Flyover

Winter break travel's first leg (actually from JFK)! On to Shanghai Jan 3.

Season's greetings

Thanks

to the Los Angeles Times, whose caption reads:

Ever new

So Final Syntheses have come and gone. It's always a moving experience, even when you take into account the pretty-much obligatory "I got a lot out of this class" business. Lang students aren't shy about criticism, though - nor about sharing what really matters to them. The generosity and vulnerability can be overwhelming. And, given the opportunity to express themselves in "a medium that matters to you," they do some pretty cool stuff. Often personal, I can't share most of them. In a way it's nobody's business but the members of the respective class, and part of the joy of these final sessions is feeling the commitment students demonstrate, one last time, to the collective enterprise we've been engaged in, to the community of learning.

I can, however, tell you about my final reflections (which I always do, and share). I'll save the Theorizing Religion reflection for another day - it's about the consequences of making "religion making" the frame of the course, and how to make the class a welcoming place both for prior learning and for concerns in other disciplines and vocations than the academic study of religion. I'll tell you instead about the first year seminar which offered a survey of New School history and devoted its final fourth to "model seminars." A reminder of the course description...

Because the "model seminar" preparation process began before Thanksgiving, the actual coursework of the class seems like a distant memory. (The student whose final reflection I post above provided a welcome reminder of the variety of things we read.) Instead we were treated to seminars on a remarkable range of subjects:

Urban Campus vs College Town • Fluxus • Education for Syrian Refugees • Black Mountain College • MOOCs • Health Crazes • What is Safe Space • The Kim Kardashian Effect • Grading Systems • The Value of Liberal Arts • Educational Access for Girls • Priorities and Life Balance • The Museum of Feelings • Learning from Popular Music • Dress Codes

There were a few connections to what we'd done together - Fluxus from Cage, Black Mountain College as an echo of New School experiments, Frank Alvah Parsons' ideas on art and advertising, various discussions around education - but not that many. There weren't supposed to be. The choice of topic was to reflect students' sense of "the urgent demands of now," or at least something they wanted to share with their classmates. They were interested in each other's choices, too.

As my Final Synthesis I reminded the class of our inconclusive discussion, in connection with the New School College experiment, about who was in the best position to know what an education should offer. The New School tradition suggests that received curricula and disciplines should be scrutinized, that the ever new constellations of social and cultural life demand ever new courses and formats. What's needful for first year college students now? Our discussion was inconclusive because the class came up with arguments for - but even stronger arguments against - entrusting the First Year Curriculum to graduating seniors, to sophomores, to students who'd chosen majors, to recent and not so recent alums... (That faculty in fact make these decisions didn't come up!) At that I suggested that, as they navigated our "open curriculum," they consult as many and and as many kinds of people as possible.

Today I suggested that we might learn from ourselves. What did the topics they had chosen suggest a relevant Lang First Year Curriculum in 2015 might look like? They seemed quite taken by my suggestion:

Art, Values and the Market

Equity: Local and Global

Learning from Popular Culture

Self-Care

What do you think?

Seeing through itching

A text I'm considering for next semester's course on Job and the arts is Hanoch Levin's Sorrows of Job (1981). Even in translation it sings/stings.

Later on it gets very very dark. Trans. Barbara Harshaw in Modern Israeli Drama in Translation, ed. Michael Taub (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1993), 23

Semester's end

Today saw the penultimate sessions of my classes, with discussion of "non-exclusive identity," white supremacy and the once and future category of religion in Theorizing Religion, four final student-led "model seminars" in Seminar in the City. Everyone feels a little played-out this 

late in the semester; tyou might think there's nothing left to do but say goodbye. But (surprising even myself, a little) I have high hopes for the alchemy of "Final Syntheses," both for individual learners (I always do one too) and for the class as a whole. Wednesday it all comes together!

Advent 3

The world, said a visiting preacher in church this morning at the end of her sermon, is too dangerous for anything but truth, and too big for anything but love. That's a quotation, the internet instructs me, from William Sloane Coffin, but it spoke powerfully to my feelings about the present moment.

Others, too, sense a gathering of clouds of war, a big one, whether in the proto-WW1-like conflicts on the margins of empires or the proto-WW2-like rise of near-fascist political movements. I quail at the thought that one of those hundreds of millions of guns making sport of our national security will be misused in a way which sets off an avalanche.

