Processing the semester

The semester, and the academic year, are over! Last bits of work are straggling in, but my classes have met for the last time - "Performing the Problem of Suffering" on Wednesday, "Exploring Religious Ethics" and "Lived Religion in New York" on Thursday. All three ended with final reflections, an ungraded synthesis which I encourage students to do in any genre which matters to them, so I'm awash with reports and visualizations of learning and arrival. These range from the slightly ridiculous - like the hand-drawn booklet from which the image above hails - to the sublime, like this Rothkoish muslin for the ethics class.

The student first dyed the whole thing yellow, then the lower portion purple (twice), to represent the struggle of ethical awareness and action - the yellow is saintly, the purple (my camera didn't capture the depth of it) human weakness and evil. It was part of the plan that eye level should be grey. Serendipitous was that the limit of the purple took on the shape of misty mountains - there's even a haze of green. Profound was the way it represented both the difficulty of ethics (it appears mostly purple, the yellow unattainable) and the underlying goodness of human nature (it's all yellow)... To know that you need to know how it was made. That's fitting, too, for process-intentional seminar pedagogy. 

Slice of life

"Lived Religion in New York City" ended with some creative syntheses, and then with various ways of relating the four key terms we came up with Tuesday (public, choice, in-between/journey, neighborhoods). At one o'clock, as per plan, we arrived at the upper right hand corner: in the in-between of public spaces and neighborhoods, choices feed journeys, which make further choices possible, in turn reshaping both neighborhoods and public life. It's not rocket science! I declared that the spiral looked like pizza - and we headed outside for a farewell slice.

Next-to-last

Scenes from the penultimate day of classes! Each contains a story.

Second one first: this is how "Lived Religion in New York" worked out its response to the project on religion in Shanghai with which we began. The Shanghai team had found four categories helpful for telling the story of religion in a city presumed secular: landmarks, compounds, privacy, waterways. As we started the semester we expected something similar for New York. What we've come up with instead is an interestingly contrasting story. We start in once relatively homogeneous ethnic neighborhoods, whose ways and means spill over into the public (to the surprise and consternation of those who think New York paradigmatically secular), which everyone passes through as they journey in-between places... all of which provides a context, materials and acceptance of individual religious/spiritual choice. This literally came together in the last 5 minutes of class! I'm excited to see how it plays out in our sharing of final reflections on Thursday. The lead-up to our choice of four terms will have given them a lot of material to work with.

The former needs a little more explanation. Our final class text is Hsiao-Lan Hu's This-worldly Nibbana (a text you've heard about before). Hu provides an ingenious, and profound, reading of non-Self by way of dependent co-arising, cannily using Judith Butler's ideas of "performativity" and "sedimentation" to suggest that what we take to be our Selves are in fact the congealing of contingent cultural practices of body, language and values which constitute - and are constituted by - us. People find their way to identifying with a gender because they have been taught to perform, and continue to perform, culturally specific ways of being gendered. As an example, Hu mentions the different ways little boys and little girls are taught to move their bodies in space, the former encouraged to stretch their limbs about, the latter to keep them close, with all manner of implications for how they understand and comport themselves in the future. Becoming aware of this allows one to start resisting it, but unlearning the very way we inhabit our bodies is an uphill task.

I decided to illustrate Hu's point about culturally-mediated gender embodiment by reference to my penchant for crossing my legs. This is something I've become more aware of recently as a friend I ride the subway with has pointed out I do this when sitting, blocking the passage of other riders (even as I think I'm moving my leg in anticipation of their movements). It seemed a timely example as the way men take up space in the subway has been enough of a theme in the last year to have been memorialized in the New Yorker's annual "Eustace" cover, and the subway has also kept cropping up in our Ethics Diaries discussions as an arena for ethical questions: I'd promised my friend I'd try not to do it in the subway anymore. You can probably guess what happened. Despite my intent not to do it during the rest of class, it kept happening, like Dr. Strangelove's Nazi arm salute! But I suppose the point was made.

Today's class ended unusually, too - with a prayer. Indeed, with two. Our last two course readings, Hu and, just before it, Pope Francis' encyclical letter on the environment Laudato Si', both end with prayers (Hu's is from Sulak Sivaraksa), so I thought it offered a nice sort of closure to read both of them together, especially as the scope of these readings might make the effort to lead a good life seem too great for us.

