Colors of another kind of California sunset over the Pacific!
Sunday, August 05, 2012
Saturday, August 04, 2012
TPSR
There's always something to discover at Torrey Pines State Reserve, even late in the summer of an already dry year: a feather caught in a spider web, sand sedimentation very like what the waves still lay out on the beach 50 feet below, a silver argiope web, and a dramatic natural sandstone arch I hadn't noticed - though other people obviously have!
Update, May 25, 2013: Saw it just in time; the arch has since collapsed.
Update, May 25, 2013: Saw it just in time; the arch has since collapsed.
After the religioclasts
Returning to "Theorizing Religion" after a few years is unnerving. I'm remembering thinking, at the end of the last iteration I did, that it hung together well but was committed to a classic texts/history of ideas/genealogy pedagogy in ways I wasn't sure I still fully supported. In the intervening years, that same syllabus has been taught, with no obvious negative consequences, and the five course texts I've ordered - all classics (Eliade, Freud, Durkheim, James, Weber) - remain central in the field. But still... the most recent of those works was written almost seven decades ago!
The temptation is to put together a syllabus which, like when I design a brand new class, grows out of the most recent scholarly work I can find - lots of work published in the last decade, if not the last five years. Students are being invited not to a museum but to a vibrant community of ongoing scholarship, reflection and debate, after all.
It's not a new temptation. The "Theorizing Religion" syllabus has been worked over for almost two decades (!) in light of new trends, and is now sedimented with works which were brand new when first included but now look old: 1993, 1998, 2001, 2003. An astute student could date me from them. (As if I'm not dated already by my receding hairline, references to retro things like the cold war and "The Simpsons," etc.!)
These late-20th century publications are there because they work, have become part of the narrative of the course. They are the survivors of annual winnowings, based on student reflections as well as my own. (Plenty of other current works were tried once and dropped; some classic works, too.) They're not classic texts, nor likely to become so, but they help illuminate the continuing salience of issues and approaches introduced by the classic writers.
But are those the issues and approaches I should be initiating students in in 2012? I'm not trying to send students to graduate school in religious studies, although if they go I certainly want them to recognize what people are talking about. (If we were the kind of program so structured we'd have an upper-level course on the latest in theory and methodology.) I understand what I'm doing more generally as offering perspectives and resources valuable for any student, whatever she winds up doing. The most recent course description makes that broader aim clair:
Unreflective views about what "religion" is (and what it’s not) blind us to the true challenges and problems of "religious" traditions. More, they blind us to other theoretical and practical challenges of our time, for many other categories central to western modernity presuppose this particular concept of "religion." A critical understanding of "religion" and its implication in modern and postmodern understandings of politics, ethics, gender and progress can make this problematic concept a vehicle for deeper understandings of "religious" phenomena, an opening to genuine dialogue, and a resource for profound cultural critique.
That still sounds good to me (if a bit wordy; I'm working on it!). I'd inflect modern and postmodern with even more postcolonial, globalization and postsecular perspectives than before, but the project is sound. Yet does the Hume-Schleiermacher-Feuerbach-Marx-Weber-James-Durkheim-Freud-Eliade story, even narrated in a savvy postmodern way till cut it? The question isn't just if I shouldn't be knocking some of the old guys out to make place for Asad-Masuzawa-McCutcheon-Fitzgerald, a group one might call religioclasts for their claim that the concept of "religion" is eurocentric, ideological and should be abandoned. The religioclast perspective is part of the narration; my very first stab at this material already made a similar point, albeit with the work of "the Smiths" - Wilfred Cantwell and Jonathan Z.
(There is some sort of performative contradiction in a religioclast course in religious studies - a requirement for majors and minors which challenges the coherence and legitimacy of the field! - but I've long owned and enjoyed that, precisely as part of the broader contribution of the discipline. A witty student once explained the difference between religious studies and theology: "they study God, we study them." My approach just extends that to the culture at large: "they believe in religion, we study them." I do think it's valuable for political and cultural critical reasons to understand all this, and if pushed I might concede that seeing through "religion" may be religiously valuable too.)
