I brought AI to class today. We'd spent the better part of an hour parsing two academic texts which addressed questions of intersectionality in France, focusing on French Muslims. The research and arguments were congruent but addressed different audiences and debates; one was addressed to political scientists whose analyses of "intersectionality" did not address religion but, the author argued, should. The other was part of a forum defending methodologies like "intersectionality" from critics on the French right who thought them unwelcome North American imports. We had a good time reconstructing the research, the different audiences and contexts, why the two sources were trustworthy - and how one might engage, critique, or go beyond the proffered research.

Then I showed the class a PowerPoint which Notebook LM had generated for me from the two articles. (This took a few minutes, but no specific prompts from me at all.) The slick presentation glommed the two articles together with striking visuals, making a monolithic assertion out of different arguments and interpretations - an aggregated argument neither of our authors had made. The names of the two researchers appeared only once, in tiny print at the bottom of the title slide; their quite different forms of research, reasoning and argumentative contexts - and the openings for engagement and critique - all washed away. 

I didn't spend long on it, though I pointed out various distortions and absurdities in the visualizations. (It gets a lot right, too, of course.) What did I hope the students learned? I told them that Notebook LM is very helpful opening up a single text, but that the work of critical engagement, weighing different sources, was beyond it. That's where you come in! In a week dedicated to the meaning and gift of plural perspectives and experiences, I hope they saw the threat in AI's mindless amalgamation.

Comfort/Consume (Me)

Reprise, in a new year in a new room, of the first alum visit to "DIY Religion," complete with their fabulous room-filling artwork. A new crop of students asked new questions, but the artist and artwork have changed in the last year too (including the work's title). And a surprise: when we suspended it from the ceiling in a nearby room, parallel to the window rather than perpendicular to it, the two sides looked completely different, the blurred edges, loopy shapes and gentle Disney colors replaced by jagged silhouettes, bold colors and what looked like abstract expressionist brush strokes. Even more beguiling/disturbing than last year ... I was happily upstaged!

Liberal arts and virtues

After a whirlwind tour of New School history in "DIY Religion" today, we have a session on liberal arts on Wednesday. Nominally it's about our particular college's understanding and practice of the liberal arts, but the momentum of doing 100+ years in 100 minutes today tempts me to be more ambitious. Liberal arts really matter in an illiberal time! 

I'm also looking for an excuse to share some images I've recently enjoyed in exhibitions, and some of which the class will have a chance to enjoy too. Here's the first:  

These are two panels by Francesco Pesellino, c. 1450, painted for a cassone, a kind of trousseau for Florentine brides. Currently in the collection of a museum in Alabama, they are part of the Morgan Library's exhibition on the Tarot - which we'll be visiting in a few weeks. The seven liberal arts (above) and seven virtues are represented as women; at their feet are associated historical or biblical figures, all male. 

Who do we have here? 

In the representation of the seven liberal arts, above we find, at right, the Trivium: Logic (with Aristotle), Rhetoric (with Cicero) and Grammar (with Priscian). At left, the Quadrivium: Arithmetic (Pythagoras), Geometry (Euclid), Music (Tubalcain) and Astrology (Ptolemy). This array allows the artist to place astrology/astronomy at the center! 

The panel of the virtues places the theological virtues at center: Faith (with St. Peter), Charity (with St. John the Evangelist) and Hope (with St. James the Greater). Flanking them are the four cardinal virtues: Prudence (Solon), Justice (Solomon), Fortitude (Samson) and Temperance (Scipio Africanus). I get all this from a website which informs me also that these panels were once in the collection of one Ludwig Wittgenstein!  

These might be a fun invitation to think about what the liberal arts are today, and who exemplifies them... and if there's a connection between the liberal arts and virtue! 

Maybe I'll have an excuse to share a contemporary work I just encountered at the Wassaic Project's summer exhibition, Tim Olson's "The Seven Heavenly Virtues at the Seventh Heaven Academy of Beauty" (2025). Painted on glass in fabulous detail (and with the same emplematic objects as Pesellino, if sometimes wittily updated) you'll find again Prudence, Faith, Hope and Charity (above), Fortitude, Justice and (below). The work is a pendant not to liberal arts but to "The Seven Deadly Sins at the Super Seven Motel" (2024).

