The Rise of the Preppers

Posted on January 30, 2012 by Kenny Paul Smith

In an insightful online piece (that includes historical analysis from Bulletin contributor Cathy Gutierrez), we learn of “a growing subculture of Americans who refer to themselves informally as ‘preppers,”’ that is, folks stockpiling food and firearms alongside innumerable other supplies in hopes of surviving the troubled times they see on the horizon.  “Some are driven by a fear of imminent societal collapse, others are worried about terrorism, and many have a vague concern that an escalating series of natural disasters is leading to some type of environmental cataclysm.” In contrast to the survivalists of the 1990s, however, self-identified preppers are not so easily discerned. “You could be living next door to a prepper and never even know it. Many suburbanites are turning spare rooms into food pantries and are going for survival training on the weekends.”

While the emergence of “Prepperism” (if you will) surely represents a financial boom for marketers of survival goods and those offering daily apocalyptic visions by way of radio, TV, and online programs (see, for instance, Survival Blog, The Coming Economic Collapse Blog, and of course Glenn Beck TV), what strikes me about this movement is its rather gnostic character, and how this relates to its ability to satisfy adherents. For, the cognitive and ritual worlds of preppers would seem to contain more than simply apocalyptic expectations, but also esoteric knowledge and practices that offer safe passage through the gates of catastrophe. Only the preppers know what is coming, and only they are engaged in the proper sort of mercantile and home management practices that ensure survival, and perhaps even flourishing in a post-civilizational world. Those who do not possess this knowledge and fail to perform these practices are, essentially, doomed to suffer and perish.

That a significant number find prepper imaginative, ritual, and social worlds enormously satisfying should hardly be surprisingly. They offer knowledge of the future that only the few are capable of grasping, a set of authoritative practices for establishing one’s shelter from the coming storm, and also a sense of evangelical urgency: if we can get this truth out to as many others as possible before it’s too late, they might be saved from the coming apocalypse as well.

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Atheists Are in the Game of Orthdoxy

Posted on January 27, 2012 by Craig Martin

The Friendly Atheist wrote late last year that “Survey Says Catholics Are Becoming Less Catholic.” A friend of mine shared it on Facebook and spurred a debate between me and him: I thought it was ironic that atheists would engage in a game of Catholic orthodoxy—drawing boundaries around what counts as authentic Catholicism and what does not.

That this author was engaging in orthodoxy games is evident in the title; the idea that Catholics are becoming less Catholic implies that there is a Catholic ideal from which there is a growing distance.

In addition, the author of the blog writes,

Do Catholics understand that they’re supposed to believe the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Christ?

50% of Catholics don’t even know that. They think it’s only symbolic. In other words, half the Catholics in America don’t know one of the most important beliefs about their own faith.

The first sentence is interesting: Catholics are “supposed” to believe in the doctrine of transubstantiation. But why? According to what authorities? Perhaps according to the authority of the Catholic church in Rome—which is precisely the authority this atheist presumably rejects. The sentence only makes sense if this atheist accepts the authority of the Catholic church.

The last sentence is also highly problematic. It seems to be saying: this is a part of Catholic faith that Catholics don’t have faith in. The claim makes no sense unless we posit a “real,” “authentic” or ideal form of Christianity. But where does this “authentic” form of Christianity exist? How can we account for it without positing a supernatural essence? Has this atheist swapped one set of supernatural entities for another?

On one level it’s somewhat ironic to me that atheists would be in the game of Catholic orthodoxy; on another level it makes perfect sense: by imagining the boundaries of Catholic orthodoxy in such narrow terms, these atheists can claim those rendered “unorthodox” as on their own side of the boundary marker—making it the case that atheism is winning the battle of attrition with the “authentic” Catholic church. This is clearly what’s at stake, as the author concludes:

It also means those of us who criticize the Church, point out the obvious lies, mock the silly beliefs, castigate the Church for its moral failings, and make the case for secular alternatives to the supposed “benefits” of religion are doing a wonderful job.

We still have a long way to go but it’s wearing off on a lot of Catholics.

Eventually, maybe they’ll muster up the courage to shed the label entirely.

