Sunset spectacular

Dance of the setting sun's light and some rainclouds moving our way. (The semicircle at right is the reflection of one of our lamps.)

Religion sauna

In this new iteration of "Theorizing Religion," the birth of the modern notion of religion in Schleiermacher's Speeches on Religion to the Cultured among its Despisers comes two thirds of the way in. I'm not sure what I was thinking as I planned it, but in practice it looked to make sense coming after a section on the challenges of contemporary American Christianity and the question if there's a non-theological way to say some (many!) so-called Christians aren't Christians, their religion not even religion. Something like that pathos animates Schleiermacher in 1799. But the students took it in a different direction, finding a sort of blessing for the spiritual but not religious. I let them run with it, playing out the Romantic possibilities, but at the end of class I told them this was the first half a pair of classes like a sauna. The cold bath of Feuerbach and Marx await. Institution-free individual experience? Irreligion! Worse: commodity capitalism.

Compost mentis

Our adventures with Haraway continued today with the "Camille stories" which wrap up Staying with the Trouble. These stories, developed by Haraway at a workshop in France with two partners, imagine the next 400 years of human life through a series of remarkable reimaginings of how humans should live. In response to environmental degradation, the story begins in 2020 with small communities (300 or so) who seek out devastated landscapes and commit themselves to rehabilitating them.

None of the Communities of Compost [as they were known] could imagine that they inhabited or moved to “empty land.” Such still powerful, destructive fictions of settler colonialism and religious revivalism, secular or not, were fiercely resisted. The Communities of Compost worked and played hard to understand how to inherit the layers upon layers of living and dying that infuse every place and every corridor. Unlike inhabitants in many other utopian movements, stories, or literatures in the history of the earth, the Children of Compost knew they could not deceive themselves that they could start from scratch. Precisely the opposite insight moved them; they asked and responded to the question of how to live in the ruins that were still inhabited, with ghosts and with the living too. (138)

These communities live out Haraway's injunction to "Make kin, not babies" and abandon expectations of reproduction and biological lineage; each new child is raised by three adults, two of whom may have no genetic connection to the child. Meanwhile, the children are made kin of other species - endangered ones like monarch butterflies - through implantation of some of that species' genetic material, which lets these persons come to know the world in more than human ways. By the time the story ends, the human population has fallen to 3 billion, fully a third of whom are "syms" - with millions of other species, many of which have, in the meantime, gone extinct. 

It's a challenging and intoxicating work of imagination, a defiant dare to us not to give up, not to think the unsustainable way things have been is the only way we can be human. Its radical reimagination of what "kinship" can be, within and beyond the human community, is already worth the price of admission. But there's something powerful already in the way she repeatedly uses the phrase ways of living and dying where most would speak just of ways of life or living. This is "compost" thinking at its most fundamental. In a time of unspeakable and largely unspoken grief at the ongoing loss of ecosystems and species, it provides a way to accept transience and change and even to go a step further: we learn anew to see life coming back out of death. Haraway does that in the excerpt quoted above, as layers upon layers of living and dying in the third sentence give way to ghosts and ... the living too in the fifth. Haraway's reimagining religion, too.

Dr Seuss sunset

Why do bad things happen to good people?

I asked the students in my "Job and the Arts" class to come up with at least three answers commonly given to the question "why do bad things happen to good people?" Some interesting responses emerged...

1. God does not control the good things or bad things that happen to people, god is not here to fix or make better, he simply brought everything here 

2. All actions have reactions, the most horrible things to happen to people can domino into the most glorious wonderful things, any one moment or action is not a complete action, it continues onward forever 

3. There is true randomness in the world, good things happen to bad people, bad things happen to good people, there is no reason only chaos. 

1. Karma, but multidimensional: you could have done something in another life that justifies something bad happening to you in this one. 

 2. The purpose of life is to experience everything, the joy and the suffering. It’s all part of living life, no matter if you’re a good or a bad person. 

3. God is a concept, not an entity. Things happen to people, there is no God at fault necessarily. 

1. Setting some kind of cosmic example for others to view and avoid 

2. There is no higher power in control of these occurrences, simply chance 

3. A well rounded, thoughtful existence cannot be achieved in the absence of suffering combated by joy 

1. Good and bad are subjective… with this label, one cuts short the meaning that could be derived from a circumstance. They are incomplete stories. 

2. Entropy, good and bad things happen at random. This also explains so many other things. 

3. People do bad things to good people because the doers are bad people. It is not as personal as something just happening to a good person. 

