OK, You're Offended. And...?

As yet another sign that I'm getting old, crotchety, and increasingly conservative, I resonated with Mark Bauerlein's reflections on David Horowitz's recent visit to Emory. Horowitz is an itinerant conservative provocateur who just loves to raise the hackles of soppy liberals. But Bauerlein's observations resonate with what I've seen, too:

Most of them [attendees] were young, probably undergraduates, and they seemed bright and engaged. Somehow or some way in their education they seem to have assimilated the notion that being offended (or not being offended) forms a significant part of intellectual exchange. If someone says something you don’t like, something that distresses you personally, you should say so. If someone knocks your religion, tell them that you are, precisely, offended. If someone’s words cause you discomfort, that inner reaction itself is worth reciting.

Is this a new forensic among college students? Back in the early-80s, I can’t remember anybody my age giving the “I’m offended” response. If it were an event like this one, people would shoot back with substance and evidence. And if they didn’t have the goods, they might just mumble under their breath, “Kiss my —-” and walk out. The “I’m offended” reply would have been understood as a capitulation, not a valid rejoinder.

Needless to say, this is a poor educational outcome. Students need thicker skins, and they need to get past their offense feelings. Don’t fetishize them — let them go, and then pose sharp questions and make better arguments. Make yourself skilled in the heat of verbal battle. That’s hard to do, though, if you’re caught up in your sensitivities.

[Compare the response of these "offended" undergraduates to the response of Daniel Dennett to Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga at a recent meeting of the APA, as recounted in "An Opinionated Play-by-Play of Plantinga-Dennett Exchange."]

Philosopher in Residence at ...?

A colleague pointed me to this obituary for Gerald Myers, who held what sounds like a delightful post: Philosopher in Residence at the American Dance Festival. Sounds like a sweet gig. This got me thinking about some other creative possibilities I could imagine taking up with joy:

• Philosopher in Residence at the Franciscan Winery
• Philosopher in Residence at the Culinary Institute of America
• Philosopher in Residence at the Paris Review
• Philosopher in Residence at the Biltmore Estate

But if I'm honest with myself, given my class and station in life, it's more likely I'd be appointed:

• Philosopher in Residence at Talladega Superspeedway
  

The End of (Poetic) Greatness?

When Stanley Hauerwas was told that Time magazine, in 2001, had chosen him as "America's best theologian," he quickly retorted: "'Best' is not a theological category."

That 'category' discomfiture came to mind as I was reading David Orr's provocative piece, "The Great(ness) Game," in this weekend NYTBR. Orr raises the carrot that teases the aspiring poet: proverbial, elusive "greatness." He well notes the vagaries of the term, the fickleness of peer evaluation, and how the vicissitudes of time can play havoc with such ranking. But in particular, he's concerned with present greatness--the fate of greatness in American poetry which, he worries, might be going the way of the dodo. Not unsurprisingly, he lays the blame at the feet of "postmodernism":

The problem is that over the course of the 20th century, greatness has turned out to be an increasingly blurry business. In part, that’s a reflection of the standard narrative of postmodernism, according to which all uppercase ideals — Truth, Beauty, Justice — must come in for questioning. But the difficulty with poetic greatness has to do with more than the talking points of the contemporary culture wars. Greatness is — and indeed, has always been — a tangle of occasionally incompatible concepts, most of which depend upon placing the burden of “greatness” on different parts of the artistic process. Does being “great” simply mean writing poems that are “great”? If so, how many? Or does “greatness” mean having a sufficiently “great” project? If you have such a project, can you be “great” while writing poems that are only “good” (and maybe even a little “boring”)? Is being a “great” poet the same as being a “major” poet? Are “great” poets necessarily “serious” poets? These are all good questions to which nobody has had very convincing answers.

But postmodernism is not the enemy of Truth, Beauty, Justice, and the American Way that Orr makes it out to be. However, what has happened is that we now appreciate that the criterion for what counts as truth, beauty, and justice is not some natural kind, not an objective given. What's true and beautiful and good is recognized as such only against a background of a shared narrative or story. The situation isn't necessarily nihilistic; it's just pluralistic. The loss that Orr laments is the loss of a dominant, WASPy set of criteria that dominated American letters in times past (Updike's death might signal the end of a regime in this regard). Its dissolution might entail the end of unanimous "greats," but not greatness as such.

