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Audio from Apple 6: “Is the City a Machine for the Making of Gods?”

Saturday, July 10, 2010 — Anthony Paul Smith

For those interested Kester Brewin has posted the audio as well as a pdf of the handout I refer to in my talk. I was really encouraged by the event (despite the World Cup induced low turn out), which sees people outside the walls of academy coming together to talk about ideas in a very serious manner. I think you’ll see from the Q&A that the audience was quite engaged and did not shy away from challenging me on a number of issues. I wish I could have spoken with more who attended the event and hope that these events continue and grow.

Posted in Bergson, Shameless Promotion, grey ecology. 6 Comments »

Request for suggestions: Feminist Theologies course

Friday, July 9, 2010 — Adam Kotsko

Next year, I am going to be teaching the course Feminist Theologies again (here’s last year’s syllabus), and I already have some pretty firm ideas about how I want to change it.

First of all, ESF is out, as the methodological discussion fell completely flat in a group of students who mostly hadn’t engaged with the Bible in the first place. I’m also dropping Serene Jones, whose book totally didn’t grab them, and replacing it with Ruether’s Sexism and God-Talk, which has obvious drawbacks but teaches really well in my experience. I’m also planning on dropping Kwok, because it’s too “academic” and field-survey oriented, and dropping the body theology text, because the only “body”-oriented issue anyone wanted to talk about was body image, which apparently is virtually the beginning and end of “feminist issues” for many of them (understandably so, I suppose, but then I don’t really want to talk about it in class and am probably not the appropriate instructor to address these issues, since I’m a man).

I know that I’m going to use Ruether, Williams’ Sisters in the Wilderness, and at least some good chunks of Laurel Schneider’s Beyond Monotheism. To fill the other slots in the syllabus, I thought that since Christianity was such a stumbling block to many of the students last year, I might do some Jewish feminism. There was also a considerable interest in ecofeminism. So here are my suggestion requests:

  • Is there a better Jewish feminist theology book to use than Plaskow’s Standing Again at Sinai? Better either substantively or for a 100-level undergrad class.
  • What would be a good book of ecofeminist theology to do?

Thanks in advance for your advice.

Posted in teaching. 12 Comments »

On understanding Gillian Rose somewhat

Wednesday, July 7, 2010 — Adam Kotsko

For the last week, I’ve been working my way through the very frequently recommended Hegel Contra Sociology by Gillian Rose — and I do mean “working,” because it is a very dense book that arguably draws a bit too much on Hegel’s writing style as well as his ideas.

As I was getting toward the end, I began to feel lost and went casting about for articles that might help. This one looked promising, until I came to this sentence:

One problem regarding Rose’s critique of Marxism is precisely her focus on Marxism as a specifically “philosophical” problem, as a problem more of thought than of action.

At that point, I realized I had probably understood more than I thought — certainly enough to realize that one of Rose’s primary goals is to critique the simplistic Marxist dichotomy between theory and practice.

Posted in Gillian Rose, Hegel, Marxism. 15 Comments »

Reminder: APS in London Wednesday

Tuesday, July 6, 2010 — Anthony Paul Smith

Just a reminder that I’ll be speaking in London today. Any Londres lurkers should feel free to come. Information from the hosts of the event below.

We’re really excited to have Anthony Paul Smith from Nottingham University down to speak, and his title should be enough to get you along: Is The City a Machine for the Making of Gods?

The blurb he’s written goes like this:

When asked about the unwavering acceleration of technological society, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger famously remarked that, “Only a god can save us now.” His philosophy of “poetically dwelling on the earth” has been taken up by many environmental thinkers, and we can still see traces of his thinking in those that pit the technological against the earth, and claim that only a god – something that transcends human tools – can save us from ecological meltdown.

In the crude-poisoned wake of the recent BP oil disaster, it may seem that such a pessimistic picture is warranted, but hope may be emerging in the work of the French thinker Henri Bergson, who suggests that there is an intimate connection between “the mechanical and the mystical.”

At Apple 6 philosopher Anthony Paul Smith will examine Bergson’s claim and suggest that, rather than rejecting technology, the only way for us to survive on the earth – poetically or not – will be to put the city at the heart of our ecology. Instead of waiting for a god we must come to see that the urban biosphere is a machine for the making of gods.

It would be great to spread the word about this, so I’ve uploaded a double-sided A6 flyer PDF you can print off and hand around here.

Seriously – you have to try to come along. It’s free. The beer is wonderful. It’s at 7:30. At the Betsey Trotwood.