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Announcement: Religion and the Media

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Craig Martin

The Centre for Freedom of the Media at the University of Sheffield has just launched a new blog on “Religion and the Media,” in part organized by James Crossley, who many of you may know. Check it out!

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Book Notes: Violence as Worship: Religious Wars in the Age of Globalization, by Hans G. Kippenberg (Stanford University Press, 2011)

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Kenny Paul Smith

By Ipsita Chatterjea

In his latest book, Kippenberg argues analysis of religious violence should not seek to sanction the purity, authenticity or legitimacy of religious groups and deem others aberrant as this distorts our capacity to observe.  For Kippenberg, the mis-handling of Jonestown as feared of by J. Z. Smith was manifest in the Waco disaster. Or, Kippenberg asserts that when academics credential the alterity of religious groups and public officials fail to understand the recursive impacts of religious belief and socio-political activity, potentially preventable harm occurs.  Kippenberg’s other case studies: Iran, Hezbollah, the Palestinian-Israeli crisis, American apocalyptic Christianity, and 9/11 demonstrate how macro-scale religious violence is observably a function of religious belief and perceptions of individual agency, communality, and autonomy. He indicates that these issues are also causative factors in the choice of non-violent religious responses by these same communities.

Kippenberg’s handling of violence as a religious act has broader applications for how analysts consider religion, agency and causation. The book is enormously useful for the analysis of religious and civic activity. In line with his observations on the problem of sanctioning legitimacy,  he asserts that analysts must try to understand the internal logic or plausibility of actions taken rather than assume brainwashing or false consciousness on the part of those studied. Furthermore, analysts must take seriously the claims made about how activity is religious for the agents profiled and then situate those decisions as adherence or rejection of a communally understood array of options.

 

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Tebow and the Religious Body (Politic)

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Donovan Schaefer

Now that Denver has fallen out of the playoffs, I want to write an homage to a figure I, like so many others, find fascinating: Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow.  Carter Turner over at Religion Dispatches has suggested that the “real reason” for “Tebow fever” was the theological investment that atheists and theists alike had in watching Tebow succeed or fail.  I think that’s absolutely right: Tebow’s body became a sort of theological battleground for broader religious and cultural forces.  But I also think there’s an even more elementary reason, one that becomes apparent when we think about Tebow not just as a proxy for doctrine, but as a particular religious body.

Feminism, poststructuralism, and decolonial studies in the humanities have made scholars more and more aware of the importance of bodies.  Whereas the logocentric western tradition focused on words–the creations of the intellect–21st century global scholarship sees words as a secondary function of embodiment.  In religious studies, scholars such as Talal Asad, Kimerer LaMothe, and Saba Mahmood have called on us to explore how bodies, through practices, are constituted as religious subjects.  Bodies become religious through performance, through embodied exercises that, through repetition, inscribe us with the modalities of a religious “ethics.”  But embodiment is more than just practices.  I here want to suggest a different direction for understanding the relationship between religion and bodies.

Here’s something I often ask my students to do: Look at this body.  How does religion converge on this body?

Religious Body

Let me tell you what I see, using my own bodily practice, martial arts, as a lens.  This is a body I would not want to fight.  It’s not just about dense muscle lines, the sheer evidence of physical strength, reach, and an intricately arranged posing that suggests bodily self-awareness and sharp muscular intelligence.  This body is compelling.  It draws the eye.  You want to watch it.

This is more dangerous than physical strength–the kind of strength you build on the bench press or the curl.  It’s a “presence.”  The kind of strength that stops bodies in their tracks without landing a punch.  And the kind of strength that draws allies, that rewrites the broader bodily landscape on which conflict happens.  This body has what we might call, following Max Weber, “charisma.”

This way of looking at bodies helps us think again about a fact that has become dramatically apparent in the past two years: Tebow is fascinating.  People love to talk about him, love to love him, love to hate him.  Tebow fever didn’t just happen.  It was and is something is felt–viscerally–by millions of bodies around the world.

