Ashen

How many masks can you see in this throng of naga sadhus at this year's Kumbh Mela in Haridwar? (I count five, more than I expected.) This pilgrimage of millions to bathe in the holy Ganga near its source was one of several government-sanctioned super-spreader events contributing to India's ongoing devastating covid-19 tragedy. We had a regime like that too, just a year ago, its mobs itching for more.

Aloft

It's been 16 months since I've been in a plane. 

Twice in the last year I made a booking (on this very JetBlue site) and then had to cancel it, but this time looks to be for real. Thank you vaccinations, thank you President Biden for getting them out there.

So it looks like just over a fortnight from now I'll be back in California for the first time in almost a year and a half!

I get swoony at the thought!

FISP

As part of a long-mandated safety inspection of our building's façades, we've had to disassemble our "enclosed balcony." For the next several months (...) all our balcony windows and decking are stowed inside the apartment. A big hassle we had a bear of a time scheduling, this turned out in the end to be a little less disruptive than we feared, though still literally cramping our style. Unexpected consequence is that, while the balcony's off limits, we now have an unimpeded view of our neighbors - and they, should they wish, of us.

Democracy in peril, again

So the Senate Republicans blocked an independent, bipartisan commission to study the attack on American democracy of January 6th. Yet another shocking non-surprise, from a party which keeps plumbing new depths in this department. (My friend M was right to call the past president "the symptom": while a professional attention hog, he's part of a far larger problem.) The short of it: congressional Republicans don't want to be victims the next time their rabble attacks, whether in primaries or the next time there's an election whose results the red hats refuse to accept. The long of it: they're reconciled to their rabble's attacking everyone else, abetting it - indeed, after this cowardly vote, encouraging it. To put it mildly, democracy demands more public mindedness than this.

Anthromes

In just three centuries, human "anthromes" (biomes built by or around human projects) have overrun the world, crowding out the wild.

Deep dive

Had the chance today to reread the "Obituary for the Holocene" which comes at the end of Jeremy Davies' Birth of the Anthropocene (University of California Press, 2016) and am again unsettled and excited by it. Coming after a chapter which sped through the half billion years of the Phanerozoic Eon, punctuated by five mass extinction events, it marches through the Holocene in twelve millennium-long sections, "like the twelve books of an epic poem" (162). Beginning 9700 BCE, Davies calls them Agrarian, Pastoral, Agricultural, Diluvian, Early Ubaid, Late Ubaid, Hieroglyphic, Pharaonic, Assyrian, Classical, Byzantine-Islamic and Columbian. The scales of the Holocene, what preceded it and what follow are vastly different, of course, but the aim in both chapters is to convey what Davies calls "panoramic changeability" (187). Both are anchored in the "neo-catastrophist" awareness that earth history isn't gradual but full of sudden shifts and jolts, and offer, he argues, a way to understand ourselves in terms of "deep time."

The Holocene was not a blank canvas upon which human societies could express themselves. Its climate was not a dull, fixed reality, safely in the background and separate from human history. On the contrary, states and cultures have always been intimately shaped by complex, changeful feedback loops between politics and climate. (150)

I've found myself referring to this narrative frequently. I planned to use it in the last iteration of "Religion and the Anthropocene" (it fell in the week I gave exhausted students off), and want to use it for the upcoming Anthropocene Humanities courses, too. I share Davies' sense that many Anthropocene discussions are weakened by thoughtless representation of the Holocene as a stable "Eden," paying even less attention to the great changes preceding it. (The map above shows The Last Glacial Maximum, 23,00-16,500 years ago, whose ebbing ushers in the Holocene.) In fact the Holocene, the context in which all human "civilizations" emerged, was stable only relative to what preceded - and will follow - it. The flows of human history are shaped by often quite sudden swings in temperature, droughts, the effects of changed oceanic currents, wiggles of the magnetic poles, and much else. (And civilization wasn't an "Eden" for most people; Davies reminds us that hunter gatherers led longer, healthier lives than their sedentary successors, civilization benefits only elites.)