I'm thinking of some vigilante Islamophobe, not of the police in their continued murder of young men of color. But that may be because, while in Shanghai, I missed another avalanche. The year I was away seems to have been an epochal year for America, one in which the dream - "the Dream," Martin Luther King's dream, the "arc of justice" dream - died, or nearly. Can we do this? Have we the will?

Even in this unseasonable warmth - New York came close to hitting the high set for this day in 1925 today - the darkness of the season gets to you. The detritus of a year's getting and spending starts to block your view, even of yourself. Hope seems harder to maintain, more clearly a theological gift, a grace.

Light another candle. Maranatha, come Lord Jesus.

Brooklyn Botanic Garden, snowless December

'Tis the season

The tree has gone up outside the Washington Square Arch. But in this unseasonably warm year, where it still feels like Fall, this tree-within-a-leaf, still green months after I picked it up, seems more suitable.

Into the Wilderness

I lost a favorite scarf tonight - grey and purple herringbone, perfect with my red-lined charcoal peacoat - but I find I don't mind. It seems like a price worth having paid for being able to see the two Thornton Wilder one-acts on the way to which the scarf must have slipped from my shoulders. The plays were "The Long Christmas Dinner" and "Pullman Car Hiawatha" (both published in 1931), and Peccadillo Theater's evening at the Theater at St. Clement's was called "A Wilder Christmas."

The first does indeed take place on Christmas Day - indeed, on Christmas Day over ninety years: we see several generations of a family appear and pass on, the ritualized informalities of the family meal continuing through time, through joy and loss. As characters pass away the actors rise from the table and move through a portal at back stage left, usually wordlessly, as activity continues at the table. It's hard not to weep at the fatal inevitability of it, at the loneliness of the departing characters.

The second is less obviously Chistmassy but more, well, Christian. Among the things it's about is a soul's ascent into heaven, reluctant to leave the earth and protesting that it's "unfair" that she not have to be punished for her failings in this life. But it's also about this world of ourse in all its unremarked complexity and splendor: at one point the actors playing passengers in a train's sleeping car - their characters are almost all asleep - sit up and turn to look at the audience, which is put to work giving voice to the land being traversed. Audience members are given brief texts to read, as towns, as the weather, as a field full of hibernating gophers and fieldmice. A ghost of a workman killed in the building of a rail bridge being crossed appears and speaks (in German). The Stage Manager, the master of ceremonies readying for prime time in "Our Town" (1938), has everyone read their scripts at once, including the actors on the stage - this is the sound of the earth! Then it's joined by the sound of other planets, audience members given Tibetan singing bells to chime, and three young women dressed like something from Vaudeville representing the hours of the night, and philosophy. We were sitting in the front row, so surrounded. All were invited to sound together, a cosmic din.

And then, coup de théâtre on top of coup de théâtre, the black curtain behind the stylized train car opens to reveal a big open sky and an angel (actually an archangel, and the actor who plays the Pullman porter) atop some stairs, who comes slowly down (to music by Arvo Pärt) into the car full of sleeping passengers, for the woman who has died...

Describing it seems like doing it a disservice: it was so theatrical, so much the power, the magic, of live performance. (Why didn't we include this in "Religion & Theater"?) So I'll say no more - see it if you can, and I hope my staging spoilers won't spoil it. It's all very knowing, very "theatrical" - one is very aware of letting oneself be party to its telling artifice - so it might not.

I have a long history with Thornton Wilder - I sensed an affinity of sensibility long before I knew he was gay - and I vaguely recall reading the first of tonight's plays once upon a long time ago. Wilder's novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey was the starting point for my "Problem of Evil" lecture course at Princeton, and something which has stayed with many students who took it. I directed a Wilder play at UWC long before that, "The Matchmaker," being already by that time a fan from his novels The Eighth Day and The Ides of March. I came late to his most famous works, "Our Town" and "The Skin of Our Teeth" (only the first of which I've even seen, in that splendid David Cromer production at Barrow Street in 2009). These last are most like the plays I just saw (it's impossible not to see tonight's one-acts as stepping stones toward them)... the magic is there already. So glad I got to see them. And in some strangely cheerful way resigned to the passing of my scarf. All things pass, but art, and love, remain. (The pictures are of the stage before the start of the first play, and after the end of the second.)