On the one hand, Tebow is a leader–an emblematic body–for millions of Christians who see in him a dignification of their faith.  Faith here is not an abstract personal belief.  It is an identity formation, an Us.  Tebow is the champion of a certain Christian Us, an embodiment of values and a leader who rallies the believers.  As a champion, he doesn’t win through debate, he wins through charisma.  He is a hero, resplendent on the battlefield.

At the same time, Tebow is fascinating to other groups–to other bodies–that are frustrated with or skeptical of the Christian Us–and particularly the Christian Us that has managed to insinuate itself into the corridors of power in America through one (but only one) of its instantiations, the Christian Right, a major driver in contemporary Republican politics.  These bodies, as Turner pointed out, are interested in Tebow’s failure, the fall of the enemy’s flag.

My argument, however, is this: this profile of the divergent responses to the nexus of religious and cultural forces that converge on the image of Tebow’s body would be irrelevant and unread if Tim Tebow were a schlub–a homely, uninteresting, modest body, the kind of body that bus drivers drive past at the bus stop.  It is also an open question to me how we would be responding to Tebow if he were not a white body.  Those who want to challenge Tebow, to fight Tebow, to talk about Tebow are drawn in by the seductions of this image–the power of Tebow’s body–no less than those who are so ardently admiring of Tebow that criticism of him becomes a political rallying cry.  Tebow’s body is a magnetic body, a charismatic body.  It bends other bodies towards it–in both positive and critical ways.

This, then, is one of the main ways that religion happens–how identities, beliefs, and affects form and fuse: not through the advance of doctrine, but through the magnetism of religious bodies.

Thanks to William Eric Pedersen for talking this post out with me and pointing me in the direction of the unanswered question on race.

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Lucian’s Satires and the Discursive Role of the Charlatan

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Philip L. Tite

By Philip L. Tite

I am continually fascinated with the discursive techniques that people use to discredit competing religious groups or cultic practices (especially as such language tends to reinforce the polemicist’s own group or worldview). Recently, while working on my next book, I bumped up into this type of narrative “positioning” (to evoke the theoretical work of Harré and Langenhove) in the motif of the charlatan in Late Antiquity, where “false” teachers or philosophers are re-presented in such a way as to not only call into question such philosophers’ teachings but also their motives (regardless of the veracity of such teachings). In this blog, I would like to share some of my thoughts on this topic (largely taken from that book manuscript).

Perhaps the best examples of such false teachers are found in the second-century satires of Lucian. In his delightful work Piscator, Lucian has Frankness draw the attention of Philosophy and the various great philosophers (temporarily brought back from the dead) to the false philosophers who merely use the title as a pretext for personal gain. We begin with the mistaken belief that Frankness (i.e., “frank speech” or parrhesia which embodies Lucian’s voice) has slandered Philosophy herself, yet it is Philosophy that corrects Plato’s accusation early on: “Careful! Perhaps his abuse was not directed against Philosophy, but against imposters who do much that is vile in our name” including setting “doctrines for sale at two obols apiece” (15) (translation from Loeb Classical Library). The rest of the text uncovers these false philosophers, calling them into judgment. In the process, we learn more about what motives define these charlatans. The primary motivations, which ironically stand in contradictions with the very doctrines being promoted, include an obsession with financial gain (“they teach these very doctrines for pay, and worship the rich, and are agog after money”) while trying to establish themselves within elite social relations that they have no just claim to (“and elbow one another at the portals of the rich and take part in great banquets, where they pay vulgar compliments” and act disorderly) (34). Greed drives these charlatans to not only demand gifts from others, but, in turn, refuse to give anything to others in need (35). Later in the text, when all the philosophers are summoned from the town by Philosophy, very few philosophers show up until, at Frankness’s suggestion, they are promised various gifts. Philosophy’s response sums up Lucian’s disdain: “The Acropolis is full in a trice as the noisily settle in place, and everywhere are begging-bags and flattery, beards and shamelessness, staves and gluttony, syllogisms and avarice,” to which Frankness adds, “These cheats are more convincing than the genuine philosophers” (42). Note especially Lucian’s use of antithesis to undermine these false philosophers. This polemical device demonstrates that these would-be philosophers only have the external visage of a philosopher, but lack the correct moral character – i.e., the internal motivations do not correspond, but rather abuse, the external appearance.

