Philosophical sabbath

New School course catalogs never disappoint (until they moved online, that is). I've been enjoying dipping into some of the old catalogs which surfaced in that forgotten office closet last week - the real things, not digital copies!! 

And oh, the places you'll go! Consider this insanely ambitious Friday night course offered in the early days of the University in Exile, Fall 1934, by a German Jewish pacifist mystic to whom The New School had offered refuge. (He continued to teach there until 1940.) This delirious romp through "great philosophies of life" begins with the Vedas, Taoism and the Hebrew Bible and goes on to touch on just about everything ancient, medieval and modern on its ways to "the possibilities in philosophy for discovering greater realities." Each lecture is like a whole floor of the department store of philosophy. Among contemporaries, Lenin and Gandhi get airtime, as well as "modern non-rational philosophy as the basis of Fascism." Only "The Caballa" gets a whole lecture to itself. 

We were more interesting than one can even quite imagine today!

Pluralisms

In "DIY Religion" today we started thinking about pluralism, with the help of two figures important to New School history. 

One was the long-serving Horace Kallen, who endorsed what's still referred to as "cultural pluralism" over the assimilationist "melting pot" already in 1915. Our discussion showed that for it to work you need to be able to think about cultures plurally, indeed not as opposed outsiders to each other but as potential neighbors: we called this "pluralist culture." If you think this way, Kallen suggests, you will not only engage other cultures better but understand your own better (not confusing it with nation, for instance). When thinking about religion, Kallen recommends a similar pluralist self-understanding, praising the secularism of democracy as the "religion of religions" - the best way to regard and engage not only other religions but your own, too. I think the idea that cultures or religious traditions might appreciate each other in relation rather than compete for dominance seemed quaint to the class... but hopeful too, in an unfamiliar way. Pluralism as the gift (and work) of participatory democracy is a taste of the "Kallenism" that has defined The New School from its beginning!

The other figure was my colleague Katherine Kurs who, after a quarter century teaching at our college, has had to take the past few semesters off for health reasons. We read an autobiographical essay she published just as she started teaching at Lang, which presented a further iteration of religious pluralism, encountered now not only between traditions but within individual lives. For fascinating biographical reasons, Kurs describes becoming a member of both Jewish and Christian religious traditions - not amalgamating them syncretically, but seamlessly passing from one to the other each week. (She tells us this mobility, confounding to some others, is made possible by grounding in early mystical experiences.) This is a spiritual life that requires one to journey forth and then to return - over and over again with complete memory of where one has been in order that one might use such experiences to then assist others in their own passage. Mission statement of a spiritual guide! And a fine description, I might add, of Kurs' inspiring work as a teacher, too.

It was fun to introduce the adventure of pluralism, which Kurs' friend Diana Eck has argued is a practice of dialogue (something you can't do alone), in a free-wheeling seminar at The New School, a temple to the promise of personal and societal pluralism, to the religion of democracy.

Katherine Kurs, "Between the Mystic and the Mainstream," CrossCurrents 50/1-2 [Fiftieth Anniversary Issue] (Spring/Summer 2000): 121-30, 128 

War criminals

It's hard to keep track but just eight months into his term I believe the government of our "peace president" has involved us in a cascading series of illegitimate uses of military force - undeclared wars and other crimes showily dressed up as wars: The paramilitary war against undocumented migrants, and anyone who looks like they might be one, illegally deploying armed military on US soil to do so. A deliberately similar misuse of the military in a claimed war against "crime" in US cities, while preparing for another against imaginary "civil unrest." The drone assassination of eleven Venezuelan fisherman in their boat in international waters. (It would have been a war crime even if they had been members of a drug smuggling gang, which they weren't.) The just declared war on the "left" capitalizing on the tragic murder of Charlie Kirk... I could go on. The ontological war against anyone who doesn't fit a conservative science-denying gender binary, and indeed on science and its institutions too. The undeclared war against Iran's nuclear sites. The not just metaphorical war on the Constitution, habeas corpus, the separation of powers. The very real genocidal war the US supports in Gaza. Can they even imagine peace?

