World Aids Day: "We Live Past Hope..."

Although I haven't update in awhile, I repost below my thoughts from last year on World Aids Day.  It seems appropriate this year that such an observance coincides the beginning of Advent.

"[W]hat you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering. Anger, not moral authority" 

-- Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (p. 132)

 "[W]e shall love each other here if ever at all."

- Audre Lorde, "Martha" from Cables to Rage (1970)

On this December 1st, I wanted to draw attention to an annual observance.  Across the globe it was World Aids Day.  It is an opportunity for all of us each year to unite and recommit ourselves to ending this global pandemic.  It has been thirty years since the first reported cases of this death dealing disease afflicted members of the GLBT community.  It was even first called GRID (gay-related immune deficiency), a term as misleading as it was stigmatizing.  Although a diagnosis of HIV+ no longer means the death sentence it once did in the 1980s (or, at least, it doesn't in much of the developed world and often only if one can afford the drug cocktail necessary to prolong life), it still remains a highly stigmatizing disease, especially in the developing world.  But it knows nothing of boundaries: it affects all races, all socio-economic levels, all countries, all sexual orientations ... all people.

Where HIV/AIDS has divided and killed, it has also enabled the formation of new coalitions (like the justly famous ACT-UP) and fostered new tactics of survival (tactics both physiological and spiritual).  It has spurned not only some of my generation's great examples of agit prop but also exceptional works of literature, poetry, theater, and other cultural artifacts both mournful and empowering -- perhaps empowering precisely because mournful.   Indeed, much of the very possibility of queer studies scholarship came about as both academics and activists (and the multiple combinations that those titles perform) lent their voices as well as created spaces for listening to the forgotten, ignored, bereft, and dead.  The affective register became for this scholarship its very condition of possibility. 

A Key theme in the observance is "Getting to Zero" -- getting to zero new diagnoses of HIV-infections.  But just as this is a time to recommit ourselves to this important, generations-long fight, it is equally a time to remember all those who have died.  It is also a time to make penance for the many ways our societies and religious communities have used their ill-formed rhetorics of fear and hatred.  What should have been words of healing balm became rather missives of hurtful speech.  
But I wish to close on a more hopeful note, by sharing one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite (and justly celebrated) contemporary plays -- Angels in America.  (I'd also recommend listening to an earlier NPR interview with Tony Kushner on the 20th anniversary of the play.)  But the scene I share from the 2003 HBO film version occurs as the title character, Prior Walter, stands before the heavenly principalities and pleads his case for "more life."  It is also probably the finest statement of Kushner's own philosophy/theology: we live in spite of the tragedies that befall us, "we live past hope."

World AIDS Day: "We Live Past Hope"

"[W]hat you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering. Anger, not moral authority" 

-- Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (p. 132)

 "[W]e shall love each other here if ever at all."

- Audre Lorde, "Martha" from Cables to Rage (1970)

On this December 1st, I wanted to draw attention to an annual observance.  Across the globe it was World Aids Day.  It is an opportunity for all of us each year to unite and recommit ourselves to ending this global pandemic.  It has been thirty years since the first reported cases of this death dealing disease afflicted members of the GLBT community.  It was even first called GRID (gay-related immune deficiency), a term as misleading as it was stigmatizing.  Although a diagnosis of HIV+ no longer means the death sentence it once did in the 1980s (or, at least, it doesn't in much of the developed world and often only if one can afford the drug cocktail necessary to prolong life), it still remains a highly stigmatizing disease, especially in the developing world.  But it knows nothing of boundaries: it affects all races, all socio-economic levels, all countries, all sexual orientations ... all people.

Where HIV/AIDS has divided and killed, it has also enabled the formation of new coalitions (like the justly famous ACT-UP) and fostered new tactics of survival (tactics both physiological and spiritual).  It has spurned not only some of my generation's great examples of agit prop but also exceptional works of literature, poetry, theater, and other cultural artifacts both mournful and empowering -- perhaps empowering precisely because mournful.   Indeed, much of the very possibility of queer studies scholarship came about as both academics and activists (and the multiple combinations that those titles perform) lent their voices as well as created spaces for listening to the forgotten, ignored, bereft, and dead.  The affective register became for this scholarship its very condition of possibility. 

A Key theme in the observance is "Getting to Zero" -- getting to zero new diagnoses of HIV-infections.  But just as this is a time to recommit ourselves to this important, generations-long fight, it is equally a time to remember all those who have died.  It is also a time to make penance for the many ways our societies and religious communities have used their ill-formed rhetorics of fear and hatred.  What should have been words of healing balm became rather missives of hurtful speech.  
But I wish to close on a more hopeful note, by sharing one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite (and justly celebrated) contemporary plays -- Angels in America.  (I'd also recommend listening to an earlier NPR interview with Tony Kushner on the 20th anniversary of the play.)  But the scene I share from the 2003 HBO film version occurs as the title character, Prior Walter, stands before the heavenly principalities and pleads his case for "more life."  It is also probably the finest statement of Kushner's own philosophy/theology: we live in spite of the tragedies that befall us, "we live past hope."

