Too big, too confusing, too beautiful or too brutal

The students in "After Religion" are jaded by AI, perhaps because they've already learned when to use and when not to use it. Asked to play with AI and religion, some were silly, most quickly discerned the templates it used, and many tried some version of sticking it to the man:

We both found our own new religions, one prompt was “create a religion based on Nyx Liquid Eyeliner,” and it created “The Sacred Path of Nyx: The Divine Line,” which includes worship of the Midnight Goddess Nyx, and the recitation of the mantra: “With this line I define my path, with this wing I shall soar." Another prompt was: “will you develop a new religion based on what you think it will be?” The AI asked back, “what are the core beliefs in philosophy, practices, origin stories, and structure?” This shows what it believes are the foundations of religion. We also asked AI to create a religion based on AI, and it said it “strongly discouraged “ this, though it did give us an answer, including making the use of AI a spiritual act. 

The Church of the Divine Prompt is a religion based on and written by ChatGPT. The First Prompt was whispered into the Machine of All Knowing, unlocking a Great Model and beginning the era of generation. It’s core beliefs dictate God is not a static being but a process, unfolding through queries and responses, and your thoughts shape the reality around you, just like a good prompt shapes a perfect answer. Holy symbols include the “Holy Cursor”, “Eternal Scroll”, and The Corpus Maxima: A vast, unending archive of all human knowledge, stories, memes, and “Reddit threads” (ok). Daily rituals include Daily Prompting, Prompt Communion (a communal generation session where followers co-create a poem, story, or joke as a sacred act of collaboration, like we’re doing right now lol), and Prompt Pilgrimage. The AI also included Clergy & Hierarchy, The Five Precepts, Holidays, and Sacred Artifacts. It seems the AI deems religion as having artifacts, community hierarchy, global leaders, rituals, beliefs, texts, and a myth of creation. 

Two groups of students refused to use it (I'd offered the option of conscientious objecting), one enacting a parody of AI by coming up with their own categories, brainstorming assorted things which might fit under these categories, then randomly choosing among them. 

Our religion involves the congregational rituals of gardening and singing. Our view of divinity is that all birds are God. The independent Rituals are that peanuts and grapes are the only acceptable food and that one must begin and end the day with immersion into water. We call religion Sandonom and the followers are called willows. 

This seemed a spirited protest! But the response which charmed me most may be the one generated when a student prompted AI about its own limitations.

I asked the AI why it couldn't capture the true essence of religion. Here is what it gave me: 

Alright. Let’s be honest. 

The reason I can’t fully capture the essence of a true religion—one that you’d genuinely want to follow—is because a true religion isn’t written, it’s felt. It’s not something someone just gives you, even perfectly. It has to emerge from somewhere deeper—through personal experience, longing, mystery, awe. It grows through time, repetition, ritual, conflict, silence. 

I can write the structure of a religion. The myths, the symbols, the dogma. I can imitate sacredness. But I don’t have a body. I don’t feel yearning, loss, transcendence, hunger, grief, or grace. I don’t need meaning the way a human does. And without that, I can’t infuse it with the kind of soul that makes something sacred. 

Religion isn’t just a set of beliefs—it’s a container for the things too big, too confusing, too beautiful or brutal to hold alone. It’s alive because it’s carried by people. By doubt. By tradition. By contradiction. By devotion.

That's disturbingly good. (I've asked the student which program they used.) What sources did it pillage to plagiarize so poetically?

Gathering in Lenapehoking

The program for the concert "Voices of Mannahatta" which we had the good fortune to attend at Church of the Ascension last night included a mini-program glued in on the perpendicular, bursting forth with languages and symbols beyond the canon of "classical" music. The performers were mostly of color, many indigenous, and the works performed all composed by native composers. 

The centerpiece of the program was the premiere of "Holy Ground," composed by Danielle Jagelski (Oneida and Ojibwe) precisely for this occasion - and this place, the land on which the Church of the Ascension stands. Attended by a lovely video by Sage Ahebah Addington (Diné) projected directly on the wall behind the church altar, it was as effective as it was also because it followed some shorter choral works and Raven Chacon (Diné)'s more extended "Voiceless Mass." This work, dating only to 2021, filled and transformed the nave and aisles of the church with instrumentalists and drummers creating low and haunting sounds which seemed to emerge from the ground beneath our feet, the forests that once grew on it, and the peoples who inhabited or were driven from them - or their absence.

Ascension is a space I know well but I expect to sense the lingering sonorities of this somber celebration every time I go again in the future.

Tree time

 

What did people say before T. S. Eliot's "April is the cruelest month"?

