Solstice approaching

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We got a tree!

Seeing through zoom

In our final meeting for "Religion and the Anthropocene," we realized we'd beaten zoom exhaustion. This sketch, drawn by a student in one of the small-group meetings, wasn't meant to be creepy - "eyes are the hardest thing to draw," she explained, and she didn't have time to draw them. Perhaps it's also that we know by now that in zoom rooms people aren't looking at you when you think they are! What she captured instead - the larger group understood this immediately when I asked her to share the image with them - was our presence, our genuine availability to each other.

My classes' final session is always dedicated to sharing final syntheses, and this was no exception. But what was exceptional was how many students' reflections discussed the community we'd created together. While the self-selecting group of students adventurous enough to sign up for a 9am Friday seminar on religion (eek!) and the Anthropocene (wha?) were clearly part of it, I take a little credit too, as this was the class I'd divided in three groups whom I meet each week for 40 minutes each (then leave the zoom room to them), around our shared 90 minute class. What made the difference wasn't just the intimacy of the small groups but the fact that I wasn't always there. We'd almost replicated a classroom, where students could form bonds outside the class and its projects - something that, it emerged from discussion, otherwise just wasn't happening. But here, we knew and cherished each other!

The fondness which filled our final hour was perhaps strange in a class on such profound and paralyzing problems as we had studied together, but, some students suggested, that made it the more meaningful. Of all my classes this semester, one quipped, this is the one that helped me imagine more futures! In 2020 that's no mean accomplishment. 

By the way, that's the student sketcher at top right. Ours was also her very last class in college: she's one of our December graduates. It can't be easy to finish college in these disembodied times. Congratulations!

No man

The New York Times breaks down US states and territories as covid spreads. The categories have changed with the pandemic's waves. Currently there's "Where new cases are higher and staying high," "Where new cases are higher but going down," and these two.

Feels like reaching for straws, huh... Community spread has engulfed everyone else, and the aggregate numbers for the day are eye-popping: 254,044 new cases, bringing the total to 17 million. And another three thousand six hundred eleven souls lost, for a total of 307,642. Horror.

Nor'easter!

Stumbling along between the Immensities

 

"Theorizing Religion" wrapped up today, a small group of zoom-weary students savoring our final time together. The final assignment, as ever, was a reflection/synthesis on what they'd taken from the class, and, as per usual, we heard about ignorance overcome, biases revealed, permissions granted - and, of course, questions unanswered! As a parting gift I shared these two nuggets from Kimberley Patton's "'Stumbling along between the Immensities': Reflections on Teaching in the Study of Religion," to which an AAR panel I attended last week had taken me back. Patton's point in the essay is that, despite our theoretical scruples and specialist efforts to avoid generalizations (not to mention the professional pressures of our academic guild), in undergraduate classes scholars of religion face students who are asking the big questions and seeking answers to them in what we offer them. 

 

I'd like to think I provided a venue for reflecting on big questions as well as questions about those questions, and students seem to have appreciate it. One put it particularly eloquently:  

Upon starting the course, I was struck anew by something which had often bothered me in a weaker form: the way that religion is a subject both academically crucial and personally captivating, but it seemed to demand a generalizing of the ungeneralizable. ... In reading the work of some of the consummate professionals included in this course, there are two immediate effects. One is the appreciation for the beauty and intrigue of any given topic when illuminated by a loving scholar, the other is seeing where this light ends, how far the surrounding unknown goes.  

Not sure what the Academy thinks of "loving scholars" but I say Amen.

Kimberley C. Patton, "'Stumbling along between the Immensities': Reflections on Teaching in the Study of Religion," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65/4 (Winter, 1997): 831-49, 836, 840

I ❤️ N Y

  

Didn't realize our wonderful trip was heart-shaped!

Final day in ADK

 

 

Just a stone's throw from where we've been staying, a frozen world!

 

Untied States of America

Here's the evidence again. Certified again. No, the system doth not protest too much. There was just one election, conducted remarkably smoothly and fairly in trying circumstances, and one clear winner.

Christmas is coming

Cloudy

Cloudy Adirondacks

Sedition

The losing president's last desperate effort to game the American constitutional system has failed, though it's a sign of how far his demonic influence has spread that anyone thought it could - or should - work. And by "anyone" I mean the majority of House Republicans, the majority of Republican state attorney generals and the feckless mob of silent Republican Senators. (Or maybe they didn't think it would work, are just feeding their voraciously norm-devouring king, but the damage is the same.) A brief for the State of Pennsylvania, arguing against the vile and frivolous Texas suit, urged: “The court should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated.” The signal has been been sent (though unhinged Alito and craven Thomas tried to leave the door ajar), but it is shocking how widely shared the seditious intent has proved. What was once a Grand Old Party is now clearly an enemy not only of decency but of democracy itself. Scary.

