Ice menagerie

Some amusing creatures emerge as yesterday's snow slowly melts... 

Blizzard art

Snow and wind had a field day with the cars parked by our complex.

Snowcabbage

We might be having us some winter weather this weekend... 

Setting the stage

My Wednesdays this semester have two classes - the weekly lecture for "After Religion" at 10:15, and the second meeting of the Monday-Wednesday seminar "Religion and Ecology" at 4:00. I took advantage of our being online for the first two weeks of the semester for the 4:00, beaming in from home. But I ventured down to my office for the first one. This had its purpose: that lecture will be online all semester, but I'll be zooming in from the office, in hopes of luring students to join me IRL for office hours after it. It was fun to post a picture and then show that I was already in my book-walled cave, ready! (A bright nearly empty subway car offered its blessing as I headed to school.)

Titanic

Remember when this beauty - A68a, "an iceberg the size of Delaware!" - broke off from the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica? (Not this one.) Well, just four years later, it is no more, having floated, spun, thinned, and finally broken up. It had quite a last dance.

New semester

Another semester underway! All eighteen students signed up for "Religion and Ecology" were there today - one of the gifts of zoom. I guess we've learned how to do class online, even a new one, with people we've never met before... but I'm sure I'm not the only one nourished by the assurance that we'll break out of our little boxes and be present to each other bodily in just two weeks (fingers crossed).

bell and Thay

Just a few days ago, thinking I might celebrate the late bell hooks in a reading in one of my classes, I happened on this 2000 account of her relationship with the great Buddhist teacher of our time Thich Nhat Hanh. And now Thay (as his students call him) has left us, too.

I've been as surprised by the remarkable range of people lamenting Thay's passing as I was at the outpour on bell's passing. In what seems a season of devastating departures, the moving on of these two cuts particularly close. I would wager that hooks has been the most widely assigned author at Lang for as long as I've been there. Her visions of "teaching to transgress" shape all that we do. (And it's nice that Lang hosted the residencies for bell which have become the most important visual legacy of her remarkable and dialogic presence.) In tributes I learned how even more personally her work and witness inspired women, especially women of color. 

Tributes to Thay make clear he was profoundly inspiring to many kinds of people, too, for all sorts of reasons, from practices of everyday mindfulness (he's the source of the tangerine-eating meditation, as well as the slow silent group walks I've done with many classes of students over the years) to the engaged Buddhism of his "action precepts" and the profundity of "interbeing." Many of the memorials I've seen are from people I had no idea were Buddhist or had a practice. I suppose we feel so bereft - and yet, in another way, not sorrowful - is because we hold Thay in our bodies, in our very awareness and interaction with the world. He taught so many how to breathe in and breathe out and breathe in again, and that each of these breaths linked us with all the world.

I was pleased to be reminded of this poem, and that it was posted on FaceBook by my pash Rebecca Solnit:

Call Me by My True Names

Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow

because even today I still arrive.

.

Look deeply: I arrive in every second

to be a bud on a spring branch,

to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile,

learning to sing in my new nest,

to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,

to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,

in order to fear and to hope.

The rhythm of my heart is the birth and

death of all that are alive.

.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river,

and I am the bird which, when spring comes, arrives in time

to eat the mayfly.

.

I am the frog swimming happily in the clear pond,

and I am also the grass-snake who, approaching in silence,

feeds itself on the frog.

.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,

my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,

and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

,

I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,

who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate,

and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving.

.

I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my hands,

and I am the man who has to pay his "debt of blood" to, my people,

dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

.

My joy is like spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom in all walks of life.

My pain if like a river of tears, so full it fills the four oceans.

.

Please call me by my true names,

so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,

so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

.

Please call me by my true names,

so I can wake up,

and so the door of my heart can be left open,

the door of compassion.

Snow watch

It even sparkles like snow ... but it's really just salt.

