Northeast!

Some scenes from the recent vertiginous trip to China's northeast, more or less in sequence except this map from the museum dedicated to the neolithic Hongshan culture in Chifeng, which conveniently shows all the places we went in black, starting with Dalian at the bottom and winding up in Shenyang at the far right. ... There's a story to each pic. Ask! 

 

 

 

 

 

Key: Grand water display and a more mysterious coastal veil near 大连 Dalian, followed by tabletop barbecue, a friend's young son helping turn the skewers. Classic holy mountain scenery at 医巫闾山 Yiwulüshan and unique mountaintop outcroppings at 克什克腾世界地质公园阿斯哈图石林景区 Heshigten Global Geopark. Silkworms fried to perfection at a restaurant near Yiwulü. Roadrip into Inner Mongolia yielded signs in Mandarin and Mongolian, blades of giant windmills as long as a parking lot, and delicious dried stonefruits. Contrived jade dragon worship and big sand dunes at 玉龙沙湖 Yulong Sand Lake, a few hour north of 赤峰 Chifeng. An enteprising espresso-tuktuk with very good coffee at the entrance to Chifeng's 赤峰红山文化博物馆 Hongshan Culture Museum and a scene of the red mountain (=hongshan) which gives it its name. Models of pagodas at the 辽代历史文化博物馆 Liao Dynasty Cultural Museum (starting with the ancient 木塔 wooden pagoda south of Datong which we saw nine years ago), also in Chifeng, and a live v-logger in rented Qing dynasty kit holding forth among peonies at 喀喇沁王府, a Mongolian prince's mansion an hour closer to Beijing. One of a myriad fossils - this a bird-like feathered dinosaur named after Confucius - found in the Jehol Biota near 朝阳 Chaoyang, a town (at 3 million probably the smallest city we stayed in) with a fun non-chain coffee shop in an old housing complex and whose Liao dynasty pagoda is accompanied by a steady stream of circumabulators. (You might recognize it from the scale models in Chifeng.) A wall of apartment complexes in 沈阳 Shenyang and the somewhat clunky cherubs gracing the lush landscaping of the one we stayed in. Shenyang's 东陵 tomb complex for the founder of the Qing dynasty, which I remembered from my first Shenyang trip, has steles in Mongolian, Manchu, Tibetan, Arabic and Chinese and some happily overgrown roofs. A diaorama of worshipping Hongshan people from the 辽宁省博物馆 Liaoning Provincial Museum, and a fragment of a face that could be any of us any time. Just some of the offerings at a swanky seafood hotpot place, 小鱼当家. And one more view of the fossiliferous neolithic and Liao-shaped Northeast, from the seatback of our Korean Airlines Flight out. 

Antiphonal

Finished Year B of the College for Congregational Development - got a certificate to show for it and even a teeshirt! 

The back of the teeshirt mimics and laments the psalms we recited in Morning and Evening Prayer - psalms we said "antiphonally": verses alternate between the two halves of the room, but each verse is also divided in two (by the asterisk), in whose middle there is a pause of, they told us, about three heart beats. This means there's a longer gap between the two parts of each verse than between the end of one verse and the start of the next, intoned by other people. 

This is an ancient practice, and one I have long loved. A long time ago I taught students how to do it, telling them to think of it like a pendulum, with a slowing and change of direction at the end of each swing, a breathlike suspension in the middle of each verse, before it gathers speed for the next. I must have had a way of letting them know how long to pause because I don't remember the anxiety we all felt here at CCD, not wanting to be the first to break the silence! Or maybe I'm remembering the times I spent in Benedictine monasteries where monks accustomed to this practice (they do it seven times a day!) made the pauses feel completely organic. I relished each one, like a draught of cool clear water, and remembered that here too.

At one point today (maybe it was even during Morning Prayer) we were asked to reflect if there were things we'd done during our week together which might be of use in a wider context, and I thought of - antiphonal chanting. How valuable it would be, I thought, if people had the experience of being in this patterned rhythm together with others, including silence, and especially if they knew from it that every verse of scripture (maybe any verse!) has more in it than its words. It is but a container for deeper knowledge or presence we can't articulate, the opening of a door to this vaster sustaining reality. Might this stop us in our tracks at the moment of judgment, condemnation? 

It occurs to me now that this thought was consonant with the aspect of "Episcopal identity" I gravitated toward during an exercise earlier in the week (see the array of twelve in the second image here) when asked what we thought our distinctive gift to the wider society might be. I picked 

Loving the questions and helping others love the questions about God, the spiritual life and life itself.  