4. A buddhist would say an answer to this question would take years and years to answer and it would not get you any closer to enlightenment. 

5. God is human too, I mean he has a part of Jesus in him.

1. Cause and Effect 

2. God likes to have fun sometimes 

3. You get what you put out into the world 

4. God picks Her favorites (holy people?) 

5. Chance! Absolute chaos and luck 

1. Coincidence 

2. For lessons to be learned 

3. There is no happiness without suffering

1. Manifestation but, like, in a bad way - sometimes we convince ourselves we’ve willed something into reality 

2. Sometimes things just happen - chaos - nothing anyone can really do 

3. Our perspective on suffering as punishment - often times people explain suffering as some kind of lesson or test 

1. Nihilism (GOTT IST TOT) 

2. Progress! (Techno Exceptionalism) (the spoils of manifest Destiny) 

3. Biological Nature, Survival of the Fittest 

4. Deep Time (Cosmic Awareness) 

5. Good and Bad do not exist only laws/rules (the Social Contract) 

1. Bad things happen to everyone we just put more emphasis on what happens to good people. Bad things already happened to bad people why do you think they are the way they are? It broke them. 

2. What one might see as good another might see as bad 

 3. Probability and fate are real things that i believe affect everyone. 

1. The world works as a series of coincidences 

2. Mercury is in retrograde 

3. There are no actual good people or bad things - everything lies on a “spectrum” and people’s experiences dictate how they see the world and where they’d place themselves and the things that happen to them on this spectrum

1. There is no such thing as an absolute “goodness” 

2. Things happen for a reason. The bad thing might lead you to a good thing. 

3. It’s a mistake to think that you are the only one who goes through bad things -> God is “just” so I guess he makes it happen to everyone 

4. Because God doesn’t exist. 

5. God might have a different perspective on what is good and what is bad 

6. Because you relied too much on God... he is tired of you 

Chtulucene humusities

The Lang courtyard trees are celebrating, or maybe I'm projecting? Today was the day "Anthropocene Humanities" got its second wind, as we crossed into Donna Haraway territory. Drawing on her partner Rusten Hogness's suggestion, Haraway proposes we replace "posthumanism" with "compost," "human" with "humus," and "humanities" with "humusities."

Human as humus has potential, if we could chop and shred human as Homo, the detumescing project of a self-making and planet-destroying CEO. Imagine a conference not on the Future of the Humanities in the Capitalist Restructuring University, but instead on the Power of the Humusities for a Habitable Multispecies Muddle!

To string together several of Haraway's key terms, we're part of the composting, multispecies worlding, sympoetic ongoingness of life - and had better realize it, since everything is at stake! The grandiose delusions of the Anthropocene arrive just as we should he recognizing how poisonous such delusions of individuality and distance (a de-worlded Anthropos modeled on the "skygods") have been. Better to call it the "Capitalocene," since it's not the species, not "human nature" which caused our problems but a particular constellation of economic and social practices which have undone even our awareness of our relational dependence on the rest of nature.

The Capitalocene was relationally made, and not by a secular godlike anthropos, a law of history, the machine itself, or a demon called Modernity. The Capitalocene must be relationally unmade in order to compose in material-semiotic SF patterns and stories something more livable, something Ursula K. Le Guin could be proud of.

But even the Capitolocene risks becoming a disempowering abstraction, so Haraway recommends the tentacular and unpronounceable "Chtulucene" instead, the busy webbing, braiding, symbiotic muddle which is also the "trouble" of her slogan, Staying with the Trouble, what goes on and has gone on for eons in her "ongoingness." Haraway speaks and writes in a language all her own, and we spent some time finding our bearings within it. But we were ready to understand, having read Ursula LeGuin's "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" on which Haraway relies just last week. But we were ready for ongoingness also because we'd given ourselves to the discourse of the Anthropocene and come out - without hope.

I haven't had a chance to tell you (I was quite sure how to tell it_ that this class, too, wrote a batch of "Anthropocene stories" for me, and they were grim. A few imagined the earth and moon, or Halley's Comet, or even forests as agents, but all the rest were stories of stunned spectatorship: people in the distant or near future - often children - experiencing the end of our human world or its aftermath. 

Especially because we had just shared some of the stories from China I was struck by this disempowerment. The Chinese stories' protagonists often chose self-sacrifice but at least they were acting. But my American students' stories had no place for agency. The damage was done, it was too late. As I read the stories I wanted to put my head on the table and cry. When I discussed it with them, one said "welcome to Gen Z." Another said the ones she worried about were not her generation but kids in the 4th and 5th grade now, who were the most cynical people she had ever met: "they just don't care."

