The desperate plight of Christians in academia

Evan makes a sensible point about the controversy over adjunct Catholic studies professor Kenneth Howell’s dismissal from University of Illinois and subsequent reinstatement, in the course of a discussion of Tim Larsen’s article on discrimination against Christians:

there’s no reason to think that any crisis of anti-religiosity is demonstrated at UI. If anything, the only reason why Howell has successfully been reinstated is because of the huge influence that Christianity maintains in our universities. Other adjuncts have not fared so well. If an adjunct instructor were dismissed for offending students with a Judith Butler reading, for instance, I can’t imagine they would have received such support or had such luck in being reinstated. The incident would have been another data point amongst many others and wouldn’t have made any news.

I agree with Larsen that if discrimination against Christians is happening, it’s bad and some kind of action should be taken. I do think that conservative Christians do present special pedagogical challenges, both because of their own attitudes (above all the tendency toward persecution complex, which is understandable given that Christian leaders are constantly teaching them to expect persecution from godless liberals) and because of the tendency for non-Christian students and, unfortunately but sometimes understandably, non-Christian faculty to react very negatively to them.

Faculty are of course the adults in the room and should figure out better ways to deal with them and guide their students in such ways — in particular, I think faculty need to be sensitive to conservative Christian paranoia and do their best not to set it off — but I think Christian leaders need to be held responsible here as well. There are probably better ways to spend the kids’ time in youth group, for instance, than presenting high school as a hotbed of violence where you’re likely to step on a used syringe while trying to dodge the couple fucking openly in the hallway and presenting college as a place where the godless indoctrinators are going to give you an F unless you tow the party line. The reality is that non-Christian faculty and students are human beings who necessarily bring their experience into the classroom, and often their past will have included negative experiences with Christian intolerance — a situation that is not helped when Christian kids are taught from age five to be as militant and defensive as possible when the topic of religion comes up.

Draft Translation of the “Introduction” to Malabou’s Changer de la différence.

Below is a contribution from Nicola Rubczak of the University of Dundee, who has translated the “Introduction” to Catherine Malabou’s Changer de la différence. Le féminin et la question philosophique as part of her MA dissertation in philosophy. I asked her if we could make her translation of the introduction available to our readers given our past engagement with Malabou and discussions around the continuing problem of the male-dominated atmosphere of the blog and possibly our thought in general (see this excellent post by Scu).

Draft of 30 July 2010. This translation is provided for academic use (personal study and classroom use) only; it is not for commercial purposes, nor for citation in any publication. A full translation forthcoming from Polity (by another translator). Think of this as an encouragement to buy the translation when it appears and a taste of the continuing relevance of feminist philosophy to our contemporary philosophical situation. – APS
Today there exist two types of feminism. The first, the traditional type, rests on the evidence of sexual difference understood as the duality of masculine and feminine. It analyses the relations between the two sexes in terms of power and domination without ever questioning, at the heart of its imperatives of equality, parity, mutuality, this duality itself. A more recent feminism, also called “post-feminism”, arising from American Gender Studies and Queer Theory, questions precisely the binary sharing of “genders”. There are a multitude of possible sexual identities and the man-woman duality is based on a cultural construction. The questioning of this construction reveals that the heterosexual matrix is thus not a natural given, but an ideological norm whose function is to regulate and to control behaviour and codes of identity.

First as Tragedy

RSA Animate continues to amaze . . .

More Classics From The Telos Archive

I’m just finishing the second bit of my post series on artificial negativity and thought I’d share some particularly funny bits and pieces from Telos I stumbled across. One thing I respect about Telos – its fierce independence.

Issue 4, published in 1969 has this on the title page:

Telos is a philosophical journal definitely outside the mainsteam of American Philosophical thought.

The capitalisation of American Philosophical intrigued me – was this a passing swipe at the APA? Lo and behold on page 206 we find a staff writer (Piccone I imagine) reviewing the APA convention in 1969.

It is generally believed that the “P” in APA stands for “Philosophical”. But if the name is to reflect at all it denotation – something very rare these days – it should stand for “Philanderers”. [the dictionary defines philanderers as] people who make love insincerely. It was quite evident that love of wisdom was a rare passion indeed in this congregation of Professional American Philosophers.

Sketch for a typology of Christian approaches to homosexuality

Anthony’s post about typologies of apocalyptic positions has me in a typologizing mood, so I thought I’d try my hand at a typology of Christian positions on homosexuality:

1. Hate the sinner, hate the sin: homosexuals are all depraved predators whom God rightly rejects; giving them any ground is out of the question
2. Love the sinner, hate the sin: homosexuals are involved in a sinful and destructive lifestyle, and it is our duty to save them from that lifestyle, since they are children of God who deserve better
3. Ignore the sinner, hate the sin: homosexuality is a profoundly disordered condition that has no place in the church, but a huge number of our ministers are homosexual
4. Hate the sinner, love the sin: “I can’t wait until I’m done preaching this fire and brimstone sermon against gays, so that I can get back to my meth and male prostitutes.” [Thanks to James K. A. Smith for this one.]
5. Love the sinner, ignore the sin: we know that the Bible condemns homosexuality, but we can get around that with some hand-wavy gestures toward the importance of love
6. Love the sinner, love the sin: the condemnation of homosexuality is a minority tradition in Scripture that need not bind us; the clear fact that practicing homosexuals are committed Christians shows we should welcome them with open arms
7. Love the sinner, sin boldly: Christians who reject normative sexuality enact God’s judgment on human sexuality under conditions of patriarchy [Thanks to Silivren for this]

Two possible combinations of the terms that didn’t make it into the typology:

• Ignore the sinner, ignore the sin: homosexuality? what’s that?
• Ignore the sinner, love the sin: homosexuality sounds like a great idea — if only there were someone willing to engage in it with me!

