Rene Girard

Girard has had a significant influence on me, and I have been impressed with the profundity of his work since I began reading it.

There are few interviews with him, and most of them are in French, but I found this today:

http://fora.tv/2009/12/01/Uncommon_Knowledge_Ren_Girard

His work, I think, requires a rather unusual degree of careful study and reflection in order to “use” it, which is why, I think, many refer to him but his thought itself seems much less mainstream in actual influence than other French thinkers who are, it seems, not actually as profound or as important. (I expect Girard to be read for a very long time indeed).

If you are not familiar with Girard, he’s most well known for his theory of mimetic desire (the triangular structure of desire for Girard is: subject-model-object, in which the subject’s desire for the object is mediated through the model, and this mediation is a source of, among other things, envy and violence), upon which he has done brilliant work on violence, among other topics. Beyond the soundbyte I just offered, his thought becomes quite hard to summarize, and even a basic summary of some of his major work would require a brief essay.

If one does read Girard with the goal of understanding his thought and not just read him for literary criticism or topically, I think it’s best to read his major theoretical works in something close to chronological order. It is thus valuable to start with Deceit, Desire, and the Novel and then move on to Violence and the Sacred etc. I found that helpful, anyway, since Violence and the Sacred does not go over much of the material Deceit does, yet it relies on it in many ways.

Lent

My wife and I were discussing things to give up for Lent, and we decided that the recreational, i.e., non-essential, use of the internet would be a good thing. So, come Lent I have no intention to read blogs or to post on mine. Unless something comes up before then, I’ll be back after Lent.

James Davis Hunter: To Change the World

A friend just informed me that James Davison Hunter, LaBrosse-Levinson Distinguished Professor of Religion, Culture and Social Theory at the University of Virginia, who is one of the great sociologists of religion currently writing, and an authority on, among other things, modernity, evangelicalism, cultural theory, education, morality and the culture wars, is coming out with a book, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (Oxford UP), scheduled for a March release in the US. This is the most exciting book of its kind that I’ve heard of, and I’m looking forward to it with the kind of anticipation with which I read Taylor’s A Secular Age. Both Taylor and Bellah give glowing blurbs, which one can find at the Oxford description: http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/ReligionTheology/SociologyofReligion/?view=usa&ci=9780199730803

And you can pre-order it at Amazon, which I just did, for about ten dollars less than the Oxford price : http://www.amazon.com/Change-World-Tragedy-Possibility-Christianity/dp/0199730806/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1266082758&sr=1-1

Hunter’s work, while obviously important for sociologists, is also exceptionally important for Christians, especially orthodox and conservative ones who are concerned about the relationship between robust, orthodox Christianity and the modern world. He wrote two books on Evangelicalism in the ’80s, American Evangelicalism: Conservative Religion and the Quandary of Modernity (1983) and Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation (1988, winner of the Distinguished Book Award of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion). Hunter is one of the most distinguished students of Peter Berger, and his work is profoundly influenced by Berger’s theoretical sophistication and religious sensitivity, evident in his approach to the sociology of knowledge (see Berger and Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality) and modernity and the sociology of religion (e.g. The Sacred Canopy and The Rumor of Angels).

Both of Hunter’s books on Evangelicalism represent theoretical and empirical (especially in The Coming Generation) tests and expansions of Berger’s theory of secularization, which Berger outlined famously and with significant influence in The Sacred Canopy, which many regard as the first theoretical statement of secularization theory in sociology. Though one may have quibbles with Hunter’s theories, both of these books are still valuable and worth reading, particularly as rather prophetic statements of where Evangelicalism was heading (e.g., Hunter, in the first book, discusses the decline of hell in mainstream conservative Christianity as an indicator of the inroads of modernity’s secularizing effects). Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation was particularly prescient in many ways, as it charted through interpretation of a major survey of evangelicals the ways in which the rising generation of evangelicals were notably less conservative than their parents on issues of belief (such as the authority of Scriptures) and practice (such as sexual behavior). Indeed, for sociological works based heavily on empirical data they have worn remarkably well over the past 25 years.