The question is, rather, if an understanding of "western modernity," figured through essentially academic concepts and theories, is still pertinent. Shouldn't I be offering non-western views? Or at least case studies illustrating what the guild now understands to be paradigmatic of religion? The problem is that there are none of the former, for all the reasons the religioclasts have been giving, and that the guild doesn't agree about the latter, with each subspecialty offering its own case studies and the religioclasts inspiring polemical subjects like suicide bombers, heritage buffs, support groups, UFOlogists, fly-fishers and secular liberals.
What to do? My two decades in this business have made me aware of how quickly academic fashion changes. I want to give my students things that will be valuable in the long run. I've sometimes sniff at courses some of my colleagues teach for offering students only "perishable" materials, none of which will even be remembered ten or twenty years from now, but it would be hard to find a more ideologically freighted concept than that of "imperishable" classics. Would adding more recent works, and works from non-western traditions help? I'm tempted to pursue Daniel Dubuisson's throwaway remark about how the western homo religiosus could be knocked out by a homo dharmicus or a homo shamanicus; I'm fantasizing about the second, as it would explode the world religions frame, too.
I'm worrying that there is no place to go after the religioclasts but perishable theory, chauvinistic particularism, naive commitment to lived religion or disengenuous new universalism - all of which tempt me! I'll let you know what unfolds.
The temptation is to put together a syllabus which, like when I design a brand new class, grows out of the most recent scholarly work I can find - lots of work published in the last decade, if not the last five years. Students are being invited not to a museum but to a vibrant community of ongoing scholarship, reflection and debate, after all.
It's not a new temptation. The "Theorizing Religion" syllabus has been worked over for almost two decades (!) in light of new trends, and is now sedimented with works which were brand new when first included but now look old: 1993, 1998, 2001, 2003. An astute student could date me from them. (As if I'm not dated already by my receding hairline, references to retro things like the cold war and "The Simpsons," etc.!)
These late-20th century publications are there because they work, have become part of the narrative of the course. They are the survivors of annual winnowings, based on student reflections as well as my own. (Plenty of other current works were tried once and dropped; some classic works, too.) They're not classic texts, nor likely to become so, but they help illuminate the continuing salience of issues and approaches introduced by the classic writers.
But are those the issues and approaches I should be initiating students in in 2012? I'm not trying to send students to graduate school in religious studies, although if they go I certainly want them to recognize what people are talking about. (If we were the kind of program so structured we'd have an upper-level course on the latest in theory and methodology.) I understand what I'm doing more generally as offering perspectives and resources valuable for any student, whatever she winds up doing. The most recent course description makes that broader aim clair:
Unreflective views about what "religion" is (and what it’s not) blind us to the true challenges and problems of "religious" traditions. More, they blind us to other theoretical and practical challenges of our time, for many other categories central to western modernity presuppose this particular concept of "religion." A critical understanding of "religion" and its implication in modern and postmodern understandings of politics, ethics, gender and progress can make this problematic concept a vehicle for deeper understandings of "religious" phenomena, an opening to genuine dialogue, and a resource for profound cultural critique.
That still sounds good to me (if a bit wordy; I'm working on it!). I'd inflect modern and postmodern with even more postcolonial, globalization and postsecular perspectives than before, but the project is sound. Yet does the Hume-Schleiermacher-Feuerbach-Marx-Weber-James-Durkheim-Freud-Eliade story, even narrated in a savvy postmodern way till cut it? The question isn't just if I shouldn't be knocking some of the old guys out to make place for Asad-Masuzawa-McCutcheon-Fitzgerald, a group one might call religioclasts for their claim that the concept of "religion" is eurocentric, ideological and should be abandoned. The religioclast perspective is part of the narration; my very first stab at this material already made a similar point, albeit with the work of "the Smiths" - Wilfred Cantwell and Jonathan Z.
