Meteorological

The Los Angeles Times, to which I now happily subscribe online, has posted a dossier of amazing b&w photographs of storms by Mitch Dobrowner. This isn't even the most remarkable, but it's a good taste.

Slum clearance

Something cool and a little disturbing happened in class today. I was having yet another class read "Crossing the City Line," Robert Orsi's introduction to the pioneering 1998 anthology Gods of the City. It's the best synthesis of American religious history and urban studies I know, and a great introduction to "lived religion" too. It anchored all my "Religious Geography of New York" classes, and "Lived Religion in New York."

Orsi's essay begins with three vignettes, all in the devastated South Bronx in the mid-1980s - a Catholic nun who's moved there to be with the suffering, a German artist who uses an abandoned school for an art work, and an old African American lady who says there's "more bad than good" around. Orsi will go on to suggest that non-urban folks have been "slumming" in the urban for the better part of two centuries, quivering with fear and desire of otherness, poverty, sensuality and vice - the exploitative libertines but also the ascetic do-gooders, all of whom want and need the city to remain alien to small-town or suburban white middle class norms. It's time to listen to the voices of those who make lives in our cities, who "have always had to live in other people's idea of where they live as well as in real places on the ground" (6).

Why was this time different? Two of my students are from the South Bronx! More: one has lived near an intersection Orsi references, and the other went to the school run by the nun's order. They're surprised and even a little pleased to encounter their home rendered an object lesson in this book (no, one wouldn't say more than that it was "interesting"), but I'm aware that the imagined community of the book - its writer and readers - did not anticipate these readers (at least not as I imagined it). I thought I was doing my part to call out the fascination with the "alien city of fear and desire" by assigning Orsi but now I wonder if I've just been slumming all along.

I've a feeling it'll do me a lot of good to learn how to do right by these students.

Coming soon!

Armada of cheeses

Most of the cheeses we enjoyed at Sunday dinner this week - missing are only the French goat and the Norwegian (by way of Minnesota) Gjetost.

Waters of compassion

Ethics and religion are like water and tea, the Dalai Lama says, but water on its own is also nourishing. And "While we can live without tea, we can't live without water. Likewise, we are born free of religion, but we are not born free of the need for compassion."

Through new eyes

While at the Studio Museum of Harlem, I also saw a wonderful exhibit of photographs taken by high school students inspired by the museum's collections. These two stunners explicitly address the religious experience of teenagers. They're called "The After-Life" and "Religion Dior." I've written to the museum to convey my admiration to the photographer - and to inquire if there are more where these came from.

Mare nostrum

 

Went up to the Studio Museum of Harlem and to El Museo del Barrio to check out the wonderful mega-exhibition "Caribbean: Crossroads of the World." There's more of it in the Queens Museum, which I hope I'll have a chance to visit, too. It's a stunner! Combing online reviews I found images of some of the works: Dudley Irons' "Black Star Line" (1995); portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley; Mallica Reynolds, "Seven Brothers" (1966); Asilia Guillén's "Exodo Cubano" (1963). And, perhaps my fave, Marisa Jahn's brilliant child literacy project "El Bibliobandido."

Hitting the presses soon

This just in: the Princeton University Press editorial board has given their final approval of my Book of Job: A Biography manuscript. It's really going to happen - perhaps appearing as soon as next Fall!

Post-Christian classroom

This year's "Theorizing Religion" class is like none I've had before. There are some real scoffers, but even the others seem to have a thoroughly post-Christian view of religion - or is that a post-religious view of spirituality? I had the class brainstorm for a definition of "religion" today and, even with my prodding, nobody spoke of god(s) or any kind of supernatural beings, other lives or worlds, scriptures, religious experiences, etc. A Heideggerian might have been amused that what they came up with was beliefs about death, "cause + effect, Nature" with "exemplifying practices," and "laws, codes about life." The circled terms above are those I smuggled in.

But I shouldn't generalize. The scoffers and a voluble Buddho-Pagan dominate the discussion. Are the others intimidated, silenced, resigned? I've heard over and over that Lang classes are full of casual anti-religious judgments but had not really experienced it in my own. But it's still early. The others may open up (I'm trying to create openings). And even the scoffers must have signed up for the class for some reason.