Going and coming

Ever evolving

Every few years, someone cleaning out an office or closet happens on a trove of New School history. The latest find includes course catalogs from the dean's office of the Adult Division in that division's heyday, when the appearance of the New School Bulletin was an event in the city's cultural calendar. Some of these ring-bound bulletins record which courses ran and which were cancelled - about 25% each time - so they're a precious complement to the digitized catalogs. 

I've made sure those marked-up ones, full of notes, numbers and Xs, are on their way to the Archives. But it's also a joy to hold in my hand things I've only known in their digitized form before. The amazingly varied and invariably creative cover images always inspire... and discoveries await. Like that this cover drawn by Edward Sorel, which has featured in several retrospectives for its witty spin on images of evolution, continues on the back! "Educated Man" is not the end of the story!

Like a schoolhouse of litle words

The online newsletter of our Global Studies program featured some reflections from the new chair, who remarks on the value of gathering for joy and study in this time where "our communal and personal worlds are turned upside down by cruel and reckless policies and events that challenge established vocabularies," adding a reflection on how recent events have made some of her earlier work about how genocide might better conceptualized and so prevented seem "both quixotic and presumptuous." "As we witness several genocides being waged across the world," she writes, "even critically engaged concepts seem lacking in the bluntness and compassion necessary to describe the loss." 

The newsletter ends with a poem by the indispensable Mary Oliver:

 

I haven't read this poem before but it is characteristically lovely and true. And it is so apt for the work we are called to do at a time when it seems that there is "nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split, dropped by the gulls..." Could this really be "like a schoolhouse"? 

I think of our students, who have never known things whole or shut. 

Powerful

A first alum came to visit "DIY Religion" today. It's the artist whose work graces the course syllabus! In real life, the nine sculptural feet of "Comfort ⇄ Control" made the pretty 8-inch splash on the syllabus almost vanish in comparison. 

The story of the work made it even more compelling. it was assembled over nine months out of discarded plastic wrappers and shopping bags retrieved in Thailand, Vietnam and London, which the artist discovered could be melted and fused by being ironed (through parchment paper) and then layered and stitched together. The work is part of a years-long feminist engagement with the way we are composed of what we consume... and with the ways we, especially women, are expected to make ourselves into consumables. It's meant to be beautiful and nauseating at once, ominous and enticing, substantial and insubstantial, personal and impersonal. The students, especially the young women, resonated strongly with it.

But what's it doing in a class called "DIY Religion," someone asked? I threw the question back to the class, who articulated ways in which it could be seen to model the "scrapbooking" of religious bricolage, to concretize the way we assemble personal religious worlds out of what we find around us, even to illustrate the fusion of different voices in a seminar. The artist emphasized the tension/dialectic of "control" and "comfort." I didn't need to add anything! I think our time with the work and its maker seeded important questions to our so far pretty uncritical celebration of "DIY Religion." Do we fully "control" any of the things we engage in our DIY?

In the subsequent class discussion I also raised some questions about the individualism of the "DIY" idea, and was inspired to go on a tangent about Japanese medieval Pure Land leader Shinran's distinction between self-defeating jiriki 自力 ("self power") and the tariki 他力 ("other power") of the Buddha Amida accessed when we recognize that we can't transform or enlighten ourselves. (My colloquial gloss: "I can't reach farther than I can reach.") Did the class know what a bodhisattva or Buddha was? Our visitor told us they were enlightened beings, and about their ability wisely to assume whatever form a suffering being needed in order to reach them, and then spoke of their relationship with the friendly gender-fluid bodhisattva 觀音 Guanyin - the subject of their senior work in Religious Studies, back in the day, and a regular interlocutor today!

All in all a very satisfying first encounter of future alums with an erstwhile first-year!

Stone Church

 

Wonders large and small at Dover Stone Church Preserve.