(There is some sort of performative contradiction in a religioclast course in religious studies - a requirement for majors and minors which challenges the coherence and legitimacy of the field! - but I've long owned and enjoyed that, precisely as part of the broader contribution of the discipline. A witty student once explained the difference between religious studies and theology: "they study God, we study them." My approach just extends that to the culture at large: "they believe in religion, we study them." I do think it's valuable for political and cultural critical reasons to understand all this, and if pushed I might concede that seeing through "religion" may be religiously valuable too.)
The question is, rather, if an understanding of "western modernity," figured through essentially academic concepts and theories, is still pertinent. Shouldn't I be offering non-western views? Or at least case studies illustrating what the guild now understands to be paradigmatic of religion? The problem is that there are none of the former, for all the reasons the religioclasts have been giving, and that the guild doesn't agree about the latter, with each subspecialty offering its own case studies and the religioclasts inspiring polemical subjects like suicide bombers, heritage buffs, support groups, UFOlogists, fly-fishers and secular liberals.
What to do? My two decades in this business have made me aware of how quickly academic fashion changes. I want to give my students things that will be valuable in the long run. I've sometimes sniff at courses some of my colleagues teach for offering students only "perishable" materials, none of which will even be remembered ten or twenty years from now, but it would be hard to find a more ideologically freighted concept than that of "imperishable" classics. Would adding more recent works, and works from non-western traditions help? I'm tempted to pursue Daniel Dubuisson's throwaway remark about how the western homo religiosus could be knocked out by a homo dharmicus or a homo shamanicus; I'm fantasizing about the second, as it would explode the world religions frame, too.
I'm worrying that there is no place to go after the religioclasts but perishable theory, chauvinistic particularism, naive commitment to lived religion or disengenuous new universalism - all of which tempt me! I'll let you know what unfolds.
Thursday, August 02, 2012
Demolition derby
Home away from home
Finally made it up into Do Ho Suh's "Fallen Star." It's a truly dizzying experience, not only perched on a precarious angle on a high ledge of an Engineering building, but with walls not perpendicular to floor.
Deepening the powerful physical disorientation, it's cosily furnished like someone's house, with old furniture, family heirlooms, photos, children's drawings, clutter... It feels like trespassing in a real home,
at least until you look out the window! A curator explained it was about the dizzying experiences of dislocation and relocation which are so much a part of modern lives. It left me feeling off-balance for hours.
Wednesday, August 01, 2012
Mitteleuropa
Monday, July 30, 2012
Unseeded?
So I'm trying to figure out what to say about "Leibniz' Theodicy as a Metaphysics for Lived Religion." When I proposed the topic, I vaguely had in mind the presentation I gave at the International Leibniz Congress in 2001 on the Theodicy as ethics - but also, of course, "lived religion," buzzword of the year. The thought was that Leibniz' idea of possible worlds encourages and emboldens a situated experimental and resilient practical engagement with the world, one which refuses to accept that things must stay the way they are, avoids grand narratives, and absorbing the failure of some of our world-improving projects with deference to divine wisdom.
Not a bad argument, and probably what I'll wind up making in Lisbon, with a quick resume of my Theodicy interpretation, an overview of the project of "lived religion," and some telling examples, perhaps some from Leibniz and some from religion (sociologist David Smilde's concept of "imaginative rationality" is promising).