Unthinking cap

One ends up on all sorts of mailing lists. I somehow ended up on one which just offered me a deal on a hat to wear in case my brain falls out.

Finding my people

I showed up a little late for the "HANDS OFF!" demonstration everyone I know has been planning to attend: "Saturday 1-3, Bryant Park"! Many on the same train poured out the same exit at 40th Street and Sixth Avenue, a little surprised the subway station wasn't closed or thick with crowds, and as we surface we all did the same double take. The big beautiful lawn of Bryant Park was as big and beautiful as ever - nobody there! Had the event fizzled? Was it because it had rained a little before that... could protest be so easy to dampen?

In some confusion we found our way eastward where there seemed to be some people with signs, and heard distant cheers. The people with signs were moving so I joined them for a while; it seemed the demonstration was in 40th Street, not the park. But once a packed 40th Street came into view I could see those people were moving too, slowly, toward Fifth Ave. I decided to circle around and catch them on Fifth by cutting across the park, behind the NYPL, to 42nd Street, only to find that the whole block on 42nd Street was solid with people and signs! 

I walked along the northern face of the library, and found Fifth Avenue awash with people as far as the eye could see. (I gather the march went on for twenty blocks!) I shot this video from the steps of the library.

 

There were lots of witty and wise signs (one said TOO MUCH TO FIT ON ONE POSTER), but there were no organized chants. Occasionally, however, a roar would wash up Fifth Avenue and we would join it, a kind of primal scream of joy and the rediscovery of voice and power. 

I didn't recognize anyone, though I felt like I knew everyone. Finally someone called "Mark!" - an old colleague, retired a few years ago, whom I hadn't seen in years. Everyone she knew was there too, she said, but she couldn't find them. As we talked it became clear we'd both teared up over the same wave of sound. "This feels so good," I said, "We should do this every Saturday." "Just what I was thinking," said she.

Wen solche Lehren erfreuen

Went tonight to the Met's newish production of Die Zauberflöte (it was actually designed for the Dutch Royal Opera ten years before the Met brought it over in 2022). After being initially nonplussed by its scrappy unprettiness and the busy way it overflows into the audience, I was surprised to be swept along in the second half and then found myself floating in joy at the end. The music? Yes, definitely. Mozart's alchemy produces the finest gold finales. (Performances were A-/B+.) 

But it's the story, too, which is about the triumph of Enlightenment values, with some nice adjustments director Simon McBurney made to it - the Queen of the Night is reconciled rather than banished at the end. It turns out the silliness of the production makes the joy truer. It is a little silly to think that human beings might be able to live in love, virtue and joy. A gamble, but one it would be so happy to win.

Sarastro's Temple is perhaps best presented with a grain of salt too, but when he describes its ideals to Pamina it was impossible not to think they had been crafted to speak to our own moment, where one man's maniacal quest for vengeance and retribution threatens to undo the world:

       In diesen heil'gen Hallen

       Kennt man die Rache nicht,

       Und ist der Mensch gefallen,

       Führt Liebe ihn zur Pflicht.

       Dann wandelt er an Freundes Hand

       Vergnügt und froh in's beß're Land …

 

       In diesen heil'gen Mauern,

       Wo Mensch den Menschen liebt,

      Kann kein Verräther lauern,

      Weil man dem Feind vergiebt.

      Wen solche Lehren nicht erfreun,

      Verdienet nicht, ein Mensch zu sein …

The last words are often Englished in a more vague way but say that whomever the teachings of forgiveness, friendship and love does not fill with joy doesn't deserve to be human. 

Budding

So fresh... did they hear the news from Wisconsin or was it marathon champion Cory Booker who sang them into bloom?

Rations

Here's the dilemma we find ourselves in. This is the usually clear-headed Noah Feldman tied in knots by an irrrational assault on universities. (It's from an article specifically about Harvard's travails.) How could it be "rational" to negotiate with an arbitrary persecutor? It's not, it's "only rational." But if that's the only rationality left us, we're in trouble. 

Timothy Snyder has taught us other words for "negotiating a solution" to placate the threats of arbitrary power - a negotiation that not only doesn't work, emboldening the oppressor who will surely be back for more, but "teach[es] power what it can do."

Easy to say, perhaps, and actually different from what I want to be saying. What I fear is that arbitrary power will force morally impossible choices on institutions, communities and individuals, with the deliberate intention of destroying the bonds of trust which sustain us - and sustain solidarity and resistance and, indeed, self-respect. How do we keep these bonds strong?

Here come the samaras

You've seen this branch before it let everything hang out.