Thanks and I hope I see some of you there and for those who can’t but are interested I will link to the audio once it is posted. Apologies for the shameless self-promotion.

Posted in Shameless Promotion. 2 Comments »

At least now I don’t have to read Living in the End Times

Tuesday, July 6, 2010 — Adam Kotsko

Maybe Zizek needs to take a break and focus on what’s really important to him:

“My God, I am the last person to know the answer to these questions,” he says, looking genuinely dismayed. “But, really, I am now thinking there is so much pressure on me to perform. I am getting really bored with it. I am a thinker, but people all the time want this kind of shitty political interventions: the books, the talks, the discussions and so forth.” He sighs and closes his eyes and seems to deflate before my eyes. “I will tell you my problem openly and for this my publisher will hate me. All the talk and the writing about politics, this is not where my heart is. No. I have been sidetracked. I really mean this.”

He opens a copy of Living in the End Times, and finds the contents page. “I will tell you the truth now,” he says, pointing to the first chapter, then the second. “Bullshit. Some more bullshit. Blah, blah, blah.” He flicks furiously through the pages. “Chapter 3, where I try to read Marx anew, is maybe OK. I like this part where I analyse Kafka’s last story and here where I use the community of outcasts in the TV series Heroes as a model for the communist collective. But, this section, the Architectural Parallax, this is pure bluff. Also the part where I analyse Avatar, the movie, that is also pure bluff. When I wrote it, I had not even seen the film, but I am a good Hegelian. If you have a good theory, forget about the reality.”

Why, then, given that he does not like most of his books and does not have any enthusiasm for the lecture circuit, does he not call a stop to the Žižek show? “I am doing that right now!” he shouts. “I am writing a mega-book about Hegel with regard to Plato, Kant and maybe Heidegger. Already, this Hegel book is 700 pages. It is a true work of love. This is my true life’s work. Even Lacan is just a tool for me to read Hegel. For me, always it is Hegel, Hegel, Hegel,” he says, sighing again. “But people just want the shitty politics.”

Via Jodi Dean

Posted in Zizek. 15 Comments »

Sermon: “What’s Really Wrong with Sodomy”

Tuesday, July 6, 2010 — Christopher Rodkey

This is part of my sermon for last Sunday at Zion “Goshert’s” United Church of Christ in Lebanon, PA, where I have been pastor for two years.  The lectionary reading from the Gospel was Luke 10:1-20.  I used a bit of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah from Robert Crumb’s fantastic The Book of Genesis Illustrated as a visual aid for the worship service.

In the Bible we find Jesus here sending out seventy evangelists.  Remember that before there were seventy commissioned by Jesus, there were 12 original disciples.  As you surely know, numbers are always important in scripture.  The twelve disciples represent the twelve tribes of Israel; and Chapter 9 of Luke begins by talking about the twelve.  But now, Chapter 10 talks about the seventy, as back then it was generally believed to be seventy Gentile, or non-Jewish nations.  But what is symbolic of the number seventy is that the seventy Gentile evangelists will be sent into Jewish towns, and the problem then becomes how they will be accepted as foreigners into the towns.

Much of this passage of scripture is concerned with Jesus offering instructions on how to deal with what will be a foreign culture to the seventy, which is Jesus’ home culture.  But along the way he condemns those towns who are not welcoming or hospitable to a fate worse than Sodom.  Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in "the church", sermons. 35 Comments »

The collection in 2 Corinthians

Monday, July 5, 2010 — Adam Kotsko

One of the biggest benefits of going through Paul’s letters in Greek hasn’t been a flood of nuance — though there are some ideological or traditional distortions in the translations, for the most part they seem to be perfectly good — but simply being forced to slow down and study things in detail. Nowhere has that benefit been greater than in 2 Corinthians, where the fun ranting part in 10-13 has always led me to underplay the first 9 chapters, which actually contain some really interesting material that provide the greatest support for a “liberation” reading of Paul.

2 Corinthians provides the greatest detail concerning one of Paul’s greatest goals, which also seems to motivate his writing of Romans: the collection for the poor of Judea. Put briefly, it appears to be a desire to fulfill the prophecies that the nations will bring tribute to Israel — but it does an end-run around the powers and authorities of both groups, instead going for a grass-roots level offering from the poor of the nations to the poor of Israel. Perhaps this can inform what we’ve been discussing in previous posts about Paul’s call for the Gentiles to abandon idolatry: instead of stopping with that purely negative gesture, favoring the poor (particularly the poor of Israel) becomes a concrete way of identifying with the God of Israel.

