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?

Claes encounter

Claes Oldenburg's spoon and cherry, over a frozen pond, by the Walker Art Center. Evidently this monster, inspired in part by the Betty Crocker spoon logo, has become an icon of Minneapolis. I learned that, and much else, in a fascinating exhibition devoted to Oldenburg's early work in the 1960s, against the backdrop of which these megaliths - and all that preceded them - make a bit more sense. Pity, really, that New York's Times Square didn't get his proposed erect banana, half-peeled.

False but good

As you may know, I often start "Theorizing Religion" with a 2x2 grid, representing the possible answers people might give to two questions: Is religion true or false? Good or bad? Good-and-true and False-and-bad don't describe all possible options. I promise that several the most interesting things we'll be reading are in the false-but-good box, though I sometimes find myself tempted by its contrary, the true-but-bad.

From the false-but-good corner, this word from China. In the Communist Party's official newspaper Wang Zuoan, head of the State Administration of Religious Affairs, has apparently written:

We should pay great attention to the eagerness of religious believers, foster the positive contents of religion, expound upon religious doctrines which accord with the development needs of society ... guide religious believers to have correct beliefs and follow correct practices, carry out the religious principles of reconciliation, benevolence, tolerance and moderation.

Nice religion lives! Maybe we should introduce him to the compassion industry and the Fetzer Institute for Love and Forgiveness?

Minneapolis skyline

Last photo before the sub-zero temp zapped my camera battery...

Perfect shape

 

My friends J and A have opened their home to this wonderful beast. A mutt from down river - Minneapolis adopts many, apparently - her name is Daisy. And she's won my cold cat-loving heart completely!

Riverine reflections

Visited the Frank Gehry-designed Weisman Art Museum this morning. It's perched next to the bridge connecting the two parts of the University of Minnesota, the Mississippi winding below. Here's part of Maya Lin's lovely "Silver River - Mississippi" of 2007, a view of the river itself, with Canadian geese flying southward, and two of the museum, one from partway across the red and yellow bridge (notice its colors reflected in the museum, and the icicles below!), one through frost from the bridge's covered walkway.

Seasonal

Late afternoon view from my friend J's office on the 14th floor of the Social Sciences building, University of Minnesota on a bright cold day.

Beyond pluralism?

Sunrise over Baltimore, as seen from the 14th floor of the Marriott Courtyard Inner Harbor. AAR is nearly over for me - I'll attend another plenary and a panel and a half, and it's off to Minneapolis for a few days and Thanksgiving. It's been fun watching two Lang fellows - a faculty colleague and a student, both named Michael - navigate their first AAR, though I wish it were one of the more focused ones. The myriad panels, almost all of which one must miss as they are packed something like 50-deep (90 including SBL!), are overwhelming in number as well as specialization and jargon. Specialists can seem to be going to a hundred parallel conferences, never overlapping.

Sometimes, however, the big plenaries (chosen by the president) bring luminaries together around an exciting theme. This year's theme seems to be the rather passé topic of pluralism. The plenary by Karen Armstrong was like a TED talk for toddlers; the conversation with Diana Eck apparently even less interesting. Perhaps today's plenary on public presentations of pluralism will change that (hope springs eternal).

In the sessions themselves, however, pluralism is over, or taken for granted. Bringing world religions together in peace and mutual understanding seems a bizarrely abstract idea, and not just because we gave up on "world religions" years ago. We understand now that living in muddled worlds with multiple religious sources and resources is something like the norm, and that at no scale are people or peoples defined simply by a single identity or commitment (though it's interesting to study why and when they think they are, or say so). There seem to be few papers on pluralism, and many more going beyond that rather brittle concept to the messier realities of religion lived with others and other traditions. One session I attended (admittedly one on World Christianity) engaged syncretism, dualism, dual or multiple belonging, contextualization, vernacularization, indigenization, acculturation, blending, hybridity, bricolage and what a Catholic panelist called pansacramentalism. As many other panels are about intersectionality - how distinctions of every kind (race, gender, class, sexuality, etc.) are interwoven with the others in complicated and challenging ways.

Pluralism looks pretty simplistic by comparison. But I have to admit that if it's old news in the American Academy of Religion, it's still big news in the wider world, and something fervently to be wished for elsewhere. It's the ethos of much of the teaching of "world religions" attended by numberless students in our universities, and the structuring assumption of my own field "comparative religious ethics."

To be honest, pluralism lies at the heart of my understanding of what I'm about as a scholar of religion, too - recall my mantra that religious studies is the discipline that reminds us there is no consensus on the real. Just last week I had to defend Diana Eck's case for pluralism (students were dismissing her arguments as ideological too quickly!) and became almost maudlin in describing how the encounter with another religious tradition - an other tradition - can be thrilling and humbling in a religious way: God (or whatever) is greater than any of our traditions, that greatness experienced as much in the incompatibilities of our traditions as in their commonalities. You can't have it all, but recognizing this is a powerful thing. Lee Yearley calls this feeling spiritual regret. Can one still feel that if one's understanding of religion insists on human messiness all the way down?

Escape

 

Made my escape from Baltimore just in time - Minneapolis isn't just warmer than Baltimore, but out of reach of that messy storm back east!

Oblivion

The hotel I'm staying at for the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion is in Inner Harbor, a very recently built up area southeast from the main wharf area where the National Aquarium lies, about 20 minutes' brisk walk from the Convention Center. At the heart

 

of these new hotels, shops and restaurants is a roundabout with a big gilded object. To the untrained eye it looks like public art. Even when not surrounded with Christmas lights, its wavy golden flames look cheerful. Come closer, though - something I fear few do - and dark

 

shapes emerge in the golden flames, shapes which eventually reveal themselves to be hanged bodies. This is no ornament for an office park or luxury hotel; it's the National Katyn Memorial, erected on the 60th anniversary of the Soviet massacre of 20,000 military officers in 1940. Somehow it upsets me greatly to see it in this so unsuitable setting, and I've found myself walking over to it repeatedly as if to console it. Inner Harbor must have looked quite different in 2000. Perhaps the flames rose over the water and into an open sky? Now it's hidden in plain sight.