A prayer for our earth

All-powerful God,


you are present in the whole universe


and in the smallest of your creatures.


You embrace with your tenderness all that exists.

Pour out upon us the power of your love,


that we may protect life and beauty.


Fill us with peace, that we may live


as brothers and sisters, harming no one.


O God of the poor,


help us to rescue the abandoned


and forgotten of this earth,


so precious in your eyes.


Bring healing to our lives,


that we may protect the world and not prey on it,

that we may sow beauty,


not pollution and destruction.


Touch the hearts


of those who look only for gain


at the expense of the poor and the earth.


Teach us to discover the worth of each thing,


to be filled with awe and contemplation,


to recognize that we are profoundly united


with every creature


as we journey towards your infinite light.


We thank you for being with us each day.

Encourage us, we pray, in our struggle

for justice, love and peace.

Let us pray for world peace, social justice and environmental balance, which begin with our own breathing.

I breathe in calmly and breathe out mindfully.

Once I have seeds of peace and happiness within me, I try to reduce my selfish desire and reconstitute my consciousness.

With less attachment to myself, I try to understand the structural violence in the world.

Linking my heart with my head, I perceive the world holistically, a sphere full of living beings who are all related to me.

I try to expand my understanding with love to help build a more nonviolent world.

I vow to live simply and offer myself to the oppressed.

By the grace of the Compassionate Ones and with the help of good friends, may I be a partner in lessening the suffering of the world so that it may be a proper habitat for all sentient beings to live in harmony during this millennium.

(Laudato Si’, 178-79; This-Worldly Nibbana, 178)

Spirit of New York

A student brought a stack of money to class today - but it was all in a good cause. It's spirit money, and she showed us how it's folded before being burnt to transfer assets to departed relatives. This was only one of many highlights of the first set of final presentations in "Lived Religion in New York."

The Buddhism in New York presentation, of which the spirit money folding was part, compared a Tibetan center on 16th Street and several temples in Chinatown. The intrepid students were undeterred by the absence of public events at the former, and conducted an internet interview with a practitioner upstate. As for the latter, after meeting the same woman at two Mahayana temples (who was delighted to see them both times), they stumbled into a press conference being given by a top priest of Fo Guang Shan at a Buddhist youth center, and were permitted to interview him too. (Conveniently both he and one of the students are Taiwanese.) They asked the same questions to their Nyingma source (named Sam), getting similar ambivalence about the opportunities and distractions of the city, compared to the activities at their upstate headquarters. They posted the different answers in different places along the walls of our classroom, inviting us to get up and look at them and so letting us get a taste of the adventure they had. And then we got to fold paper...

Next came a presentation on the challenges of keeping a long fast in New York. One presenter focused on Ramadan, and interviewed a family member. Another focused on Greek Orthodox Lent and interviewed someone she works with. The results were fascinating, both from a comparative and a lived religion perspective. Neither interviewee described herself as religious, but both took on the ardors of fasting for their own interesting reasons. The Muslim had grown up in Karachi and Dubai and fasted in part to experience a connection to home, but described observing Ramadan in New York as far more difficult than it is in these Muslim cities, since shops here are open and colleagues blithely eat... not to mention that New York summer days can be 18 hours long! For the Orthodox fast, by contrast, New York turns out to be a great place "since there are so many vegan restaurants here."

After that we learned about the little floe left of what was once a major German population in New York City - a third of the population, making it the third-largest German-speaking city in the world. The presenters researched the German Lutheran church of St. Mark's - originally in Kleindeutschland in the Lower East Side (the building is now a synagogue), relocating to Yorkville on the Upper East Side after much of the congregation died in the General Slocum disaster of 1904. They still have services in German, not too poorly attended, according to a student who attended. Although their congregants long ago moved to the suburbs, many evidently return each week for services, as well as for German film screenings. But this tiny remnant of what was once a major part of New York's experience of itself is all but invisible today. "I've lived in the neighborhood for twenty years," said my (20-year-old) student, "and never noticed it was there."

