MetroCITI adieu

Today was the last session of the MetroCITI pedagogy workshop I've been participating in all year - we started last July! In that time, the ten participants - from many different schools and teaching many different subjects) have gotten to know each other well. Over the course of ten months, one of us had a baby, another has one on the way, another got married. We also workshopped, carried out and debriefed about a classroom project and a faculty development project for each of us.

Excellent fun! Today we reflected a little on why it was such a special and fruitful experience. Some veterans of the program had told us, a third of the way in, to relish discussions about pedagogy which wouldn't become mired in the structures and dysfunctions of a particular institution, or in the particular foci of a given discipline. It's also a space without power dynamics and competition, where what unites us is a shared commitment to inquiry. Returning together today to the seminar's central idea that learning involves the coming together of students' prior knowledge and what we were calling subject matter knowledge, something else became clear.

The power of our discussions has come also from the fact that each of us is a non-specialist (to put it mildly) in the others' fields. As each described key subject matter ideas they were trying to convey to students, the rest of us were at once in the role of pedagogues and students. This might be the case for most pedagogy discussions, and should happen in the many settings where interdisciplinary exploration happens (I have sought it out betimes by taking classes in fields I don't know), but it is in fact a rare and precious thing. We were all grateful!

On the wall outside our classroom were two diagrammings of a famous line from James Clerk Maxwell: Metaphysical doctrine is not of much use in a world like this, in which the same antecedents never again concur and nothing ever happens twice. But pedagogical networks...!

PS Here'a a picture of the lot of us, bidding farewell at a Greek restaurant fittingly called Symposium. From right: a professor of

chemistry, TC grad student, sociology, convener, writing, economics, TC grad students, writing, chemistry, physics, government, history, me.

Ahem, ahimsa

Few people notice the Gandhi statue at Union Square

It unfolds

The final projects for "Performing the Problem of Suffering: The Book of Job and the Arts" are in, and they're really impressive. Let people work in the genres that matter to them, and they work hard. The mostly design students in my discussion section also brought completely different and delightful ways of tackling issues. Here's one from a

student in Communication Design - one of those foldy fortune-telling things where you make a few choices (Job/Friend/God/Satan, then some numbers) before arriving at o one of eight alternate endings (!) to the Book of Job. What a brilliant way of embodying the principle, as Robert Frost called it,

There’s no connection man can reason out


notherBetween his just deserts and what he gets

Another student's project is "a comic about the unnaturalness of trying to force-forget one's suffering: a version of Job (of the Book of Job) struggling to find peace after his restoration." I've borrowed these images (with permission) from her blog; make sure to go through them one by one, seeing only one at a time. The gaps are essential.

(Descriptions of some other projects here.)

Spirit of New York

A student brought a stack of money to class today - but it was all in a good cause. It's spirit money, and she showed us how it's folded before being burnt to transfer assets to departed relatives. This was only one of many highlights of the first set of final presentations in "Lived Religion in New York."

The Buddhism in New York presentation, of which the spirit money folding was part, compared a Tibetan center on 16th Street and several temples in Chinatown. The intrepid students were undeterred by the absence of public events at the former, and conducted an internet interview with a practitioner upstate. As for the latter, after meeting the same woman at two Mahayana temples (who was delighted to see them both times), they stumbled into a press conference being given by a top priest of Fo Guang Shan at a Buddhist youth center, and were permitted to interview him too. (Conveniently both he and one of the students are Taiwanese.) They asked the same questions to their Nyingma source (named Sam), getting similar ambivalence about the opportunities and distractions of the city, compared to the activities at their upstate headquarters. They posted the different answers in different places along the walls of our classroom, inviting us to get up and look at them and so letting us get a taste of the adventure they had. And then we got to fold paper...

Next came a presentation on the challenges of keeping a long fast in New York. One presenter focused on Ramadan, and interviewed a family member. Another focused on Greek Orthodox Lent and interviewed someone she works with. The results were fascinating, both from a comparative and a lived religion perspective. Neither interviewee described herself as religious, but both took on the ardors of fasting for their own interesting reasons. The Muslim had grown up in Karachi and Dubai and fasted in part to experience a connection to home, but described observing Ramadan in New York as far more difficult than it is in these Muslim cities, since shops here are open and colleagues blithely eat... not to mention that New York summer days can be 18 hours long! For the Orthodox fast, by contrast, New York turns out to be a great place "since there are so many vegan restaurants here."

