Workspace

I didn't tell you, but my computer crashed the day of the book launch. Everything turned out OK, thanks to a Genius at the local Apple Store (and to my backing up more or less regularly - do it!). It emerged that the operating system went awry somehow. Now I'm equipped with a newer, fleeter-of-foot operating system called OS X Mavericks.

Which doesn't mean nothing's changed. In the new OS, some of the fonts I use in my diary (each of my various projects has its own font and color) have disappeared, including the one for the Job book (coincidence!). It also gave me a perfect occasion to pick a new desktop picture. You'll recognize this one. On the heels of this one, it joins this cool series.

Beginning to feel a lot like...

In reverse chronological order, here's Plaza Street East just as the day's snow started its devolution to slush, icy surfaces already forming.
Despite the blizzard, the East Village was crawling with people in Santa suits. Not sure why these guys weren't in pubs like everyone else.
Old world ornaments in old worldy Myzel's Chocolates on 55th Street, where I was not, of course, buying anyone Christmas licorice...!

Parsons Pompeii

Think of this blogpost as a pendant to the images from our class tour of the new building on Wednesday. I didn't mention that much of the interest came from our students' avid interest: most of them are from the Parsons fashion program, which migrates down to that building next semester. A big shift! I happened to be in Midtown this evening and realized it was my last chance to see the building where the fashion program has been for more than four decades. Making the most of a difficult situation - the place is stuffy and much too small, but ideally situated in the fashion district - the words YOU NEVER LEAVE PARSONS have been plastered across the windows. A day after the last classes and showings, it was a ghost town. Though rooms may have looked similar every night for 40 years, tonight the bare dressmakers' dummies were eerily reminiscent of Pompeii.

They left in such a hurry after last night's farewell party that 5 magnums of champagne were still waiting, unopened, on the abandoned stage.

Launched!

Last night's book launch was a dusey. Thirty seven people showed up! The four speakers - Nic Birns, Jerry Schneewind, Leong Seow and Fran Snyder - gave exquisite 5-minute talklets, each of them worth the price of admission. I learned tons about the Book of Job from them, so I suspect it will have been informative for others present, too! (Nic also took the pictures below.) In attendance depite the busy season were current and past students (Job seminar veterans!), colleagues, folks from church, my editor, a venerable librarian, old friends, and three of four of my recent housemates! Six copies of the book were sold and more signed, and the wine didn't run out. I dare say... a success!

Theorizing Religion score

My dad sent this picture of sunset over the Pacific last night. That was probably during the time many of the students in "Theorizing Religion" sat down to craft their Final Reflections, which we just shared in class this morning. The crafting and sharing of final reflections happens each year, and is always informative (and gratifying - students are getting stuff from the class that means something to them, and which they're not getting elsewhere). But this class has had a special friendly energy, so when it came my turn to share my final reflection, I shared a lot.

Specifically, I noted that it's been twenty years that I've been teaching versions of this course -  as long as most of the students have been around. (For its first decade it was known as "Approaches to the Study of Religion.") I've not taught it each of those years, but certainly at least a dozen times, perhaps more than that. It's a special pleasure and privilege to teach it, as it gives the opportunity to reflect on what this religious studies thing is, and how I understanding my own place within it, year after year. And this can't just be open-ended navel-gazing, as it has to produce a workable syllabus each time.

Over the years the syllabus has changed in many ways, I told the class, but the core has always been a historical account of the emergence of modern thinking about religion in the West, and the academic discipline(s) that have engaged with it. The backbone has always been primary texts, from Hume to Eliade, as far as possible read in their entirety. But some of the same questions have dogged it the whole time, too. Classic texts? All western men? In various ways over the years I've tried to make it less Eurocentric, and leavened it with contemporary scholarship, much of the best of which happens to be by women. That we keep reading James, Durkheim, etc. seems warranted in part just by the fact that we do keep reading them. Pretty much the only texts I assigned in the 1990s that are still being read today are the classic texts, which serve as a lingua franca between generations - as long, of course, as we share this narrow core. Broadening the core seems the way to go, but this is something you can't do at the scale of a single class or school - or, indeed, country!