But today I was reading in Maria Rosa Antognazza's big intellectual biography of Leibniz (2009), which claims to provide a synoptic and coherent narrative of the polymath's life and work which no earlier generation could achieve - and some critical assessments of it. Antognazza distinguishes her project from that of earlier biographers stumped by the sheer variety of Leibniz' theoretical and practical projects, starting with Fontenelle in 1717, and the generally accepted response - focusing on only one or two strands of his oeuvre, ignoring or even deploring the others. Recent scholarship allows us to see that
Throughout his life Leibniz nursed essentially the same dream: the dream of recalling the multiplicity of human knowledge to a logical, metaphysical, and pedagogical unity, centred on the theistic vision of the Christian tradition and aimed at the common good. (6)
On the basis of a broad and deep reading of Leibniz' work and the latest scholarship in and beyond the history of philosophy she promises to stitch back together the man dismembered by Fontenelle and his successors by emphasizing the organic development of a generally harmonious system of thought and action within a particular historical context (10). Even his philosophical works can't be understood without awareness of his non-philosophical projects. That fits my understanding of the man - but then I focused on his philosophical theology (as Antognazza did in her first book), not his work in mathematics, law, history, physics, metaphysics, etc. (Intriguingly she argues also that Leibniz only makes sense if understood as a German, a thinker of the Holy Roman Empire: more, doubtless, anon on that.)
One scholar whose work I admire has serious "methodological" concerns about Antognazza's project, though. In order to make of Leibniz' life and work a whole, he alleges, she claims that the seeds of all of Leibniz' mature work were there at the start of his career - just as the late "Monadology" would predict: it almost seems as if the most basic features of Leibniz's intellectual system were implicit from the beginning (9). He assails her for the vagueness of the claim, and challenges her specific accounts of alleged early anticipations of mature views on monads, sufficient reason, etc. There's no consensus among scholars about the relationship of Leibniz' early, middle and mature thought. Few believe that Leibniz did not correct and even replace many of his ideas along the way, and everyone knows that his Nachlass is full of semi-serious experiments.
I can't get into the details - I don't know them! But this disagreement got me thinking about Leibniz and "lived religion," and biography. A biography of the whole man clearly makes him more three-dimensional, and will surely help us understand his thought better. (Not everyone would agree with this claim, actually. I remember the rather pained introduction to a biography of Kant, where the biographer had to come to terms with Kant's own apparent contempt for the irrelevance of merely biographical stuff - a contempt I imbibed as an undergraduate in Oxford. Who cares if someone figured something out as a result of love or loss; if it's worth anything it makes philosophical sense, and that's the only reason we could possibly be asked to care about it.)
But the narrative of a whole life inevitably irons out some of the larger and most of the smaller contingencies of a life. (We've seen Margaret Urban Walker's objections to the ideal of the "career self.") Even without the help of the "Monadology," a biographer will plant seeds in her account of her subject's early life to give us something to follow, continuity, tension, tragedy, triumph. I'm not sure you could write a satisfying biography without doing something like that.
What's this got to do with lived religion? Well, one of the emphases of scholars of lived religion is that life is messy, people's religious lives are less coherent than philosophers and theologians demand, and folks are less bothered by that than one might think they should be. They're characterized by a "logic of practices" quite unlike the logic of concepts. It's more like a habitus, a pragmatic social habitus, a process, a modus vivendi and operandi too, savoir faire as well as vivre. And one of my emphases is that this is true not only of lay people but of religious specialists and professionals, too.
Would I dare claim that part of Leibniz' appeal is that his life was so shaggy - and not held back by its prolific messiness but driven by it? Would it be heavy-handed to suggest that this is the form of engaged living the Theodicy was written to promote?
Not a bad argument, and probably what I'll wind up making in Lisbon, with a quick resume of my Theodicy interpretation, an overview of the project of "lived religion," and some telling examples, perhaps some from Leibniz and some from religion (sociologist David Smilde's concept of "imaginative rationality" is promising).
