Winter weather watch

Blue, pink, green, yellow? We're predicted 16-22" of the white stuff!

Adult joy

Our church's Adult Forum on vocation continued today, after a hiatus for the annual meeting. Today we heard from someone who found her way to lay hospital chaplaincy after several decades in the classical music field. Many things she described resonated, like that experience in most businesses tends to involve moving farther and farther away from the front lines where the work is done, and where she felt the joy of making a difference. Joy seems an odd thing to find in hospital chaplaincy, where so many are experiencing different degrees of pain and fear and loss, but she helped us understand the joy of being able to be with the great range of people in a hospital (patients, family, staff), often in silence, and of offering them the chance to be together, often in silence. Some of her more dogmatically religious colleagues say they "bring God into the room" but she finds God - she spoke of the shekhinah, the divine feminine in Jewish tradition - is always already there, at the head of every patient's bed. Powerful.

Sorted

In other news, we've just passed the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas, and a friend has just published his translation of one of the few heretofore untranslated works of Aquinas. That's not quite true, since "De Sortibus" was translated into English several decades ago, though not published... but the translator then is also the translator now! He's calling this a retranslation into contemporary English! A letter, "De Sortibus" has avoided publication so long because it might seem an unserious topic - when and how it is permissible to cast lots - but it's an accessibly odd and surprisingly relevant topic even now, and comes with a great story that really brings Aquinas to life. My friend asked me to blurb it (though sadly his editors replaced my puns).

Thomas Aquinas’ best known works, like his reputation, are daunting. As a result, too many students steer clear of his work or, worse still, read summaries. But the power and charm of Aquinas’ thought are best found in thinking with him as he names and reframes questions of all sorts. This is something Aquinas invites us to participate in throughout his oeuvre. If you’re casting about for where to begin, you could do a lot worse than start with De Sortibus in Peter Carey’s delightful translation.

Second opinion

Ventured downtown today - doubly masked, of course! The object was picking up a new laptop (hurrah!), but the occasion allowed me to pop into a lot of old haunts. Muji, Banana Republic (I've forgotten how to buy clothes, but I had a birthday coupon to use up), the Union Square Green Market, New York's sole Peet's (another birthday freebie, my second large cappuccino in, perhaps, a year!), a favorite Japanese grocer. And the subway...

M-masked

It's good to have a government that tells it like it is, though that means facing just what an awful situation we've been left by their cruel and feckless predecessors. Even without the pandemic's apparently irresistible spread around the world, it remains deadly in the US. (4,101 souls lost yesterday...) It will surely be months before I am able to get a vaccination. So I'm switching to double-masking for my limited excursions to enclosed places. Perhaps by Spring my glasses will fog up less...!

Good bye, Holocene

Hello, Anthropocene

Hope of the SBNR

Today's class in "After Religion" was about "spiritual but not religious" (SBNR). We covered a lot - almost certainly too much - but I'm confident there was something for everyone. SBNR get a bad rap for being shallow, self-involved and irresponsible, often deservedly, but it's one name for the space many of my students are in. It's better than the reified none-of-the-above lumped together as "religiously unaffiliated" "nones" or "The World's Newest Major Religion: No Religion," but needs elaboration. So as a first exercise I asked students (in the zoom chat) to supply some other compound identities like SBNR, using the formula

A  but/and  (not)  (also)  B

and gave some examples to get them going: Catholic but not practicing, spiritual and secular, atheist but open, Buddhist and also Jewish, religious but not spiritual. Students ran with it:

Religious but not spiritual

Faithful but skeptical

Interested but not committed

Spiritual and intuitive

Traditional, but not religious

Raised Roman Catholic but not practicing

Jewish and spiritual, or conversely, religious and cultural

Agnostic atheist

Curious but not fully convinced by any religion

Pagan and spiritual

Spiritual and a little Jewish

Catholic on paper but not really

Spiritual and a little Jewish too

Jewish but not kosher

Interested but not open

Jewish and spiritual

Spiritual and open

Muslim, but only sometimes

Open but unaffiliated

Catholic but not guilty

Superstitious but science-driven

Spiritual but not traditional

Catholic childhood but now a spiritual adulthood

Agnostic and searching

Vulnerable but self preservative

Religious but not practical

Not concerned and not worried

Religious but also liberal

Cool, and in just 3 minutes - one of the things you can do with zoom that you can't do in an in-person classroom! What was interesting, I noted, beyond the particulars, is what it means to identify with a but or an and. This is part of the "after religion" landscape, where more and more people feel they have to/can parse their relationship with traditional communities and identities. Like SBNR, when not taken generically, each is a refusal to identify in a simple way - is the promise of a story. It takes us beyond the barren Protestant landscape of the Pew religion surveys whose central interests are identification (understood primarily in terms of belief) and participation (understood in terms of regular congregational worship). Later in the class we'll look at limits and problems of this imagined capacity for self-definition; students who listened to the "Killjoy's Introduction to Religion" podcast I assigned have been introduced to some of them. But at this stage - our first real class together - it seems better to honor and explore the hope of the SBNR.

The other interactive part of class came after I'd breezed through some of the Pew data on declining religious identification and participation (conventionally defined) in the US and a broader global view (where we noticed the "after religion" as well as the "before religion"). We considered the project of the Sacred Design Lab, the latest iteration of an endeavor whose earlier versions I've regularly used in "Theorizing Religion." (They'e allied also with Harvard Divinity School and Krista Tippett's "On Being Project.") These post-religious spiritual entrepreneurs help groups, organizations and companies address the "soul-deep needs" of people after religion.

We see a future emerging in which the wisdom of our ancestors is remixed to make countless new iterations of soul-centered design. In practice, "designing for the human soul" for these "translators" and "interpreters" of "ancient practices" means finding non-religious ways of articulating the "50,000 year old questions" (as one of their partners termed it in a conversation a few weeks ago) and how these have been addressed by traditions from every time and clime. These practices are stripped of "accretions of orthodoxy and hegemony," and "rejiggered" for "emergent challenges." I'm not sure whether this will speak to my SBNR largely design-based students, but I'm hopeful. To start them off, I shared a list of the "ancient practices" named in the Sacred Design Lab brochure we'd read and invited them to share ideas about where these were from and what they were good for. It's a capricious but stimulating list.

mikvah 

rites of passage 

veneration 

journey 

ablution 

alchemy 

meditation 

lectio divina 

libation 

alms 

witness  

intercession 

metta 

covenant 

memento mori

mandala 

adornment 

tea ceremony 

testimony 

elders 

relics 

text 

guide 

drumming 

bindi 

centering 

praise songs 

prayer beads 

feast days 

stained glass

Next week, as we turn to the archetypal SBNR practices of yoga and mindfulness, we'll start to question the ethics and efficacy of such appropriation of what the Sacred Design Lab partner called "the human birthright." But for now I'm hoping that students are pleasantly surprised to find their vocabularies expanded and energized, their search a little less lonely and less abstract and disembodied. 

For good measure - but this was almost certainly too much - I finished the class by tracing some of the contours of "spirituality," then turned to James Miller's Daoist-inspired critique of the unsustainable modern distinction between philosophy, science and religion as dealing with the allegedly separate realms of "inner, metal subjectivity," "nature and the environment" and "theology and the supernatural." They're not distinct, of course, and appreciating this means we should realize we're not only in an after religion moment but also after philosophy and science, at least as conceptualized by unspiritual moderns. Whoa!

Flurry

Time slows

Second best

This is interesting... or is it? (The brown and beige categories are cringe-inducing, but overall it's a good conversation-starter, and a good inoculation against maps showing every part of the world as tied to one religion only.) It's from a 2016 article in National Geographic (online only) called "The World's Newest Major Religion: No Religion." I'll be using it in class tomorrow, to contextualize - and provincialize - the US-focused stories on the "rise of the religious 'nones'."