Davies' argument is that we can better live into the Anthropocene if we recognize what it's displacing - that the "birth of the Anthropocene" coincides with the end of the "Holocene" - and that this can help us accept our place in the complicated feedback loops of human and other than human forcings that have always shaped human destiny. The Anthropocene poses new challenges - a more unstable context than humans (or other life forms) have known for 12,700 years - but it's not our first rodeo. We've been variously on the make since before the Holocene began... Here's how he starts his story:

The dawn of the Holocene saw ice and permafrost retreat from Europe, as hazel, birch, juniper, deer, and boars spread north (a temperature rise of seven degrees Celsius can expand a tree species’ range a thousand kilometers toward the poles). Humans followed, hunting the forest mammals with bows and arrows, gathering hazelnuts, and catching eels in wicker traps. The richest center of this Mesolithic culture was probably Doggerland, a low-lying territory of marshes and narrow valleys on the northern edge of the continent. Wetlands expanded rapidly in the tropics, attested to by rising levels of atmospheric methane. Pottery, still unknown in the Fertile Crescent, was already a widespread and long-standing technology for cooking and display among the hunter-gatherers of China, Japan, and northeast Asia. The ceramics of the Jomon hunter-gatherers of Japan—whose diets involved acorns, fish, and smoked pork—grew increasingly sophisticated in this millennium as their first year-round villages emerged. Villages were established in North China as well; their inhabitants hunted deer, processed seeds, made tools of bone and antler, and may or may not have adopted sedentary lifestyles. Domesticated food plants, dissimilar to their wild progenitors, evolved in the Americas: nomadic cultivators in coastal Ecuador and the Colombian Andes domesticated squash and arrowroot, respectively. (164)

My use of Davies' "epic" of the Holocene has been a little different. The week I'd assigned it for in "Religion and the Anthropocene" last Fall was the one in which we were also to read the Dao De Jing. The idea was that it makes sense to understand things in terms of flows and oppositions - at every level from the cosmic to the personal - as Daoists do when you realize that the Holocene wasn't a featurelessly stable background to human endeavor, that balance or harmony are processes, and far from automatic. Relatedly, I've referred to Davies' "epic" in connection with the Book of Job, a reminder that the wild and barely tamed world of the theophany records experiences of the natural world as anything but a stable backdrop. The intrusion of Stengers' Gaia isn't new, and some of our most venerable traditions know all about it, if we can learn to hear what they're saying.

More broadly, I've been recalling Davies' "epic" in the effort to convince myself that the religious legacies of the "world religions" (and others, of course) aren't all automatically and obviously obsolete because they take for granted a Holocene stability which no longer obtains. The Holocene was more stable than the Anthropocene will be, but it didn't allow human beings to be so unaware of contingency, catastrophe and irrevocable change as to make them pollyannaish in taking natural harmony for granted. Increasingly I'm thinking that that blithe pollyannaishness is part of the Anthropocene problem: the transformed experience of human power over (and independence of) nature made possible by the force - unconnected to the cycles of living interaction which previously structured all life including our own - of fossil fuels.

Davies' exercise is a little contrived of course, and perhaps - despite its emphasis on unexpected changes at many levels - too coherent. 

The pace of both technological and climatic change accelerated dramatically in the seventh millennium (3700–2700 B. C.). It could be called the Hieroglyphic millennium: writing was among the period’s many innovations. The changes in climate were ultimately driven by the changing geometry between the earth and sun. Ever since the Pastoral millennium [8700-7700 B. C.], the amount of summer sunlight striking the Northern Hemisphere had slowly decreased. The decline in summer heating steadily weakened the force behind Northern Hemisphere monsoons, but the monsoons’ feedback relationships with vegetation cover (among other things) meant that rainfall patterns often altered not gradually but in sudden, localized jumps. The seventh millennium saw a great cluster of these regional jumps to much drier conditions. In essence, it witnessed the emergence of the modern world’s arid belt above and around the Tropic of Cancer, from the southwestern United States to the deserts of the Sahara, the Middle East, and Central Asia. It is tempting to link these climatic changes to social ones, and to see the struggle to cope with desiccation in the monsoon belt as the common factor behind the (very) approximately simultaneous emergence of complex societies on three continents. Grand paradigms like that always work better as provocations than as dogma, but the widespread socioecological reorganizations of the Hieroglyphic millennium, like the temperature anomaly of the Diluvian millennium [6700-5700 B. C.], undoubtedly constitute a major landmark for the view from the Anthropocene. (172-73)