Discussing that with the two others who gathered there I found myself making a similar point: our society pushes us into rigid, premature and polarizing identifications (answers), estranging us from the deeper transformative mysteries of our lives and interrelatedness (questions). 

Obviously, engaging more people in antiphonal psalm recitation isn't the way to do this! (I'm not sure everyone at CCD is a fan either - witness the teeshirt.) But other things like periodic retreats, or weekly sabbaths, maybe even structured collective experiences of breathing together in silence, might be. Thank you, CCD!

Giving up the privilege of praying

 

 

 

First in a suite of "Prayers for Strangers in this Strange Land" in the new issue of Sojourners, responding to the clashes and clamor around the impending 250th birthday of the US. 

Formations

Barely returned from China and I'm at the second half of the College for Congregational Development, picking up from last July. The handwritten newsprint posters, held up by blue packing tape, the strangely compelling windows of the Thomas Berry retreat center, the endless iterations of chicken breast concoctions for dinners... Even unjetlagged it would be déjà vu all over again. Happily, about half of the participants are familiar from last year, too!

Last year's rather wrenching program was focused on individual differences/ "preferences" and the dynamics of interpersonal relations in organizations in the midst of change, including the infamous Myers-Briggs test, which - amazingly! - noone has so much as referred to in passing this time. There were a few sessions on the particular charism of religious organizations but they were few. This year's is about the congregations all of us participants were sent by and will return to, and full of fun provocations like these twelve aspects of "Episcopal identity," spread along the four walls of our meeting space for us to graze among and then congregate before where there seemed a particular resonance. 

We're still given nuggets from business schools but the excitement comes in sessions on Episcopal or Anglican "temperament," the Benedictine way of life which this temperament makes accessible to laity as well as clergy, and each community's concentric circles of "mature practitioners," "Sunday sacramentalists," "occasional attendees" and the "vicariously connected," each a site of grace.

The curriculum's overall understanding of congregational development is the development of congregations of all sizes, locations, and conditions into more faithful, healthy, and effective communities of faith - one size does not fit all! - and we're asked to share all manner of perspectives on the congregations which sent us. We also got to go on a field trip to consider how congregations are known from the outside. Our team went to the jewel box of the Church of the Transfiguration. 

The focus has been on what our trainers are calling "formation," the way an organization, old or new, develops and renews itself by asking "who are we? what are we here for? who is our neighbor, and how are we related to our neighbor?" "Formation" comes from the scary model which operates in the background of the whole project to move beyond the "church in decline" diagnosis of Mainline churches like the Episcopal Church, Alice Mann's "life cycle of organizations."

Here is it, with little Xs from each CCD participant marking where we would place our congregations. It's natural that organizations live and die, but we're about ways of having the fullest life before the inevitable through various practices of "ongoing renewal, revitalization, redevelopment and outside intervention." (One of our trainers described it as "brush your teeth or they'll fall out.") This involves embracing the different "sizes, locations, and conditions" of church communities, and welcoming the reality that, in our own time, the "vicariously connected" are among our most important interfaces with the wider society. The old model of church-going, and of churches' contributions to society, is obsolete.

I'm not able to do any of this, needless to say, without thinking about my life in other institutions going through existential challenges: colleges and universities, liberal arts and the humanities, and of course our own sick puppy of a school... topic for another day.

Time warp

I've been off the grid for the last fortnight, having that vertiginous off-the-chart experience travel in China always offers me. 

This year's trip is to the relatively untouristed northeast - 辽宁 Liaoning and 内蒙 Inner Mongolia. We started in 大连 Dalian, a just century-old city on the coast. In the mountains of 赤峰 Chifeng we encountered the 辽代 Liao Dynasty, which ruled northern China for two centuries a thousand years ago, soon trumped by the 红山文化 Hongshan Culture, dating back 5000-6500 years. But even human history feels recent here, as a visit to 朝阳 Chaoyang reminded us, where we saw fossils of dinosaurs, pterosaurs and early angiosperms named after every place we'd been!

Back to grim US and New School realities on Friday. 

Involuntary separations

What we learned at a Faculty Senate meeting this morning was made known to the world later in the day. Nineteen beloved faculty colleagues are being let go. (The article doesn't mention that sixty-eight staff members are as well.) Almost all of the faculty, along with another forty-odd who have accepted various "voluntary separation" offers, are from the liberal arts divisions of The New School.

Liberal arts enrollments are indeed an ongoing challenge, for us as in other universities, but more than a few of us think university leadership is taking the opportunity of budget-forced "work-force alignment" to fundamentally to turn the ship away from the "social research" which has long defined us. Hidden within the article is the reality that many liberal arts departments are being devastated.