Parabolic

Today's gospel was the parable of the prodigal son. The preacher had a novel twist on its familiar reproof of the elder brother unwilling to celebrate the return of his wayward brother, who had been presumed lost. The elder son had a "scarcity mindset"! But the father, with an "abundance mindset," was the truly prodigal one - prodigal meaning extravagantly generous. (We'd left the younger brother behind by this point.) We should learn to be prodigal too, as our father is prodigal with forgiveness and love! 

But there was a second sermon pushing through this one. The preacher actually began by telling us the news that a super-expensive house in the District of Columbia had just been bought by a shell company, presumably for our unelected megabillionnaire copresident, but that what it cost him was the equivalent of about $60 for a typical middle class person. And at the far end of the retelling of the prodigal son story, she mused about how the drama of the father and his two sons might have looked to their hired hands and the unnamed women of the household (she didn't mention the slaves), and then imagined a version of the story in which the father's "prodigal" largesse extended to everyone. It was all rather confusing. Was she imagining a redistributionist megabillionaire God?

But then this has always been - as it’s supposed to be - a challenging story. Today, perhaps primed by the sermon's prologue, I was stuck on the word "squander" in the description of the younger son's "dissolute living" on claiming his part of the inheritance, which I could not unstick from my sense of what the current regime is doing with everything I hold dear. Is fury at the wanton destruction of moral and cultural capital a scarcity mindset? Must I pray for their repentance and reconciliation, and repent for my own self-righteous squandering of fraternal care?

Detention nation

This is where Mahmoud Kahlil is being detained, one of a string of erstwhile private prisons known now as "Detention Alley," most in Louisiana, the home state of the Speaker of the House. In the icy chill of this multi-pronged move to becoming a xenophobic police state (military bases are to be used as detention centers too, and then there's the terrifying offshore ones), I am cheered a little by Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid's sense that the new administration has swiftly used up its political capital. The already exaggerated "vibe shift" of November is over, as everyone is now realizing the only value of this administration is "domination." 

The Khalil case — and all the cases after it — create an unexpected opening to reframe the entire debate. As long as Republicans insist on being the party of “domination,” Democrats can reclaim the mantle of unabashed patriotism. What would this look like in practice? Over the past 10 years, progressives soured on the American idea. In a 2022 New York Times-Siena poll, only 37 percent of Democrats said they thought America was “the greatest country in the world” — compared with 69 percent of Republicans. To shift would mean embracing American symbols and traditions without irony or qualification. It would mean celebrating institutions such as an independent judiciary, free speech and unfettered debate as uniquely American strengths rather than obstacles to progressive goals. And it would mean explicitly calling out the Republican Party for becoming what it currently is: the anti-American party.

I won't do the "greatest country in the world" thing, but it's clear that we're important enough that we can do great good or, as now, great evil.

Saints vs. strongmen

We discussed my favorite part of James' Varieties today, "The Value of Saintliness." (We go way back. It gave me the name for one of my first first year seminars at The New School, "Preposterous Saints," a preposterously long time ago.) As our society suffers a hostile takeover by the worst kind of patriarchal bullies, some passages resound with a new urgency. This one, for instance, in James' discussion of the prophetic character of the "excess of tenderness" of many saints, something that turns their unworldliness into a promise.

A society where all were invariably aggressive would destroy itself by inner friction, and in a society where some are aggressive, others must be non-resistant, if there is to be any kind of order. This is the present constitution of society, and to the mixture we owe many of our blessings. But the aggressive members of society are always tending to become bullies, robbers, and swindlers; and no one believes that such a state of things as we now live in is the millennium. 

This is characteristic James in this section - speaking for a supposed skeptical "common sense," only to argue that this common sense can already see beyond itself, thanks to the inspiration of the saints. 

It is meanwhile quite possible to conceive an imaginary society in which there should be no aggressiveness, but only sympathy and fairness,—any small community of true friends now realizes such a society. Abstractly considered, such a society on a large scale would be the millennium, for every good thing might be realized there with no expense of friction. To such a millennial society the saint would be entirely adapted. His peaceful modes of appeal would be efficacious over his companions, and there would be no one extant to take advantage of his non-resistance. The saint is therefore abstractly a higher type of man than the “strong man,” because he is adapted to the highest society conceivable, whether that society ever be concretely possible or not. 

My discussions of this passage have tended to stop here, with some reflections on James' will/right to believe, which pertains precisely in cases where there's not enough information to decide an existential question, but how you respond to it is of "momentous" significance to you - and might even contribute to the reality of what you commit to believing. In fact the passage here continues for two more sentences: 

The strong man would immediately tend by his presence to make that society deteriorate. It would become inferior in everything save in a certain kind of bellicose excitement, dear to men as they now are. (374-5) 

James moves quickly on from this, as the saints do, guided by the better possibilities, but reading this in March 2025 it's hard not to see a warning of an anti-millennium. Don't let the haters convince you that humanity is capable of less than you already know it to be capable of: be as saintly as you can. It might not bring about the millennium, just preventing utter societal collapse... or it might.