In the balance

Yesterday was my birthday, and among other presents (the best was learning that my parents will get the covid-19 vaccine Monday morning) we got a lovely new lamp. Appearing precariously balanced on a skinny bar, I thought the globe might seem unsettling but in fact it's balanced and calming. And then there's the world of colors (it has a dimmer, and can give the golden glow of a harvest moon or bathe the whole room in bright light) and shapes it projects and reflects all day long (do you see the sun that's casting the shadow on the wall?)! 

I can use that calming as the big event of the day after my birthday was the melt-down of my laptop, which wouldn't open: somehow it's lost track of its own start-up disk. It's likely that everything I've done since the last backup is lost, including the arc from the horror of January 6th to the joy and relief of the 20th... good thing I distilled at least some of my thoughts and feelings here!! Also inaccessible, at least for now, are notes from the final congealing of my course syllabus, but I'm optimistic that this material is fresh enough in my mind that this actually gives me a chance to bring it together even more cohesively. 

I'm lucky that there are other devices in the apartment (like the one I'm writing on right now) and pretty much everything else I've been working on lives online and is recoverable - as, in future, I'll make sure everything does and is. So a disaster it is not, but it is a pain. It's been time for me to get a new computer for a while, but still... 

Waves

Looks like New York City, devastated by a first covid wave and becalmed for half a year of social distancing, is in the throes of a new wave. The vaccine is far off for most, remain vigilant!

Ancestors assembled

There are many reasons why Wednesday's inauguration was so moving - starting with that it happened at all, undisturbed. One friend has enthused about the power and joy of the arts embraced by the inauguration, from paintings to poetry. Another swooned over how this most Catholic of inaugurations also represented the best of Catholicism. (Amanda Gorman is Catholic, too!) All are moved, I think, by the explicit and effective reclaiming of the Capitol from the tawdry attack on it two weeks before, an act of reconsecration.

I remain struck by how the entire Mall was transformed, first with the monument of lights for the four hundred thousand American COVID dead around the Reflecting Pool by the Lincoln Memorial, and then by the fields of flags - state and national - along the mall, 191,500 of them. The sea of flags (so many, and yet barely a third of four hundred thousand) was meant to represent the people whom safety considerations prevented from attending the inauguration, but I'm sure I wasn't the only on to be reminded of a cemetery on a day of remembrance. We will all one day be among the dead, this seemed to me to remind us, but also: the dead are with us. Silent witnesses, they were the privileged audience of the inauguration - ancestors.

Day after

"After Religion" kicked off yesterday! Since it was the morning of the inauguration, the class was not just preliminary but abbreviated. But we did get a start. I offered these three different ways one might take the course title, and then asked students to chime in, on a google.doc. They had a few minutes to engage one (or more) of these claims. You won't be surprised that the third generated more, and more fleshed out, reactions. Good to know! My resolve to cover all three is redoubled.

Inauguration!

Not sure what picture to post at this moment of relief and hope and new resolve, but our new first lady, Dr. Jill Biden, found just the one. It was her suggestion to hang "Landscape with Rainbow," painted by Robert Seldon Duncanson (1821-72), in the Capitol as part of inaugural ceremonies - ceremonies that together felt like a rededication of that recently desecrated building. Duncanson, a Cincinnati-based painter who was apparently the best known African American painter during the years surrounding the Civil War, painted it in 1859 (!). As Amanda Gorman put it at the end of her inaugural poem:  

there is always light if only we’re brave enough to see it, if only we’re brave enough to be it.  

What joy to move from a presidency defined by fear and lies to one of hope, honesty and love. I pledged allegiance again today.

Still small voice

I'd nearly forgotten how good presidential feels, especially when it comes to facing the terrible, sorrow on an unspeakable scale.

Arc

Have you noticed? Inaugural activities have begun already! And while the weekend's threats to lay siege to Capitols across the nation turned out to be rather smaller than feared (arresting all those U. S. Capitol invaders sent a clear message that the Trumpian impunity of white reaction is over), it's still hard to believe that we're experiencing a political handover... The miracle - and this time round you really feel how miraculous it is, what faith in a system it requires - of democracy.

