The Third Truth

Book Review: Four Freedoms

Thu, 14 May 2009 22:36:32 GMT

Heading into my read of an advance review copy of John Crowley's forthcoming Four Freedoms, I was unsure what to expect. The publisher's blurb told me that it was a book about "a disabled man...among a crowd of women" at "the height of World War II." It didn't seem obvious that this scenario would be a setting suited to the artful exploration of ideas I had enjoyed in the author's AEgypt cycle, a set of four novels that develop a complexly interwoven text about the human experience of magic and the magic of human experience. I needn't have worried.

The Four Freedoms of the title are the ones articulated in FDR's 1941 State of the Union speech: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear. The fact that the novel is divided into four parts suggests a correspondence, but there's no obvious one-to-one relationship between those parts and the freedoms. They seem more like the four movements of a symphony, and here is the key to the esoteric dimension of Four Freedoms: the Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinees generales (1808) of Charles Fourier. Crowley is very coy about this element of the novel--unlike his free admission of the historical and scholarly grist for his mill in AEgypt--he never even mentions Fourier by name, either in the novel or in the afterword that discusses his research sources. Still, the unavoidable fact is that Four Freedoms character Pancho Notzing's "Bestopianism" is Fourierist though and through: a magical ur-socialism founded in "Passionate Series" generating "Harmony" through the satisfaction of dynamic and heterogeneous desires. Pancho himself is even a biographical cipher for Fourier. Where Fourier was the son of a prosperous cloth merchant and had a career as a traveling salesman, Pancho is retiring from a career as a traveling salesman of luxury cloths.

The Theory of Four Movements is Fourier's earliest and most bewildering exposition of his system. The mouvements themselves are enumerated only in a footnote and some brief glossary material, where they are given as social, human, animal, and organic--in descending order. The hierarchy of the Fourierist movements perhaps accounts for the sparing but curious use of the first-person plural in the frame of Four Freedoms. The "we" narrating the novel could be the collective identity of the quasi-phalanx of the Van Damme Aero manufacturing plant, a "Temporary Harmonious Zone"--cousin maybe to Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zone.

Both the little society of the Ponca City plant and the greater society of WWII America with its socialized command economy are especially worth readers' attention at a time when the US is confronted with a need to fundamentally reorganize its material and industrial bases. The historical setting of Four Freedoms is bracingly topical while we confront a "great recession" or even "greater depression" that seems bound to displace what "postwar" generations have been taught to consider the American "way of life." A gasoline ration of four gallons per week? That was a reality of the home front.

I cried once in the course of reading this book. If it has that effect on anyone else, I wouldn't necessarily expect it to be at the same place: there's a lot emotional power distributed through many personal stories over the course of the novel. As I have come to expect from Crowley, his narrative voice is sure--both efficient and beautiful--and his characters are compelling. The plot is largely subordinate to the characters, and tends to fan out from them in individual tributaries of memory, told to one another or simply recalled.

Crowley's AEgypt (especially as read backwards from the final realizations of Endless Things) can be considered a meditation on "neurodiversity": the idea that there are many necessarily partial and complementary ways of perceiving and understanding the world. Four Freedoms can be read as a corresponding exploration of physical diversity expressed through sex, age, disability, and race. But this is no moralizing, didactic exercise. I recently had a conversation with a literal fellow traveler on an airplane, regarding the importance of storytelling in the learning process. The stories in Four Freedoms can remind us of the kind of learning we all need to do, and that we will do whenever we remember our diverse radical passions.

race and the path to the Presidency

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 12:20:59 GMT

During this election's Democratic primaries, Clinton surrogate Geraldine Ferraro trotted out the ridiculous claim that Obama was "lucky to be black." She suggested that racial minority status of itself gave Obama an advantage with the electorate. That was and is false on its face: racism is alive and well throughout the US in varying degrees, and all other things being equal, a white candidate can be expected to trounce a black one in appealing to the voters. (What's more, Ferraro's remark was designed to cater to and inflame white resentment toward successful blacks.)

But I was reminded of that "luckiness" when reading what blogger Hilzoy recently wrote:

This season, Obama has had the good fortune to run against two people who held the peculiar belief that they were entitled to the Presidency, and who, as a result, badly underestimated him. The fact that he seems to never let that condescension get to him, however, has nothing whatsoever to do with luck, and everything to do with temperament and character. Since I agree with McCain that we will need a steady hand at the tiller in the years to come, I'm glad to see it.