New Yorker cartoons

No, and yes.
(From December 7, p69; December 14, p65)

Chills

In the Guardian stunning aerial photographs by Daniel Beltrá of Greenland's glaciers in crisis. Unspeakable beauty, and calamity.

Art!!

Quite an artistic day we had in Philadelphia, starting with one of the city's famous murals (actually one of a pair, the other, in similar colors, faces it) made possible by the widespread rowhouse construction. But the highlight was the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a third of which we explored. Wonderful to rediscover PMA's splended medieval European collection, including this "Holy Kinship" (attributed to Matthäus Gutrecht the Younger) from around 1500. The Virgin Mary's (and so Jesus') extended family?! Mary's mother Anne married three times, dontcha know, with progeny (and of course husbands) each time. Overflowing with babies on their mothers' laps this is a Christianity unrecognizable to the religious imagination today, whether of the image is male Protestant Trinity or celibate Catholic saints. Ave Mariae!
And then the Monets, each a work pulsing with life. In the first I saw, a landscape on the isle of Saint Martin, you become aware that the wind you see playing in some tall grasses in the distance is also scudding clouds over your head, beyond your field of view. In others, colors morph as you watch from blue to a rose-tinted brown, or from pink and yellow to sun-spangled green, and green sea currents roil powerfully. (Photos, including the museum's, don't begin to do justice.) And in 1873's "The Sheltered Path," you find yourself hurrying to catch up with the man ahead of you, who's just turned - or is just about to turn - back, but in any case wants you ion that path with him. How can you not follow?

In parts of Prospect Park

Autumn still reigns!

Liquid illumination

Wondrous light show along the Schuylkill River walk in Philadelphia.

Brotherly love

My Chinese friend is heading back to Shanghai next week, so we went on a final trip out of town - to hang out with a friend in West Philadelphia. It's another world than this New York/Brooklyn one, and in not unappealing ways. Blocks of shambling Victorian houses, murals all over the place, walls full of Monet landscapes, and street cars, too! Details anon.

Maker community

You know I've introduced a new framing category to "Theorizing Religion" this year: religion-making. Here's how I described it in the course syllabus:

What has recently been called “religion-making” isn’t just something scholars do. We experience “religion” as a natural kind because it is woven into our individual, social and even political experience. “Religions” are made and unmade not just by participants but by critics, by high and popular culture, by individuals and communities negotiating complicated identities, by those who claim to be “spiritual but not religious” - and by the law. The academic study of religion is not an escape from these practices of making and unmaking “religions” but the chance of an overview, critique, dialogue, intervention. Its opportunities for reflection and comparison with the practices of other times and places offer more than just scholarly rewards. 

This week students shared the last of three "Religion-Making Reports":
The second and third of these assignments predate the "religion-making" rubric, but take on (I trust) a further interest in this new frame. The first was explicitly designed to tap students' "prior knowledge" regarding religion, and to invite it into the space of our discussions. (It was the focus of the "pedagogical project" I'm doing for my pedagogy seminar at Teachers College.) But that was a long time ago, so I decided to devote part of our Wednesday class to discussing "religion-making" explicitly.

The discussion flowed nicely from student analyses of various constellations of religion stuff online, which had examined not only the often dodgy content of internet sources but their unnamed sources, glib generalizations, hidden agendas, marketing strategies, etc. A particularly interesting discussion arose out of a student's celebration of chat forums, ideally democratic places where users generated the content in response to their own questions and concerns. (These were a great resource, she argued rather charmingly, for those who didn't have the privilege of participating in seminar discussions like our own!) Soon we were learning about online forums for members of particular religious traditions such as judaism.stackexchange.com, an entirely different ballgame than beliefnet, religionfacts or even On Being.

In the class' last ten minutes I asked students to bring their thoughts back to the particular enterprise of religious studies in this context.

The responses are utterly fascinating, offering totally different ways of understanding why and how to do religious studies than I have encountered before. Some excerpts:

It leaves room for the debate of religion. The many different theoretical understandings of religion change from person to person; by establishing a place where this “debate” is acceptable, it allows individuals to create and further develop their own thoughts on religion: how that impacts them individually, how it impacts their community, etc.

