Consolation of the sea

Bicameral mayday

When the omnibus reconciliation bill that has somehow taken the place of a properly announced and debated budget (how did they manage to break that norm too?!) was passed by the House, I felt the end of American democracy was near. In the meantime the Senate parliamentarian has, I think, stripped away the effort to kneecap the judiciary, but the reckless Supreme Court majority has since filled in the gap. Republican Senators in smoke-filled rooms have only made the bill even more regressive on care of the needy, fossil fuels, the terrorization of immigrants and the redistribution of wealth - not to mention national debt. And what gave me the worst chills remains, and the President's decision to celebrate the day at Florida's own future CECOT confirms the reality of the threat: they're building concentration camps. And we pay.

SBMA

Two works from the lovely Santa Barbara Museum of Art resonate with my experience bringing reflections on the religion of trees to the ISSRNC. On the one hand, it felt a little like the teeny tiny artist - painting a tree - oblivious to the all-enveloping weeping woman in David Alfaro Siqueiro's "The Aesthete in Drama" (1944); his canvas is about the size of each of her welling tears. Is focusing on trees irresponsible sentiment-ality in the face of climate catastrophe?

The other is contemporary Iraqi-American painter Vian Sora's magnificent canvas "Woodlands" (2020), an evocation (the caption explained) of the great forests of ancient Mesopotamia, continuing: A striking, tall form - a majestic tree - glows with the intensity of neon orange. Does its otherworldly hue signal the mythic power of a thriving forest, or does it gloomily foreshadow its eventual disappearance? 

 

The captioner thinks a later painting indicates the answer is the latter as the magnificent forests of Mesopotamia [were] decimated by deforestation and a cyclical climate that became hotter and drier. But maybe it's both. If our conference was full of gloom over human fecklessness, many of us reached out to other than human persons, not just as tragic victims of anthropogenic harm but as our necessary partners in the relationships which must be rebuilt and reimagined if we are to begin healing. Trees in particular are world-builders!

Ready for liftoff

 

On Santa Cruz Island yesterday

ISSRNC

ISSRNC was good fun! This society, soon to celebrate its 20th anniversary, was established to add a social science dimension to emerging work on religion and ecology, as well as more attention to religion beyond the world religions, and is going strong. Perhaps a hundred anthropologists, philosophers, indigenous activists, development economists, literary scholars, geographers and ethicists and even a few theologians gathered to think together about our conference theme "Religion, Migration and Climate Change."

The International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture was founded by the enterprising editor of the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, Bron Taylor, who is otherwise best known for arguing that our time is seeing the birth of a new science-friendly nature religion which he calls "dark green religion." Correlatively he has argued that the supposed ecological "greening" of older religions is superficial; as "agricultural" religions oriented beyond the natural world, the "world religions" cannot outgrow a fundamental suspicion of nature. 

All of these themes were replayed in different ways during this conference. A Lifetime Achievement Award was offered to Catherine Albanase, the historian whose 1990 Nature Religion in America, 2008 A Republic of Mind and Spirit and 2023 The Delight Makers established a long-standing tradition of (settler) American "metaphysical" religion enthusiastic about the energies of nature and less connected to European traditions than imagined Asian and indigenous ones; the New Age turns out to be quite old, with lots of baggage. A special panel revisited the "Greening of Religions Hypothesis," work conducted a decade ago by Taylor and some collaborators analyzing 700 social scientific articles to determine if an environmental turn had moved the needle on established religions' indifference to nature: they found no significant progress in 2016, and report none since then either. But "Dark Green Religion" is alive and well in natural history and art museums!

Beyond this it was an intimately interdisciplinary and multigenerational gathering with papers on a plethora of parareligious subjects, from water spirits in Nepal and post-Christian pilgrimages to sites connected to Mary Magdalene to the theological meaning of the economists' category of the "resource curse," from something called critical surfing studies to the environmental devastation caused by successive enlargements of hajj facilities in Mecca to the religious imaginations of climate refugees in the Sundarbans and ICE detention. California butterflies, Indian Ocean sea turtles, struggling English cuckoos, the supposedly "de-extinctioned" dire wolf, and the soon to be extinct Virginia saltmarsh sparrows were mentioned too. (Someone talked about trees, too!)

