Utterly exhausted. An unbelievably long and full day, with lots of superstar names.

900-1130 – Rethinking Secularism a panel with Charles Taylor of McGill University, José Casanova of Georgetown University, Saba Mahmood of Berkeley, and Craig Calhoun of New York University
1145-1245 – Contemporary Islam: The Meaning and the Need of a Radical Reform Tariq Ramadan of Oxford University
100-230 – James H. Cone being interviewed by Cornel West
300-430 – The Commission on Reasonable Accommodation in Québec: Reflections with Co-chairs Dr. Charles Taylor and Dr. Gerard Bouchard
430-500 – A conversation with Professor Greer Anne Wenh-In Ng of the Toronto School of Theology, who I met sitting next to me during the previous presentation, on the subject of Canadian multiculturalism and interculturalism
500-630 – Scriptural Reasoning Group: The Other Within and Without: In Loving Memory of Michael Signer a panel featuring papers and readings from Signer, my Judaism professor at Notre Dame who recently passed away, Peter Ochs of the University of Virginia, R. Kendall Soulen of Western Theological Seminary, Medhi Aminrazavi of the University of Mary Washington, and Steven D. Kepnes of Colgate University
630-700 – Further conversation with Michelle Peterson before saying our good-byes

Add to that my getting up well before dawn, a fabulous interview in the afternoon, and a room service pizza and I'm now going to keel over.

The AAR conference is still giving me the impression that it did last year: unbelievably huge. It's much less personally engaging than other conferences I've been to: too big, too diverse, too much happening at once. It's sort of the Wal-Mart of academic conferences. If I recall correctly, it's something like 7000 in attendance, but that might be the numbers from before AAR split with SBL. Normally, the word "diverse" would be a positive one, but this is "diverse" in the way a student paper ought not to be: not enough unity and focus to give it much cohesion. Still, as a buffet or sample bar, it is interesting to be able to take in talks on just about everything, but conferences that are a little more thematically unified seem to be more able to grab my attention and imagination.

I ran into Michelle P., who I met years ago doing summer Master's classes in Spirituality at Notre Dame. I thought that I might see her again, as I had last year at the AAR in Chicago, and so we once again had a good hour or hour-and-a-half of catching up. She's launching into a Paul Ricour-based dissertation on a language of silence, so to speak, analyzing and articulating the raw experience of silence and of awareness of being itself, with a lot of engagement with Edith Stein and Martin Heidegger as part of it. I thought that sounded daring in itself, because it is so difficult to try to articulate such fundamental (and such non-vocal) experiences. It reminded me of a song-writing challenge Kevin and I imagined back during the Road Trip in 2000, when we were struck by the nature of the high-altitude quiet when we stopped along the top of the Beartooth Mountain Pass: to try to somehow capture this distinctive silence in music. That same irony seemed to be driving Michelle's project, whether in language or in music one would try to describe an experience of silence. But what else are we left with, as far as human tools go? Music seems the easier option to me, really, in being able to take refuge in metaphor and in emotion-bearing sounds beyond the scope of language. But I did think that Michelle was setting herself up for a great research agenda after finishing the dissertation in being able to take the language and tools of analysis that she is crafting and then turn those onto a variety of mystical texts that she can explore with those tools. It's easier to go into kataphatic mysticism – the mysticism of "stuff," of metaphor and image and mediation through things, ranging from nature to music to conversation to sacraments – than it is to go into apophatic mysticism, the mysticism of stillness, silence and negation. But both routes are equally valid and equally necessary in human mystical experience. Nor can you really separate them, I think, because even the most kataphatic of mystical experiences, like the sacrament of the Eucharist with its language, story, drama, ritual, bread and wine, always can lead one into an apophatic experience of silence and simple awareness of the presence of God in receiving the Eucharist.

I also ran into Gavril from our Department, who I had also last seen at last year's AAR, and caught up on his news a bit, as well as running into Marquette Professors Hughson, Schultenover, and my Doktorvater Fahey after the end of the afternoon's Ecclesiological Investigations session. I had sat talking with a Dr. Kim from Leeds Trinity University College at the end of that session, where the closing respondent to the papers presented had talked about the work of Ecclesiology having shifted from the older paradigm of being concerned primarily with the question of the relation of church and state, and now had moved to the relation of church and culture. We were both struck, though, that the way that this had been presented was in such a way as to basically reduce Ecclesiology to Missiology, or the study of mission or missions. While my own ecclesiological work is concerned with such activities as an outgrowth of spirituality, it really starts, as in the Second Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, with a much more explicit interest in the Triune God, and only from there moves toward activity and spirituality. That is to say, it is a primarily theological ecclesiology. The respondent's concern with the use of the tools of the social sciences for ecclesiological work just made me wonder whether that would end in the reduction of ecclesiology to sociology, or sociological descriptions of church behaviours, which I don't think is the same thing as ecclesiology at all.

Anyway, it was exciting to see that the Ecclesiology section, which Fahey told me this summer was a relatively recent addition to the AAR, had gathered quite a large group in attendance. Even more interesting was to see how young and diverse that group was. The Scottish presider quipped about this in his closing comment, wondering aloud whether this indicated that the proclamations of a post-Christian culture might be premature.

Had a good interview today, very focused on my teaching skills and history. We most talked about teaching theology to a broad and diverse stretch of students: across religious, ethnic, educational, and age groups. In many ways, my experience at Saint Joe's was more useful background than my experience at Marquette, where I've had only a few non-traditional students, whereas in South Bend I also did some teaching for the diocese, with students thirty or forty years my senior. So it was a very comfortable, "shop-talk" sort of conversation, but she definitely kept me interested in the position.

So that's been the day, with all of its random conversation and stray activities, whether talking online education with a Pagan woman trying to set up an online Pagan seminary in California as we stood in line at a conference center coffeeshop downstairs in the Palais des congrès de Montréal, or whether venturing out a little while ago to a restaurant open in an alley in Chinatown for some late-night food.

Each semester that I teach Introduction To Theology, I begin with raising the question, "Is Theology Make-Believe?" (This is the English translation of the Irish form of the question as I have it in the title of this entry.) I do this for one simple reason: all of us have grown up in a culture defined philosophically by the movement called The Enlightenment, an 18th-century philosophical movement that is at the root of contemporary European and American thinking. Having graced itself with this name, "the Enlightenment," which more than implies the correctness of its own positions, this movement was radically anti-spiritual, effectively dismissing all of religious faith as a matter of personal, subjective, "belief" that has nothing to do with any actual facts about the universe. Since those kind of ideas are – whether accepted or resisted – saturating the brains of my students, I prefer to address them directly, and to examine whether there is in fact good reason to consider Theology as a discipline a science that produces knowledge, and not a kind of mental self-pleasuring for those who are interested in "that sort of thing."

To this end, I open up with an article that I know will be too difficult for most of my beginning students, but which I will help them through. This article is a symposium, a conversation by four scholars: a Political Science professor from Louisiana State University, a Methodist Ethics professor from Duke University, a Catholic Studies professor from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and an Orthodox theologian. Entitled " Theology as Knowledge: A Symposium", this conversation takes on the question of whether Theology as a discipline truly produces knowledge (just like, say, history, sociology, or chemistry) and whether it properly belongs in the university. Although all of these participants reject the Enlightenment's decree that Theology no longer counts as a real discipline, they represent a diversity of perspectives on Theology's relation to knowledge and its place in the contemporary university. As I said, I guide my students through this material and through the new vocabulary and concepts, but I want them to see what an informed person with a reasonable university education should be able to read regarding matters religious or theological. This is not USA Today, designed for sixth-grade readers. At the end of the semester, the students revisit this article for a final exam essay, and in that way I give them an experiential insight into how much their own capacity to read this subject intelligently has developed over the length of the course.

I was struck today by our opening-of-the-year Department of Theology convocation today, where, as it turned out, this very question was addressed in a public discussion by the faculty. This attitude toward Theology as a discipline is not just a problem among under-read and under-educated freshmen, but is also the general way of thinking among the bulk of the faculty in the other departments, even at a Catholic university. This has been recently highlighted for us by the feature article published in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled, "The Ethics of Being A Theologian". The author, K.L. Noll, a Canadian professor of Religious Studies, took for granted that his discipline, secular Religious Studies, produced real knowledge, while Theology does not. This was an article published in the primary journal for the university community as a whole, and is so full of the sort of ill-considered stereotypes that the scholars in the "Theology as Knowledge" symposium attempt to address that it fills me with dismay to see the kind of obstinate avoidance of any thought that can challenge Enlightenment dogma – and this among university educators. Despite being a Religious Studies professor, he had no idea of what theologians actually do, and the variety of methodologies by which they conduct their research and produce their conclusions. In the face of contemporary atheist critiques, he says, all theologians are just dismissive. Maybe that's what I sound like I am being here, but I'm not here going to try to reproduce in print an exhaustive and book-length explanation of everything that theologians do. But I can make that case.

At the convocation, Kurz responded with a detailed examination of the variety of methods he employs as a biblical theologian, highlighting the vast intellectual requirements necessary to do his work, and the sorts of results they produce. Masson addressed a variety of points in response to Noll, one of which specifically addressed the engagement with reason and sense-data incumbent upon the theologian, specifically in his case coming from the Scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas: the same medieval affirmation of the truth of sense-data that helped give rise to the modern physical sciences. Long waded into Noll's basing his argument on the philosophy known as Logical Positivism, as almost all of today's "scientific fact versus religious faith" arguments are, despite the repeated discrediting of this philosophical approach in recent decades, as well noting how Noll's article persists in believing that one can separate "reason" from "faith" in human thinking, as though any system of thought does not depend on first principles, presuppositions, or dogmas. That insight is one of the most basic insights in post-Modern thinking, but is absent in this kind of recycled 18th century Enlightenment anti-religious folk wisdom. Barnes was the quietest and yet most damning. He took issue with Noll's characterization that

In sum, the religion researcher is related to the theologian as the biologist is related to the frog in her lab. Theologians try to invigorate their own religion, perpetuate it, expound it, defend it, or explain its relationship to other religions. Religion researchers select sample religions, slice them open, and poke around inside, which tends to "kill" the religion, or at least to kill the romantic or magical aspects of the religion and focus instead on how that religion actually works.

The idea, Barnes argued, that in this illustration, one can get at the truth of a thing by the examination of its corpse was as false for the frog as it is for as complex a human reality as religion. (I couldn't help but be reminded of the passage in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings where Gandalf says to Saruman that, "he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.") More than that, though, Barnes was quietly outraged at the cheek of an atheist to even employ the metaphor of vivasection as a path to truth. (And despite his claim to be personally a theist and professionally an agnostic, Noll's methods assume and necessarily conclude the reality of atheism – another major problem with his approach.) If Christians today, Barnes argued, have to always answer for incidents of the past where Christianity as a whole is held responsible for any crimes of past individuals – excesses in the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Galileo trial – then atheists today cannot be excused from answering for the crimes of organized atheist regimes: the vast genocides of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, the People's Republic of China. Programmatic atheism repeatedly ends in death; vast, organized, death. Barnes argued that an atheistic argument would here casually employ a metaphor of killing the subject in order to get at the truth of it, without the slightest shame by the author of that argument, had come to the limits of tolerance in educated conversation. Christians, Barnes believed, have too long been too generous in letting atheists be treated as individual and noble conversation-partners, without ever raising an issue of atheist complicity in atheist social atrocities. As I said, that made for a sobering end to the four panelists who responded to the article.

The last question, then, it seemed to me, was whether this response would be heard beyond those who came to the convocation. Would theologians push the matter, into a wider Marquette publication, or, even better yet, an attempt to print a version of the convocation as a response in the Chronicle of Higher Education itself? That seems to me the most important of goals, as it is there that the distortions and stereotypes were being most widely distributed among academics who didn't have the necessary education specialities to be able to locate the weaknesses in the article by themselves.

I read an interesting note from Dr. Lysaught a bit ago when I got in from dissertating downstairs at Starbucks, encouraging me to try to grab a newly-posted Systematic Theology position, and noting that:

New Zealand is supposed to be a very interesting place to live. They use the British system -- only teach theology students. That sounds dreamy. I'd say it's worth an application.

I looked at it, and briefly thought about it, but four objections came immediately to mind with astonishing power:


Not to mention everyone else I love. I was willing to consider work in the U.K., knowing that that's a seven-hour plane ride, and having had domestic travel that lasts longer, given delays and connections, but New Zealand is far enough that the trouble of the distance seemed too prohibitive.

Against what seemed to be all odds, I had a pretty fine birthday on Saturday. My strength returned and I seemed to finally shake off the worst of this persistent lung and throat infection by Saturday, just in time to receive an impromptu dinner-and-cake party from the Lloyds. Crip and Lisa had arrived the night before to stay over the weekend, leading up to Lisa's Tuesday dissertation defense. Dan baked me a pound cake after an afternoon phone call where he flew into a mock rage upon discovering that I had no favourite kind of cake and had opined that there were only a few kinds of cakes and that they were pretty much all the same. As he began to rattle off cake names in brutal refutation of my mistake, I seized upon "pound cake" as something I had always enjoyed and as a way of stopping what threatened to be an exhaustive taxonomical listing of all known cakes. Mostly it was just exceptionally phenomenal to see people again. I had gone something like eleven or twelve days without talking to a friend face-to-face, which, when I think about it, is really strange: I don't know when I'd ever done such a thing, but that was sort of the nature of the "feels like it's just hanging on for one more day" bug that I had. The Harrises showed up a bit later, rounding out the cutely enthusiastic birthday greetings I got from all the kids. Amy surprised me with a copy of the DVD of Once, which I had recently shown to them, laughing as I opened it that she had intended to get me the soundtrack and had been surprised to receive her order and to find the movie. But I assured her that this was perfect, as it contained both the movie and the soundtrack, as it were. So just lots of friendly talk, eating and drinking through to a little after midnight, which is the best gift of all. I had talked through the day with my folks and with my brother (with little Nate giving an ongoing series of whoops and cries in the background that sounded more like what you heard in the background of the jungle house at the zoo than from an infant vocalizing), and I missed out on the phone call from Leslie and the nieces, which resulted in a voice mail of birthday greetings that sounded enthusiastic from Grace and either competitive (trying to outdo Grace) or just annoyed from Haley, which had me laughing by the end of it.