Downy

Meet the downy birch, the intrepid first responder to climate change who is spearheading the reforestation of the Arctic, with potentially calamitous consequences for the lifeways of the Sami and their reindeer - as well as for slowing already galloping global heating.

As the planet warms, the Arctic treeline is accelerating towards the pole, turning the white landscape to green. The trees used to creep forward a few centimetres every year; now they are leaping north at a rate of 40 to 50 metres a year. (source)

Teach teach teach

Whew, three syllabi done! It's more work than it used to be, now that all classes live on the LMS (learning management system), but that positions us well for any bumps we might encounter along the way. Like the fact that our first 2 weeks are going to be online again! Still, two 3-course semesters back to back are making for a tiring year. At least I get to choose what I teach, and each of these classes will be a rewarding experience, whether taught for the first time or a repeat.

Tree alphabet

I'm about three years late learning about this, but did you know that there is a New York City Tree Alphabet, a font you can download? NYC Parks Department artist-in-residence Katie Holten designed it with the silhouettes of "existing native and non-native trees, as well as species that are to be planted as a result of the changing climate." Hence 

Ash, Birch, Crabapple, Dawn redwood, Elm, Flowering dogwood, Ginkgo, Hawthorn, Ilex, Juniper, Kentucky coffeetree, Linden, Maple, Nyssa, Oak, Persimmon, Quaking aspen, Redbud, Sassafras, Tulip tree, Umbrella pine, Virginia pine, Willow, Xanthoxylum Americanum, Yellowwood, Zelkova 

You could potentially plant secret messages, discernible only to those with the key. In the meantime, can you decipher my message above?

AI religion

Attended an interesting panel discussion on the huge topic of "AI, Religion, & Humanity" tonight. The panelists were tasked with talking about religion in the broadest terms (including shibboleths like "Abrahamic," "Africana" and "Eastern" religions) but even this was a contribution to discussions that tend to be dominated by theist mindsets. Is intelligence something that only creatures with souls can have, or is that just the idea of some traditions? Can gods choose objects, including machines, as avatars? But the main question became "values," something humans presumably share and AI, unless we program it in, doesn't. An inventor of AI wearables for people dealing with various health challenges said she'd met AI pioneer Marvin Minsky and he'd quipped that our future would soon be in computers' hands, and "we'd be lucky if super AIs kept us around as household pets." 

What "values" would we try to bake into AI, if we could? Ethics in AI discussions focus on overcoming various kinds of human inequality (though the inventor also said some people she'd met abroad had told her they wondered why they were helping people whose afflictions they believed were the result of things they had done in their past lives), but a scholar who's written on the history of colonialism, race and religion predicted that the first big ethical issues we face will involve new inequalities - not humans vs. machines but humans vs. cybernetically enhanced humans like those the world's militaries are feverishly working toward: do we let them vote, have children? 

Perhaps it's having Ishiguro's Clara and the Sun on my mind but I started to wonder if some of the values we'd want AI to have shouldn't include things like the capacity for wonder, for love, for relations with the non-human world, for knowledge of God...

Carved

Have you seen pictures of the amazing sculptures the wind carved in frozen sand along the shore of Lake Michigan recently? As much as 15" high, they have been likened to chess pieces. They replicate in 

a matter of days forms we're more used to see as the accumulated work of thousands and millions of years of erosion. I think they're awesomely time scale-jangling but a Texan friend declared: "Unfair!"

Unpredictable

This sign was posted beneath the iPad-register at a bakery-café we went to yesterday with a friend. It's not original, I learned later, but no matter - it seeded our conversation in all sorts of ways. The obvious was the Great Resignation, and the compounding indignities of always demanding customer-facing service work. This led us to reflect on AI service workers, and how they might be shaping customers' expectations and behavior. Soon we were talking about Kazuo Ishiguro's Clara and the Sun, which I read over the break and the friend had started as an audiobook before stopping as it was breaking her heart. If you don't know it, it's narrated by a robot created to help children overcome loneliness as they approach adulthood, and the power of the book is as much in her story as in the way she describes the near sci-fi world she lives one. It's a world she only dimly understands or seeks to comprehend; she's programmed only to engage things that might help her in her caring task. Her dedication to that task of course puts unpredictable humans to shame...