As a literary scholar he would admit this, no doubt: every narrative is, well, a narrative! But rereading it with a class of Chinese students in mind, I notice in a new way that, while Davies includes the history of civilizations on all continents (and the Austronesians who settled the islands of the Pacific), the epic is anchored by a focus on the Fertile Crescent, the only part of the world on which there's a near continuous spotlight. He admits this, too, when explaining how he chose names for the Holocene millennia. He explains that this region, a hub of three continents, happens also to be one whose "development is (uniquely, for now) well enough understood to allow for detailed discriminations between each millennium" (162). The other data points he offers suggest but don't supply alternative, let alone plural, narratives. I don't know if those students, rooted in "5000 years of Chinese civilization," have a different sense of "deep time"... perhaps we can talk about it! Maybe Daoism will return, even!

Chez voov

Meet Voov, the almost-zoom. Operated by Tencent, mother of WeChat, it has an interface based pretty obviously on zoom. I'm  

getting to know it because it's the platform through which I'll be teaching my course for the Renmin International Summer School. The  

free version I downloaded from the Apple Store doesn't appear to have Breakout Rooms, but it does have a more extensive menu of emojis.

Neel

Went to the Met today for the Alice Neel show. It's a beaut but I don't really have a sense of how her portraiture-focused practice changed over the more than five decades of her career (she lived 1900-84). The exhibition is organized thematically rather than chronologically, intriguing in its own way... but I kept doing double takes on seeing a work from the 1930s or even the early 1920s that already was recognizably hers, and masterful. Guess I'll need to go again!

Starbursts

Scales fall off

As I get back into teaching about the Anthropocene mode, I'm appreciating The Anthropocene: A Multidisciplinary Approach by two British paleobiologists and an American intellectual historian of Japan. They insist on a "multidisciplinary" rather than "interdisciplinary" approach because the different disciplines we need to make sense of things aren't convergent in their methods and forms of argumentation, and we're best off learning from each as well as from the frictions between them. They write accessibly about complicated methodological issues like different understandings of scale and causality: how can one begin to make sense of vast biogeochemical changes and the fact that they have largely taken place within the span of single human lifespan, or that human efforts over the next lifespan will have far far far-reaching consequences?! This humble insistence on plurality allows them to push back against totalizing responses, whether scientistic or nihilistic, while holding on to the Anthropocene language as a reminder that all these phenomena are part of one "predicament." (They prefer "predicament" to "problem," which gets us looking for a single solution and inclines us to accept a single discipline's way of deciding it. Historians and geologists both accept periodization as a useful organizing principle but know how not to let it displace the interlocking complexity of actual causality.)

This graphic (from 2019) doesn't appear in their book but complements their warnings about too-consistent views, and in an arresting way makes real one of the Anthropocene's mind-blowing numbers they cite: Our "anthropomass" (as Vaclav Smil calls it), combined with the mass of our domesticated animals comprise an astounding 97% of the total zoomass of terrestrial animals. (Almost as overwhelming as Our strangely unfamiliar planet now has more than 193,000 human-made "inorganic crsytalline compounds," which vastly outnumber Earth's ˜5,000 natural minerals!) Livestock are a big part of the footprint of a surging and increasingly meat-consuming human population, major drivers of CO2 as well as rainforest destruction; their care - grazing land as well as land growing feed for them - now takes up 27% of land mass!! But that's still an unassimilibale abstraction, detached from the local realities that comprise it. This map from the vastly informative Our World in Data (they also have country-by-country breakdowns) makes that 27% real in an irreverent way - equivalent to the whole Western Hemisphere!! And it contains other delicious provocations too. The counterintuitiveness of placing "built-up areas" in North Africa, or "freshwater" in Mongolia - not to mention placing Europe in "barren land" - shakes up our unthinking intuitions about geography, geopolitics and history. Once you've aggregated Anthropocene-scale phenomena - you can't just go back to the tired truisms of periodized world history and human geography.