Monday, returning to my observation of Barnes's undergrad Augustine class, I was flamboyantly given a present by Barnes in front of the crew, gaudily wrapped in Cartoon Network Justice League wrapping paper that matched the endless supply of Justice League napkins he keeps trotting out at different occasions. I held off on opening the thing until after class, just in case it should prove somehow embarrassing, which I wouldn't put past him. I could feel that the item was framed and under glass, so I was expecting either a photograph (Barnes is good amateur photographer) or perhaps some rare comic book cover framed, which is a sort of thing I had seen him do before. I slowly removed the wrappings under the watchful eyes of him, Jessica, and a few others who hung out for the occasion, to reveal an aged, framed, black-and-white print I had never seen before of Diana Rigg in a black-and-white, very mod outfit, hair blown up and back from her face: all very much from her Emma Peel era. So I really had a good laugh then, since I had mentioned at some point a few months back that I had been quite smitten with Emma Peel when I was about ten years old and had discovered old Avengers re-runs playing on what passed for late-night Rockford television back then. I think we had been talking old movies or DVDS or such, and I had mentioned finding some Avengers episodes recently, and had laughed in retrospect about having had what at the time was an unconventional first sex symbol. Barnes had remembered that and grabbed this piece of pop periphernalia for me, and so that was a slightly awesome gag/pop culture gift.

We all returned to the Lloyds' on Sunday for a cookout on behalf of Crip and Lisa, with Bill and Rachel Oliverio and their kids also making it over. This occasion was sort of a Milwaukee-reunion party for Lisa and Crip, with them excited about getting authentic brauts and cheeses and such, and raiding some of the local markets to put that together, as well as, of course, to see old friends. There was a bit of anticipatory celebration for Lisa having made it to her dissertation defense, and a bit of a belated birthday party for Crip, whose 30th was on the 16th. I had only seen Bill in passing this year, so it was cool to be able to catch up on his news in a bit more detail. Bill successfully defended his dissertation in Theology and Philosophy while I was sick, focusing on hermeneutical schemas for Pentecostal biblical interpretation, and had just accepted a sort of missionary/professorial position, having been invited to come teach at a college in Nairobi, Kenya. So that led us to all sorts of cross-cultural, African political and social situation-type discussions through the night, along with the normal "program" type questions you ask when anyone picks up a new academic position. Continuing from the day before, there was also a lot of such talk with Crip and Lisa about their experiences so far, and just a lot of interesting material (for me) from having three scholars who deal with Pentecostalism centrally, while I'm currently just addressing it in a contextual way for my dissertation. I might actually attend next year's meeting (in Minneapolis, in the spring) of the Society for Pentecostal Studies just to listen in to the senior scholars of the field and get a broader idea of the current state of that conversation, which might give me some ideas of what to do with some of my dissertation research once it's finished. Bill, who I discovered already heads the Society's philosophical study group, immediately started vetting me for possibly delivering a paper for the group while Lisa and Crip just laughed, but it didn't take me too long to convince him that I was doing nothing that fit naturally into distinctly philosophical categories. An unfortunate amount of time ended up being spent talking about the security concerns of working in Nairobi at this time, which are not inconsiderable. Bill is flying over to eyeball the job and the situation in May, but remains cautiously optimistic.

Mom wrote and asked me about what I thought about all the controversy regarding President Obama's addressing the graduating seniors at the University of Notre Dame. I hadn't consciously articulated my thoughts until she asked, but now that I have, I thought that I would just copy it all down here. I would preface my comments by reassuring or informing anyone who found them objectionable from a Catholic perspective that I'm twice as orthodox as they are and am willing to prove it in public, internationally-televised debate, and that I can successfully do so with two glasses of wine on an empty stomach in my system, which proves both that I'm a notorious lightweight and that I am so orthodox that I'm willing to invoke Paul and foolishly boast about it because it's so true that I don't have anything to gain or to prove from it. That's my response to anyone whose most beloved rhetorical strategy is to deny the faith of anyone who disagrees with them, which has been more embarrassing in all this affair than anything having to do with the actual invitation to President Obama. So, as I wrote to Mom:

The Notre Dame thing is more irritating to me than anything else. It's a kind of short-sightedness that I find sometimes irritating or sometimes just disappointing. The same thing happened with Bush in 2001, but I don't know that that was made into such a big deal by the press, perhaps because the press felt any protest regarding Bush was part of the natural order of things. I call it short-sighted because I think it's an illusion at best that anyone would expect a President of the United States to perfectly line up with Catholic teaching. There are a number of things in the party platforms of both Democrats and Republicans that are utterly opposed to Catholic ethics, so this should be no surprise. Even someone perceived to be as politically "Right" as the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, publisher of First Things, had warned those around him that they ought to always expect the Republican Party to betray them, despite the current seeming alignment of Republican interests with some of the concerns of his circle. In the same way, when you were younger, it was taken as a matter of simple fact that the Democratic Party, the party of the "little guy," was the party that Catholics and Evangelical were going to be naturally aligned with. But then came the shift of the "New Left" in the 1968-73 period when what it meant to be "Left" in the Democratic leadership underwent an astonishing ideological transformation, not least in its new hostility to religious belief and expression. The Republican Party in the late 1970s made a conscious and concerted effort to pick up the Evangelicals as a voting block, with great success. Since the 2004 Presidential election, the political Right has gone back to that playbook and has been making a major effort to do the same thing with Catholic Americans, though not with such visible success, except among some bishops who ought to be a bit more circumspect and clever about the extent to which they are being used for partisan politics.

The basic political issue, both in the Notre Dame snafu and in the past several years, is of course abortion. Because human life in particular is held to be sacred, with each human being possessing the dignity of being the image and likeness of God, a human rights ethic that has any consistency includes an opposition to abortion. This has been the case in Christian teaching since the late first century, when we see the topic first addressed explicitly, or in parallel secular ethics like in the unedited version of the Hippocratic Oath, where ancient physicians of that school swore to protect life even in its earliest stages. With respect to the sketch of the political context of this Notre Dame debate that I just gave, I have seen very little evidence that the leadership of the Republican Party is interest in pursuing the abortion issue as a priority beyond using it for the gathering of a voting block: a few rallying cries during elections, blocking the use of American funds to commit abortions overseas, sure, but nothing beyond that. There has been nothing like the forcing of the issue in the way the Abolitionists did in the lead-up to the Civil War.

The shape and nature of the argument involved in all of this has great significance. The logic used to justify the act of abortion itself, that the undeveloped fetus is not yet a "person," is a philosophical logic. That the fetus is human and is alive is a simple matter of genetics. People who debate using that language are just being sloppy. The question of "personhood," or of "humanity" as a philosophical concept, is more hazy. But Catholic ethics has increasingly become sensitive to the use of this argument through history, where invoking the debatable nature of someone else's humanity ("so-and-so isn't really human": no one has ever used this argument with regard to their own humanity) has been the justification for every other atrocity that people now repudiate. We pride ourselves on being the sort of people who would never have done that awful thing, whether against Jews, Africans, Native Americans, Cambodians, Rawandans, Sudanese, whoever. But it seems significant that the logic and the shape of the argument is the same. Catholics led the opposition to legalized abortion when it became an issue in the United States and when it culminated in the Roe v. Wade decision at the same time as that hard Secularist shift in the Left. So abortion has in many ways been popularly perceived as a particularly "Catholic" issue by those on both sides of the argument. Within Catholicism, this has become as much a "litmus test" issue as it has by those supporting the idea of a right to abortion, who throw their support behind anything even perceived to have anything to do with abortion, such as recent debates over the use of fetal stem cells in medical research. (The logic being that if any ethical qualms are shown here, it amount to becoming too close to admitting that unborn human beings have political and human rights, and so therefore no ethical concerns can be allowed to be raised on this issue. If you look at the lobbying groups supporting such research, it is abortion-rights groups that lead the way: "science" as such has very little to do with the politics.)

For those opposing President Obama's appearance at Notre Dame, the assumption is that any perceived acceptance or honouring of Obama as President is tantamount to an endorsement of his position as a supporter of abortion. This is, of course, foolish. That argument, extended logically, would imply that any recognition of the authority of the government of the United States implies an endorsement of its current policies. This is the exact opposite of what a democracy entails, of course, where everyone can cheerfully oppose the policies of their government without recourse to succession or civil war: one just has to convince their fellows to follow another course during the next general election, and thus we have revolution without bloodshed. So the basic argument against recognizing President Obama in this way falls apart. Notre Dame has recognized and received a number of Presidents over the years, every last one of which can be found to be in violation of Catholic ethical principles on one point or another. (Whether President Obama's choice of accepting the Notre Dame invitation over the hundreds of other commencement invitations he has received is driven by any particular political agenda is not a question I'll bother to consider here.)

But, say those who push this point, the abortion question is a special one: it is a fundamental crime against humanity to kill those least capable of defending themselves, depriving them of the chance to achieve any potential in their lives. They point out that John Paul II highlighted the particularly egregious nature of this act as perhaps the most fundamental violation of human rights that we have ever committed. All true. If so, that raises the question of complicity again. We are either complicit in aiding and abetting our society's support of abortion or we are not. Honouring a President who supports the idea of abortion rights, they argue, creates a tacit support that is incompatible with being Catholic. Myself, I cannot accept this argument, for the reasons described above. If their argument is true, these people are also aiding and abetting abortion by remaining citizens of the United States and by recognizing the legitimacy of this administration. To be truly consistent, their options could only be emigration, revolution, or utter non-recognition of the government in a state of permanent civil disobedience, probably no matter whose administration is currently running the show. Any position other than these seems to me to be opportunistic and disingenuous, if they have really followed their logic to its natural conclusions. That is, one that is opposed to President Obama on a more individual and personal level, and is using the abortion issue as a front for that opposition, but without being willing to follow their own logic to its natural ends. To insist that there should be this utter "line drawn in the sand" over the mere appearance of the President of the United States at the University of Notre Dame, or even the specific honouring of him for other goods shown in his life, and not to therefore question whether there is the same "line in the sand" between their Catholicism and their American citizenship is to "have their cake and eat it, too." There are a few Catholics who have been that consistent regarding issues of church and state. I do not see it happening here, which to me undermines the seriousness of the protests being raised.

The question becomes one of the greater good. Which is the greater good? To exist together in a democracy where freedom from the threat of civil war is seen as more important than even disagreement on fundamental issues of human rights such as that seen in the abortion debate, where the status of even a human being's development and acquiring of human rights is questioned? Or to exist in a country that guarantees that right to life (and all attending human rights, even those opposed by the Political Right but supported by the Catholic Church) even if guaranteeing those rights must come at the cost of the political union of the nation itself? Unless people follow their arguments all the way to the fundamental issues, which to my mind is the same thing as saying that they admit what they are really arguing about, then I think they are just wasting their time. Or worse, showing off for the cameras, whether to demonstrate to others how serious they are, or whether to reassure themselves.

So no, I don't find the people debating President Obama's presence at and honouring by Notre Dame to be persuasive. I am a Roman Catholic Christian, who has thoroughly investigated and has been convinced of the truth of the questions of that faith. I am also an American, excited by the prospect of a diverse democracy built upon a fundamental conception of Natural Law and Human Rights – the intellectual children of the Medieval Catholic universities which were then fostered by the Modern age. I am also a loyal son of the University of Notre Dame du Lac, excited by that school's distinctive gift and history of voicing Catholicism into the university, national, and international cultures of our time. The presence of the President is one more day at Notre Dame, one more person present who is in the midst of the ongoing conversation or story of their life. I was never in doubt about the Catholicity of Notre Dame, so protesting President Obama's presence does nothing to convince me any more of Notre Dame's Catholicity. I was never in doubt of President Obama's not being Catholic, so protesting his presence does not tell me or him anything that we didn't already know. The willingness of several of the prominent protesters to call Notre Dame President Fr. John Jenkins's Catholic faith into question over his issuing the invitation? That doesn't convince me any further of the depth of their Catholic faith. Instead, I find the moment, the conversation, the appeal to decency, logic, law, the Good – all things that are good – I find that the appeal to these sorts of things that the President and Notre Dame would be talking about, these are all aspects of God's creation, of the action of the Word and the Spirit in the world. That being the case, all that the President actually has to talk about are those things that the Catholic Church affirms, even if he has yet to make some of those connections, himself. I'm content to let that process happen, to even pray for the occasion, and to let God do any convincing necessary, having long since learned the lesson that my being loud or rude in no way assists God in this work.

President Jenkins put it entirely sensibly when he said, "We are not ignoring the critical issue of the protection of life. On the contrary, we invited him because we care so much about those issues, and we hope . . . for this to be the basis of an engagement with him," as well as adding that, "You cannot change the world if you shun the people you want to persuade, and if you cannot persuade them . . . show respect for them and listen to them." Former President Fr. Ted Hesburgh also put it well when he said the other day, "No speaker who has ever come to Notre Dame has changed the University. We are who we are. But, quite often, the very fact of being here has changed the speaker."

Hmm. And that concludes my thoughts. Sorry about the length, Mom: you asked. (And you're the Irish parent.)

Mike

A few of the last minutes of conversation over at Dan and Amy's has been rattling around in my head for the last few days. I don't remember how either point came up, whether they actually flowed from the conversation at that point, or whether they were the sort of things that came from some new thought or free association that popped into someone's head. Amy mentioned praying the office to me, which surprised me as I didn't know that she or Dan had ever done, or even heard of, the Liturgy of the Hours. I was probably thinking of it a lot more of late just from my reading in Thomas Merton, which very well might have been how the subject came up. Praying that liturgy throughout the day is a context to all of Merton's thinking that a number of people fail to recognize, or at least give sufficient weight to its effect, which is easy if you've never sunk into that rhythm at a monastery.