CFP: College Theology Society 2012

I'm so very long behind in blogging.  I have several posts I'm trying to finish and others I'm beginning to sketch.  It's, of course, terribly difficult to get such things done when you work full-time in Baltimore and go to school in DC (with mid-terms right around the corner), plus other obligations. Hopefully, I'll be able to get some of these and other things done.  In any event, I wanted to pass along this announcement from one of my long time favorite academic societies, although I'm yet to attend one of its conventions.  The theme is both timely and provocative. 

College Theology Society 2012 Convention: "Found in Translation: Living Faith in New Contexts"

Religious traditions live by translation, as religions are expressed not only in different languages but also in various social and cultural contexts. Artists, missionaries, public theologians, scholars, and teachers have always sought ways to communicate religious convictions and questions to new audiences. Those efforts at translation often bring controversy, as the recent history of Christianity, from Wyclif and Tyndale to the Roman Catholic Church’s new English translation of the Roman Missal, abundantly shows. Still, translation remains essential to religion, particularly in a globalized world that gives access to, and responsibilities toward, people whose voices would not have easily been encountered generations ago. This new access—through the proliferation media, greater ease of travel, and perhaps especially the extent of current migration—is changing daily lives throughout the world, challenging people to negotiate the differences that emerge. As people interact in new ways, dominant cultures find themselves not only translating, but translated into, new social realities. In these interactions, translation has served too often as a tool of colonization, including the destruction of languages and cultures. But it has served as well in the service of enculturation that enriches religious traditions, as in the artwork and vital community of San Antonio’s San Fernando Cathedral, and the transformative dialogues that can arise between religions. What new possibilities for our lives and our religious traditions are emerging through such translations? What valued wisdom of the past are we in danger of losing? Where might we need to acknowledge that different languages and worldviews are incommensurable, impossible to translate fully enough? And how, as teachers and scholars of religion, can we assist our students, our faith communities, and our world in the translations necessary to meet the challenges of our time?

See here for the listing of individual sections and conveners.  The CTS, which was established in 1953, will meet this year at Saint Mary's University of Texas in San Antonio from May 31 through June 3, 2012 

Examining Assumptions: "Ever Intent upon Heavenly Things"

Photo: Window, St Aloysius in Somers Town, London.

"To be a human being is to be open to infinitely more than simply being a human being."

Jean-Luc Nancy, 

Noli me tangere: On the Raising of the Body

Monday, August 15th, was the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, or what in the Eastern Christian churches is called the "Dormition of the Theotokos" (for some history see here).  Although theological and liturgical traditions dealing with this aspect of mariology date back to the earliest Christian centuries, for Roman Catholics is was on Noveber 1, 1950, that Pope Pius XII solemnly declared the Assumption a dogma.   Within the hierarchy of church teaching, a dogma is defined as a revealed truth pertaining to faith or morals, and therefore requiring belief for salvation.  While ostensibly about the Virgin, the dogma of the Assumption actually teaches an eschatological truth.

Okay.  I can see the eyes rolling.  But wait, don't click away just yet.  Please.

Yes, there's something about Mary when it comes to Catholics.  Indeed, even the great twentieth-century Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth recognized the centrality of the Marian doctrines to Catholicism, although it is for that very reason that Barth cannot regard Catholicism's mariological obsession as true Christianity: he accepted the common dogmatic tradition of the early church, but denied her cultic veneration by Catholics, which he saw as "overloading" the doctrinal content.  In volume 1.2 of his celebrated Church Dogmatics, Barth doesn't mince any words, explicitly calling Mary's veneration a "heresy" and "cancer" that needs rooting out.  For Barth, veneration of the Virgin was nothing short of a mistake, "an excrescence, i.e., a diseased construct of theological thought": "Wherever Mary is venerated, and devotion to her takes place, there the Church of Christ does not exist."  

Much of my own life has been spent being formed in/by institutions dedicated to her patronage: my childhood parish and its parochial school that attended from K-12 grades, Our Lady of Pompei (I share this link somewhat ambivalently); my undergraduate college, Mount St. Mary's University; and the Baltimore church choir with which I sang for a time, the Basilica of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.   I even recall the pastor of my childhood parish asking me, upon a visit home from college, whether in my theological studies I would be taking coursework in mariology.  I bristled at the thought, chalking up his question to his pre-Vatican II seminary training, and usually treating further examples of courses offered in mariology as conservative throwbacks.  But Mary is central to several prominent Catholic theologians and church leaders of the late 19th and 20th centuries: M. J. Scheeben, Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balathasar, Wojtyla/John Paul II, Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, and even so-called progressive thinkers like Edward Schillebeeckx, Karl Rahner, and Leonardo Boff.  But it's safe to say that I have never had a particularly personal devotion to the Virgin Mary.  I do, however, understand and appreciate her role in popular religiosity, and works by Rachel Fulton, Margot Fassler, Miri Rubin, Stephen J. Shoemaker, Donna Spivey Ellington, Jaroslav Pelikan, George Tavard, and Robert Orsi help clarify the histories and ethnographic practices of these Marian beliefs.  Still, my Catholicism (whatever it may be) has always been heavily influenced by what Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich called the Protestant Principle, which might also explain my affinity toward/for certain brands of postmodern theology (e.g., Caputo) the general retrieval of apophatic and mystical traditions.