Today's final presentation was about the St. Francis Xavier. The two students were interested in the parish's outreach to LGBTQ people, and found lots - though over the course of conversations with four different people connected to the parish they were able also to register the delicacy of being a gay-friendly Catholic church. The priest, and a long-term parishioner to whom they spoke, seemed to dodge their questions about inclusiveness by directing them to the parish's Catholic Lesbian and Gay Catholic groups, and pointing out the chapel for those lost to HIV/Aids: actions, not statements! And, they reported, everyone's favorite phrase seemed to be "who am I to judge?" - they didn't know the phrase's papal pedigree! But after talking to my colleague M, a parishioner there, they were able to end their presentation with an account of the congregation's public support of its LGBTQ ministries at the consecration after recent renovation, to which the (not so gay-friendly) Cardinal Archbishop of New York could only applaud.

A wonderfully multi-dimensional picture of New York as a place where religion lives is emerging - and we have yet to hear the presentations from groups exploring yoga centers, kosher bakeries and the Hare Krishnas who sing and dance at Union Square!

Religious bouquet of the West Village

For "Lived Religion in New York" today I reused a little walking tour I developed seven years ago for Religious Geography of New York. To make it more interesting, I had student teams spend 15 minutes in class first becoming an "instant expert" on one of five sites we were to pass, and then letting the students talk about the places as we got there. So students told us about the Village Presbyterian Church, The Church in the Village, Integral Yoga, the Salvation Army, and, at the end, the second cemetery of Congregation Shearith Israel.

We learned that the first is no more than a landmarked façade, its congregation having to give it up after a spat over the Yom Kippur War led a Jewish congregation which had been sharing it to leave them with a budget they couldn't manage, that the second houses what had been three congregations, that the third started on the UWS, that the fourth preferred meeting on the street noisily rather than solemnly in sacred spaces, that the last - across the street from Lang - used to be much bigger, still contains the grave of someone who fought in the Revolutionary War, and shows us the contours of a grid older than The Grid - a mini-education in New York religious history. But there was more. All the places we went were alive. Okay, so Village Presbyterian is now condos called "The Portico." But Church in the Village was in the midst of their weekly food pantry service, and Integral Yoga's bookstore was closed for a lunchtime meditation. We noticed (well, I noticed and drew the class' attention) to the books in the window, beneath the Hindu statues: Rachel Carson and Rumi.

Abingdon Square, where the Salvation Army had had large open-air gatherings in the 1890s, wis now a little park whose flowers so delighted us all that I took a detour past the Jefferson Market garden, where one of the volunteers at the gate who, on learning who we were, said: If you wonder if there is a God, look here!

Not too nice

Had a somewhat difficult discussion in "Lived religion in New York" class - or tried to! Students had submitted drafts for papers on what "lived religion" means and most argued that religion is irreducibly subjective, entirely individual and something nobody else has any business judging. The reflex relativism is, I've suggested before, an understandable response to difference and plurality, and probaby better than the alternatives politically, but I thought it was time to push back a little. If people's religious lives are so completely individual and self-contained, I asked first, why do people congregate in formal and informal settings, commit to creeds and practices, etc.? For that matter, if religious life is so rooted in individuality, how is this even possible? Next I wondered about how people change their religious practices? Outsiders may not be able to judge a person's practices as mistaken or ineffective, but people might say that about their past selves... again: how is this possible, if all standards come from the individual?

Reflection on how people's stories of religious change are likely to exaggerate these changes, and their suddenness, led - finally! - to students' conceding that sometimes we can see things others cannot see about their own lives. We didn't get to the academic implications (and responsibilities) here, but this was already a breakthrough. And then suddenly we'd switched from bland tolerance to critique: people told of grandparents who don't realize the contradiction between their values and what they hear at church, of a long atheist brother whose family staged an intervention when he started going to church (I'm sure he'll end up an atheist again, said his sister), and a friend whose creative integration of Buddhist and Christian practices had earlier been praised (she suffers from depression, we were told, but she won't admit it). It wasn't hard for me then to observe that judgments about religion are ubiquitous and probably inevitable - that religion is the sort of thing one can't really truly be indifferent about. So perhaps our picture of people's religious worlds needs to take this into account (why do people congregate again?!), and our idealized view of approvingly neutral observers needs a reality check.