More on Updike, with Nicholson Baker

There have been some wonderful tributes to Updike around the horn, but I think my favorite feature so far has been the Guardian's moving montage, "John Updike: A Life in Pictures," a chronological journey that well captures Updike's charm and humanity.

But I thought Nicholson Baker's terse, profound comment on NPR best captured the sense of what we've lost: "It's just shocking when a very intelligent person is no longer looking out at the same world that you are."

That took me back to Baker's U and I (1991), his hilarious, self-absorbed-yet-generous, back-handed homage that chronicles a young writer's obsession with the elder statesmen ("U" being Updike, and "I" being Baker). Reading the opening chapters on the day of Updike's death was eerie, as Baker is struggling with whether to write an essay on Updike while he's still alive. Startled and prompted by the death of Donald Barthleme, Baker comes to a realization:

I suddenly got a glimpse of how disassembled and undirected and simply bereft I would feel if I were to learn suddenly through the Associated Press of Updike's death.

I remember that sensation. It was exactly how I felt upon learning of the death of Jacques Derrida, while engaged in finishing a book entitled Jacques Derrida: Live Theory. And it was exactly as Baker commented: what one couldn't quite get used to was the fact that one would no longer hear from this writer, no longer get their take on the world we shared. The spigot had been turned off (and goodness knows both Updike and Derrida has voluminous wells and unrestricted spigots). Sure, the archives will for years yield hitherto unseen materials, but these would never be new observations of the world continuing to unfold. And one would have to learn to write of them in a different tense: every present would have to be turned into a past.

Baker's U and I attests to this in a long meditation on a curious phrase of criticism:

That phrase which reviewers take such pains to include when delivering their judgments--when they say that among living writers so-and-so is or isn't of the first rank--had once seemed to me unnecessary: the writing, I had thought, was good or bad, no matter whether the writer was here or not. But now, after the news of Barthleme's death, this simple fact of presense or absence, which I had beun to recognize in a small way already, now became the single most important supplemental piece of information I felt I could know about a writer: more important than his age when he wrote a particular work, or his nationality, or his sex (forgive the pronoun), political leanings, even whether he did or did not have, in someone's opinion, any talent. Is he dead or alive?--just tell me that. [...] The living are always potentially thinking about and doing just what we are doing: being pulled through a touchless car wash, watching a pony chew a carrot, noticing that orange scaffolding has gone up around some prominent church. The conclusions they draw we know to be conclusions drawn from how things are now. Indeed, for me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo. The dead can be helpful, needless to say, but we can only guess sloppily about how they would react to this emergent particle of time, which is all the time we have.

So while Baker was contemplating a posthumous piece on Barthelme, his thoughts turn to Updike: "How fortunate I was to be alive when he was alive!" And the drive to produce U and I stems from an urgency and a hope: "All I wanted, all I counted on, was Updike's immortality."

John Updike, RIP

I could only respond in a gasp of surprise upon seeing the news of John Updike's death. He was, without question, one of America's great "men of letters," if you'll forgive the cliche. I appreciated his fiction and stories (I notice one of my earliest blog posts was on Updike's Early Stories), some his poetry, and even more so his criticism (just last night I was reading from his latest collection, Due Considerations). But his work for me always had a feel of an older generation without being old enough to seem exotic or distant enough to be a glimpse into foreign worlds--and yet, it also didn't feel like he was unveiling the world I inhabit. James Wolcott, while recently reviewing The Widows of Eastwick, provided an insightful analysis of how younger generations of writers related to Updike's towering presence, casting a long shadow over the American literary scene.

And yet I have always appreciated that Updike valued literature as a means of delight. Updike believed in fiction. As he noted in a late piece for "This I Believe" on NPR (included in Due Considerations):

A person believes various things at various times, even on the same day. At the age of 73, I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness. The special value of these indirect methods of communication -- as opposed to the value of factual reporting and analysis -- is one of precision. Oddly enough, the story or poem brings us closer to the actual texture and intricacy of experience.