A reckoning with vocation

Today I was invited to speak to our church's Adult Forum, whose theme for the Epiphany season is vocation. For reasons of availability, I was the second of what will be six speakers. The first, last week, was an inspiring narrative of being lost and found, addiction and recovery and then work helping others rebuild and reconnect, most recently at Rikers Island. "That was amazing," people said, deeply moved, "I feel sorry for whoever's coming next!" I waved sheepishly. So I had a week to figure out how to come next, though I'd been gathering thoughts for a few weeks. How my faith has shaped my vocation - our prompt - isn't a topic that I really know how to talk about. It was good to have a chance to try, or at least to explain why I wasn't sure how to do it! So what did I do?

I started with the logo of our series (above), which uses an image common to college and other career and vocational advising contexts. Having identified myself as an undergraduate teacher of liberal arts I said you could see folks like me in the picture: the pole in the middle! Then I quipped about designing courses, how the best way to start is with a strong example of what you're teaching about and why it matters. Only then, in the second session perhaps, do you bring in complications, definitions and ... theory. That's what I do. So Charlie last week and me this week might even make sense. Here goes!

My theory came from my old pash Max Weber, who's helpful not just once but twice for thinking about vocation, once in a broad way, once in a way more specific to my work as an undergraduate teacher. The broad way involves the role the idea of vocation plays in the argument of Weber's famous The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In the middle ages, only dedicated religious had vocations. Luther's idea of a priesthood of all believers meant that everyone now had a vocation - though he was a traditionalist: this didn't mean your vocation wasn't still that of your family, your guild, your class. Only with Calvin does the question of finding your vocation really get going, and for deadly earnest reasons. Most people are predestined to hell, so folks seek desperately for some sign they are among the elect predestined for the other place. Every life choice gets sucked into a quest for visible success, and the question of how to make the best use of your life undermines every relationship with others or with tradition: hello capitalism. Even if Weber was wrong to think that this attempt to make everything religiously meaningful wound up disenchanting the world, the idea of vocation is one we need to be careful about. It can be part of the "unprecedented inner loneliness of the individual" Weber espies in Calvinism and its capitalist successors. And, anyway, it's just not helpful to suggest that there is a single right answer to the question how a person should spend their life, especially in our own rapidly changing times. 

So much for Weber and the question of vocation in general. Important and influential for my particular trajectory have been his ideas about the vocation of the scholar and teacher, articulated in "Wissenschaft als Beruf." Like every vocation, Weber thought, this involved a kind of asceticism in service of an ideal. (He thought these spheres incompatible in a "polytheism of values" - you couldn't serve the god of knowledge and the god of politics or art or profit, too, claims perhaps worth reconsidering.) The vocation of the scholar was to be superseded - to be another brick in the wall of knowledge, their contribution so useful nobody remembered who made it. The vocation of the university teacher involves a sort of disappearing, too - it is an abuse of academic authority to preach, so one should never reveal one's own convictions, just offer "inconvenient facts" for every party. If you're going to do/believe this, then you can't also do/believe that, though you will also have to do/believe this, etc. We help others be thoughtful and consistent by making the insights and sacrifices involved in every view clear without ever taking a side.

This prohibition on taking a stand is especially important in religious studies, where we need to convince students and colleagues alike that we are servants of the project of knowledge, not proselytizers for some variety of faith. I described how very good I've become over the years in concealing my own views, serially inhabiting many different positions as worth taking seriously over the course of a semester, leaving students frustrated at questions which seem unanswered because we've entertained too many possible answers to them - but also how in recent years I've started to wonder about this ideal. (I didn't get into the reasons, from the Marxist, postmodern, pragmatist, Buddhist and Daoist critiques of the very possibility of value-neutrality to more recent misgivings at the whiteness of presuming to be the pole.)