Interesting as I reflect on it is that the shift to acknowledging our discomfort and disdain at other people's religious practices went through discussion not of weird religious practices of strangers but through family and friends. It's easy to be indifferent to people we don't know or care about, especially in the abstract. Perhaps it will be harder for students to see indifference as a form of care and respect now...? Is it too much to hope they'll come to appreciate the ways in which scholarly reflexivity can take us beyond indifference and disdain?

I once did see but now am blind

More Michel de Certeau in "Lived Religion" today. I focused on two passages in The Practice of Everyday Life (L'invention du quotidien I: Arts de faire), one from the influential distinction between strategy and tactics, and one from the equally celebrated "Walking the City":

Lacking its own place, lacking a view of the whole, limited by the blindness (which may lead to perspicacity) resulting from combat at close quarters, limited by the possibilities of the moment, a tactic is determined by the absence of power just as strategy is organized by the postulation of power. (38)

The ordinary practitioners of the city live "down below," below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk - an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban "text" they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of space that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other's arms. (93)

Perhaps because I'd already described him as a mystic of everyday life, only one of the students was put off by all the negatives. The others saw that the "perspicacity" in question is the pearl of great price. And who wants distant sight when one can hold one's lover in one's arms?

Bringing de Certeau's ideas in is changing the tenor of our class discussions in interesting ways. What if what makes us most human, most alive, could at best be described by a paradoxical "science of the singular" - and if we understood religiosity and spirituality in its terms? Individual believers aren't making their own little religions. They lack a view of the whole because the whole isn't important to them (that's for planners, and intellectuals). Freed by their powerlessness from the responsibilities and the coarsening generalizations of institutions, creeds and theories (what de Certeau calls "strategy"), they discern (by engaging them) dimensions of reality that can't, and needn't be, articulated in words. Something like that!

Voyageons!

Just a week from now, I'll be in Paris gearing up for a big international gathering marking the thirtieth anniversary of the passing of the polymath Michel de Certeau. I was invited because his collaborator and literary executor visited Fudan last year to lead some seminars around his thought, and I had the privilege of showing her around Shanghai a bit. I met the great man himself when a teenager - his last teaching job was at UCSD - and I vaguely recall playing chess, and his letting me undo some improvident moves. But before last year's seminar I hadn't really engaged very intensively with his oeuvre. I've still barely scratched the surface (apparently he penned more than five hundred works, many still unpublished), but I've crossed some kind of threshold: I led the students in "Lived Religion in New York" in a discussion of two widely-cited sections from The Practice of Everyday Life (the misleading English name for L'invention du quotidien I: arts de faire). It's not easy, for several good reasons: his writing is, perhaps intentionally, difficult. The kinds of "tactical" practices he's drawing attention to are hard to describe in words, and flourish without such articulation - and may even depend on this unarticulability. I felt in at least some of the students the sense that this can be revelatory for understanding the life of cities, and of religion (and of course for urban religion). It goes beyond the analyses of the American theorists we've been reading. Merci, Michel!

Deus absconditus

What words might you use to define "religion"? We filled half a board!

Not unsympathetic

In "Lived Religion in New York" today we discussed the approach taken by the Journey through NYC Religions website whose director visited our class last week: "sympathetic objectivity." I was expecting the students to be critical, since students at Lang are reputedly suspicious of everything, especially religion, but found them instead to be remarkably friendly to the idea. Our visitor had us read the start of the website's account of its method.

The usual method of journalists is to start with skepticism in order to arrive at an objective picture, then to add sympathy toward the end of the reporting process. Over time, the reporter’s skepticism can harden into cynicism about their informants and, at worst, about life itself. The public too has become cynical about journalists. The public believes that the journalist tactically fakes sympathy at the beginning of the interviews in order to advance their reporting. ...

Proposed instead is starting with sympathy - "fellow feeling." Convince people of the "sympathy of the heart" behind your interest, and they'll welcome you into their religious communities. (Journey has visited over 6500 in all five boroughs!) As one journalist fan of the approach summarized it,

Get more bang for your buck with empathy first. Open ears and heart makes for better interviews. Skepticism later, if needed.