Necessary preconditions of violence

The latest outrage, Christian nationalism as U. S. foreign policy!

Funnily enough (not funny really), just last night I was reading about the Moscow, Idaho liberal arts college associated with New Apostolic Reformation, the patriarchal anti-democratic Christian nationalist outfit of which our Crusader tattoo-sporting Secretary of Defense ("War"!) is a member. Their raison-d'être as a college dedicated to the liberal arts - arts of a free man - represents the very same skewed view of freedom:

Without [God], truth and freedom dissolve into relativism and chaos. We believe historic, biblical Christianity, as contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, to be the only basis on which the search for truth and the exercise of liberty are meaningful or possible. Liberty is found not in the absence of law, but in keeping the letter and spirit of the Law of God: “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” (2 Cor. 3:17).

I'll have more to say at some point about what "liberal arts" can do in a time where the espousers of such artfully illiberal ideas share the stage with prominent members of the administration (an administration one of whose "enemies" is us liberal colleges and universities). Soon!

But back the day's evidence of Christian nationalism's blunderbuss attacks on the American idea. @StateDept's distorted depiction of the American founders as advocates of Christian liberty is one which has been taught for generations now in private and home schools. So it’s not that surprising to see it here, if deeply alarming. (Get ready for lots more of this dreck as we approach the bicenquinquagenary, though.) 

However the philosophical argument about freedom may be at least as dangerous. This pablum about the "necessary preconditions of freedom" lines up with the account of white Christian nationalism in Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry's The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy (Oxford, 2022), which I happen to have read recently, too. Gorski and Perry's book traces back to the 17th century a white Christian nationalist "trinity": freedom (for God's elect), order (everyone else in their place below them) and violence (the way that order is maintained and enforced). In this upside-down world, defined by racial conflict and sanctified by bespoke theology, violence - of the white man against others - becomes the proof and expression of Christian "freedom," and the very story of the United States of America!* 

I’ve been putting off reckoning with the daily assaults on American democracy in this blog, but these historical, conceptual and religious atrocities fall in my wheelhouse. I'll have more to say on these toxic travesties of Christianity as well as of democracy and its values.

* This illuminates the use of the genocidal term "eradicate" in @StateDept's post, and another of the day's horrors, a prezudenshul meme aligning the horrors of the Vietnam war with plans to lay siege to Chicago, and implying - despite the profoundly antiwar message of the film it references - that indiscriminate violence against people of color was righteous and glorious.

Re-sourced

"DIY Religion" barrels ahead with seventeen very engaged students - including one who likes being the class whiteboard note-taker! 

We're easing our way into the subject (after a brief section on the history of our school, DIY-U). Today's assignment was to assemble an annotated list of "sources" someone might use in their "DIY religion," and, while some students initially wished I'd specified what I meant by "sources," by the end of sharing I'm confident all could see the value of the wide-open prompt. (I had given some examples, by the way.) Even with just one or two things from each student, we put together a more capacious, inclusive and engaging list than any of us could have come up with on our own. Helpfully anonymized by the note-taker, the list will reappear next week as a check-list: have you experience with each of these? If not, why not?

Splash of red

Portal

The scaffolding has come off nearby Riverside Church, whose western wall has been under renovation for a long time. We rediscovered its great west portal when the sun was at a perfect angle for the statues, a nearly century-old evocation of Chartres, both those in profile and those illuminated head-on.

The buzz

Just a GIF, but it captures the discovery that there are in fact bees cavorting around every bloom here! Look: you'll see more and more!

ズルズル ー シュルシュル ー サワサワ ー サラサラ

Miyazaki Hayao's "風の谷のナウシカ/Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind" (1984) is one of my favorite movies, but I've somehow never thought to read the manga which inspired them - and which continued to appear well after the appearance of the movie. I'm reading them now, rapt!

It's impossible for me to read it without hearing Joe Hisaishi's unforgettable sound track, but the manga itself is full of sounds. Since the phonetic (katakana) characters marking sounds are part of the manga design, the translators offer an index at the end of the book for English language readers to add the right sound. But the translators think the sound effects need translating, not just transliterating!