Arboritecture

Who knew that trees have only a limited set of "architectures"? Francis Hallé, Roelof Oldeman and P. B. Tomlinson observed as many as 23 (later revised to 24), each a different combinations of six options: 1) To branch or not to branch? 2) If branching, only at bottom of stem or all along it? 3) Do you grow without rest or is there a dormant season? 4) Do all your branches grow upward or outward, or do some grow upward and outward? 5) Do you flower at branch tips or on smaller lateral branches? 6) Do your branches change back and forth between growing upward and outward?  

Hallé, Oldeman and Tomlinson, Tropical Trees and Forests: An architectural analysis (1978), cited in William Bryant Logan, “The Things Trees Know,” Old Growth: The best writing about trees from Orion magazine (Northampton, MA: Orion, 2021), 25-38, 26f; image source

Winter scenes

Took our car for a spin up the Hudson River today. On a bitterly cold day it was definitely winter. The snow that fell in NYC the day before we returned has melted, but it was holding on here. I've always wanted to grab a snap of the impressive icicle clusters along the roads so this was a good chance. 

The light snow's outlining (this isn't a very good shot) reminded me that forest trees are not just vertical but as important to the life of their community once they've fallen, criss-crossing the forest floor.

Patterns everywhere

Window condensation after a chilly night

Well placed

Some more satisfying discoveries at the Brooklyn Museum, which has again restructured its art of the Americas floor in fascinating and urgent ways, including reflecting on past collecting and showing practices and weaving works by living artists into the historical rooms For instance, African American, Cherokee and Shinnecock heritages inspire Richard Mayhew's gauzy landscape "Pastoral" (1962) provides an obscurely dreamy horizon in the dimly lit room of precolumbian sculptures. This early 18th century traveling desk, from Bolivia or

Peru, includes on its front (hard to photograph because of reflections on the glass case) images of enslaved African and an indigenous figure being trampled by a bull. Inside is Eden itself, complete with unicorns... but I noticed that this Adam got fruit from the Tree of the 

Knowledge of Good and Evil before Eve did! And this gorgeous 2016 work by Shinnecock Courtney N. Leonard, "Artifice (Breach Series)," one of the last things you see, references the tribe's restoration project to seed new oyster beds on the eastern end of Long Island. 

Pop

Went with my friend M to the Brooklyn Museum to see "Revelation," an exhibition exploring the significance of Andy Warhol's religious life. Who knew that he was raised a Byzantine Catholic (or even that there was such a thing!), and continued to attend masses daily throughout his life? We were transported by its opening hall, which felt like a chapel, and thought the show might offer some interesting queer Christian insights, but in the end were disappointed. There was little sense of the distinctiveness of Byzantine Catholicism, and the broader understanding of Catholicism was lifeless, too. Not being a Warhol aficionado, I'm not sure how much the lack of depth was part of his pop art practice. As we sat facing two life-size pink and black prints of Leonardo's "Last Supper" side by side (with another pair in yellow and black behind us),  we were stupefied but couldn't look away, it almost seemed like there was something significant going on - maybe even something connectable in a non-trivial way to the mystery of the Eucharist - but the show didn't help us name or understand it.

Spiking again

Just got my latest test result - negative - but trends are troubling.

Metaforce

As for most Christians I know, the Book of Revelation a.k.a the Apocalpyse of John is a topic I avoid. Along with earlier worthies like Martin Luther we wonder if it belongs in the canon of scripture at all and effectively act as if it didn't. We cherry pick a few phrases from the fuzzy finale - "A new heaven and a new earth," "and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes" (Rev 21:1,4) - while secular culture runs with the "four horsemen of the Apocalypse" and the "seven seals." The rest is left to crazed fundamentalists who think we live in the End Times, or want to.