An intellectual feast! And there was the optional excursion to Santa Cruz Island, too! But the overall mood was subdued. It's a tough time for religion, nature and culture. One keynote address bemoaned the incapacity of UN programs to take seriously the "intangible" religious loss and damage being caused by climate change. Another (which I missed but a friend told me about) reported on some Amazonian shamans' announcing that the world had had enough of human beings and we were all going to perish, although some of us might have a future reborn as other animals.

But then our conference was taking place in June 2025, when generations' worth of environmental progress is being aggressively scrapped in the US even as climate catastrophe approaches new tipping points globally - and when communities of researchers like us are under unprecedented assault by state and federal government pogroms. As green and even dark green religions stall, anti-environmental cults abound. When the long-awaited recognition of some mountains and rivers as legal persons came up, someone who studies Catholic traditions in West Virginia suggested the next question was who gets to appoint their legal representatives: someone might report that a given mountain was eager to share the mineral wealth God had filled it with. And the dark side of American "metaphysical religion," an ignorant mysticism of affirmations and whiteness, reigns in the White House.   

This all makes interdisciplinary work on ecological relationships, environmental justice and the spiritual state of the planet that much more urgent. Our human and other than human kin need it desperately. "Religion" needs it too...

Crossing

The optional ISSRNC field trip to Santa Cruz Island was splendid!

ISSRNC'd

Apologies for radio silence this past week! I was enjoying a family reunion, then knocked out by military adventurism and its showboating sequel - and then drove up the coast to Santa Barbara for the meeting of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture, which just wrapped up after three full days. Actually, we continue with an optional excursion to Santa Cruz Island tomorrow; after that I'll be able to devote some time to synthesizing the many rich and varied ISSRNC discussions...

Podcast blast from the past

I didn't dare! This was a wonky article I published a quarter century ago.

New life

In the middle of the boneyard (and this photo), a new Torrey Pine rises! 

 

Torrey Totoro was keeping watch!

Outlook

Torrey Pines Extension

Raising a flag

What was the news from America today? A wannabe generalissimo wasted tens of millions from the public purse for a lackluster military parade while five million citizens gathered across the nation to decry the slide into authoritar-ianism. Huzzah!

But the day began with the awful news that two lawmakers in Minnesota, Melissa Hortman and John Hoffman, and their spouses had been shot in their homes by a vigilante assassin, impersonating police. Getting into what he took to be the spirit of the moment, maybe the murderer thought he'd be rewarded with a presidential pardon. His vehicle contained a list of dozens of other targets, as well as No Kings rallies. No faux-king way.

Antibodies!

Saturday's going to be transformative. There will be gatherings everywhere, at every scale. It'll take time but we'll turn the tide.

Military dishonor

Stationing the military in a US city (not to mention against the wishes of the city's mayor and the state's governor) is another unspeakable outrage. But the effort to coopt the military for white supremacy, which seems to be the agenda for this stage of the hostile takeover of the US, takes other terrible forms, too. We know about the ways the unqualified Secretary of Defense gratuitously fired generals who weren't white men. We know he has ordered the erasing of the military's long history of racial and gender inclusion. 

And we knew that he was cynically restoring the names of military bases which had been stripped of the names of Confederate generals in response to the belated reckoning of BLM, dodging the law by finding other veterans who happened to have the same names to name them after instead - not that Bragg, that Hood, that Lee... nudge nudge wink wink. 