But today I was reading in Maria Rosa Antognazza's big intellectual biography of Leibniz (2009), which claims to provide a synoptic and coherent narrative of the polymath's life and work which no earlier generation could achieve - and some critical assessments of it. Antognazza distinguishes her project from that of earlier biographers stumped by the sheer variety of Leibniz' theoretical and practical projects, starting with Fontenelle in 1717, and the generally accepted response - focusing on only one or two strands of his oeuvre, ignoring or even deploring the others. Recent scholarship allows us to see that Throughout his life Leibniz nursed essentially the same dream: the dream of recalling the multiplicity of human knowledge to a logical, metaphysical, and pedagogical unity, centred on the theistic vision of the Christian tradition and aimed at the common good. (6)
On the basis of a broad and deep reading of Leibniz' work and the latest scholarship in and beyond the history of philosophy she promises to stitch back together the man dismembered by Fontenelle and his successors by emphasizing the organic development of a generally harmonious system of thought and action within a particular historical context (10). Even his philosophical works can't be understood without awareness of his non-philosophical projects. That fits my understanding of the man - but then I focused on his philosophical theology (as Antognazza did in her first book), not his work in mathematics, law, history, physics, metaphysics, etc. (Intriguingly she argues also that Leibniz only makes sense if understood as a German, a thinker of the Holy Roman Empire: more, doubtless, anon on that.)
One scholar whose work I admire has serious "methodological" concerns about Antognazza's project, though. In order to make of Leibniz' life and work a whole, he alleges, she claims that the seeds of all of Leibniz' mature work were there at the start of his career - just as the late "Monadology" would predict: it almost seems as if the most basic features of Leibniz's intellectual system were implicit from the beginning (9). He assails her for the vagueness of the claim, and challenges her specific accounts of alleged early anticipations of mature views on monads, sufficient reason, etc. There's no consensus among scholars about the relationship of Leibniz' early, middle and mature thought. Few believe that Leibniz did not correct and even replace many of his ideas along the way, and everyone knows that his Nachlass is full of semi-serious experiments.
I can't get into the details - I don't know them! But this disagreement got me thinking about Leibniz and "lived religion," and biography. A biography of the whole man clearly makes him more three-dimensional, and will surely help us understand his thought better. (Not everyone would agree with this claim, actually. I remember the rather pained introduction to a biography of Kant, where the biographer had to come to terms with Kant's own apparent contempt for the irrelevance of merely biographical stuff - a contempt I imbibed as an undergraduate in Oxford. Who cares if someone figured something out as a result of love or loss; if it's worth anything it makes philosophical sense, and that's the only reason we could possibly be asked to care about it.)
But the narrative of a whole life inevitably irons out some of the larger and most of the smaller contingencies of a life. (We've seen Margaret Urban Walker's objections to the ideal of the "career self.") Even without the help of the "Monadology," a biographer will plant seeds in her account of her subject's early life to give us something to follow, continuity, tension, tragedy, triumph. I'm not sure you could write a satisfying biography without doing something like that.
What's this got to do with lived religion? Well, one of the emphases of scholars of lived religion is that life is messy, people's religious lives are less coherent than philosophers and theologians demand, and folks are less bothered by that than one might think they should be. They're characterized by a "logic of practices" quite unlike the logic of concepts. It's more like a habitus, a pragmatic social habitus, a process, a modus vivendi and operandi too, savoir faire as well as vivre. And one of my emphases is that this is true not only of lay people but of religious specialists and professionals, too.
Would I dare claim that part of Leibniz' appeal is that his life was so shaggy - and not held back by its prolific messiness but driven by it? Would it be heavy-handed to suggest that this is the form of engaged living the Theodicy was written to promote?
Sunday, July 29, 2012
Bruised and bemused
I've just finished reading Richard Holloway's stirring memoir, Leaving Alexandria (Edinburgh & London: Canongate, 2012). A friend in Australia posted some reviews of it on Facebook and I found I had to read it. I don't read a lot of memoirs, but this one sounded important, so I got myself a copy. To tell the truth I'm not sure I would have bought it in a bookstore, with its blurbs from Alexander McCall Smith, Philip Pullman, Karen Armstrong, Alain de Botton and others; I'm glad I did.Holloway has been a hero, perhaps a martyr, for liberal Christianity - though he wouldn't put it that way. He was a bishop, finally Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, but gave it all up because of the intransigence of reactionary voices within the Anglican Communion (especially on questions of sexuality). He threw his mitre in the Thames at the Lambeth Conference in 1998, and resigned as bishop in 2000. In the last few years he's pretty much given up Christianity, or, perhaps, given up on it. Was religion a lie? Not necessarily, but it was a mistake. ... The mistake was to think that religion was more than human. (343)
But while he prefers the company of (non-evangelical) atheists to that of Christians who claim certainty, Holloway seems happiest in the company of poets, and would like to find a way to sustain the poetry of religion without its prose. This poetry works with experience of absence more than presence, and its central motif is pity - for others, and for oneself. These experiences are something churches - especially dark old churches which are open at all times - make possible. Philip Larkin had a name for it in his poem Church Going: "ghostly silt." Silt is the perfect word. It suggests the slow silent accumulation of pain and regret, and their distillation into memory and mercy. (252) We'd be better off without church hierarchy, but not without churches.
