The Works of Friendship

updated Tuesday, April 6, 2010: additions to Ben Dunning and Diane Davis; NEW listings on Samuel Baker and two of my fellow Yale alums, Michael Milton and Tyler Wigg-Stevenson.

It seems altogether fitting that my first real post of 2010 should be one that reflects on the accomplishments achieved by others during the last year.  This post, which was mostly composed back in early January but has remained buried because of more pressing personal matters, chronicles the works of friends that have appeared in print.  Because the theme of friendship has once again proven to be so existentially poignant for me, I will save the unpacking of my titular terms for another post.

• Daniel Joslyn-Siemiatkoski, a medievalist and church historian, has published Christian Memories of the Maccabean Martyrs, based on his Boston College dissertation (see here for an extended preview).  Among other virtues, Daniel's study employs a postcolonial analysis keyed to an historian's sensitivity to the particular and contingent so as to illuminate more deeply certain patterns of medieval Christian identity- and culture-making.

• Benjamin Dunning, a specialist in New Testament and Early Christian literatures, published Aliens and Sojourners: Self as Other in Early Christianity in UPenn's magnificent series Divinations, along with two articles in the Journal of Early Christian Studies and the Journal of Religion related to his next book project on, as he describes it, the "theological significance of sexual difference and gendered embodiment in second- and third-century Christian thought." The articles are: "What Sort of Thing Is This Luminous Woman? Thinking Sexual Difference in On the Origin of the World," Journal of Early Christian Studies 17.1 (2009): 55-84; and "Virgin Earth, Virgin Birth: Creation, Sexual Difference, and Recapitulation in Irenaeus of Lyons," Journal of Religion 89.1 (2009): 57-88.

• Susannah Chewing's edited collection The Milieu and Context of the Wooing Group appeared in the series "Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages" from the University of Wales Press (American distributor, University of Chicago Press).

• Nathan Mitchell, a scholar of longstanding note in the history and theology of Christian liturgy, published The Mystery of the Rosary: Marian Devotion and the Reinvention of Catholicism (excerpts available via the link and here on Google books).  Nathan seeks to "account for the rosary's ubiquity, durability, and resilience" as a popular devotion that cuts across a diversity of spectra and historical continua.  But his aim is not to offer a "positivist history" of the devotion; rather, his a hermeneuetical enterprise, seeking "to understand how what happened continues to shape human experience."  He states his argument clearly: "to understand the rosary's adaptability and survival across chronological periods, cultures, and continents one must examine more closely the changes Catholicism itself began to experience after the Reformation...and the Council of Trent."  Importantly, he demonstrates how, contrary to certain popular historiographies, "Catholicism after Trent did not become a fossilized, monolithic institution immune to change."  For Nathan, "the rosary survived and flourished because it was able to absorb the reframings of reform, representation, ritual, religious identity, and devotion tha came to characterize early modern Catholicism and that have continued to shape Catholic piety and practice to the present day."   From the outset, Nathan whispers what I take to be two axioms that ought to govern any inquiry into historical Catholicism: (a) "a reform of church life is inevitably a reform of its images as these are framed in its icons, its rites, and its written narratives"; and (b) "Catholics have maintained traditions of belief and behavior not through single-minded intransigence but by embracing flexibility and change."  See here for a brief video excerpt of Nathan discussing the sacramental theology of Vatican II, the sacraments of faith more generally, and how through sacrament Christians are committed to social justice. Nathan also continues to write his extraordinary column, the "Amen Corner," for the liturgical studies journal Worship.

• As its editor, Nicola Masciandaro successfully shepherded the inaugural issue of the new journal Glossator into existence. The issue was replete with outstanding contributions, but I especially draw attention (given the rubric under which I am writing) to Daniel C. Remein's exquisite essay in what I would have to call a combinatorial poetics (i.e., combining his scholarly work with his poetry and creative writing -- although I am well aware that the distinction I'm making between the two is utterly arbitrary), and the collaborative piece by Nicola and Anna Klosowska, who also collaborated with Bryan Reynolds on a chapter in the latter's new book, Transversal Subjects. See here for Dan's blog. And Nicola's essay "Becoming Spice: Commentary as Geophilosophy" has now appeared in Collapse VI: Geo/Philosophy .
  

• Eileen Joy's essay "'In His Eyes Stood a Light note Beautiful': Levinas, Hospitality, Beowolf," appeared in the volume Levinas and Medieval Literature: The "Difficult Reading" of English and Rabbinic Texts.  The essay can also be read here.

• It is impossible to chart the many scholarly iterations of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (there are, in fact, no less than three webpages [see here and here for the other two] for him as well as the group blog In the Middle) but I will note that he contributed a chapter on lithic memory to the already well-received collection, The Post-Historical Middle Ages [see below]. Ever the active blogger, JJC has also listed what he considers to be his top 20 posts of 2009, a year that also marks the end of his run as department chair [see also here and here].
  