Many feminist theologians have rightly pointed to how oppressive and patriarchal appeals to Mary can be.  Writers like Brazilian Sr.Ivone Gebara in Mary, Mother of God, Mother of the Poor; Sri Lankan Fr. Tissa Balasuriya in Mary and Human Liberation; and Fordham University professor Sr. Elizabeth Johnson in Truly Our Sister have pointed toward new ways to reactive this ancient symbolic language.  Gebera, a leading figure in ecofeminist Latin American theology, was silenced by then Prefect Ratzinger (forced to study traditional theology for 2 years), and I haven't been able to locate much else about her, though she has since continued to publish.  In Balasurya's case, such work lead to doctrinal investigation and ultimately to an excommunication that was later rescinded when he was reconciled with the Church.  Johnson offers a mariology "from below" that aims to be "theologically sound, spiritually empowering, ethically challenging, socially liberating, and ecumenically fruitful."  For Johnson, Balasuriya, and others, Mary, when properly understood within her scriptural matrix, becomes not a blight but a blessing for liberative theological projects. 

But where does this leave me and the Assumption?  It's not my intention to deny or defend the dogma, but I do want to share a few brief, but I think significant thoughts, from a theologian who remains a decisive if sometimes problematic influence on me, the great German Jesuit Karl Rahner.  WIT has also posted on Rahner and the Assumption, giving especial attention to Rahner's justly praised "hermeneutics of eschatological statements" insofar as these relate to the Assumption.  They don't, however, concern themselves with the particular essay that is my focus.

In the first volume of his Theological Investigations series, Rahner published his paper "The Interpretation of the Dogma of the Assumption" (pp. 215-27).  Indeed, Rahner had prepared an entire manuscript on the Assumption that went unpublished for fifty years, after a Jesuit censor nixed it in 1951.  So, an under-appreciated and often ignored aspect in Rahner is how central both Mary and the saints are for his theological project.  Dr. Peter Fritz has been attempting to rectify this (along with showing Rahner's versatility for the future): see here for his still available paper from the 2011 Karl Rahner Society annual meeting (they don't leave them up indefinitely!).  Fritz's paper makes a number of very important observations.  Noting the apparent non-centrality of Mary to Rahner's theological project, Fritz nonetheless observes:

Many of Rahner’s Marian writings seem to concern the development of dogma only; thus Mary appears to be a peripheral figure for him, whereas she appears central for Hans Urs von Balthasar. But a closer reading of Rahner’s Marian writings, when they are placed in the context of mid-twentieth century theological debates, particularly the controversy over the “fundamental principle” for Mariology, reveals that Mary, if she does not reside at the center of Rahner’s theology, allows us access to this center, from somewhere other than the periphery. 

One intriguing thing Fritz extrapolates from Rahner's mariology is not simply that it is important, but how Rahner goes about his mariological tasks.  In other words, and this goes to the heart of censorship of Rahner's book on the Assumption by his confrere, what matters is Rahner's performance of a Catholic theological ethos.  The Jesuit censor, as Fritz points out, objected to Rahner's work, because Rahner didn't hue closely enough to the argumentative strategy of the papal teachings.  Whereas Rahner's interpretation and argument for the Assumpotion's dogmatic importance might end up at the same place as Pius XII, for the Jesuit censor it was necessary for Rahner to engage in a formal repetition of the papal language.  This, of course, would be slightly impossible, because, as Fritz rightly points out, Rahner and Pius have significantly different starting points.  Fritz comments:  

When Rahner thinks about Mary's Assumption, he asks first how her final end relates to the whole of salvation history.  Pius, on the other hand, emphasizes the private significance of the Assumption for Mary. These varying approaches to the Assumption do not lead to a complete divergence between Rahner's and Pius's conclusion...but they do raise the question of how a Catholic theologian might best arrive at such conclusions.

But what I think is so important here, and which Fritz spends a brief time elaborating at the conclusion of his essay, is this very question of ethos:

Is Catholicism's ethos properly deployed as a strict enforcement of "the sacred," a determinate sector occupied by the rosary, the Eucharist, and those who partake in them, or as the radical openness of human life toward future fulfillment, an openness that uses multiple paths -- some manifestly sacred and others not -- to advance toward enjoyment of God? In fact, it may be both, so long as the former does not cancel out the latter tout court. This last clause, of course, is the key.  

As a rhetorical term, ethos names the character or guiding beliefs of a community or determinate social group.  Its literal Greek meaning is "accustomed place," and its Latin equivalent is mores. We might think of ethos as something akin to Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus.  To speak of ethos in relation to theology and Christian practice is therefore to ask not only what the operatively fundamental dispositions are but also to raise the question of what constitutes proper persuasion.  That is, within any given ethos there operate certain rules and grammars by which certain speeches can and others not be heard.  Ethos names the anterior field our of which the power of our theological language emerges and from which it derives its solicitation. 