After that we learned about the little floe left of what was once a major German population in New York City - a third of the population, making it the third-largest German-speaking city in the world. The presenters researched the German Lutheran church of St. Mark's - originally in Kleindeutschland in the Lower East Side (the building is now a synagogue), relocating to Yorkville on the Upper East Side after much of the congregation died in the General Slocum disaster of 1904. They still have services in German, not too poorly attended, according to a student who attended. Although their congregants long ago moved to the suburbs, many evidently return each week for services, as well as for German film screenings. But this tiny remnant of what was once a major part of New York's experience of itself is all but invisible today. "I've lived in the neighborhood for twenty years," said my (20-year-old) student, "and never noticed it was there."

Today's final presentation was about the St. Francis Xavier. The two students were interested in the parish's outreach to LGBTQ people, and found lots - though over the course of conversations with four different people connected to the parish they were able also to register the delicacy of being a gay-friendly Catholic church. The priest, and a long-term parishioner to whom they spoke, seemed to dodge their questions about inclusiveness by directing them to the parish's Catholic Lesbian and Gay Catholic groups, and pointing out the chapel for those lost to HIV/Aids: actions, not statements! And, they reported, everyone's favorite phrase seemed to be "who am I to judge?" - they didn't know the phrase's papal pedigree! But after talking to my colleague M, a parishioner there, they were able to end their presentation with an account of the congregation's public support of its LGBTQ ministries at the consecration after recent renovation, to which the (not so gay-friendly) Cardinal Archbishop of New York could only applaud.

A wonderfully multi-dimensional picture of New York as a place where religion lives is emerging - and we have yet to hear the presentations from groups exploring yoga centers, kosher bakeries and the Hare Krishnas who sing and dance at Union Square!

Torrey Pines in bloom

Jesus rocks love

I'm not usually in California this time of the year, so I wasn't prepared to find St. James Catholic Church awash in first communicants, little ladies - brides - and little gentlemen. (Each of the eighty-four had made a banner, like this one.)

Well, in fact I wasn't completely unprepared. By marvelous coincidence, the announcement below had emerged from a trunk just this morning.

JFK --> SAN

The not-quite-smooth line tells of regular turbulence and, more dis- appointingly, as good as no views. But we're in San Diego, open vistas!

Greening

Updates on my two window views - our street in Prospect Heights and my office view of the Lang courtyard. The lush greens of summer can't be far off...

Yours in anarchy

This gentleman came up in "Exploring Religious Ethics" today, twice. J. M. Hinton didn't look like this when I knew him, of course. The photo's from 1955 and he was my philosophy tutor at Worcester College, Oxford three decades later.

He might be bemused to have cropped up in a course on religion, being non-religious himself, and delighted at his second cameo. The first came, surprisingly enough, in a discussion of Zen koans. A grievously literal-minded philosophy student wanted to know if koans were solved, and what that meant. I said that from my understanding they were designed not to be solved, or dissolved, but to nag, indigestible, until - until whatever was supposed to happen happened: not something I was in a position to know about. Koans aren't aspirin, but administered in an entirely individualized way by a master to different students, responding (as we learned from Thomas Kasulis) "not to the student's question but to the student's question."

She was unimpressed, so I said I thought the well-chosen koan (chosen by teacher, not student) had to work as language that refused to be sense or nonsense. A bit like - I said, going out on a limb and saying so - my experience as an undergraduate with the ontological proof for the existence of God: the claim that the existence of the idea of a being greater than which could not be conceived proved the reality of such - since to exist is greater than not to. J. M. Hinton had had me read the standard refutations (notably Kant's "existence is not a predicate") but I wasn't buying it. I thought the refutation missed the point. If logic rejects this insight, I said, so much the worse for logic! Mr. Hinton - who knew me to be no more a theist than he at the time - said he didn't agree with me, but that I should keep with it. Perhaps Hinton encouraged my passionate and confused response because he was an anarchist.