The site invites us into a debate in journalism which has helpful parallels for an introductory course in the academic study of religion.

While we also highly esteem investigative reporting, we don’t think it is the primary paradigm for journalism. Rather, most reporting in democratic societies should be rooted in a concern for building a healthy social trust and community well-being. Journalism should start with genuine sympathy or empathy, move to objectivity, and then if called for, add criticism. ...

[S]ympathetic objectivity is not about feel good, positive stories. It is about deeply understanding and appreciating what other religious people have to say to us who have a different religion or those of us with no religion. We discover that the religious people are contributing assets to our lives in the city, not just deficits. Of course, from this position of deep understanding we will run across weaknesses, contra- dictions and conflicts that our audience ought to be aware of. That is why “sympathy” is only the first step in reporting, not the last step.

There's much to like here. But... can you really get to objectivity from fellow feeling? The Journey team gets invited in by convincing communities that they genuinely believe that each is doing something valuable which other people would benefit from knowing about (and I'm not doubting the genuineness of their belief here). But how do you get beyond providing human interest stories and community announcements? Even if you're not convinced that religion often has a dark side, how can you be sure what you're getting from a religious community's self-descriptions is "objective"?

Not to worry: as one of my students said, there's no such thing as objectivity anyway! All of us are inevitably biased and we should just admit it.

This seemed the wrong way to resolve the problem. (Problem, what problem?) But I made things worse by appealing to the "hermeneutics of suspicion" (assuming everyone knew this and resonated with it) and contrasting it with a "hermeneutics of charity," more academic ways of making kindred points. I should have known better, or at least not been surprised that these didn't fly. The former's worry that people might not fully comprehend their own situations - or their own minds! - found no takers. And the latter's idea that I need to approach the other as probably right, someone I could learn from, demands a more dynamic openness than discrete moments of fellow-feeling. Nobody was getting why both seem to me - at least potentially - instruments of human liberation, which might enhance the creativity and power of lived religion. Sigh.

I'd forgotten my frustration the last time I taught this course (and that to a group many of whom had just completed "Theorizing Religion") when most the class shrugged off every attempt to introduce sociology, psychology, history, theory, critique. "Lived religion" is personal, I was given to understand, and just as nobody can tell me what my truth should be, nobody can know it as I do. The only approach to it is sympathetic objectivity - empathetic respect for my reality. The Journey's mutual admiration society is just what the doctor ordered!

I need to find a way to assert the significance of academic reflection and complication. In class today I tried to describe the value scholarly work adds as filling in what people cannot, in the nature of things, know themselves. This isn't skeptical or debunking (or not necessarily) - I understand it more as liberating. The creativity and power of lived religion aren't undermined by what we do, but can be enhanced by it, no? Ultimately the project isn't categorically different than Journey's, but there are differences of emphasis, method and audience which it will be helpful for us to articulate.

Up a tree

I should by now know better than to think of religions as family trees, but when a student asked today what the difference between "Catholic" and "Christian" was I turned horticultural again. I wanted to show that "Christian" was a term used by scholars (and some Christians) to refer to the whole family, while others - a branch of the tree - used "Christian" only for themselves. That things weren't going to work became clear at latest when I found myself representing Pentecostalism as a branch floating free above the tree, which of course some of the self-described "Christians" would, too... at which point I felt obliged to acknowledge that Catholics would represent the tree differently, too. Oy vey!

Four dimensional!

I've been reconnecting with friends and colleagues from my year at Fudan - seven in two days! But/and I've also been working on my Spring Lang courses in that indirect way of mine. Today I clinched a deal on "Lived Religion in New York," which I'd imagined renaming "Lived Religion in New York and Shanghai" this time last year but later ruefully decided I couldn't find enough material for. Turns out material for making the contrast has, well, materialized!

Several of my Fudan friends have been working on a project on the religious landscape of Shanghai, and even had an exhibit not so long ago of photographs by one of the participants. Called "上海 • 神圣 / Shanghai Sacred" it was organized around four "dimensions" for making sense of the religious ecology of the city where Chinese modernity was born: landmarks, compounds, privacy and waterways. To varying degrees these are very Shanghai-specific (especially waterways) but that's not a problem. Au contraire, it's a great opportunity!