I didn't know what to think, but the thought did come to me that maybe the Anthropocene make isn't a suitable topic for a first year seminar, for students' first experience of college? They weren't wrong to think that they've come late to the game, that earlier generations (including mine) have left them a world in what seems a terminal spiral of loss. But then they didn't need me, or the sources I've given them to read, to tell them this.

What they needed, I thought, was hope - and for that, it turns out that Haraways ideas of "ongoingness" are just the ticket. It relit a fire I thought had been ignited by Julia Adeney Thomas' insistence that most human actions over time did not lead to the Anthropocene

cumulative history necessarily ignores all the things that people did that never contributed to the forcings on the Earth System (Strata and Three Stories, 61) 

but had been extinguished by a careless remark of Amitav Ghosh'

althrough different groups of people have contributed to it in vastly different measure, global warming is ultimately the result of the totality of human actions over time (Great Derangement, 115) 

- a line which jumped out its context to restore the fatal logic of all-overwhelming Anthropos. Fatal and fatalistic - but false. I've been at pains to argue that most human living has been and continues to be mindful of the resources and relationships squandered by the Capitolocene, but I think the point finally stuck today. Thanks, Donna!

New Normal

After a year's covid hiatus, students in the Illustration Department at FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology) are again designing mini-murals    along their building. This is just a sampling of #ChalkFIT 2021's record 101 panels depicting "The New Normal"; two religious ones here!

Fall creeps in

I've noticed the first leaves to change color often are those on vines.

Met

The Gubbio Studiolo remains roped off, but this "Armoire surréaliste," crafted by Marcel Jean in wartime exile in Hungary in 1941, nearly made up for it. It's at the entrance to the sprawling Surrealism Beyond Borders show. (It looks like a painting in this picture but it's an actual wardrobe.) 

Leaf peeping

How I missed this amazing light show last year! (And watching it grow)

Intricacies

Not all the potted flowers in preparation for winter are the same

Religious studies roundtable

LREL roundtables are back! Very excited for this first one of the year.

Enclosure

In very local news, the balcony we've been banished from since May for the city's Façade Inspection and Safety Program, having been patched, resurfaced and repainted, is finally being restored to us. Today was the happy day when the twenty panes of the window enclosures (which were parked in our dining area for these five months) were put back in place. A final inspection next week will allow us officially to start using it again. Soon!

Weather!

First day with a nip of fall chill in the air had its share of weather too.

Helena of Holy Apostles?

It's been - egad - a decade since I learned that a young researcher, H, had discovered the Church of the Holy Apostles to have been an important hub for gay rights organizing around and even before Stonewall. The researcher, now a friend, was passing through NYC this weekend and came to church with us. (She's known and loved by the congregation, having given a rousing talk for us on the 50th anniversary of Stonewall.) But her research is ongoing, and keeps uncovering more inspiring stuff! 

A particularly exciting example: It was at Holy Apostles that the first open lesbian, Ellen Barrett, was ordained to the Episcopal priesthood, in 1977. She'd had a long relationship with the church, knowing it in part through some of the secular organizations that had meetings in the parish house. The last time I talked with H about her, she told me she'd tried and tried to track the Rev. Dr. Barrett down, but she seemed to have fled the world for a monastic order. That turns out to be true - but not the end of the story! It emerges that Sister Helena OSB, as she is now known, has become a priest affiliate at St. Mary's Cathedral in Glasgow, and quite a few of her sermons are available online. (May I say thank you, covid?) 

H has been in touch with now 75-year-old Barrett, and plans to interview her soon. All very exciting, as she was an eyewitness, a partic-ipant, a focal point of so much of this history! I found a taste of how delight-ful and informative that conversation will surely be on the twitter feed of a short-lived inclusive Christian youth group - notes from an autobiographical talk Helena Barrett gave in 2018, with the hashtag #WhyStayLGBT - though #WhyStayChristian was clearly a theme too!

Quite a story she tells, with lots of doors closing and others opening. She did indeed join a monastic community in Britain in 2004 as an "alongsider" - where she met another nun who became her wife!

The voice that emerges from these notes, and from the recordings of her sermons, is so engaging... "Why am I a Christian?" she said, "Because I can't not be, and even the church can't stop me, though God knows theyve tried"! I hope can talk to her sometime, too...

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

The late afternoon sunlight seemed to call forth all manner of critters from the knobby trunk of a familiar tree yesterday. Uncanny....!

