Dantesque

At the entrance to the Indiana Memorial Union, where our conference is taking place, a rather disturbing statue by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, sent from France in 1948 as thanks for postwar assistance of some kind. It's Ugolino and his sons - just right for a conference on religion and the Anthropo- cene...?

Unmanned

I've arrived in Bloomington, Indiana for a conference called "Religious Perspectives and Alternative Futures in an Age of Humans." The somewhat awkward age of humans is a way of referring to the Anthropocene mindful of charge that the term homogenizes a state of affairs for which only some anthropoi are mainly responsible. In any case, I'm excited by the way the conference is framed:

Discourse of the Anthropocene resonates strongly with mythic and religious genres—declensionist or ascendant storylines; tales of hubris, forbidden knowledge, theodicy and eschatology—making the Anthropocene ripe for analysis by religion scholars. The Anthropocene raises religious and ethical questions about how to understand humanity’s place within planetary evolution, and how to envision the future trajectory of human societies. Scholarly debates arise over dystopian and utopian visions; whether some human groups bear greater moral responsibility than others for environmental harms stemming from colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization; and whether the Anthropocene represents a spiritual aggrandizement or condemnation of humanity. Our project assumes that these debates about what it means to be human in an “Age of Humans” fall within the purview of religion, philosophy, theology, and ethics.

I'm one of thirty-odd presenters, and we have enough time through Sunday to get to know each other at receptions (like the one where I found gingerbread anthropos). In my talk I'll be speculating about how the Book of Job might be read as our consciousness absorbs the significance of the "age of humans," offering these projections as an example of a sort of a semi-scifi "conjectural exegesis" of sacred texts which might help us make sense of what's going on and who we are in it.

Flow of history

Something's going on beneath the surface of Indiana.

Groves of academe

Self portrait with Lang courtyard trees as another academic year ends.

In depth coverage

We're always told not judge a book by its cover, but consider the poor cook cover designer! Judged by the cover and by the book. A student in "Performing the Problem of Suffering: The Book of Job and the Arts" 

took on the challenge of designing a new cover for the Book of Job (in the translation I recommend) and it's a dusey. As it leads you into the book, the cover unfolds and unfolds in a brilliant - and profound - way.

And into summer we go

Vegetable brain

I must be doing something right...!

Middle aged

Something in conversation over dinner tonight took me back to medieval times. Well, back when the Knights Templar set up a commanderie near the town of Arville, about 150km southwest of Paris, eight centuries ago. I spent one of my college summers there, volunteering at what I thought was a dig but was really a chantier, a construction site. As properly trained folks fixed up the 12th century pigeónnier,

 

I manned a 20th century bétonnière. Mostly I remember the satisfied exhaustion at the end of a day hauling bucket after bucket of sand, water and cement. (Sated by manual labor, a single novel lasted me the whole time, Anthony Burgess' Earthly Powers.) What else? I got to know yellow cherries, and the link between cérise and cérisier. At our final lunch I learned that yummy cervelles were in fact pig brains. Medieval!

 

Pics from here

Son of Earth

Finally getting around to reading Norman C. Habel's Finding Wisdom in Nature: An Eco-Wisdom Reading of the Book of Job, the extended analysis on which shorter essays I've been thrilled by build. Building on the approach of the Earth Bible commentaries Habel helped edit, this reading attends to Job as an "Earth being," and listens further to hear the voice of Earth in a narrative too long read anthropocentrically. While he starts with an account of 28, for him the hinge, the round of a U-shaped structure, I like the way his approach can change the way the story begins. Learn from him to hear what Job's first words are really saying

          Naked I came from my mother's womb
          and naked shall I return there.
          The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away,
          blessed by the name of the Lord (Job 1.21).

Job's response is depicted here as relatively submissive. God seems to be winning the wager. ... The reading, however, is not that simple. ... In his devastating grief, Job identifies with Earth as his mother, the source of his being and the womb to which he will return in death. 

By identifying with Earth, Job hints that his primary allegiance is with Earth not with heaven. Job is an Earth being suffering without cause along with other Earth beings. Job dares to name his mother, Earth, in the moment of extreme anguish. In so doing, Job suggests that his mother too suffers when her children are treated with cruel abandon by their celestial overlord.

Each chapter of Habel's book ends with a poetic "Retrieval," in the voice of the Earth.

          The Voice of Earth

          I am Earth, Job's mother,
          and the source of life for all Earth beings.
          it delights me that Job,
          an Earth bring with genuine integrity,
          a wise man who spurns evil,
          identifies with me as his mother
          after a vicious round of disasters.

          Job blesses a sky being he calls Yhwh,
          his perceived overlord in heaven above,
          but he stays true to me
          with his roots deep in Earth.

          I am insulted by his God
          who is willing to violate an Earth being
          and his family of Earth beings
          for his own celestial pleasure.
          Such cruel folly!

          The disasters that befell Job
          are not disasters that arise from Earth
          as part of my natural order,
          an order that reflects innate wisdom.
          The disasters portrayed
          are unwarranted interventions of God,
          including ferocious fire from heaven.

          These actions are not only acts of
          divine injustice and celestial folly
          against Job as an Earth being,
          they also cause me to suffer without justification.
          I may suffer when humans abuse me.
          I suffer even more when God is the culprit.

          After a second act of divine injustice,
          I felt for Job
          whose flesh was violated with unwarranted boils.
          In his agony Job joins me again,
          sits on the ground surrounded by ashes.
          Through all of this agony,
          Job has been a man of integrity,
          true to himself and true to me.

          How, I wonder, will Job relate to me
          after his seven days of mourning
          when he begins to vent his anger? 