Lived religion has twisted the knife some more: to what extent does attention to thought, to systems, to texts reinforce a particular sense not just of what religions are but of what what human societies are like - an elitist one with hierarchies of authoritative interpreters? You've heard me worry about this many time before, so I'll say no more here. I shared this concern with the students, but admitted that the "hybridity all the way down" approach unsettled me, too ... as also does my discomfort with it.

I won't be doing "Theorizing Religion" next Fall - I'll be in China. And when I return to it in Fall Fall 2015, who knows what it will look like? Already when we did Marx this time around I remarked that my imminent Chinese adventure had given an edge of danger to ideas which, in an American liberal arts college setting, seem entirely recreational. After a year in the company of Chinese scholars of religion, some of them asking the same questions I ask each time I revise "Theorizing Religion," who knows where I'll be!

Signature

We ended our New School history class in its future - a tour of the University Center, due to open its doors in a month! It's quite a different experience from inside than from outside - full of light and movement.

View from the spot from which I've followed the whole process.

 Our class gathers in the Welcome Center opposite.

View from ground floor back across intersection to my photo spot.

Something important on whiteboard next to the elevator bank.

 Iconic NYC water tower skyline view southeastward from 7th floor.

 Inside/outside view down Fifth Avenue as the sun sets in the west.

 The color scheme is nothing if not bold (Urban's colors were subtler).

 One of the fonts "wayfinding" pro Ruedi Baur designed for the building.

Distant West 14th Street Christmas lighting seen across a crowded room.

Across Fifth Avenue through a grid of divisional names.

Long-flowing stairways define the experience of the building.

 My indispensable co-teacher in the vast new 800-seat auditorium.

Religion is...

Tried something very cool in class today and it nearly worked.

A little context: it was the penultimate session of “Theorizing Religion.” I almost always end my classes with two assignments, an academic one (graded) and a final reflection (ungraded). The former, an essay “contextualizing, critiquing and/or correcting” one of our classic theorists of religion with the help of three of our contemporary readings, was due yesterday; the ones I’ve had a chance to read so far are really good. The final reflection, which can be in any genre students choose so long as they’re prepared to share with the class, is due in class Thursday.

Today we had our last reading – Ann Taves’ “building-block” approach to religion by way of the idea of "specialness," which is incidentally also a critique/correction of Durkheim. Taves argues that debates about “religion” – is the term too western, too critical, too protective, etc – shouldn’t mean Religious Studies should hang up its hat. But we might still be better off not using the word “religion” or its various not-quite-cognates in other languages as a second-order term… I’ll spare you the details. The piece is at once liberating and frustrating, clarifying and banal (“specialness”?!) – but that’s the point. She wants us to get on with things.

So I decided it was time to give the students a chance to come up with their own definition of religion. Borrowing the speed-dating format from last semester I had students do this…

Design your own theory of religion!

-- Questions to any definition of religion (as a group)

-- Draft your definition, with three examples (5 minutes)

-- Exchange 1 (5 minutes) - 1 minute to revise

-- Exchange 2 (5 minutes) - 1 minute to revise

-- Exchange 3 (5 minutes)

-- Finalize and share if you're comfortable

It would have worked flawlessly without step 1, which got everyone spooked. (Besides, it turned out,  the questions I guided us toward - self-serving? culturally specific? etc. - were the wrong ones. What we should have asked was: Is it too broad? Is it limiting? What is it for (practical, political or academic purpose etc.)? Still, once we started, it was fun, and by the end everyone was happy to share what they’d come up with. We had a little of almost everything: deities, comfort, meaning, community, transcendence of self and of this planet, personal, universal, cosmic. Some were very long; one, following Taves' lead, abandoned the term - though apparently only after the exchanges. One student semi-seriously offered “Religion is living!” (When pressed she said this included non-humans. What about yogurt, I asked. Sure, she said. Observed another student: So it’s all about culture!) I think the difficulty, the fun, and the variety will have seeded the emerging personal reflections in a good way.