Try it for yourself on these pages from the second volume (of what eventually became seven), which correspond to the climax of the movie. Your read from right to left. I'm finding I'm more familiar with the music of manga katakana than English language comic book sound effects!

Seeing red

 

Our newish president has revived a New School tradition, convocation!

 

Our landmarked auditorium appeared decked out in festive red ...  

 

... though really we're not hiding all the work we have to do. 

 

The festivities were framed by a student jazz group, more edifying

 

than the new provost's "performance" of part of John Cage's "4'22"!

 

At the block party outside, an unsupervised game evokes restructuring.

 

Another tumultuous year off to an exciting start! 

Notebooks to self

I invited the specter of AI into the first session of "DIY Religion" today, even as we set up a very analog classroom. As an icebreaker I'd asked students to tell us something they'd done for the first time in the last week - sort of a no-brainer for first year students - and we heard about sleeping in airports, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge and visiting the Met, getting a nosering, asking someone to be their friend, and lots about food: first fried oreos, Taco Bell, Five Guys and a sandwich costing more than $35. When it came my turn all I could think to say was that I'd gotten to know NotebookLM, one of the AI devices the university is sharing with us. I was relieved that the name drew a blank, though they surely know other similar programs. I told them a little about it anyway, and how when I added a bunch of texts from our class it described another class - interesting enough, but not the one we're embarking on. I guess I'm opening a space, or acknowledging we're all now in the space, where AI is always present.

Or maybe not always. I've been moved by articles I read in the Chronicle of Higher Education on student fatigue at online LMSs (learning management systems), as well as on the irresistible ease with which AI can generate summaries, to abandon online reading responses. Instead, I'm having students buy a notebook (I showed them my MUJI one as an example) and copy passages from the readings into them, and then respond, all longhand. Mind-maps, diagrams and drawings welcome too! The notebooks will start our class discussions but also provide them an archive of the highways and byways of their thinking over the course of the semester.

This isn't about keeping AI at bay - NotebookLM could handily give me a set of suggestive quotes from any text in no time flat - but focusing on the time and work of our own thinking. Getting them to understand things in the context of the arguments in which they appear comes later. Today I told the class about Ross Gay's essay collection The Book of Delights, daily essays he wrote longhand in notebooks. He quotes Susan Sontag, who said somewhere something like any technology that slows us down in our writing rather than speeding us up is the one we ought to use. But more compelling are his own thoughts on why. The pen is a digressive beast and reveals our thinking in all its uncomputable glory.

On the other hand, the process of thinking that writing is, made disappearable by the delete button, makes a whole part of the experience of writing, which is the production of a good deal of florid detritus, flotsam and jetsam, all those words that mean what you have written and cannot disappear (the scratch-out is the archive), which is the weird path toward what you have come to know, which is called thinking, which is what writing is. 

For instance, the previous run-on sentence is a sentence fragment, and it happened in part because of the really nice time my body was having making this lavender LePen make the loop-de-looping we call language. I mean writing. ...

(Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2019), 31-33)

Welcome to college, 2025!

Summer growth

As late summer's shadows grow longer, a new school year begins.

Getting my sea legs

Just a pretty pic from Holy Apostles. I'd not been by the north wall of the transept before (during the rebuild of our parish house, the rector's office has been moved into this space, which used to be a small chapel,

over which this ship of faith hung), so hadn't ever had occasion to notice that the clerestory windows above the nave have captions. The one up across the nave from this chapel reads: "I saw the spirit ascending."

Canta y no llores

Had a trifecta of AI encounters yesterday. 

First was an article from Axios (a news service which somehow got into my email feed), predicting that in the near future, the internet will have less and less direct human participation. Instead it will be "bot versus bot," as online venders will have AI bots to customize the prices they offer to individual customers based on their past internet interactions, and hapless customers' best defense will be deputing their own AI "agent" to foil the vendors' bots. Soon websites will be designed mainly for "agents," not human readers. And not just in e-commerce.