Towering

The Jefferson Market Garden dahlias are still going strong! In case the photo doesn't make it clear, they're taller than me by half. Wow!

Many Christs

Surprised the students in Theorizing Religion today by suggesting to them that Christianity might be more than they think it is... or maybe even more than anyone thinks it is. We were building on James Cone's argument, in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, that most white Americans' Christianity isn't really Christianity since it overlooks the continued centrality of the crucifixion - the paradoxical cruciform idea that the last are first and the way to hope is through suffering. Authentic Christianity - and God - is there whenever an innocent person is crucified, something which tragically happens all the time, though more often to people of color. Supposed Christians who ignore the ongoing reality of crufixion, especially in racist killings, are Christians in name only, Cone preaches.

I have the class read Cone for the significance of his ideas as well as to introduce them to the different kinds of claims made by theologians. Scholars of religion can't make the sorts of claims about true and false religion that religious folks are making all the time - or at least not in the same way. As a scholar I have to recognize that the people Cone criticizes would consider his Christianity inauthentic, even if, as a Christian, I want to take his side. I have, at least initially, to accept as Christian all who so describe themselves.

I wanted the students to appreciate that Christian theology has many mansions. What else, I asked, besides the crucifixion, might someone think is the central deciding event/symbol in Christianity? I went through a few important possibilities.

- Jesus' resurrection: the defeat of death and the promise of immortality, a refuge from the pain and sorrow of this passing world

- Jesus' incarnation: the paradox of the infinite taking finite form, human or - in more recent thinking - all other forms of created being, giving them a kind of infinite significance

- Jesus' teaching: love of neighbor and enemy, for the least of these, justice and beloved community

- Jesus' healing miracles: supernatural help for the struggle with the trouble of this world, health and abundance in this life

- Jesus' community: the establishment of the church as a way for succeeding generations to be saved and supported

- Jesus' casting out of demons: a protector in spiritual warfare, where we're otherwise outclassed by Satan and his powers and principalities

I noted that all of these had scriptural warrant and, while compatible with each other, really described dramatically different understandings of human life, its meaning and destiny - not to mention the nature of God. I emphasized in particular how commitment to the importance of one of these could go along with rejection of others (and admitted that I was inclined to ignore some, too, especially the last, although this was a widespread view in this country and globally). But, returning to Cone, one needed to see how glossing over the crucifixion on the way to the others could go hand in hand with the moral blindness of injust social orders such as American white supremacy. Not a kumbaya moment!

Storytelling exchange

Today was the day the two iterations of "Religion and the Anthropocene" intersected - well, hopeful the first of several. My first years are submitting an "Anthropocene story" soon, and to inspire them I shared eight of the Anthropocene stories written by my students at Renmin this summer. They're terrific, on their own and as a groupo, but also of course come from a most unexpected source. I've told my students here that I'll send their responses to the authors of the Chinese stories, and their praise is starting to come in. I'll be sharing some of the American students' stories with the Chinese students, too. As one of the Renmin students wrote when I asked permission to share her story, 

It’s a good chance to conduct a cultural exchange between countries. I hope your students will love it! If some of them are willing to share their writing with me, I will be very happy.

Anti-Columbus Day

Seen in the stairwell at school

Rosebud

Amazing news! Rosamond Sleigh, the high school English teacher who rocked my world (and many others'), is alive and well - at ninety-seven! She's in assisted living but apparently as sharp as ever. (I learned all this because an ex-student some years my senior has been close to her all these years and set up a GoFundMe campaign to make sure she could continute to pay her bills.) I wrote about this in every sense larger-than-life educator in this blog some years ago, after a conversation with a master teacher about master teachers I've known: she's been a point of reference for me for four decades! It's really wonderful to see the cascade of tributes as other students from her half century of teaching attest to the way she's changed all our lives.

Groundskeepers

OK, so the Adirondacks during peak leap peeping season are a sight to behold. Behold the red carpets surrounding Whiteface Mountain on all sides! But it occurred to me that there's something a little odd about focusing on the part of the woods that has finished its work. 

If instead of looking up you look down, you see that the forest community is still busily churning away. Having read a lot recently about how trees communicate and care for each other through mycorrhizal networks and fungi make pretty much everything happen, I saw the true impresarios of the forest surfacing for some R&R.

While most of their work happens beneath the surface, you can get a sense of the vibrant interconnected worlds they generate and support from the sheer variety of settings in which I caught them in the act... 

Back in the Adirondacks!