View from our Brooklyn roof

That time again

That sinking feeling

Another greatest classic - this time in the Lang First Year Café Night series: Sergei Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin." Three dozen students sat patiently through it, but when my colleague B tried to lead a discussion about it, nobody said a word. It's too hard to read, a silent,

 

black and white propaganda film about revolution, its hero no individual but a mass coming to consciousness of itself? Perhaps. But maybe it was

something else. When B, near her wits' end, asked if anyone could think of a more recent film which "Potemkin" in some way reminded them of,

someone finally piped up. "Titanic," he said, because in both someone commands someone to "shoot them like dogs." But there may have been a deeper wisdom in the analogy. The main thing this generation knows about the USSR is that - like the Titanic - it wound up going under.

Wall of sound

My parents spent the weekend here, and on Sunday my mother wanted to hear a big gospel choir, so we went to the Brooklyn Tabernacle. It was the 3 o'clock worship service (third of the day), and the famous choir was in street clothes. The choir, at least 180 strong, entirely filled the stage of this converted theater. This vast tableau took the place of an altar, and even of a sermon, a living picture of the broad community of Pentecostal Christianity, cutting across racial lines like no other American religious group.

Theirs was a mighty sound, but they were amplified by a small forest of microphones, and still had a hard time breaking through the synthesizer and rhythm sections at times! It was mainly banal Evangelical praise songs (You are mighty, Jesus is My Friend, etc.), except for one electrifying top-tempo gospel-style Glory Halleluia! Each song repeated often, ascending in volume, modulating chromatically upward and upward, plucking audience members one by one from their seats, their hands upraised or outstretched. Overpowering though it also is, the experience of this music speaks to people through people.

I was reminded of the international chorus assembled at Engage, the GLBTQ Asian conference I attended in Hong Kong (third picture down here), which drew from similar choirs singing similar praise music in Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and providing a different but no less moving witness.

Cinéphile

What a week! A concatenation of Film Forum series let me see two films which have long been honored as best ever - Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" (1941) and Jean Renoir's "La Regle du Jeu" (1939) - on the big screen: my first time for the Renoir, for the Welles it's been decades. Both are feasts for the cinephile, but "Kane" now seems a little precious, while "Règle" remains for me a work of devastating perfection.

Prospect Heights masjid

Exploring some of the less developed parts of Prospect Heights to see the studios of artists (thanks to the Brooklyn Museum's GoBrooklynArt program) I happened on a new mosque just blocks from my home.

Unspooling

My old high school friend J found this dizzying secret dance here.

Leibniz paper #1, seven weeks away!

Divine gifts

Nobody pays attention to party platforms except the opposition. So you can imagine the delight of the Republican operative who did a search for "God" in the 32-page Democratic Party Platform and came up with nothing. (There's a discussion of the contributions of communities of faith, but no mention of God by name, unlike the name-dropping Republican platform.) I'm not sure it's big news, since there was only one use in 2008 - which has since been restored.

We need a government that stands up for the hopes, values, and interests of working people, and gives everyone willing to work hard the chance to make the most of their [God-given] potential.

Why bother, you might think. I thought so. And then I was describing it to one of my first year students (none of whom has been following the conventions) and suddenly it seemed that, although it will win no points with anyone at this point, there is a difference between "potential" and "God-given potential" as political terms. My potential is mine, and my concern. My God-given potential is something else, something of broader concern. We have a duty to God to allow those potentials God has given people to develop, all people's, not just our own. And perhaps we have a duty to God to develop our potentials for the sake of all - though that might seem a stretch to some, I grant, a flashback to the day when there were thought to be duties to God, to others, and to self, all interconnected.

There are plenty of reasons to support democracy, and to pursue the common good. God-given potential in all is a Christian one. It's actually quite a radical idea. That talent of yours? You didn't build it.

Bobst matrix

NYU's Bobst Library, which we New Schoolers also use, has installed a screen to ensure that nobody ever again leaps to his death from its galleries. I'm sure we'll soon get used to it, but before we do it's worth appreciating how like the cascading ciphers of the Matrix it is at its best, not so inappropriate, I suppose, for a repository of knowledge.

Flor de calabaza

Brooklyn Sunday Dinner #2: fresh squid salad, squash blossom and tomato risotto, Mexican flan. Best of all, I only had to make the risotto. Co-host M, a Catholic theologian by avocation, patiently steamed the squid as I harangued him about Cardinal Dolan's practically post-Christian invocation of God "father of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus" at the RNC. Earlier in the day housemate V had converted my pressure cooker into a double boiler. Guest G provided sorbets and a Malbec. Gochiso.