The setting demanded I say something about my faith at this point, so I said that this vocational history helped explain, perhaps, why I'm so inexpert at doing that. (Wisely, I decided not to use the technical term "déformation professionelle," or to dilate on the disconcerting reality that I find it impossible to occupy a first-person view without also hearing the third-person.) In recent years, I told them, I've stopped dodging the question when students ask "are you religious." Being of the "they will know we are Christians by our love" school, I hope they become appreciative of Christian (and more generally religious) possibilities because of the respect with which I engage other views, the seriousness with which I take all their questions. If that sounds wimpy, it's nevertheless true. The faith of a Christian liberal.

Plenty of other things came up in the Q&A which I won't bore you with, from "essential workers" to how to reach those who felt it was their vocation to attack the U. S. Capitol last week to why I didn't like Pixar's newest, "Soul." But I have to say: this was a great opportunity and I'm glad I took it. I guess I do have a sense of vocation, one which makes sense beyond the rarified air of a privileged American liberal arts college. And... it was nice to have a chance to spell out my debts to Weber. I didn't realize until today how ascetic the snarky-seeming "inconvenient facts" beat really is. Or how its performance of service to the importance of things yet unknown and unthought aspires to forge a student's relationship with a real and unfolding truth, a truth which can set you free to reconnect to the world of care, complexity and relation.

Surprise! Perhaps our four years of winter are coming to an end!

Moving in

The syllabus for "After Religion" is done - well, the starting version at least! I reserve the right to tweak as we go along but it's pretty cool already, with catchy topics taking us well beyond received views of the nature, value and fate of religion, all garbed in a technicolor dreamcoat of resources of many kinds. The cherry on top is the fun image I borrowed for the title page, from the planned conversion of an abandoned Christian Science church on Central Park West into the new home of the Children's Museum of Manhattan!

Up in arms

Calm before the storm

A lot of things are happening next week. The obvious ones: A new semester kicks off, with a first guest lecture and the first session of "After Religion" Tuesday and Wednesday. These happen to be the eve and day of the presidential inauguration, which we all pray comes about peacefully - but prayer is probably needed. That's enough stress to fill one's plate. I hope it's the last time course planning is hostage to the trolling and bullying of the soon to be twice-impeached, and look forward to feeling involved and invested in a process of democratic rebuilding, not the chaotic free-fall of the last years. As with last week's attack on the U. S. Capitol, though, we probably don't know the full extent of the damage we'll have to address, and the response of those who've been convinced their world is ending will be painful...

I have additional stressors of a more personal sort, too! On Sunday I'm the speaker for an adult education forum at my church, invited to reflect on how my faith has affected my "vocation" (a topic I've, as a certain kind of religious studies scholar, assiduously avoided)... And then next Saturday is my birthday, an unnerving double palindrome.

The new semester is just around the corner and zoom meetings have started up again. Every conversation starts with fumbling over the opening pleasantries: halting responses to "how are you? how have you been?" quickly seek refuge in "how good it is to see everyone here today."

Dealer of death

Meanwhile the horror and heartbreak NYC went through has now gone national. (If our experience is anything to go by, some of the bodies placed here will still be there half a year from now.) Remember, this too is the work of our liar in chief. Through denial, distraction, dereliction of leadership and support of destructive fantasies like the anti-mask movement, he has killed hundreds of thousands. Demonic.

Pray for the state of our country

When discussing the Book of Job I often describe it - and through it scripture and liturgy more generally - as offering us words for the times when we have no words. So I'm grateful for the letter of the Episcopal Bishops of New York responding to the attack on the U. S. Capitol incited by the president, "Pray for the state our our country." A taste:

President-Elect Biden and Vice President-Elect Harris will come into office with the herculean task of uniting a fractured and violent nation, and restoring the honor of the presidency. Every person of good will must rise to support them and help in that effort. Those who carried out this act of shame have promised more, and more violent, actions to come. This country is not out of danger, and the future of our republic and common life are profoundly uncertain. Perhaps our biggest fear is that some essential thread which has bound us together in the past has now been cut, and that we may now devolve into chaos.

As Christians, we are people for whom reconciliation is not simply another virtue, but is the foundation of our life and who we are....

