Against persuasion

Particularly since reading What is Talmud?, I have been thinking about the goals of conversation. As often happens with me, my initial impetus in thinking through this issue stems from annoyance: I’m always very annoyed when someone proposes abandoning a conversation because persuasion is unlikely, particularly when they cite the problem of incommensurable presuppositions. Those kinds of declarations always weirdly instrumentalize conversation, which is an activity that I enjoy for its own sake. It’s fun to talk about ideas, to come up with new ways to defend or explain ideas, to hear new criticisms — or at least it can be, when people aren’t uptight and don’t take a challenge to their statements as a personal insult. My ideal of a night out is sitting around a table with people shooting the shit, and that’s the way I approach blog conversations, at least when I’m at my best. I have no idea why it would occur to me that such a night out would be more fun or more worthwhile if only I could get someone to have the same ideas as me.

The emphasis on persuasion seems to me to err in at least two ways.

My contribution to the Karl Barth Blog Conference

The annual Karl Barth Blog Conference has been underway for the last few weeks, this time around focusing on putting Barth in dialogue with various figures. Paul Dafydd Jones has written on Barth in dialogue with The Monstrosity of Christ, and I wrote a response (appended to his post). I’ve already written a considerable amount on that book, and so I focused on critiquing Barth more than on Zizek or Milbank.

Thanks to the conference organizers for inviting me to be a part of it.

On Cyril O’Regan’s Gnostic Return in Modernity

One reads the first few pages of Cyril O’Regan’s Gnostic Return in Modernity with a kind of dawning horror: not only is this just the “method” volume rather than the thing itself, but the thing itself is going to total seven volumes (on Boehme, British and German Romanticism, Hegel, Schelling, 19th-century anti-Gnostic discourse, and 20th-century Gnostic and anti-Gnostic discourse) — many of which, he leads one to believe, are already largely drafted. Surely this is one of the most ambitious scholarly projects currently underway in theology today.

One also reads with a sense of profound relief, because it is clear that this is not going to be a moralizing discourse on Gnosticism of the Voeglin type. He rejects the notion that modernity as such is Gnostic, and he also rejects the common notion that Gnostic teachers are egomaniacs addicted to fame — in short, that the cause of Gnosticism is being a bad person.

Reflections on Fall Teaching

Over the last week I submitted the final grades for the Roman Catholic theology course [syllabus] I was teaching at DePaul and, as this was the first course I’ve taught for non-majors, I’ve been thinking about what worked in the course and what did not work. It is difficult to judge from the student evaluations how things went, since only nine students completed it. I suspect this is due to DePaul’s policy of emailing the students and having them fill out evaluations on-line. The nine evaluations I received were mixed, from some giving me top marks and others giving me bottom marks, and if I were to rely on the content of these evaluations I wouldn’t really get much specific direction. Still, the fact that they are mixed has given me pause, since at Nottingham I have consistently received high above the department average.

The academy’s permanent state of emergency

Tactically speaking, I fully support the effort to push for regularizing the vast population of permatemps in the academy and turning back toward tenure as the normal condition of employment for academics. At the same time, I think that the desire to return essentially to the way the academy was structured during its American heyday under Fordism is inadequate, because arguably we are still working within the very same structure today.

Philosophy of Religion syllabus

I have posted the syllabus for my Philosophy of Religion course on Scribd. This is the last course I’ll be designing for Kalamazoo College, and it is also (somewhat strangely) my first time actually teaching philosophy.

Certain commenters will probably be gratified to see that I’m finally teaching Mary Daly, albeit not in the Feminist Theologies course — she does say, after all, that Beyond God the Father is an attempt at feminist philosophy.

Stuff your stockings!

The international mega-hit Awkwardness is available from Book Depository, with free global shipping.

This offer makes Amazon’s US site, which “usually” dispatches the book in one to three months and makes you pay for shipping, look like a bunch of amateurs.