One of the anarchists he had me read (in another tutorial, Moral and Political Philosophy I think it was, though he was probably the only tutor to assign anarchism, and I may have been the only one he assigned it to at the time) came up later in today's class. It was time again for "Ethics Diaries," when one of the students leads the class in discussion of an ethical topic or situation of their choice for half an hour, as I sit back, take notes, and try not to take sides. Today's topic was stealing, which was introduced through an anecdote about a shoplifter and the famous "Heinz's dilemma" - may a man whose wife will otherwise die steal a cancer medication he cannot afford, and which the pharmacist, whom he approached, refuses to sell him at a discount?

The oddly paired topics led the discussion to move toward queries about fair prices for things, and before long students were talking about employers who steal from their employees; how smart businesses control for a certain amount of theft; kleptomania, greed and need; cellphone insurance fraud; intellectual property and patents; and whether someone who needed shoes should steal the cheapest shoes she could find or the ones likely to last her the longest. As in "Ethics Diaries" discussions past, the discussion was centrifugal. Usually I just let it spin out of control, but this time the spirit of Michael Hinton inspired me to write a few words on the board:

Proudhon: "Property is theft!"

Suffering too insignificant to see

Sometimes I think I'm kind of an awesome teacher. Sometimes I feel like a dolt for taking years to understand something that's been staring me in the face all along. Today I experienced both of these things, together! What made me feel on top of things was the pleasure my whole discussion section (for "Performing the Problem of Suffering: The Book of Job and the Arts") has taken at a somewhat unusual assignment:

Recitation (5%), performed in Discussion Section weeks 12-13. Memorize a 10-line section from the Book of Job (in any translation, language, adaptation you choose) and recite it, with a brief explanation for your choice of passage and version.

Students selected the most fascinating range of passages, and delivered them with tenderness, vulnerability, confidence, delight... (Nobody just phoned it in.) One student had rendered the start of Job 3 a song, which he sang to guitar in his native Hebrew. Another held up the painting above as she recited the scene where Job is about to lose his health - in Korean. We had two more in Korean, two in Spanish, one in Urdu and one in Hindi (both original translations), and one in Norwegian. The ones in English, native and not, were lovely too. Hearing the melody of our languages was a way of honoring, indeed celebrating how international a group we are, even as students' choices of passages of defiance, despair, hope, threat and comfort allowed them to express something important about themselves. (And the Book of Job, which might seem very old hat by this time in the semester, was new again!)

The feeling of doltishness had to do with the wife of Job, whom I've always thought I was attentive to. Don't I have people read the "Testament of Job," where Job's wife (there given the name Sitidos) seems the true star of the drama, or the dramatic versions of Robert Frost and Archibald MacLeish (Thyatira and Sarah, respectively), where Job's wife practically gets equal airtime as her husband, or Blake's "Illustrations," where Job is never seen without his wife by his side? Yes, well, but. These are all stories by men, telling a story about a man. Who is this woman, Job's wife? What's her story?

What enabled me to see further - finally - was a play by Canadian Native playwright Yvette Nolan, which was one of two I assigned this week. The play tells of God appearing, in the form of a Native healer, to a woman who is unhappily pregnant. It is called Job's Wife, or the deliverance of Grace but the play has no other references, even hidden ones, to the Book of Job. I suggested in lecture that the title functions as a question.

But what is the question? It's about "Suffering too insignificant for the majority to see" (I read from Alice Walker's talk of this name): it's right there when you have eyes to see it. But after today's discussions, I feel like I barely saw anything before. As has happened before, my breakthrough came when I asked students to do something and did it myself. The prompt: "Tell a story about/called Job's Wife." And suddenly I was wondering about her back story. About her friends - surely she has some: what might their exchanges have been like? And if they might not come together to take over the end of the story.

Next time I teach this class - and I'm certain it needs to be taught again - she won't be discovered as an afterthought, a reminder of the marginalized and voiceless. Maybe - as Nolan was perhaps trying to do - we can make the phrase "Job's wife" as significant as "patience of Job" or "friends of Job." 