It seems to me that the temperment and character to brush off such condescension could be the result of a lifetime staring white priviledge in the face and overcoming it routinely.

stupidest religion news headline in ages

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 22:51:30 GMT

Texas polygamist sect is accused of indoctrinating girls

Meanwhile, Pope accused of Catholicism during US visit and Bear accused by Interior Dept. of shitting in woods.

Care to name a religion that doesn't indoctrinate its members?
Gah.

Elijah Siegler: "God in the Box: Religion in Contemporary Television Cop Shows"

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:14:38 GMT

Siegler's study was anthologized in God in the Details: American Religion in Popular Culture (eds. Mazur & McCarthy). I read and critiqued it for a seminar I'm just finishing.

Siegler states his goal at the outset: “This study is an effort to make sense of this kind of intrusion of religious language, symbols, and themes into the secular venue of the TV cop show.” (p. 199) He begins with a rueful review of the extent to which previous studies of television have ignored its content or assumed its uniformity. Siegler doesn’t seem interested in arguing for television as an overall cultural force for good, but he does propose to vindicate it as “a locus for real thought about serious religious issues,” using three critically-lauded 1990s police dramas as his case in point. (p. 200)

Siegler alludes to Tillich’s conception of religion when he characterizes religious issues as “questions of ultimate concern.” (p. 202) But rather than emphasizing his own theoretical definition of religion at the outset, Siegler attempts to tease out the implicit definitions of religion from the three cop shows he has chosen: an admirable approach.

He claims that Law & Order presents religion as a “social fact” which provides cultural location for the characters, and the potential to provide motivations for justice or mayhem, depending on the adherent and/or the religion. (The second of the three aspects that Siegler suggests are in play, i.e. presentation of casuistic processes, is negligibly religious, I think. At least he hasn’t supported it as such.) He emphasizes that Law & Order is distinctive in admitting “no essence, no substance to religion.” (p. 205)

In NYPD Blue, religion is used primarily as a device for punctuating the dynamics of character, with institutional rites serving to cap off television seasons and to illuminate the depths of personality and conscience beyond their professional police roles. Religion is identified with personal “faith,” and presented as a fragile psychological property, subject to destruction through trauma and disillusion.

The third show, Homicide, seems to use a pair of cops in order to engage religious themes. Pembleton is a “fallen Catholic” whose Jesuit training has formed his intellectual and moral perspectives, while his partner Bayliss is a “spiritual” eclectic who eventually identifies as a Zen Buddhist. They thus emblemize opposing (or complementary) religious positions, characterized by Siegler as pre-modern and modern, respectively. (I would suggest that Jesuitism is as distinctively modern as liberal Protestantism, and that the church-hopping Zen convert might be more accurately termed post-modern.)

In his search for the moral conundrum at the heart of police dramas, Siegler asks, “How can the cops--our heroes--do the right thing?” (p. 210) What he doesn’t question, although he traces the historical arc of the development of crime drama back to Philip Marlowe, is why are "the cops--our heroes"? He comes close to this dilemma when he points out the critical notice of 70s vigilante-cop movies as “ideologically conservative backlash to a perceived liberal criminal justice system.” (p. 211) But he still maintains that more recent television cop dramas provide a more respectful view of the constraints on police and court power. I have to stop trusting Siegler on this point, after I read his summary of the shows, where “the investigation of a murder and its prosecution are hampered by rules, laws handed down from above that favor the criminal’s civil rights.” (p. 210, my emphasis) Of course, what the democratically-enacted laws protect from the inevitable overreaching of police are the rights of suspects. According to Siegler's synopsis, “the cops find the man or woman who is guilty” on the basis of illegally-obtained evidence or unreliable testimony. The propriety or morality of warrantless searches isn’t questioned by the shows. Nor is the apparently infallible character judgment of the police, according to the outlined scenario. (One hopes Siegler actually knows better.) Unlike the 70s vigilante movies, these shows provide justification--however complex and sophisticated--for coercive actions of cops qua cops, abusing their institutional authority without being marked as renegades.