I hadn't thought about the veterans whose names they were using to skirt the law; my bad. This is desecration of the memory of the dead. But the absolute obscenity of this became clear to me today on reading about the president's explicitly championing Confederate names at a military base yesterday (in front of a hand-picked military audience). I read that to rename a Virginia base originally named after Confederate general A. P. Hill they are stealing the names of three other veterans. Renamed Fort Walker two years ago after Civil War surgeon and Medal of Honor recipient Mary Walker, it is now to be named (nudge nudge wink wink) after three figures who fought in North Carolina for the Union: Pvt. Bruce Anderson from New York, 1st Sgt. Robert A. Pinn and Lt. Col. Edward Hill from Michigan. Call them "A. P. Hill" for short. Nudge nudge wink wink.

I'm at a loss for words to express my outrage at this. These were men who fought to defeat the Confederacy, now coopted to commemorate a Confederate general? Two of them just to provide initials for this travesty?! Grinding these men's names up to make a Confederate golem is horrifying, even before we learn that First Sergeant Pinn served in the Colored Infantry. How many of those nudging and winking know of this desecration, smile at the South sneakily rising again? Shameless, disrespectful of the dead and so vile vile vile ...

Fecundity

Update on what's doing, and isn't doing, in the Lang courtyard maple

world - the broken spring sprig, and hopeful treelets among the gravel.

Under siege

"Occupation" was maybe still sort of a metaphor when she wrote this.

None of that

Thought we were done with the 'nones'? The latest analysis of the religiously unaffiliated in the US, who have been the subject of scrutiny and alarm for a dozen years now, proposes further subcategories with nifty names: 20% NiNOs, 36% SBNRs, 34% Dones, 10% Zealous Atheists.

Come "After Religion" next spring, we'll have to fold this analysis together with the story that religious disaffiliation has plateaued, the weird meme that this is because young men are going back to church, the claim that religion has become "obsolete" for US culture as a whole, and the latest Pew global religious landscape report, which swells the ranks of the unaffiliated by including most folks in China.

Pentecost

As another terrifying day of the carnage presidency unfolded this morning, our rector received applause after a sermon. We don't do applause (except for visitors sometimes) - that's not the point of preaching! - but it's happened once before recently (on Easter), and perhaps for the same reason. Both were characteristically rich and erudite sermons, but I think the applause was for the gift of forthrightly speaking the truth. After an account of the ways our liturgy reminds us that God keeps God's promises, a pause, then this: 

It’s intellectually dishonest and spiritually insulting to insist that all is well when all is quite patently not well. Given the destruction all around us I imagine that recently many of us have had some version of a conversation that includes the question, “how do we come back from this.” Understandable. And, with all due respect, our faith urges us to ask something different. Because bad times, good times, times of groovy neutrality - we never go back, ever. So the question before all of us becomes how do we move into something new...

Acknowledging hard truths - not just about the destruction unleashed all around, but about the reality that we can't make it go away - allows of true hope. 

And the next question, for people of faith, is how are we being called to go further and faster and more compassionately than we ever thought that we could in order to move with God around a space that provides, insists on, life for everyone?

Out of pain and grief come urgency and resolve. In response to destruction there can only be creation. Yet the work requires more than we think we're capable of. Do not the wicked hold all the cards? But today is Pentecost, and she ended by quoting some words of Annie Dillard's (which an internet search informs me are favorites also of Rowan Williams): 

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return. 

Whoosh. 

Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (London, 1984), 40-41

Holy confusion

A friend shared this sweet prayer for Pentecost by Maren Tirabassi.

Pollinator prairie

After No Mow May, NYBG's "daffodil hill" is doing just fine!

You can't erase us

Thank you to WaPo's Michelle Kondrich for this visualization of what this aggrieved white male supremacist government is trying to do to the way our country looks. There's no way they can succeed in this dehumanizing folly, but one has to wonder: would any other group think they could?

Future of radical history

I've always wondered (well, once I knew about it) why the eminent radical historian E. P. Thompson should have been the speaker at the inauguration of Eugene Lang College in 1985. 