Perhaps Hunter’s most significant and profound work, however, is his The Death of Character: Moral Education in a World without Good and Evil (Basic Books, 2000). This is one of the most important analyses of contemporary culture that I’ve read, not least because it has such dramatic and direct implications for a huge number of areas, including education (particularly policy and curricula), childrearing, cross-generational sustainability of religious beliefs, and, of course, social, cultural, and political life. Hunter acknowledges his debts in this work not only to MacIntyre and Taylor, but also to Philip Rieff, a University of Chicago sociologist who was never really mainstream, so far as I can tell, and is not much read in contemporary sociology departments (judging from what I can see here at Yale). Yet his most influential work, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, remains a brilliant and important analysis of culture. If one read The Triumph of the Therapeutic in 1964, when it was published, one was unlikely to be surprised by what happened in the Sixties, especially in education and sexual ethics, because Rieff had basically predicted all of it in this work.

Hunter thus draws on a rich tradition of philosophical and cultural analysis to inform a brilliant and rigorous sociological study of the practices and communal conditions necessary for developing and inculcating character, how our current conditions makes this practically impossible, and what the implications of this situation are.

It’s especially because of Hunter’s proven ability brilliantly to analyze practices and the theoretical, cultural, and social conditions that legitimate  and enable them, as well as his recognized theoretical sophistication and insight into pressing cultural concerns, that I am so excited about To Change the World.

I can’t think of anyone better qualified to offer this kind of analysis, and I have been waiting, ever since I discovered Hunter and knew of his Christian convictions, for him to offer a constructive work based on his vast theoretical and practical experience. It looks like in March my waiting will be over.

Jacques Barzun

God bless wikipedia. I’m constantly looking for interviews of people I admire, as they offer tremendous insight into a person and often prove delightful. I discovered today that wikipedia has a link to a long BookTV interview with Jacques Barzen: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Barzun See the links at the bottom of the page. And, if you don’t know Barzun, repent and begin reading!

He’s like an Etienne Gilson of the humanities; one simply must read him, if only for one’s own good.

Yale Acquires New Professor of Ethics

Harold Attridge just emailed the Divinity School today, informing us that Jennifer Herdt, Associate Professor of Theology in Notre Dame’s Theology Department, will be the new Professor of Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity Schoo, effective July 2010. 

Here is part of Attridge’s email:

Members of the YDS Community:

I am delighted to let you know that this afternoon Jennifer Herdt let us know formally that she has accepted our offer to join the faculty in July as Professor of Christian Ethics.  Jan Hagens, Jennifer’s husband will also join the Yale faculty as a lecturer in the College, teaching in Directed Studies and Comparative Literature.  He will be also serve YDS as Assistant to the Dean for Continuing Education.

It looks like a good acquisition for YDS, which has traditionally been strong in the area of ethics. Herdt is, among others thing, on the editorial board of The Journal of Religious Ethics, one of the leading journals in the field of ethics.

Now, if they’ll just make the theology hire . . .

Reading and Listening

I’m returning here to the original purpose of my blog to list some recent things I’ve been reading and listening to.

I just listened to a lecture by Peter Ewells on education and assessment, which was excellent. It was rich with content and provided an overview of major issues facing educators, especially issues of concern to policy makers. It may be an ominous sign that I am so interested in aspects of administration, pedagogy, etc., as such people seem to get roped into committees, etc. But, since I am a graduate student, no such risk yet obtains.

Also on a pedagogical and educational note, I’ve read some recent articles, one of which was in the Atlantic, on teaching, and it seems that certain false but enormously influential strains of thought about pedagogy are finally being overturned by evidence, especially from charter schools and programs like KIPP. All of that has been encouraging to my outlook on the future of K-12 and higher education.