Part of what's fascinating is that this is not a simple losing-faith story. As Holloway eloquently describes, he struggled with doubt from the get-go. His faith journey was characterized by it. And, indeed, his preferred form of Christianity - humble, compassionate, engaged, Episcopal/Anglican - is characterized by it too.
Let us suppose that God exists and Jesus is his revealed meaning and live in faith as though it were true. We cannot know any of this for certain, but there is beauty in the choice and it will give our lives a purpose, and maybe pay the universe a compliment it does not deserve. Care to join the experiment? Care to do the insane and lovely thing? (185-86)
I don't any longer believe in religion, but I want it around: weakened, bruised and bemused, less sure of itself and purged of everything except the miracle of pity. I know that the people who will keep it going will have to believe in it more than I do. Who could be persuaded by my whisper? Who could even hear it? (349)
I hear it, but I'm not sure what kind of persuasion it's hoping for. There's no "argument"! I'm not poetic enough, I think, not yet.
Saturday, July 28, 2012
Friday, July 27, 2012
Hautkrankheit der Erde
Thursday, July 26, 2012
Up
The newest member of UCSD's Stuart Collection of public sculpture, Do Ho Suh's "Fallen Star," as seen from around Geisel Library. I wonder if one can ascend to it, see the garden, see the fully-furnished interior...
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
There be monsters
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Is the best good enough?
Monday, July 23, 2012
Retheorizing
One of the (many) pleasures of the rapidly approaching Fall semester is a return to "Theorizing Religion," perhaps my signature course, after a two-year hiatus. The class started as "Approaches to the Study of Religion" at Princeton and has been my constant companion and conversation partner as I make my way in religious studies.
Although the colleague who's taught it the last two years hasn't changed my syllabus from 2009, I can't just teach the same class again. The field of religious studies has evolved - we're decisively post-secular now as well as post-modern and post-colonial - and so, in my nonlinear way, have I. The Aboriginal Australia course experience necessitates the inclusion of something about the contemporary study of indigenous traditions. The lived religion course and ERSEH require engagement with the emerging field of lived religion. And it's high time I included some non-western theorists, and even some queer theory.
How to do this while still grounding students in the classical theorists of religion is the question! (Yes, I guess I still, if somewhat uneasily, believe in classic texts.) It'll certainly be fun, though. Wish me luck!
Although the colleague who's taught it the last two years hasn't changed my syllabus from 2009, I can't just teach the same class again. The field of religious studies has evolved - we're decisively post-secular now as well as post-modern and post-colonial - and so, in my nonlinear way, have I. The Aboriginal Australia course experience necessitates the inclusion of something about the contemporary study of indigenous traditions. The lived religion course and ERSEH require engagement with the emerging field of lived religion. And it's high time I included some non-western theorists, and even some queer theory.
How to do this while still grounding students in the classical theorists of religion is the question! (Yes, I guess I still, if somewhat uneasily, believe in classic texts.) It'll certainly be fun, though. Wish me luck!
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Saturday, July 21, 2012
Tim the Panda's new book!
If only it were as easy to write under my own name as to ghost write for a Lego panda! Some highlights from the just released More Adventures.
The gang was all here
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