Read harder!

There are certain figures who, as it turns out, are always saying something more nuanced and just plain better than one customarily recognizes. When one puts forward a straightforward reading of the figure and then suggests that certain features of his or her thought may be improvable in some way, the figure’s defenders spring into action.

The figure, we learn, has already anticipated the critique and so thoroughly debunked it as to render it laughable. Indeed, the figure has conclusively demonstrated — for those with eyes to see — that the aspects of his or her thought that are supposedly bad or at least capable of improvement, are in fact absolutely necessary and good. The very terms in which the figure is being critiqued are decisively overcome and rendered moot by the figure’s work, making the critique naive and, if we’re going to be frank, even a little sad. If only people would sit down and read a little harder, they wouldn’t say such dumb things and they would have access to the abundance of good and nuanced ideas in the figure.

Summer Reading: Omensetter’s Luck

My original plan was finally to read Mason & Dixon. It was all prepared. I had some twenty hours on a plane over the course of three weeks; long afternoons in Belgian cafes, those littering the sides of countryside canals mostly, but a few in small Limburg towns. A perfect time for Pynchon, I told myself. When time came to pack, however, I discovered that my copy of the massive novel simply did not fit comfortably into my lone carry-on bag. Thus it came to pass that I instead brought along William Gass’ difficult (but, I was soon to discover, not too difficult) first novel, Omensetter’s Luck.

The relationship started off a little rocky. I struggled with and against it so badly on the plane that I gave up, opting for something more immediately palatable on the in-flight entertainment screen in front of me. I will never get back those hours watching Date Night, Sherlock Holmes, 500 Greatest Goals, and a special about the football rivalry between Argentina & Brazil. Even upon settling into the pace of life in Belgium I found the damn thing, except for the end of section two,^* sluggish. But then it happened. And by “it,” I mean page 125. it was here that one of the novel’s main characters, the Reverend Jethro Furber, described his parishioners thusly:

Interview with Clayton Crockett

AUFS contributor Clayton Crockett has an interview up at Columbia UP’s website about the forthcoming edited volume Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic. Here’s an excerpt:

Q: From the title we know this will be a tour de force on Hegel; what debates do you want to spark among readers?

Clayton Crockett: In Theology and Religious Studies, there’s been this return to Paul, sparked largely by Badiou’s book Saint Paul. We wanted to help mark a similar return to Hegel. The major issue has been the stereotypical postmodern view of Hegel as a totalizing thinker who suppresses all differences. But this interpretation of Hegel has been shown to be problematic by thinkers like Zizek and Catherine Malabou. We wanted to include people and positions that were closer to the original postmodern suspicion of Hegel as well as bring in the more recent views.

Q: Scholars and supporters of Hegel’s dialectic feel that he has been marginalized and misunderstood; what about his philosophy has been misconstrued and how will your book set the record straight?

CC: After World War II, Hegel was cast as the thinker of totality in European thought, and a genuine philosophy of difference had to break with Hegel—this is the perspective of Deleuze, Derrida and Levinas. Of course, this is a simplification and distortion of Hegel, as Zizek and Malabou, among others, have shown. The logic of the dialectic has been read as progressive and accumulative, it’s this engine that swells up and subsumes all distinctions, differences and singularities. Malabou and Zizek, influenced by deconstruction and post-structuralism, have convincingly demonstrated that the Hegelian dialectic “works” by not working, by breaking down and exposing the gap that persists between reality and our ideals. It’s not that the dialectic gets reality to become our ideal; it’s that the dialectic shows how reality IS the irreducible gap within our ideals themselves.

One question I would have for Clayton (or for anyone really) is whether there’s a connection between the “return to Paul” and a “return to Hegel” — as I have found myself, during a summer in which I’m enacting my own kind of “return to Paul,” also drawn toward a deeper engagement with Hegel (partly inspired by my reading of Gillian Rose).

Sketch for a Typology of the Apocalyptic

Some time ago Daniel Barber and I were talking about the ascendancy of “the apocalyptic” in recent Christian theology and I rattled off a typology of different positions, in so far as I understand them. The notion of a typology came as I had recently taught Niebuhr’s different Christ and Culture types and find this sort of bestowing of identity to be a useful heuristic for mapping out the differences between positions and also for freeing up some space for different uses of a good name. As a heuristic, of course, there is room for divergence and tendency between these positions, and the typology is only a kind of virtual map that can be used in navigating while, because a map is also a construction, may come to change our relationship to the territory.

As I see it there are three basic positions being bandied about, which I have titled:

• The Paradoxical Apocalyptic
• Apocalyptic Nihilism
• Insurgent Apocalyptics

A brief thought on questions of Pauline authorship

I’ve finally made my way through Paul’s undisputed letters in Greek and am now aiming to read all the epistles this summer (having already read 1-3 John, James, 2 Peter, and Jude — the latter two because of the recent discussion of sodomy). This has been an excellent exercise for shoring up my Greek skills, but the main intellectual result has been to soften or nuance some of my views on Paul. First of all, I realize that I went into this project believing that I would find some clear overarching “Pauline system,” but that ran aground in Galatians — there’s something about having to work through a text in agonizing detail that makes it very difficult to breeze over things, which I was predisposed to do whenever I came across the clear contradictions in Galatians.

The solution, it seems, is to recognize change and development in Paul’s thought, which seems a sensible enough position in retrospect but which was apparently unavailable to me initially because of an unreflected-upon “scriptural authority” that Paul the man, if not all the letters under the name of Paul, still had for me. Once it is permissible to assume that Paul’s position is evoluving, though, I wonder how much the question of authorship matters.