I think I'll start my class on lived religion in New York with the exhibition brochure, which has a paragraph explaining each of the 4 "dimensions", and propose that our class by semester's end find four "dimensions" for conveying what we've found about New York. Along the way we'll have a teleconference or two with the Shanghai researchers, to learn about their work, understand their "dimensions" better, and share what we've come up with them. Comparative research in religion live!

The cherry on top? A Fudan undergraduate I came to know quite well has become part of the project (I suppose I might have had something to do with that) and is eager to be a sort of foreign correspondent/liaison for us over the course of the semester. 

fashionable religion

In the welter of end-of-year activities we started something new this week, too. A Swedish fashion designer who has recently joined the Parsons School of Design Strategies contacted our religious studies program to propose some sort of collaboration. In Gothenberg he had attended several seminars in the Theology Faculty. Apparently his dissertation explored the applicability of the liberation theological concept of "base communities" to innovative fashion production, although he seems more interested now in talking about heresy. In any case, I invited him to class a few times, and then, Monday night, we had a first official gathering on the religion-fashion connection, in a studio at Parsons - half a dozen faculty and students from each program attended. I thought I might end up with something wearable by the end of the event but that will come later. For now it was just a free- wheeling discussion exploring affinities, metaphors, synergies, of which there are more than a few. It turns out that the Integrated Design Program explains its relationship to design and design studies more generally much the way lived religion relates to "institutional" religion. "Capital F fasion" is, he says, like organized religion, with its authorities, sacred texts and practices, but what they're interested in is more fluid, more egalitarian, spunkier - and integrated with all of life. Everyone gets dressed, his Dutch colleague P said, there's no reason fashion (small f) shouldn't be part of everyone's everyday life. (She doesn't seem to think the same about religion.) We have much to teach each other and learn from each other. We reconvene in February - join us? If not wearables we'll at least be producing a few pamphlets on the subject!

Duck, here comes Christmas!

Someone sent me the link to someone's collection of the "worst nativity sets." Some of them are pretty awful, but as a set they raise some rather interesting "lived religion" questions. Is this religion? Isn't it? Something like this awful-wonderful zombie nativity must be a gag, as is the bacon and sausage nativity you'll have to look up on his site. But cupcake topper nativity seems like it could be an expression of some

 

kind of piety. And what about dog nativity? While I'm not a dog person I can see how this might be more than dog-worship, might be its own tender expression of "O come let us adore him." Celebrate the coming  of Christ into your life by expressing something of yourself: isn't that the sort of thing "lived religion" takes seriously? But wasn't Jesus' human form sort of central? Maybe not. WWJD? Better a moose than a zombie.

HASK not

For our fourth Lived Religion in NYC fieldtrip (the others took us to Eldridge Street, the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine and the Rubin Museum of Art) we did something rather interesting today. We went to the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen. But we didn't volunteer; we stood in line, and ate sloppy joes, cole slaw and corn on the cob with the other guests. My original idea had been for us to volunteer, but that would involve arriving at 9:30 and staying at least until 12:30, not possible for busy students. A logistical constraint became a pedagogical opportunity. It is harder to receive than to give, and we got to see HASK from the receiving end. (Our presence contributed something though, if only conversation fodder: some folks evidently thought us refugees from last night's razzia on Zuccotti Park!) And maybe some of the students will make the not unprecedented move from guest to volunteer.

I timed the visit to come in the middle of our reading of a book about another well-known New York food charity whose name misleadinlgy suggests a religious connection, Courtney Bender's Heaven's Kitchen. Bender's participant observation is of the community of volunteers in the kitchen of God's Love We Deliver, an organization which brings food to homebound people with AIDS. The kitchen volunteers never see the recipients of their work, and don't talk about AIDS. They also, Bender found, rarely talk about religion. What do they talk about? Bender's a good listener, and describes the gossamer-like threads of spirituality, memory, habit, etc. which make this a community. GLWD's mottos are food is love,  food is therapy and food is charity. Bender finds the kitchen workers disdain such explanations as marketing; "food is the message." But the mottos do help define some of the very different and even conflicting rationales for feeding programs - it's not just nutrition - and I was eager for students to sense the wordless but eloquently polyvalent message of food prepared at a place like HASK, and to see the overlap of the different HASK communities: guests and volunteers (maybe even that both are outreach missions of the church)... Did they get it? We'll see once we discuss student reflections on Thursday.