A university without a history department is a different animal.

Bicenquinquagenary

What to call the upcoming 250th celebrations? 

The current regime (Robert Reich argues we shouldn't defile words like "administration," "president" or even "government" to describe these lawless brigands, but "regime" is OK) has found ways to make even "1776" and "250" toxic (taxpayer-funded slush fund for paramilitary thugs? monstrous arch of vanity?), confirming their unworthiness of the history they claim to embody. What can we say worthy of that history?

Although decades of reconstruction await, I think the rest of us will muddle through. I'm heartened by Jill Lepore's wry perspective on the 1976 bicentennial ("by almost any measure, 2026 is a goat rodeo") and Heather Cox Richardson's just-unveiled "250 to 250" project, among other interventions. This history, as Richardson reminds us, is ours. 

But what to call the whole thing? The official moniker "semiquincentennial" - half of five hundred - gives me thousand year Reich vibes. A long view of history suggests that two hundred fifty years is a pretty impressive achievement. Most empires don't last that long, let alone longer. Invoking five hundred years sounds grandiose and presumptuous. (Most trees don't live nearly that long, for instance.) 

I'll settle for bicenquinquagenary (a term I encountered first at Princeton's 250th in 1996). If that sounds a little wobbly and weird, so much the better. At its best, the United States of America has always been a little loopy and piety-challenging.

Pea tangle

Camera lucida

Just sun and a tree dancing this morning. Eat your heart out, Man Ray! (But don't ask me why this magnolia, alone among the trees along West 12th St., freed itself of the sharp edges of every other's shadows.)

New School upon New School!

The New School aged a quarter century in a day! At the university's 90th commencement at the Barclay Center in Brooklyn today, our president referred to ours as a 130-year-old institution. A new story of the New!

It makes sense to start our institutional storytelling with the origins, 130 years ago, of the oldest part of the present institution - the pioneering school of fine and eventually applied art much later (1942) renamed Parsons School of Design. Parsons was saved from collapse by the briefly solvent New School in 1970, before rapidly becoming the most successful and lucrative component of the ensuing hybrid university, but what was happening there before 1970 fits awkwardly if at all into received New School stories. 

It would be good to weave our stories together better. Each is a bit of a shaggy dog story, though. What William Merritt Chase concocted in 1896 is nothing like what the school now named Parsons was to become. And of course the same could be said for the New School for Social Research, started in 1919, which my co-historian J and I have long argued spent a century trying (ultimately unsuccessfully) not to be a university. For its part the serendipitous 1970 merger - a surprise to both parties - only started to make any kind of sense in the last twenty years.

So it's passing strange to think that proto-Parsons was in some sense New School before New School was! It's the sort of thing folks say when they marry into families, but nevertheless more than a little odd. 

When The New School (the one kicked off in 1919) celebrated its centennial seven years ago, we saw first efforts really to combine the two stories. (You'll recall I found that no comparable efforts were made in storytelling around New School's 75th or Parsons' own centennial in 1995 and 1996.) These recent efforts mainly took the form - familiar, too, from marriages - of suggesting that TNS and PSD were meant for each other. The long years spent on their own - half a century for one, three-quarters of one for the other - were a kind of wandering in search of the unexpected partner who was destined to complete them. It was forced but the giddy conventions of centennial celebrations excused it.

If one hundred and thirty, it's funny to think that The New School is in fact a nineteenth-century institution! But it's less fun to think about these differently nested stories at a time when the Graduate Faculty, the distinctive key to The New School for a long time (though only starting in 1934, and never exclusively), seems about to be restructured nearly out of existence. I'm not quite ready to imagine that The New School existed in some nascent way before the New Schools of the twentieth century - and might somehow continue after them, too.

National rededication

The Christianist nationalists are staging a jamboree on the National Mall today to "rededicate" the United States to their God. I feel, not to be frivolous, like the indigenous Taino must have felt when Columbus claimed to claim their land for his God and the king who had sent him. As many of us learned from Sylvia Wynter, one Taino, invited to endorse the new regime, is reported to have said "The Pope must have been drunk, the king of Castile a madman!" I want to say, too: this isn't theirs, isn't theirs to take, and the God whom they claim entitles them to is not the true God!

But of course it's more complicated, especially for someone descended from Columbus', not the Tainos' world. 