But the times we're living in, if not the End of the World, seem increasingly "apocalyptic." The term has become a staple of climate journalism. And we know in our bones things are likely to continue in that direction. The brilliant process theologian Catherine Keller's written a book to remind us that "apokalypsos" means not ending but disclosing - revelation - and shows that we're better off not ignoring but facing the final book of the Christian canon. Or even claiming it. 

Keller wrote about the Apocalypse earlier in her career, chronicling the often hideously misogynistic ways in which it became a "self-fulfilling prophecy" for the worst kinds of conflict and violence, but sees it differently now. Revelation has inspired horrors but it has also inspired utopias. Further, its seeming acceptance of the need for world-ending violence needs to be understood in the context of imperial domination: John of Patmos didn't start the violent fantasies but was working through the accumulated trauma of centuries. Haunted by more recent and ongoing trauma, we might find inspiration in his "dreamreading" of his time. Indeed, like it or not, the ways we are haunted by it are often Revelation-formed. Its metaphors have proved so powerful they're better described as "metaforce." They can't be escaped, but can be faced. And, in John's struggles to find hope in his hopeless times, we might even find sustenance too.

To my considerable surprise, I found sustenance. There's something liberating about allowing oneself to admit that the history unfolding around us feels like waves of murderous horsemen, seals, bowls of wrath. Keller explores how the horsemen seem to be predicting the ecological crisis, as lands burn and seas die, how the "whore of Babylon" seems to anticipate global capitalism. Prophecy, she reminds us, isn't predicting (let alone knowing) the future but discerning abiding "cultural patterns." (As a process theologian she thinks even God doesn't know, let alone predetermine what happens.) There's something strangely consoling in this recognition that cascades of calamity are not new, that deadly patterns might yet be discerned in our travails and perhaps transcended.

And once you allow yourself to read the text, it turns out to be even weirder than we could imagine. It wildly outstrips not just our cherry-picking but that of those reading the "signs of the times" in anticipation of Armageddon and the "Second Coming" (a phrase which occurs nowhere in the Bible). Indeed, it's fabulously queer! The one who descends from the clouds at its start, for instance, isn't anything like white supremacist Jesus but looks more like Wole Soyinka - clouds of white hair and copper-colored skin - with breasts. The woman clothed in the sun isn't Mary but ancient Sophia, Egyptian Isis. The four beings who resemble animals and a man, traditionally read as referring to the four Evangelists, instead seem like reminders of what Keller and some of her colleagues at Drew call "divinanimality." PS We're animals, and - coming third - not the most important. And so on. The text remains a source of profound discomfort, but one which goes deeper and points farther than the blood-thirsty world-hating fatalism of the text's most vocal fans.

And then there's the end, when God - again everything but a a bearded white guy - "makes all things new," not new things. The "new heaven and new earth" don't replace the existing one, after dispatching it in wave after wave of genocidal ecocidal violence. The waves of violence come from us (not a few from people thinking they're acting out the script of Revelation...). Instead, when the time is ripe, God comes to earth, eliminating the distance between heaven and earth that has inspired such creation-condemning theological mistakes, in a cosmopolitan city with no need for a Temple. It sounds truly dreamy. (It's also apparently an enormous cube...)

At the center of the new Jerusalem, you know, is the tree of life. But of course it's a little more complicated than that. 

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life , bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river, is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. (Rev 22:1-2; qtd. 173)

Keller will dream read the fragrant leaves in terms of indigenous medicine dances for the diverse community, but first she notices a textual oddity. How can one tree be on boths sides of a river? It might be what's called a collective singular, as when one says "the oak thrives on our campus" (175); is the city really a forest? Keller's more taken by another possibility, the "collective singular" of a woods that's all one tree, like the Pando populus, the 100-acre aspen grove in Utah whose thousands of trees are all linked by a single root system at least 80,000 years old. Perhaps the tree of life is a similar rhizomatic system. It resonates with Process theology, which "envisions a cosmos arising moment by moment out of the relations between every register of existence." (176) Keller's Revelation discloses the possibility that ultimately all are part of a "plurisingular Tree of Life." 