But this is also admitting that I am at a loss for words of my own for what's happened and happening. I have no idea what reconciliation could be here, and hear those on "my side" who angrily reject the idea that people so gullible or craven or hostile to the reality of American diversity deserve to be engaged at all, especially in the face of their enduring support of the president's and his party's sustained assault on the very structures of our democracy. But I also cannot imagine abandoning reconciliation as the horizon of our shared life. The bishops append some prayers from the Book of Common Prayer. It consoles me to have words such as these to intone - and that they're there already:

Oh God, you made us in your own image and redeemed us through Jesus your son. Look now with compassion on the entire human family; and particularly this part of the family, in the United States, and those in our nation’s capital; take away the arrogance and hatred which infect our hearts; break down the walls that separate us; unite us in bonds of love; and work through our struggle and confusion to accomplish your purposes on earth; ...

For the Human Family, Book of Common Prayer, p. 815

MMMM (wordless keening)

 

Meanwhile we've reached 4000 souls lost each day. And more to come.

Prospect

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The light this morning

American carnage, Chinese dream

 

From a German site: day of shame for America's democracy.

Germans know the fragility of democracy, and have been more attentive than we have to the damage Trump and his revolving door of goons and thugs have done not only to the image of the United States but to that of democracy. Putin must be happy beyond his wildest dreams, Xi too.

I'm not sure how the next two weeks will look, but I'm confident history will see all of the years of Trumpian shamelessness through today's appalling dénouement. How did we not see it was all leading to this? 

Or maybe even this is naive: there's no we, nor likely to be one for some time. Many still see this as part of an entirely different story. Reality remains fractured, broken. 

Wish us - that there may again be an us - luck as we limp forward.

Faith in maps

In part, I confess, to keep Georgia off my mind, I've been having a ball finding fun resources for "After Religion" - like a virtual tour of a Taiwanese 世界宗教博物館 Museum of World Religions!

Cartographic representations of the world's religions are a trip, too. The worst is from PBS (alas).  Rather cooler is this second one, though I can't find who made it. This third, by Carrie Osgood, uses fewer categories but is making me very happy.

Westward leading, still proceeding

 

The Del Mar Mexican nativity group is in good hands! And don't think it's late to be posting a picture of it: the Magi are still en route. They don't arrive with their gold, frankincense and myrrh until Wednesday.

Rooted

From our Misfits box, some color from last year to brighten a dull day

Denialism

Only the second of January and already I've broken one of my new year's resolutions! The resolution was to give no further oxygen to the outgoing norm-breaking huckster of a president and his enablers. But the cynical shit-show promised for January 6th reminds that we're not out of the woods. It's clear that, whatever happens to the impeached loser after January 20th, his most ardent supporters' attack on democratic norms and values will not abate. Why did I think his leaving would end it?

As opportunists and saboteurs mine the harbors of presidential transition, I realize I've been not just naive but in denial. The way others are denialists about climate change or income inequality or structural racism, I'm in denial about the anti-democratic ethos of the president's party - and, presumably, a good percentage of the tens of millions who voted for them in November. It's denial because I know it and refuse to believe it. Because I can't imagine it's being true.

I know about the extreme polarization of not only our population but the worlds they think they live in. Time was, people joked that all parties in the US were centrist but that's not true any more. The right's chauvinism and contempt for norms place them in league with the illiberal authoritarianism of Orban and Erdogan, far removed from conservative parties in most countries; I was agog at the chart above showing the imbalance of the wildly extremist Republicans and still centrist democrats. They - and this isn't just the politicos, talk radio shock jocks and cable hacks - really don't believe in playing by the rules, in the necessity of playing by rules if we are to live together. They believe they have a unique relationship to rules: the "God"-given right to make them, bend them, be served by them which is white supremacy.

Intuitive liberal democrat that I am I find myself asking: have Democrats become more extremist, too - the way the "cancel-culture" obsessed (and practicing) other side claims? No, and not in the same democracy-undermining way. We dream of a more perfect union, not the impossibility of union, the irreconcilability of difference.

So back to the drawing board. What should my new year's resolution be?