Religious bouquet of the West Village

For "Lived Religion in New York" today I reused a little walking tour I developed seven years ago for Religious Geography of New York. To make it more interesting, I had student teams spend 15 minutes in class first becoming an "instant expert" on one of five sites we were to pass, and then letting the students talk about the places as we got there. So students told us about the Village Presbyterian Church, The Church in the Village, Integral Yoga, the Salvation Army, and, at the end, the second cemetery of Congregation Shearith Israel.

We learned that the first is no more than a landmarked façade, its congregation having to give it up after a spat over the Yom Kippur War led a Jewish congregation which had been sharing it to leave them with a budget they couldn't manage, that the second houses what had been three congregations, that the third started on the UWS, that the fourth preferred meeting on the street noisily rather than solemnly in sacred spaces, that the last - across the street from Lang - used to be much bigger, still contains the grave of someone who fought in the Revolutionary War, and shows us the contours of a grid older than The Grid - a mini-education in New York religious history. But there was more. All the places we went were alive. Okay, so Village Presbyterian is now condos called "The Portico." But Church in the Village was in the midst of their weekly food pantry service, and Integral Yoga's bookstore was closed for a lunchtime meditation. We noticed (well, I noticed and drew the class' attention) to the books in the window, beneath the Hindu statues: Rachel Carson and Rumi.

Abingdon Square, where the Salvation Army had had large open-air gatherings in the 1890s, wis now a little park whose flowers so delighted us all that I took a detour past the Jefferson Market garden, where one of the volunteers at the gate who, on learning who we were, said: If you wonder if there is a God, look here!

Better than a tempest in a teacup, a Kusama Yayoi in a cup of coffee!

Rockaway Beach

 It's almost beach time again - glad nobody else has noticed!

 Manhattan from Jacob Riis Park, so close yet so far away! 

Canoli!

My friend M, channeling his Sicilian grandmother, made his famous canoli today. Here are some, crumbly while keeping their form, filled with a lemon cream which miraculously doesn't shoot back out the sides, confectioner's sugar just this side of airborne... As he says: mystical.

The tulips at Jefferson Market Community Garden are out of this world

 

Divine dowser

One of the TAs for "Performing the Problem of Suffering" gave a terrific lecture on Archibald Macleish's drama in verse "J. B." today. It really is a brilliant work of art, a profound articulation of mid-century existentialism.

And, as I like telling people, "J. B." was probably my first exposure to the Book of Job, in a production at Torrey Pines High School in 1981 or 1982. I was none of the characters whose names you know, but "First Messenger," the one who (in several scenes) leads Second Messenger, the one who actually witnessed the calamity, to tell JB and his wife Sarah the awful news as their children, one by one, are felled by modern accidents. (Second Messenger gets the italicized line I only am escaped alone to tell thee...)

In the context of this course I've thought more about staging it than I have in a long time. Having Zuss and Nickles, failed old actors now selling balloons and popcorn in a big tent circus, donning and doffing God and Satan masks allows for remarkably subtle ambivalences - not to mention the unexplained and unnamed prompter who nudges them on. Preparing it for class today I was struck by the conceit that the hapless man who walks into the play of Job doesn't know it's a play: he's not acting. (Sarah seems more aware that she might be.) The player has to seem entirely unfeigned - his character happy but also good, maintaining a faith that's not the smug American Calvinist faith that success shows your merit with the divine. Here's how he describes his good fortune:

It isn't luck when God is good to you.
It's something more. It's like those dizzy
Daft old lads who dowse for water.
They feel the alder twig twist down
And know they've got it and they have:
They've got it. Blast the ledge and water
Gushes at you. And you knew.
It wasn't luck, They knew. They felt the
Gush go shuddering through their shoulders, huge
As some mysterious certainty of opulence.
They couldn't hold it. I can't hold it.
I've always known that God was with me.
I've tried to show I knew it ... (37-38)