It's a terrific book and makes possible - makes necessary - a rereading of Revelation. The biblical book is fearful but it doesn't give the last word to the theologically conservative. It does go somewhere different than the God-is-love theology of the other John; there's as good as nothing of love in John of Patmos, Keller notes. But it doesn't suggest that the Christian God is, after all, a God of judgment and vengeance - indeed, one who planned or permitted a catastrophic end for this creation in which all but a handful of creations would be gorily destroyed. What a relief to find nature and God not cursing but grieving, and calling us to mourn and rage with them, at the horrors humans have unleashed on each other and the world! 

The Apocalypse of John doesn't predict a cataclysmic comeuppance for humans who loved the world too much. In its sights, rather, is an end to division, exploitation, imperialism and estrangement from the rest of creation. But first we need to recognize the power of its "metaforce" even for those who don't want to face it - a metaforce more likely to create havoc than healing if not recognized. Read with Keller, the Book of Revelation doesn't promise a happy ending, but it offers the possibility that this is not the end. 

Catherine Keller, Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy, and Other Last Chances (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2021)

Forest Forum

I attended - virtually of course - the second event in the Orion magazine/ Yale Forest Forum series "On Trees." The speakers, each the author of a different kind of book about trees, zoomed in from India, UK, Germany. There were thoughtful reflections aplenty but what really got me was learning that the audience was huge: together with their first event, the series had 14,000 viewers. Clearly trees are reaching out to many people!

It happened here!

Thanks to the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project for the reminder: Ellen

Barrett's ordination at Holy Apostles was forty-five years ago today!

Slush

Troubles ahead

I feel I should acknowledge the first anniversary of the storming of the Capital but what to say? A friend was expecting bloodshed and death at rallies and counterrallies across the land, and I half hoped he was right and that it would lead a critical mass of Republicans finally to distance themselves from the Big Lie. But, of course, no. MAGA rowdies are just the tiny tip of an iceberg of bad faith. As the House Select Committee confirms what we all knew was happening in the waning days of the Trump administration (en gros if not en detaille), the events of January 6th are looking to me like a glitch. The storming by the mob wasn't supposed to happen, since the Vice President and Congressional Republicans were supposed to do the deed circumventing democracy themselves. The assembled crowd, who'd been told to "stand back and stand by" until the day things got "wild," was there to share the giddy thrill of the last-minute putsch, and, as needed, to engage with protesters after the act of usurpation, if necessary providing a pretext for a crackdown. When Pence wouldn't play ball, his boss changed the plan: the crowd would pressure the Republicans who had been given their marching orders to stay the course - as, of course, almost all did. Things got out of hand because some of the marchers understood that the kneecapping of American democracy they were being asked to participate in was already an act of violence against the state - something the House Republicans, and now most members of that party, continue not to admit. The number of people in on the plan then (and still in on it now!) is staggering. The number convinced that democracy must and may be short-circuited - by legal means if possible, by others if necessary - is terrifying. How can they be convinced to trust democracy again?

Wintry mix

Travel in omicron times

We were among the lucky ones. Our flight wasn't one of those winnowed by jetBlue in anticipation of covid-related staff shortages, even though it was only half full! And it wasn't among the 2300 flights apparently cancelled because of last night's winter storm in the Northeast (we were delayed a little). But omicron reality awaited us at JFK, where we waited 45 minutes for a gate and another 45 minutes at the gate for someone to get the jet bridge to work - and then another hour for baggage. Finally home at midnight!

California adieu

The iPhone camera has somewhat exaggerated the color of the sky - it was a paler purple - but the signature of the departing day is true.