Recapitulation

Not sure just why this fern so captivates me - is it the wintry color palate? Or the pink and purple? The fractal frenzy? All of the above. But most of all: it reminds me of seeing snowy mountains from the air, a scene which to me looked like, well, leaves! Here's the image I'm recalling. It's clearly stayed with me: snapped (and shared in this blog!) thirteen years ago! My name for the image was "leaflike."

Covid update

By one measure, the seven-day average for US Covid-19 deaths has apparently fallen below 500 for the first time since last March. As if five hundred were a small number! And that still means that more - often many more - than three thousand five hundred souls have been lost each and every week for sixteen months... and that's only in the US.

人类世人文学

As we ease into summer, I'm pivoting from Religion & Anthropocene to something a little different, at least on the surface: Anthropocene & Humanities. "Anthropocene Humanities" is the name of the course I'll be offering for the Renmin summer school starting end of next month, and also of a First Year Seminar I'll be teaching in the fall. The readings for the former are already set, but the latter will benefit from that attempt, as well as new discoveries (like the books above). I'm excited to be able to bring to beginning students at Lang questions from students in China. 

"Anthropocene Humanities" has a nice ring to it, the clash of Greek and Latin etymologies adding to a sense of potent multiplicity. But what might it mean? Here's the (Lang) course description:

Anthropocene names the new reality – and awareness – that humanity has become a planetary agent, perhaps the single most important factor in the current history of life on earth. The term was coined by natural scientists but has been increasingly taken up by thinkers in the human sciences. This course surveys debates about the meaning and significance of humanity’s new status within the earth system from historical, philosophical, literary and comparative, as well as feminist, postcolonial and postsecular perspectives. We'll employ the tools of the humanities to make sense of the Anthropocene, and use the challenge of the Anthropocene to reimagine the work of a planetary humanities.

The word "postsecular" might give me away. The Renmin reading list, compressed for a summer course as well as non-native readers, lifted the readings not explicitly engaged with religion from my "Religion and the Anthropocene" syllabus. But that doesn't mean the approach will be secular, at least not in an unreflective sense. I'm persuaded by those who think the "secular" human sciences are both beholden to and blind to religious legacies, as well as by those who question if all of the modern western disciplines aren't in fact implicated in the Anthropocene disconnection from the rest of nature. The Anthropocene adds an urgency to such interrogation.

The Renmin course will be a sort of report on these western discussions, inviting comparative responses from students. (Chinese traditions have long been figured as "humanistic" too. Who knows what resonances the Chinese version of the project - 人类世人文学 - offers!) The resulting discussions will, I hope, help make the Lang course not just organically postsecular but more fully "planetary." 

Stay tuned!

Return

A week's get-away wrapped up with a picnic with a dear friend under the blooming chestnuts of Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square. We met the same friend in another Philadephia park on our way back last Fall, masked and distanced. What joy today to see each other's faces and, best of all, to hug!

Some of the delicate denizens of Clifton Gorge...

Green light Ohio

We've been out of town: marked the achievement of vaccine immunity by visiting our friends in Columbus, Ohio again. Blue blue skies made the bright spring leaves especially luminous - as we drove across Pennsylvania it sometimes felt like the photographic negatives of the fall purples, reds and oranges we saw on our last trip over, in October. For this second visit we got a deeper view of Ohio history,  both geological and human. The inter- and post-glacially cut Clifton Gorge (below) was a dramatic contrast to the flatness of the landscape. But most exciting, for me, were the mutely monumental Newark Earthworks, the largest surviving complex of the Hopewell culture, recently in the news, as the Moundbuilders Country Club complicates nomination of the site as UNESCO World Heritage.