In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity. I find in my own writing that only fiction -- and rarely, a poem -- fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel. In composing even such a frank and simple account as this profession of belief, I must fight against the sensation that I am simplifying and exploiting my own voice.

In a way, I'm still reeling from this news. It's surprising how the loss of such a figure can make one feel lonelier, that somehow a conversation has been shrunk, cut short, while there was still much more to say.

Inauguration Poem by Elizabeth Alexander

Much could be said about today's events, but not by me. Let me just highlight Elizabeth Alexander's poem for the inauguration, with a lilt and rhythm that, it seems to me, calls to mind a marriage between the Beat poets and hip-hop.

Praise song for the day.

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others' eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, "Take out your pencils. Begin."

We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, "I need to see what's on the other side; I know there's something better down the road."

We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by "Love thy neighbor as thy self."

Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.

Fish on the Fate of University, Inc.

As per usual, Stanley Fish's latest column on higher education is provocative, and not a little disheartening. Riffing on Frank Donoghue's book, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, Fish documents the decline and irreversible trajectory of higher education which has hitched its wagon to pragmatist "training" and job certification for the corporate world of production and consumption. In short, the "university" is well on its way to being a very expensive and very snooty vo-tech school. Fish always tries to be unsentimental and "realist" about these matters, but it's hard not to detect just a twinge of disappointment and a whisp of lament. Asking about the possibility of "restoring" the classical vision of education's "inutility" (and I would add, the correlate classical vision of education as formation), Fish turns to Donoghue:

In a new book, “The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the University,” Frank Donoghue (as it happens, a former student of mine) asks that question and answers “No.”

Donoghue begins by challenging the oft-repeated declaration that liberal arts education in general and the humanities in particular face a crisis, a word that suggests an interruption of a normal state of affairs and the possibility of restoring the natural order of things.

“Such a vision of restored stability,” says Donoghue, “is a delusion” because the conditions to which many seek a return – healthy humanities departments populated by tenure-track professors who discuss books with adoring students in a cloistered setting – have largely vanished. Except in a few private wealthy universities (functioning almost as museums), the splendid and supported irrelevance of humanist inquiry for its own sake is already a thing of the past. In “ two or three generations,” Donoghue predicts, “humanists . . . will become an insignificant percentage of the country’s university instructional workforce.”

He goes on to suggest that this trend is over a century old, and can be seen most recently in the astronomical rise of adjunct professors on large university campuses. And according to Donoghue, the prospects are particularly dark for my field. Citing the founder of the abominable University of Phoenix, Fish notes:

Sperling understands the difficulty of achieving accreditation for his institution as a proxy “for cultural battles between defenders of 800 years of educational (and largely religious) traditions, and innovation that was based on the ideas of the marketplace – transparency, efficiency, productivity and accountability.”

Those ideas have now triumphed (Carnegie and Crane are victorious), and this means, Donoghue concludes, “that all fields deemed impractical, such as philosophy, art history, and literature, will henceforth face a constant danger of being deemed unnecessary.” And as a corollary “professors will come to be seen by everyone (not just those outside the academy) as unaffordable anomalies.”

Embedded in there is a bitter irony: Sperling's corporate critique of classical educational traditions rightly links this model to a correlate and intertwined vision of religious education as primarily the formation of a certain kind of person. Indeed, one might argue that the last gasps of this "classical" model unhooked from religious commitments and practices was always and only a model living on borrowed capital and borrowed time. (One could quite easily generate a story along these lines with the help of Charles Taylor's own story in A Secular Age.)

But here's the irony: today, religious colleges have bought into this corporate, instrumentalized picture of higher education as aggressively as anyone. This partly stems from the decentralized, "marketplace" configuration of higher education in the United States which forces Christian colleges to "sell" themselves as a viable and promising option for the student "consumer." (I grant that this decentralization also makes it possible to have "thickly" religious institutions.) It also stems from the fact that Mommy & Daddy, who are so often paying the bills, have imbibed and absorbed this instrumentalist expectation that education be "useful" (read: will pay the bills and secure "success" as measured by the metric which is late modern consumer capitalist "happiness"). And so they want to hear that utilitarian message from Christian colleges--which is at least one of the reasons that we see pre-professional programs gobbling up the energy and space of Christian colleges that, nostalgically, describe themselves as "liberal arts" institutions (yes, I'm speaking about my own home institution, Calvin College , among others). Or why the cash cows of "degree completion programs" have become the lifeline of smaller Christian colleges and universities. In such an environment, even the humanities have to "pay up": they have to prove their worth as measured by fiscal utility.