[Update 9/7: I clearly wasn't the only one to think Dolan's words heterodox. In Charlotte, as part of his even longer preachment to the Democrats, Dolan corrected course, invoking "Almighty God, father of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, revealed to us so powerfully in your Son, Jesus Christ." But it's the Deist "nature and nature's God" invoked against gay marriage both times:

RNC Dolan: "Make us truly free, by tethering freedom to truth and ordering freedom to goodness. ... May we know the truth of your creation, respecting the laws of nature and nature’s God, and not seek to replace it with idols of our own making. Give us the good sense not to cast aside the boundaries of righteous living you first inscribed in our hearts even before inscribing them on tablets of stone. May you mend our every flaw, confirming our soul in self-control, our liberty in law.

DNC Dolan: "May our liberty be in harmony with truth; freedom ordered in goodness and justice. ... Show us anew that happiness is found only in respecting the laws of nature and of nature’s God. Empower us with your grace so that we might resist the temptation to replace the moral law with idols of our own making, or to remake those institutions you have given us for the nurturing of life and community."]

Adoramus te

Just one more week to see Bartolo di Fredi's huge and amazing altarpiece from Siena at MoBiA, reunited with most of its predella for the first time in two centuries. I'm so glad I got to see it. You go too.

Reading outside the box

Hey, remember the Book of Job book I was trying to write? Well, the readers' reports are back, and positive! They're not very detailed on the content, which would be worrisome except that I'm confident that they actually read the manuscript. Why? Because one of them wrote this:

While our author is a good word-smith when it comes to the broader strokes, in the details, he can give you fits.  Some of the sentences he writes remind me of verbal box-canyons:  you enter but you have a lot of trouble getting out the other side.

He's right, of course. Even after many drafts and concerted efforts at accessible writing, and the assistance of one of the clearest writers I know, my language tends toward the gnarly. But still I'm thrilled. He's what every writer dreams of: a real, close reader!!

Lived religious geography

My first year students hit the jackpot today. I'd talked them through the walk we made (part of) on Tuesday, explaining why I'd chosen each site, and then asked them to think of a few sites in their hometowns they might show someone interested in the "lived religion" of the place. Each then shared her/his tour with a neighbor, and the neighbor reported on something that struck them from this tour. Great things emerged!

My tour:
• Roman Catholic church of St. Francis Xavier to suggest the individuality of congregations, how much bigger and varied a big church may be than its official line, and the paradigmatic lived religion of queer Christians;
• Limelight Marketplace (in erstwhile Episcopal Church of the Holy Communion) to evoke secularization, prise apart religious life from religious buildings, and suggest that nightclubs, if not malls, might offer some "religious" solace;
• Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art to explore the continuum between religion, spirituality and art, and to think if cultural centers like museums might serve religious needs too;
• the Salvation Army to introduce the privatization of religion thesis and the ways religious organizations have reacted to it;
• Village Presbyterian Church for more building secularization but also to tell the story of the cohabitation of different religious communities in the same building (and its limits);
• Tiles for America, an example of the spontaneous memorialization which is a prime locus for lived religion, not explicitly religious but symbolic; and finally
• the 2nd cemetery of the Spanish Portuguese Congregation Shearith Israel, to recall the palimpsest of grids in New York, and to raise the question: where are the dead New Yorkers?

What they came up with:
• a church in the Bronx which broadcasts its services live on a big TV screen out front, where they are followed by some people who aren’t comfortable with the community inside;
• a Catholic school, also in the Bronx, elaborately transforming the school auditorium into a church for holy days: altar, new lighting, etc.;
• Prosperity Dumplings on Eldridge Street in Chinatown
• Whole Foods, in London;
• a group which met on Sunday afternoons in Annapolis to solemnly ring fourteen singing bowls;
• the bedroom of one student, which has to Buddha statues as well as the signs of the bat mitzvah she organized for herself;
• stops on the Great Ocean Road where you can leave other people behind and be alone with the raw power of nature;
• a local video store in New Jersey, now closed, which was a family not only for those who worked there but for many others;
• hookah bars in Palestine, and here;
• abandoned churches in Chicago now inhabited by homeless squatters, as well as a Catholic neighborhood with shops selling all sorts of paraphernalia, and a tree a whorl in whose bark reminds some of the Virgin Mary.

Up the island

 

Walked up Broadway from Union Square to Lincoln Center with 

 

my friend R today, a beautiful day. He was embarrassed when I took 

 

pictures - "you look like a tourist!" - to which I happily pleaded 

 

guilty, at least until we got to the environs of Times Square!

