Boycott

I'm not sure how many of us participated in this today (I bought a loaf of bread at the Green Market) but it felt good to be doing something. The at once brazen and sneaky way our government and the ways of life government protects are being taken from us make it hard to respond.

Myriad nature

The torrent of words our class free-associated with "ecology" on Tuesday furnished the platform for today's discussion of the promise of religious naturalism. I'm always warning against the false closure offered by definitions, and often solicit such whiteboards full of terms from students, parsing what we come up with together for richer, perhaps conflicting understandings hidden behind apparently self-explanatory terms. These give a sense of finality, too, though - many students take pictures of the sprawl on the board, but I'd be surprised if anyone ever looked at them again. 

I'm trying to do more with them "Religion and Ecology." A few weeks ago, we generated a spray of words around "religion" initially strikingly unconnected by the texts we'd been discussing at the end of one class, and in the next I had students read through them again and select among them to write out working definitions of their own.

This time, I also reproduced the word cloud on a handout. The instructions were to go through the whole list and circle each word which seemed applicable to "nature," and then go through them all again and underline each which seemed to relate to "human." It was an attempt to shoot the moon on the self-defeating question "what is the human relationship to nature?" - self-defeating because the very formulation presents the two as unrelated, separable. This proved a little unwieldy in practice - despite my instructions most went through weighing each word for leaning one way or the other - but it led to a fruitful discussion. Shouldn't every underlined word also have been circled? Some of the more negative, or more conceptual things seemed to some students only "human," but aren't we part of nature? And if so, aren't even our most irritating and ecologically destructive traits natural? This seems obviously true in general but sticks in the craw when you have to make it particular through all these terms.

Students kept wanting to absolve nature of responsibility through claims that "only humans" were one way or the other, at first negative but then more general: self-aware, language-using, tool-using, aware of death, cultural... I pushed back each time, pointing to recent findings in animal and even plant studies and then asking, again and again, "does it matter if it's not only us?" 

Religious naturalism is in one sense the view that everything human is, of course, natural, and so, of course, must the world of our religions be. Even the most elaborate conceptions of a supernatural reality are natural phenomena! My accounts of religious naturalism usually stop there. (It's plenty!) But in the context of today's evocation of the wisdom and play, the grieving and language, the art and awareness of our other-than-human kin, I experienced in a new way what might count as religious about this view. Are not religious feelings like awe, wonder, humility, participation, gratitude ... appropriate responses to it? 

What about vocation? We may not be the only ones to be/do XYZ; put differently, there may be more than the human way of being/doing XYZ. Thinking we should be defined by what we alone are or can do replicates the biblical idea that we are not part of nature but made in the image of something beyond it. (There are analogs in other traditions.) But even if there were things exclusive to us, why should they be the most important thing about us? What if we understood our ways of being and doing as part of the unfolding creativity of what Carol Wayne White calls "myriad nature"? What if we were and did them with this understanding, one voice in a glorious cosmic chorus?

But today was also a Thursday, and since this iteration of "Religion and Ecology" focuses on "Buddhist perspectives," that means we ended with a meditation. Today's was a "metta" meditation led by Sharon Salzberg, which quietly widens the circle of care (may ___ be free from danger, ... be happy, ... be healthy, ...live with ease) from the self to humans known and less well known and then to "all beings." At the end I invited the students to flip over our handout and spend five minutes writing whatever came to mind. The concentrated silence was lovely.

When we gather again next week we'll see what this all added up to.

Semi-mythical

I'm chuffed to have a cameo in this project from a class which invited students to invent some myths about the Lang courtyard.

Embrace

q

After another extended brainstorm of terms - this time words they associated with "ecology" - the Religion & Ecology class decided to take advantage of the warmer weather for a first visit with our kin in the courtyard below. What shall we do down there, I asked? "Hug them!"

Unqualified threat

Not to bum anyone out, but the cavalcade of malevolent thugs being given high government positions are a problem that's not going to go away. The press speaks of rewarding "loyalty" over "competence" but it strikes me the obvious lack of qualifications is part of the point. 