Unmasked bandit

The latest news from the CDC - that vaccinated people don't need to wear masks outdoors or even indoors, whether interacting with other vaccinated people or with unvaccinated people - is confounding. The masks which we were expecting to continue to wear for the benefit of others aren't needed after all; the unvaccinated can still get infected and infect each other, but we vaccinated people aren't likely to be vectors for it. Still, it's confusing. I don't like masking, but I understand it as a visible commitment to the common good. I don't like looking like I put my own convenience over the health of others, don't want to seem to be encouraging such behavior, don't want to produce incentives for people to put themselves at risk so as not to stand out.

And this is happening as pretty much every other part of the world is suffering from new waves of infection, going back into lockdowns, testing the limits of hospital systems, etc. Going "back to normal" seems obtuse in this context, even callous, but then our normal has never extended that far beyond our privileged selves (even in our own country). Part of the normal I bristle at being urged to return to is that it is one in which I unthinkingly feel invulnerable to the hazards haunting human life in most times and places, and just as unthinkingly accept that others remain subject to them. But I can feel the habit of that invulnerability returning, the caution attending every imagined encounter pre-vaccination a fuzzy memory, almost an embarrassment. 

Does that mean I'll keep wearing a mask? In many cases it's still required - public transportation, at the discretion of shop owners, etc - so I'll still have one along at all times. But encountering others when walking outside I may still mask up as a sign of respect and concern... anf humility.

Commence!

I'm a sucker for pomp and circumstance, I admit it... but that doesn't mean I watched our university commencement live: it's available for posterity here. There were many heartening and inspiring words, and many acnowledgments of the many-layered challenges of the last year. I particularly loved the Parsons student speaker, whose talk begins at 1:06:48 and beautifully captures what The New School does as a learning community, likening the student experience to the deep dives of the narwals, the "unicorn of the sea" which is our mascot. New School narwals dive deeper than any other marine mammal, we learn, and when they resurface, in many and distant places, have learned "to embrace the unexplored ocean rather than to swim away to the safe shore." But the sweetest moment may have come during the conferral of honorary degrees, which went to the President of Ford Foundation, theater director Ping Chong, and - en Español - two people from Colombia, José Alberto and Luz Mery Gutierrez, a sanitation worker who started retrieving discarded books and, with his wife, set up what became a network of community libraries; the first book was a copy of Anna Karenina. In the midst of the rubble of recent years, their story is particularly poignant and hopeful. 

Graduated!

I know I'm a bit of a pollyanna, and among the things we're all weary of is hearing about the unexpected up-side of zoom... But we just had our recognition ceremony for our graduates (two years' worth, in fact, since last year's got just a prerecorded "memento"), and, while more students might have shown up, those who came were fittingly fêted.  We had a complicated "run of show," with three student and one faculty speakers, a student musical interlude, and the reading of all graduates' names by their department chairs, with intricate zoom choreography of cameras off and on and off again so that everyone might be seen as their name was read, but it worked well enough. It  

was a collective effort and felt like one! And it brought our community together in a way we haven't been for fifteen months. And... it also allowed of something traditional graduations (not to mention socially distanced ones) don't: you could see people close to each other, even as they were in reality hundreds of miles apart... and best of all, you often got to see graduates' friends and family with them, most movingly when one of the student speakers mentioned her "mother and abuela" - and there they were behind her, serious, proud. We've got your back, too!