All of this is worrisome enough before moving into the crowning, titular section of the study. Siegler’s examination comes to rest on the interrogation chamber, “the box” as Homicide calls it, as the dramatic arena of moral epistemology, “where communion between the police and the criminal is possible, where the former can find the truth and the latter can seek absolution, and where the audience can find meaning.” (p. 211) I greatly fear that we can now see the fruit of the meaning that these shows have communicated to American audiences. These dramas were constructed in such a way as to justify the use of coercion by authorities to elicit criminal confessions. We don’t need no stinkin’ fourth amendment to the Constitution! Especially not for Muslims and “illegal combatants.” We have now reached the point where an American Supreme Court Justice, with his naked face hanging out, can tell the BBC that he doesn’t think that “so-called torture” by interrogators isn’t precluded by the Constitution because it isn’t “punishment” per se, and political pundits openly favor torture--often using television drama (notoriously the “ticking bomb” fantasy of 24) as evidence for their arguments.

Siegler’s reflections on Foucault’s genealogy of discipline are certainly relevant. The 1215 Lateran Council not only mandated sacramental confession, it also forbade priests to sanction trial by combat and related judicial procedures (as coercing God into judgment). As a result, Continental European jurisprudence came increasingly to rely on confessions, and on torture to produce them. The technique of controlled drowning, called “water-boarding” by its modern American proponents, was in widespread use by the end of the Middle Ages.

At the end, Siegler does not simply argue that 90s cop dramas were a notable vehicle for moral reflection in mass media. He actually insists that “television best expressed religious and moral concerns through police dramas” which had “the box” at their core. (p. 211, my emphasis). If “the box” was our best, no wonder we are so bad.

Since I wrote this piece a few weeks ago, current events have fueled my animus on the topic.

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 22:53:02 GMT

Another day, another reason to be glad I don't carry a cell phone.

Thanksgiving

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 20:49:57 GMT

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 00:49:57 GMT

As I arrived home, I was climbing the dimly-lit back stairs to the apartment and saw something dark and shapeless at my feet. Picking it up, I saw it was a black t-shirt. I have a few black t-shirts of my own, and this path is one my laundry travels, so I brought it inside to better light in order to determine if it was mine. By the time I was through the door, I was already suspicious of the unfamiliar detergent scent, but I went ahead and turned it right-side-out to reveal the printing on the front: "I once was lost, but now am found."

I laughed to myself, not found by anyone that wanted you! And I tossed it back out on to the banister.

Thu, 23 Aug 2007 01:06:17 GMT

Months before Rowling's fans were able to blog their disappointment or outrage over the terminal Harry Potter book, my wife was expressing some rue and quiet lamentation over Endless Things, the fourth and final volume of John Crowley's Aegypt. These books have been published over a twenty-year period, and I read the first volume myself in the late 1980s, taking in the second and third each within a year of their issuance. In light of my intelligent wife's evident dissatisfaction, it was with some trepidation that I finally
embarked upon the last of them.

Crowley's prose is gorgeous as always, and littered with wonderful observations. The scholars of esotericism who have so informed the writing of the three previous books actually begin to intrude as characters in this one; the brief narrative presences of Frances Yates and Gilles Quispel were special treats for those who are familiar with the academic underpinnings of Aegypt. And protagonist Pierce's gnostic attainment in the antepenultimate chapter is a very wise and beautiful passage.

But it's not a happy ending--not as I reckon them anyhow. How can you expect a happy ending from a work with an explicit structure that works its way through the astrological houses from Birth to the Prison? Crowley metafictionally tips his hand in describing a manuscript within the novel that does not provide linear or cyclic resolution, nor even the sense of a completed part of an adumbrated whole: "It was without end but it was finished." Finishing Aegypt involves a great deal of calculated disenchantment that can feel like betrayal to those of us who have been so under the spell of the earlier volumes. Once or twice too often for my taste, the numinous is reduced to the neurotic.

At a couple of points in Endless Things, Crowley seems to intimate that genuine, world-transforming magic was only possible during the 1970s. Perhaps that was really true for him, although it would be a genuine shame if so. After reading the exercise in disenchantment of Endless Things, on behalf of 21st-century magicians, conventicled and unconventicled, I feel I may--in all readerly friendliness--rebuke him as a splitter.

scary stuff

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 12:46:43 GMT

Constantine's Sword looks pretty interesting. Word is, its documentation of contemporary US theocracy puts Jesus Camp in the shade.