This is not just because our invincibly ignorant coup leader distrusts experts or because he likes breaking things, though that's clearly the case too. Victor Shih's research on the political weakness of authoritarianism helps me recognize something else at work. By appointing people to positions they would never deserve to hold, he creates dependents. They've never had it so good, nor have any chance of having it even half as good without him. It works even better if everyone knows their main qualification is his favor. 

But the authoritarian leader surrounds himself with incompetents for another reason, too. Capricious and unscrupulous as he is, he's ever anxious about being replaced, and so wants to make sure he has no viable challengers. When an incompetent becomes competent, he is purged. 

Why bother to point this out? To have realistic expectations about what awaits us.

Life preservers

So glad this morning to find this flag flying at church. This was timely and also necessary. The current regime's vicious attempt to erase trans people from public life led the National Park Service, which maintains the website of the National Register of Historic Places, to replace "LGBT" and "LGBTQ" with the stunted "LGB" across its pages - including the page dedicated to our church. We will not be party to this cruel inhumanity, and are indeed called by our faith to denounce it. Nobody, certainly not a would-be king who thinks he can name and remake reality by fiat, can erase the divine image in every human being. Trans people are among the most authentic people I have ever known, and the attempt to deny their very existence bespeaks a dangerous fear of the reality of our embodiment and our diversity. A friend quipped: you can't do imago dei without dei.

By coincidence, today's Gospel reading included the words which inspired Bishop Budde's appeal to the newly inaugurated president last month: "Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful" (Luke 6:36). They come after a formulation of the golden rule: 

Jesus said, “I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you. ..." (Luke 27-30) 

This is a hard teaching, especially in a time of hatred, curses and abuse, and our preacher (a seminarian from Union Theological Seminary) reminded us that Jesus' words do not say that injustice is not injustice or not to be fought. Rather, they explain that the only way to bring an end to hatred is through love.

The Old Testament reading offered an example of such forgiving love in Joseph (he of the amazing technicolor dreamcoat), whom his jealous brothers had sold into slavery, now an advisor to the Pharaoh. As he reveals himself to them when they come to Egypt pleading for help as their land is in famine, he says

He said, “I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And now do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life. For the famine has been in the land these two years; and there are five more years in which there will be neither plowing nor harvest. God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors...." (Gen 45:4-7)

I'd not heard, or noticed, this as an illustration of the call to love those who persecute us but it's a doozy. The ultimate aim must be not just justice but reconciliation. With those who would define us out of existence! Hard as it is even to imagine, may such a day come soon... But this passage was also a sobering reminder that our troubles have only begun: "there are five more years of famine to come" (45:11).  

How important, in such times as these, are communities like this one, affirming the God-given dignity of all God's creations, and giving us a place from which to live that affirmation. 

Just asking

We took a breather from James' Varieties today to consider the proposed update in David B. Yaden and Andrew Newberg's Varieties of Spiritual Experience: 21st Century Research and Perspectives. Professing to revive and renew James' "phenomenologically sensitive," "philosophically sensible" and "scientifically oriented" approach to the psychology of religion (8-9), Yaden and Newberg synthesize a century's worth of work and report the results of their own psychometric work building on it. 

Our class moved toward trying their survey ourselves, but started with some of the research James' book worked from, findings assembled by James' student Edwin Starbuck for his Psychology of Religion. People love writing about themselves, especially when told they need not share what they wrote, so we first spent time answering a subset of six of Starbuck's questions which appears in Varieties (above). I thought the questions pretty 19th century but the students were game. Later learning about the broader set of "autobiographical" questions Starbucks' questionnaires inquired about, they were even more intrigued. If 19th century, this was the formula for a novel - about you!

A few students recalled having seen the set of six questions in James Varieties itself but none remembered that it was in a place where James quotes a robustly "healthy-minded" person cheerily responding "nothing," "no," "none" to most of them! 

