AAR 2009: Taking stock

This AAR was very good for me overall. Friday night, Dan Barber and I got to meet Bruce Rosenstock, after attending the great session he was a part of; we all went out that night and also got to hang out a bit at my session the next morning. My paper was well-received and the session itself generated some great conversation, including a conversation with Catherine Keller, whom I was meeting for the first time.

The Zizek-Altizer session was good, but somewhat disappointing, in that the system of having hand-selected responses from the audience (which sounded great to me going in) didn’t work quite as envisioned, in part due to Zizek’s long-windedness. Receptions were interesting, as I met more new people than I usually do, including James Cone, whose hand I shook but who almost certainly had already forgotten I existed even before the handshake was finished — but my main goal was to be able to tell my students in liberation theology that I had met him, so: mission accomplished on that front.

Beyond that, I had very productive conversations with publishers, ate some good meals, heard some good papers, and bought some interesting books. There was a nice restaurant in the conference center that appeared to be organized around the Unibroue beers, so I enjoyed that, and I also had pho for the first time in Chinatown, where I got to talk to an actual non-academic Montreal resident with whom I shared a table. Sadly, that was about as much exploration of Montreal that I did unguided by AAR-related concerns; my biggest regret on this front is that I didn’t get to take advantage of the possibility of buying French books.

Feel free to share your own experiences, or links to posts thereupon, in comments.

The task of the theologian

I have taken an increasingly hard line against the self-deprecation of theologians vis-a-vis “the church,” a condition I have called “ecclesiological Stockholm Syndrome” and likened to the phenomenon of “cognitive regulatory capture” in the realm of finance. I am utterly convinced that the role of a theologian is that of a critical intellectual, which means that the only tool the theologian has is persuasion. All the critical intellectual can do is try his or her best to create persuasive arguments that stand up on their own terms; if the audience is completely unreceptive, I think we need to give the theologian the benefit of the doubt and assume there’s a basic unpersuadability at work in said audience.

Ecclesiological Stockholm Syndrome

It’s amazing to me how many theologians, particularly those within a general evangelical orbit, have ecclesiological Stockholm Syndrome: the twin tendency to idealize and fetishize local church life and to denigrate their own role.

The recent financial crisis has given us a great term for this tendency: cognitive regulatory capture. All of the behaviors that Halden points out among theologians are, at best, equally prevelant among church members and especially leaders — I don’t recall any incidents of systematically covered up child molestation among theologians, for instance — and whatever faults they exhibit to a greater degree are probably due to their academic setting rather than personal failings. There are plenty of church members in good standing who faithfully donate the proceeds of underpaying their workers or gouging their customers, for instance, and I don’t think any academic theologians fall into that category.

And to act like theologians are unique in their lack of attention to the poor is appalling, in the face of the massive indifference displayed by the vast majority of church members. For every theologian who fails to visit the soup kitchen often enough, I’ll give you a pastor on a campaign to build a gym where his congregation’s children can play for like three hours a week.

Theologians should be exemplary in two areas. First, they should be exemplary in the degree to which they reflect intellectually on the gospel. I’d say that we’re on pretty firm footing here, on average — there are a lot of intelligent, reflective Christians out there, but few of them are going to reach the level of someone who earns a PhD, teaches, and publishes in the field. It’s elitist to say so, I know, but academic theologians really do consistitute an intellectual elite.

Second, they should be exemplary in their criticism of the church’s preaching and discipline. On this front, the attitude displayed in Halden’s post is amazingly counterproductive. Theologians don’t need to submit their judgment to the people in the pews or to the church authorities. They can’t force either group to do what they want, obviously — the lack of concrete power is the trade-off for taking up a reflective and critical role in the church — but they can and must deliver their criticisms as forcefully and persuasively as possible. Preemptively telling people they should totally dismiss theologians is arguably a rhetorical misstep in this context.

Overall, I think it’s crucial to avoid a kind of “Donatism for theologians” that would amount to little more than an ad hominem argument — by and large, theologians are perfectly capable of carrying out their theological duties while committing adultery or skipping church. (In fact, they may well have real theological reasons for avoiding church services as they currently stand! Is that simply impossible? One sometimes suspects that, for the “strong ecclesiology” crowd, it is.) Perhaps we can think of situations where immoral behavior would reach such a pitch as to undermine the theologian’s standing in both the academy and the community, meaning he or she could no longer effectively carry out that role — but those are extreme and rare cases. In the majority of cases, we should judge theologians simply as theologians, that is, according to the standards inherent to their particular role.