Later, when fishing for the false philosophers that flee, figs and gold are used as bait. Lucian highlights that charlatans are those who are out for sordid gain, in this case primarily wealth and social prestige (i.e., honorable places at elite banquets, thus abusing the patronage system).

Glycon Sock Puppet, by Mark Stafford (http://www.hocus-baloney.com/)

Lucian’s polemical barbs are not limited to a generalized criticism of the degradation of “true” philosophy within the various schools, but are extended to specific cult leaders who were his contemporaries. In Alexander the False Prophet, Alexander the priest of Glycon is attacked as turning a quick profit from trumped up divinations (23). Indeed, Alexander is characterized as being motivated by wealth, specifically in pursuing the rich (16), as well as desiring a reputation (e.g., in his relations to Rutilianus) and, perhaps most vividly set forth by the narrative, his sexual appetites, including young boys and married women – with the praise of their husbands no less! (41-42). Noteworthy is the use of “the kiss” for both the boys and the women. Lucian claims that Alexander would “not … greet anyone over eighteen years with his lips, or to embrace and kiss him; he kissed only the young, extending his hand to the others to be kissed by them. They were called ‘those within the kiss’” (41). Similarly, those women that Alexander desired to have sexual relations with would be “deem[ed] … worthy of a kiss” (42). A ritualized kiss is incorporated into the prophet’s interactions with his followers, using the kiss to demarcate degrees of access or acceptance by Alexander. Lucian, of course, casts this ritual act into an immoral light. Under the pen of Lucian, Alexander becomes the quintessential representative of the charlatan trope, though he is not the only one to fall under Lucian’s polemic.

Closely related to early Christian circles is Lucian’s The Passing of Peregrinus. Here we find Proteus Peregrinus – a once Christian, once Cynic philosopher or teacher – that is castigated as a charlatan preying upon the ignorant masses. Evidently, Peregrinus gained a prestigious position within Christian circles. When he was imprisoned, these Christians seem to have viewed him as a martyr figure, rather than, as Lucian saw him, as a scoundrel. Peregrinus’s motivation is the “reputation … and notoriety-seeking that he was enamoured of,” which was nicely given him by these simple folk along with a great deal of money: “much money came to him from them by reason of his imprisonment, and he procured not a little revenue from it.” While Peregrinus is not characterized as seeking sexual pleasures, he does fit the other two elements of the charlatan trope that we find addressed by ancient writers, both those outside and within early Christian circles: a desire for a lasting reputation (so significant in an honor/shame culture) and material wealth. Whether Lucian’s descriptions of such teachers were accurate or polemical distortion is beside the point. His barbs effectively illustrate the trope of the charlatan.

In the above examples, there are at least two insightful observations that can be made about this motif: (1) There is a humorous side to the polemic. Lucian (unlike, e.g., Irenaeus in Against Heresies 1.13.3, where the motif is applied to Marcus “the Magician”) is trying to make us laugh at those he is attacking. The humor itself functions to undermine the “false prophet”. I’ve included a delightful and humorous image of Glycon, as a sock puppet (by Mark Stafford), that I found on the Internet that nicely highlights the whimsical, humorous side of such rhetoric (Stafford also has some other wonderful art pieces using religious humor). (2) The focus is less on actual doctrines or practices, let alone the “authenticity” of the experiential moments of those “deluded” by such prophets/philosophers, and more on the motives of the leading figure. This is not a debate. Rather, it is an attack on the character of the person who is seen as a foundation of the group or movement. The motives of desiring financial gain, sexual exploitation, and establishing an enduring reputation or legacy do not appear in all instances of the charlatan motif, but they are common enough as focal points. To question the teacher’s character is to undermine the competing social group.