• Cary Howie contributed the chapter "Superficial Medievalism and the Queer Futures of Film" to the collection Queer Movie Medievalisms. Cary blogs intermittently, but always beautifully, at Mended Things.
  

• In addition to his many book reviews, Aaron Klink authored the chapter "Knowledge Seeking Wisdom: Medical Professionals, Religion and End of Life Care" in volume 1 of Religion, Death, and Dying, ed., Lucy Bregman (Praeger Press). Aaron also delivered a subtle but riotously funny paper on the queer theological work of James Alison at the American Academy of Religion's annual meeting in Montreal. My favorite moment in the talk -- alongside Aaron's various Lutheran testimonials -- was when he reminded the audience that, while the American Lutherans were discussing the issue of blessing same-sex unions at their annual synod back in June, a tornado hit. For the "conservatives," this was clearly an act of Divine judgment against those who would wish to bless such unions. Meanwhile, the "liberal" faction, upon their victory, claimed hermeneutical superiority by retrospectively interpreting the tornado as the presence of the Holy Spirit!

• Two individuals with ties to  the UT Austin English Department graduate program have also been active. Bradley J. Irish, who specializes in Tudor literature and history, published "'The Secret Chamber and the Other Suspect Places': Materiality, Space, and the Fall of Catherine Howard" in Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 4 (2009), pp. 169-74. Brad also gave papers at several important conferences, including one entitled "Surrey, Richmond and the Poetics of Ambivalence," at Hampton Court Palace for an international gathering on "Henry VIII and the Tudor Court, 1509-2009." He closed out the year by delivering an MLA paper.   Sebastian Langdell's "‘What world is this? How vndirstande am I?’A reappraisal of poetic authority in Thomas Hoccleve’s Series" appeared in Medium Aevum 78.2 (2009).

• The year also closed with Brian P. Flanagan receiving his first book contract for what is surely to be an impressive systematic treatment of the ecclesiology of the Dominican theologian Jean-Marie Tillard (1927-2000); the volume is forthcoming in 2010 from Continuum/T&T Clark.  See here for an abstract of Brian's 2007 Boston College dissertation.  Brian, who now teaches at Marymount University (Arlington, VA), has also authored an essay on the use ecclesial metaphors in the College Theology Society's journal Horizons.  A member of that wonderful Society since 2002, he was just elected to a term on its board as Treasurer.  In his bid for that position, Brian wrote that his "research and experience have confirmed...the fundamental importance of opening spaces for community among all of us in our otherness to each other, and [his desire] the Society’s tradition of openness to our sometimes cacophonous, sometimes harmonious, voices."   In addition to Brian's above mentioned work on Tillard, those interested might also consult Christopher Ruddy's recent book length study, The Local Church: Tillard and the Future of Catholic Ecclesiology.

• Finally, two former colleagues of mine (among the very many who have gone off to do interesting and much needs things) from Yale Divinity School have been doing very noteworthy work.  The Rev. Tyler Wigg-Stevenson '04 M.Div, who recently founded the Two Futures Project for the abolition of all nuclear weapons, was interviewed in October 2009 for the PBS show "Religion and Ethics Newsweekly" (see here and here).  Tyler is also the author of the provocative 2007 book Brand Jesus: Christianity in a Consumerist Age, the germination for which, he notes, was a term paper in a YDS exegesis course on Paul's Letter to the Romans.  Mr. Michael Milton '03 MAR, who now resides in Austin, TX, and has spent much of his professional career in nonprofit fundraising and development, published Head First Data Analysis in August 2009.  For more on this, check out his blog.  Michael also has a forthcoming book on Excel.  I'm excited to hear about his several other writing projects, too.
   

Writing in his preface to Gilles Deleuze's ABCs: The Folds of Friendship, Charles Stivale observes how "friendship is not, and indeed cannot be, one single type of practice in all instances" (p. ix). Through a series of carefully executed readings of Deleuze's writings, Stivale produces a "zig-zag methodology" imminent to the work itself. Most important for the purposes of this post is what Stivale says about how the "different tonalities and diverse forms of affect [that] are precipitated within the teaching exchange" can fold into friendship (p. 35). In Stivale's ex-pli-cation of Deleuze, we learn that "what is interesting in a course is much less its subject than its emotion....[that] it's not a question of following everything or of listening to everything, but of keeping watch so that one grasps what suits him or her at the right moment" (p. 40). To be studious in this Deleuzian sense is to be watchful, which is a pensively productive vector of desire. The pedagogical charge, Stivale later remarks, isn't to found (or to find "false security" within) so-called 'schools of thoughts'; rather, it is for students to "seize...[particular] notions in movement, twist them in their own way, and use these concepts and notions as needed" (p. 42). Just as Deleuze practiced in his own pedagogy, a teacher's task is "that of a mediator to the students' varied movements of comprehension and experimentation as a relay in the capacities of affect" (p. 42). It is in keeping with the force of this thinking that I wish also to make mention of and celebrate the work of some teachers, past and present:

• Appearing late in 2009 was David H. Kelsey's decades-in-the-making magnum opus, Eccentric Existence, which is a highly anticipated two-volume, 1100-page constructive account of Christian theological anthropology. See here to listen to a 30-minute radio conversation with David about the book. While the interviewers can be a bit annoying, what comes through clearly here is how amazingly subtle a thinker David is. One thing David speaks about in the interview is his own transition from writing about theology to doing theology, and, although he values both operations, this is a transition that he has consistently encouraged his students to pursue. On a personal note, I had the immense pleasure of taking several seminars with David, now retired, while I attended Yale Divinity School, and he also served as my adviser for a period. He remains for me a model scholar not only in his erudition, but, most importantly, in the care, generosity, and humility that exudes from his person. (David also wrote a detailed review essay on "Theology in the University: Once More, with Feeling," that appeared in Modern Theology 25.2, and which examines the recent books by Gavin D'Costa, Andrew Shanks, and Stanley Hauerwas on theology and the modern university. Theological education is also a topic dear to David's heart, one on which he has previously written thoughtful and widely praised ruminations.)
  

• One of my undergraduate professors, moral and systematic theologian David Matzko McCarthy (who has also produced creative essays on sexuality and queer theology), edited a remarkable volume, The Heart of Catholic Social Teaching: Its Origins and Contemporary Significance, all of whose contributors are faculty of my alma mater, Mount St. Mary's University (Emmitsburg, MD). It is a collection that arises from the "collaborative habits of a real community of teacher-scholars, philosophers and theologians who live in the same place and talk to each other about the general education program in which they all work." That back-cover endorsement is from the pen of another of my early teachers, William Portier, who, after nearly 30 years of teaching at The Mount (as we call it) took up a position at the University of Dayton.

• Palgrave published Elizabeth Scala's co-edited volume, The Post-Historical Middle Ages. The book and its many amazing essays (including one on lithic memory by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen) has been already been referenced several times with great interest by the folks over at ITM, and there was quite the buzz surrounding it at last May's Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo -- a buzz connected with phrases like "paradigm-changing" despite Palgrave only having one copy on display and no promotional materials of speak to speak. Wordisms offers a few nice thoughts on the book, especially a series of provocative remarks on Liz's chapter, "The Gender of Historicism." Liz also published an article on Chaucer's Wife's and Clerk's Tales in the 2009 volume of the annual Studies in the Age of Chaucer.
  

• Another UT Austin medievalist, Daniel Birkholz, contributed a chapter on "Biography After Historicism" to the above volume, The Post-Historical Middle Ages, and his latest article on the Harley Lyrics appeared in the 2009 annual volume of Studies in the Age of Chaucer. He was also awarded a Solmsen Post-Doctoral Fellowship for the 2009-2010 academic year.

• A specialist in Romanticism, Samuel Baker has "Scott’s Stoic Characters: Ethics, Sentiment, and Irony in The Antiquary, Guy Mannering, and ‘the Author of Waverly’" in a special issue of MLQ 70:4, pp. 443-71.  In this essay, Baker revisits the claims to a "split [Walter] Scott," or that "picture of him as an author who, torn apart, knits himself back together in a powerful (if perhaps inflexible) corpus."  Aiming "less to add details to this picture than to bring its central figure into sharper focus," Baker sets out asking "[b]y what virtue did Scott, who seems to us so contradictory, project a meaningful character."  For Baker, the answer presents itself in a particular form of stoic philosophizing in which the self was "virtuous enough to be sentimental."  Not only does this article offer a compelling portrait of Scott’s "character types," but signals a more explicit concern on its author’s part with the affective dimensions of literary culture-making.  This essay is part of a series that Baker is publishing on what he describes in his faculty bio as "ethical dispositions in the Romantic novel, , tracking how stoicism and skepticism, among other attitudes, ceased to refer to specific philosophical schools and began to be seen as general psychological orientations."  Baker, who previously worked as a journalist and book reviewer prior to taking his PhD, has also written a lengthy piece on the “maritime georgic” (see ELH 75 [2008], pp. 531-63), and this previews some of the ideas in his forthcoming book, Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Maritime Empire of Culture.  He has been involved with  Harrington Fellow program at UT’s Harry Ransom Center, where is was one of the coordinators of the symposium, "Seaborne Renaissance: Global Exchanges and Religion in Early Modernity."