Besides all my readings for class, which include lots of Kierkegaard, Tillich, Barth, Raher, McFague, Althaus-Reid, medieval theologians, I’ve been rereading Augustine’s Confessions  and also intend to read a couple of his other major works. I’m planning on writing my Medieval paper on Augustine, Scotus, Aquinas, or Ockham, in descending order of probability. I think I need to just stay with Augustine, as I don’t want to begin in depth study of Aquinas and other later Medieval thinkers until I have an very strong foundation in Augustine’s major texts (Confessions, Trinity, City of God, etc.). So, I’ve been poking around in a lot of stuff by Chenu, Richard Cross, Gorden Leff, Marilyn Adams, and other scholastic experts.

Turner gives recommended reading lists in his syllabus, and I’ve been reading a number of books on those lists. I read Louth’s work on Mysticism, which was good, and I’m reading both of Turner’s books on Medieval theology, although with less urgency than some of the other material I’ve been reading. I’m also reading Leclercq’s The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture as well as Smalley’s The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, both of which are recommended highly be Turner. Turner’s Eros and Allegory, as well as both of the preceding books, have caused me to reflect more than usual on questions of reading, in a deep, not modern, sense. In particular, I’ve been increasingly suspicious of standard criticisms of Patristic and Medieval hermeneutics due to historical, not primarily theological, considerations. We’ll see if of my suspicious work into my paper.

For Kierkegaard all the texts, save one, that Hare assigns I’ve read at least once, some multiple times, so I am really getting a lot out of the rereading process. I’m also using the course to read some classic secondary sources I had not gotten to, most of which are relatively old. There are a number of topics I could write on, but I am still leaning towards a paper on The Sickness Unto Death, this time moving past the first six paragraphs, which, in a sense, I have spent the last three years studying. But I am also strongly leaning towards a project that deals with Jacobi’s influence on SK, especially drawing on Paul Franks work on German Idealism and some of Bernard Williams’ work on ethics. If I start the Jacobi project, my goal will be to revise it and rewrite it over my year in Heidelberg, incorporating a lot more of Jacobi than is in English and drawing on more German scholarship. Since I’ll have German down before I turn to the relevant Scandinavian languages, I’m trying to structure my major projects so that they lean heavily towards work I can do responsibly in German, and thus work focusing either wholly on Idealism, Jacobi, Romanticism and Hamann or those topics and thinkers in relation to Kierkegaard.

I am more and more coming to grasp structural components of Kierkegaard’s thought that eluded me in my first trip through the major pseudonymous writings, and I think The Sickness Unto Death plays a more central role in understanding SK’s authorship than has been widely recognized. Indeed, I think one of the many fruits of the work I’m currently doing is that I’m going to be able to explain a pedagogical or interpretive point: why Kierkegaard is so badly understood. A lot of famous thinkers are badly understood, even by people who’ve bothered to read some of their major work, but SK is particularly badly understood, even by many Kierkegaard scholars, and it’s becoming increasingly clear to me, in some cases at least, why that is.

Naturally, besides all my class related material, I’ve been reading some things here and there on the side. Among my bedside books are Noll’s The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, which strikes me as an important book for any Christian, but especially theologians and historians. I recently read Marsden’s Reforming Fundamentalism, which was a sobering and enlightening history of one part of my heritage as an American Fundamentalist/Evangelical. I also have some books by Scruton by my bed, which I read as time permits and inclination suggests. Some other books, not necessarily restricted to my bedside, are Robinson’s The Death of Adam, which is proving thoroughly enjoyable and rich with insight. I’m not sure I always trust Robinson’s historical sense, but that does  not detract from my admiration for her writing. I’ve also been reading some McCabe, in this case God Matters, which goes along nicely with Turner’s class.