Window shopping

First day of "Lived Religion in a Secular Age"! After syllabus preliminaries, I took the class on a walk around our neighborhood to try to unsettle their sense of religion. First stop, the church of Francis Xavier, vast and newly renovated Roman-style pile - and home to the city's most visible gay-friendly Catholic congregation, whose brilliant Pride Parade archbishop-bypass is a splendid example of lived religion. Next stop, the Limelight Markeplace, three-story mini-mall of fashion and accessories in a landmarked ex-Episcopal church - before it became a shopping center, it was site of the city's most famous nightclubs, Avalon and Limelight. Time was running short so I could only point to the Salvation Army headquarters' deliberately non-religious civic architecture, the portico of what was home to the Village Presbyterian Church and a Reformed Jewish congregation, and we ended at the Second Cemetery of the Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue across the street from school ... without having time even to glimpse the Tiles for America, last survivors of the city's explosion of 9/11 memorialization. Oh well, it was a start.

Bright lights

This picture doesn't quite capture it, but the under-construction new World Trade Center shimmers at night when seen from 12th and Sixth.

Foodie Brooklyn

When I moved to New York in 2002, my friends J & A took it as the occasion to start a tradition of Sunday dinners, something A remembered from her childhood. In the intervening years we've had scores of wonderful meals at their flat on West 90th Street with visitors from near and far. It anchored my week, too. But J & A are in Minneapolis now (where I got to help assemble Sunday Dinner, Minneapolis #2 two weeks ago), and Sunday Dinner here in New York has become my responsibility. We started small but tasty today, just three.

Working with ingredients from the Brooklyn Farmers Market and the Manhattan Fruit Exchange, I served vichyssoise with a hint of nutmeg (and chicken stock from new housemate V), followed by a caramelized shallot-fresh corn-cheddar-herb-grape tomato quiche, and a salad of lentils, kale chiffonade, mint, oranges and goat cheese in an orange zest-coriander seed vinaigrette - all accompanied by a summery rosé. Then co-conspirator M provided sorbets for dessert, which went nicely with some inky pu erh tea I'd picked up in Kunming. A good start!

Fresh face

I'm having a Lived Religion moment over a story in yesterday's Times. A woman in her eighties, concerned that her favorite representation of Jesus, a 19th century fresco in her local church, was being destroyed by water damage, restored it. The result doesn't look much like the original, it's true. But the original surely didn't look much like Jesus. The Times reports that the blogosphere has been having a field-day with the supposedly simian character of Cecilia Giménez' work - and I'm sure the Times article will inspire more. I'd like to know how Giménez and her community feel about her work. Apparently she did it with priestly approval and in broad daylight; the "disfiguring" was discovered only when the heirs of the painter of the fresco came by to have it restored. Who exactly has a problem here, and is it a religious problem?

Actually, I think I might use this in class. In their celebration of the religious resourcefulness of ordinary people, my "Lived Religion in New York" students moved too quickly to disdain specialist knowledges in religion, the ordinary person being assumed to be competent both to define and to find ways to meet her own needs. Since then I've been thinking about presenting religious specialists as sustained by ordinary people who need their special gifts and skills (who can then, and only then, shape these needs). Giménez may be unapologetic about her faithful attempt to render the face of her Lord, but also prefer the work of a trained artist... (Word is she's bedridden with anxiety over the ruckus she's caused.)

On the other hand, wouldn't it be cool if someone experienced a miracle cure in front of the new "Ecce Homo"?!

Go New School!

The new year is upon us, starting with a new cohort of incoming students. I met my Lang advisees one on one yesterday, and I spent the afternoon today with a group of first years from across the University's divisions in a joint academic exercise called Experience+Meaning, tapping the vitality of nearby parks to spark discussion and new ideas about public space. We had great exchanges, and came up with some nifty ideas for conveying our appreciation of the performative and interactive nature of private enjoyment of public spaces. It was fun to model the interdisciplinary conversation and the movement from theory to practice, from experience to product, which define this place.

 

Then I got some r&r at an orientation jam of the Jazz program. A faculty trumpeter was soaring as I came in, but I took this picture during the pause when he took a breather, and asked if anyone else in the room wanted to play. "Joe, Joe, Joe!" chanted some students, and a nerdy-looking white guy in the blue t-shirt of the orientation leaders picked up his guitar. They still needed a drummer, and found one, too, another orientation guide. Joe started haltingly playing solo and then, before one quite knew it, drums and base had joined, then the piano, and it was a combo, an ensemble, one riffing off the next, the music getting groovier and lovelier by the minute! I love this place, I thought.