Meanwhile, I'm starting to get the fear that's been prescribed to me.

pleasing some of the people

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 15:44:50 GMT

Choicest comments from my teacher evaluation returns this spring:

Compare: "Our TA was very unprepared for lecture. At 9 AM he simply asked the class if they had any questions, and didn't have a plan for discussion."
To: "He was always well prepared for sections but sometimes it would have worked out better if he would have gone with the flow more and not tried to stick to such a rigid game plan."
(One of these must be inaccurate, or else I was Dr. Jekyll in the afternoon and Mr. Hyde in the morning.)

"I got the impression that if I did not spend my whole evening reading the course materials than Matthew wouldn't be interested in my contributions, questions, concerns."
(The student resented being expected to read assignments, apparently.)

Elsewhere, I got the response I most hoped for: "He helped immensely in getting more out of the course packet readings. They always meant a lot more to me and made much more sense after the TA session."

Most flattering: "He really knew his stuff, but was one of the strangest people I have ever seen."

What's in a name?

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 23:04:00 GMT

First Monica left on all-too-convenient indefinite personal leave, and now she is taking the fifth with respect to any testimony to Congress.

I don't think that you can dodge a subpoena with the Fifth Amendment. The committee should make her sit there and decline to answer every one of their questions, just to generate the proper record of what she could have told them--but wouldn't, for fear of putting herself in jail.

Undergratuates...

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 16:32:47 GMT

...can't get 'em to follow simple instructions, can't just flunk 'em all.

over soon, over soon

Wed, 06 Dec 2006 08:47:14 GMT

Ok, I'm trying to finish my last paper of the quarter. I was working on it at the library from noon Monday to 10 am Tuesday. Then I went home and got some food, four hours' sleep, a shower, and a few kisses. Now I'm back at it, and I hope to be finished by 6 am. But I realized about an hour ago that I'm stuck here in the library until regular opening time at 8:30 anyway, because my jacket is in a locker on a stacks floor that's closed for the evening, and it's about 11°F outside.

Furshlugginer Cathars. You're dead! Dead, dead, dead.

the last dualism

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 00:01:21 GMT

Last night I attended a talk by noted feminist religion scholar Carol Crist at the Feminine Divine in Cross-Cultural Perspective conference. She presented on the topic of Life and Death as "the last dualism." She expressed her surprise and disappointment that feminists and neopagans are still attached to the concept of "life after death." According to Crist, denial of birth and death are necessarily linked, and are symptomatic--or perhaps even causative--of the sort of "dualistic thinking" proper to patriarchal oppression.

While I enjoyed her talk, I was not at all convinced that she had herself transcended the particular dualism of Life and Death. She repeatedly stressed the idea that "death is a part of life," so she prioritized life. At no point did she suggest that we might consider life to be a part of death! In the Q&A afterwards, in fact, she went so far as to assert that the Divine ("Goddess," in her parlance) is certainly deathless, in contrast to the mortality of humans. In this connection, she also expressed her antipathy for forms of spirituality that assert in the manner of Valentine Michael Smith, "Thou art God/dess." She insisted, "I'm not Goddess! I am not perfect or eternal." It seems to me that with the emphasis on change and transformation, that Goddess ought properly to be considered omnimortal, i.e. dying every moment. Indeed, the gist of the talk suggested that death is neccessary to life.

The talk also stressed the extent to which death represented a dissolution of individuality, and thus a source of fear and anxiety for members of an acquisitive, individualistic culture. Yet she entirely neglected the rich and well-documented mystical traditions in which the aspirant is instructed to attain to that same dissolution of individuality before bodily death as the signal spiritual attainment. Although to do so would have perhaps involved some troubling compromise with sets of ideas that Crist has written off as epiphenomena of "dualistic thinking," I think that consideration of these traditions was imperatively relevant to the central theological conundrum that she chose to take up.