I feel like sharing all of these, old and new, as an antidote to something I'd rather not share, a creepy selection of virtues included in a work showing as part of a Christian nationalist exhibition at the State Department, disingenuously called "Passport to Patriotism: 250 Years of Diplomacy." 

This is "Valor, Purity, Justice (Old Glory)" (2026). While these virtues are apparently associated with the colors of the American flag, they here look so like something from Fascist Italy it makes my skin crawl (especially the Christian resonances of "purity" - which is conspicuously not one of the classic seven virtues). It's the work of a satirical painter, but the show it's in seems to be as unironic as they come. No doubt they'd place scary white men in front of each of the three droopy white women. 

As it happens, the forces of darkness are claiming the liberal arts for their reactionary attack on democracy and learning. I call on all the traditional virtues and liberal arts to come to our rescue!

Onboarded

My courses are both off to a good start, new versions of old courses but already, with the students' help, breaking new ground.

In "DIY Religion" yesterday we brainstormed "religion" and "DIY" on their own before imagining what "DIY religion" could be, discovering at least three kinds of DIY - and so three kinds of DIY religion - on the way: (1) learning by doing, (2) finding what you need, (3) making do with what's to hand. These are quite different, and lay the groundwork for richer conversations than we had last year.

And in "Religion of Trees" our regular starting encounter with an elder - the elm in nearby Washington Square Park fêted as Manhattan's oldest tree - was enriched by the brand new New York Tree Genus Map, and revelations about the tree itself from Harriet Rix's wonderful The Genius of Trees. We call it an English elm (a colonial tree!) but it's not originally English either, having been brought to the British Isles as a cutting during the Roman Empire - and originally from Spain!

I'm not sure students were quite ready to follow me in wondering if this makes it the same tree as the one it was cut from, almost four centuries ago, and the same as all the other cuttings before and after, but notice has been served. We'll follow up on the surpassing strangeness of trees (not just clonal ones like elms) in our next class, when we consider what pronouns to use when referring to - or addressing - them.

Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom

Checked out the twin exhibitions on the Tarot at the Morgan Library today, Renaissance Symbols and Modern Visions. I'm planning to take the "DIY Religion" class there. Tarot is not really my thing but, judging from last year's cohort, it's likely to be of more than casual interest to at least a few of the students. I'm not sure the part about the original 15th century Italian tarocchi cards will wow them, but the modern adaptations have something for everyone. For me, it was the Six of Trees (they're flying!) from Rachel Pollack's Shining Tribe Tarot of 1994.

DIY seminar

Not a moment too soon, I've started tightening the bolts on this year's iteration of "DIY Religion." Though we won't get into the syllabus until next Wednesday, I'll be meeting the students a week from today!

What do I have planned for them? Alum voices will again play a significant part in the class, but we haven't the budget for six guest lecturers this time. This gives us time for some field trips, including to the newly redesigned "Contemplation Room" in the University Center (whence the above image of a chill Gnarls) and to the exhibit on Renaissance and contemporary Tarot at the Morgan Library.

The broader argument of the course has changed a bit, too. If last year's point was "gosh, religion has always been DIY!" this year's will also explore the resources and limitations of DIY in religion and more widely. These issues came up in our discussions last time, as we noted the bias "DIY" seems to have against established communities and institutions and even relationships - but can an individual really know what they need? The questions are made more urgent yet by the inroads AI agents have made in young people's lives even in the last year, threatening all those relationships and communities (and institutions like universities!).

A familiar refrain from all my classes: what we do in a seminar is special, something none of us could do on our own. 

DIY hat trick

The big reunion happened today - fifteen of the alums who've been involved in the "DIY Religion" class joined us for a final celebration. Three came in person, another dozen online, which turned out to be just right for the capacity of the room. Students helped think of a fun way of celebrating the rewarding conversations they'd had with alums: pairs of current students alums, names pulled from two woolen hats, sat at the front of the room and chatted for three or four minutes about a prompt, also pulled from a hat (by the student from the pair before). 