A good moment to reinforce the provocation of James' counting such a view as "religious." We realized how Starbuck and James had managed, despite the Christian language shaping of their work, to offer questions open and open-ended enough to allow for a wide variety of experiences to reveal themselves in response.

It was time for the online survey, called Varieties Corpus. Everyone enjoys an online poll but this one (which takes about thirty minutes) rankled, if perhaps in fruitful ways. It opens by asking participants to describe a powerful experience in their own words ("phenomenologically sensitive") but then asks participants a barrage of questions about that experience in terms gleaned from past iterations of their survey, and over and over again in different positive and negative formulations.

It was hard not to feel badgered. Really, like any such device, it's wittingly or unwittingly an education in the terms the researchers think important. Yaden and Newberg claim to have discovered six different varieties of spiritual experience: unity, divinity [or numinous], revelatory, synchronicity, paranormal and aesthetic. But maybe these are terms worth adding to our autobiographies? Near the end the survey asks participants are asked to count the number of times they've had each.

Quantitative research, even "phenomenologically sensitive," ick! It all left us ready to return to James's 19th century characters - we left his "sick souls" twisting in the wind this week, though we know we'll find "conversion" rescuing many of them next week - but alert in a new way to the stakes of this line of inquiry. The "science of religions" language is James'. Science of what, for what?

Punting on the religious questions (is any of it, well, real?) in their "philosophically sensible" agnosticism, Yaden and Newberg are interested in the therapeutic applications of their findings - as part of "positive psychology." James' concerns seem to have been more personally existential, but also more curious about what "religious" experiences reveal about the often painfully pluralistic universe of which we're a part.

Progressing

Had a chance to return to New School history today, with my partner in crime J. Our host was the graduate faculty, whose place at the center of standard histories was part of what inspired J and me to enrich and complicate these narratives, but the audience included many people from other parts of the university. 

As you can imagine, our response to the question we were given, "How progressive is The New School," was, well, nuanced. 'Progressive' meant different things at different times, and it's not clear what it means today, though it's the term we revert to over and over in describing our values, our pedagogy, as well as in our regular episodes of protest and critique: "Isn't The New School supposed to be a progressive place?" &c. 

We've been asked a similar question before: "What does it mean to be a progressive university?" That was (egad) nine years ago, part of Staff Development Day, and it was fun to revisit what we said there and update it for 2025 and a different audience. Surveying The New School's first century we enumerated values articulated along our winding way, from commitment to the new to professionalization to pluralism to adult education to various kinds of liberalism and critique, and then opened the floor for a discussion of what our future might hold.

The future's too far away, though: the threats to our very existence as a university, not to mention a "progressive" one, are too present right now. Besides, the president was there, and people rightly wanted to hear from him how the university would protect its community against government attacks (and how to define that community), who its allies were in this work, what role it might have in being again, to borrow the name of the most recent book about The New School, a light in dark times.

It seemed like an inopportune time to bring in historical nuance and contingency. Wouldn't it be better if we could agree on what we're about, have been about, ought to be about? Was this really the time to complicate our sense of a clear identity, to puncture the myth that we've always been the same "progressive" thing? In less fraught times, people welcome the serendipity, the fragility, the sense that what we're about is something people have been challenging and refining all along. It also fits the president's sense that the unique space universities offer is precisely a space for research, debate, contestation and innovation. But right now?

As ever, I learned things from this new context and conversation. I was reminded by this audience that the university is the most international in the country (something easy to forget at my college, the least international part). As we try to articulate our values and protect our communities we should know that we have companions in universities not only all over the city and country but all around the world, many of whom know how to deal with interfering governments. 

But revisiting our history I was also reminded that The New School was once a place committed broadly to the education of adults, within but also beyond its walls. As we push back against a regime based on cynical lies (including lies about universities), we might have a role to play promoting lifelong learning as a common good, a way to rebuild a divided nation, a way back to the joy of living in truth with others in a grand democratic experiment...