The easy thing would just be to say - and with justification - that the story the Christianist nationalists are telling about the Founders 250 years ago is untrue. The Founders, though some were inspired by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, were part of an imperial European Christian world uninterested in other cultures. But they did not dedicate their independence to the Christian God, and certainly not to an Evangelical one who hadn't even been invented yet. Most of the thirteen colonies had their own established church, but the federation of rebelling colonies who called themselves the "united States" was to establish none. The First Amendment made explicit what was implicit about religion in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

That said, the Founders didn't have the pluralistic religious panorama that the United States has become in mind, either. (I've been wanting to find a way to say this for a while.) We need to tell a story that admits and embraces growth, maybe one that shows how, over time, the US comes more fully to embody its founding ideals, "a more perfect union." A ship, one might quip, founders if it doesn't move. (The Catholic in me says that the Protestantism of many Christianists makes them unable or unwilling even to imagine such development.) 

But as I contemplate what's being said on the Mall, I balk at the very framing. How dare we start the story we tell - however the last two and a half centuries are narrated - in 1776, as if if nothing preceded it? That's the drunk madness of the Doctrine of Discovery/terra nullius Wynter's Taino named. The story of the US unfolded on stolen land, building wealth and clearing swamps and forests with stolen labor. And it was never the only story unfolding here, nor itself a single story.

What story should one then tell? As a partisan of democracy (unlike those on the Mall whose false God enjoins them to subvert it in a great spiritual war), I'd like to say that the Founders stumbled on something remarkable and of broader significance than they could have imagined - the idea of a political community in which everyone matters. If everyone really has a voice, who knows what glories might emerge from their collaboration? (This is the dream the Equator editors see the present regime as having fatally dashed.) And what possibilities of collaboration, across and within every kind of difference, it opens up!

Hold the Norman Rockwell images: The telling of this story can't abstract from the story of a hemisphere ravaged by the very unequal "Columbian exchange," the centuries-long enslavement of people from Africa (and indigenous people too), and the religion of "whiteness" which sanctioned them. The US became the dominant world power we still fitfully are not because of divine blessing but because of the cushion of two oceans around land taken from peoples decimated by our diseases. 

What about the blessings of liberty? Is it self-delusion to think that democracy may have played some part in the success of the US? The "us" of enfranchized citizens always projected an excluded "them," it is true. Is it vainglory nevertheless to think democracy is still the best way of naming, minimizing, maybe even overcoming these exclusions? If not the best or only, a way? This wouldn’t erase the crimes of the founding and the expanding and their long shadows, but might it redeem them?  

"Redeeming" - that’s Christian language. Do I dare say anything to all this as a Christian? (Not because Christians have a privileged say here - those who say so are those I'm calling "Christianist" - but because I am an American and a Christian, or strive to be.) 

As a white Christian I can say one must begin with repentance, that our chances for transformation - as individuals or communities - are unmerited and yet real. Taking these chances may be a way to begin atoning for this history of plunder and presumption. But I wouldn’t have the effrontery to tell a non-white Christian to think this way. 

As a Christian I feel I should say that we are called and sent to the lands of others to recognize them, as we have been recognized, as all of us children of God. Christianity may not be the only or best way to do this; arguably the potential for it within Christian culture was developed only through encounter with other traditions. Christians (as I've learned from Willie James Jennings) should remember we are guests in the story of redemption, naturalized to it, not native. And we were invited into the covenant community along with the whole of humanity. There is no subset of humans for whom there is a special place, most certainly no special nation. Christianity most be universal or it is not Christian. 

What story can a Christian tell about the experiment launched by the imperfect and unrepresentative white men gathered in Philadelphia 250 years ago? It can tell that despite human imperfection religious liberty is a good thing, that diversity of every kind is a gift that keeps giving, that the shape of the human story isn’t fixed or finalized. The American way isn't the only or necessarily the best way of realizing all this but enough of it may serve toward this end to merit continuing the experiment, learning to do it better. (Indigenous sovereignty now, reparations for enslavement, and fearless history for all!) 

The American flag was cut from cloth of a Christian civilization but it flies for all God’s children, of all faiths and none. If it flies only for some, it doesn't deserve to fly at all. 

An "unamerican" thought? If I spoke those words in the Mall, and the Founders had to choose which words spoken on the Mall today were truest to their better natures, I hope they'd endorse mine.

Pins and needles

The academic year's over. Someone's taken down all the flyers for events and opportunities on campus and off; student research projects, senate candidacies, casting calls and recitals; faculty plugs for fall classes that weren't filling. Now we wait to see who gets to be part of the school's next chapter.

Unguarded

Today was a good New School day. 

