I stitched together an hour's worth, and they add up to a remarkable education.

Wil Gafney (Brite Divinity School), White Supremacy in Biblical Interpretation 

Erika Gault (University of Arizona), Three Fast Facts on Black Religion and Black Lives Matter 

Jeannine Hill Fletcher (Fordham University), Christian Scripture in America's Racial Project 

Roger Sneed (Furman University), Black Liberation Theology and Black Lives Matter 

Rebecca Hankins (Texas A&M University), Current Thoughts on Race, Religion & African American Muslims 

Shreena Gandhi (Michigan State University), Cultural Appropriation as a Facet of White Supremacy 

Melissa M. Wilcox (UC Riverside), The Power of the Stories We Tell

Postcards to voters

据了解呢？

I've found a fun new Mandarin app. News stories are presented at various HSK levels (I'm at level 4), with an audio recording, grammar notes and a set of effective exercises on comprehension, vocabulary and sentence structure. They choose good stories, too! So far I've done:

长沙的一个矿井被改成了游乐园 

Pit converted into amusement park in Changsha

一艘货船撞上黄浦江西岸

Cargo ship crashes into west bank of Huangpu River in Shanghai

羊奶粉在中国越来越受欢迎

Goat milk infant formula rises in popularity in China

上海两家公司因小笼包商标都将对方告上法庭

Shanghai companies enter legal battle over xiaolongbao trademark

天津一个图书馆的猫陪伴孤独的读者

Cats accompany lonely readers at Tianjin library

and, since not all entertaining news happens in China,

德国野猪成网红，粉丝救了它的命

German wild boar became internet star, fans saved its life

I didn't of course know most of the topical vocabulary for all these, but the app helps you out seamlessly, and I was able to figure out what was going on in all of them without difficulty... reading, at least. (Which isn't to say I got all the comprehension questions right the first time.) Listening comprehension is still the biggest challenge for me, though it must do something to listen a few times in a daze, read through the vocabulary, listen again, and then start of make sense of things.

I'm learning some important new words, like 新冠疫情 (xīnguān yìqíng), COVID-19 epidemic situation, and newsy phrases like 据了解 (jù liǎojiě), which has cropped up several times, is unhelpfully rendered it's understood that in dictionaries, and must correspond, judging from its use in these stories, to "apparently" or “reports suggest" or perhaps "it would appear." 

Like all the Chinese language learning materials I've used, the site furnishes translations of none of its texts (just vocabulary and grammar), so I'm having to feel my way to understanding from the inside. These texts are just the right length and level for me to do a new one each day, so I think I'll soon get how "it's understood"!

(The image is unrelated, from our Saturday Central Park jaunt.)

Showing up masked

As folks elsewhere in this godforsaken land give up on masking, this is a nice reminder that masking binds us to each other - and why I ❤️ NY.

Feelers

 

As we explored Central Park's North Woods today, this little critter (life size if your screen is the same size as mine; click for an enlarged view) allowed me a closeup. But my subject was bigger than I realized: the antennae go beyond my picture!

This just arrived in the mail! Seems even more an artifact of a world long gone, living in a differently shaped history.

Late summer light

 

Some flowers escaped from the long-ago faded flower beds on Riverside Drive into the wilder woody part of Riverside Park below. The late afternoon sun of a beautiful almost autumnal day pointed them out to us. It also back-lit the paper-thin grass seeds below for us...

Picturing religion +

I asked the Theorizing Religion students to come up with images to supplement those I started us off with. Here are four of them, Catholic-heavy as usual. But, I'm happy to report, no suicide bombers.

This is how we live now

Here's my instructor's view of this week's "module" of our canvas-homed "Theorizing Religion," as it appeared between the Monday and Wednesday sessions. (I "published" the ones without green checks just before class so they became visible to students only once class began.) Folks aren't kidding when they say this is labor intensive! And it does rather put a damper on spontaneity. (The form it took today was deciding not to do one of the breakout sessions I'd planned; I can see it would be harder to add something than to omit or postpone.) Oh well, it's certainly true that all this forces you to be a much more intentional teacher. I'm already in the habit of telling students why I make the pedagogical choices I make, so at least I know how to do that!

What I haven't figured out yet (I asked the students if they had ideas) is how to juggle a zoom gallery, a powerpoint, the class canvas page and an assigned text on the same laptop screen. I've already moved my class notes back into the non-virtual, printing them out before class and then writing on them by hand, and I'll be encouraging all my students to do the same. (It solves the idle hands problem, too.) Printing out the readings (all but one of which are pdfs or websites) is an option, too, though an unappealing one. I suppose I could get a bigger screen, or a second one... though I don't want to do anything students can't also do.

A more urgent question is tracking down the two students who didn't show up today. Don't give up on this: we had an amazing and satisfying time together today, and things will only get better.

Bitter spice

Preparing a Palestinian chicken dish, I've got no sumac,
but am hoping lemon zest will do ...

By the way, somehow it's gotten to be September! ...

Sorry, I'm trying hard not to be overwhelmed by my horror (and fear) that lethal political violence has arrived in this country, and that folks - led, of course, by our demonic president but not restricted to his side - are indifferent to the loss of life on the other. Life is cheap in America.