Handy

After four years of near constant use, and holding valiantly together despite being cracked already in its very first month (subway platforms are, we learned the the hard way, not soft), I'm replacing my iPhone. I guess the decom-missioned one was already an old model when I got it, as I'm going from a 7 to a 12 in one fell swoop! Thanks...

Here and there

Because of covid-19, the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion is virtual. It's also spread out over 12 days! So I've started two weeks of weaving in and out of my usual work to hear people presenting on all sorts of subjects new and familiar. Yes of course it's on zoom, with the full assortment of technical glitches, and so far all webinars where the audience is invisible. But it's still strange and fun - like the talk (whence the image above) about divination among the precolumbian Mexica as an interlocutor for contemplative studies today. The guild persists!

Generational syncopation

Covering familiar materials in an unfamiliar way, some cool things came out. The readings were Diana Eck's classic "'Is our God listening?': Exclusivism, Inclusivism, Pluralism" (1993) and How We Gather (2015), a proposal for finding religion-like benefits in non-religious organizations and practices both volunteer and for profit. I usually assign these on different days - the former with some Karl Barth, the latter with Pew surveys on the religiously unaffiliated - but in this year's syllabus they wound up together. Interesting issues arose from the juxtaposition, perhaps most pointedly when we considered the affront of millennials told they were were being religious without knowing it, and, on the other hand, how someone identified with a world religion might feel take to being described in the religion-less terms of How We Gather ("that's what inclusivism feels like on the receiving end!").

But the really fun part came as a result of my introducing the two texts as representing the experiences of different generations. Eck reports on the changed religious landscapes of boomer pluralists, largely raised in monolithic religious worlds progressively enriched and complicated by America's growing religious diversity. Angie Thurston and Casper ter Kuile, authors of How We Gather, speak to and for the millennial "nones" living in the aftermath of this pluralizing transformation, largely raised without affective bonds to any religion at all. Really fun, though, was realizing that none of us quite resonated with either. Not surprising, perhaps, since two of us are Gen X and the rest are Gen Z!

Last splash of Fall color!

人类世学！

It's a long shot for lots of reasons, but my hosts at Renmin have asked if I'd be willing to teach there again this coming summer. Indeed I would be, committed as I am to civil society dialogue even between strategically competitive countries. I even proposed a new course!

Anthropocene Humanities

The Anthropocene names the new reality – and awareness – that humanity has become a planetary agent, the single most important factor in current earth history. The term was coined by natural scientists but has increasingly been taken up by thinkers in the human sciences. This course surveys anglophone debates about the meaning and significance of humanity’s new status within the earth system from historical, philosophical, literary and comparative, as well as feminist, postcolonial and postsecular perspectives. Conducted in English, the course employs the tools of the humanities to make sense of the Anthropocene, and uses the challenge of the Anthropocene to reimagine the work of the humanities.

1. Introduction: What is the Anthropocene?

Steve Bradshaw, “Anthropocene: A Documentary” 

Jill Schneiderman, “Awake in the Anthropocene” 

2. The Anthropocene and the environmental humanities 

Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses” 

Jeremy Davies, Birth of the Anthropocene 

3. Philosophical challenges of the Anthropocene 

Clive Hamilton, Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene

Roy Scranton, “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene” 

4. Queering the Anthropocene 

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “A Feminist Approach to the Anthropocene: Earth Stalked by Man” 

Whitney A. Bauman, “Climate Weirding and Queering Nature: Getting Beyond the Anthropocene 

5. Decolonizing the Anthropocene 

Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, “On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene”

Françoise Vergès, “Racial Capitalocene: Is the Anthropocene Racial?” 

6. Desecularizing the Anthropocene 

Bronislaw Szerszynski, “Gods of the Anthropocene: Geo-Spiritual Formations in the Earth’s New Epoch”

Fabrice Monteiro, “The Prophet” (photo series)

7. A Chinese antidote to the Anthropocene? 

James Miller, China’s Green Religion: Daoism and the Quest for a Sustainable Future 

8. Writing Anthropocene futures 

Donna Haraway, “The Camille Stories”

Precolombian

Imagine discovering this! Extinct animals suggest 12,500 years old...

Well Met

First expedition to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in almost a year!

The "aura" of artworks made every work veritably leap off the walls.