Process this!

I've tasked students in "Religion and Ecology" to kick off each Tuesday class session with an account of what we got up the week before. They work in pairs, and each presentation has a different way of summarizing and synthesizing. Today's presenters organized their thoughts on something called a Miro board (which was a little larger than this when projects but not enough to read the text), coding our different texts by color. The purple and orange boxes are labeled "process" and the light blue box at far tight was our group walking meditation.

Winter scene

Blue sky (and woods and newly fallen snow)!

Public service

Vermont digs out from a heavy snowstorm - those orange things are plow trucks, supplemented by countless smaller ones. Good thing the plows aren't part of the federal government, whose plows are being systematically disabled by the private helicopter class.

Glazed

Spending the weekend at a little Airbnb in Vermont. We wanted a blast of winter and we're getting it!

Timing

It would be a busy semester even without the carnage of the old-new presidential regime, tearing at the foundations of our world. But somehow I'm managing to keep things on track, generating welcoming learning communities in which students are making friends and engaging challenging ideas - part of "carrying on" as resistance to chaos and paralysis. As I stagger to the end of the week I'm particularly pleased with the way I was able to end the last two.

The week had started with reading some classic texts in "Religion and Ecology": Lynn White's field-creating 1967 essay on the religious origins of the ecological crisis, and one of the texts he refers to, the creation narrative in Genesis 1 - home of the "dominion clause" which, White argues, in western Christianity formed the uniquely anthropocentric civilization despoiling our planet. 

Then, in "After Religion," came the travails of secularism, an embattled ideal in need of challenging and perhaps also championing. Heady stuff; I might share some of the class's ideas with you next week.

Let me say a little more about the second session of "Religion and Ecology." Following up on Genesis 1 we read the alternate (actually older) creation narrative of Genesis 2, then contrasted both with the cosmology of the Skywoman story with which Robin Wall Kimmerer starts Braiding Sweetgrass. Despite glaring differences, there was no relation - let along community - recognized among the human and other than human in either Genesis. Then we rubbed it in more with a reading of Genesis 3 - the banishment from Eden - and a reread of Kimmerer's words about the fateful encounter of the "offspring of Skywoman and the children of Eve," which we read two weeks ago.

On one side of the world were people whose relationship with the living world was shaped by Skywoman, who created a garden for the well-being of all. On the other side was another woman with a garden and a tree. But for tasting its fruit, she was banished from the garden and the gates clanged shut behind her. That mother of men was made to wander in the wilderness and earn her bread by the sweat of her brow, not by filling her mouth with the sweet juicy fruits that bend the branches low. In order to eat, she was instructed to subdue the wilderness into which she was cast. 

Same species, same earth, different stories. Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness. One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven.

We'd read this together before; now we get it, the class said! We turned then to Kimmerer's "grammar of animacy," the urgent need to learn to recognize all the other than human peoples around us, who offer us wisdom and relation - which might start with the use of a new pronoun, ki.

All of this, amazingly, we did in 75 minutes, and class is 100. For the balance of class I led the group in a Thich Nhat Hanh-inspired silent group walking meditation around the block. I'd promised them both a field trip and meditation, and this wasn't what they were expecting, so I thought I might as well throw ki into it too. Mind your walking slo-o-o-owly, I said, and connect with the other than human kin along the way. We'll take 20 minutes, and I'll make sure we finish on time by setting my timer for 15 minutes: you can silence your phones. At 15 minutes the class had settled a little restlessly into the ultra-slow pace I'd set (from the rear) and we'd reached only halfway around the block! It felt like crazy speeding up returning to the normal pace which delivered us back at school at exactly 3:40. That was amazing, said one student, perhaps a little insincerely. The amazing thing, I responded, is that you could do this around any block, any time. 