Well, it seems that his host, Margaret Jacob, also a historian and Lang's first dean, convened a forum on "The Future of Radical History" with Thompson and fellow British Marxist historians Perry Anderson, Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm on October 20th. (Anderson and Hobsbawm were regular members of the New School's Graduate Faculty.) The dedication of the new college was the following day. The symposium, attended by 1000 people, "was organized to mark this event and was intended as the first gift of Eugene Lang College to the university"! 

Jacob describes the content of Thompson's talks as untimely: 

Will Thompson have made any linkage between radical history and the aims of education? I hope soon to know! A tape recording of the dedication turned up in a box in the University Archives, and is being digitized as we speak. But in the meantime, how interesting that, like The New School in 1919, Eugene Lang College should have been ushered into existence by historians! (The New School's recently arrived president, Jonathan Fanton, and the Graduate Faculty dean, Ira Katznelson, were both historians, too, a Committee on Historical Studies established just the year before, in 1984.) 

On the symposium, Margaret C. Jacob and Ira Katznelson, "Agendas for Radical History," Radical History Review 36 (Fall 1986): 26-45, 26

The description of Thompson's talks is in Margaret C. Jacob, "Among the Autodidacts: The Making of E.P. Thompson," Labour / Le Travail 71 (Spring 2013): 156–61, 160 

Forest floor

At school yesterday, enjoying the summer's peace and quiet, I betook myself to the courtyard to be with the trees. I mostly hang out in the canopy out my office window, though I make visits to touch the trunks of the red maples on the ground - including checking those who seem to have given up the ghost. But I don't usually sit in the white gravel platform, and so hadn't realized that not a few of those samaras seem to have taken root.  

Good for the soul

 

 

 

 

 

Happy to have a chance to attend one of the Multifaith Mondays gathering weekly at Columbus Circle. Today they had a Methodist and a Hindu speaker and were led in song by the director of a gospel choir. (Photo below by Harold Levine)

Read Haring

Guess who designed the New School catalog cover in Spring 1986?

Hail Mary pass

I got in the spirit for Pride Month, which starts today, by reading a delightful new graphic novel by Andrew Wheeler and Rye Hickman called Hey, Mary! Its protagonist, a high school student named Mark, is a good Catholic boy and so can't accept that he's gay. By book's end he's learned that, whatever others may think or want, he's both, as many have been before him - something he discovers in part by being introduced to the grand queer history of Catholicism. These images from the back cover bring together some of the many LGBTQ saints he learns have preceded him. But the most moving sections involve Mary (the woman at lower right), with whom Mark has long had a close relationship. I've passed my library copy of the book on to a friend, but when he returns it I'll share a scene...

Schooled!

Our New School history show keeps finding new audiences. Today was Alumni Reunion Weekend, and we were asked to talk about "Secret Histories of The New School." A little more than a dozen alums showed up (there were five other events scheduled at the same time) but they were ready to rumble! 

And somehow the assembled group included people who'd studied in every decade from the 1960s on, in everything from AAS to PhD at every part of the school except the performing arts! (There was even someone who'd participated in an undergraduate "great books program" from 1969 to 1971 of which none of us knew!) After a short presentation we had them ask each other about their (and weirdest) classes (and weirdest), memorable experiences, and then share with the larger group some things from their past they'd like to see at the school today. 

Our time proved too short to hear from everyone, but what was shared was amazing. How valuable for design students to take liberal arts courses, for sociologists to break with their value-neutral European professors and become artist activists. How much they learned from older classmates in Adult Division courses and from part-time faculty members involved in worlds beyond school. How galvanizing protests were. And, of course, how indispensable international students are.

All toled

While advising someone on using blogger today, I remembered that this one has an archive not only chronological but of labels. One of the smallest is "tom toles," a political cartoonist whose work, before he retired, was always spot on. (Indeed, each of his frames had a double punchline, the second in the lower right hand corner, where we see him at his drafting table.) How sobering to be reminded that the affronts of the second run of our outlaw president were all there already the first time around!