I had lunch with the TAs from the just-completed iteration of "After Religion" (in the dappled light of the courtyard maples, despite the barriers), happy to learn how the experience has been useful for them. Before and after that, I had zoom interviews with potential TAs for next year's iteration, and, wow, what a cavalcade of talent - and in areas entirely different from this year's two stars. It's exciting to think about how the course will be reshaped in consultation with a new crew. (Choosing just four of the ten I spoke to won't be easy.)

There's something more than usually bittersweet about perching between past and future at this end-of-the-schoolyear moment, since so much is uncertain about next year. Several of the potential TAs face the loss of an advisor or even their school. And who knows what world we'll be teaching in (if we're still there) in January 2027?! Scare quotes-framed though it is, it feels a little like cheating on the pain of the present moment to make even provisional plans for next year.

But I sure do hope The New School makes it through, and as much like the fabulous if flawed beast that it has been as possible. I felt that in the worlds of curiosity and commitment of these graduate students, and again when I rounded out my day with a visit to the senior show in the BFA Fine Arts program, which included work by two of the "After Religion" students. The array of gifts on display was overwhelming! 

This picture isn't from that show, but from one I found my way in accidentally: MFA Textiles. These works are (I think) part of a project of found materials called "Fibres of Thought" by one Vidushi Parashar, whose description includes the words:

In a world that's attracting us to the constant chatter and noise, this project focuses on the tender mutation that one goes through to release the feeling of overstimulation. ... The aim is to let each form ask people to loosen their grip. To soften. To laugh. To linger. To remember what it means to be unguarded. I am interested in what happens when we are disarmed by delight. When laughter opens the body. When something playful can hold something devastating. When wonder becomes a method of survival.

How much we give each other in this school...!!

Shallows of MAGA

May I state the obvious? Even if the project weren't being executed poorly and way over budget by unqualified people hired without proper process, the prez' plan to paint DC's Reflecting Pool "American flag blue" emblematizes the cheap grace his vision of America offers. This pool won't reflect anything. His type think nothing like that is needed. The sky, the world, transcendence, even reality? We're "great" without you.

S'pore

An old school friend, living in Singapore for the past two decades, came to New York for business and pleasure. She brought us some tea (decaf!) from a fancy tea company based in Singapore, and with it a glimpse of a totally different world, a Eurasian geography in which the Atlantic world barely figures.

我慢

At the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine this morning, the annual Asian American Pacific Islander Celebration Service was dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the closing of the last Japanese American internment camp, Tule Lake. 

In his sermon, the Reverent Canon John Kitagawa, whose family were imprisoned at Tule Lake, emphasized that the danger to non-white and foreign-born Americans persists, and in a time of resurgent white supremacism offered a Japanese word for the struggle to bend the arc of history toward justice: 我慢 gaman. Rooted in Zen Buddhism, he told us, gaman is patient persistence in enduring the apparently unbearable, persevering without losing one's dignity or commitment to a better way.

This Japanese gift was offered in a service which included music sung in Malayalam, and Prayers of the People offered in English, Shanghainese, Spanish, Tagalog, Japanese, Cantonese, Malayalam and Korean. Written for the occasion by Deacon Elis Lui (the bulletin has just the English), they're worth reading, though you might find yourself weeping if you do, as I did. Now imagine hearing each in someone's ancestral language, a polyglot chorus united in mutual care.

Only in America, I thought to myself, with fierce gratitude. And in the Church? 絶望せずに我慢しましょう。

White supremacy rears its head

It took just a week for the SCOTUS conservative majority's claim that the Voting Rights Act was no longer needed to be proven wrong. 

Tennessee Republicans' gerrymander to procure the final of the state's nine Congressional seats for their party by carving up Memphis winkingly claims merely to be nakedly political, and so SCOTUS-approved. Of course a third of the electorate voted for Kamala Harris and a Democratic candidate for Senate in 2024... but that's no reason why a gerrymandered state legislature can't engineer a 100% Republican delegation to Washington, surely? That's just politics! 

Except it's not. Such transparently anti-democratic theft of votes is pure White Supremacy. The Republicans elected in gerrymandered districts don't bat an eyelid at silencing the Democrats in their state, because they've been raised to believe that not all citizens' votes should matter, even as they claim representation based on census counts including those they disenfranchise. The template for this theft of others' voice is slavery and its Jim Crow successors, where not only the voice but the labor and freedom of African Americans were systematically stolen.

Did the SCOTUS majority consider that their green-lighting of "merely political" vote-rigging might entrench White minority rule? Or do they, too, think that it wouldn't really be minority rule, since those robbed of their votes should know their place as second-class citizens in a White "Christian" America? Democracy for some is not democracy.