Lent this year has, for me, been an occasion of some meager recollection of that spirituality, with a greater recognition – or admission – of how much better I do with that kind of structure. I would once have bristled about a lack of spontaneity in such a format, but that is starting to look more and more to me like a function of age, of a certain sort of youthful enthusiasm, like that which would see "self-expression" as a key part of art, but which is coming to appear more and more like a substitution of mere energy for real vision. Prayer seems more like art in that way to me, I think, where there is certainly something to be said for sincerity, of course, but where that is revealed to be pretty thin beer the longer you sit with it.

Then somewhere near the end of the evening Mike said something to me about being weak in art history, particularly as regards its tie to theology and theological history: a thought that he had expressed earlier in the evening's conversation. Something recently had gotten me thinking about how I started picking up that interest, myself, back in the summer of 1991 in Madison. Perhaps that had come up in the "spirituality and autobiography" conversation with Meg last week, as we also talked about her work in, and thoughts about, theatre. So I found myself making a bit a strange recommendation to Mike in suggesting that he might want to start reading in that direction the same way that I did: through the Protestant Fundamentalist theologian Francis Schaeffer. I call this a bit of a strange recommendation in that quite disagree with Schaeffer on a great many things, now, finding him guilty of trying to squeeze too much into the formula he was describing as he attempted to diagnose the shift of Western culture from its Christian philosophical, theological and spiritual roots to a new Secularist paradigm, basing far too much of the latter on Existentialism. The phenomenon he is trying to describe is a real one, it was just that he oversimplified the mechanism of how that shift was occurring, resulting in a number of problematic descriptions and assessments in support of his overall argument.

But nevertheless, like Merton said about Tertullian, "he's worth reading even when he's wrong." The genius of Schaeffer was that he tried to do a very necessary work that it us utter anathema in today's academic culture: he tried to be a generalist. The generalist tries to master a great many fields so that their interaction can be described. For all the noise we make today about being "interdisciplinary," it's all too easy to find fault with someone who tries to do this, because no one today can possibly master all major fields of human knowledge. I just found fault with him, above, although I might argue that I was speaking as a specialist somewhat closer to the heart of his program. But it's not his ambition or his intention with which I am finding fault, nor am I trying simply to be an academic nit-picker. I think that those attempts at speaking in a more "generalist" way are important, and that is a work that particularly falls to theology among the sciences. (See the "definition" of theology I have on my profile page, to see more of that idea.)

So, why the recommendation to Mike? Schaeffer seriously attempts to incorporate art history into his survey of the shape of how our culture is and has been shifting, integrating it into his philosophical, theological, historical and political argument as a serious voice and influence in the cultural conversation. So: music, art, film – all these were major fields for a Christian to know, which was a rather novel position in American fundamentalism in the 1960s or 70s. As a model, or a starting-point in trying to get a sketch of an integrated view of art and the history of ideas, Schaeffer still strikes me as a useful starting point, in just the way a lot of theological educators might use Justo Gonzalez's survey histories of theology for undergraduate or Master's students who are trying to learn their way "around the map" of history, even though you will tell them later on to toss out a lot of the generalizations that Gonzalez makes as they grow more competent. Mike is more than competent enough in the general history of thought, and in Christian thought in particular, that he could read Schaeffer without swallowing it all whole, as I did as a beginner in such things, where I had to continue to work just to see how much more there was to learn than his direct summations. So for the first time in 15 years I find myself hefting the one-volume work How Should We Then Live? The Decline of Western Thought and Culture, which became Schaeffer's major entry into public conversation on the cultural impact of the anti-Christian shift in Secularism, both as a book and even more as a documentary series. (Which is an interesting story in itself, given that this documentary series was produced in many ways as an answer to the more-or-less uniform Secularist vision given in many PBS documentaries of the time, with PBS protesting – in all sincerity – that they couldn't show something that was so one-sided in its perspective.)

It'll be interesting to revisit this just for intellectual autobiographical reasons in seeing whether it does indeed work for Mike in the way I suspect. I figured that the Protestant orientation would be familiar, and that its direct and popular nature would make for a far easier starting-point than something like the vast (and very Catholic) theological aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar, however much better Von Balthasar's work might be in a more final sense. Bob Foster is going to be in town tomorrow and we're gathering to enjoy his company – "Thursday is the new Friday," quipped Amy – and it'll be interesting to see whether he agrees with my thought that this could still be a useful starting-point for Mike in trying to integrate art history into his theological work.

Here's an article and sample essay from a conference I would have loved to have attended in Rome about the broad cultural reception of evolutionary theory over the last 150 years. Fun stuff, and hopefully the type of thing on the academic level that will raise popular consciousness and discourse in the United States.

Give to Darwin What Is Darwin's. But Creation is God's

A major conference sponsored by the Vatican has assembled scientists, philosophers, and theologians of various tendencies. All of them said yes to evolution. But the intelligent structure of creation also has its defenders. Beginning with the book of Genesis

by Sandro Magister

ROMA, March 9, 2009 – Two hundred years after the birth of Charles Darwin, and one hundred fifty years since his most famous work, the pontifical council for culture headed by Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi has sponsored a monumental international conference, entitled "Biological Evolution: Facts and Theories. A critical appraisal 150 years after 'The origin of species'."

The conference was held from March 3-7 in Rome, at the Pontifical Gregorian University. It was organized by this university together with the American University of Notre Dame.

The speakers were leading worldwide specialists in various disciplines, from biology to paleontology, from anthropology to philosophy to theology. A wide variety of positions were discussed. There were Catholic scholars, Protestants, Jews, agnostics, atheists.

Since Darwin, few scientific theories have been debated as bitterly as evolution, or have determined such a paradigm shift in the common interpretation of all of reality, including man.

In both the field of science and the view of the Catholic Church, creation and evolution are not necessarily incompatible. But on both sides, there are tendencies to erect theoretical constructs that are mutually exclusive.

In officially presenting the conference at the Vatican, Jesuit Fr. Marc Leclerc, professor of natural philosophy at the Gregorian, summed up the two opposing ideological tendencies as follows:

"The novelty of this paradigm prompted a number of Darwin's followers to go beyond the limits of science in order to set up some elements of his theory, or of the modern synthesis created during the twentieth century, as a 'Philosophia universalis', in the fitting words of then-cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as the universal key for interpreting a reality in perpetual change.

"But too often, the adversaries of Darwinism have also followed this same path, confusing the scientific theory of evolution with the all-inclusive ideology that deformed it, in order to reject it entirely as being completely incompatible with a religious view of reality. This situation could explain the contemporary return of 'creationist' conceptions, or that which sometimes presents itself as an alternative theory, so-called 'intelligent design'. At this level, we are far from scientific discussions."

In effect, none of the speakers at the conference defended any of these ideological constructions. All of them were discussed and evaluated critically. The common intention was to employ the individual disciplines – scientific, philosophical, theological – with the specificity and richness of each one, for the benefit of all.

After five extremely intense days, with thirty-five presentations each given by a different specialist, it can be said that the objective seems to have been reached. Peace between creation and evolution now appears more solid.

( Read more... )

Dinners have been my chief joy the last several days. I wasted an incredible amount of paperwork time nearly inheriting (again!) my grandmother's car from my cousin Jane, only to discover that there were some extra costs associated with my particular position, so much so that I could not afford to receive a free car. So I am restrained from committing the great Green sin for a while longer. I also found that I was the Last Man Standing for the Canadian professorship search I had been part of, only to have that Department re-assess their goals for the professorship having undergone the process, and deciding to re-write the job description and conduct the search again next year, which they invited me to take part in, should I still be on the job market. And so, with such seeming bonanzas sprouting wings and fluttering off at the last minute, the dinners I mentioned become the clear highlights of my week.

I started to play the game of "When do you have some free time?" with Jessica last Wednesday after Barnes's undergrad Augustine class (which I'm sitting in on), when I had the inspiration of then realizing that I could do dinner right then, which actually turned out to be one of the few openings in her schedule. She had never been to Zaffiro's Pizza and Bar, it turned out, which happened to be my craving of the moment. Since this is a Milwaukee classic, I came down somewhere between suggestion and insistence, and that's where we ended up. The fact that she's currently doing the vegetarian thing didn't end up being a problem, as they do a decent veggie pizza, too, and we compared pizzas of America, Italy and Ireland (not recommended!). This gave us more chance to talk about her engagement, and we talked criteria for deciding who you marry, and quite a bit about friendships attached to or affected by getting married. There was some particularly curiosity on her part about how I've stayed friends with people I've dated, and even been accepted as a friend by husbands of such. That her best friend is the ex of her fiancé is a juggling act in which she has found herself. So that lead to some interesting talk on balancing friendships with marriage.

Friday's gathering at the Lloyds' of the group felt especially good after having missed it the week before due to being sick. I started to share the news of Jessica's engagement (pretty much everyone knew her, even if they'd only met her once) but I found out that everyone already knew, Barnes having had his own dinner with her the night before. That most exciting bit of news out of the way, I played with the weird drama of "won but didn't win" in telling everyone about the Canadian professorship as we ate the fabulous ham dinner Amy had prepared. And Barnes shared the discussion that his undergraduate class had had on Wednesday about another thing I missed while sick, the consolatio-style talk that his friend Julia had had with the class about her upcoming death from cancer, as a lesson built off of the discussion of Augustine's friend's death in Book IV of The Confessions. Students had been reporting that that session was the singlemost important class they had ever attended, and spoke intensely about it for about 50 minutes before Barnes turned the class to a more text-based subject. I'll watch the recording of the session at the library soon. There was some talk then on Friday about how he came to schedule such an unorthodox event for the course, and how it was that he came to ask Julia to do this, both as much for her as for the students, he said.

Our BSG-watching that night proved to be very exciting as a lot of the hidden background history of the show was finally revealed as the story is coming to its conclusion, and it was a mercifully satisfying piece of writing. Talking about that gave way to general conversation that kept us all going until about 1am, when we all finally turned in, all of us again spending the night. I loitered around in the morning after the Harrises left, talking with Amy while playing cars and trains with Owen while Dan gave Anna a reading lesson, and chatting with Dan about Roman rhetoric and such random topics until he went in to the library around noon. While he worked on some research there, I took care of my business and then headed back to their place for another dinner invitation, this one over yummy meatloaf. I checked on the ride back to make sure that Dan remembered that this was Valentine's Day and that "Let's hang out with Mike!" wasn't a disaster in the making on his part, and was relieved when he said that, having to roll with their babysitter's schedule, he and Amy had dinner-out plans for the following night. So we were making up for a movie night invitation I had had to turn down earlier in the week as I was trying to make up for lost time with the dissertation. With Dan and Amy, we'll often go old-fashioned and do a "short" before the feature of the evening, often an episode of the hysterical Arrested Development, which I'd never seen until they started showing it to me. This night, instead, I had them watch the pilot of Everwood, which series I thought they might really enjoy together, since I thought it was an exceptionally-written multi-generational family drama, and is still one of my top-3 all time pieces of television. That went over well, with some interesting observations just about the nature of television pilots as a distinct sort of thing in themselves, and how you have to watch them with slightly different expectations than a series in the midst of production. We then went on to the Coen Brothers' recent comedy Burn After Reading which gave us plenty of laughs, though I observed that somehow their movies often seem more funny in their individual moments than they seem as a whole film.

An essay by Prof. Stanley Fish on the future of classic university education. By "classic" I mean the university education as a humane formation. What is generally called a university education today has in fact become something much less: it's a job training program. I don't think that that's snobbishness saying so. I don't think it's a holdover of some old cultural ideal that amounts no more today than some conservative impulse on my part. I believe it to be a simple fact of intent. There is a point to educating toward an economic outcome. But there is also a point toward education toward a philosophical and humanist one, particularly one in the Christian humanist mode of what university education had been. To simply mandate the new form, for the powerful to simply create workers for their economy? That's a kind of conquest that violates the spirit and intent of America.

Still, I think there are a few avenues around the bleak diagnosis Fish offers here. Some of us simply do the true mode of education no matter the shape and intent of the university system in which we find ourselves. We seek out the right teachers, we ask the right questions, we do the work. There are also a few schools, most of them newly created, that try to explicitly address this trend, offering themselves as an alternative to the dominant university paradigm. Most of these schools are Catholic, drawing on historical components of Catholic education, and I've been interested to watch them. But a lot of them import quite a bit of conservative culture or what's called conservative or traditionalist Catholicism into their program, which I don't think are necessarily components of that classical form of education, nor, for that matter, necessarily traditional in their Catholicism. Still, it's interesting to see what kinds of ideological trends are frequently part of creating such schools. It is particularly astonishing in the face of how politically Left university educators tend to lean that education should have become so utilitarian. I wonder whether the New Left, 1960s-70s ideology of unqualified "freedom" with regard to everything – including "liberation" from the claims of any truths beyond individual desire or preference – have rendered the Left unable to resist, or even recognize, an all-consuming pragmatism or utilitarianism in university education.

The Last Professor
Stanley Fish
January 18, 2009, 10:00 pm

In previous columns and in a recent book I have argued that higher education, properly understood, is distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world.

This is a very old idea that has received periodic re-formulations. Here is a statement by the philosopher Michael Oakeshott that may stand as a representative example: “There is an important difference between learning which is concerned with the degree of understanding necessary to practice a skill, and learning which is expressly focused upon an enterprise of understanding and explaining.”

Understanding and explaining what? The answer is understanding and explaining anything as long as the exercise is not performed with the purpose of intervening in the social and political crises of the moment, as long, that is, as the activity is not regarded as instrumental – valued for its contribution to something more important than itself.

This view of higher education as an enterprise characterized by a determined inutility has often been challenged, and the debates between its proponents and those who argue for a more engaged university experience are lively and apparently perennial. The question such debates avoid is whether the Oakeshottian ideal (celebrated before him by Aristotle, Kant and Max Weber, among others) can really flourish in today’s educational landscape. It may be fun to argue its merits (as I have done), but that argument may be merely academic – in the pejorative sense of the word – if it has no support in the real world from which it rhetorically distances itself. In today’s climate, does it have a chance?

In a new book, “The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities,” Frank Donoghue (as it happens, a former student of mine) asks that question and answers “No.”