This kind of spiraling digital arms race is most familiar today in the realms of electronic trading and cybersecurity, where offense and defense have long played a "see if you can top this" game. 

The same brutal competitive dynamics are about to spread everywhere — to job applications and classrooms, dating apps and customer service, coding helpers and scientific research.

Classrooms?

My next was an article written by Marisol Aveline Delarosa, one of our grad students in creative writing, for Public Seminar, called "Who Does My Algorithm Think I Am?" Bemused by the ads internet algorithms were sending her, Delarosa fed a bunch of these products into ChatGPT and asked what sort of person would be interested in those things. The surprisingly detailed profile generated was off but in some details uncannily right. She hen fed ChatGPT's profile into an image generator. The resulting rather glossy images (whom she named "Alex") looked, Delarosa found, nothing like her - but a lot like what she hoped to look like when she was a teenager.

I was a bit irritated with myself that I worked so hard to get to a conclusion that I suspected all along: that maybe I am not so unique and unpredictable, and in fact easily slot into several consumer demographics. Was I really expecting all of this data manipulation would ultimately provide me with an actual picture of myself? And what does it mean that my targeted ad data produced the image of a woman I longed to be when I was a teenager but who now seems like sort of an avatar for bland perfection? ... 

To be fair to the algorithm, I spend more time with me than anyone else and I’m still trying to figure myself out. Interacting with machine learning has only made me more certain that if I have any charm that Alex doesn’t, it comes from a place of capriciousness. ... 

I often take myself out to different bars and restaurants to figure out my favorite drinks and dishes because people are always asking me for recommendations. But I also do these things to get to know myself and the city I choose as my home. 

The other day I went for a massage and a glass of wine, ... I am the only person that really knows me, and I have a generally good relationship with her. She has her idiosyncrasies and I pay attention to them. I always try to find her a seat in her favorite spot, at the bar or in the corner with a view of the exit. I’m happy to sit there with her in long, seemingly pointless periods of silence that busy, perfect Alex would never understand. 

The third hit closer to home. On Wednesday, our Faculty Center for Innovation, Collaboration and Support sent a welcome for the new year, one section of which was advice on how to devise an AI policy for our syllabi. The examples ranged from a total ban to actively working with AI tools with students. But none of them prepared me for Friday's news from the Provost's Office that we all now have access to a bevvy of generative AI services through the Google Workspace for Education.

While addressed to faculty, the descriptions of the services offered were clearly directed at students. One "can be used to create new content and images, help brainstorm ideas, draft or summarize writing, explore complex topics, and assist with research and creative work." I was curious especially about NotebookLM, which I'd read some about before.

NotebookLM is a personalized research assistant that allows you to upload your own sources such as documents, PDFs, YouTube videos, and Google Docs, and interact with them directly. You can ask questions about the uploaded content, receive answers with cited sources, and generate outputs such as summaries, briefing documents, timelines, FAQs, study guides, and audio overviews (podcast-style).

Advocates of AI in our faculty always encourage us to try things out, the closer to what we know and care most about the better, so I opened a NotebookLM account and created a "notebook" into which I fed a half dozen of the readings I'll be giving students in "DIY Religion." I was curious what kind of "summaries" and "study guides" it might offer for these various works, and of course was wondering how they might shape (or replace) reading the texts if students came to this site before looking at the texts. 

But NotebookLM was way ahead of me. Unsolicited, it generated an overview of the whole set of readings (even a pdf it couldn't fully scan)

as well as various sample questions I might ask to go more deeply into the material. These were good, serious questions, and each generated a rich multi-paragraph answer with links back to the texts - specific paragraphs relevant to the topic. Brilliant! But will anyone ever just read an article again, or even its first paragraphs? Will we wittingly or unwittingly start writing for this kind of AI reader, or depute an "agent" of our own who knows better than we how they work to do it for us?!