Not great poetry, perhaps, but compelling in its own way. I wonder, too, how this Job, child of Earth, will understand the caprices of the sky being, a being Whose wisdom, too (according to Habel's reading of chapter 28), was found and resides in Earth?

(Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014), 32, 34

Class act

A little muffled because of the student academic workers' strike and many faculty (including yours truly) holding class off-campus so as not to cross their picket line, the academic year is coming to a close.

"Performing the Problem of Suffering: The Book of Job and the Arts" effectively wound up on Monday, with a remarkable showcase of student creative projects. Ranging from engraved wood inspired by Jung's Answer to Job to a near-operatic scene of a livid Mrs Job, by way of a video game, a chapbook weaving Job with Mary Oliver and a short film of interviews, it was an impressive display. I'm planning on taking several of them with me to Beijing, where I'll be teaching a course on similar, if less religious, matters this July. It was gratifying to get to know the students through these final projects - since the course was a lecture, I didn't have the satisfaction of a personal relationship unfolding over the semester. But the quality and seriousness of these projects confirms that the class was an occasion for meaningful and open-ended exploration - at least for those students who volunteered to share their work with the wider class.

"Religion and Ecology" ended in Union Square today, with final reflections and snacks. In the shimmering shade of new green, as tree seeds and the occasional wasp wafted by, the class plighted their troth to ecological awareness and to New York City. "Bioregionalism" and the embedded ethics of indigenous peoples appealed to them, but, really, the city is where they want to be. It's part of nature too, after all - let's find ways of making our cities ecological! What about religion, I asked, interjecting everything from Ramadan to older Hindus' withdrawal from the world to Japanese linguistic fillips of gratitude to the sacrifice of the first born, but we've been there done that. Apparently it was good to learn about different traditions' ways of making sense of our planetary existence - especially the 'liquid ecology' of Daoism and the 'honorable harvest' of Native American nations - but none of them seems to help much in practice. Still, it's good to acknowledge the ecological crisis as a spiritual one, as connected to spiritual questions and practices.

I must have been doing something right: there seem to be students from both classes signed up for "Theorizing Religion" this Fall!

Spring insanity

Saecula saeculorum

Beat the crowds to the Cloisters part of the Met's summer blockbuster "Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination" - indeed, I often had rooms to myself! (Others were doubtless taking in the Members Preview at the Fifth Avenue Met.) The placement was tasteful once you get used to the idea that once sacred works in a place like the Met are just cultural objects shared with the general public, objects which fashion designers might be inspired by, engage in dialogue with or

- of course - desecrate. The Cloisters itself has a faux sacred air, but the ease with which it has been coopted as a setting for couture suggests this apparent sacredness extends as easily to secular luxury as to humble devotion. Fittingly (sic), a medley of sacred music, opera and film scores floats through this usually silent space. Like the Chinese Buddhas conscripted for the last big fashion blockbuster, the Christian figures here seem just to be gritting their teeth: this, too, shall pass.

Rogation Sunday

Can these (in the garden at Holy Apostles) be peonies already?

Ecological aesthetics

We're not palms, able to jump among beaches through wave-bobbing and bird-winged seeds.

One of many breathtakingly poetic sentences in my new book crush, David George Haskells' The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors (Penguin, 2017). The chapter on the sabal palm (and on the rising seas and vanishing beaches and wetlands) continues

But as the ocean unsettles the old human order, we might attend to the trees, not to mimic them but to better understand life on the shore. Sabal palm has learned to thrive amid changeability. ...
The biblical parable can be reworked. The fool is not the person who builds on sand. The error is to believe that sand can be rock. (81)

New leaf!

A chive grows in Brooklyn

Strike?

The end of an academic year is usually an emotional roller coaster. Classes are coming to a close, in sweetness and glory ... or at least relief. Committees are realizing what they've achieved, if anything. (What a lot of committees I've been on this year, and what a lot of time and goodwill has been squandered in them!) The agitation of graduates about to bid farewell, new horizons and new uncertainties beckoning, is sensed by all..

But this year's ending is fixing to be rather more exciting than usual. Student academic workers - graduate teaching fellows and graduate and undergraduate research assistants - have recently unionized and have been negotiating a contract with the university administration. The administration, which has fought the campaign from the start, are stalling, perhaps hoping that the onset of summer will dissipate the mobilized energy. (This must be page one of every university administrator's handbook.) But the student union is wise to this trick, and so is threatening a grading strike, to start next Tuesday - one week before the end of classes. No agreement will mean students in classes graded by graduate students won't get their grades. The faculty has been asked to support the likely strike by not making contingency plans, and by not crossing the picket lines at the entrances to our main buildings should the strike happen. A strike would cause turmoil and distress, especially for students needing to present final work and send off transcripts, but that's sort of the point. "It's supposed to get ugly," one of my tenured colleagues observed with satisfaction.

By happy coincidence, my classes won't be so disrupted. The "Job and the Arts" class meets Monday, just before the strike. (Grades would have to be submitted by the graduate student teaching assistants, though, so might not happen for a while.) "Religion and ecology" had its final presentations this week, and we have a blog we can use in lieu of a classroom next week. But many of my faculty colleagues face starker choices. The student academic workers union hopes they'll hold class off-campus, but there aren't spaces enough in parks and cafes around school, certainly not spaces conducive to media-rich final presentations. I hope the prospect of protracted "ugliness" will push the administration to negotiation in good faith to avert it.

Vroom

Remember those first leaves and tips coming up in the BBG's Native Plants garden 11 days ago? Well, they've covered the forest floor!

If these walls could talk

In the space on West 14th Street where some old buildings have been taken down, before a sleek new one goes up, spirits of street life rise!