As intellectual beings, we need to explore religion not just through experience or emotions but through our intellect, through academic study. It can be difficult because academia attempts to isolate the idea from the personal and that can be extremely difficult especially if you identify as religious. But it is also extremely helpful, because it allows for more of an objective perspective and analysis on religious subjects. The academic study of religion also really forces one to be critical and honest (because it's so depersonalized) in ways that they might not be able to do otherwise

For the rising numbers of Spiritual But NOT Religious (SBNR) individuals in America and elsewhere, a great number of them are gaining their information on various religions in an academic setting. ... As society begins to value secularism on a grander scale, and American children are raised with less and less religious upbringings and do not get access to religious information in public schools, we are becoming a generation of individuals seeking knowledge of religion, particularly those we have not encountered in our own lives. While the internet and various commercialized "religions" offer an introduction to an assortment of religions, most college students are aware of the unreliable nature of these sources and seek a more trustworthy source of religious information, which does not expect them to participate or to commit to practice. 

In light of studying religion through the view of philosophy, I have had a very difficult time understanding the practice of spirituality within my own personal life. ... We must be prepared to understand our incapacities in speaking for the religions which we academically explore, because the most important aspect of all of them can and will always be the lived experience of them

An academic study of religion allows us to take a step back and ask ourselves what we're looking at. As we've noticed, we may not know how to speak about it and may get things completely wrong. But there is something valid and beautiful in how as time goes on, we develop new understanding and new ways of speaking. I feel this separation (from the spirituality of religion) can help in understanding the role of religion in human life (as it may be hard to see how it affects your life when you are fully immersed within it). ... The academic study of religion seems to be plagued with the stigma of secular/western understanding. I wish to eliminate this stigma and bring in an understanding that the academy, while allowing us to remove ourselves, also allows us the time and place to deeply immerse ourselves in religious study and understanding without being bound by spirituality.

I believe that the academic study of religion should expand outside of the university and intellectual, hard to access places, and become available in more accessible terms. It can take years to understand any religion, and instead of doing all of the research by themselves, people can instead read papers and books written by people who have spent years and years studying different religions. The study of religion helps people to gain a wider understanding of other people and the different faiths that other people carry with them. The idea of understanding multiple different religions can lead to a pluralistic society.

It's one thing to read what some scholars think about religion, but it's another to delve into a website or a news source that deals specifically with the way that actual religious people live their actual religious lives. So, what should academia do? Firstly, I believe that academia should record, track, and write thoroughly about the act of religion making. I believe that studying online religion, religious blogs, websites such as judaism.stackexchange.com and the like that actually detail religious lives can infuse the importance of the study of experience into the academic study of religion. I don't believe that academia has a space to "debunk" religious beliefs, so to speak. I believe that academia can and should be a part of the religious world, to critique and foster dialogue both within and outside of religious communities.

An interesting thing about scholarly work on religion is that most people who have been religious for most of their lives seem to have no need for, or at least do not regularly consult, those types of sources. ...  So I think that the most pivotal role played by academic religious studies is in providing information for non-believers (and of course other academics). This leads to an interesting situation, where it is possible and often happens that outsiders who have consulted the rigorous scholarly work on a tradition and then go out and observe or talk to practitioners find that what they see is nothing like what they expected. 

Basically the role of the academic study of religion is so that people don't take religion for law, but as something that can be used as a reference, or rather as a guide. 

I think that engaging with questions about what makes something a religion can help someone figure out which aspects of their life they consider religious or what they consider their religion to be. ... but I also think there's a reality to the fact that people do things in ways that resist categorization. 

The two forms of proof accepted by academics (previously published studies and field work) are seemingly flawed and self-propelling. Like all academia it focuses on examining the world but seldom examines itself. As far as religion making, I feel very few people outside the ivory tower of academia take academic views of faith as important, instead focusing on experience. I feel this is a healthy thing. 

I am thinking of safety and security in relation to the world of internet forums, where thoughts and opinions can be shared behind the mask of a screen. By contrast the classroom can be a space where discourse can be made without threat of danger or extremism. It is also a place where conversation can illuminate the limitations of distinctions and boundaries that can be made in the privatized action of observation of personal research. This reaction is aimed towards academic discourse and round0table discussions like we have at Lang, rather than academic writing, though I'm sure you can't isolate one without the other. Even though I do not have deep religious beliefs or a certain tradition, it is comforting to know religion, scholarly info or not, helps others or positively influences others. 