Let me turn now to Rahner's essay, "The Interpretation of the Dogma of the Assumption."  To read Rahner is, I believe, to experience the pleasures of theological indirection.  We must immediately note that Rahern's concern is with interpretation, or with "an exposition of the content of the new dogma" in order "to understand what is really meant by saying that someone is corporeally glorified in heaven" (pp. 215-16).    Rahner outlines his approach:

Thus is we wish to know what is really involved in the substance of this defined proposition, our best plan is to ask first of all in what wider context of Christian truths it really belongs.  The true meaning of any individual proposition of revealed truth does indeed contain an 'item' of new knowledge, which is added on to the other truths, enlarges and completes them; yet a proposition of this kind is itself only really intelligble in the totality of the one saving Truth.  We may regard this totality as plainly set out for the first time in the Apostle's Creed.  Our question then runs as follows: To which article of faith does the new dogma belong as its consequence and organic unfolding?

In answer to his question, Rahner posits three creedal phrases to which the "new dogma" relates: (a) "born of the Virgin Mary"; (b) "descended into the Kingdom of the dead"; and (c) "the resurrection of the flesh."  In relation to the first phrase, Rahner does discuss the (now still) controversial claim that, as theotokos, Mary is "co-redemptrix."  For Rahner, Mary is co-redemtrix, not because she shares ontologically in Christ's redemption of the world but because she "co-operates" in Christ's saving act, "insofar as she does, for the salvation of the whole world and not only for her own, what a human being can and must do in the power of grace and for grace: receive it" (pp. 217-18).  

But it is with respect to the third creedal phrase that Rahner locates the most decisive meaning of the this "new dogma."  He writes:

She who by her faith received salvation in her body for herself for us all, has received it entire.  And this entire salvation is a salvation of the entire human being, a salvation which has already begun even in its fullness.  Mary in her entire being is already where perfect redemption exists, entirely in that region of being which came to be through Christ's Resurrection (p. 225).

Rahner's position, in short, is that in the Virgin all creation finds an anticipation of a transfigured state.  She already participates in that "perfect redemption" of which the gospel preaches.  For him, Mary symbolizes in "the most perfect way possible" what a fully "redeemed person is and can be."  Mary's fiat symbolizes the human person's truest act freedom.  Her assumption (or dormition) is a prolepsis of all of creation's eschatological hope. 

He continues:

The salvation of the flesh too has already begun in its final form.  The world is already in transition to God's eternity, not only in the 'spirit' of those who have gone to their everlasting home and not only in the body of the Son who came 'from above,' but also in the bodies of those who are simply 'from below.'  Even now there belongs to the reality of the entire creation that new dimension which we call heaven and which we shall also be able to call new eather once it has subjected all earthly reality to itself and not just an initial part of it (p. 226).

If mariology was for Barth a metastasized cancer, it is for Rahner a healing balm: the problem with protestantism, says Rahner, is that they only have a theology of the cross and not a theology of glory "as a formula for reality here and now" (p. 226).   Certainly in her maternity, Mary symbolizes the generativity of creation.  But where others would and still do posit maternity as a fundamental mariological principle, Rahner proposes what is always his basso continuo -- graced nature (cf. Johnson, p. 145; Fritz, p. 5).  What makes Rahner's position so fruitful is how he ensures that a fundamental mariological principle, should such a principle exist, is actually fundamental: whatever else it might do, for a mariological principal to be truly fundamental it must touch on the very core of theological thought.  Rahner concludes his essay with these words:

But for anyone who believes that counter to all appearances the forces of thee world to come have already seized hold of this world, and that these forces do no consist merely in a promise, remaining beyond every sort of creaturely existence, for a future still unreal; for such a one the 'new' dogma is really nothing more than a clarification, throwing light on a state of salvation already in existence....The 'new' dogma has significance not only for mariology but also for ecclesiology and general eschatology" (pp. 226-27).

Rahner's mariology is part and parcel with his continual concern for the proper telos of human fulfillment. His work on the Marian doctrines (but especially the Assumption) mediates, as Fritz suggests, between theology and its ethos, thereby suggesting that if theology is to possess "vigor, cogency, and cognitive power" (to repurpose a phrase of R. R. Reno's) it must remain somehow connected to an ecclesially mediated pneumatic existence.  Indeed, as Brian Daley, S.J. argues in a recent article, much of what constitutes the differences in approaches and understandings of Mary's role are related not solely to "the form in which that doctrine is expressed as part of the central faith and practice of the church" but "are really differences in ecclesiology: what one expects of the church, how the church communicates the gospel, where one looks for the church in its fullness" (pp. 860 and 862). But suggesting a connection between vision and virtue, Rahner is not in any way prescribing veneration of the Virgin as a litmus test for orthodoxy, not least because Rahner recognizes in such veneration the historicity of all Catholic devotional life.

