Theology Blindspot

“...the struggle between secular critique and religious sentiments—the very same conflict we had in the Danish cartoon crisis and other freedom of speech versus moral harm-cases (see Saba Mahmood’s ‘Is critique secular?’)—is only on one level a struggle between secular and religious worldviews; on a second level, it is a conflict among religious actors. The same is true for all other possible secular-religious conflict situations. My thrust is that it is really this second level that is the most instructive in terms of empirical insights for further theory-building. In order to get access to this second level, however, social sciences have to overcome the theology blind spot and have to open up to the empirical study of theological debates. In the remainder of this post I quickly want to outline what this opening-up could look like in the three approaches to the study of religion identified by Cécile Laborde in her post: Where is theology in the critical, upholding, and disaggregating perspectives?”

Kristina Stoeckl, "The Theology Blindspot" The Immanent Frame - http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/?p=40240

Stoeckl provides an interesting summary of the problem of looking at religion and secularity without care and attention for theological discourse. It's a mistake rightly pointed out by this author in much of the literature, and one we are also trying to redress with Newcastle's Religion in Political Life in Australia volume forthcoming in 2015.

Crucially, however, it should be noted that this is an evidence based, empirical and forensic interest in theology with the sole purpose of understanding religious thought and action.

On Waiting for Godot

“So what is it about Beckett’s weird, apocalyptic clown show that gives it such remarkable resonance, soulfulness—even, dare I say, flat-out entertainment value?... How could it not? For ‘Godot’ remains—there’s no use denying it—a profoundly atheist work, though we must not overlook the profundity for the godlessness. Beckett’s is not the blithe, hyperconfident, 21st-century atheism of Richard Dawkins, or the bland, self-satisfied scientism that constitutes a kind of default worldview in the educated West. It is instead the 20th century’s wounded, elegiac brand of letting-go-of-God—the entirely comprehensible incomprehension of intellectuals who felt poised between the Stygian maw of the Holocaust and the real probability of nuclear annihilation. For all its impish gallows humor, ‘Waiting for Godot’ has, to my ears at least, an unmistakeably valedictory timbre; it sounds like the lament of a one-time believer who once took the promise of faith seriously, or at the very least understood its high stakes. Put another way: Beckett’s is a voice that anyone conversant with the stark desert landscape of the Bible—anyone who has, so to speak, sat picking scabs with Job or eaten locusts with John the Baptist—will recognize in a heartbeat.”

"A God-Shaped Hole," America Magazine - http://www.americamagazine.org/node/157753

I had the pleasure of seeing the opening night performance of this rendition of the play with Patrick Steward and Ian McKellen in the lead roles at the Haymarket Theatre in Edinburgh.

On Teaching Religion

“When I first started teaching in my current institution, a decade or so ago, I was impressed by the diversity of students in lectures. Lots were believers of one sort or another, but many others would describe themselves as atheists and agnostics. Whatever they thought about religion, they shared an intellectual curiosity and open-mindedness that made teaching the best part of my job: they enjoyed being challenged in their assumptions, and they loved exploring the ways religions have shaped and been shaped by cultural, social and political shifts. Most noticeable of all, students rarely expressed a need to proclaim or defend their own faith perspectives in lectures. But things are so different now... Recently, a group of students in a lecture refused to undertake the work set because they didn’t want to apply postmodern perspectives to what for them was a sacred text. A female colleague was accused of being ‘stupid’ and ‘lacking authority’ by those who believe a woman has no right to teach others about religious texts. Other colleagues have been marked out as heretics in lectures. ”

Anonymous Academic, "Teaching Religion: My Students Are Trying to Run My Course," The Guardian - http://gu.com/p/3mhhf

I remember teaching religion and theology at a Russell Group University in the UK some years ago in a similar way to this academic's experience, i.e. open-minded, diverse, curious. It is sad to think that this is being eroded.

A Lesson From Auschwitz

“Dr. Bronowski insisted that the principle of uncertainty was a misnomer, because it gives the impression that in science (and outside of it) we are always uncertain. But this is wrong. Knowledge is precise, but that precision is confined within a certain toleration of uncertainty... For Dr. Bronowski, the moral consequence of knowledge is that we must never judge others on the basis of some absolute, God-like conception of certainty. All knowledge, all information that passes between human beings, can be exchanged only within what we might call ‘a play of tolerance,’ whether in science, literature, politics or religion. As he eloquently put it, ‘Human knowledge is personal and responsible, an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.’”

Simon Critchley, "Dangers of Certainty: A Lesson from Auswitz," The New York Times - http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/the-dangers-of-certainty

On Solitude and Writing

“But also [Ingmar Bergman] was an extremely disciplined artist. He had no discipline in his personal life—I do—but he had extreme discipline when it came to his art and the way he ran his life around it. For the last 25 years of his life, he was married to the same woman, and the chaos of his life had settled. He lived on a small island called Faro, north of Gotland, where he would plan his films, write the scripts, make the screenboards, and everything. He limited his activities: Besides working and thinking, he might go for a stroll. He would only drink buttered skim milk, and have one cookie in the afternoon—his ailing stomach couldn’t take more than that. In the late afternoon or evening, he would have visitors over to go and look at a movie in his cinema. And that was his routine, every day. He didn’t try to do more.”