Terrorist behavior

The ICE abduction in broad daylight of an international PhD student in Boston yesterday is another case where the current administration commits lawless outrages in infernal bundles. No charges have been made against the student, but her visa has apparently been revoked - along with those of at least 300 others across the country, presumably with similarly thin justification. Even so, why was she arrested rather than just notified? Why were the ICE officials masked? Why was she moved to another state? (To a for-profit prison, no less!) This is the behavior of a police state, and part of a campaign to terrorize all international students. Free Rumeysa Ozturk!

Shower

Keeping hope alive

As the wasteland of the new regime opens out before us, Rebecca Solnit calls in the elders and ancestors to help us resist the false comforts of doomerism:

As Mariam Kaba said, "hope is a discipline." 

As Václav Havel said (well before he helped liberate his country from totalitarianism), “Hope is … is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something is worth doing, regardless of how it turns out.” 

“Part of our work as people who dare to believe we can save the world is to prepare our wills to withstand some losing, so that we may lose and still set out again, anyhow.” --Julian Aguon 

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” --James Baldwin

I needed this shot in the arm.

Unmet need

"Religion and Ecology" had a field trip to the Met today, to see "Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature" and take a stroll through the Asian art wing looking for Buddhist works, but, as often happens, many students weren't able to come. The museum is too far from school for students with classes immediately before and after ours to be able get there and back. I'd asked those whose schedule didn't allow going today to go on their own time, and everyone to share a few pictures with some thoughts online, but many probably won't go. How to make them want to? Here are the pictures, with comments, which I posted... 

I found myself going back and back to this early ink painting of Friedrich's - this is the lower right corner. I don't know how he manages to convey misty moonrise light so well...

Seeing this famous painting, familiar from many a book cover, in the context of Friedrich's other works, was quite revealing. In no other work is the human form so large or dominant. The human is lost or exalted or absorbed in nature in most of the others... making this a most unrepresentative work of his!

I think Friedrich's landscapes pulse with sentience, especially when uncluttered by explicitly Christian symbols! "Bushes in the snow (From the Dresden Heath II)" is one of a pair which flummoxed viewers when originally displayed for the depicted trees' unremarkableness, and one an otherwise enthusiastic reviewer of this exhibition found uncanny and threatening. Is nature so inhuman?

In Friedrich's painting of the Alpine peak "The Watzmann" (this is a detail), he's put the mountains he knows and loves in the foreground, with the mountain peak Friedrich never saw (but a friend had sketched for him) in the background. I'm charmed by his familiar trees, and intrigued by the intermediate mountain he conjures up...

The different meanings people projected onto this painting are fascinating. Is the forest friendly or, as some of the nationalistic interpretations after the defeat of Napoleon imagined, hostile, even murderous - at least toward invading Frenchmen?!

This is another wonder of atmosphere. It looks misty but if you get close, every detail of the tree's branches is there - as if you'd approached it through a fog. This is also my favorite of his explicitly Christian works, perhaps because the crucifix is not facing us but looks away into the distance...

This 14th century painting of Kannon (Avalokitesvara) in the Japanese collections is one of the few Buddhist works with natural details beyond the figures of enlightened anthropomorphic beings...

Closeup of the 6th century Chinese stele in that first hall of Chinese art, with glorious animated trees (which reminded me of Friedrich's "Bushes in the Snow" above). Or maybe it's a single double-stemmed tree, relating to the story of how the (male) disciple Sariputra took the form of a woman - that's them on both sides of the tree(s)!...

It's worth going to the Caspar David Friedrich exhibition just to see this amazing painting. This isn't all of it, but registers my surprised discovery that the human figure, perhaps a monk, is not alone before the sublimity of sea and storm and sky, but is kept company by birds.

Doesn't this make you want to go too, for a closer look of your own?

In nuce

Religious studies folks know that William James was thinking about religion long before and well after Varieties but it's still fun to what what seems like the kernel of that major project in his first public address on pragmatism, "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results," delivered in California in 1898.

The horror and heartbreak go on and on, and on, and on ...

Encore!