The whole thing went much more quickly than I anticipated. I was expecting (planning!) to spend half an hour in the line but we were in in ten minutes. The food happens very quickly, too, and is quickly eaten. Not that anyone is hurrying you on; au contraire, you feel welcome to take your time, make yourself at home, and people do. But the staff and sixty volunteers pass in a blur. It's all friendly efficiency (and the food was tasty!). From experience I know that the stations of volunteers are involved in conversations as warm and disjointed as those Bender found at GLWD. But the contact between the worlds of volunteers and guests is like the interlocking of gears, perfectly fitting but touching only for the briefest moment. Both are in movement - am I letting a metaphor get out of hand here? - but in different directions. Part of the fulfillingness of volunteering at HASK is precisely being part of so well-oiled a machine. Is it also the precisely defined and limited contact with guests - not that different from GLWD's kitchen workers who never saw the people who ate their food? HASK has recently moved the food service volunteers into the church space, so volunteers and guests share the space. Have people's experiences changed?

(Pictures from here and here)

A magician in the classroom?

A magician visited "Lived religion in NYC" today. I mean that almost literally, in two senses. The visitor is a specialist in helping couples design interfaith marriage services (for which she also officiates). She described to us the long process of exploring the partners' religious backgrounds, practices and hopes with them, soliciting accounts of their understandings of their relationship and of marriage, and of her work translating it into the at once mystical and dramatic "language" of successful liturgy. She had brought along two liturgies she recently developed for us to look at, one Jewish and Hindu, the other Kabbalistic and Wiccan, and as she talked us through the second one, you really got a sense of how the "change in ontological status" she had told us a marriage service needs to effect was effected. It's a kind of magic.

But she's a magician in another, more technical (and anachronistic) sense as well. I'd invited her to our course at this point because we have explored all the things ordinary religious people do for themselves, without the support or sanction of "organized" religion or religious specialists. And yet ordinary people support organized religion and religious specialists too. Why? It's not just external compulsion and the temporal power of spiritual organizations. I've been suggesting that there are things one might feel the need for a specialist for, and this visitor was supposed to exemplify this. As she explained how difficult it is to do what she does well, this seemed confirmed.

But then it became clearer and clearer to me that she may be a religious specialist but is no sort of segue to organized religion. To my surprise I was thinking in Durkheimian terms (terms we all supposedly learned to shed in graduate school!). What she offers is not religion but magic. She works as an individual for individuals, and maintains her standing through her ability to effect results. Her authority comes from this effectiveness, and comes from her distinctive life and personality, not any sort of authorized training, lineage or ordination. (The answer to the question how she could marry a Mormon and a Catholic, for instance, is simply and finally that she has. Now that's magic!) When I quipped that, in light of the fact that half of all Americans now marry across religious lines, her line of work might be something one might mention when asked "what can you do with a religious studies degree?" she put me in my place: she didn't learn how to do this from books.

We all shed Durkheim's religion/magic distinction, though, because he seems simply wrong to see in one the guarantee of a shared moral life in community, in the other an individualistic and amoral practice which could not generate anything like such stability and meaning and may even undermine it. (I've often quoted John Gager's suggestion that in fact "magic" is no more than a name for "religions we don't like," "religion" a name for "magic we do like.") In this specific case, is not the interfaith marriage liturgist helping individuals transcend individual needs and deepening and extending moral communities?

Extended family

Today could have been the day we exploded the category of "lived religion," but I'm not sure anything like that happened. We've been discussing the adoption and adaptation of mizuko kuyô 水子供養 rituals in America as chronicled in Jeff Wilson's brilliant book, Mourning the Unborn Dead: A Buddhist Ritual Comes to America (which I've discussed before). This gave us an opportunity to think about the work of ritual - what it does and how - and whether the mysterious continuum from fertilized egg to successfully delivered baby isn't perhaps better understood through ritual than definitions and artificially drawn lines. (I put on the board the awful proposed amendment to the Mississippi State Constitution which is likely to be voted in at the next election: the term ‘person’ or ‘persons’ shall include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.)