"What Great Artists Need: Solitude," The Atlantic - http://bit.ly/1b3gDDQ

Surveillance and the Eye of God

“Surveillance is sometimes spoken of as a God’s eye view of the world. This idea is explored in relation to the ‘objective gaze’ of disengaged reason in the Enlightenment and its technologically-reinforced modes in the twenty-first century. The rise of the eye-centred viewpoint is coincident with the ‘great disembedding’ of individuals from the social. This in turn also prompted the self-disciplines of modernity, which are now key aspects of the power-base of modern institutions. A crucial moment in this shift was Bentham’s panopticon proposal, in which the knowledge regime of secularism started to shape social imaginaries in relation to surveillance. While secular omniscience was sought through the surveillance gaze, and explored later in the work of Foucault, Debord and others, the eye-centred view is not without critics. We draw upon some biblical resources, notably, the story of Hagar, that query the centrality of ‘objective vision’. Instead, an ethic of care is proposed, based in part on a fresh understanding of the ‘eye of God’. It is argued that the implications of the care ethic go far deeper than current appeals to privacy, data protection, civil liberties or human rights.”

David Lyon, "Surveillance and the Eye of God" Studies in Christian Ethics 27, 1, 2014 - http://sce.sagepub.com/content/27/1/21.abstract?rss=1 

I wrote about this some years ago and will return to it at some point.

Campbell's Law

“The most common problem is that all these new systems—metrics, algo­rithms, automated decisionmaking processes—result in humans gaming the system in rational but often unpredictable ways. Sociologist Donald T. Campbell noted this dynamic back in the ’70s, when he articulated what’s come to be known as Campbell’s law: ‘The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making,’ he wrote, ‘the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.’”

"Why Quants Don't Know Everything," - http://wrd.cm/1aqjvdj

As I get ready for another year of metricized higher education, it's always nice to remind myself that social psychologists have already documented how policy metrics are quickly counteracted by the corrupting effects of the measure used. In the HE case, we get measured on student feedback, citations indices, and a range of other Key Performance Indicators (I was once advised to cite myself and colleagues to increase our H-index). In any case, given that the problems with this kind of thing are relatively well known, here's hoping that some wisdom may also filter into the system, as this article suggests. Campbell's 1976 paper can be found here: http://bit.ly/LZ2WcS.

On Comedy

“That comedy is a mansion built on tragic foundations was a theory given credence by Sigmund Freud. “A jest betrays something serious,” he wrote in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious... The first doubled comedians were the first professional comedians, the comic actors who plied their trade as professional theaters emerged during the late sixteenth century. It was these men for whom the word comedian was coined, a designation that sought to describe the nature of their labor by placing them within a strict generic context. Prior to this moment, it was not possible to define comedy so neatly, nor could it be so closely associated with particular individuals. Rather, it existed as part of the much wider category of “fooling,” a diverse and multi-faceted portmanteau of spectacles that might include jugglers, acrobats, and simpletons as much as it did jesters and wits. Medieval fooling could also incorporate a mystical dimension, imagining the fool as both scapegoat and scourge, a quasi-apocalyptic Everyman who stood to remind us of the principle listed by St. Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians: ‘The wisdom of this world is foolishness before God.’”

Andrew McConnell Stott, "Split Personalities," Lapham's Quarterly - http://bit.ly/1cFqbTq

Academia's Stratification

“We have tended to see the professor as a single figure, but he is now a multiple being, of many types, tasks, and positions... As higher ed has undergone some of the same changes as medicine, a complicated web of academic labor has developed. For the student, the result is similar to the patient seeking health care: When she enters college, she only occasionally encounters a full-fledged professor; she is more likely to see beta professionals—the adjunct comp teacher, the math TA, the graduate assistant in the writing center, the honors-program adviser, and the staff members who run the programs... The chief difference from medicine is the steep drop in pay, benefits, and job security for those who hold beta positions... What good is knowledge if it brings us gross inequality and unfair terms for a majority of those who work, or with whom we work?”

Jeffrey J. Williams, "The Great Stratification," The Chronicle - http://bit.ly/1d6FgKj

Professor vs. Frycook

“The high cost of college makes people think that most faculty are overpaid. Let me debunk this myth...My total gross: $621,652. That’s it—25 years in universities, including nine part-time jobs. Annual average gross income: $24,866. McDonald’s suggests that employees find a second job. Since I did not take that into account, we should not count my income from jobs that were outside of universities. If so, my academic earnings were $609,413. Compare that with $581,450 at McDonald’s. Predictably, I earned more as a professor than I might have made as an employee at McDonald’s. What is really surprising is that it took me 25 years to do so.
”

Alberto A. Martinez, "Who Earns More: Professor vs. Frycook," - http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/?p=6283