• Diane Davis published Reading Ronell, an excellent edited collection on the work of Avital Ronell, featuring contributions by Judith Butler, Jean-Luc Nancy, Sam Weber, and Hent de Vries, among several others.  In her introduction, Diane describes any project with the "mission" announced in this book's title as an "arduous task": "How might one approach an oeuvre explicitly designed to 'resist you,' to get 'you' to question what it means to read anything at all? To open a work by Avital Ronell is, in a sense, to eavesdrop on a fundamentally dissymetrical Conversation in which 'your' addresser is first of all an addressee occupying a space of troubled reception."  Ronell's work palpably thematizes the call of the Other, where writing itself is always already (in me quoting Diane quoting Ronell) "at the behest of another."  That volume's aim is, tropologically speaking, to enable us to "perk up our ears" and hone our auditory abilities in order to meet the demands of "Ronell's exquisitely (and excruciatingly) meticulous readings [that] orchestrate, each time, a depropriating encounter with the inassimilable....Reading at the extreme limits of responsibility (response-ability), Ronell enacts an ethics of reading that responds to the trace of the other while tirelessly demonstrating that there is no way, ultimately, to have understood (completely)." Both Diane and her contributors thus attempt to respond through an "expansive and diverse assemblage of essays" to the "singular provocation of Ronell's 'remarkable critical oeurve' -- the devastating insights, the unprecedented writing style, the relentless destabilizations -- [that] is a function of her ethics and practice of reading."   The volume, moreover, is itself described as a somewhat belated response of the editor (a calling in on a self-made promissory note) to a 1994 special fifty page section on Ronell (edited by Jonathan Culler) in the journal diacritics.  Unlike that issue, which Diane nicely observes "fascinatingly display[s]" the "sort of competitive mimesis" that the Ronellian style apparently inspires, this volume sets out to be "an assemblage...les given to mimetic impulses and more interested in reading with Ronell: by reading Ronell reading, or by examining the ethico-political implications of her radical dislocations, or by carefully explicating, extending, and exploring the paraconcepts addressed in her works."  It is equally worth mentioning, as Diane herself does near the close of her introduction, "one profound regret": that Ronell's great teacher, Derrida, who expressed his eagerness to participate," passed before he was able to complete his contribution to the volume. As Diane recalls, "At his home in Rise-Orangis one afternoon in late 2005, when he was already quite ill, he again expressed to me his enthusiasm for this collection and his sincere hope to complete his contribution to it.  I am extremely grateful to Derrida for his unwavering encouragement, and I want to mark his disseminated presence in these pages: though he could not complete his essay, he did contribute a great deal to this collection."

• Although previously announced for a 2009 release, the much anticipated Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria Nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe by Marjorie Curry Woods is now scheduled for release in 2010. It should be available at OSUP booth during Kalamazoo, and I anticipate a future post about the volume upon its publication.
  

• I'm also happy to report that, while visiting him with him in April, Dale B. Martin, a noted scholar of New Testament and ancient Christianity, awoke to find himself elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Interested parties can also watch Dale's lectures from his Spring 2009 Yale undergraduate introductory course on the New Testament. Technically speaking, of course, I was never a student of Dale's while I attended Yale, since I never enrolled in any of his courses. But in other, more important respects, I remain indebted to him for not only his many kindnesses but especially the consistently provocative nature of his challenges. One of the first memories I have getting to know Dale entails the both of us walking in a late night rain after a choral rehearsal. We were discussing his book, The Corinthian Body, which I had just started reading; I was communicating to him my then frustrations about what he meant by the social construction of identity, informing him that I was (at that stage) too committed to some kind of post-Heideggerian notion a substantial self (however hermeneutically ridden) to make the leap into social construction. In his typically Texan way, Dale declared me "too damn conservative" before hopping in his car. I was, to say the least, dumbstruck, since I had never thought of myself as conservative in nearly any way (nor had I been considered conservative while attending my college). Although nothing is ever predictable with Dale, I say "typical" only because of his continual ability to compel -- very often with a single, well placed remark/rejoinder -- an entire rethinking of one's position. In my case, that rethinking lead far behind a simple position on some academic issue; it brought about an entirely new relation to the world and my place in it. Because of his influence, I can point to the exact moment (some time later, in a course on martyrdom and traditions of noble death with Adela Collins) when I became a self-consciously aware postmodernist. Of course, some might lament such influence, but I revel in its devilishness.

I am also eagerly anticipating the continuing unfolding of this new year as it will bring into print the work of Douglas R. Boin (a specialist in classical Latin and the literatures and material cultures of Christian late antiquity), whose UT Ph.D. is still so newly minted that it shines. He will publish articles in the Journal of Roman Studies and the American Journal of Archaeology. Doug also presented papers on late antique Ostia, the principle site of his research, at international gatherings in Rome and Philadelphia. See here for more on his activities and global sojourns.