I stuck the landing for the James' Varieties class today, too. We had a friendly and wide-ranging discussion of the "sick soul," and the profound sense of the cruelty and meaninglessness of the world which James argues some of these "religious pessimist" are "congenitally fated" to dwell on. This class professes to be more "healthy-minded" than others I've guided through this book, and many thought the agonies of the sick souls overwrought. "Don't ruin it for it for everyone," responded one in half-jest to Tolstoy's account of the bottom falling out of his outwardly successful life. 

But James wants us to face the fact that anyone's life could come unmoored due to forces beyond our control. So in the class' last minutes I had someone read aloud the text James put in a footnote to the chapter's final paragraph, a terrifying account of a group walking at night (presumably in India) whose leader was suddenly dragged away by a tiger. The rush of the animal, and the crush of the poor victim's bones in his mouth, and his last cry of distress, ‘Ho hai!’ involuntarily reëchoed by all of us, was over in three seconds. The shell-shocked survivors found themselves on the ground, we heard, initially unable to move for fright, and only a whisper of the same ‘Ho hai!’ was heard from us. Eventually, still stunned, they were able to sprint to safety, but were surely tiger-haunted for the rest of their days. How's that for the precarity of good fortune? 

Class was in its final minute. "Ho hai," I said. "See you next week." 

I'm pleased with the elegance of these class endings, but really I'm happy that in this fourth week of the semester the class communities feel like they have become enough of a reality that I can throw such disconcerting things at them in parting. They know we'll be together again next week. And, I hope, they feel - from the precise timing of the class finales - that I can be trusted to keep these spaces safe for abiding with the big, hard questions together.

TQ

In case you hadn't heard: there'd be no Stonewall without the TQ.

Reality gulf

Gosh how embarrassing. The craven sell-out to the mad king only gets worse when you learn it's only American users of google.maps who see this. Apparently Mexican users see the familiar Golfo de Mexico, and everyone else sees both. Is ours the only one so obviously rigged?

Sermons in stone

This afternoon sunlight bounced off the window of a building across the courtyard to spotlight some of the beloved rocks in my office. Alps, Sangre de Cristos, Sierras and Himalayas radiated together.

Add snow to witch hazel for jewel-like magic!

Winter lights

Solitary motorcycle, doubtless a delivery, braves newly fallen snow.

Witch hazel!

That smell of burning

If I said the sense of belonging has been historically under appreciated by biased political activists, I’d be dinged six times by the maniacal purge of socially engaged research in the NSF and federal agencies. Other terms the thought police would like to commit to the fire:

• activism
• activists
• advocacy
• advocate
• advocates
• barrier
• barriers
• biased
• biased toward
• biases
• biases towards
• bipoc
• black and latinx
• community diversity
• community equity
• cultural differences
• cultural heritage
• culturally responsive
• disabilities
• disability
• discriminated
• discrimination
• discriminatory
• diverse backgrounds
• diverse communities
• diverse community
• diverse group
• diverse groups
• diversified
• diversify
• diversifying
• diversity and inclusion
• diversity equity
• enhance the diversity
• enhancing diversity
• equal opportunity
• equality
• equitable
• equity
• ethnicity
• excluded
• female
• females
• fostering inclusivity
• gender
• gender diversity
• genders
• hate speech
• hispanic minority
• historically
• implicit bias
• implicit biases
• inclusion
• inclusive
• inclusiveness
• inclusivity
• increase diversity
• increase the diversity
• indigenous community
• inequalities
• inequality
• inequitable
• inequities
• institutional
• lgbt
• marginalize
• marginalized
• minorities
• minority
• multicultural
• polarization
• political
• prejudice
• privileges
• promoting diversity
• race and ethnicity
• racial
• racial diversity
• racial inequality
• racial justice
• racially
• racism
• sense of belonging
• sexual preferences
• social justice
• sociocultural
• socioeconomic
• status
• stereotypes
• systemic
• trauma
• under appreciated
• under represented
• under served
• underrepresentation
• underrepresented
• underserved
• undervalued
• victim
• women
• women and underrepresented