One book that is leaving a major impression on me is David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous, which so far is brilliant and powerfully reorienting. I first heard of it from a Tolkien scholar, Patrick Curry (he has a fantastic book on Tolkien and ecology), and, thanks to Tolkien, I am very open to the kind of work Abram is doing, work that I would have find bizarre four years ago. Ever since my Tolkien class as an undergraduate, I’ve considered myself a treehugger of sorts and have been receptive to ecological work, although some stuff I’ve read, like McFague in theology, is unappealing. Abram’s provides an remarkable analysis, based especially on Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, of the Lebenswelt that we naturally inhabit, arguing that, in spite of what we consciously think, the Lebenswelt is actually well described by categories and frameworks we typically describe as animistic. I would have found this thesis highly suspicious 4 years ago, but after Tolkien and especially Barfield, I’m actually quite sympathetic to what Abram is doing. I will continue to reflect on his work as I’m reading.

There are other interesting things I’m reading, especially some material I’m getting into on resurrection (a topic on which I want to do some serious theological work) and atonement, but I can’t think of a lot of it and this post is already lengthy.

Important Research on Multitasking: Don’t Do It

http://chronicle.com/article/Scholars-Turn-Their-Attention/63746/

This article in the Chronicle of Higher Education presents and discusses some recent research on multitasking that confirms earlier research: Multitasking is bad for you.

Clifford Nass, a professor at Stanford, has shown multitaskers seem actually to be worse at multitasking than the old fashioned people who do one thing at a time:

Indeed, last summer Nass and two colleagues published a study that found that self-described multitaskers performed much worse on cognitive and memory tasks that involved distraction than did people who said they preferred to focus on single tasks. Nass says he was surprised at the result: He had expected the multitaskers to perform better on at least some elements of the test. But no. The study was yet another piece of evidence for the unwisdom of multitasking.

The recent research also confirms something I have noticed in my own experience, especially in the past few months. The internet is a major distraction for me, not in any straighforward sense, but in the sense that I noticed I had difficulty switching from online browsing to focused reading, or doing the latter while my computer was up, or I was entertaining the possibility of checking my email in ten minutes. Another psychologist, Meyer, has explained why this is: “In a series of papers a decade ago, he and his colleagues determined that even under optimal conditions, it takes a significant amount of time for the brain to switch from one goal to another, and from one set of rules to another.”

Indeed, I discovered this article on multitasking because I switched from finishing Andrew Louth’s The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition to checking Arts and Letters. Now I know scientifically that I had better mentally block off a large chunk of time within which I forbid other activities besides reading if I want to give Louth the attentions he deserves.

All of this research, for which I am grateful, confirms ancient wisdom. Indeed, I often think much sociology and pyschology involves establishing for our own satisfaction what our mothers told us, or, put another way, proving ancient wisdom. I do not demean this effect, for we no longer trust our mothers and the ancients as we did before, and if we thus need researchers to prove teachers are most important for students education, or that doing five things at once diminses our capacity to do anything well, thank heavens for curious, gifted, and diligent researchers.

One should notice especially how concerned these psychologists are about the implications of their research: they see that it suggests what critics of technology and advocates of traditional forms of learning have long said, namely, that technology (much of the time)  and multitasking are destroying, not aiding, our capacity to learn and to reason well. The capacity to sit on one’s rear end for a long time and do one task, suggested by the German word used to describe scholars and other focused workers, Sitzfleisch, is not replaceable, but it is destructible.

This Sitzfleisch is, not incidentally, one of the traits that should characterize all good scholars, but especially those in the humanities, for certain texts, like Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, require nothing less than many tens of hours of focused, diligent attention in order to approach even a skeletal first-hand knowledge of them. The demand placed on the readers of such texts is one reason I am suspicious, as was my perhaps most learned professor, of people who claim wide-reading, particularly as scholars. A corollary of my skepticism is the deep respect I have for someone like Denys Turner, who you do not need to be around long to learn that he has spent many hundreds of hours carefully reading about a thousand years of Latin texts. He knows secondary scholarship, but he does not much like scholarship (so he says), and it’s quite clear, for example, that he knows Aquinas – and cares more about Aquinas - a great deal better than he knows, or cares, what other people have said about Aquinas, which is not to say he does not respect the opinions of other; indeed, he’s perhaps the most open academic I’ve yet met. But he knows what is intrinsically important and distinguishes it from what it is necessary qua academic in a university.