Oops

I'm teaching the Bodhicaryavatara in "Exploring Religious Ethics" again, a text I remember really enjoying working with last time. I'm no more qualified now than I was then, of course. My colleague C, who works in just that tradition, told me that nobody in Tibet thinks the  text (known in English sometimes as Guide to the Bodhisattva Way) can be read without several lengthy commentaries. I wing it, Great Books style (as the existence of a Oxford World Classics edition suggests). Focal point of today's class, was the bodhisattva vow, which starts may I allay the suffering of every living being. I am medicine for the sick. May I be both the doctor and the nurse, until the sickness does not recur. (3.6-7) and assumes its classic form As long as space abides and as long as the world abides, so long may I abide, destroying the sufferings of the world (10.55). I dwelt on the insanity of such a pledge, which nobody in her right mind could make. The text says as much:

I have promised to liberate the universe from the defilements, to the limits of space in the ten directions, but even my own self is not freed from the defilements!
At that time I was intoxicated, speaking without realizing my own limitations. After that I can never turn back from destroying the defilements. (4:41-42)

We explored the "intoxication" - the roller coaster rush coming from contemplating the wondrous work of enlightened beings as well as one's own abjectness, against the backdrop of the discovery of the extent of suffering needing release - but also how, in retrospect, the bodhisattva has found his "limitations" to be illusory. (The rest of the book shows how that was done.) Forced by an improvident (providently improvident!) promise to do the humanly impossible, a promise he finds he can't unmake, the bodhisattva has to unlearn what it means to be an agent, on the way to discovering a different kind of agency - one which can end the sufferings of the world...

The students aren't buying it. They think Buddhism doesn't traffic in intoxications of this kind. Revealingly, one recalled from the preface a story about Santideva the editor indicated looked to be no more than a trope - the idea he must have been of royalty, who renounced kinship for the religious life (the story told of Gautama the Buddha). She didn't remember the Tibetan tale the editor tells next:

Santideva - although he was an advanced practitioner who had visions of Manjusri and received direct teachings from him - seemed to the other monks simply to laze around and do nothing ... The other monks decided to humiliate him  by showing his lack of learning, and asked him to give a recitation before the monastery from the scriptures. Santideva initially refused, but assented when they insisted and agreed to erect a teaching-seat for him to sit on. The first stage of the humiliation was to erect the seat so high that he could not reach it. One can imagine the monks whispering and giggling as he approached, but it is said that with one hand - plus the magical powers which seem to descend on saints - he lowered the seat, sat on it, and asked what they wanted him to recite, something old or something new.At the request for something new he began to recite the Bodhicaryavatara. When he reached Chapter 9 ... it is said that he ascended into the air and disappeared, though his voice could still be heard. Santideva then refused to return to the monastery which had not understood that spiritual depth may not always be obvious, and that we can never tell who may or may not be saints working in their own way for the benefit of others. (ix-x)

Comfort and affliction

Had the chance today to see one of the other projects of Outside the Wire, the program whose Job readings I've told you about, and whose director Bryan Doerries came to speak to my class. Today's event, part of their "End of Life" series, was at Sloan Kettering, one of New York's research hospitals, the audience mostly people in palliative care. The play read from was Sophocles' little-known "Women of Trachis," which ends with the hero Herakles, dying in agony of poisonous centaur's blood administered to him by a wife who thought it would revive him (and in horror kills herself), demanding that his son end his life - at one point calling him to "be a doctor" to him. (The story's a lot more complicated, and awful.) Its final line, spoken perhaps by someone in the chorus, is something like "everything you have seen here is God [Zeus]."

The structure of the event was like the readings of "Ajax" and "Philoctetes" which Doerries has taken to tens of thousands of veterans and their families (he writes about it in his recent The Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies can Teach Us Today), as well as the Job readings. Well-known actors read scenes, then cede their places at the table to representative community members who offer first reactions. Doerries then leads a discussion, organized around a sequence of questions, ending with some quips about tragedy's comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. It all works very well, and today's discussion, although abbreviated for reasons of time, opened up much.

Our friend the Book of Job showed up, too. In response to Doerries' final question, which inquired about the audience's sense of the meaning and significance of the final line of the play, one of the two doctors who'd started the discussion said it reminded him of the last lines of Job!

Pink and green and red and yellow and blue, and more to come!