Disbelief and dread

Oak Flat

That book I started reading, Lauren Redniss' Oak Flat: A Fight for Sacred Land in the American West, couldn't, alas, be more timely. Or out-of-timely. Among the outgoing (fingers crossed!) Trump administration's efforts to rush or jam through changes the Biden administration won't be able to change are assorted moves of environmental plunder. You've heard about their proposed sale of rights to the Arctic national wildlife refuge, but the news just broke today (for me at least) that they're trying to do in Oak Flat, sacred to the Apache in Arizona, too.

Last month tribes discovered that the date for the completion of a crucial environmental review process has suddenly been moved forward by a full year, to December 2020, even as the tribes are struggling with a Covid outbreak that has stifled their ability to respond. If the environmental review is completed before Trump leaves office, the tribes may be unable to stop the mine.

“The Trump administration is cutting corners and doing a rushed job just to take care of Rio Tinto,” said the Democratic Arizona representative Raúl Grijalva. “And the fact they are doing it during Covid makes it even more disgusting. Trump and Rio Tinto know the tribes’ reaction would be very strong and public under normal circumstances but the tribes are trying to save their people right now.”

Changing views

 

A few days ago - it was November 19th - we noticed some strange objects parked on the street below. What the? You couldn't see them

when I snapped a picture of nightfall for a friend the following day... But by the next day it became clear what was going on. Union's tower!

Reading pleasure

It's not quite Thanksgiving break but some of my leisure reading for the holiday has arrived and I couldn't resist diving in.

North Woods, Central Park

 

Stay home for Thanksgiving

Covid is out of control in the United States (almost 200,000 new infections in the last day!), affecting people who know its danger and - perhaps even more - those who don't. One of my students told me about an interview they saw with a nurse in South Dakota describing tense conversations with gravely ill patients about to be intubated who refuse to believe Covid is real and that they are dying. “It’s not one particular patient; it’s just a culmination of so many people and their last dying words are, ‘This can’t be happening, it’s not real.' And when they should be spending time FaceTime-ing their families, they’re just filled with anger and hatred. I just can’t believe those are their last words.” 

Anger and, yes, hatred is what I feel towards those who have filled these heads with misinformation, but for these victims an aching compassion and mute sorrow. Denial is understandable. People they trusted lied to them about the danger, endangered them. And part of denying they have Covid - the nurse told of people who wanted to believe it was flu or even lung cancer - is denying that they caught it from someone, and that they may have passed it on to someone else.

I've thought a lot about about the loneliness and terror of those dying, in pain and isolation with no chance of the touch or even the presence of those they love, and about the grieving that hasn't been able fully to take place in response to these deaths, on every level from the personal (Joe Biden's empty chairs at the kitchen table) to the national. But another deep existential wound this pandemic will leave is the horror and shame of having potentially exposed another to a death-dealing virus. Too many of those who refuse masks and other measures don't know these feelings, but, sadly, will.

Hot spots

Death cult

 250,000  

are dead and this moral midget thinks he's entitled to another term

image chart

Something subtracted

We're in the final third of a long semester. My students aren't the only ones to tell of being overwhelmed - zoom keeps on sucking your energy even when you've learned to call it "zoom fatigue," and coursework just keeps coming, week after week. Many students are slipping behind, and adding self-reproach to exhaustion, heartbreak, isolation, and dread about the future.

Since I am meeting students in "Religion and the Anthropocene" one-on-one this week already, I let them persuade me to take take this week off. That means there's no assigned reading, no reading response. I'll still be signing into zoom during our regularly scheduled meeting time Friday morning, but nobody else has to.

The only problem is what to do with the originally assigned material for this week. Do we drop it, or bump the readings of one of our subsequent weeks? The syllabus is already chockablock. Fortuitiously the topic was/is Daoism, and one of the readings the Dao De Jing. If there's anything one might be able to do better by not doing it, it's studying Daoism. I've sent the students a few passages from the Dao De Jing, and told them that I don't expect them to read any more.

XIX
Eliminate the ‘sage’: forget ‘wisdom’
People will be a hundred times better off.
Eliminate ‘benevolence’: forget ‘rectitude’,
And people will have filial piety.
Eliminate cleverness: forget profit,
And there’ll be less thieves and rogues.
Superficial things are insufficient,
What is needed is all-embracing.
Exhibit the unadorned.
Hold fast to the un-carved block.
Avoid the thought of Self.
Eliminate desire.