Like all the other books in the Zer0 series, Awkwardness makes an excellent stocking stuffer. Or for the Sex and the City or Sarah Palin fan in your life, you might try Nina Power’s One Dimensional Woman. Does your uncle wonder if there’s an alternative to capitalist realism? Mark Fisher is your man! And that’s just the beginning… Surely there has never been a better year to stock stuffings with various attempts to renew the role of the public intellectual.

UPDATE: Redeem your stocking as well! Book Depository currently has a bigger discount on Politics of Redemption than either Amazon site, again with free global shipping. Send it to your aunt in New Zealand! Surprise Vladmir Putin!

Repost: Airport Security and Aesthetics

[In honor of the beginning of holiday travel season, and in light of the continued controversy surrounding the TSA, I've decided to repost this piece from last year.]

One guy tried to set off a bomb in his shoe, and now millions of shoes have been taken off and put through X-ray machines as a result. A couple of guys had a hare-brained scheme to mix deadly chemicals in the plane’s bathroom — which wouldn’t even have worked, as I understand it — and now we have millions of little plastic bags with little travel-sized toiletries.

Some might admittedly view these new practices as over-reactions. Indeed, some might even mourn the fact that there is no foreseeable way out of these stupid practices, as no politician wants to be the one who loosens up the rules and then gets blamed for the next terrorist attack.

But I think we need to look at the bright side — this is an opportunity for the greatest performance-art piece in the history of the world. All we need is a truly dedicated artist to stage an attempted attack and a new bizarre practice can be imposed upon millions of travellers for years to come. (Perhaps we could brainstorm in comments.) This heroic artist would need to be selfless enough not only to risk jail time, but to be willing to forego claiming credit for the piece, as the confession that it was merely a prank might endanger the new practice’s continuation (though who knows?). Only years later could the artist finally come forward and “sign” their massive work, which had played out for years on a stage the size of the entire nation, perhaps adding a note explaining that the project was meant as a commentary on our security-obsessed age, etc.

In a further twist, perhaps next time you’re unlacing your shoes in order to put them through an X-ray machine along with hundreds of your fellow citizens, you should ask yourself, “Has this already happened? Was the shoe-bomber just a performance artist?”

New Feminist Theologies syllabus

Next quarter I am teaching the Feminist Theologies course for a second time, and I have significantly changed the syllabus.

I had trouble generating discussion last time around, both because of the 8:30 timeslot and because the first two books I assigned — Serene Jones’s Feminist Theory and Christian Theology and Schussler-Fiorenza’s Wisdom Ways — totally failed to connect with them. This time the course is mercifully scheduled for the noon hour, and I’ve decided to lead with Ruether, with whom I had great success in my Liberation Theology course, and to dump both the other books. I’m also adding in Judith Plaskow, because it seems negligent not to include non-Christian examples as well.

Last time I decided mid-quarter to start incorporating more Bible discussion into class time, as those discussions seemed to be most interesting and participatory — and so I’m basically doing a Bible discussion on alternating Fridays (supplemented by the relevant sections from the Women’s Bible Commentary), and I’m explicitly allowing them the option of doing a Bible-focused paper if desired.

Kwok Pui-Lan’s Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology is also out, as it was much too “academic” in style (i.e., heavy on reviewing the literature) and the students essentially hated it. I am, however, incorporating her chapter on Ruth to pair with that discussion. Finally, I’m remedying what the students felt to be a significant gap last time by incorporating a work on feminism and ecology, Elizabeth Johnson’s lectures-turned-book Women, Earth, and Creator Spirit.

Overall, I feel confident about the syllabus, but I also did last time, so who knows. In a class like this, I think that the group of students I get will determine things even more than usual, but I hope my experience and the changes I’ve made will at least bring up the baseline.

Final lecture: Global Christianity

[Since Global Christianity (syllabus) is my more "experimental" course this quarter, similar to the devil course last spring, I thought it might be appropriate to post my capstone lecture notes here, as I did with the devil course.]