Discursive positioning such as we see in Lucian’s satires is not limited to the ancient world. The late 20th century is filled with examples of religious leaders who have been cast into the role of the charlatan. Whether a particular figure or group lives up to the role imposed on them is not the point, but rather that in-group/out-group social distinctions are effectively drawn up through the employment of such rhetorical techniques. Identifying and explaining such employment – asking for whose advantage is such language used, against whom is it applied, and for what hoped for benefits (materially, socially, ideologically) – is, in part, the task of the scholar. Not in a normative sense of justifying or countering such language use, but in the explanatory sense of elucidating processes of human conflict.

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The Existential Work of the Jedi

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Kenny Paul Smith

In a Bulletin post from August 2011, I speculated about the likely religious future of George Lucas’ still wildly popular, and globally distributed, Star Wars universe. Might figures such as the Jedi Knight come to play an increasingly explicit role in popular religious imaginations, practices, and institutions?

Typically, scholars of new religious movements assess such queries by looking to large sociological surveys for the number and percentage of citizens who self-identify as adherents of specific religious institutions, in this case “Jediism.” This approach certainly has its merits, as it allows us to quickly identify explicit shifts in religious self-identification, such as the 2011 Czech Republic census which noted that more than 15,000 citizens chose “Jedi Knights” as their religious preference, and those from a decade earlier suggesting similarly impressive numbers in Australia (70,000), Great Britain (390,000), and elsewhere.

Of course, interpreting these numbers is another matter altogether. In nations of many millions of people, they represent very small percentages indeed, typically less than 1%. Moreover, it is not certain what percentage of Jedi intend their adherence ironically or as a mode of resistance to being asked such questions to begin with, as opposed to more traditionally religious motives. That said, the assumption that religious identity necessarily requires a strong cognitive component such as sincere belief or devout practice is at odds with the reasons that many (though surely not all) people see themselves as religious (e.g., because they were raised in a given tradition, because they want to provide an ethical foundation for their children, because of the social contact religious communities tend to offer, because they represent a potentially interesting diversion, etc.).

Alongside religious self-identification, we might also look at the existential and cultural work being performed by the resources under consideration. For Lucas’ Star Wars imaginary has become entangled in all sorts of entertaining, economically profitable, and just plain interesting, forms of cultural production, including (but by no means limited to): online videos gone viral (e.g., Jedi Kittens, Jedi Squirrels, and a day in the life of a lazy Jedi), television commercials, online gaming communities, martial arts, fast food, and even a science-fiction-themed brothel. More, it has inspired popular artwork of so-called “Jedi saints,” childhood education prorgams, an imaginative setting for a recent Jedi & Sith marriage (see picture above), and Christmas nativity scenes featuring “the chosen one, Luke Skywalker.”

The data created by this line of investigation, like that of large scale studies, is by no means unambiguous. Are these, alongside the new Jedi churches that are thriving online, signs that Jediisms are primed to flourish within the religious mainstream in America and elsewhere? Many will no doubt respond that such a suggestion is itself worthy of science fiction, since the Star Wars universe is, at the end of the day, purely a work of the human imagination. The same of course could be said of any religious world we might inhabit, though we typically advance such claims about the religious worlds of other folks‘. More, many of those inspired by Star Wars themes perceive them as especially well suited to challenges within their actual, lived social worlds. As one Jedi martial arts instructor explains, “What we’re attempting to do is focusing on elements that have to do with really important components in life,” for instance, teaching children self-defense, but also how to remain calm and at peace under difficult circumstances.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Religion across Boundaries: An Interview with Dawne McCance

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Donovan Schaefer

I interviewed Dawne McCance in fall of 2011 about her book, Derrida on Religion: Thinker of Differance (Equinox Publishing, 2008).  She suggested several avenues for connecting Derrida’s work to contemporary conversations going on now in the humanities around disciplinarity, religion, ethics, and critical animal studies.  A Distinguished Professor of Religion at the University of Manitoba, her new book, Critical Animal Studies: An Introduction is forthcoming from SUNY.

Donovan Schaefer: You mention by name many of the philosophers Derrida was in conversation with in his work: Plato and Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Levi-Strauss, Gadamer, de Man, Searle, Habermas, and others. Where do you see Derrida’s points of contact with the study of religion?