A neighbor comes to call

AAR

Whew! I atttended part or all of fourteen sessions. All over the place!

•Buddhist Critical-Constructive Reflection Unit:  

Joanna Macy and the Work of Our Time 

•Queer Studies in Religion Unit:  

Queer Secularities 

•Indigenous Religious Traditions Unit:  

Rising the Feathered Serpent: A First Flight Over Indigenous Contemplative Traditions 

•Practical Theology Unit:  

Vulnerability, Dignity and the Ecological Crisis

•Comparative Religious Ethics Unit:  

Postcolonialism, Race, and Critical Theory in the Study of CRE

•SBL Bible and Practical Theology and AAR Evangelical Studies Unit:  

The Intersection of Bible and the United States 2020 Politics

•Indian and Chinese Religions Compared Unit:  

Why Humanities Should Go Global

•Plenary Panel: The Changing Field of Religious Studies:  

A Short History of the American Academy of Religion’s Annual Meeting

•Exploratory Session:  

Critical Whiteness Studies and Global Religion

•Religion and Popular Culture Unit and Yoga in Theory and Practice Unit:  

The Power of Context, Identity, and Capital: Three 2020 Books Interrogating Spirituality and Yoga

•Indigenous Religious Traditions Unit and Religion and Ecology Unit: 

Indigenous Ecologies: Trees, Temples, Texts, and Sacred Territory in an Era of Climate Change

•Womanist Approaches to Religion and Society Unit:  

Celebrating 30 Years of Womanist Approaches to Religion and Society

•Comparative Studies in Religion Unit: 

Implicit and Explicit Comparison in Religious Studies Scholarship: A Collaborative Experiment in the Use of Buddhist Categories

•History of Christianity Unit:  

The 1619 Project

Cabin fever

We're in a cozy cabin in the woods but I'm at AAR! It's a drag being on the receiving end of webinars, where we can see the speakers, in their boxes, but they can't see us. I suppose it's the way we live now - and I'm learning a lot - but one misses all the unscheduled stimulation of a conference, bumping into old friends, meeting new people, gathering around a speaker after a panel... An old friend took time out of her response to three new books on American yoga (all of whose authors' names curiously began and end with a) to name all that's not happening. She introduced it under the phrase "research continuity," something she argued we need to realize has been seriously disrupted by the pandemic. Not just the scholarly community-building effervescence of in-person conferences (she thinks now she should have pushed AAR to cancel this year's conference rather than go for this bloodless simulacrum) but the analogous blockage of access to libraries, the other places we get to browse old and encounter new scholarship. All of this on top of the untold grief, anxiety and isolation of living in these times. "I'm supposed to act like I'm okay as I speak to you about these amazing books," she said, "but I'm not okay." It was good to hear these words.

All roads

Our pre-holiday non-holiday holiday journey went through Rome today!

AAF FOMO

I've not been attending that many AAR Virtual Annual Meeting sessions - I'm teaching, after all - but I have managed to have the familiar experience of discovering a few jewels but otherwise getting the sense I was missing most of what was going on. One session today, on the history of the AAR no less, helped explain why nobody could hope to avoid the sense of missing most of it! (See above.) It was interesting also to learn that our predecessor, NABI (the National Association of Biblical Instructors) peeled away from the Society of Biblical Literature in 1909 for the latter's connection to the Church, as well as their resistance to scientific research - but remained focused on the same material, now called "Bible and Religion." Only in the 1960s, when we were renamed American Academy of Religion, was even a desultory effort to move beyond Christian topics made. Now a thousand flowers bloom.

One such jewel was a panel of the recently formed "Indian and Chinese Religions Compared" Unit, where four scholars considered how a globalized humanities might learn from non-Western traditions not only in content but in form and approach. I attended in part because a Sinologist I met in Shanghai was sharing his work on how the work of Tang dynasty "scholar poets" became forms of meditation, incantation and apophasis, a lovely presentation. I was excited also by a paean to the Mahabharata, a polemic against Buddhist studies' implicit acceptance of an irrelevant western distinction between philosophy (the framework for most work on Indo-Tibetan materials) and literature (template for studies of most Sino-Japanese works), and a dialogue the 17th century Indian Muslim poet Bidel of Delhi describes with a Brahmin when they were both on the road to a spring sacred to many traditions. Especially in the time of "love jihad" legislation, it was nice to be reminded of the depth and beauty of Indian religious pluralism. This presenter also shared a translation of a ghazal of Bidel's "on composure and distraction."

                  Dust of distraction

         everywhere

         the opposite

of composure.

 

         Bringing lips

         to silence

         is the aim

of the collected heart.