To conclude this rather long post -- a length that I still find odd, given my lack of personal devotion to the Virgin -- I wonder if we might not think of doctrinal language as cognitive maps of available affects (with bows here to Sianne Ngai's wonderful text, Ugly Feelings).  Doctrines, like texts, register (communicate?) certain modalities of experience and existence; in them affects are condensed (but hopefully not calcified).  The now not-so-new dogmatic language of the Assumption places the experience of hoping at its core, and it is hope that moves us into a future.  As a traditional Collect for the Assumption reads:

Almighty and everlasting God,
You have taken up body and soul
into the heavenly glory the Immaculate Virgin Mary, Mother of Your Son: Grant, we beseech You, that, ever intent upon heavenly things,
we may be worthy to be partakers of her glory.

This prayer to be "ever intent upon heavenly things" asks of its supplicants an affective posture: to rest in the hope that this historical existence will be transformed and enlivened.  Mary's Assumption is creation's prolepsis: in her "most perfect redemption" believers witness what it means to partake, as she does, in Divine glory.  In Mary, the human person's constitutive openness to infinity is made manifest.

-------

Brian Daley, "Woman of Many Names: Mary in Orthodox and Catholic Theology," Theological Studies 71 (2010), 846-869.

New Open-Access Journal: Lumen et Vita

In the course of googling for something random, I came across this interesting and newly minted open-access online journal, Lumen et Vita, which is the "graduate academic journal of the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry."  It looks to, at least presently, an annual publication, with volume 1 having just appeared sometime this year.  It also appears to be presently restrict submissions to members of the student body of BC's STM.  I hope that both it increases it's frequency and opens the submissions process up to graduate students at other institutions.  I think this latter point is especially important, because, unlike other fields in the Humanities (e.g., English), there are no graduate student journals of theology (or at least none to my knowledge).  I also hope they increase the number of books reviewed.

Still, the initiate ought to be congratulated, since it importantly moves theology further into the new world e-scholarship.   Here's the table of contents for the inaugural volume:

Articles
Redefining Spirit Through the Body for the Healing and Flourishing of Trauma Survivors
   Paige Cargioli

Suffering Our Way to Salvation: Ivone Gebara, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, and the Adequacy of the Cross as a Symbol for Women
  Amy Chapman


The Human as Encounter: Karl Barth's Theological Anthropology and a Barthian Vision of the Common Good
  Benjamin Durheim

From Theoretical to Practical: Developing Tillich's Aologetics
  Wendy Morrison


Millennium Development Goals and Catholic Social Teaching: Ongoing Responsibility and Response
  James O'Sullivan


The Consciousness and Human Knowledge of Christ according to Lonergan and Balthasar
  Aaron Pidel, S.J.

Book Review
God's Many-Splendored Image: Theological Anthropology for Formation
  Luis Joshua Sáles

Food and Bodies Transformed

On this Holy Thursday, I wanted to share two passages that I find particularly striking.  The evening Mass of the Lord's Supper, celebrated on Holy Thursday, opens the Holy Triduum (which closes with Evening Prayer on Easter Sunday).  This period of solemnity and celebration is considered the "culmination of the liturgical year."  Holy Thursday in particular celebrates the giving of the Eucharist to the Church.

The first quotation comes from the great American liturgical theologian Aidan Kavanagh's The Shape of Baptism (1978):

To know Christ sacramentally only in terms of bread and wine is to know him only partially, in the dining room as host and guest.  It is a valid enough knowledge, but its ultimate weakness when isolated is that it is perhaps too civil....However elegant the knowledge of the dining room may be, it begins in the soil, in the barnyard, in the slaughterhouse; amid the quiet violence of the garden, strangled cries, and fat spitting in the pan.  Table manners depend on something's having been grabbed by the throat.  A knowledge that ignores these dark and murderous human gestes is losing its grip on the human condition.

  Aside from the jarring juxtaposition of imagery so characteristic of Kavanagh's prose, there is an obvious inference he means for his readers to draw: to celebrate the Eucharist in the comfort and security of our often sanitized liturgies apart from an active remembrance of the suffering and sacrificial death of Christ is to ignore the abiding heart of the Eucharist: "Table manners depend on something's having been grabbed by the throat."  In the decades following the Second Vatican Council, this concern to re/connect liturgy to life, worship to the witness for social justice,  finds some of its profoundest articulations in theologians influential to, associated with and/or inspired by developments in Liberation Theology.  Thinkers like Karl Rahner, Gustavo Gutierrez, Juan Segundo, Tissa Balasuriya, J. B. Metz, Edward Schillebeeckx, Piet Schoonenberg, and others have exceptional meditations on this aspect of the Eucharist, often tied to equally penetrating analyses of the sacramental presence of Christ.

For appreciating these points within an American context, I can't recommend anything more highly than the late Monika Hellwig's (1929-2005) still moving essay, The Eucharist and the Hunger of the World.  Hellwig begins with a phenomenological description of the human experience of hunger (for food, freedom, meaning, truth, authenticity, etc) along with a description of the basic Eucharistic action as the sharing of a meal, and then employs these to underscore and reinforce a belief in the radical interdependency of all people.  Through a series of compassionate sketches of how global poverty stalks and brutalizes its victims, leaving them bereft of not only sustenance but even human dignity itself, Hellwig concretizes the meaning of the Eucharist for a needy world. 