Dawne McCance: In this book what I attempt to unfold, at least in part, are some of Derrida’s “points of contact” with the study of religion. More than that, however, my purpose in the book is to introduce students and scholars of religion to Derrida’s work overall, so as to allow them to discern these “points of contact” for themselves. As you note in your question, Derrida engages the work of canonical thinkers in the Western tradition, from Plato, let’s say, to Habermas. Only relatively recently during the modern period, have these thinkers been assigned to either philosophy or religion, one as distinct from the other, a division which is not easy to uphold when it comes to Derrida’s work, in particular his work (in Rogues, and in The Beast and the Sovereign, Volumes I and II) on democracy’s theological-philosophical-political foundations. I do not set out in the book to delineate or defend disciplinary divisions, but rather to consider the work of thinkers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Meleau-Ponty, Levinas, Gadamer, and Habermas, among others, as essential to scholars of religion, as much as to scholars of philosophy and/or literary criticism.

DOS: What regions of our field right now do you think would benefit from revisiting Derrida’s work on religion?

DM: From the many ways your question might be answered, I will select only two. The first pertains to how religion is and might be taught. Here, I am thinking, for instance, of Derrida’s last seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign (Chicago, 2009); and in addition to this, I am thinking of his next-to-last seminar on the death penalty, which Peggy Kamuf is now translating. Derrida approaches Christianity in particular as providing the theoretical-philosophical foundations for contemporary thinking of sovereignty (of the self and of the nation-state) and of the sovereign’s right to life and death of the other. I am interested in this work as suggestive of an approach to teaching religion.

Secondly, Derrida’s work on animality and “the animal” question has yet to be taken in the study of religion, although I consider it a profound importance for the contemporary rethinking of ethics, particularly animal ethics.

DOS: The “Key Thinkers” series is designed in part to produce teachable books on complex thinkers. Do you teach Derrida to undergraduates in religion classes? What resistances and openings do you find in doing so?

DM: Yes, I teach Derrida in undergraduate religion classes – not only Derrida, but, depending on the course in question, a number of other philosophers, as well as literary, religious, critical, ethical, and architectural theorists, and so on. I am not persuaded that my responsibility as a teacher is to define and defend disciplinary boundaries – or boundaries of other sorts either (although I want students to study the history of these boundary formations) – so much as to invite students to consider certain religious (philosophical, ethical, theoretical) issues, to open them to available resources pertaining to these issues, and to encourage them to think critically. I am privileged to be working in a Department of Religion that considers “theory” to be essential from the introductory to the doctoral level, and that, as one of its streams, offers a PhD in theory.

DOS: Going back to the world religions question: do you think we are we at risk, in using the world religions framework (even with Derrida), of recreating something like the conditions on the island of Capri that you describe taking place in the 1994 conference where “Faith and Knowledge” was delivered, where the assembled experts on religion represent a very limited swathe of the religious diversity of the world? Is Derrida too Eurocentric to help us overcome this?

DM: As you will recall, it was the Eurocentric, particularly patriarchal Judeo-Christian representation that Derrida called into question at the isle of Capri gathering. While he did not presume to have expertise in religion, in non-Western religions especially, he was consistently mindful of the need to open “world religions” to traditions beyond the (primarily Christian) West.

DOS: Derrida in his late writings identifies himself as an “animalist” philosopher, and I was grateful to see that you mention Derrida’s work on animality and species several times in this book. Do you find some significance in his critique of species boundaries for the study of religion?

DM: Yes, I find Derrida’s work on “the animal” question to be crucial, not only because it critiques, throughout the tradition of Western metaphysics, the determination of human/animal difference on the basis of animal lack or incapacity, “the” animal’s lack of the “can have [pouvoir-avoir] of the logos,” as he puts it in The Animal That Therefore I Am (Fordham, 2008), but also because, as I think Derrida points out, ethics, including animal ethics, cannot be reduced to a prescriptive calculus that recognizes moral worth simply by assessing the extent to which human or nonhuman animals are “like us.” In the ethical approaches that prevail in contemporary critical animal studies, the ethicist takes himself (the “mentally normal” adult human male) to be both author and norm, an idea that is not compatible with ethics as Derrida’s understands it.