 

         Be

         spinebound

         for a moment

         held together

         by attentive slow reflection.

 

         Your compendium of inner meaning

         has come apart

         from all those proofs

         and heartfelt demonstrations

of composure

 

         In this ocean

         waves grow

         in search of pearls.

 

         You skim the surface

         fleeting and impatient

         seeking

a collected heart.

 

Among its beautiful merits, she observed, was the poem's acknowledgment that in this life composure usually loses out to distraction, whatever faith journey one is on.

Avian heights

 

As I bent in to take a picture of an abandoned bird's nest on the west shore of Cayuga Lake, a din overhead made me look up. Can you see?

Nw direction

All other plans to get out of town having been foiled, we're stealing away to the northwest. The mountains we drove through (not green in this season, of course) are so different from the corrugations of the Alleghenies to the south or the block of the Adirondacks to the north!

Symbiotic Bir'yun

The final weeks of a class always have a valedictory feel and today was no exception. "Religion and the Anthropocene" meets twice more (and there's much work students might or might not turn in), but it's clear things are drawing to a close. A satisfying one, though! Things are coming together. 

Today's class covered an insane amount of material - that documentary about Lynn Margulis, a gnarly piece of Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble, and Deborah Bird Rose's lovely essay "Shimmer" - but we'd also decided to skip our scheduled session on Daoism, and I became possessed of the idea of somehow squeezing that in too. Somehow, though, going from Daoist considerations of reality as liquid, all forms (including you and me) merely temporary congealings, we got to Haraway's "tentacular" thinking and Rose's commendation of practices of bir'yun. The hinge was some footage from the documentary - here's my new iPhone's recording of a subscription website's screening of the documentary's sharing of a video from a class in which Margulis was showing videos, our astonishment joining that of layers of other viewers!

With these images in mind, everything made a different kind of sense - and that's even before you get to the sym- part of the story (symbiosis, symbiogenesis, sympoiesis). If this is what's going on, then selves are not in but expressions of environments and relationships, rising and falling, hardening and softening, wiggling and entwining. Individualism crumbles, but so does anthropocentrism - though selves, including human ones, are among the forms the Dao takes. We were at the threshold of rediscovering, in Rose's words, that the shimmer of life does indeed include us. (G61) (The image at top is a recent example of the kind of Yolngu bark painting whose cross-hatching evokes bir'yun - the "brilliance" or "shimmer" of sunlight on moving water, or firelight on painted bodies in motion.) And that, as Haraway shows, we need new (or perhaps very old) ways of thinking.

What happens when human exceptionalism and bounded individualism, those old saws of Western philosophy and political economics, become unthinkable in the best sciences, whether natural or social? ... What happens when the best biologies of the twenty-first century cannot do their job with bounded individuals plus contexts, when organisms plus environments, or genes plus whatever they need, no longer sustain the overflowing richness of biological knowledges, if they ever did? What happens when organisms plus environments can hardly be remembered for the same reasons that even Western-indebted people can no longer figure themselves as individuals and societies of individuals in human-only histories? Surely such a transformative time on earth must not be named the Anthropocene! (30-31) 

Today's readings only tangentially touched "religion." (Haraway blames our estrangement from and despoliation of the symbiotic world on the "sky gods" and their votaries.) But it was all over our discussion! It felt - I hope students would agree - like we've arrived at a point where "religion and the Anthropocene [sic!]" makes sense as a project.

I'm a little giddy that things congealed in this way, and it tempts me to try to articulate just how these things hold together for me. This is something I've felt, intuitively and inchoately, at least since seeing that documentary for the first time, but not had occasion, nor confidence, to try. Emergence and sympoiesis are the reality of life (and perhaps not just life), a reality closer to what Daoism describes than monotheism and the cascade of deadly dualisms which follow from it assert. And yet, despite the truth in the critique of sky gods, I don't feel that this is incompatible with my faith as a Christian. Just beneath the shimmer, the layers of atmosphere-regulating bacteria, in the tangle and trouble, I sense the face of God, happy to be discovered.

John Feldman, “Symbiotic Earth: How Lynn Margulis Rocked the Boat and Started a Scientific Revolution” (Bullfrog Films, 2017)

Donna Haraway, “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene,” ch. 2 of Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke, 2016), 31-57

Deborah Bird Rose, “Shimmer: when all you have is being trashed,” in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, ed. Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt (Minnesota, 2017), G51-63

Pall

Our nation is becoming a cemetery. The loss of life reported today approaches the deaths on 9/11! And the curve will go up and up. Newly reported infections topped 200,000/day. The calamity is happening everywhere, a thousand trickles turning into torrents, hard to take in, impossible to grasp. How are we able to talk about anything else?