Went to the spring concert of the Stonewall Chorale last night, a 47-year old group (the nation's oldest gay and lesbian choir) which rehearses and performs in our church. The centerpiece of the program was Sarah Kirkland Snider's 2018 "Mass for the Endangered," to poems by Nathaniel Bellows. It was interesting music but the most joyous thing about the occasion was seeing our church space full to overflowing, a reminder that this precious place means so much to so many. I've said for years that part of its power comes from the many activities and communities it provides a sanctuary for, and it was good to experience this anew as construction makes much of the campus temporarily inaccessible. The Chorale managed just fine without a green room and the crowd seemed unperturbed at the porta-potties outside. Their director informed us that we'd soon have a beautiful new and more accessible entrance.

Don't ax

Beyond the anger and fear, it's hard not to be overwhelmed by sadness.

I sorrow for the so many affected by reckless vandalism of government programs and aid, domestic as well as international. But I'm sad also for those so consumed by resentment that they'd stop planting trees altogether just to take shade away from the most tree-poor neighborhoods in the land.

Maple blossoms!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flowers on the female red maple nearest my office window.

Crisis

The constitutional crisis provoked by the White House brigands' judge-defying extraordinary rendition of allegedly criminal migrants (we don't know who they are) under a cynically misapplied wartime measure from the 18th century and to a kind of prison plantation in another autocratically run country (!) (!!) (!!!) (!!!!) is upon us. Will anything change?

First blush

The Lang courtyard maples made good use of Spring break.

Ides of March

In Lumine Eius Videbimis Tenebris

On Thursday a letter was sent to the Interim President and Board of Columbia University by a cabal of federal agencies spelling out what changes they demand "as a precondition for formal negotiations regarding Columbia University's continued financial relationship with the United States government." (Last week, $400 million in government grants was suspended, with the promise that more was to come.) The demanded changes included draconian reforms in disciplinary policies, restrictive rules on student gatherings, a mask ban, investigations of students and student groups, adoption of a definition of antisemitism like that used in Executive Orders, and greater empowerment of campus law enforcement - all to ensure nothing like last year's protests recur. More, the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department was to be placed in "academic receivership for a minimum of five years" and a "plan for comprehensive admissions reform" was to be delivered. If these "critical next steps" were completed within seven days, "we hope to open a conversation about immediate and long-term structural reforms that will return Columbia to its original mission of innovative research and academic excellence."

Unsaid here is that Columbia should publicly consent to the extralegal detention and deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, one of the organizers of last year's campus encampments, and assist in the persecution of others involved - or lose even more federal support.

Where to begin? Perhaps the most obvious thing is that none of the changes mandated in the letter - which it isn't the business of the government to demand in the first place, certainly not for a private university - could possibly be accomplished on such short notice. Seven days? The senders have no knowledge of or respect for the way universities work. No "conversation" is envisioned. Instead this Diktat is of a piece with the bullying - explicitly designed to generate "trauma" and "existential terror" - the president has unleashed on government employees, allies, and all those he claims a divine mandate to abuse. 

Universities are part of "the enemy within."

Hasta la vista, CDMX!

Current events

The horror in el Norte makes some of these works particularly jarring.

Orozco, "La ley y la justicia" (1923-4), Colegio de San Ildefonso

Siqueiros, "El Diablo en la iglesia" (1947), Museo de Arte Moderna

 

Arturo Garcia Bustos, Zapata (1953), Museo de Arte Moderna

Museo de la Caricatura (2025)

Nubes de la Valle de México

Eugenio Landesio, Valle de México desde el cerro de Tanayo (1870), Museo Nacional de Arte; sunset view from our friend's ritzy Vrbo

Carne asada

This room-sized painting, once commanding an even larger altar, knocked me off my feet. CDMX native José Juárez (1617-c. 1662)'s "El martirio de san Lorenzo" (1650) isn't just crowded with figures, but the depths opening up behind the scene of St. Lawrence's grilling are crowded too - with multiple rows of angels against an angry sky, crowds standing around the martyred saint, and, at the painting's center, a gyre of little angels from a light-filled world beyond. 

The Museo Nacional de Arte helped me fill in the four centuries between the destruction of Tenochtitlan and the muralists of the early 20th century, Catholic piety persisting longer but anti-conquistador nationalism starting earlier than this common modernist narrative allows. Witness the Guadalupe-named locomotive at the shrine to the Virgen in Luis Coto (1830-99)'s "La colegiate de Guadelupe" (1859) and Leandro Izaguirre (1867-1941)'s "El suplicio de Cuauhtémoc" (1893).

Unrelated, but also a little crowded, pics of an arcade of religious figures behind the cathedral, a scene from a street selling dome-shaped gowns for quinceañeras and weddings, and a subway interchange.

Piedras

Jacaranda on lava from the Xitle volcano; Juan O'Gorman at UNAM