DOS: By design, Derrida writes in complex thought-phrases that deflect the satisfaction of compact or accessible answers. Your book is slim, but feels almost unbelievably rich in the way it braids together different textures from his work while keeping their density intact. I have to feel like there was a conscious strategy behind that. How did you go about simplifying that which so ardently resists simplification?

DM: I am suspicious of “simplification” as of the idea that Derrida’s work is to be resisted because it is “difficult.” We are living in difficult times, where answers are not always readily available; and where, for instance, the unprecedented human subjection of animals is radically changing material conditions for life on this planet. I have had the privilege of studying Derrida’s work for a number of years, and although I still regard myself as a novice in this respect, I may have gained enough sense of his writing overall to enable others to enter his oeuvre, and to begin to appreciate his remarkable initiatives.

I take his work seriously as enabling readers to engage some of the difficult questions of our day, and hopefully, to move through them.

 

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Priming Students for Seeing White Privilege

Posted on January 13, 2012 by Craig Martin

Here’s a trick I use—which seems to work—in order to prime students to be predisposed to looking for rather than dismissing white privilege when I talk about race in my REL 101 course.

I introduce the topic by pointing out that scholars who study privilege almost universally find that those who have privilege are often the ones who have the most difficulty in seeing privilege, and then I ask students to speculate on why that might be the case. They usually give decent answers: for them it’s not “privilege” it’s just normal; they don’t have anything to contrast it with; etc.

By having this discussion about why people can’t see privilege at the outset, I think a number of the students unconsciously say to themselves: “I’m not going to be one of those suckers who don’t see it—I’m totally gonna look for it!”

My experience is that when I start the section of the course on race with this little discussion, the students turn out to be more open to what follows.

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Teaching Epoche

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Kenny Paul Smith

Ninian Smart claimed that, if we fail to set aside (at least temporarily) our reactions to and opinions about the people, communities, and traditions that constitute our objects of study, we are quite likely to generate more data about ourselves than about them. While this position is subject to important critiques, I believe that it offers an important epistemological insight from which our students might benefit: temporarily bracketing out our own judgments opens up cognitive and social spaces in which the self-understanding of (religious) others might emerge, providing us with information we are unlikely to come by sans epoche. Given that popular discourse in the larger culture displays almost none of this, students from virtually any disciplinary field stand to benefit from this methodological principle.

But how might we best teach it? In some eight years of adjunct teaching at a state university, I have found this lesson is far more likely to “stick” if wedded to examples students find either entertaining or upsetting. So, I begin not by elucidating Smart’s principle, but by showing the class a video such as Prophet Yahweh, Seer of YAHWEH, summoning UFOs for a Las Vegas TV news reporter in May 2005 (which most find entertaining), or an NPR audio-clip of FLDS leader Warren Jeffs preaching on “The Age of the Negro” and the proper place of women (which most find upsetting).

I also ask students to make two columns on a piece of paper. In column A, I ask them to write down their own reactions to and opinions about Yahweh’s or Jeffs. We then discuss the strengths of column A, for instance, that it helps students to work out what they think about our research subject. But when I ask what the weaknesses of column A are, it becomes obvious pretty quickly that this sort of data doesn’t really tell us much about Prophet Yahweh or Warren Jeffs, but about our own preferences and commitments.

Then I show the video or play the audio clip a second time, asking students to bracket or suspend their own opinions and fill in column B with our subject’s self-understanding as best they can from the limited data we have. We then discuss the benefits of column B: we have finally find out something about how our subjects understand their own religious constructions! We also discuss the limitations of remaining always in column B: at some point, we may want to formulate our own positions about those we study. Indeed, it is naive and unhelpful to expect or insist that students remain perennially in column B.

Of course, dispelling the cognitive illusion that column B provides unfettered access to the religious worlds of our subjects is an important task, though one for another day. Reflecting  upon reflect upon the categories we use to receive others’ self-understanding is a task best performed once we’ve gotten students to the point where they can use these categories with some skill. You’ve got to get them in the boat before rocking it is worthwhile.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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