Academic study is my way of accessing something that is important to someone else, since I cannot access it the way they do. Academic study is both disillusioning and beneficial in this way.

There's a lot of religion-making going in our class discussions every day. It's a little humbling to know just how much! What to do with this is another question. Does it outline new vocations for academic religious studies scholars and teachers?

Buy buy, BeliefNet

The students in Theorizing Religion have spent this week presenting on an "internet source" about religion. Many focused on BeliefNet. The two most illuminating presentations offered structural analyses. One noticed that the bottom of the webpage is information until the heading Advertise with us, which includes various breakdowns of the site's users (apparently unchanged except in layout since 2009). The student surmised that the site is structured the way it is - with lots of little boxes requiring enouraging lots of clicks - in order to harvest this sort of information about users. As you're using the site exploring sources of information it is gathering information about you for marketers.By the way: Belienfet only makes people feel good, but also encourages a sense of self that allows one to realize their grateest potential in the hard-to-find "About Us" section at the top of my post suggests nobody checks up on this page. A different kind of glitch was the subject of the other student's presentation. He noticed that the "Christian Quote of the Day" on Monday was in fact the same as the Buddhist one, while the "Buddhist Prayer" was, like the Christian one, from the Book of Common Prayer. An ingenious analysis of the structure of BeliefNet's other daily sites and sources allowed him to conclude that it treats Buddhism and Christianity as more like each other than the other traditions, because both are constructed as being after the same spiritual goal.

Information overload

Spent some time time in NYU's Bobst Library today for the first time in a while, finally finding an angle from which the anti-suicide grille in the atrium doesn't look like a prison. (Looking into the building is different.) Up in the stacks I was amused to learn that my book is in the BS section (!), 1415.52 .L37 to be precise.
Then found my way to 55 West 13th Street, home of the newly-formed New School for Performing Arts, whose entryway has become a dizzying vortex of famous names. Empowering or just exhausting? It's certainly in a much more visible location than its companion cataract of courses.

Old friend

At MoMA today I ran into an old friend - Gustav Klimt's "Der Park." Long before I saw the painting itself, I had a poster of it on my wall. Its extravagant use of most of the square canvas for a sea of green foliage put me in mind of the chestnut trees I had marveled at in Vienna as a boy from Southern California, overwhelmed by their lushness. My cell phone snaps were no good (any more than having seen them on his cellphone prepared my Chinese friend for Monet's water lilies!), but someone has posted a picture of the dazzling cosmos of color in the canopy when the painting recently traveled to Melbourne... a coincidence that he should be in similarly deciduous-deprived Australia?

The whole nine

Okay, so the gentrification of Prospect Heights is proceeding apace - and if it were not, then being featured on the New Yorker website would clinch it. (You'd never guess from this elegaic story, which concludes that things are just changing as they always have, that this was an Afro-Caribbean neighborhood, though.) That's the building which eclipsed my Manhattan view, just the tip - as I've recently realized - of an approaching iceberg. Another dozen buildings are planned to its left as part of the Atlantic Yards (or Pacific Park, as it calls itself) and among those, this one won't even rate. It's chopped off at lower right below.

Alt-history

As directed by the Guardian's review, I binge-watched the first season of Amazon's adaptation of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle - all ten hours of it. It's a gripping yarn, and a chilling story. Supposing the Axis had won the Second World War, what would a Nazi-led United States look like? Had the Germans given Japan control of the West Coast, how would that be? And if there were rumblings of potential war between these two superpowers as an aging Führer approached death,

how would the North Americans caught in between react? I'm a little tired of the blandly frantic young protagonists, but the older characters have depths and surprises, and it's always stunning and often unsettling to see the imagined nipponized or nazified 1962 Americana, which is revealed slowly and cannily. (For instance: Reichshauptquartier where the United Nations building now stands? Huckleberry Finn banned, the Bible, too? I won't say more to avoid spoilers.) Can't wait for season 2!

Giant clams!

Loot from yesterday's trip (note penny at lower left for scale)