This is why the most intense and concentrated articulations of this instrumentalized vision of Christian education are found, not in the upper echelons of the academic division, but in the Admissions department (and its cognate, Public Relations and Student Life, which are the "face" of the college to the prospective educational consumer). Analyze the admissions literature of just about any Catholic or Christian college or university, especially those that bill themselves as "liberal arts" institutions and watch for the buzzwords. (It would be particularly interesting to compare this literature to the same sorts of information that was provided 50 or 75 years ago, by the same institution.) This also explains why PR departments will only promote faculty research and activity that seems "interesting," useful, and "safe."

[It should be noted, by the way, that this is not a critique of the general task of sharing information about our institutions to prospective students. I have no brief with getting the word out; the issue is how we do this and how we portray the mission and task of our institutions. (For a very helpful discussion of the difference between "marketing" in the mode of consumption and "marketing" in the mode of disseminating information, see Todd Steen and Steve VanderVeen's nice little piece, "Will There Be Marketing in Heaven?" in Perspectives.)

Now, the really haunting question is: what do we do now? What do we do in the face of this? Well, probably for the most part, I'll live off my hypocrisy, continue to inhabit the instrumentalized college & university as a tenured professor, and snipe at the margins, thereby comforting myself by thinking I'm playing a "prophetic" role [LOL!]. For several years, I would say I've "deluded" myself (Donoghue's term) by thinking that a small cadre of committed folks might be able to stem the tide and redirect our institutional behemoths to remember who they are, and Whose they are. I'm a little less sanguine about that these days--well, actually, I'm a LOT less sanguine about that.

And so I find myself with strange, haunting, ridiculous thoughts, upon which I'll never act: that maybe the space for "education" now lies outside the institutions that bear its name; that a tiny band committed to this vision would be better "educated" outside the mechanisms of accreditation and certification; that even Christian higher education finds itself in a "monastic" moment, calling for strategic and intentional abstinence and reorientation because of our collusion with University, Inc.; that perhaps we--professors and students alike--are called outside the safety of our institutions into experiments we have not yet imagined; that perhaps the fate of University, Inc. need not be confused with the "end" of education.

The Devil Reads Derrida: forthcoming

The new Eerdmans catalogue includes information on a new little book of mine that will appear in April. The Devil Reads Derrida: and Other Essays on the University, the Church, Politics, and the Arts, gathers together a number of my "popular" pieces that have appeared in magazines and other periodicals ranging from the Christian Century and Harvard Divinity Bulletin to Christianity Today and The Banner. In short, it's a book without footnotes. And it includes a new introduction that articulates my vision for Christian "public intellectuals," utilizing Little Miss Sunshine as something of an allegory.

I take this sort of "outreach" scholarship seriously, and enjoy it very much, and so hope this book might fall into the hands beyond the usual suspects of students and scholars. Here's the description from Eerdmans:

The Devil Reads Derrida brings together essays and articles written for a general audience by a notable young voice in the church and the academy. A specialist in French philosophy and postmodernism, James K. A. Smith has also consistently sought to speak to the church as the most important “public” for his work.

This book brings together some of Smith’s most significant forays into the public arena, focusing especially on discipleship, the university, and politics and the church. It also provides a selection of his criticism, including essays on Harry Potter, A History of Violence, the poetry of Franz Wright, and much more.

Smith’s work as a Christian public intellectual brings theological wisdom into the service of lived discipleship. Whether grappling with the Wild at Heart phenomenon or the challenges of secularization, dealing with sex or consumerism, or commenting on The Devil Wears Prada or American Beauty, Smith tackles each issue with clarity and insight, with scholarly rigor — but always with an eye to Christian discipleship and the life of the church.

Brooks on Gladwell: Not Quite

I'm about halfway through Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, which has been a breezy but fascinating read (any book whose argument hinges on Canadian hockey players is bound to suck in a Canuck). I'll comment more fully on the book when I'm done (over at What I'm Reading), but given David Brooks' column on Gladwell today, I wanted to make one clarification.