What was my definition? (As you may know, I always do whatever I ask students to do.) I used Karl Barth’s “Religion is atheism”—the fallen creature’s denial of its createdness. This was an idea I included in “Theorizing Religion” once or twice in the past (only one student got it) but not recently. Do you really think that? asked the friend of yogurt, somewhat taken aback. I'm pleased my own view has been backgrounded enough over the course of the semester that this seemed possible. (This is just the kind of backgrounding the New Yorker reviewer deemed "anti-intellectual" in my book.)

New Yorker minute

 

You know the famous Andy Warhol line... well, my quarter hour seems to have arrived! No less august a magazine than The New Yorker has seen fit to publish a review of my book - indeed, quite a long one (5 pages!). I haven't actually read it yet (you can, here). Why? Well, I learned of it from my editor, who sent an email saying

a fulsome treatment of your book in The New Yorker – did you see it? I don’t think you come across as Mr Rodgers, personally, but as they say, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

Mister Rogers? It was Fred's Will Rogers reference made me a little uneasy. Usually you note that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about when pretty bad things are being said. So all I've done is checked the Mister Rogers reference:

In all this, Larrimore maintains a supremely tolerant position. He approves of the wealth of “interpretative openings and opportunities.” Everything is O.K. with him, and he thinks that whatever disagreements there are may lead to community. (This is interesting, since an absolutely crucial aspect of Job’s trial is that he suffers alone.) Such a latitudinarian approach is perhaps appropriate to a reception study, telling who thought what, and who, after them, thought something else, but eventually it comes to seem anti-intellectual. At times, Larrimore sounds like a kindly Unitarian minister, or like Mister Rogers.

That would hurt if I didn't make the same point about Job's solitary suffering in the book - admittedly among many points and in the context of medieval liturgies and Books of Hours, and again in the admittedly quite involved interpretation of Margarete Susman. It's true that I condemn those who too quickly condemn Job's friends... Just sayin'.

What also doesn't really hurt, though I think it's supposed to, is the reference to Mister Rogers. So I come across as nice? How, well, um, true! I can't remember when it was, but someone likened me to Mister Rogers once before; I rather liked it.

I'm wearing my red cardigan to school tomorrow!

Sonderbar Ding

The visit of my Japanese friend H gave me an excuse to see the Met's "Rosenkavalier" again last night. (We also saw the rat pack "Rigoletto" on Wednesday.) It was my third time, including the summer Met in HD reprise last year. Glad I went! The cast was entirely new: Daniela Sindram was our Octavian, Martina Serafin our Marschallin, Peter Rose our Ochs and Erin Morley our Sophie - none of these names I recognized - and all under the very able baton of Edward Gardner. But this 44-year old production of a now 101-year-old opera (the Met premiere was 100 years ago) was still seamless and timeless. It made me realize how much even of the Fleming/Graham performance's magic is in the production itself - the grand old sets, the physical comedy, the meticulously Hogarthian crowd scenes...

My relationship with opera began at the Staatsoper in Vienna, whose standing room you could see for 20 Schillings - less than $2. (First opera: "Lohengrin.") Waiting in the queue for the tickets I got to recognize the true believers, some of whom came every night, others for every performance of a given opera, some for every performance by a given singer. As my theater friends have since told me, every performance is different, even with the very same cast. If you go just once, you'll never know. The flip side of that, at least in a case like this gorgeous klunker, is that beneath the differences - did the Marschallin always start singing "Die Zeit, die ist ein sonderbar Ding" while embracing Octavian, over his shoulder? - it's always the same.

Which is, of course, a very "Rosenkavalier" sentiment. Octavian thinks he could stop time, but the Marschallin comes to appreciate that time is as much God's creation as anything else (Auch sie ist ein Geschöpf des Vaters, der uns alle erschaffen hat), ravaging in the individual's life but mysteriously consistent over the sum of lives. There will always be another Octavian discovering another Sophie; time might even graciously stop for them for a shining moment. The Marschallin's resignation seems miraculous, even religious to the young lovers (Mir ist wie in der Kirch'n), but something like it is demanded of all of us eventually (I guess I'm getting there). The capacity for this resignation is a miracle too.