XLVII
You can know the universe
Without leaving your house.
You can see the ways of heaven
Without looking out of your window.
The further you go
The less you know.
That’s why the wise achieve without moving,
Name what is, without needing to see it,
Accomplish great things without action.

XLVIII
In pursuing one’s studies
Something’s added each day.
In practising the Way
Something’s subtracted each day.
It grows less and less
Until one reaches non-action.
When one reaches non-action
Nothing is left undone.
It’s always through not interfering
That one can control the realm.
Whoever loves to interfere
Will never control the people.

Translation

Unchosen choice

Fun class in "Theorizing Religion" today - one which ended up in a different place than students expected, with things relevant and complicated in ways they hadn't anticipated. Our reading was a chapter in Elizabeth Pérez's Religion in the Kitchen analyzing the stories Lucumí initiates told of themselves. Unlike what other scholars of Afro-Cuban traditions report (perhaps because many of them chose to become initiated themselves), Pérez finds the the members of the community she's studying go to great lengths to explain that they did not seek initiation out, rather "initiation was thrust upon the narrator" (149). Becoming priests of Lucumí was an "unchosen choice" (144).

We spent some time looking at antecedents, sources and parallels of such self-narration. Pérez mentions Christian stories of conversion like Paul on the road to Damascus, the Bantu practices of claiming authority through suffering called ngoma, specific 19th century Cuban contexts where expressing "a desire for Lucumí initiation" would be "tantamount to rejecting God as well as science" (159), and finally the practices of "testifying" in Protestant American churches. For these and other reasons, the story is one of struggle, resistance and ultimate surrender. But similar story structures happen in many religious traditions. I mentioned the dhami we met on our way to Kailas, who had done his darndest not to be a spirit medium, his resistance proving futile. 

The idea of "unchosen choice" took us to the roots of the word "conviction" - to be "convicted" is to submit to a law whether one will or no - and so to the reality that religious identity is rarely experienced as a free choice. I explained that this was the reason Locke and other early modern Europeans argued for religious toleration (I suppose I was thinking of Bayle): we cannot choose to believe or disbelieve, and any demand that I believe or disbelieve something is nothing but an invitation to hypocrisy. Of course this goes against the easy subjectivism of many of my students, who think about religion is something people somehow choose to believe. Of course we saw Winnifred Fallers Sullivan argue that One of the lies modernity peddles is that you can and should choose your own religion in our very first class session but that was long ago and far away. I think it started to make sense today.

But it's disturbing sense. If religious freedom is respecting people's deepest unchosen commitments, what about that baker in Colorado? (I didn't have to bring him up: a student did.) His refusal to design a wedding cake for a gay couple seemed to most people I know a religious rationalization of a non- or prereligious prejudice. I could see students struggling with unexpected empathy for the baker, for whom his own preferences had nothing to do with it but God's will (as he knew it) was God's will. Can a sincere religious argument be made for some forms of discrimination? Bringing in the case where a Native American successfully defended his consumption of peyote as a religious obligation didn't get the bitter taste from our mouths. In America today "religious freedom" is experienced as a weapon of the dominant culture, not a protection of pluralism and minority cultures, but here our liberal deference to individual self-determination seemed to morph into an argument for the other side. 

I didn't observe that this slippery slope takes you quickly to perdition, especially if you follow recent arguments that accord vague "moral" objections the status of unchosen choices (or rather, shows you need a Millian and not just a Lockian liberalism), nor did I recapitulate Sullivan's argument that the "impossibility of religious freedom" demands that we own our understandings of the relation of church and state as themselves theological. I'll get to that Monday, when we read about a less threatening mobilization of religious freedom from a century ago. Instead I remarked on the strange fact that many who claim protection of their "unchosen" convictions regarding gender insist on regarding homosexuality as a choice - what Amy Coney Barrett in her confirmation hearing persisted in calling "sexual preference." What's up with that?

It was late and we had to end class, but I could see synapses popping. Perhaps "fun" is the wrong word for our learning. This was not where students expected a discussion of an exotic minority community on the south side of Chicago to lead us!

Ice chandelier jellies

How do these stunning ice forms happen? They appeared above one Woniu Lake near the Russian border of Heilongjiang, in Northeast China.

Good news

Allow a proud big brother to brag a little. My sister's the editor of the Gisborne Gazette, which just won a big prize: the Community News-paper Association of Victoria's top award: Best Community Newspaper!

Forest floor

 

The forest floor's moment