( Read more... )

My education in the Department of History at Northern Illinois saw me being trained by a large number of Marxist theorists. They weren't my primary professors, nor my best, but they were numerous. Professor Marvin Rosen, the Director of Undergraduate Education, was perhaps the most flamboyantly Marxist, and publicly despaired of my increasing interest in historical theology and my decision to undertake graduate studies at Notre Dame. But, to his credit, was always warm and encouraging to me in general. Still, this was a crowd that – dare I say it – took Marx's words that "religion was the opiate of the masses" as utter gospel.

Myself, I thought that was just, historically speaking, dumb. The other day, I read a quotation in passing that I wished I had conjured up myself back in those times, that went straight to the heart of the psychology of belief and unbelief, and what is far more often at stake in people's psychological motivations for their beliefs, but was much more precise than my more intuitive "That's dumb."

“A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death—the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged.”

– Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz, “The Discreet Charm of Nihilism"

I've been thinking a lot about love lately. Not being "in love," whether in fiction or (alas!) in fact, and not in any of the usual ways in which we speak about love. There was a conference notice I was mailed a few months ago that quite caught my imagination, and I've not been able to get it out of my head. Syracuse University is sponsoring their third "Postmodernism, Culture and Religion" conference on the topic of love as a political notion. As a Christian, a Catholic, and in particular as a Catholic Christian theologian, I realize that I must believe that something of a "politics of love" must be possible. Certainly we see it at some level in the politics of the Church: the social justice ethics, the care for displaced populations and for our own poor and sick, for human rights of every sort, of those promoted or despised by the political left and right. But a "politics" of Love? Love as a political notion? The suspicion, of course, is that that is just being sentimental. How can you have a politics of love? Over dinner I was watching the grim realpolitik of Steven Spielburg's film Munich, and the seeming impossibility of conceiving of a politics of love in such situations brought the question back to my head.

Christian ethics flow from a notion of Who and What God is, though. Three divine "Persons" constituting One God, interpenetrating, perfect knowing and acceptance of one another, utter union of being: if this is what God is, this is what is then most fundamental about all of reality – relationship. Christian ethics of personhood, dignity and rights, all flow from that vision, as do the more secular ethics of the West today, if more by momentum than from the logic of secular presuppositions about what human beings are or what reality is. So if relationship and love are most fundamental to reality, why not to politics as well? But then, the need for politics as we understand it often has to do with human evil, with the failure of love. Is such, then, still potentially to be conceived as a politics of love?

Is this all just a lead-in to a sentimental, theological way of talking about politics? Or can we in fact use "love" as such an organizing category in a way that makes it just as "real," having just as much "teeth," as other ways of conceiving a political theory or language?

The notice, at least, is rather striking:

The Politics of Love

A constellation of internationally prominent theorists–philosophers, theologians and psychoanalysts–will gather to discuss the question of whether the concept of love can be redescribed as a political concept. Is love necessarily a private matter or does it also have a public meaning? Can love become part of a political project? In addition to an ethics or religion of love, can there be a politics of love?

[Big names in the academy headlining the conference here]

The topic of the conference was inspired by the following passage:

"People today seem unable to understand love as a political concept...The modern concept of love is almost exclusively limited to the bourgeois couple and the claustrophobic confines of the nuclear family. Love has become a strictly private affair. We need a more generous and more unrestrained conception of love. We need to recuperate the public and political conception of love common to premodern traditions. Christianity and Judaism, for example, both conceive love as a political act that constructs the multitude...There is really nothing necessarily metaphysical about the Christian and Judaic love of God: both God's love of humanity and humanity's love of God are expressed and incarnated in the common material political project of the multitude. We need to recover today this material and political sense of love, a love as strong as death. This does not mean you cannot love your spouse, your mother, and your child. It only means that your love does not end there, that love serves as the basis for our political projects in common and the construction of a new society. Without this love, we are nothing."

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), pp. 351-52.

Did many folks catch this? One of the refreshing pieces of babysitting the nieces is just the pleasure of sitting with a morning paper during part of breakfast (after the getting-the-girls-fed part). So this caught my eye in the Chicago Tribune yesterday, and its follow-up today.

As an undergraduate History major, I had quickly learned the lesson that the Left is correct about everything in our society, and it was only the long study of history that eventually pushed me over to hard-core political independence and the determination to try to think through issues on a case-by-case basis. As I wait in hope to see if an Obama administration fulfills any reasonable proportion of people's hopes for it, a big part of my hope rests in whether Obama will transcend the sillier side of hard-core American liberalism, which somehow never seems to realize that by "tolerance" it means "agreeing with us," and that to embrace diversity means to be Just Like Them. These very well-meaning people – perhaps illustrating the danger of "a little education," even if Ivy League – have long decried that white, male, European culture has been an all-conquering phenomenon in world affairs. The greatest ideological irony of all time is that these same people can then turn around and push onto the whole world the most all-conquering form of that culture ever, which is today's Western European/American secularist liberalism, and to then hail that as diversity.

I'm very bad for saying this, I know, and you might think I'm a conservative for not going after them with equal fervour here, but really, going after conservative inconsistencies seems beside the point since election day.

Which brings me to this article I caught in the Chicago Tribune. Had this girl been one of my high school students, she'd be riding a helluva college recommendation from me for her creativity and guts. And perhaps most of all for her class: for her willingness to not name names, and to turn what could be a sneering "aren't they all dumb?" moment instead into what teachers like to call a "teachable moment." It's no big credit to you if you simply point out someone else's failures, as I do in the generalization I make about some ideologues, above. It's great credit to you when you can actually look at yourself and get others to do so, and to admit that maybe we aren't as far along as we think we are....

Tolerance fails T-shirt test
John Kass
November 13, 2008

As the media keeps gushing on about how America has finally adopted tolerance as the great virtue, and that we're all united now, let's consider the Brave Catherine Vogt Experiment.

Catherine Vogt, 14, is an Illinois 8th grader, the daughter of a liberal mom and a conservative dad. She wanted to conduct an experiment in political tolerance and diversity of opinion at her school in the liberal suburb of Oak Park.

She noticed that fellow students at Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama for president. His campaign kept preaching "inclusion," and she decided to see how included she could be.

So just before the election, Catherine consulted with her history teacher, then bravely wore a unique T-shirt to school and recorded the comments of teachers and students in her journal. The T-shirt bore the simple yet quite subversive words drawn with a red marker:

"McCain Girl."

"I was just really curious how they'd react to something that different, because a lot of people at my school wore Obama shirts and they are big Obama supporters," Catherine told us. "I just really wanted to see what their reaction would be."

Immediately, Catherine learned she was stupid for wearing a shirt with Republican John McCain's name. Not merely stupid. Very stupid.

"People were upset. But they started saying things, calling me very stupid, telling me my shirt was stupid and I shouldn't be wearing it," Catherine said.

Then it got worse.

"One person told me to go die. It was a lot of dying. A lot of comments about how I should be killed," Catherine said, of the tolerance in Oak Park.

But students weren't the only ones surprised that she wore a shirt supporting McCain.

"In one class, I had one teacher say she will not judge me for my choice, but that she was surprised that I supported McCain," Catherine said.

If Catherine was shocked by such passive-aggressive threats from instructors, just wait until she goes to college.

"Later, that teacher found out about the experiment and said she was embarrassed because she knew I was writing down what she said," Catherine said.

( Read more... )

About half an hour ago, walking over to Raynor Library, I saw what very well might have been the brightest, largest-to-the-eye meteor I have ever seen. I think it broke of a section toward the end, before disappearing. I think it was quite close. I was walking down the south side of Wisconsin Avenue, and from in front of the Engineering building it appeared over the Jesuit residence. And here's the thing: I was walking toward the city center, less than a mile away. Significant light pollution. And the sky seems to be that sort of flat, grey, higher-altitude overcast. Which would mean that I saw the meteor in the few miles below the cloud cover. Whatever my unverifiable details, it was spectacular. I looked around in vain for anyone else who saw it, but everyone near me was walking the other way.

Now back to the dissertating. Oh, I already got short-listed at one of schools I interviewed at when I was at AAR. Flying over for an interview in a few weeks. And the drama builds....

Talking with Saint Thomas University in Miami and Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, CT tomorrow. This was a day with a bit of a different beat – less taken up with the Job Center and a chance to take in a bit of the conference itself. I joined a group listening to David Tracy work through an in-progress chapter, if I understood correctly (I arrived a minute or two late) about notions of the infinite and God, and tied into recent phenomenological notions of "the impossible." This took us on an interesting walk through Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, along with intersections with modern authors including Derrida, Nietzsche, a bit of Heidegger, and a few others whose names escape me now. It would have been easier-going on paper rather than verbally, and I'm hard-pressed to sum it up as I want to got to bed now, but maybe I'll come back to it later. I've only read a bit of Tracy, and that some while ago, and this was my first time actually encountering him.

2008 Templeton Prize winner Michal Heller, a Polish priest and physicist, gave a Templeton-sponsored address entitled something like "Human Time and the Time of the Universe." I went to that one with Aaron S., whose dissertation hits on some similar themes, and Mark Ch. from our department, and, other than the difficulty of hearing Heller when he let the microphone drift from his face, was quite interesting, in a basic-science-for-the-masses way. I was personally struck by the timeline for the process of creating carbon in the universe through the element, which makes up the bulk of our living matter, being distilled over multiple generations of stars: the whole "we are stardust" bit. It hit me in kind of a pedagogical way. While the medievals knew from their astronomy that the Earth was a point so small in the universe that it could only be registered mathematically, they took this as a fact illustrative of the infinite love of God and of human worthiness over something so minute. Moderns, on the other hand, took the same fact (which they believed themselves to be more intelligent and informed for, forgetting medieval theology and assuming that such things cannot be known without Hubble telescopes and the like), and argued that there could not be a God, because why would an infinite God bother with something so minute and therefore meaningless? (While an overstatement, of course, that contrast, in and of itself, might serve as a basic summary of the difference between Medieval and Modern Western philosophies of humanity.) What struck me was the realization, after hearing Heller describe that multiple generations of stars seem to have been necessary to build the carbon from which organic life is made, is that this vast, vast universe was necessary to create the cosmically tiny seed of life that is Planet Earth. That scientific necessity, it seemed to me, would be an interesting point of contemplation to offer the next student who gives me the poorly-thought-out "giant universe means no God" argument.

Ran into Crip and Lisa at the Marquette party tonight and got a chance to catch up at some length with them, while also chatting some more with Aaron, Professor Wood, and a prospective doctoral student from Duke named Silas who stopped by. During the afternoon I got an hour or two in with Kari-Shane, ate some wonderful Cream of Potato and Leek at Kitty O'Sheas with her, Jeff W., and a gazillion rowdy Bears fans in from the game (in more of that wonderfully mild weather), and also ran into Gavril from Marquette in the hall and talked for a bit. I spotted Michelle Peterson from Masters time at Notre Dame in one of the Hilton lounges and caught up with her, comparing doctoral programs and exam, and hearing her cool philosophical approach to theology from her department at Iowa. All in all, another object lesson in why people are really excited to come to this monster national conference each year!

The interviews today seemed to run the stretch from good to great. The first was friendly with one representative of the department asking sensible questions about teaching and the content I'd inject into their departmental offerings. The second was twice the normal length of 20 minutes, with five members of the department, and became wonderfully enthusiastic and excited-sounding as I went on. They sold their program strongly, emphasizing a wide variety of opportunities that, thanks to their remarkable and ongoing growth, would be available to me for research despite being a primarily teaching institution. Other forms of teaching opportunities, such as an increasing travel-related component of studying - how would I like to return to Tunisia and Algeria as part of teaching Augustine, for example - were mentioned. I felt like the king of the party by the time I left that one, with many thanks for my time. The last of my three interviews today was the most intense. Two of the four of that group were familiar with Sullivan's work, and so these scholars asked detailed and probing questions about the dissertation project, far more so than any other group. That interview, too, I think was very positive, and that the depth of my answers with regard to the dissertation seemed satisfying to them. That was at the end of the day, and they were clearly wiped out, and so "intensity" was more what I got a feeling of, rather than the love-fest of the prior interview, but I do think that it was a favourable showing. I walked out to find a request for another interview waiting for me from one of the schools to which I'd applied, and I'll be checking for more tomorrow.

Ran into lots of people today just hanging out in the Jobs Center. Along with my talking with Kari-Shane some more, I also saw and talked with Aaron (who had flown into Milwaukee and stayed with Dan and Amy on Thursday, so that he could talk with his dissertation director before coming down for interviews), Ramon L., Kenny Y., Matthew G., who I'd gone walking with last night, Jeff W., Scott C., and John J. So I wasn't hurting for interesting theological/political/cultural conversation, as well as job talk. I also met sigerson face-to-face for the first time, joking that she seemed so much more feminine in person than the Jeremy Brett-as-Sherlock-Holmes picture I always had in my head of her from her primary LiveJournal userpic. She's out from Boston University and staying with magdalene1, who I've never met face-to-face, either, and who I thought would be able to join us for dinner tonight. That ended up not quite happening, and I went out just with sigerson and her compatriot Sara from Boston U., finding our way to a corner bakery for dinner, and talking about our various work, with sigerson having a dissertation project in mind about the various ways in which people read novels for ethical meaning, and Sara doing a lot of work on liberal democracy and Islamic states. So that, added in with my ecclesiological work, made for eclectic, but very interesting, dinner conversation through the evening.

And I'm tired all of a sudden - right wiped out - after three nights running without more than four hours of real sleep; just lots of tossing and trying to rest or snooze after three good hours last night. I don't know what the deal is with that.

A man stopped me on the street, wanting me to autograph his jersey. He thought I was some Chicago Bulls coach, apparently. And I don't know what the deal is with that, either.

My new suit got some compliments, which was very cool. As I feared, though, it’s so dark that every bit of dust or lint that I catch seems to glow. I had to keep brushing myself off and hoping that I didn’t look like I had fatal dandruff – on my knees. As I type, I'm being shown up, though, by an entirely different level of class being displayed by the women gliding through the Palmer House lobby in elegant evening gowns and their companions in tuxes or well-cut suits. Not that mine isn't good, but.... I wonder if there's an Event on, or if this is simply high-end Chicago nightlife that one sees in Chicago at the Palmer House if one is here more often than I am.