I also got to talk about what in other classes I call the question of the limits of the moral community. A discussion of rituals for "children who unfortunately were not able to be born" (to use the language used at Hasedera in Kamakura) let me suggest that our discussions of "lived religion" have focused only on "human beings who managed to be born and haven't yet died." But no religion thinks that's all there is, and certainly no lived religion, which where ties with ancestors, the departed, and whatever other forces and agents there are perhaps most intimately felt and maintained.

To make the point I recalled the painting above, Charles Willson Peale's portrait of his family - painted over thirty-five years (1773-1809), during which time his first wife died and he married again: both wives are in the portrait, and the two little girls at the table died as children. I recalled other family portraits from the exhibition at the New-York Historical Society where I saw this one which included gauzy figures of babies who had been stillborn. Not so easy to answer the census-takers question "how many people are there in this family or house?"

What happens to "lived religion" when we expand the sense of the community in this way, and take into account the fluid boundaries which lead William LaFleur to entitle his book on mizuko rituals in Japan Liquid Life? We don't - well, I don't - want to endorse an approach which accepts the "buffered self" Charles Taylor thinks replaced the "porous self" in our "secular age."

Lived religion at OWS

I'm not sure if this "sacred space" has been at Occupy Wall Street all along - I noticed it for the first time today. It's at the other end of the park from Broadway, where the interfaith services happen at 3:30 on Sundays. Next time I'm down there I'll take time to investigate what has found its way to the altar, and ask what activities have constituted themselves around it.

Noch einmal, mit Gefühl

A few weeks ago a friend of mine introduced me to the recordings of the Brahms symphonies which Marin Alsop made with the London Symphony Orchestra. They're lovely, dancerly in some places where I've grown up hearing ponderousness, and generally luminous. My friend thinks it's because Alsop is a woman. "Women hear differently," she explained; after all, one hears with one's whole body. I've been mulling that intriguing observation over ever since.

Today I brought it up in class, as we were discussing McGuire's sophisticated and often surprising discussion of gender and lived religion. Students had come up with many examples of religious traditions where women and men have different experiences because of different roles, different access to spaces, etc. Is it only cultural construction of gender she's getting at, I asked, and let the image of a person at the center of an orchestra playing Brahms frame the difficult and historically fraught question of gender and religious experience. It made everyone uncomfortable. A good thing?

Another bric in the wall

We've finished our reading of Meredith McGuire's Lived Religion. Going through it again, with a class, really heightens my appreciation of its achievement, as well as my awareness of roads she hasn't taken. I'm asking the students to follow up two sources she refers to as a way of learning from her and/but also learning how she works from others' research. My illustration is an article by Otto Maduro to which she refers in her closing discussion of syncretism and bricolage. She argues that syncretism is the norm - it is anti-syncretism that needs to be explained! - but the contrast with his argument makes her individual bricolage-focused study seem to present rather too rosy a picture of religion, by still implicitly separating religious from political and ideological structures and ideas.

I would like to see more studies ... of the syncretizations at work in Methodist history between the Wesleyan tradition, on the one hand, and, on the other, U.S. white supremacy, middle class ethos, and Manifest Destiny. Similarly, I would encourage researchers on Pentecostalism to zero in on the ongoing hybridizations in the Assemblies of God between its Holiness heritage and the extraneous trends of dispensationalism, Armageddon theology, and the gospel of prosperity-alongside with the abandonment of an earlier openness toward women leaders and pacifism. I would suggest to those researching the history of missions to study the processes of integration of (and resistance to) capitalism, militarism and U.S. hegemony into the evangelizing practices, among others, of both U.S. Protestant and Catholic missionaries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. To those interested in the sociology of Puerto Rican Christian churches I would propose to reconstruct the dynamics leading to the pervasive recasting of Puerto Rican nationalism as a religious heresy.

 

Otto Maduro, “‘Religion’ under Imperial Duress: Postcolonial Reflections and Proposals,”

Review of Religious Research 45/3 (Mar 2004): 221-34, 229-30