This leads me to my second, and significantly longer, quotation from Sara Miles's memoir Take This Bread.  It's a curious book, as its author confesses, since it charts the most unlikely of conversions.  But for that very reason, an eminently appropriate religious book.  The following passage comes from the prologue, pp. xiii-xv:

     Beyond any single moment of epiphany, my conversion was a long, complicated, and often unconscious journey.  When I left the home of my atheist parents, I had no reason to think I was looking for God: I just knew I wanted to experience meaning and connection.  The material world was my ground: bodily experiences the context in which I searched for knowledge and love, political and moral purpose.  I looked in all kinds of places, often extreme: in the heat and exertion of restaurant kitchens, in poor people's revolutions and in war zones, in engaged journalism and passionate politics, in love affairs with men and women, in the birth of my child.  Something was tugging at me.  It drew me form individual experience to collective experience, crossing lines each time -- lines of family, of nation, of people, unlike me -- to find intimate human connection.  I saw people betray their friends sacrifice for strangers; I saw people suffer and starve; I saw people transcend their own limitations to nurture others and become part of communities.  Everywhere I saw bodies and food.

     Food and bodies had always been wrapped in meaning for me: They were my way of understanding the world.  But it would take decades to have these accumulated experiences make sense in a narrative, much less one I'd call Christian.  It took actually eating a piece of bread -- a simple chunk of wheat and yeast and water -- to pull those layers of meaning together: to make food both absolutely itself and a sign pointing to something bigger.  It turned out that the prerequisite for conversion wasn't knowing how to behave in a church or having a religious vocabulary or even a priori "belief" in an abstract set of propositions: It was hunger, the same hunger I'd always carried.

     Holy communion knocked me upside down and forced me to deal with the impossible reality of God.  Then, as conversion continued, relentlessly challenging my assumptions about religion and politics and meaning, God forced me to deal with all kinds of other people.  In large ways and small, I wrestled with Christianity: its grand promises and its petty demands, its temptations and hypocrisies, its ugly history and often insufferable adherents.  Faith for me didn't provide a set of easy answers or certainties: It raised more questions than I was ever comfortable with.  The bits of my past -- family, work, war, love -- came apart as I stumbled into church, then reassembled, through the works communion inspired me to do, into a new life centered on feeding strangers: food and bodies, transformed.  I wound up not in what church people like to call 'a community of believers' -- which tends to be code for 'a like-minded club -- but in something huger and wilder than I had ever expected: the suffering, fractious, and unbounded body of Christ.

What Miles articulates connects nicely to what I was only intimating at above: the relation that obtains between the form of one's prayer and the comportment of one's worldly actions.  To speak of a transubstantiation of the gifts of altar is not enough; we must also discover and sustain those actions that transubstantiate the world around us so as to become more fully aligned with the good and liberating intentions of God's reign.  As the great English Dominican Herbert McCabe once wrote, "In all sacraments God shows us what he does and does what he shows us."  Sara Miles discovers this ancient sacramental principal -- expressed in a wonderful chiasmus by McCabe rather than the traditional cumbersome Latin terminology -- when she understands how knowledge of the world comes through "food and bodies."

The Eucharist becomes, to slightly re-purpose the phrasing of the medievalist and theologian Oliver Davies, "the thematic key not only to the way the world is, but also to what and how we are, and to what God has given us of himself to hold and to understand" (The Creativity of God: World, Eucharist, Reason, p. 7).   This is all a case of what Davies would further term "eucharistic semiotics."  It was and remains a goal of the Second Vatican Council that our liturgical signs should, rather than be kept safe in highly ritualized observes, really signify.  To appreciate the Eucharist has the summit from and toward which everything flows is to risk disturbing our worship habits.   Truly there is no more "perverse core" to Christianity (to borrow Zizek's phrase) than what Sara Miles's conversion taught her to understand: the material world is our ground, but it is a world of "food and bodies, transformed."

 

On Making a Return

Silkrock formation, Paria Canyon (Vermillion Cliffs Wilderness Area, AZ)

"No human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature's wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies
to the presence
of other human beings.

-- Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

 

"Joys impregnate. 
Sorrows bring forth."

-- William Blake

Well, it has been just over a year since my last blog post.  While I've been lurking on many blogs, I've been relunctant to resume my own, choosing reclusivity rather than re-engagement.  Because I've been dealing with a number of serious professional setbacks that correlate with and directly impact a series of equally serious and, admittedly, devastating personal experiences (with all their attendant affects of fear, failure, grief, and the like), I've held my tongue here for fear of what I might actually say.  Perhaps fittingly, I'll (only somewhat less cryptically) say more about some of this indirectly through a post  I'm currently writing on the swerve (away) from happiness (this might develop into several posts or a series).  That periphrastic enough for you?!