My interview on Monday makes hash of my plans to check out early, save my ridiculous Palmer House fees, and to see Mom, Leslie and Jim and the nieces on Sunday and Monday. And I can't go out after I'm done on Monday since I need to be in Milwaukee on Tuesday to vote. So it goes. I'll get to see everyone in a week and a half, anyway, when I head down to babysit.

I wasn't able to make it to any sessions today, given the way my interviews were scheduled: the ones I would have tried to sneak in for most of a given session were back here at the Palmer House, and in my dress shoes I couldn't try to rush back and forth. So that's that. If there's nothing better tomorrow, I'm inclined to just cross the street and take in the Art Institute: it's been a long time since I've been there, now. I was smiling as I walked by last night, remembering getting locked into the front revolving door with Julianna once during college as we were leaving well into closing, and having to be found and let out by a guard. They've got some exhibitions going on now that look interesting if not earth-shattering. Not that you ever know what you might find earth-shattering if you let yourself wander freely in a great museum....

At the Palmer House in Chicago, lounging in their grand lobby where I only have to pay $7 for an hour of wireless rather than $15 for an hour of cable internet access in my room. (I was here my first year at Marquette, I think, when I got tix to Simon and Garfunkel's tour, and Kev, Stevie and Erin and I all met here in town, for drinks at the Signature Room, dinner at some cool old local place Steve knew, and then ice cream at Water Tower before the show. A great night.) And I wanted to check for any last-minute contact from any of my applications. The interview system here at the AAR is chaos: completely confusing. Half internet dating, half speed dating, half passing notes in class. My "Jobs Center" orientation tonight, for which I came down and paid for my Friday night's stay, consisted of getting a packet and no orientation meeting. Charming. I don't know quite what to do for the schools for which I have applications out and haven't been turned down (I've been declined for interviews by two schools so far). Some of the schools I'm waiting on are listed as "open" interviews, meaning I fill out a card that gets passed to them and the assign me a slot, or not. There's lots of schools that haven't said "yes" or "no" to me, officially, but have been gleefully sending me more paperwork – mostly affirmative action information requests. So I'm not sure if I'm supposed to put in interview requests for them (other than the few that explicitly stated that theirs would be the "open"-style interviews) or whether this would be tacky and harrassing of me. Of course, in the end, I can't risk making any mistake of simple omission, so tacky and harrassing interview requests it is! So it looks like I'll be hanging in the interview lounge and missing most of the conference proper.

I've talked to a few guys from Marquette who did some interviewing last year. Apparently the fact that I have three confirmed interviews going in is really good, especially given that I'm still writing. Yikes. And yikes to the bare-chested Roman soldier who just passed me! Halloween in the Loop.... It's a warm, wonderful night here, and I went walking in Grant Park a bit ago with Matthew G. from my program, taking in the classic Chicago skyline. I always loved the "sliced-away" building: you know, the one that was in Adventures in Babysitting? (If I remember correctly....) Then I enjoyed seeing the lions at the Art Institute again for the first time in a long while, a bit of Lorado Taft, and the costumes of the people going up and down Michigan Avenue. Again, a great night to be in Chicago. Yowza! The biker-dominatrix who just walked by was a bit ... flamboyant, even for the rest of what the city has conjured up tonight.

The best part of the Jobs Center tonight was running into Kari-Shane, my best friend from my first few years at Marquette, before she landed a job at St. Ben's/St. John's in Collegeville, MN, beating out a hundred people with Ph.D.s in hand before she had even turned in her dissertation proposal. She's tenure-track there, and here to interview candidates for their Theology and Gender position.

Mmm... Bailey's on the rocks. So Chicago. So Irish-American. So yummy.

Anyway, they don't seem to have people down here interviewing candidates for the Theology and Spirituality position I applied for, and she knows nothing of that search, but thinks it would be supergroovy if I could end up up there, teaching with her. So

Crap! A $14 Bailey's?! Palmer House.... I 'll make a point of staring at the scenery a bit more while drinking it, so as to try to convince myself how high-end this all is.

So... she joined me down at some faux pub in the Hilton where the American Academy of Religion conference is being held and we caught up while I grabbed some Fish n Chips: me telling her about the dissertation, which she made cool, excited noises over, at least letting me think that mine is a cool idea. She told me the horror story of her mis-medicated, 21 hour labor to end up giving birth to Sarah via C-section last year. And other tidbits of motherhood. Running into lots of other old faces in passing: Michelle from a summer at Notre Dame, Rhodora from Mark's M.Div. class. I struck up a fun conversation trying to figure out how to sign in with a University of Chicago prof on the way over to the Hilton and once we got inside.

A funny thing happened on the way to the ... conference. In my uncomfortable dress shoes, I decided to hop the shuttle over from the Palmer House to the Hilton, saving me a nine-block walk. We got a few blocks, then stopped. Then the bus driver laughed... and walked off the bus. When he came back on, we finally noticed the faint reflection of flashing lights behind us. The bus got pulled over – a big, regular bus, like one you'd take on the interstate. The driver got pulled over because he had clipped off a side mirror on a car. And the cops saw. Because it was the police car he clipped. After a few minutes, we realized we all were going to get to the conference faster if we just walked the remaining seven blocks. And, like I said, it was great outside. And, of course, I was in a rush to make it to my orientation....

So, so far, so good.

Kind of a crummy-feeling day, with a cold coming to visit or somesuch. Felt like a wrung-out washcloth all day.

But I had a bit of interesting fun in being interviewed by a senior Journalism major doing work in what I think she called "literary journalism" (referring more to style than subject) and who had found me as part of a major feature-length piece she was working on about people who keep blogs and why they do so. It was a curious piece of happenstance for me, in that I had just recently looked at some of the resources I used on my first webpage, back in the ancient internet days of 1995, I think. It was before I had internet access through my personal computer, and had to use the school computers at Notre Dame for internet access and email, and so my first pages, later re-uploaded to my AOL account, were really nothing much more than "bookmarks" lists of links I found interesting. Back in these very early days of net usage, I had tripped across the page of a CalTech grad student named Eve Andersson, (archived here) who had a quirky, fun internet presence, getting herself named an Internet Goddess. Seeing a link I'd had to her page, I glanced to see if she still had such a presence, but now she's a more serious, restrained computer professional doing her work. But an article that mentioned her original page (and the archived 1995 Washington Post article describing her foray in pre-blogging terms and perspective) reminded me of something I hadn't quite thought of: that her early page, particularly her occasional literary accounts of interesting moments of her life, were one of the earliest instances of a blog.

I had forgotten that it was off of that occasional format of hers that I had started making available in 1997 "public letters" of particular events in my life, essentially my pre-LiveJournal weblog. This was in the News section of my AOL homepage, due to be scrapped as an entire AOL resource at the end of this month. I started by blogging, I realized, not with LiveJournal, but with the first Chrysogonus Fest in July of 1997: an acoustic rock concert in the hermitage of a monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani.

So that ended up being a bit fun for Rachelle, the student doing this article, to find someone who could actually relate their blogging back the Stone Age of the internet, now so lost to history. For me, blogging was less about public communication than easy access, an outgrowth of my own private journaling, which had migrated from spiral notebooks in college to my non-internet LCIII Macintosh at Notre Dame, and the occasional large "public letter" I would write up about what I was doing and send out to a number of friends with whom I kept in touch. Putting an account of some adventure, complete with pictures, onto the internet seemed easier than lugging photo albums around and telling an increasingly weary tale to friends or family who wanted to know what I did in Ireland, or at Gethsemani, or in Nashville, or whatever. That anyone else in the world would find it worth bothering with didn't really cross my mind.

The job interviews are starting to all come together for the AAR meeting in Chicago this coming weekend. That's making it all that more concrete, and making me all the more curious about these places, programs and people with whom my life might shortly be intersecting. One small job in a world of people working jobs, but still such an epic thing for my own story. So I'm all the more curious about what these universities and colleges are like.

Another piece of fun was getting together the other day with Jessica, who had been a student of mine in my first semester of teaching Introduction To Theology during her first semester at Marquette. It was an amazing thing to be able to see at that time, not really knowing that such a thing was possible, but to see that she had The Gift, and that she could go the full distance in Theology or Philosophy – that she just had the natural talent for the reflective sciences. Maybe that's what was happening to Albert Resis, my Soviet History professor, who started talking to me about a doctorate my sophomore year. I don't know what that was like for him, but for me, as a teacher, it was a thrilling thing to see and experience: a student who could equal or beat me in going the distance in the field. Fabulous! So Barnes started talking to me about her the other day, as he has her now, and he could see the same thing, and was trying to remember if this was the girl that I said I'd be lateraling over to him for his required-for-majors Theology of the Early Church course.

She and I had been meaning to catch up for a while now, and had been playing tag for a few weeks, but now she also needed to talk to me about a recommendation for a Bioethics internship she was looking at, and so we needed to get together just to talk Bioethics in general, and programs of, and plans for, graduate study. She had actually come to Marquette to get into their outstanding Biomeds programs before I threw her the curveball of how cool Theology could be. Bioethics was a point where she could indulge that other interest, as well. And so we sat over at the Brew and talked what it was that made Theology or Philosophy "practical," which is frequently the objection people throw at such studies. And it's true: as fields, they don't seem to produce products one can sell. But it seemed to me that the trick is that everyone has theologies and philosophies, whether or not they ever really thought about them: they just pick them up from what their current culture tells them. So everyone deals with theology and philosophy, even if they think theirs is an anti-theology or anti-philosophy. The truth is that that just makes most people suckers for flawed and underdeveloped theologies and philosophies, no matter how well-educated they are in other fields. These are the fundamental sciences: the ones from which or against which all others take their interpretive stances. The products of Theology and Philosophy, of good ones and of bad ones, are civilizations....

Whew! I just sent out the last batch of the job applications, including one to sunny Scotland. I still am amazed at what an exhausting process that has been: I had it in my head that it would probably take two or three days to put it all together, but starting from scratch, it's been closer to a month of solid work. I've still had to keep my Official Crazy Dissertation Hours to do it all: up, shower, breakfast, library, meal, library 'til closing, move downstairs to 24-hour zone, another hour or two, home, sleep. It's good to be able to give that kind of devotion back to the dissertation, now, while keeping an eye peeled for any late job notices that come up.

I had a good piece of fun Friday when Julie R made it by for a visit during the afternoon, as part of a weekend trip back to Milwaukee from Long Island, where she has started work on a Ph.D. in Psychology, focusing on her taste for research into cognition itself. She was aglow with energy and excitement, reminding me of what starting graduate studies was like: the pure pleasure of being able to sink, unrestrained, into your own field of studies and no longer have your attention spread out in more general studies. So we talked about that, what work she had already begun doing at SUNY Stony Brook, how cute bohemian Jewish grad students can get her involved in university activities, my applications adventures, teaching and student reviews, Chopin's Nocturne No. 8 in D Flat Major, if I recall that name correctly, and Mozart's Requiem. Just good, fun stream-of-consciousness conversation. That was the extent of my recreation this last week, other than a last-minute dinner invitation from Dan and Amy to join them and the kids in checking out Joey Buona's, where we tried out a pair of their family-sized dinner platters. (My Signature Steak: nothing great; the Chicken Marsala: extremely good.) Mostly our conversation ended up being a lot of updating them about the application business, as well as a bit about my trip to Chicagoland. Anna and Owen were not content to leave us to grown-up conversation, though, and so we spent a certain amount of time talking about drawing, choo-choo trains, and tic-tac-toe strategy, too, just to even things out.

I also received photographs from Jules and from Emily that, along with my pics from the other week's visit with my nieces, let me properly illustrate my entries from Julie's departure from Milwaukee back in August, and from my dash down to Chicago to visit Emily at her Jane Austen conference and to see some of my family, too. So that lets those journal entries finally feel complete to me.

And, sadly, I cannot really think of anything else in my life other than a salmon-like desire to return to my dissertation work. I'm listening to Mark's CD Simplicity right now: was there really a time when everyone around me just broke out spontaneously into incredibly cool rock music?

I'm back to Marquette and trying to tie up the job application business after spending a few days down at my sister's, where I had the opportunity to help a bit by watching the girls a few times, to go to Grace and Haley's soccer matches, and to spend even more time than ever before just hanging out with Sophia, who loves to say "Unca Miiike?" with a smile and a tone that makes me sound like I'm the very incarnation of Fun. I also dashed over to Chicago to spend Sunday afternoon and evening hanging with Emily and assorted companions of hers – costume historian Megan, biochemist Sarah, and Media scholar Katie Z. – which was a good time, if too brief. Dinner was at the equally-cool Tapas place Café Ba Ba Reeba near DePaul University. And Emily gave me a copy of a treasure I had confessed that I had not read – Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey – and, generous 18th Century scholar that she is, even annotated it for me with scattered and cool insights and comments, in a cool "Longman Cultural Edition" that is already full of interesting scholarly intros and articles. It would be so fun to do that stuff for a living, too, though I wouldn't want to join Em in worrying about that market: my job search is hair-raising enough without thinking of the poor Literature scholars! :-(



I gave Grace the "Grace Fun Mix" I conjured up for her years ago, now that she was finally of age and now that I finally remembered to do so. And so I also had to make a "Haley Fun Mix" because she was about old enough, too, and definitely old enough to feel slighted. I had been playing with a large selection of songs for her for awhile, but I needed to get it burned to disc before I left. So I've been re-listening to the Haley mix to see if I still think it flows, given that it was finalized quickly. They're both on CD, as I'm "old school" like that. The girls called them "playlists" as they're totally digital babies, but I still have yet to get an iPod, as I'm holding out for a 32GB iPhone to be released before making the iPod/cellular phone leap, and so I still am functioning with discs, although Professor Barnes reported the other day that the undergraduates see them as archaic and a dead form, and I guess this was thus confirmed by Grace and Haley. They have a list that they'd kind of pulled together from stuff of Jim and Leslie's that they like. 4 year-old Haley observed to me "I've already got 'Just Like Heaven.'" (Actually, I used a cover version by Katie Melua that I'd gotten from Emily.) But the sudden image of Haley as a four year-old purist fan of The Cure made me laugh. As I confessed long ago, before Haley was born, when I first put together the mix for Grace, some four years ago, long before she was ready for it, in a fit of Uncle-ish anticipation, there was a secret agenda to all this. Secret agenda: to endow the girls with wide musical tastes and getting them to like more than what all their friends will tell them they have to like. Secret secret agenda: Haley's list is a bit heavy on piano, one of which Leslie recently purchased....