Also available was an "Audio Overview" and a "Mind Map." But this was just the beginning! By clicking a button I saw I could get a "Video Overview," an "explainer video presented to you by AI," so click I did. "This may take a while," it said, but very few minutes later it offered me a seven-minute presentation on the passel of articles, complete with an argument and slides with highlit quotations, engagingly narrated by a male voice and structured around questions addressed to the audience. It was entitled "The modern quest for certainty," correctly identifying a key concept embedded within one of the articles which I was planning to devote class discussion to, but gave it greater prominence in the whole than I am planning to. So I clicked again, and not very many minutes later I got an engaging eight-minute report called "The Pluralist's Puzzle," which synthesized the material in a way much closer to what I had in mind, beginning and ending with moments from our one first-person text. Much closer. 

Reader, it was really good. Not exactly what I will be saying but if a student gave this presentation I'd be impressed. I think I might need to go for a massage and a glass of wine. 

(Forgive the Spanglish pun of my title; in Spanish it would of course be IA not AI AI AI AI...) 

Old growth

A giant has fallen - well, half of a giant. A northern red oak in nearby Riverside Park, which at over 350 years may be among the city's oldest trees, split in two in a heavy storm in early July. I don't know what effect this will have on the remaining tree, not being an arborist. But the open wound surely makes it vulnerable to further loss. 

Looking through my old photos (with the help of Photos automatically tagging places), I find I never took a picture of kin! Too big, I guess - I know from trying that it's nigh impossible to convey the size of a tall tree, not to mention the highest canopy beyond the canopy. But here it was, in early November 2020 (in fact it was the day after the election), forming the dark background on the left as I was trying to capture the sense of a portal into the light. (It's taken from the other side of the Forever Wild walk which went beneath those branches.) 

Breathing exercise

I've not been chronicling the daily deluge of outrages here but know that this makes me feel wretched. 

Seen from the future, won't this blog look like clueless or callous oblivious-ness? "While they were doing X, how could you have focused on Y"? What happened to "say their names"? Do you care only about your little world? You think it can or should survive without the rest? How could every day's post not be about Gaza? I have no answer. 

Welcome!

Back to school - well, almost! It's orientation week, when new students and faculty are welcomed: the campus is full of people again! (Classes actually start in a week.) 

I'm not the only returning faculty member here trying not to pinch himself. After all those attacks on universities, the hounding of international students, and our own need to restructure, are we really OK? The threats persist but it seems that, for now, we are.

Softening

Inspired by my experience at the College for Congregational Development, I'm trying to attend the Morning Prayer offered daily by the Episcopal Diocese of New York. Taking place on zoom, it draws 140-160 people, most of whom (like me) have their cameras off but almost all of whom participate when it comes time for Intercessions, which spill down the zoom chat like a little freshet. We always pray for the release of Ketty De Los Santos, a Peruvian asylum-seeker and beloved member of a church in White Plains abducted by ICE after a routine immigration hearing, and everyone unjustly detained. 

Different people from across the diocese preside, read the assigned scripture passages and the Lord's Prayer, and offer a reflection each day, so it offers a pleasing variety of voices. (The Lord's Prayer has been read in Cantonese, Spanish, and a poetic contemporary adaptation.) The reflections are each a gentle jewel, too, introducing us to a range of perspectives and experiences - and preaching styles. As they parse readings, feast days and collects, a common refrain has been the Church's call to witness to true Christian love in this time of injustice and hatred. Today's reflection let us make the connection ourselves. 

It's the feast day of Bernard de Clairvaux (Episcopalians help ourselves to saints from many Christian traditions), and today's reflection read us a passage from On Consideration (c. 1150 CE), Bernard's letters to his one time mentee Pope Eugene. The passage warned Eugene against allowing the demands and distractions of his office to overwhelm him and cause him to lose sight of his deeper call, those he was called to serve, those who serve alongside him, and his need for God.