Riktlinien

The only thing more entrancing than the extraordinary delicacy of Hilma af Klint's "Nature Studies" (1919-20), on view for what may be the very first time at MoMA, is the way each is accompanied by a geometrical symbol designed to communicate "what stands behind the flower," a set of virtues, vices and tendencies verbalized in a notebook. 

The woodland strawberry at upper left on the sheet below, for instance, is described as Liberator / Longing to create balance within the blood system by expelling either white or red blood cells. The European wood sorrel at upper right: fragility - submissiveness / shyness - humility / fear - respect / self-loathing - obedience. The common dandelion, at lower right: Beginning / Sluggish persistence / Jealousy / Tenderness. And catsfoot, at lower left: Peace and harmony. 

 Stacked or divided squares, diagonals, circles, curlicues, eddies, spots and seeds inside and beyond the squares in colors and gilt... I have no idea what's going on. It doesn't help when I read af Klint's words, "When we turn our gaze toward the plant kingdom, it gives us information about the composition of our own being." Is this visionary a little mad? 

But it's impossible not also to feel that these plants and flowers were revealing something to her, that kin's self-understanding might be more like a geometrical symbol than a pretty watercolor. 

And of course each will be different from others, even as symbols, words and organic material resonate, calibrate and swirl within each of these registers as well as among them. To learn the languages one would need to open oneself to all at once, example by example.

Perhaps I could start by apprenticing myself to the Yellow toadflax (center of the image above and at top), whose symbol is below, and whose textual translation reads:

 

 

 

Determination

Insight into the direction of the road

(beginning knowledge)

 

[Btw, the yellow iris above, which alone gets a whole sheet for itself and a cosmogony of symbols, is described: Spiritual reservation / Belief in the creation act / Reverence for the power of thought / Longing for holiness based on the Reverence for the strength of feeling] 

We were the world

In these times, cosmopolitan strength becomes a liability.

Source

Travel ban for citizens of the Republic of Letters

I wonder how long this xenophobic college-killing measure has been in the works?

Book end

A lot of loose ends here, glad I finally have time to start tying them up! 

 

And found a phrase I might use as an epigraph:

We are taught that using a plant

shows respect for its nature

Robin Wall Kimmerer,

Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

 (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2003), 110

Education under siege

The indispensable Heather Cox Richardson reminds us that exactly one hundred years ago on this day, a substitute biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee was indicted for breaking a state law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools. A few months later he was found guilty, but he was vindicated by the judgment of history. 

The story's more complicated, of course. If fundamentalism was dismissed by educated elites, efforts to prevent the teaching of evolution have never stopped. And fundamentalists regrouped outside the public eye, bursting back on the political scene fifty years later in attacks on secular American culture which may now be entering a whole new phase. Education is only one front, if a key one. Richardson takes the occasion to lay out just how deep-rooted the current attack on universities is (combating campus antisemitism is barely a pretext for plans announced long before October 2023).

That history reaches at least as far back as the 1740s, when European-American settlers in the western districts of the colonies complained that men in the eastern districts, who monopolized wealth and political power, were ignoring the needs of westerners. This opposition often took the form of a religious revolt as westerners turned against the carefully reasoned sermons of the deeply educated and politically powerful ministers in the East and followed preachers who claimed their lack of formal education enabled them to speak directly from God’s inspiration.

Touching on post-Scopes fundamentalists' improbable alliances with business in resisting the New Deal and modern liberalism ("socialism!" "atheism!"), she mentions everything but the particular relatively new flavor of fundamentalism shared by Heritage Foundation and the vice president, that all the institutions of the land are to be stormed, their current inhabitants driven out and replaced. These people mean business and the theological fervor of their cultural revolution only makes it more terrifying. When they say "professors are the enemy," they mean Enemy - though their Golden Calf is the one that smells of sulfur.

Twilight colors

Painterly clouds tonight...