( The Grace Fun Mix and The Haley Fun Mix )

The question as to whether I committed some musical crimes likely remains open.

So, six more applications are finished now, and I'm now left tackling those asking for more bells and whistles, like "Statements of Scholarly Interests," writing samples, and proof of teaching effectiveness. And sending off for and purchasing more of my transcripts. Yay. Notre Dame, at least, gives me those for free, but I have to pay $5 a pop for my Marquette ones. Small investments, to be sure, compared to getting a job in the uncertain economic future we're all looking at, but in the present they're little costs that add up and add to the churning stomach acid. Okay: done with the job stuff for the night and back to a bit of dissertating before bed. I'd hoped to catch up with a friend on the phone tonight, and I've still not made it out of the Library....

Five new junior faculty positions have been listed on the American Academy of Religion website, including an ecclesiology position at the Catholic University of America in Washington D.C., and a history of modern Christianity position in a Religious Studies program at the University of South Florida in Tampa. The latter is a newish school, but one that very much wants to grow into a serious research institution and only has a 2/2 teaching load. So these are among new positions to think about. But the core of my prep work on the application process is (mercifully!) done and so I won't have to spend nearly so much time on all of this as I have the last few weeks.

Yesterday was the first session of this year's meetings of the Seminar on the Jewish Roots of Eastern Christian Mysticism, with Professor William Kurz, S.J., one of our senior biblical scholars, speaking on "Mary: Woman and Mother in God's Saving New Testament Plan," which was a theological and canon-critical reading of Mary in the New Testament, built off of, but not limited to, a historical-critical approach to the New Testament, in the manner described in his and Luke Timothy Johnson's The Future of Catholic Biblical Scholarship: A Constructive Conversation. This was a look at a forthcoming article that provoked some interesting discussion afterward, mostly on the Jewish lines typical of the Seminar, such as looking at the imagery tying Mary to the Ark of the Covenant/Mercy Seat. One thing that grabbed my attention was his addressing Luke's repeated meditations on the theme of Mary "pondering in her heart" the events of Jesus' conception, birth and life. He speculated this repeated theme as being an indication that Luke bears a Marian-inspired theology of the Incarnation, or a Marian tradition of interpretation. This was an idea I'd never heard before, particularly in contrast to the ancient tradition of Luke as an interpreter of Paul, and so I thought it would be interesting to re-read Luke with that question in mind and to see if it seems to work.

Talking with him afterward, he mentioned that he had written me a very strong letter of recommendation, reporting my gifts and reputation as a teacher as unique among graduate students. That was kind of flooring to hear words so generous, and I couldn't help but be incredibly gratified. So I certainly hope that that could help me get over the "paper hump" and to the first-stage interviews at the American Academy of Religion in Chicago next month.

Mike Harris and I were just talking about the history of this celebration the other day, and weird modern gnostic/neopagan appropriations of it. Two more applications go in the mail today, though not the one to Saint Michael's College yet (though maybe I should hurry up and finish that one today, just for the symmetry of it). I don't know how I'll squeeze in any feasting today because I'm still dizzy from the very, very best steak I ever have had – the Truffle Seared Tenderloin with chevre whipped potatoes and madeira~black truffle mushrooms over at Roots with Diane on Friday night – and trying to do anything more seems like overkill.

MICHAELMAS!

August Vogel
St Michael's Victory Over the Devil
1911
Bronze
Sculpture above the main entrance to St. Michaelis in Hamburg, Germany.

Well, I just applied for my first professorship. It's strange: I'm not at all sure that I'm quite what they want, as they listed the job description, with the various emphases that they stress. It's not how I would describe my course of studies or specialization. At the same time, as far as the actual work is involved, I know that I could teach all those classes, no problem. It's just strange to be aware of the discrepancy between who I look like on paper and who I really am.

This week has been insane: I cannot believe how much nit-picky detail and work has gone into all of this preparation for applications, for the academic CV, cover letters, and statements of teaching philosophy. friede, who is also going through the process, has been really cool in letting me bounce ideas off her and for offering quick and useful criticism. But it's been a week of getting my own stuff done in the morning, at the library by noon, and working through midnight or later before starting the process all over again – and that just being this work stuff. I'm almost desperate to get back to the dissertation.

I've been pretty purposely underground for the last several days, although perhaps that didn't take much purpose, given how driven I've been with all this extra work. Last week left me kind of spinning, and so it was good that this week already did have a few scheduled breaks. I babysat for Dan and Amy on Wednesday, so they could take Dan's uncle and aunt to a Brewer's game, and so an evening of dinner and Cinderella with Anna and Owen was actually a fun change of pace. Amy came over for a few hours last night to watch the two-hour Grey's Anatomy season premiere, and so I zipped home for a few hours to do that and to clean my living room to make it more hospitable. I had two bookshelves worth of books piled on the coffeetable. Total bachelorism. So that was fun as Amy got a night off of getting-Anna-to-stay-in-bed duty and, since we weren't watching it over at their house, we didn't get the usual heckling from Dan for watching such a goofy show. Diane had tonight only as a gap in her schedule for the next several days, and so she summoned me for dinner and port tonight, and so that will be my reward for getting the first application out. She's made reservations over at Roots, and so I'm excited to finally get around to trying that out.

The job process, even just in its beginning stages now, is already creating a feeling of instability, of the sense that I'm not really living here in Milwaukee anymore, but am on the preliminary edge of moving. And I so hate moving. I was just saying to someone the other day that, no matter how much I like traveling, even for weeks at a time, I have a rest and confidence that comes from the knowledge of a "home base" somewhere behind me. Now I'm wondering where I'll be in a year's time, and what kind of place and home I will make for myself there.

Yesterday was such a maddening day! I returned home by 2-something am from the previous night's late hours in the library only to find what sounded like a pleasant (but still too-loud) party going on in the apartment next to my bedroom,which kept me up for another hour or two, only to then be woken up by someone who thought pulling the building's fire alarm would be very funny at 8am. So as I joined the flood of residents heading down the stairs, I realized that I had left my backup hard drive sitting on my desk, next to my computer, along with my laptop in the other room. I had been meaning to leave the backup hard drive at Dan and Amy's for safekeeping for a long time, but kept forgetting to do that, and now I was going to see all the copies of my dissertation and files go kablooie because I had forgotten to grab the thing along with my pants. Fortunately, the alarm turned out to be the idiot prank that it was. And things went chaotic and downhill from there. Laundry finally had to be done as I was down to wearing old coats and shower curtains. A long phone call from a friend in a hard place, more material to be written up for the professors writing job recommendations for me – it kept me going for the whole day.

A few of these job applications require my undergraduate transcripts as well as my graduate ones, and those came in the afternoon mail. It was kind of fascinating to read through my undergraduate transcript again for the first time in years, probably since I applied to Marquette. I had forgotten some of the details, and there was a class or two that I was no longer even sure who had taught it, along with evidence of decisions I could not remember making, like why it was that I did my first semester of Intermediate German and then took the second semester not the following spring, but the spring after that. Similarly, as I was writing up histories of my work for the professors writing for me, I was going back through my files to fill in those details, seeing papers I had forgotten that I'd written, and being really intrigued and impressed by some of the things I had written. Because of the specific information having leaked out of my head, I couldn't write these same papers today, and so they sounded extra-smart to me, which is a kind of silly feeling when you're reading yourself.

Time for a break! I've been working all day, one way or another, on things associated with the job application business, all of which seems even more all the pressing having lost the last few days to whatever bug had me in a relative stupor all weekend. I tried writing some things while dizzy that now, re-reading them, are clearly am dum. Seriously. That addled. So, I appear to have my wits about me again, more or less, and now am playing catch-up. I can't believe how much stuff I have to do, though, in order to get all these applications put together. So many little things to verify, to put in order for professors so that they can write their letters, and so forth.

Still, a few cool bits: Professor Kurz mentioned to me how he had been hearing from multiple student sources that I was a great classroom instructor, which is gratifying, and Professor Dempsey was adamant in saying that I include in my CV the fact that I was asked to come in and consult for the Department when they were designing parts of the new major in Catholic Theology because I was considered a good teacher and one who was thoughtful or informed regarding high school theological education and the formation of such teachers. So those were both kind things to be told. And, heading downstairs to the Bridge an hour or two ago for a drink, I ran into a former high school student who is in Law School here now, and he wants to head out for drinks, which would be fun.

I was taking care of all my AAR conference stuff the other night, and getting my arrangements ready for interviews while looking around at an apartment full of stuff: I'd so like to fast-forward and just be settled some place already....

Blech. Had a horrible night for one reason or another, and have been feeling like I went through the mangle all the rest of today. I backtracked a bit over the long weekend and took some time to go back to the dissertation outline and to look at – and tweak – the big picture again. This was good, as I've been so focused on the current chapter, 3, and its related parts in chapter 2, for a while that I'd gotten a bit vague on the plan for 4 and 5. I also did some bibliographic drudge work down in the bowels of the periodicals section of the library that I needed to get done, or went digging around in European computer catalogs, or even Amazon France, in order to find bibliographic details on material we lacked here in the States, finishing up last night by plodding my way through copies of Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique and the old New Catholic Encyclopedia so that I could eyeball old entries written by Sullivan and properly add them to the bibliography: detail work I knew would be of great meaning and importance to countless people of future generations.

More interestingly, I continued digging through and preparing parts of the job hunt for the coming months, talking through some of it with Emily down in Missouri as she's looking at doing the same in 18th Century Literature. It was interesting to line the jobs up with someone not in the same exact field and to discuss pros and cons of positions regarding their teaching and research balances and possibilities. Given the dominance of research in my own training, it was a bit odd to see quite so many schools that didn't seem to emphasize that part of the equation for faculty. (And to notice things like the massive amounts of jobs looking for scholars of Islam, and of Religion in American.) I've listed the currently-posted job possibilities below the cut, with the major contenders and better fits toward the front, and further down those positions that I'm less interested in, or aren't necessarily looking for me, but which I could arguably fit. I've cut out the addresses and "send info to so-and-so" parts of this, so as to make them less dull for curious family or friends.

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I saw this article Tuesday night and grabbed the book from Raynor Library's browsing collection on Wednesday. So far it's compelling reading, but also kind of heartbreaking as an attempt to look at the currents of campus culture for my students: this is neither the respect for or empowering of women that I seem to remember being the goal of the feminisms of my student years nor the inheritance from any forms of chivalry. Eek: I'm starting to talk as a member of a different generation! Sex & the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America's College Campuses isn't bleak or hand-wringing, though, just honest. I can immediately think of half a dozen friends I'd like to read it with, though, who would have some professional interest in the topic, whether pedagogical, psychological or cultural.

Myself, seeing how the book itself arose out of a Spring 2005 course by the author at Saint Michael's College, this book has really got me thinking in terms of designing either a similar course on "Sex, Dating, and Spirituality," or perhaps having it as one major component of a "Faith and Contemporary Culture" course. I couldn't help but notice how my students last semester, while enjoying all or parts of my "Theology Through the Centuries" course, and reading the classic texts that made the bulk of that syllabus, were particularly involved in, or just plain excited by the reading of Joseph Ratzinger's/Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures. The reason for this seemed to be because of the immediate, even practical, nature of the theological questions being discussed: suddenly they saw all the stuff we had been reading suddenly becoming important and useful in the shaping of contemporary culture, politics, worldviews, economics, and the like. So maybe a whole course that addressed contemporary issues of different sorts, or from different angles, but all rooted in theological discourse. It would have to be a course where the students had already been exposed to some of the Tradition and its sources, and had begun to learn to reason in such ways. But anyway, I'm thinkin'....

Author sees wide gap between college students' faith, campus culture

By Carol Zimmermann
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Author Donna Freitas held her breath when her book, "Sex & the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America's College Campuses," was published this spring.

She was nervous that the book's frank discussion of the pervasiveness of casual sex on today's school campuses, Catholic colleges included, would not be warmly received by college leaders.

But while she was bracing herself "for the worst," as she put it, Freitas said she received an unexpected "outpouring of positive response" from people "who care deeply" about today's college students and who want to help them, including professors at Catholic colleges.

Freitas, a Catholic theologian and assistant professor of religion at Boston University, said she was encouraged not only by how "open and supportive people have been" but also by their willingness to "engage in positive conversation rather than run away" from an issue many might not want to discuss.

While Freitas was attending the Catholic Theological Society of America meeting June 5-8 in Miami, she said, several theology professors told her they plan to discuss her book in courses they are teaching this fall.

The author also has been contacted by countless parents asking her to recommend a college campus where the frequency of casual sex, or as she terms it, "hookup culture," is less prevalent.

In a recent telephone interview with Catholic News Service from her home in New York, Freitas said it's important for parents to talk to their children "way before college" about the type of school environment they might encounter.

Freitas started talking with college students about their views of sexual behavior and how these ideas or practices connected, or not, with their faith during a course she taught on dating several years ago at St. Michael's College, a Catholic college in Colchester, Vt.

In discussions with students she realized that many of them did not see how their faith had much to say about the issues they faced.

Freitas was determined to find out if this small group of students reflected a larger trend and that became the impetus for "Sex & the Soul," published by Oxford University Press.

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I had a quietly fabulous time with Jules Monday night. The scheduled Event of the evening was to watch Before Sunset together. I had bought that DVD and my copy of Before Sunrise with her back in December of 2006, and sweat through the break in not watching them on my own, to save the experience for her. I had seen them a few years earlier, and then had rented and watched them again in November and absolutely been floored by them in a way I hadn't been before. But for one reason or another, whenever Julie and I hung out, we were doing something else. So I didn't get a chance to watch Before Sunrise with her until a few months ago, and Before Sunset finally happened last night.