Homesteading in the big lie

If it wasn't obvious before, it is now: the Trumpian cancer on American democracy's has not abated but is metastasizing. I've been watching with dread as small men (it's men, mostly, though they have their publicity-loving gals too) make nests for themselves in the big lie. More than frightened and saddened, though I'm those things too, I'm just confused. What do these people believe, what do they think they're doing? They know it's a lie, don't they? They know that their man tried every sleazy trick in the books and still lost the election, surely? They know that it's a lie and that he's a liar, with a demonstrated contempt for truth and democracy, don't they, a prophet of desparate American carnage loyal to nothing but his own vainglory?

I was going to add that they know that the assault on the Capitol in January 6th, answering a losing candidate's siren song to overturn an election, was a near-death experience for American democracy... but they don't know that. Many evidently believe what the insurgents believed: they feel called to bludgeon into submission a system that doesn't produce the outcomes to which they feel entitled. The battery of "election integrity" laws from state Republicans, competing to outdo each other in cant and cruelty, are like elaborate bandages over feigned wounds; each is also a shot in the arm of the insurgents' distrust of the structures of American democracy. 70% of Republicans think the election was rigged, though nobody can say just how. How can one reason with such unreason?

It's hard now to imagine that January 6th wasn't just a dress rehearsal for what's to come, what is indeed already happening, a hamstringing of American democracy by people convinced that it has become their enemy who somehow don't realize that they have have become the enemy of the civic trust they claim to revere. But I don't actually know what they are thinking, hence my confusion. I don't know what game they think they're playing, though Masha Gessen and Timothy Snyder have shared the playbook of their nihilistic masterminds. Imagine finding a home in a big lie, whether embraced or tolerated, reluctantly or enthusiastically, whether as truth or fiction... Imagine imagining there's no life or future for you in truth, only in lies.

Gaudeamus igitur

Another academic year is officially over. The institution came through this stronger than we dared hope - like faculty around the world we pulled out all the zoom stops, and learning happened, though frazzled exhaustion did too - but I worry for graduating seniors. Even in an ordinary year many of our students don't feel they've made it through a right of passage, newly skilled and focused and empowered, but what about this diffused and two-dimensional year? The designers of the Class of 2021 mug doubtless didn't have this in mind, but its loose and sketchy and unfinished look seems all too apt.

Durables

The New School has a new provost, sociologist Renée T. White - only our second one to be selected through a national search. It's an exciting moment, and not only because the rethinking of the structure and nature of the university which the past year's crises seemed to demand has been postponed until her arrival. Strategic planning, especially around the special meaning of the "liberal arts" at our design and social research university, awaits, and her experience and commitments will help shape it. (She has served mostly at small colleges committed to women, doing important reseearch at the intersection of race, gender, inequality and public health). After a time of anxious uncertainty it's a moment of great promise!

Coincidentally I've been revisiting the moment when New School last brought in an outside provost eighteen years ago, the anthropologist and globalization theorist Arjun Appadurai. His appointment was big news, but his tenure was unfortunately brief: this was during Bob Kerrey's embattled tenure as president, as he cycled madly through five provosts and a dozen deans before being hit by a faculty "no confidence" vote when he claimed he could be provost and president at the same time! But the need for academic leadership which Appadurai demonstrated was established, and what had been a bare bones Provost's Office has continued to grow since his time here.

Less successful was Appadurai's effort at getting New School to globalize its curriculum, especially in engaging Asia, which seems to have met more resistance than just a mercurial president. Pretty much the only vestige of the revolution that wasn't is the India China Institute, whose account of its history records an ambition no less compelling today, if harder to imagine realizing: 

[W]e are bringing together key people to rethink vital questions like: What are the truly important issues? How is the world changing? If we can get thinkers in India, China and the United States not only to agree about the biggest questions, but also to decide the shape and scope of them, then the answers will have a certain range of durability that answers in the past have not had. That’s a big ambition. But The New School has always been about big ambitions.

"Durability" is an interesting criterion, especially for the ever-New School! I wish it for Provost White, and, with her guidance, for a distinctive New School vision of liberal arts, global and just.