We each contributed a prompt at the start of the game (I took down some online alums' prompts from the zoom chat) which solicited all manner of interesting anecdotes and reflections. In the end some virtual alums had to leave so we only got through eleven, but it was plenty. (The three prompts which we didn't get to - at right above - may have been picked from the hat and returned!) It all made for a light-hearted and yet open-hearted sharing, smoothly bridging generations and timezones, with every one's voice heard. 

And then, for those there in person, there were donuts from a place an alum had reminisced about. Real or virtual, all are keen to do it again!

Religious revival meeting!

This was the week for the first years in "DIY Religion" to present what they learned from interviewing fifteen of our alums. We have more work to do, drawing some more general conclusions from what were apparently warm and thoughtful conversations; that's work for next week. For this week we basked in the idiosyncratic accomplishments and inspiring ideas of our fabulous alums! 

We got the world religions in there too, somehow - and then some! Our fifteen included folks who've found their DIY way to being a devotée of Guanyin, an Islamic feminist, the director of an avant garde theater company inspired by Jewish textual exegesis, an intimate of Ram Dass, three Christian priests (MCC, Episcopal and... it's complicated), a Radical Faerie, a rap-recording reviver of traditional Taíno language and spirituality and a young Zoroastrian. Wow...!

Job seekers

Attended a presentation on trends and challenges in higher education today, from one of the sources of the materials which were keeping my Provost's Office colleague up at night. Nightmarish indeed was this slide on changes in work. My colleague had mentioned hearing the half-life of job skills keeps shortening part: most workers will need on the job retraining every five years. But the research indicates many workers will not be on the same job at all: Today's workers have not just 12-30 jobs over a lifetime, but multiple careers as well. Twelve to thirty?! Many sectors are included here, but still, wow.

I can't wrap my head around this. The implications for higher ed, the focus of the talk, are perhaps clearer: workers will be regularly needing retraining in and between jobs - a market for adult education, albeit focused on short shelf-life job skills. Us liberal arts types might be the only ones also to see an enhanced need for the "durable skills" of critical thinking, research, communication, ethical reflection, collaboration, etc., too. But what of the workers themselves?

Beyond the matter of commuting and health care, lodging and schools (no small matter any of them!), does this mean most workers will always be on the market, always looking for the next opportunity given the likelihood their current employment won't last? (Is this what young folks mean by learning to "brand yourself"?) How nerve-wracking, how exhausting, even for those who manage to stay ahead of the game, securing a satisfying next gig before the last one peters out. 

But I wonder also what this means existentially, spiritually, since meaningful work is central to a full life. In Theorizing Religion a few weeks ago we reviewed Marx's claim that the forms of personal spirituality emerging already in his time were the sign of a thorough alienation of laborers from their labor. 

Marx worried that work harnessed to the caprice of a commodity market decoupled from actual human need and meaning - manufacturers pay laborers to make whatever sells, workers take whatever jobs are avaiable - voided labor of its meaning to the laborer. A restless and unending calibration of your skills with an ever changing market seems like a more extreme form of this abstraction. 

What religious world would be the "reflex" here? (Reflex isn't a good thing: it's smoke showing there's a fire.) A restless accruing of ever more means to spiritual balance and control? An eclipsing of even a shred of meaning in one's human agency, seeking release instead in mystical, perhaps psychedelically mediated other worlds? The presentiment that this whole world is run by spiritual forces inimical to human values, who can be resisted only through a warfare of charismatic extremity? A quasi-religious exaltation of the apparently unchangeable realities of biological reproduction? A seeking of kinship in forms of life radically unlike the human, from the fungal to the digital to the, well, arboreal?

I think I might take advantage of the relationships with alums I've rekindled for "DIY Religion" to pick their brains about this... 

Full circle

My series of alumnae/i-led classes in the "DIY Religion" first year seminar came full circle today! 

Our speaker was an anthro-pologist who's just defended a fascinating dissertation on non-Turkish Muslim ummah in Istanbul. But fifteen years ago he was in a first year seminar here himself. It was called "Religion in Dialogue" - with yours truly! 