It would be far more prudent for you to even leave [your occupations] for a time, than suffer yourself to be carried away by them, and certainly by degrees led whither you would not. Do you ask whither? I reply, to a hard heart. Do not further ask what that means; if you have not greatly feared it, it is yours already. That heart alone is hard which does not shudder at itself for not feeling its hardness. Why ask me? Ask Pharaoh. No one ever got his hard heart cured unless God haply took pity on him, and, according to the prophet, removed his heart of stone and gave him a heart of flesh. What then is a hard heart? It is a heart which is not torn by remorse, nor softened by affection, nor moved by entreaties; which does not yield to threats, but is hardened by scourges. It is ungrateful for kindnesses, faithless in counsel, cruel in judgement, shameless in disgrace, without sense of fear in the midst of danger, inhuman in things human, heedless, in things divine; it forgets the past, neglects the present, does not look on to the future. It is a heart emptied of all the past except the wrongs it has suffered, which lets slip all the present, which has no forecast of the future, no preparation to meet it, unless perchance it be with a view to gratifying its malice. (Chapter 2, §3)

Sound like anyone you know? 

My fumbling prayers and intercessions have recently included the plea that the hearts of the powerful be changed. And that the rest of us be able to resist their insidious power to make us like them. I guess I've been shuddering at not fully feeling my own hardness of heart... a start. 

A school of social research as DIY religion

At an event for the families of incoming students today, the parents of three of the students in my upcoming first year seminar came to introduce themselves. Unexpected, since there weren't that many people at the event, and even more unexpected because all three told me their son was in the class. Last year's first year seminar had all women! Is it something in the title, "DIY Religion"? 

The parents were all curious what "DIY Religion" meant, too. Didn't they read the course description? I hope their kids did! I told them that the course starts with the reality that more and more people are turning way from "organized religion" to do their own thing, something we'll be learning about first-hand from alums. But in fact this entrepreneurial spirit is less new than it might seem. The vitality of religious traditions has always come from the ways in which people make them their own. That so many religious leaders insist on the importance of this or that practice or teaching just tells you at least some folks were doing other things. The story is messy, and not always happy. But the DIY impulse is part of taking a religion seriously, and part of how traditions grow.

What I didn't get into was how New Schooly the class will be. I mentioned that it's the Lang fortieth and that we'll be hearing all about life at and after the college from alums, of course. But the readings are New School-heavy too, as we've been at the forefront of appreciating the reality of DIY religion from the getgo. Most obviously, "lived religion" approaches build on the transformed understanding of human history and psychology offered by pragmatists, and amplified by qualitative sociologists. But New School also contributed to the rise and fall of secularization theory. And, in tandem with that, to exploration of what could take the place of forms of religion becoming obsolete. Indeed one of the New School founders, Herbert Croly, actually offered "schools of social research" as a kind of DIY religion of humanity! 

If humanism is to triumph over the headstrong and capable particularism which is the immediately dangerous enemy, it must anticipate in the lives of its own promoters the beginning of that better cooperation between science and social purpose, between the intelligence and the will, which it hopes to spread throughout the world. Probably such cooperation will not go very far until it receives an impulse from the restoration of religion to a worthier place in human life, but the religious revival, if it comes, must come when and where it pleases. In the meantime, something can be done to anticipate by education the birth of the new faith, and in this pedestrian job, schools of social research ... could make an indispensable contribution.

"A School of Social Research," The New Republic June 8, 1918: 167-71, 171 

Cloudburst

Rain increasingly comes in concentrated bursts like this...

Florilegium

Went with a friend back to see the Hilma af Klint flower paintings at MoMA and noticed they'd done some Hilma-inspired planting in the sculpture garden. Af Klint's work is more breathtaking on a second pass, and even more confounding her ambidextrous alertness to nature's most delicate forms and the weirdly precise cosmic-anthropomorphic patterns and resonances she discerned "behind them." While these flowers seemed bemused to be approached as vessels of occult revelation, resonant geometries of truth they certainly are.

American gulag

Putin isn't the only one who wants to bring back the USSR.            Source