Sexification

By now, we’re all probably familiar with the growing trend toward attention-getting, “sexy” course titles, in an effort to attract ever more fickle students. I don’t know if it is widely practiced yet in religious studies, but I am convinced that the potential for sexification of course titles is outstanding despite our discipline’s un-sexy reputation. For instance, who wouldn’t take a course titled “Incest, Gang Rape, Dismemberment, and Genital Mutilation: An Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures”? I’m sure we can come up with more examples.

New Critical Animal Studies Blog

Just a quick note to direct interested readers to a new group blog focusing on critical animal studies called The Inhumanities and includes long-time blog friend Craig. Here is the announcement of their first book event:

We are pleased to announce our first event, an intervention in and reading of Matthew Calarco’s Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. We plan to cover a chapter a week, and the first post on the book will be up this coming Tuesday, 9-1-09. We encourage everyone to participate in comments, or emails. Calarco has been kind enough to agree to follow the discussion, and post a response at the end of the discussion.

Remember, if you want to email us just drop us a line at inhumanitiesblog@gmail.com

I hope to read along and you should to.

Policing Academic Freedom

A few months back the Times Higher Education supplement reported that the Department of Politics and International Relations at The University of Nottingham were to vet all module reading lists to ascertain “whether any material on reading lists could be illegal or might be deemed to incite people to use violence”. This move is in the wake of the arrests last year of two members of the campus community, Rizwaan Sabir, a then MA student in this department, and Hicham Yezza, an administrator in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures. Many of the readers of this blog will be familiar with the story. Such a auditing process, for all modules in the department, in the words of David Miller of the Teaching Terrorism group at Strathclyde University is a “fundamental attack on academic freedom”. Two members of staff from the department rushed to defend the university and the policy. Academic freedom they note ‘applies to staff, not students, and academics, not administrators’ – academic freedom only applies to institutionally sanctioned members of academic staff.

Such a definition of academic freedom is dangerous and it is our duty as scholars, particularly young scholars, to resist it before it becomes more common currency.

Lazy Sunday Link Post

Just two links today. The first is a non-blog by Joshua Delpech-Ramey that he calls Darkhorse: Peripheral Visions. Joshua is a good friend of mine who is doing really interesting work on Deleuze, the Heremetic tradition, esoteric thought, theology, in addition to being a musician. I’m hoping he joins in the English language reception of Laruelle and translates Laruelle’s mysticism book (do it!). Check out his website for his occasional writings on all these subjects.

The other is the blog of Roland Boer with the great name Stalin’s Moustache. Boer, for those who don’t know, does really interesting work in politics, philosophy and Biblical studies. He is also something of a publishing machine and his book, Political Myth in the Goodchild, Surin, and Davis New Slant series is very good. Folks like Boer, whose work is similar in style to that of Jacob Taubes, do creative work with the Bible that is fascinating to me. I’m also a big fan of his love of public transportation (he’s organizing a seminar series on a train – fucking epic!), cycling, and traveling by boat (apparently his most recent book on Calvin was written while at sea).

The latest in a series of link posts

Those wishing to be depressed about academia have ample fodder in this excerpt (posted by Jodi Dean) from Kenneth Mostern’s “On Being Postacademic,” which concludes: “Academia has neither capitalist forms of abstraction nor socialist forms of solidarity to recommend it.” In a more sarcastic vein, one could also find much material for despair in this post by Marc Bousquet, the relentlessly negative author of How the University Works — a more straightforward presentation of the same insights can be found in this post and many others on the blog.

Brad and I have been discussing Christian appropriations of Zizek over at “Church and Pomo.” The basic question at issue — “Why do you even want to claim Zizek?” — is reminiscent of Anthony’s post What Does (Certain) Contemporary Christian Theology Want from Philosophy?, which I looked over yesterday and realized contains one of our truly great comment threads.

Thomas Lynch has a summary of a conference about money that may be of interest to some readers — apparently it took place at Nottingham University — and Michael Austin has posted some reflections on the metapysics of psychoanalysis. Meanwhile, Ads Without Products has continued to churn out great posts at an alarming pace, including one on messianism and waiting rooms and one offering a recommendation to Alain de Botton.

And finally, in the spirit of inter-religious dialogue, here’s your moment of Zen (via Yglesias).

Theology through Film syllabus

Adam’s recent post below got me thinking about the course I taught last semester and the help I received here at AUFS. In the spirit of gratitude and friendship I’ve decided to share the syllabus I created for the Theology through Film module. I was pretty happy with how the course went this past semester, though I’ve already decided to change one of the Christology lectures and need to consider how to deal with the British system of (not) reading texts. Anyhow, any suggestions are welcome and I hope it helps those who may try to create one of these courses in the future.

A warning to all theologians

If you’re dismissive of Richard Dawkins, you must be in the tank for some religion — not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course! Except for the whole thing where your discipline produces no advance in knowledge whatsoever. But still: nothing but respect, man.