Change of aspect

This is a time of busy work in the woods. While new plants push up through last year's amassed leaves from below, trees launch seeds in their millions from the heights. The two meet here, where what seems the fastest growing ground plant spreads out thick leathery 

leaves big enough to catch rosaries of seeds loosed by the trees overhead. But as I was gazing at these yesterday the messiness of it suddenly gave way to another view. I felt I was in the presence of a jewelry seller, with precious wares arrayed for all to admire.

Planted and self-planting

Rise and subsiding

Our view is changing daily, as the condominium tower being built at Union Theological Seminary rises. The scene is giving me a little déjà vu, as a big building grew into the eastward view of my Brooklyn perch too, but while that effaced the Empire State Building (inspiring me to eloquent ambivalence!), this will merely cover the boxy Interfaith Center. Still, my monkey mind swirls around it, agitated.

If these walls could talk

After today's final faculty meeting of the academic year, we bid farewell to five beloved faculty members who were moving on. As part of pandemic-forced belt-tightening last year, the university had offered long-serving senior faculty the option of retiring early with some benefits and emeritus status, and five at our college were among those who opted for this. (Many others, myself included, were made the offer and didn't.) The five, all women, have contributed so much the place really is unthinkable without them. Two began as part-time faculty. One came to the New School three times - first as a teenager to the Freshman Year Program, then back to teach after graduate school for a few years, and then for a final burst a little after I arrived. Between them they helped craft some of our most valued departments and programs - cultural studies, arts in context, literature, history, civic liberal arts. One moved from theater to arts in context to writing. Several have worked also in other divisions, two of them have been key to the establishment of the Faculty Senate, and all served in innumerable positions in the ever shifting but never shrinking world of committees where faculty get to know each other. All will be sorely missed.

A zoom farewell is far from ideal, not least because it's not the same when everyone is toasting with a different beverage, but it was lovely nonetheless. You felt people really looking at each other, channeling fondness and care! As resident historian I'd been tasked with supplying the dean with early photos of our departing colleagues, and the chairs of their current departments said a few words, before others chimed in. Stirring tributes and charming memories were shared, but the real activity was in the chat, where the tools we've developed over the year for that kind of discussion participation were put to ideal use. Tributes, thanks, affirmations of others' tributes, gushing forth like a stream. (And the transcript is of course available, along with the zom recording!)

I did my bit in the chat, having fond memories of working with all five though leery of appearing to claim a special relationship in a collective setting, but for one I felt I should actually speak, a professor of literature and environmental humanities who has occupied the office next to mine for a long time. Others with offices nearby had spoken about how "the 4th floor won't be the same without you!" but I had a special in, since Elaine and I share a very thin wall. I thought this was the time to come clean that I had beeen able to hear years' worth of meetings she had with student advisees, and sometimes listened in. (She must be able to hear as much from my end, but although we spoke often about all sorts of things, in her office and mine, in the doorways and in the hallway outside, we've tactfully never mentioned this.) I told of how moved and instructed I have been by the way she tailors her advice to each student, challenges them to take themselves seriously, changes their lives!

This unwittingly provided a motif for the dean, who wound things up referring to how we would never forget these departing colleagues. "You're in the walls of Lang!" Elaine, Elaine, Colette, Sumita, Stefania - thanks for everything.

Aftr Rlgn

And here's what we wound up doing! Notice how many of the class materials are hyperlinked in blue - this was the least text-focused course I've ever taught! (I'm happy to send the links; ask me if you're interested.) 

The first half of the semester unfolded largely as planned, but much changed in the latter half. I'm not sure if you can get a sense of the flow from week to week, but it had an organic feel to it. 

When lecturing in zoom the instructor can't see her students, as the screen is filled with slides. Feeling disconnected from students I decided to prerecord the lectures for weeks 4-12 so I could meet them in conversation during our our scheduled time; I called it "open office hours" and sent each student an invitation. Many (if not most) students availed themselves of this opportunity, and the conversations were sustaining for all involved, including me! Prerecording the lectures was alarmingly easy - I had to laugh at my own jokes - but these conversations kept me connected to the class as a whole.