Even if I found fault with her presentation, it still provoked me to a nearly ecstatic appreciation of the extent to which death is a vehicle of life AND life is a vehicle of death. The two can be seen as complementary phases of a single curve, the warp and woof of a fabric both human and divine.

fiction of dreams

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 02:32:18 GMT

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili by Francesco Colonna

Trilby by Charles Nodier

Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll

The Nightmare Has Triplets (three volumes: Smirt, Smith, & Smire) by Branch Cabell

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H.P. Lovecraft

The Arabian Nightmare by Robert Irwin

A Box of Dreams by David Madsen

"Inside the packed cathedral all was sweet odors, cool shadows, the glint and glimmer of gold, the shy presence of the numinous amid the interplay of darkness and light; polychrome saints looked down from their lofty niches: St Parthexus with his gilded phallus, St Romo and the blind lion, St Averina carrying her lacerated breasts on a silver platter; votive candles winked before gaudy shrines; above the High Altar was suspended a huge icon of the Keys-in-Triplicate, wreated in the smoke of ambergris, rosemary, cedarwood and myrtle. Great shafts of air bisected the tenebrous interior, their passage and dispersal echoing the whispered supplications of a thousand worshippers. Ranks of gorgeously-robed acolytes were already assembled on the marble sanctuary, which was inlaid with lozenges of onyx and porphyry."

I read the last of these this weekend while traveling. Like all of the others in the list, it is patently indulgent and highly recommended.

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 00:59:55 GMT

"More sacrifice is going to be required. We will either create a world in which our children and our grandchildren have a hope of an optimistic future or we will leave to them a world with a hateful empire centered in the Middle East." --Karl Rove

Like much of the rhetoric that comes out of the Bush administration these days, this strikes me as perfectly true, albeit not in the way the speaker intends. We will need to sacrifice tax cuts, corruption and war profits in order to create a world with hope for our descendants. Or we will create a world with a hateful American empire with its military forces centered in the Middle East.

Electoral Politics

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 14:20:52 GMT

You've probably seen this already and don't need to

--AZ-Sen: Jon Kyl

--AZ-01: Rick Renzi

--AZ-05: J.D. Hayworth

--CA-04: John Doolittle

--CA-11: Richard Pombo

--CA-50: Brian Bilbray

--CO-04: Marilyn Musgrave

--CO-05: Doug Lamborn

--CO-07: Rick O'Donnell

--CT-04: Christopher Shays

--FL-13: Vernon Buchanan

--FL-16: Joe Negron

--FL-22: Clay Shaw

--ID-01: Bill Sali

--IL-06: Peter Roskam

--IL-10: Mark Kirk

--IL-14: Dennis Hastert

--IN-02: Chris Chocola

--IN-08: John Hostettler

--IA-01: Mike Whalen

--KS-02: Jim Ryun

--KY-03: Anne Northup

--KY-04: Geoff Davis

--MD-Sen: Michael Steele

--MN-01: Gil Gutknecht

--MN-06: Michele Bachmann

--MO-Sen: Jim Talent

--MT-Sen: Conrad Burns

--NV-03: Jon Porter

--NH-02: Charlie Bass

--NJ-07: Mike Ferguson

--NM-01: Heather Wilson

--NY-03: Peter King

--NY-20: John Sweeney

--NY-26: Tom Reynolds

--NY-29: Randy Kuhl

--NC-08: Robin Hayes

--NC-11: Charles Taylor

--OH-01: Steve Chabot

--OH-02: Jean Schmidt

--OH-15: Deborah Pryce

--OH-18: Joy Padgett

--PA-04: Melissa Hart

--PA-07: Curt Weldon

--PA-08: Mike Fitzpatrick

--PA-10: Don Sherwood

--RI-Sen: Lincoln Chafee

--TN-Sen: Bob Corker

--VA-Sen: George Allen

--VA-10: Frank Wolf

--WA-Sen: Mike McGavick

--WA-08: Dave Reichert

Maybe this is working, but every little bit helps.

Distracted

Fri, 20 Oct 2006 02:32:03 GMT

Oh, I guess I'll just go back to reading about massacres of Cathars for a few hours.

Preach it, Brother Rude.

I have become uncomfortably numb.

Thu, 19 Oct 2006 21:36:24 GMT

During the last week I re-read Foucault's Discipline & Punish for a cultural history class. I felt a sense of vertigo reading an intellectual of the 1970s writing about torture, secret confinement and arbitrary power of national sovereigns as things that were part of the Western system of politics and jurisprudence three or four centuries earlier, and "now"--after two complete transformations of the penal process--literally inconceivable as a part of contemporary society.

Preach it, Brother Olbermann.