When I got over to their place, though, she and Jackie were in the midst of their stare-at-the-accident fascination with The Bachelorette, and so things had to be postponed for an hour while they filled me in on that piece of reality TV nonsense, which has long been their personal cocaine. So that had us laughing and talking bizarre dating dynamics, while Julie caught me up on her news here and there. We took some time there, as she filled me in on some things she wanted to talk with me about, and it proved, in a way, to be an interesting jumping-off point to the film: to move from real couple dynamics to a well-done fictional one in a kind of extreme setting, but then to use the fictional narrative to come back to the real one later in the night. She's been around the Theatre program enough that she's one of my favourite people to watch anything with, and she was technically taken with the film right away, marveling at how tight the narrative was, which was gratifying. I was surprised to have her say that she thought she preferred the second one: I wouldn't have been surprised to hear that after further viewings, but Before Sunrise is such a charmer of a masterpiece that it can leave the more complicated Before Sunset to seem less attractive by comparison, at least at first, I suspect. But I think the realism of that complexity appealed to her, though she felt ambiguous about some of the character flaws revealed in that complexity, like the question of fidelity raised by Jesse and Celine's situation.

So we worked our way through the Chianti and through some talk on the logic of fidelity, of what the human mind or spirit needs in that commitment. We didn't actually tie it into her upcoming research as she starts her Psychology Ph.D. at Stony Brook, but now as I'm typing this up, it strikes me that that might make for an interesting project in light of her focus on cognition itself. Playing the part of a theologian, that made me talk about what seemed to me to be the pure functionality of classic Christian sexual ethics, that they were not taboo-based but based on a pretty common-sense, observational reaction ingrained human psychological drives, although probably articulated in terms of "natural law" theory, but ultimately meaning the same thing. As usual, the conversation seemed to be just getting really going when I had to duck out if I was going to catch the last bus before the city system shut down at 2am.

My social streak continued last night, then, when I got together with Diane for dinner. She jumped at the chance to picnic, since she and Tim don't really get the chance with their conflicting work hours. So we went over to Metro Market and walked around the produce and deli sections, putting together a few salady things for her, and grabbing some bread and fruit and fried chicken for me. We decided to forego wine and to instead grab local soda: her pouncing on a Sprecher's Kola and me, when I inexplicably found no non-diet Sprecher's Root Beer available, grabbing a Point Root Beer instead, which I'd been meaning to try, anyway, and which proved to be well above average in quality.

We left the car parked there, after she showed me how her recent car accident in the nearby intersection went down, and we strolled over to Lake Michigan, grabbing a picnic table over by the Solomon Juneau statue where we had a great view of the sailboats playing in the light of the setting sun. Seeing those, I instantly regretted not having my camera. Amid lots of purely fun talk and laughing, it was really cool to hear something of how she's getting a sense of growing as a writer through her writing job for Discovery World, and how even what would seem to be straightforward factual or scientific writing could give her a chance to engage in unexpected creative exercises, such as her assignment to describe all the species of fish in a particular display as though she was writing wine reviews. Watching the sailboats made me recall the fun of learning to sail and windsurf with Richard Grainger in the Sailing I camp my first year at LOMC, and the thrill of getting away from the kids during our break and racing Sunfish against one another, standing off the gunwale with backs arched out over the water, straining to keep the boats running as fast before the wind as we could without the sails flipping us over. Diane and I both thought that it would be fabulous to go out on Discovery World's schooner, which neither of us had done, and she told a funny story of waiting for a particular appointment on day, and running into a strapping, gorgeous guy who she (brightly) asked if he was the person she was expecting, only to find out, in his rich English accent that, no, he was the chef on board the schooner, leaving her thinking "Of course you are!" and laughing about this vision of all the mancandy staffing the sailing vessel that she never got to go near in her work at the place.

As we finished the last of our food, we strolled down Juneau Park to the older, upper part of the Art Museum, to see if we could get out on the deck overlooking the water, which I had only really noticed for the first time from the picnic table. That was locked down, and we debated whether it was worth climbing the fence and getting caught now, or whether to save that for a different time. We went back around the front, peered in through the window at a model of a PT boat, so then I gave a brief history of PT 109, which I assumed it was, and privately marveled at how my fourth grade war histories were still floating around in my head. We settled onto a spot where we overlooked the Calatrava addition to the Musuem, leaning on the top of a wall, Peanuts-style, and Diane asked about some of what the looming application process looked like, after I had told her about getting a feeler for a systematic theology position from Pittsburg's Duquesne University, which I was kind of theo-geekily delighted to see was actually named Duquesne University of the Holy Spirit, who I happen to find very cool. So, moving eventually to sit at the foot of the Lincoln statue, I tried to make sense of that process, as well as marveling in general the simple fact that it's coming, while we also talked here-and-there of the architecture that we liked as we looked northward across the park at the old Cudahy Building and the new high-rises in the neighbourhood. The older buildings, with their penthouses six or eight stories above the street were the ones that caught my eye more, though we also laughed about the idea of dressing up and posing as through we were thinking of buying one of the new condos, "modestly priced between $649,000 and $2,499,000," just so that we could get in and eyeball them.

Diane led me down Kilbourn a few blocks and then turned down to a cute, quiet place I'd never noticed before on Cass and Wells called Buckley's Kiskeam Inn, we finished up the night sitting out at the sidewalk table with a pomegranate martini for her and a Syrah for me, just talking over our current events, and looking back over the last year at how much had changed over that time. Good times. Tonight, by contrast, I think will be largely devoted to laundry.

I was smiling earlier last week about how true this one is, and then had this scene play out again yesterday with my neighbour Kelly and her boyfriend Mark....

Another waking in the middle of the night. (Heh. Just found your note. Thanks, Em.) Took a few hours out to finally catch Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull this past evening with Mike and Donna, over at the glamourous Oriental Theatre, though not, unfortunately, in the main theatre, as it would have been if I'd seen it in the first week or so. That was just pure popcorn fun, as expected, with Spielberg enjoying himself playing with all sorts of 1950s cultural motifs.

Pulled down my copy of Jordan's A Crown of Swords for fun reading during meals, sleepless interludes, and such. My copy of Lord of Chaos is now fallen into three large chunks still hanging together in its hardcover: the rush to printing always made me feel that these were not the best-bound books in the world. But this read-through has had a bit of a nostalgic feel to me. I always remember reading the first blazing sentence of Lord of Chaos from my brother Joe's new copy, sitting cross-legged on a table in a hallway waiting on him while he was in his Portuguese class at the U of I, coincidentally as a classmate of one of my favourite L.O.M.C. campers, Dana Ingman. A Crown of Swords was the first volume of The Wheel of Time that I'd made a point of buying on the day of release, and the first one to make promotional use of that newfangled "internet," posting the Prologue for free on Tor Book's webpage, before they figured out how to charge for that, too. Reading the prologue always makes me remember walking up to Holy Cross House on a sunny day, reading a copy of the Prologue I'd printed out at the library, and of handing it around to Brett Boessen and Kate Keating, sharing the excitement of the coming story with them. I can't think of many books that have so many memories attached to the reading of it in this way, but it certainly reinforces the fact that it's fun to find friends who share our fandoms.

Miscellanea from the web that I wanted to jot down in my journal: Two news stories about Tim Russert's funeral,

Political leaders pay tribute to TV's Russert
Obama, McCain among mourners at Washington funeral Mass for Russert

and an interesting cultural essay that caught my eye reposted in crookedfingers' journal:

1958: The War of the Intellectuals
By RACHEL DONADIO

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Heh. I certainly did not mean to imply in the previous entry that I was actually considering going for the University of Durham position: I was just commenting on how much better the U.K. pay was for a non-tenure, one-year teaching gig than the American version I've foolishly done this year, to the delay of my dissertation. But I thank everyone from England for being so upbeat about the thought of having me being local for a time, and for all the dissertation-writers – and my Mom – for telling me in no uncertain terms to not take such a gig and to get the dissertation done before all other considerations.

The University of Durham – Durham, England – is offering a one-year positon teaching undergrads philosophical/systematic theology at the rate of £27,466 to £32,796 per annum. It's a one-year, crap position, if with the (for me) glamorous benefit of being in England. But given that my own one-year crap position here at Marquette has paid me more on the order of $10,000 for a year's work, with the chief benefit being the utter disruption of my ability to do dissertation research (which the Durham job would also do), I find myself wishing that I could dramatically break into sincere weeping when I look at the British offer. I think the pound is still going two-to-one against the dollar, right? Maybe I'll just publish a letter in the student newspaper and give all my students "A"s at the end of the semester in protest.

I'm curious to see such a major political voice as his has been venturing into these academic areas....

In Westminster lecture, Blair says faith can transform humanity
By Simon Caldwell
Catholic News Service

LONDON (CNS) -- Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has spoken of his "passionate" conviction that religious faith can transform humanity for the better.

Blair, 54, a former Anglican who was received into the Catholic Church just days before Christmas, said he wanted to promote the "idea of faith itself as something dynamic, modern and full of present relevance."

He told 1,600 people gathered in London's Westminster Cathedral April 3 that faith had a "major part to play in shaping the values which guide the modern world and can and should be a force for progress."

"But it has to be rescued on the one hand from the extremist and exclusionary tendency within religion today and on the other from the danger that religious faith is seen as an interesting part of history and tradition, but with nothing to say about the contemporary human condition," he said. "I see faith and reason, faith and progress, as in alliance, not contention."

His remarks came in a lecture on the subject of "Faith and Globalization," the first in a series of six speeches hosted by the Archdiocese of Westminster on "Faith and Life in Britain."

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Victory! Word has come that, as expected, Erik successfully defended his dissertation yesterday at Boston College.

Emily/friede  sent me an interesting article on the current popular image of the humanities professor as a weak expert on obscure irrelevancies who teaches in order to take advantage of the sexual possibilities of his students. It delves into where that particular stereotype or myth comes from, and then dives into the real possibilities of a love that teachers and students rightly share, a love of a subject, or of learning itself. The essay then goes on to make the most improbable (for our culture) argument that "the 'eros of souls,' in Alan Bloom’s Platonic phrase — 'brain sex,' in plainer language — is not only higher than the eros of bodies, it is more satisfying." This is presupposition behind the motives of Mel Gibson's character in the movie adaptation of The Man Without A Face, his directorial debut and my favourite film about teaching because of just this point of what can deeply develop in a teaching relationship.

In the popular imagination, humanities professors don’t have anything to be ambitious about. No one really knows what they do, and to the extent that people do know, they don’t think it’s worth doing — which is why, when the subject of humanistic study is exposed to public view, it is often ridiculed as trivial, arcane, or pointless. Other received ideas come into play here: “those who can’t do, teach”; the critic as eunuch or parasite; the ineffective intellectual; tenure as a system for enshrining mediocrity. It may be simply because academics don’t pursue wealth, power, or, to any real extent, fame that they are vulnerable to such accusations. In our culture, the willingness to settle for something less than these Luciferian goals is itself seen as emasculating. Academics are ambitious, but in a weak, pathetic way. This may also explain why they are uniquely open to the charge of passionlessness. No one expects a lawyer to be passionate about the law: he’s doing it for the money. No one expects a plumber to be passionate about pipes: he’s doing it to support his family. But a professor’s only excuse for doing something so trivial and accepting such paltry rewards for it is his love for the subject. If that’s gone, what remains? Nothing but baseless vanity and feeble ambition. Professors, in the popular imagination, are absurd little men puffing themselves up about nothing. It’s no wonder they need to be taught a lesson.

...

Love is a flame, and the good teacher raises in students a burning desire for his or her approval and attention, his or her voice and presence, that is erotic in its urgency and intensity. The professor ignites these feelings just by standing in front of a classroom talking about Shakespeare or anthropology or physics, but the fruits of the mind are that sweet, and intellect has the power to call forth new forces in the soul. Students will sometimes mistake this earthquake for sexual attraction, and the foolish or inexperienced or cynical instructor will exploit that confusion for his or her own gratification. But the great majority of professors understand that the art of teaching consists not only of arousing desire but of redirecting it toward its proper object, from the teacher to the thing taught. Teaching, Yeats said, is lighting a fire, not filling a bucket, and this is how it gets lit. The professor becomes the student’s muse, the figure to whom the labors of the semester — the studying, the speaking in class, the writing — are consecrated. The alert student understands this. In talking to one of my teaching assistants about these matters, I asked her if she’d ever had a crush on an instructor when she was in college. Yes, she said, a young graduate student. “And did you want to have sex with him?” I asked. “No,” she said, “I wanted to have brain sex with him.”

– William Deresiewicz, "Love on Campus: Why We Should Understand, and Even Encourage, A Certain Sort of Erotic Intensity Between Student and Professor" in The American Scholar, Summer 2007

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From my current dissertation reading, which I was able to do maybe a whole 60 pages of while babysitting the nieces since Thursday the 13th (more on that later):

In the course on Blondel, John [McNeill, S.J.] basically taught us his dissertation. He told us that when he first read L'Action, he thought it the most original philosophical work he had studied. When, however, he completed his analysis of the philosophical sources on which Blondel drew, John wondered if the book contained a single original idea. John's analysis of the sources of L'Action gave me a sound insight into the way the human mind creates, and that insight ultimately shaped my own approach to creative speculation. I did not deem Blondel's dependence on other minds for basic insights unusual or exceptional. I rather suspected that most original thinkers remain significantly beholden to the thoughts of other minds. That fact, however, did not make them any the less original; for human originality derives not so much from the novelty of one's ideas individually and separately considered but from the novel way in which one synthesizes previously unrelated insights. Blondel had written a very creative philosophical work because, even though he derived most of his basic insights from other thinkers, no one else had put those ideas together in the precise manner in which he had. Thereafter, I took Blondel's approach to creativity as my model.

– Donald Gelpi, S.J., in Closer Walk: Confessions of a U.S. Jesuit Yat, p. 108.

This insight into creativity reminded me of another passage where an author articulated the same basic insight:

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring two pence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

– C.S. Lewis, in "The New Men," chapter 11 of Beyond Personality: Or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity in Mere Christianity.