The course runs again next spring but I'm not ready to assess the whole yet. Materials highlit in our final discussion ranged across the class, from Andrea Jain's critique of "neoliberal spirituality" in the 2nd week to Yuria Celidwen's invitation to indigenous contemplative practices in the 13th but we'll see what the course evaluations say! 

Afterreligion

"After Religion" wrapped up today. (I'll share the final syallabus another time.) What had initially been conceived as a showcase of students' final projects was at the last minute replaced by a panel discussion about the fruits of the course. It turns out the larger zoom lecture community isn't one in which students feel safe sharing their often quite personal work, though many have shared their work with me (like the magazine at right). So instead the TAs reflected on course materials and discussions they'd found interesting and useful for their own studies and research - two are sociologists of religion, one an anthropologist, one from Iran, one from China, one Mexican American, all of which made for perspectives different from but complementary to mine - and then we opened up for a general discussion. It went well, effectively reviewing and refreshing our discussions over the course of the semester in a forward-looking mode: not just "what's stayed with you?" but "how will this affect what you do next?"

A few student stalwarts stayed on after our time was up, and one asked my own thoughts about the ULEC (lecture courses for students from liberal arts, design, performing arts) experience. I told her that I enjoy teaching the ULECs because the students, coming from across the university, don't just bring gifts in many genres but are also more international than my liberal arts college seminars. But this past year, where many of the international students were dialing in from their home countries, often in the middle of the night, something more clicked. Knowing it was going abroad made my largely made-in-America material feel parochial. I admitted that, if international students were in my physical classroom I'd think less about the appropriateness of a US-anchored discussion - after all, they'd made their way to study here. But now it was different. A significant part of the argument of the class was challenging the naturalness of the modern notion of "religion," a notion which misrepresents non-western traditions and experiences, and in the practice of colonialism and capitalism, profoundly (mis)shapes them. Important clarifying work, even "decolonial"! Still, many of these students were new to thinking about religion in any form. Did I want to be part of broadcasting the modern notion of religion, even to debunk it? 

This related to another realization I didn't mention, a tension I found myself feeling between the call to contribute to the interrogation of the structural "whiteness" in American institutions and thoughts demanded by this moment, and the somewhat different - if related - issues in internationalizing a syllabus. Next year's version of "After Religion" will be a concrete context for thinking this through, the more grounded if we're able to gather together on campus.

Never-ending loop

As the US looks forward to summer relaxation, with more vaccines than people who want to take them (!!), the pandemic can feel over. But as at every stage in covid's march across the globe, there are other parts of the world where the crisis is ongoing and worsening. We hear about India and Brazil, because they are huge and in downward spirals because of Trumpian know-nothing leadership. (One recalls also the brash claims that India had miraculously dodged the bullet.) But the situation is bad in many places, and many are suffering the onset of second, third waves. WHO's global tally of three million two hundred and nine thousand one hundred and nine souls lost is almost certainly an undercount. A New York based writer whose family is in India describes an anguished cognitive dissonance all of us should be suffering:

Although I can look forward to picnics in the park this summer, India’s parks are becoming grave sites. All the justified optimism around me now feels unjust and even irresponsible. For many of us with friends and family around the world, the trauma feels like a never-ending loop: When your immediate situation improves, another loved one enters a crisis.

It would be nice to think that the shared experience of the pandemic would expand our sense of "friends and family around the world" but it seems we have far to go, unprocessed grief, guilt and relief making it hard even to recognize in the terror of Delhi the existential dread New York was facing not much more than a year ago.

Slipping on

Just signed the contract for teaching again in the International Summer School of Renmin University of China this summer, after last year's pandemic-related cancellation. But of course I'm not going to 

Beijing to do it: we're online. (No details yet of the platform but it won't be zoom.) The closest I'll come to Renmin might be these slippers from the university hotel where they put me up in 2019!

Shape shifting spring

Pow!