Theodicy of so-called Christians

In an interview, the Evangelical Christian climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe identifies a theodicy problem in the behavior of many self-professed Christians. The interviewer asks about the majority of Evangelicals who distrust science and deny the climate crisis.

Does our current situation ever make you doubt? 

It does not make me doubt the existence or the goodness of God. It makes me doubt God’s ability to act in people who call themselves his followers. I had an interesting experience a few years ago: I was visiting a university, as I often do ... One of the administrators stuck their head in and said the dean wants to talk to Katharine. They ushered everybody out and then the dean came and sat down and said, “I used to be an evangelical.” So I asked the obvious question: “Why are you no longer?” He said: “It wasn’t because I doubted the existence of God. It’s because I couldn’t see any evidence of God working in people. I saw person after person who claimed that they took the Bible seriously, they were Christian” — I’m paraphrasing — “and all I saw was the opposite of love. It got to the point where I couldn’t see any evidence of God working in people.” That’s what I’ve struggled with, too. What breaks my heart is the attacks I get from people who identify as Christians. When someone on Twitter has just called me a whore and I go to their profile and it says something about “loving others” and “so blessed” it makes me feel so discouraged. I’m thinking, God, what are you doing?

I have the same query, and not just about climate denialism. As my students tell me year after year, self-professed Christians are the strongest arguments against Christianity and its God. Like Hayhoe, I want to resist the dean's "they were Christian" with something like "people who call themelves his followers," "people who identify as Christians," but what are they then? My friend Victor Preller liked to repeat the adage - was it from Bonhoeffer? - that the church is the cross on which Christ is crucified daily. And God, what are you doing?

All aflutter

A last little trip before we head back to New York took us back to the central California coast. I'd been hearing for a few months that the monarch butterflies, whose numbers had plummeted almost to nothing in recent years, were on a rebound, so we checked out the Pismo Beach Monarch Butterfly Grove. I don't know what it was like when the monarchs here numbered in the tens and even hundreds of thousands, but this was quite a throng. They gad about high in a copse of eucalyptus trees 

(hence the graininess of my image), settling to rest in dense bunches to reduce wind exposure. Seeing them, my body stretched and arced to see them, made me deliriously happy. Butterflies are miracles all the time, but the precarious status of this community of North American monarchs, with their unbelievable migrations, sits at the center of Donna Haraway's "Camille Stories," a crucial text in my Anthropocene Humanities course, so it was especially glorious!!

Beached

Low low tide reveals weird worlds within worlds (in Santa Barbara)

Discernment resolution

Found these fellows in a shady part of Rose Canyon Open Space Park, on the way to dinner with friends, seemingly in convivial discussion. 

My day had begun with a church service at Holy Apostles - by zoom of course - in which a priest slily and a little irreverently rendered the famous three-legged stool of Scripture, tradition and reason/ experience in a more dynamic way as a "tricycle of discernment." This fit with the Gospel reading, Christian Scriptures' only story of Jesus as a child, sometimes called the Finding in the Temple, where Mary and Joseph, five days after losing track of him, find their twelve-year-old insouciantly ensconced with the elders of the Temple: not teaching (let alone disputing, as often rendered in Christian tradition from more antisemitic times) but listening, discussing. Our priest suggested this was Jesus - whom we believe to have been fully human, after all, as well as divine - doing the work of discernment, moving his tricyle. But her main point was that even Jesus knew that discernment is sometimes best done in company with others. Our dinner with friends was confirmation of that! I'll take this to heart this year.

Bluffing

There's always something going on at Torrey Pines State Beach

as forces natural - and human - flow through it.

Prosit Neujahr

Apparently lead (actually perhaps tin) pouring augury is no longer permitted in Austria, but we found an old set. Turns out the practice has a long history in northern Europe, and a cool-sounding name: Molybdomancy. (It's been replaced in the EU with wax pouring, ceremancy.) As for what our shapes portend, it's hard to make out.