The research thus reminds me of the importance of attending to things, something Oliver O’Donovan speaks incisively of in a lecture (the title of which I’ve forgotten). We are to attend well to the world, and we thus must develop the capacities that enable attentiveness and fight against conditions that weaken it.

I gave up the television a good while ago (found it boring), although I still enjoy shows or movies now and then. Now I suppose I need to learn better how to control this thing enabling my current post. To that end . . .

Williams James’s The PhD Octopus

A friend pointed me to James’s outstanding essay, written in 1903, “The Ph.D. Octopus,” that dealt with graduate education and concerns James had about the direction it was taking.

http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/octopus.html

It’s nice to know one has the company of James in one’s concerns about graduate education. Unfortunately, James’s ideas for reform were not implemented, and things, a hundred years later, have gotten much worse, as he feared they would.

It’s worth noting a few things about James’s article. First, he clearly thought that qualifying for a PhD in no way ensures that one can teach, and that the assumption of such a connection was rubbish:

First of all, is not our growing tendency to appoint no instructors who are not also doctors an instance of pure sham? Will any one pretend for a moment that the doctor’s degree is a guarantee that its possessor will be successful as a teacher? Notoriously his moral, social, and personal characteristics may utterly disqualify him for success in the class-room; and of these characteristics his doctor’s examination is unable to take any account whatever. Certain bare human beings will always be better candidates for a given place than all the doctor-applicants on hand; and to exclude the former by a rigid rule, and in the end to have to sift the latter by private inquiry into their personal peculiarities among those who know them, just as if they were not doctors at all, is to stultify one’s own procedure.

He also makes a point about the effects of snobbery, which hits home for all those in higher education, I think, especially in prestigious institutions in which snobbery is the order of the day. He addresses the class of “failures” created by the education system, and how the creators of that system are responsible for those failures.

Finally, his last suggestion, which was also left untouched, was to let men of exceptional intellectual power forego the hindering tedium of higher degrees with the assurance from their professors that they have their support and recommendations. I am sure things like this happen, but I’m equally sure it almost entirely restricted to elite classes – as we all know, it’s still an “old boys club,” when it comes to getting certain jobs and positions, it’s just the club is a bit more diverse than it used to be.

This last suggestion of James struck me as particularly wonderful, as I know people for whom the PhD will be a waste of time, if not a dulling of their talent, and yet they “must” get it. More is the pity James’s advice was not followed.

Incidentally, a college professor in 2003 reflected on James’s essay, “The Ph.D. Octopus: One Hundred Years On.”

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/septemberweb-only/9-15-12.0.html

Christopher Hitchens and J. Gresham Machen

Here is a good interview with Hitchens: http://www.portlandmonthlymag.com/arts-and-entertainment/category/book-and-talks/articles/religion-god-0110/#

One of the many reasons I like Hitchens is because, in some ways,  he understands Christianity better than most Christians. The interviewer is a self-professed liberal (a sophisticated one who distinguishes Fundamentalists and Liberals by distinguishing “literal” and “metaphorical” readings of the Bible – very savvy indeed), and Hitchens provides an argument, not unlike Machen’s in Christianity and Liberalism, against her: her version of Christianity ”is not in any meaningful sense”  Christian. This is one of the interesting, and to serious Christians and serious atheists, obvious facts about liberalism: only liberals think their views are serious and plausible representations of the tradition they claim to be a part of. Everyone else knows better. Orthodox Christians know that if certain things are false, the game is up and one had better be honest, stop taking money from one’s parishioner’s and denomination, and give up the title “Christian.” Atheists who have no reason to not read the Scriptures honestly and are not invested, emotionally, sentimentally, or financially, in Christianity, see the absurd hermeneutical distortions of liberals as just that: absurd.