One key problem that seems to lurk in many students' minds is this cultural stereotype of what I once heard CNN describe as "the eternal war between science and religion." Now, if you know anything about the history of science, not only do you know that this perceived conflict only goes back to the philosophers who proclaimed their anti-Christian agenda as "the Enlightenment," that is, about 200 years at the most, but even more absurdly that what we call "modern science" and its attendant miracles of technology are actually an intellectual outgrowth of Christian theology. Had you never had the huge assumption of the thirteenth century Scholastics that because the universe was created by a God of logic that therefore the universe had an inherent logic that could be described in the logic of mathematics, you never would gain the centuries of intellectual investment that it took to produce our basic sciences before they started paying off in the concrete results of our technology. That's all straightforward History of Science, which I first learned from a man of Hindu sensibilities, who fully acknowledged the difference between what Christian Europe could have produced from all of the more haphazard and unsystematic sciences of other cultures throughout history that didn't have the theology to make the leap of faith required to assume that there was a logic behind the universe capable of being discovered.

Since then, this was perhaps the most important essay I've ever read about science and religion, written by the evolutionary biologist from Harvard, the late Professor Stephen Jay Gould, himself an agnostic of Jewish heritage, whose popular writing on evolutionary theory has been so well received. I read his magisterial The Mismeasure of Man as a sophomore in my Racism in American Society and Culture course, and that damning history and critique of the scientific establishment's construction of "scientific racism" in the 19th and 20th centuries has stayed in my memory as a model of the power that clear scholarly writing can achieve. The similarly-powerful essay of his that I reproduce here I read in the South Bend Public Library one summer afternoon, I think, where I believe it was reprinted in an issue of Commonweal. I've thought of it quite a bit since then, and cited its thinking and its mere existence to students concerned with the matter. It popped into my head again in the shower the other day as I thought over my students' discussions on the Aristotelian revolution in 13th century Catholic theology, and I just thought to go looking for it and was pleased to be able to find it online, and indeed, to discover that it is one of his more noteworthy and much-discussed essays.

I call it the most important essay I've read on the matter not because it was particularly new in its thinking. It's not. In fact, it's main point is pretty much straightforward, long-established Catholic thinking on the matter. In fact, it's kind of amusing to admit, but I think it's important as an appeal to authority. Now, normally an appeal to authority is seen as the sort of thing that "religion" does: appeal to the authority of Scripture, or a Pope, or the Magisterium – that sort of thing. It's the kind of appeal that's used to discredit religion as not having any greater proof for its claims. In fact, though, the appeal to authority functions in most of our lives, as we are all mostly not experts in all of the fields, topics and questions that we interact with through our lives. In this case, to hear a scientist who holds great authority in his field say that there's no intrinsic conflict between science and religion ends up having much more weight for the person who has been conditioned by our culture to view religion with Enlightenment skepticism. And so I appeal to Gould's authority for this purpose, though I could cite older, more long-established theologians on the same point, or appeal simply to a logical argument on my own, laying out the evidence for my listener or reader. Yet I know that, in fact, the authority of the Harvard agnostic evolutionary biologist will have a weight that even just a glance at the pure logic of the argument will not. That's not "scientific" of even the hard skeptic, I'm amused to note, but it's the way things are.

Now, I will say that I'm not sure that I'd entirely sign off on what Gould says. I think he makes a common mistake when he says that the realm of religious thought has to do with "the search for proper ethical values and the spiritual meaning of our lives." While that's true, I don't think it's the whole truth of the matter. There is a tendency today to reduce "religion" to ethics or morality, and maybe that business about "meaning" or "the afterlife" as well. Christianity, at least, cannot let theology be quite so limited. Gould speaks here of "nonoverlapping magisteria," or NOMA, as the principle has been abbreviated. It seems indisputable to me that "science" and theology (the quotes are simply to acknowledge the vague or popular term: theology is "science" too, after all) have different methodologies. But I also think they have the same subject and goal, to the extent that one is general enough to call their subject and goal "reality" or "truth."

Theology's task is just as much the pursuit of factual truth as is the physical sciences': it is not about imaginary stories whose goals are simply "personal" and aimed at some kind of cheap psychological "comfort." To the extent that they are both interested in the truth about reality, sciences' insights about the nature of the physical universe are key data for theology. Gould acknowledges that the fields do rub up against one another: I think that to too quickly call them "nonoverlapping" might dogmatically blind us to the necessary interactions of the two fields, and unnecessarily complicate the important task of their dialogue and collaboration. And it's a critical collaboration: one that has been destructively distorted in the past by theology interfering with science, and destructively distorted today by scientists dictating philosophical or theological conclusions under the mask of the authority of the physical sciences. Gould's essay goes a long step toward a scientific declaration of modesty that can help in restoring that balance.

Nonoverlapping Magisteria
by Stephen Jay Gould

Incongruous places often inspire anomalous stories. In early 1984, I spent several nights at the Vatican housed in a hotel built for itinerant priests. While pondering over such puzzling issues as the intended function of the bidets in each bathroom, and hungering for something other than plum jam on my breakfast rolls (why did the basket only contain hundreds of identical plum packets and not a one of, say, strawberry?), I encountered yet another among the innumerable issues of contrasting cultures that can make life so interesting. Our crowd (present in Rome for a meeting on nuclear winter sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences) shared the hotel with a group of French and Italian Jesuit priests who were also professional scientists.

At lunch, the priests called me over to their table to pose a problem that had been troubling them. What, they wanted to know, was going on in America with all this talk about "scientific creationism"? One asked me: "Is evolution really in some kind of trouble. and if so, what could such trouble be? I have always been taught that no doctrinal conflict exists between evolution and Catholic faith, and the evidence for evolution seems both entirely satisfactory and utterly overwhelming. Have I missed something?"

A lively pastiche of French, Italian, and English conversation then ensued for half an hour or so, but the priests all seemed reassured by my general answer: Evolution has encountered no intellectual trouble; no new arguments have been offered. Creationism is a homegrown phenomenon of American sociocultural history—a splinter movement (unfortunately rather more of a beam these days) of Protestant fundamentalists who believe that every word of the Bible must be literally true, whatever such a claim might mean. We all left satisfied, but I certainly felt bemused by the anomaly of my role as a Jewish agnostic, trying to reassure a group of Catholic priests that evolution remained both true and entirely consistent with religious belief.

Another story in the same mold: I am often asked whether I ever encounter creationism as a live issue among my Harvard undergraduate students. I reply that only once, in nearly thirty years of teaching, did I experience such an incident. A very sincere and serious freshman student came to my office hours with the following question that had clearly been troubling him deeply: "I am a devout Christian and have never had any reason to doubt evolution, an idea that seems both exciting and particularly well documented. But my roommate, a proselytizing Evangelical, has been insisting with enormous vigor that I cannot be both a real Christian and an evolutionist. So tell me, can a person believe both in God and evolution?" Again, I gulped hard, did my intellectual duty, and reassured him that evolution was both true and entirely compatible with Christian belief—a position I hold sincerely, but still an odd situation for a Jewish agnostic.

These two stories illustrate a cardinal point, frequently unrecognized but absolutely central to any understanding of the status and impact of the politically potent, fundamentalist doctrine known by its self-proclaimed oxymoron as "scientific creationism"—the claim that the Bible is literally true, that all organisms were created during six days of twenty-four hours, that the earth is only a few thousand years old, and that evolution must therefore be false. Creationism does not pit science against religion (as my opening stories indicate), for no such conflict exists. Creationism does not raise any unsettled intellectual issues about the nature of biology or the history of life. Creationism is a local and parochial movement, powerful only in the United States among Western nations, and prevalent only among the few sectors of American Protestantism that choose to read the Bible as an inerrant document, literally true in every jot and tittle.

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Did anyone pay any attention to the curious story about Pope Benedict XVI and the protests at Rome's Sapienza University this past week? I think that it might become one of those episodes that becomes larger in later history, as the significance of certain events gets taken as emblematic of historical shifts taking place at a given time. In this case, I think it might become the opposite of the infamous "Galileo Affair," to which the players in this event make direct reference. The incident of Galileo's trial before the Inquisition regarding the Copernican theory of the heliocentric solar system – the sun being the center of our star system and not the Earth being at the center of things – became the great symbolic myth of the Enlightenment philosophers in the 18th century, and their anti-Christian program: Galileo's trial became emblematic of obstinate, ignorant, anti-intellectual Religion being defeated by the always-wise, ever-progressive and irresistible onward march of Science into the future.

Yet anyone who does the slightest reading on the matter knows that this simplistic spin on the event was hardly the way of things. The Galileo affair was an historical footnote until it was dusted off and used for Enlightenment propaganda. Galileo was not opposing a Religious view with a Scientific one: his world did not have our later, absolute division of such things. Copernicus himself was a cleric, likely a priest: one might just as easily say that the heliocentric system was then a "priestly" theory. Galileo was not challenging the authority of Scripture as such: there was no unified theory of Scripture in his post-Reformation world to oppose in such a simple dichotomy as "science vs. religion" or "science vs. the Bible" in the way people like to put things. In fact, he appealed in such things to a far older interpreter of Scripture who had high status in theology and philosophy – Augustine of Hippo, who had died over a thousand years earlier, and who, like Galileo, dismissed simple-minded literalism as unworthy of the depths of the documents of Scripture. Galileo's actual trouble came more from challenging the Aristotelian basis of the contemporary science of his day, that is, challenging the current scientific establishment, and claiming for his own experimental results an authority they did not yet possess. It also didn't help that he got into a political mess by getting petulant with the very Pope who had been supporting and authorizing his work. No scientist today who so "jumped the gun" on claiming success for his findings would be accorded the "scientific sainthood" Galileo is: his story has been co-opted by those creating their own narrative of the Modern "conflict of science and religion," ignoring entirely the origin of Modern science in a Medieval and Christian context, not a Modern and Secular one.

Which brings us to the curious events of this past week, events which I wonder whether in the future will come to seem equally emblematic, but in a reverse way. It seems clear to me that Western science and theology, with their commitments to the idea of an objective truth, against much of the thrust of contemporary Western philosophy which has given up on truth, are inevitably going to increase in their collaboration. As the myth of a conflict of science and religion begins to fade away with the Modern worldview as we move into Post-Modernity (whatever that is), I can't help but wonder if the anti-papal fervour displayed this week – is it overstating to call it hysteria? – might come to symbolize the ignorance of the dogmatically anti-religious viewpoint that doesn't recognize the fundamental harmonies between the quests of science and Jewish/Christian religion.

What's most striking to me is the way in which the faculty and student protesters – so locked into the myth of "science versus religion" – failed to understand the clear language of support that Ratzinger used in his 1990 statement (included below). If anything, Ratzinger defended the sciences against the philosophical skewing in the Modern philosophical school of the Enlightenment that produced the great modern myth of unwavering antagonism between the two quests for truth, and attempts to cut lose the sciences from any wider contextualization in the world, including in ethics, which is not the same thing as religion, but which religion and philosophy have always included. Making science ask questions of itself should hardly be interpreted as a fundamental attack on science itself. I hope the episode will have the effect of so embarrassing the traditional reactionaries who fancy themselves the speakers for their hostile vision of "science" so that people capable of actual rational conversation will come forward in leading dialogue with theology.

Included behind the cut are articles from the week:

Ratzinger's 1990 remarks on Galileo
University students attend audience after pope cancels visit
In undelivered speech, pope urges scholars, students to seek truth
All Things Catholic by John L. Allen, Jr.: Update on La Sapienza spat
The pope, modern science, and a canary in the coal mine
Do the homework: University fiasco shows scholars miss pope's point
Tens of thousands fill St. Peter's Square to show support for pope
Rejection of Pope's speech is fear of dialogue between faith and reason, professor says
The text of the Letter of Protest

( Read more... )

I can begin by copying the words of my journal entry from the other day: "I've been underground the last several days, doing dissertating stuff and preparing for the new Theology Through The Centuries course with Dan, who is also teaching a section of it." It has been keeping me away from my own journaling for a bit, much less trying to keep up with everyone else's.

But I have to say: what amazing days! The dissertating has been pure fun, a real brainstorming period for the whole rest of the project, with all sorts of organizational, structural or programmatic ideas coming to me. The part of the project that is "constructive" – that is, attempting to do something really constructive or new in the field – has been especially exciting, as I'm finding new directions to take the material that have got me rather excited. But the continuing sessions of planning with Dan have been a quietly thrilling experience. I was again over at his place the other evening for a long work session.

First there was some playing with the kids, and then being treated to a sweet root soup that I remember them making last winter, and a later dessert of mint chocolate chip that Amy had fetched for the occasion. It was Dan's night putting down Owen while Amy took Anna, and I kept my streak going by going in to the screaming Owen after Dan had left him, and simply saying to the 16-month-old, "Dude: it's time to sleep. Just lay down and go to bed." No sooner were the words out of my mouth than he dropped down face-first, quieted down, and lay still, other than some sullen-appearing kicking of his mattress. I have no idea why he does this for me, but it cracks me up. I told them I have the strangest feeling that he sees me as some sort of 1 year-old analogy to a frat brother.

But then the work with Dan got going for the next several hours. What's been so cool about this, I finally realized, is that I've never constructed a course with someone else before. I've never been around anyone who was going to teach the same thing as me. Dan and I have a few variations in our reading list, and more in our reading schedule, but there is a considerable amount of overlap: more than when we had started. To have another expert regarding the material, debating readings and possible lessons, someone who also has teaching experience (he taught junior high, which I consider to be more hard-core than my high school experience, and we're both of the opinion a lot of undergraduate courses could be tougher than they are), really made designing the course a pleasure in itself, but even more, it refined the course. This is not the course I would have designed on my own. Altered reading lists (we both separately had been thinking of adding Basil of Caesarea's On The Holy Spirit to the readings, and subsequently selected some passages we thought worked), different lesson styles, rubrics for daily assignments and discussion: all of these came out of our sessions, and as a result the class will be different from anything I've ever taught in its pedagogical approach. I'm excited and nervous. Dan's section went well today, he thinks, and my two are tomorrow. I include the reading list for those interested.

( THEO 106 – Theology Through The Centuries – Reading Schedule )

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