My general hope is to resurrect and relaunch this blog by posting more regularly, including reflections, striking quotations, commentary on items I may be reading at any given moment, various announcements, and even some of my own work as/if it materializes.  Most importantly, I want this blog to serve as a companion to my thoughts during a continued period of bereavement for and because of dreams deferred, hopes made despondent, bureaucratic evils, and the possibility of a future self that will have been made extinct.  If, as this blog's thesis avers, we are only ever indirectly ourselves, then we are equally always grieving over a future self left unrealized.  But, curiously, what can sometimes find actualization is a path left fallow years ago, thereby becoming reacquainted with a self we thought to have long ago rejected or forsaken.  So, perhaps an element in the realization of our indirect subjectivities is a rendering present of our widowed selves.

For now, I'll be posting during the Triduum.

UPDATED: The Works of Friendship

A few months back, I offered a somewhat lengthy post on the scholarship and activities of several people with whom I have been acquainted -- friends, teachers, colleagues, and the like.  Well, I've gone ahead and updated that listing, including adding a few additional write-ups.  Check it out.

Updated post on The Works of Friendship

Thomas Merton and Rowan Williams: Thoughts on Trust, Desire, and the Finding of an Orientation

I have recently found myself ruminating over a thought-passage from the always inexhaustible writings of the great American Trappist monk Thomas Merton (1915-68).  The following text comes from his slim but classic Thoughts in Solitude, first published in 1956.  Indeed, another scholar-priest and poet-mystic, the current Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams (b. 1950), has called this text "one of [Merton's] most profound and abidingly impressive books."

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.  I do not see the road ahead of me.  I cannot know for certain where it will end.  Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that  am actually doing so.  But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.  And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.  I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.  And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it.  Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.  I will no fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone (p. 79).

What I've called a thought-passage is more traditionally labeled a prayer.  What I find so resonate in these words is Merton's brutal honesty: he has no idea where he is headed but rather than despair he emplots his anxiety within a horizon of hopefulness.  His self-doubt and trepidation finds its only security in complementary intuitions about the Divine and a life lived in relation to that fundamental principle: "I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.  And I hope that I have that desire in all that I am doing.  I  hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire."  To comport oneself according to such an eros is to make trust one's most fundamental orienting desire.

Rowan Williams, in his January 29th concluding remarks to the gathering "Building an Ethical Economy" at Trinity Wall Street in New York City, took up the question of trust in a way I find remarkably resonant with Merton, since both men use trust as the horizon of hopefulness to frame an otherwise unclear and perhaps motivationally paralyzing set of experiences (Williams's remarks on trust start in at about 26mins).  Trust, says Williams, is "not only about mutual belief"; rather, at a "slightly deeper level, it's about having some confidence that you are not completely indifferent to my interests.  I trust you to tell me the truth because I believe you have a sufficient concern for my interests not to be misleading me....Trust is a belief that the Other shares something of my interest."  This means that the "charge and challenge" is to ask, "Whose interests do I recognize?"  In the Archbishop's estimation, faith can play a larger part in society and culture by helping individuals "to imagine more deeply and broadly the interests of the Other."  A deficit of trust goes hand in hand with a deficit in relationships.  The "most basic of questions," then, is, "Why should I be trusted, and how do I set my life on a course that makes it trustworthy?"  For Williams, the answer to that question of the form of our relating is necessarily bound up with the theological question of "why we trust God." Admittedly "boiling down" a great deal of theological reflection, Williams concludes:

Christian theology, at its best, has always said we can trust God because God has made us when God didn't need to.  God has created what is other to the Divine Life so that it may be loved.  Because nothing we can do can make God happier, safer, richer, or anything of that kind.  God, as Clement of Alexandria said many centuries ago, is distinctive in that God loves what he has no natural communion with.  Because God is God.  And the miracle is that God has created a world to be in communion with the Divine love.  God, in short, recognizes our interest by the sheer fact of creating us.  We know that God is not in the business of creation and redemption because of God's interest, but because of ours.  And so, because of that selfless outpouring at the root of our very being, we trust God.  And the challenge for any believer in a God of that kind is whether we can, in some small measure, so reflect that selfless outpouring that we may be trustworthy and trust, in turn, neighbor and stranger.

Clearly, Williams is sketching a theology of God as impassible and a doctrine of creation ex nihilo -- positions that have both, and I think rightly, been challenged across a range of theological positions, most especially in Catherine Keller's The Face of the Deep and John Caputo's Weakness of God.  But setting such metaphysical matters aside, what Merton and Williams share, I suggest, is a profound recognition of how peripatetic modern life can be, which they wed to an image of the Divine as that in which one might place one's full trust when all else seems precarious and overwhelming.  The God in whom this trust is placed is said to be a God on whom the believer can lean.  Against the despair prompted by the falling away of worldly security, Merton and Williams offer the outpouring of sheer gift.  Belief, far from being mere propositional content, thus becomes a modality of action: to believe is to abide in the Other.  Our trustworthiness is thus a product of our having already trusted another.  Or, as Merton elsewhere writes in Thoughts in Solitude: "Your life is shaped by the ends you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire" (p. 49).



