"Religion and the Anthropocene" met outdoors today! Many in the class are in NYC and the rest are aching to be, so we gathered in Washington Square Park. Logistics were predictably a challenge (my cellphone hotspot saved the day, anchoring our zoom class on my laptop) but the happy energy of a field trip prevailed. Students able to be present strolled with those far away on their phones - all while in zoom breakout sessions! For other discussions, all of us zoomed in from different places in the park or, when we found some tables free, passed my laptop ("our classroom!" I kept thinking) from hand to hand speaking to those far away. I'm not sure how much of the content will have stuck, since all of us in the park were in sensory overload: not just the trees and the sky and the people we didn't know and the people we did know but being in bodies together and moving and getting a paper handout and and and...
The readings were about settler colonialism and part of the lesson was learning to feel discomfort in the paradisaical park, the dream of European settler ancestors come true on territory long cared for by Lenape people pushed far from this land and then for a time by free black New Yorkers; it was a potters field too. Its oldest tree, the over 300 year old Hangman's Elm, is an import. "We are always in dialogue with our ancestors as dystopianists and fantasists," Kyle Powys Whyte, author of one of our texts, argued. Most of us settlers don't realize this or even understand what it means. It's almost a religious thought.