Academic update, with abstracts

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 19:34:36 GMT

I'm almost finished with my spring quarter at Northwestern; I'm in the process of writing the last of my papers (due tomorrow). I have been sort of derelict about posting abstracts of my papers to LJ this year, but the quarter system has made the papers shorter and less noteworthy on the whole. Here are a couple of abstracts of recent papers, though. The first, "Poliphilo's Children," is a 11K-word piece that I presented at the conference "Hidden Truths, Novel Truths" on esotericism and fiction at the Esalen Institute's Center for Theory and Research last month. The second, "Lollardy, Privity, and Mystery," is a just-completed 3K-word item for an English seminar on "Heresy, Rebellion, and the Book."

Poliphilo's Children: Esoteric Discovery, Recollection, and Anamnesis in Contemporary Fiction

The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili was first published in Venice in 1499. The author Francesco Colonna, writing as "Poliphilo," offered a long dream-narrative in which the protagonist sought to recover his beloved among ancient buildings and monuments, and amidst the festivities and ceremonies of pagan cults. The Hypnerotomachia was in many respects developed from mythic narratives of late antiquity: the pagan Metamorphoses of Apuleius and the Christian Psychomachia of Prudentius. Even more fundamentally, Colonna’s book reflects the paradigmatic story of the bereaved Orpheus, both as a tale of lost love and tragic affection, and as a metaphor for the loss and attempted recovery of knowledge.

The enigmatic and esoteric content of the Hypnerotomachia, along with its narrative complexity and rich descriptions, have made it a point of reference in three recent novels. John Crowley’s Love & Sleep (1994), John Banville’s Shroud (2002), and Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason’s The Rule of Four (2004) each make the Hypnerotomachia a sort of metafictional feature of their respective stories. All three of these books speak directly to the nature of intellectual work and the value of personal memory. In addition to examining these three fictions as the progeny of the Orphic Poliphilo, the present study works to identify in each case the Euridicean Polia, the lost loves and lost knowledge that inform these novels.

Lollardy, Privity, and Mystery

The interaction between the establishment church and Lollard or Wycliffite dissenters in late medieval England was characterized by the interplay of issues surrounding secrecy and proprietary status regarding scriptures, confession, and other sacraments. The 14th and 15th centuries when this conflict developed were also a time in which the social organization of artisan and craft guilds was a matter for public notice, and many Lollards were themselves craftsmen. The Middle English term misterie denotes a craft guild and its secrets, as well as a religious rite, and the confluence of these ideas in the social space of Lollard heresy and its repression helps to illuminate the motives of the heretics as well as the methods of official reaction.

I should have an abstract to post for my recently-completed major history research paper on "The Master of Rhodes Letter on the Birth of Antichrist." That will have to wait for a few days, while I wrap up this last paper: a study of the mutually-constitutive nature of Anna Kingsford's social activism and her spiritual doctrines regarding the rights of women and animals.

Thu, 16 Mar 2006 19:14:18 GMT

"Truth derives its strength not so much from itself as from the brilliant contrast it makes with what is only apparently true."

--Emanuel Lasker, Common Sense in Chess (1917)

S.N. Balagangadhara: "How to Speak for the Indian Traditions: An Agenda for the Future"

Thu, 02 Feb 2006 06:22:13 GMT

This article in the current issue (volume 73, number 4) of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion was first presented last year at a conference on "Contesting Religion and Religions Contested: The Study of Religion in a Global Context," sponsored by the Ford Foundation, Emory University, and AAR. The article purports to center on a methodological question of dubious value: "How to speak for religion in the academy?" I think that it is more important to ask how to speak about religion, since I don't think that it is the job of the secular academy per se to speak for religion.

The evident content of the article, however, centers on a contrast between "the Indian traditions" of spirituality on one hand, and the Abrahamic monotheisms on the other. For context, Balagangadhara makes an observation or two about the classical Aristotelian notion of ethics and the goal of eudaimonia, which I found valuable and interesting. (This brief part of the article resonated well with Gananath Obeyesekere's comparisons of ancient Greek and Indian ideas in Imagining Karma, which I read recently.)