Lived religion

Unplanned, both my classes are reading from Meredith McGuire's Lived Religion this week! In both, we're not only getting to know a recent direction in research, but pushing back against narratives which presnet current American pluralism unprecedented. McGuire refers to work by historian Peter Burke, who draws on Bruegel's "Fight between Carnival and Lent" to argue that pre-Reformation European Christianity had a much broader understanding of religion, one encompassing feasting as well as fasting in prescribed rhythms. Way fun to have that image overlooking our class discussion! 

In "Theorizing Religion" we also watched a witty video by the young scholar who produces the series "Religion for Breakfast," one of whose exhibits is an amulet from late-Roman Anatolia which happily mixes together Christian and non-Christian images; the class really got into it when I pointed out that such an amulet won't just have been an individual's syncretic secret but produced on a wider scale for many people. Both helped the class see beyond individualistic conceptions of private spirituality. As McGuire puts it: 

[I]ndividual religion is, nevertheless, fundamentally social. Its building blocks are shared meanings and experiences, learned practices, borrowed imagery, and imparted insights. (Lived Religion, OUP 2008, 13).  

Wanderers and their shadows

 We had the second alum-led session in "DIY Religion" today, by a fairly recent graduate who is in her first year in the PhD program at Harvard's Committee on the Study of Religion, focusing on medieval Christianity and critical theory. I've given the alums carte blanche to teach about whatever they think might contribute to an understanding of "DIY Religion" today, and each will be on a wildly different topic. Beyond acquainting students with multiple images of where their studies might take them, it's making our course truly multivocal and multidisciplinary!

The first, two weeks ago over zoom, was entitled "Healing technologies." An alum who tried and left Rabbinical School before completing a Masters in Social Work focused on the way religious rituals can give body to a liberated future rather than an oppressive past - and suggesting ways of DIYing within rather than beyond "religions."

Today's, entitled "(A)theological dissent," took the class into dense passages from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Friedrich Nietzsche to provide a genealogy of efforts to move beyond a Christian culture. Key was "Acquaint Thy Self First Hand With Deity," the 1836 speech that got Emerson banned from Harvard Divinity School for thirty years (though now there's an endowed professorship named after him). Each of us is divine, if we only knew it and stopped accepting the forced mediocrity of imitating earlier supposedly more spiritual figures and ages. And yet Emerson still considered himself a Christian - and was in imagination still too Christian-like for our "atheist, not anti-theist" alum.

In Nietzsche's Gay Science we first mulled over the famous "Where is God? ... We have killed him!" section (§125). Is the magnitude of this deed not too great for us? Do we not ourselves have to become gods merely to appear worthy of it? But the presenter's goal was this:

Delight in blindness. – ‘My thoughts’, said the wanderer to his shadow, ‘should show me where I stand, but they should not betray to me where I am going. I love ignorance of the future and do not want to perish of impatience and premature tasting of things promised.’

The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (CUP 2001), 120, 162 

The presenter's suggestion was that really DIYing it means letting go of received ideas not only of what "religion" is but even of what it means to be a "self." Can we live into presence, relation, and care for the oppressed without losing ourselves in the impatience of "projects" which seem future-oriented but really perpetuate the problems of the past?

Heady stuff, and no more something I could have come up with than the earlier alum contributions. But that's the point! I want the students to receive what the alums think valuable to share. And compared to my more academic presentations, these alum offerings are inspirational - and challenging - in a whole other way. Emerson was on to something: 

Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul.  

The Major Prose, ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson (Belknap Harvard, 2015), 114

I'm provoked too! 

Yet to come: alum-led classes on "Trans saints," "Making hijra," "Spirit and revolution" and "Wild church"! All framed by "Comfort ⇄ Control"! 

Something rather than nothing

I've had it with the "nones." Not those so designated but with the designation. For a while it seemed cute and even funny - "not nuns, nones!" - but in the present moment defining anyone purely negatively isn't fun or funny at all.