Floating up from the past

Where the lamented Thé Adoré used to be, what seem to be very old shop signs have reappeared - a printer, and a children's barber. Or are they the first signs of what will next inhabit the little house on 13th?

Splash

  

Forgot my camera at home, but the camera on my smartphone did very well with the dazzling fountain at Lincoln Center this evening...

I was there for a Mostly Mozart concert (Andrew Manze conducting Bach 3rd suite, Mendelssohn's first piano concerto (with Stephen Hough), Mozart's Jupiter symphony), filling out a first week back which has included a brilliant play ("Tribes" at Barrow Street) and a disappointing film I'd waited all summer to see ("Beasts of the Southern Wild"). Coming up in the remaining days before the new academic year begins a jazz celebration, "Clybourne Park" and perhaps Kusama Yayoi at the Whitney.

Lived ... secular ...

First meeting with the students in my first year advising seminar, "Lived religion in a secular age." An interesting bunch, if gender-imbalanced even for Lang: nine young women, two young men. Not necessarily a problem, perhaps an opportunity. But there's more. As we went around the room introducing ourselves, I asked the students which pole of the course title - lived religion or secular age - interested them more. I hoped and prayed that it wouldn't be 9 to 2 for lived religion, and map onto gender lines. But it did.

(I hope nobody else noticed.)

Happily, the peer adviser who'll be running the first year workshop running parallel to my class was there too. A true model of Lang insight and sophistication she claimed the question on her own terms. She was interested in half of each pole, living and secular. Thank you! Now we can proceed.

Chances are

Listened today to a "webinar" on first generation college students (FGS), presented by the authors of a new book on the subject. FGS are an "invisible minority" who arrive in colleges and universities without the "cultural capital" of other students. They are less likely than other students to participate in extra-curricular activities or to avail themselves of the advice and resources offered to help students succeed. And if they are having problems, they are less likely to tell their advisers about them. So, the webinards argued, it is incumbent on advisers and faculty to get to know who their students are, teach them "help-seeking skills" and learn about their particular needs and hopes. Institutions might also consider various mentoring and learning community models, involving older FGS students, faculty and staff.

I was struck by this phrase, on one of the slides: Do not assume successful assimilation, and don't leave serendipity to chance. The former I get (though I know I could do it better), but the latter seems silly. Until you think about it. A big part of what we advocates of the liberal arts and of student-directed learning celebrate is serendipity - one aspect of the freedom in "liberal" arts - and it's certainly true that we try to establish a learning environment in which it can happen in various ways. But I hadn't thought about it in terms of privilege, or in connection with the culture shift demanded of FGS...

Multimedia

I'm getting with the program! Both of my Fall courses will assign not only readings and site visits but podcasts. They're from this project, put together by some graduate students at the University of Edinburgh. I've not had a chance to listen to more than a half dozen of them, but the idea is good, and when they're good they are very good. For instance, the conversation with Linda Woodhead about secularization theory will frame the subject for my first year seminar. It gives a beautiful overview of the topic, and why secularization theory remains important even as discredited. Indeed, it'll help me situate The New School in its special place as a bridge between European and American academic worlds, as it features Peter Berger's and José Casanova's contributions quite prominently.

The Religious Studies Project interviews teaching or attending conferences in the UK and so clearly has a British focus - not a problem unless you're unaware of it. To me it's a gift, a corrective to the preoccupations of American academe. It introduces a younger generation's map of what's living and what's dead in the field. And it's reminder of conversations with folks with assorted British accents and mannerisms back in my Oxford days!

Not all the podcasts are quite as satisfying as the Woodhead discussion, showing the difficulties of the genre. Interviews are hard! In one case, the interviewee seems to be playing dumb, reporting that only 40% of Buddhists in the American Religious Identification Survey indicated that they believed strongly in the existence of God, and contextualizing statistical factoids from ARIS with snibbets from interviews with American college students. In another, one of the major religioclasts seems to dodge all but his own questions to the field (kudos to the interviewer for pressing him). And in another, the interviewer interrogates a Norwegian scholar about the legitimacy of gender studies in religion with an aggressive obtuseness I thought long extinct, certainly among younger scholars. Think again!

A good interview doesn't just happen, anymore than a good article or talk or exhibition; it takes craft and care. A student of religious studies could learn valuable lessons from the content of these podcasts, as well as from their form - even when they're not entirely successful.

Metalic

Another metal-clad construction going up nearby, this one in Brooklyn.

Upwards

Remember the 65 Fifth Avenue building site? In the three months I've been away, the new University Center has been getting a skin.