But then Balagangadhara goes on to set up two opposing exemplars in order to illustrate the supposed contrast between Western and Indian spirituality. The first exemplar is "a medieval monk." While he claims that "there are quite a few works dealing with medieval religiosity ... that can be used in this context," (994) he doesn't bother to cite any of them. (In fact, this entire 35-page article lists only two references: a book by the author of the article, and The Complete Works of Aristotle!) The picture that he paints is in no sense a generically representative ideal of medieval monasticism, let alone Christianity as a whole (or Western monotheisms as a category!), but he insists vaguely that "one can extend such a sketch to the modern-day world as well." For his counterpoint, he depicts an even more nebulously-characterized "middle-aged man" navigating the options offered by the Indian traditions (997). While he claims that a parallel set of stresses act on the Christian and Indian aspirants alike, Balagangadhara insists that the "traditionally Indian" resolution of "enlightenment" (998) is fundamentally dissimilar from the Christian resolution of "healing grace." (996) I am entirely unconvinced on an empirical level by these featureless caricatures. Certainly, there have been Christian mystics (medieval monks, even!) whose spirtual tensions resolved in a "revelation" of the sort that Balagangadhara calls "enlightenment" (998). It is also my impression that the "Indian traditions," even prior to colonial contact with the West in the last few centuries, included examples of "healing grace."

Balagangadhara insists that the Indian traditions value "experiential insights" in the place occupied by "doctrines" in Western religions (1002). He goes on to claim that "We need to coneptualize the difference between [Indian and similar] traditions in a different way than we do that with respect to philosophies or religions." (1006) I found none of the arguments in this section of the article very compelling. Finally, he introduces a key metaphor, in which "religions" (which the Indian "traditions" are not) are "route descriptions" of an absolute type, grounded arbitrarily in a single context, whereas "traditions" offer themselves to be relativized to the individual. But then he observes that these (originally, properly?) relative and mutually negotiable "traditions" have hardened ito "religious" forms after contact with "religions" from the west (1011-1012).

I could care less about Balagangadhara's desire to exclude "his" "traditions" from the category of "religion" (an agenda adopted at one time or another by partisans of anything that might be called "religion"--excepting only the Roman Catholic Church). His effort to categorically convict Western "religions" of a psychologically coercive absolutism will tend in the long run only to promote that sort of "religion." In general, I found this article sloppily argued. Its subtitle "an agenda for the future" went unfulfilled, as far as I could tell. His final appeal that religious studies should "develop novel ways of understanding religious and cultural diversity" is not a innovative suggestion. The efforts to develop more useful distinctions and more accurate categories are the meat and potatoes of secular religious studies already, in those cases where there is any amount of methodological reflection.

ouch, dammit

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 19:32:33 GMT

While rushing to answer the door yesterday, I slammed my noggin into the edge of a bookcase. It sounded like a gunshot to me, and V said it was pretty loud from the other room. There wasn't much bleeding, and there's only been a little swelling. But in the middle of the night I woke up with fever and nausea, and I am sporting a stellar Harry Potter Antichrist Mark of Cain in the middle of my forehead just below the hairline--at least for a few weeks. Maybe permanently.

sigh of relief

Fri, 16 Dec 2005 22:19:26 GMT

I've finished my work for the fall quarter. Grades are back for all courses but one, and they look good.

I'm already started on work for all but one of my winter courses, but I'm giving myself this weekend off. I think I'll do some "creative writing"...

Oh, and the Senate failed to get cloture on PATRIOT Act reauthorization. Sweet news.

almost there

Wed, 14 Dec 2005 05:54:04 GMT

My work for the quarter is nearly finished. I have only one paper left to complete, and it is due Friday.

Last weekend, when I should have been getting that paper wrapped up, I received the lovely gift of a bookcase from my brother. Naturally, confronted with the windfall of nine empty shelf feet, there was nothing for it but to invest almost 20 hours into reorganizing my entire library. Little achievements that pleased me in that process included:

shelving the Nancy Cunard bio by Chisholm next to Penelope Rosemont's Surrealist Women
fitting all of my James Branch Cabell (except for secondary sources) onto a single shelf
getting my books on Islam up at eye level
making a nice little endcap of 19th century Rosicrucians: Jennings, Randolph, Bulwer-Lytton, and Levi

Of course, while the last quarter (prolonged past the Northwestern calendar because of the course I'm taking at the Newberry Library) isn't quite finished, next quarter has already started. I have reading assignments in two of my classes, and about a thousand words of Latin paleography to get through, from a 15th century MS.