Only people who want to have a culturally palatable version of Christianity, for example, twist certain clear passages to mean the opposite of what they say. Those with no vested interest in being “Christian” see such readings as dishonest and attack the Bible for teaching x, while the crunchy conservatives who are willing to stick their fingers in the eye of culture admit that x is what the Scriptures say but that that means the culture, not Scripture, is wrong (usually an impossible scenario for liberals, unless the culture is politically conservative).

The Fundamentalist/Liberal dichotomy can drastically oversimplify, but if you have people, like this interviewer, labelling everyone orthodox as Fundamentalist (i.e., if you affirm the creeds, so believe Jesus rose from the dead, etc.), then one can see where one falls on that crude, but helpful, scale. That scale better represents the historical reality of “Fundamentalism,” too. As anyone who has read Machen knows, he was an excellent thinker who stated clearly what the dividing issues were between Liberalism and Christianity: basic commitments to those doctrines that make Christianity what it is. He wanted to cut through the beloved fog of mealy-mouthed preachers and theologians who intentionally used traditional language whose traditional meaning they denied.

Denys Turner recently said something in tune with Hitchens’ comments. Someone in Medieval Theology asked if any of “these people” questioned whether “God was omnipotent, you know, like Process theology did.” Turner said, “No, not really.” He then went on to say, “I don’t see the point of a limited God – why bother with that? We’ve got enough things in the world, why would we want to add one more great, big thing?” Why indeed. 

Still, it’s a delicious irony to hear a hardened atheist telling a professing Christian what Christianity means.

I endeavor to be honest enough with myself so that if I lose my faith I become a Nietzsche, not an Episcopalian (of course, I attend an Episcopal church, so I can’t resist taking shots at them). Radical Islam does everyone the courtesy of reminding them that beliefs matter and sincerity does not hack it. If you sincerely get your beliefs wrong, as most of the world thinks radical Islam does, all the theoretical schlock shoveled from humanities departments will not fill the holes left by the bombs of their false belief. Hitchens only takes seriously serious believers, hence his remark that if all Christians were like his interviewer, he would not have to bother writing against Christianity.

Honest Christian profession is going to make people angry and offended, no matter how politely expressed; it’s one of the most disgusting condescensions of modern theologians (like Bultmann) to act as if everyone “back then” thought Christianity was sensible, as if the early church did not have its own cultured despisers (a historical inaccuracy demolished by, among many, Robert Louis Wilken), and “now, as modern people, blah blah blah,” we have to make some alterations. History revenges itself, of course, so that while Bultmann or Tillich (or fill-in-the-blank) is going out of fashion more people are still being converted to the same Gospel, replete with “supernaturalism” and bodily resurrection (while using the wireless), and, wherever they are fallibly but faithfully living, they are still mocked by the intelligentsia, respected by the common man and beloved by the poor. Some things don’t change.

Marilynne Robinson: An Interview, Reviews, Etc.

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justintaylor/2010/01/01/an-interview-with-marilynne-robinson/

Michael Horton, from Westminster Seminary California, has an interview with Marilynne Robinson that mostly focuses on her collection of essays, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought.

Roger Kimball also reposted his review of that book, for those without access to the New York Times Review of Books, here:  http://www.newcriterion.com/posts.cfm/More-on-Marilynne-Robinson-5044

Paul over at Philosophy, Lit, Etc. has a link to a long excerpt from Robinson’s recent essays, “Onward Christian Liberals,” http://praymont.blogspot.com/2010/01/state-arts-gossip-accomplished-nephews.html 

I intend on reflecting further on this essay in a later post, but for now I’m just noting it.