I've taught the Pew Research Center's "Modeling the Future of Religion in America" since it came out three years ago, noting its beholdenness to a narrow definition of religion as affiliation. It's Pew as much as anyone who has taught us about the "rise of the nones." Usually we critique its lumping together all "Christians" and, even more, its throwing all those who don't check an affiliation box on a survey into a monolithic sea of "nones." (Dumping everyone else into a residual category of "Other Religions" pisses students off, too - when it's included in the picture at all.) We notice how they offer graphs which let you tell the story either as one of the decline of Christianity or the rise of the unaffiliated, and note their prediction that, in three out of four hypothetical scenarios of religious "switching," Christians will cease to be a majority by 2070. These studies and the way they have been reported and interpreted feed the alarmist "America as a Christian nation" shibboleth. It all seems rather zero-sum but it was only this time through, with the DIY Religion class, that I noticed that they confirm this framing.(This is on the third page of a website where most people read only the first.) It comes as a relief that rates of rise or fall are likely to slow, possibly resulting in a kind of "equilibrium rather than one group ascending completely and the other disappearing." A relief and a surprise, given that the framing has suggested an inescapable existential battle between the two sides. And who was thinking in terms of anyone's "ascending completely"? Who could even conceive that?

In the context of our class, we noticed how incongruous this polarized story seems against the backdrop of the religious pluralism which has long characterized the American landscape. "Christians" count as a unified block rather than a world of jostling competitors only when contrasted with something else, but the sources we've been reading have argued that the vitality of the American religious scene has long derived precisely from that jostling competition and the particular voluntarist way of experiencing religion forced by an ever expanding spiritual pluralism. (To be fair, the Pew model comes from this peculiar denominationalist culture: everyone is free to affiliate, it's only when people decline to affiliate that they get spooked.) Attentive as we have been to the variety and spiritual depth and adventurousness of those relegated "nones," we see glasses overflowing where they worry about a glass emptying.

This isn't to say that nones are just religious in their own way. Rejecting or repurposing organized traditions is important for many, and not all experience this as freedom rather than emptiness. For many, "religion" just is obsolete. But in the present moment, the Christians vs. nones framing seems not just misleading but pernicious. Not only is the ever churning mix of American spiritualities obscured, with a stalemate between two competing visions the only conceivable alternative to the eradication of one by the other. (One student astutely observed that this sounded a lot like the bankrupt American two-party political system in 2025.) But a contrast between religion and irreligion (to name it) isn't between two similar competitors, two different visions of the good or true or beautiful - or spiritual. It's between something and nothing. (And so, in the extreme, everything and nothing.) 

"None" may just be a shorthand for "unaffiliated" in a conventional sense: just this year Pew finally tried to measure as agency, initiative and conviction what in the earlier studies appears only as absence. But "none" resonates with the most extreme rhetoric of the current administration, a Manichaeanism made explicit in that chilling speech of Stephen Miller's last week. 

We stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble. [...] What do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness, you are jealousy! You are envy! You are hatred! You are nothing! You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing. We are the ones who build. We are the ones who create. We are the ones who lift up humanity. ... To our enemies, you have nothing to give, you have nothing to offer, you have nothing to share but bitterness. We have beauty, we have light, we have goodness, we have determination, we have vision, we have strength. We built the world that we inhabit now.

In his signature enactment of the hatred and nihilism he claims define those he demonizes, Miller spat out the word "nothing" over and over and over. I watched the video: you could feel the spite building from the repetition. This extreme dehumanizing of those who think differently is central to his thinking, as it is to the "or we won't have a country" rhetoric of his boss. Its hollowness bellows.

In hands like theirs, Pew's already prejudicial shorthand "nones" becomes poison. The unaffiliated are not free-thinkers, seekers, innovators, DIYers, but defined purely as negativity, emptiness, a chaos threatening to engulf and consume "the world that we inhabit." The setting in which Miller spoke, and things students in the class have mentioned seeing in their internet feeds, made me aware that the outrageous "are you something or nothing" challenge might be appealing to some young people lost in this age's uncertainty.

How do we teach them that plurality is not only possible but actual reality?