Other Links of Interest:

• Thomas Merton Center.
• International Thomas Merton Society
• The Merton Institute for Contemplative Living
• Soul Searching: The Journey of Thomas Merton (PBS documentary)
• The Archbishop of Canterbury

A Life of Toils & Vigils: Innocent III and the Phenomenality of Research

Brevis sit et vana huius seculi fallax gloria 

Brief and empty is the deceptive glory of this world

-- Jacques de Vitry.

We are never what we are; something different is always possible.
-- John D. Caputo

One of the most popular texts during the medieval period was Pope Innocent III's (d. 1216) On the Misery of the Human Condition (De miseria humanae conditionis), which dates to the 1190s.  The text repeatedly confronts its readers with the absolute and, for Innocent, abject mortality of earthly existence.  For Innocent, "man was formed out of earth, conceived in guilt, born to punishment. What he does is depraved and illicit, is shameful and improper, vain and unprofitable. He will become fuel for the eternal fires, food for worms, a mass of rottenness."  In an effort "to make [his] explanation clearer and ... fuller," Innocent elaborates with apparent relish:

Man was formed of dust, slime, and ashes; what is even more vile, of the filthiest seed. He was conceived from the itch of the flesh, in the heat of passion and the stench of lust, and worse yet, with the stain of sin. He was born to toil, dread, and trouble; and more wretched still, was born only to die. He commits depraved acts by which he offends God, his neighbor, and himself, shameful acts by which he defiles his name, his person, and his conscience; and vain acts by which he ignores all things important, useful, and necessary. He will become fuel for those fires which are forever hot and burn forever bright; food for the worm which forever nibbles and digests; a mass of rottenness which will forever stink and reek….

But before we write Innocent off as a hater of all things fleshly, before, that is, we issue against him some dualist insult, we might pause and reflect on what it is that Innocent''s apparent "misery" at human life targets.  Here the corruptible nature of the human body serves to frame a more general concern for the proper comportment of earthly life.  Like the slightly later tradition of the ars moriendi and even to some extent the mid-twentieth-century theological notion of a "fundamental option" (most commonly associated with the German Jesuit Karl Rahner) or for that matter certain Heideggerian and Gadamarian ideas about facticity and situatedness,  to be acutely aware of our finitude allows us, at least potentially, to live with a greater sense of the importance and weightiness of what we do now.  But also its absolute contingency, for things can be otherwise.  Our place on the Wheel of Fortune will be altered.

But one passage in particular strikes me as remarkable resonant.  Here Innocent calls his readers to remember what might called a constitutive non-knowability characterizing the factical life of scholarship: 

For although a researcher must toil through many vigils and keep vigils over his toils, there is hardly anything so cheap and easy that a man can understand it fully and clearly, unless perhaps he knows for sure that nothing is known for sure.  This may seem an unresolvable contradiction.  But why?  "For the corruptible body is a load upon the soul, and the earthly habitation presses down upon the mind that muses on many things" [Ecclesiastes 8:16-17].  Hear what Solomon says about this: "All things are hard; man cannot explain them by word" [Ps. 63:7-8].

What I find so remarkable about this brief passage is how it powerfully articulates the difficulties of a scholarly life.  These are not merely or only existential difficulties, but are somehow structural -- perhaps even ontological.  Innocent writes about how "a researcher must toil through many vigils and keep vigils over his toils."  This chiasmus between toiling and vigiling is so necessary because our ability to know is so constitutively flawed, impotent.  From a theological position, this inability to know -- whether fully or accurately -- might, following Augustine, be declared a necessary condition of postlapsarian existence.  Original Sin, in an Augustinian frame, has inescapably cognitive consequences.  (I think this is a feature that Milton deftly weaves into his Paradise Lost.)  But still we press on, still we toil in our vigils, still we keep vigil over our toils.  Innocent here sounds to my ears remarkably like John Caputo in More Radical Hermeneutics: On Not Knowing Who We Are: "We are driven by the passion of non-knowing" (p. 3).  But in that same passion -- brimming with its unique difficulties, replete with its own anxieties and calamities -- we are able to hear a certain tonality of hope and expectation.  Caputo again, from his still beautiful essay on Foucault: "For our being human spins off into an idefinite future about which we know little or nothing, which fills us with a little hope and not a little anxiety, a future to come for which there is no program, no preparation, no prognostication" (p. 36).

With Innocent, we see that, in whatever else it might consist, the phenomenality of scholarship rests precisely in its hylomorphic qualities.  Life is hard, and we have to work hard to get it right: so Aristotle wrote, Solomon confessed, and Caputo channeled.  But the life about which we speak is a life which unfolds in unseen directions, and it is this Deleuzian impersonality that might enable us to think our lives otherwise.  As Amy Hollywood writes in the close pages of Sensible Ecstasy: "What is required is a resolute attempt to think the body otherwise, as the site of possibility and limitation, pleasure and suffering, natality and death, for all human beings in all our multiplicity and diversity" (p. 186). 


For the texts from Innocent, I have used the translation by Margaret M. Dietz (Indianapolis: Library of Liberal Arts/Bobbs-Merrill, 1969).

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.