Persisting in his integrity

Wish I'd got a clearer picture, but here's Job's wife exhorting him to curse God and die from the fireplace of the John Hewlett House (1740-60), originally in Woodbury, NY and now among the period rooms in the new American Wing of the Met. I think that must be Satan pulling the strings above her, but what's the strange object on the far left?

Hear smart people talk about the Book of Job!

Stick 'em up

Tonight was what was in effect the final lecture of our New School history course. (Next week we go for a tour of the soon-to-be-opened building and students report on their work.) The theme was Gender & Knowledge, the name of the most important of early Lang's paths of inquiry - notice it at the center of the 1986-97 curricular "map" above - but we also used work by some feminist colleagues to reflect on broader questions. My colleague J told a beautiful story about changing understandings of feminist scholarship by placing the Lang "map" between what may have been the first course in women's history at an American university in 1962, Gerda Lerner's "Great women in American history," and a course being directed right now by FemTechNet, a New School-based alternative to the massive open online courses (MOOCs) everyone seems to think are the future of higher ed. I got to talk about the work of a revered colleague past - Sally Ruddick - and a revered colleague present - Ann Snitow, what joy!

It was also our closing lecture, so we returned to questions about how stories are told - in general, and in the specific case of The New School. Our framework came from Ann's beautiful if somewhat melancholy essay exploring why feminists are "too soon forgotten and actively misremembered." I told you about this article last time. It makes use of New School psychologist colleague William Hirst's idea of "stickiness." Ann recounts how the women's movement eschewed photos and leaders, emphasizing diversity and open-endedness, and comes to the conclusion that this is a pretty sure guarantee of not being remembered!
What to do? It's difficult, discouraging even. We don't want to sell our souls in order just to be remembered, and yet wouldn't it be nice if the women's movement were more continuous, not skipping generations, each thinking itself the first. At least we can record what happens in all its richness and hope that someone someday will stumble on it... 

We were presenting this also as a way of reflecting on the way New School history gets told. This institution, in which women have played remarkably important parts as founders, students, faculty, administrators, etc., continues to tell a story of male founders, presidents and exiles. The two main women mentioned - Martha Graham and Hannah Arendt - weren't nearly as important as countless other, forgotten, women. But there are other aspects of New School history which seem to lack stickiness, too. Some of these are among the things that J and I find most compelling about it. In structure and ethos, if inconsistently,

we didn't want to be a university, with a defined goal or leader or curriculum or commu- nity. We didn't want to be weighed down by an endow- ment, a board, disciplines, let alone hoary tradition.

But to be ready to answer the demands of the day, to have the agility to discern and meet "unmet need," it surely wouldn't hurt to have a sense of a legacy of experiments, open-ended inquiry, unexpected communities, would it? Here's hoping this will stick with our students!

Shades

The Freedom Tower through a shade from 9th floor conference room.

From the archives

 

The Book of Job's been part of the curriculum here for a long time!

Launch!

The Book of Job: A Biography will officially launch next week - Thursday, December 12th, in the Hirshon Suite at The New School (55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor), 8:00-9:30 pm. Wine and cheese served!
I'm very honored that there'll also be a few words from C. L Seow of Princeton Theological Seminary and J. B. Schneewind of Johns Hopkins, as well as from my Lang colleagues Nic Birns and Fran Snyder.

This time it's for real

 After one return from the dead, I think this is really it for Ray's/Roio's.

Once upon a time in the Village

A frame shop near school has displayed this old map in its shop window. How old is it? 1961 - old enough for The New School to be contained in the 12th/13th Street neighborhood, for the Women's House of Correction to be overshadowing Jefferson Market, for traffic to be going through Washington Square, and no Bobst. What else can you see?