Beyond nihilism and fanaticism

DIY Religion's tour of New School-connected thinkers on religion continued today with two heavy-weights from sociological debates about secularization, Peter Berger and Jose Casanova (with cameos by John Dewey and Alfred Schutz). Berger's the best known secularization theorist to have recanted in the face of evidence that religion seemed to be on the wane only in Europe. Casanova wrote one of the most famous books refuting and moving on from secularization theory, Public Religions in the Modern World. (They didn't overlap, though, Berger's two decades ending shortly before Casonova's three and change began.) 

I gave the class the essay where Casanova first laid out the argument of his book, "Beyond European and American Exceptionalisms: Towards a Global Perspective" (2003), and a piece Berger wrote for The Christian Century, "Protestantism and the Quest for Certainty" (1998) which uses the phrase "do it yourself"! Casanova's essay was a good text for explaining the rise and fall of secularization theses, but I'm not sure anyone in this generation can imagine a world without religion. But Berger's arguments - at least until he changed from his sociologist's hat to speaking as a Mainline Protestant - proved electric, and felt intensely relevant. 

Berger's argument, in a nutshell, is that modernity leads not to a decline in religion but to a change in how people are religious. What effects this change is pluralism, which relativizes beliefs and practices earlier generations might have unquestioningly taken for granted. In this "age of uncertainty," we are free - or forced - to choose what we will believe. (His book The Heretical Imperative made this argument in 1979.) But uncertainty is unnerving, and if everyone has their own belief, it may seem that the only certainty is the unsatisfying virtue of tolerance. Relativism can slip into nihilism: there is no truth! And this can push people to seek the unquestioning certainty offered by various dangerous types, what Berger calls "fanaticism," until they realize its fundamental mendacity. He described a dispiriting dialectic of nihilism and fanaticism and back again which struck some of my students as perfectly describing what they encounter online every day.

Berger offers an antidote to this downward spiral: communities that sustain us in faith (knowingly not knowledge) in the context of uncertainty. Contrasting them with demanding fundamentalistic religious organizations, he calls them "weak" institutions - voluntary associations where "uncertainty-wallahs" can share their uncertain faith rather than pretending certainty. 

Even apart from Berger's suddenly switching to theological mode to root all this in Paul Tillich's "Protestant principle," First Corinthians' God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong and the "kenotic," this was a harder sell. I made a passionate case that weak - participatory, democratic - institutions are what we need, now more than ever. I'll be curious what stays with students from all this, and if it offers them some resources to resist the present fanaticisms, whose appeal several of them clearly feel.

We didn't, alas, have time to see Berger hit the limits of his own tolerance for uncertainty, in a telling anecdote from a conference he'd attended on "epistemological modesty":

One of the participants from Israel recounted a story from Talmudic literature. It went something like this: A group of rabbis were arguing over the right interpretation of a biblical text. Rabbi Eleazar, who had interpreted the text one way, was one of the authorities cited, as was Rabbi Yochanan, who had interpreted it differently. The rabbis could not agree. In the group there was also a mystic, an adept of the Kabbalah. He said that it was possible for him to enter into an ecstasy that would take him directly before the throne of the Almighty; he offered to do so and to ask God himself to give the correct interpretation. The group agreed, whereupon the mystic took off in his ecstasy, stood before the throne and addressed God: "King of the Universe, we cannot agree on this text. Can you give us the correct interpretation?" 

God, who of course was himself occupied in the study of Torah, shuffled his papers, shook his head, and finally replied: "Well, Rabbi Eleazar says so-and-so, but Rabbi Yochanan says so-and-so, and then there is Rabbi Amitai who says so-and-so . . ." 

I'm not altogether comfortable with this story. I'm inclined to think that, both from a Jewish and a Christian point of view, we should assume that God could indeed have given the right answer. 

Sublimest weakness!!! But even without this, ours was a profound and wide-ranging discussion, I think.

Pluralisms

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

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

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

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

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

Powerful

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

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

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

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

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

Re-sourced

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

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

Notebooks to self

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to college, 2025!

Canta y no llores

Had a trifecta of AI encounters yesterday. 

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

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

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

Classrooms?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A school of social research as DIY religion

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

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

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

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

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