What’s unclear to me is how we should understand what Paul was doing in Corinth and how he managed to attract an apparent critical mass of rich or powerful “converts.” He says over and over again that the Corinthians are his “boast” — perhaps getting the rich and powerful to go along with his mission represents a kind of tour de force (navigating the camel through the eye of the needle, so to speak)? And perhaps allowing other, poorer churches to provide support instead of letting the rich Corinthians keep him as a kind of “court philosopher” was a strategic move to humble them?

Another thought: exactly who was in charge of compiling these letters? Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Saint Paul, economics. Leave a Comment »

Religion and belief

Saturday, July 3, 2010 — Adam Kotsko

Over the last few days, I’ve been involved in a discussion of religion at Unfogged, where I tried to argue that religion isn’t primarily a matter of believing propositions. It went relatively well compared to previous attempts — presumably the experience of teaching has mellowed me out somewhat — but there always comes a point where one begins to ask, “Why am I putting so much effort into convincing someone who obviously won’t be convinced?” Reflecting with Brad on this, and starting from the premise that the purpose of such debates is usually not to convince the individual person you’re arguing with but for the benefit of the bystanders, I concluded that my goals in such conversations are as follows:

  1. To break the hegemony of fundamentalism over the concept of “religion.” When people think that religion means believing stupid things, they are usually thinking of fundamentalist Christians as their model of religious people. Jews and Catholics are ignored, and liberal Christians are dismissed as a bizarre contradiction. Obviously this is simply inaccurate — it winds up basically slandering all religious people by assimilating them to the worst kind, and this then has the effect of making the debate much more heated and defensive than it needs to be.
  2. To move toward a more general critique of ideology, in which “religious” ideologies would not be uniquely problematic. This is the ultimate payoff, besides simple accuracy, of putting forth a practice-centric definition of religion (in which “struggling with one’s faith” would be an evangelical Christian religious practice, for example). The primary emotional charge for people who dislike fundamentalism isn’t so much their beliefs, but what their beliefs make them do. Once we start talking about beliefs as a structuing principle for practices or a rationalization for practices, it becomes clear that non-”religious” beliefs can be just as problematic, if not moreso.
Posted in blog posts, religion. 21 Comments »

Lightening the Tone

Thursday, July 1, 2010 — Brad Johnson

Anthony just referred to today as “Self-Harm Day on AUFS,” given the overwhelming bleakness of the posts on the main page. So, w/ that in mind, I thought I’d lighten things up a bit w/ some anti-IPhone backlash animation.

Posted in The lighter side of AUFS, technology. 2 Comments »

“Being just is inhuman.”

Thursday, July 1, 2010 — Brad Johnson

We don’t do a lot of straight-up links to non-academic papers here at AUFS. But when we do, I like to think we have very special cause. For my money, Susie Linfield’s essay “Living with the Enemy” more than meets my definition of “special cause.”

As an essay, I think it kind of loses focus near the end. But as a whole, I find it nothing short of stunning. If nothing else, I’m hopeful that it gets more people (myself included) reading Jean Améry. The essay itself is positively riddled with heartbreaking poetry. E.g., quotes like:

“The tortured person never ceases to be amazed that all those things one may… call his soul, or his mind, or his consciousness, or his identity, are destroyed when there is that cracking and splintering in the shoulder joints… Only through torture did he learn that a living person can be transformed so thoroughly into flesh.” (Jean Améry)

Revenge and reconciliation are often posited as opposites, with justice as the mediator between the two. But the Rwandan victims understand—far more wisely than either perpetrators or theorists—how inadequate all these purported solutions are; each fails to address, to heal, to unmake, or even to lessen the crime of genocide and the unending pain it causes. For the so-called survivors, genocide is the crime with no sentence, the problem with no solution, the crime with no end. “What’s the use of looking for mitigating circumstances… ?” asks Berthe Mwanankabandi, whose parents and eleven siblings were murdered. “What can you mitigate? The number of victims? The methods of hacking? The killers’ laughter? Delivering justice would mean killing the killers. But that would be like another genocide… Killing or punishing the guilty in some suitable way: impossible. Pardoning them: unthinkable. Being just is inhuman.”

That last sentence, especially, just stands out to me in such a stark, haunting way. I do wish, though, that Linfield had dwelt on that thought longer, esp. as so much of what precedes it is read through Améry, who seems absolutely consumed by the fundamental injustice of forgiveness & reconciliation. This, to me, is something worth thinking much more about.

Posted in Jean Améry, justice. 11 Comments »
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