Brooks' generally appreciates Gladwell's emphasis on the role that social forces and other cultural "conditions" play in success. In Gladwell's account, there are no "self-made men," so to speak. There are those who inhabit a kind of perfect storm of opportunity that gives them an advantage. Thus Bill Gates' goes on to found Microsoft in no small part because he attended an elite private school in the late 70s which had its own computer terminal (in a time of mammoth mainframes). This, along with other factors, provided opportunity for extensive practice (10,000 hours is a magic number of "mastery" in the book) which then puts Gates ahead of the curve as other opportunities arise.

Gladwell's argument or analysis has a Rawlsian political edge to it: society should create egalitarian structures of opportunity. While I don't think Gladwell cites (or even reads) Rawls, he does suggest policy makers imagine a kind of "original position" where we don't know where we stand within a society. Wouldn't we all pick those configurations which broaden opportunity?

But Brooks then seems to "overread" Gladwell. Though affirming the importance of these cultural, even biological, conditions (I'm eagerly awaiting Brooks' new book on neuroscience), he makes this criticism:

Gladwell’s social determinism is a useful corrective to the Homo economicus view of human nature. It’s also pleasantly egalitarian. The less successful are not less worthy, they’re just less lucky. But it slights the centrality of individual character and individual creativity. And it doesn’t fully explain the genuine greatness of humanity’s outliers.

But that's not true of Gladwell. He doesn't reduce success to luck; he recognizes that there is a threshold of ability that must be in place in order for "luck" to work. For instance, you won't win a Nobel prize if you have an IQ under 120. But on the other hand, having an IQ over 120 does not make you more likely to win a Nobel. In other words, once you get to the 120 threshold, IQ no longer becomes a significant predictor. At that point, other forces of opportunity take over. While Brooks hails the importance of "personal initiative," Gladwell's account of the genius Chris Langan shows that one has to have the opportunity--the good luck--to become the kind of person who has such "initiative." In short, Brooks has underestimated Gladwell's account.

Mr. Johnson's Critical Wisdom

Apropos the last post, consider Adam Gopnik's recent summary of Samuel Johnson's "philosophy" of criticism:

No critic has ever been wiser about the limits of criticism, and about how few rules can ever be made for writing; Johnson is the model of a reactive critic, seeing when a piece of writing was made, and how it works, then and now. His premise was always that something that had long pleased readers must have pleased them for a reason; sometimes it was because of a quality or a problem in their time that had made the work seem briefly pleasing, sometimes it was because of some permanent quality of imagination or truth. The critic’s job was to distinguish between what belonged to the history of taste and what belonged to the canon of art, and to try to explain what made the permanently pleasing permanently please. For Johnson’s great question is not how to write, or what to write, but why write. His criticism provides a simple answer: to help us enjoy life more, or endure it better.
Johnson has no illusions about criticism’s ability to fix or cure. Critics are to writers not as doctors are to patients but as bearded ladies are to trapeze artists—another, sadder act in the same big show.

On the "Uses" of Literature

Having just finished another rendition of my course on "Philosophy of Language and Interpretation," this time around I found myself more and more fascinated by Wittgenstein (and a later disciple, Robert Brandom). In particular, I was struck by how fruitful Wittgenstein's account of meaning as "use" could be for thinking about literature and poetry. While my primary training is in phenomenology--specifically the train of thought that runs from Edmund Husserl through Heidegger to Jacques Derrida--I found this "semiotic" stream less provocative than Wittgenstein's "pragmatism."

So I was intrigued to read a recent piece in the Chronicle Review which raised some similar concerns. Though Rita Felski ends by commending phenomenology for the study of literature (which I still think is valuable), in the middle of her argument is a claim that warrants some Wittgensteinian unpacking:

What literary studies sorely needs, in other words, is a nonutilitarian understanding of use. To talk about the uses of literature is to insist that those uses are plural and diverse. We need to surrender, once and for all, the quixotic pursuit of a single concept that can explain why literature matters.

Read the entire article.

Goodbye "Holiday" Feasting, Hello Advent?

A couple of weeks ago my home institution announced the latest way the economic downturn would affect us: they canceled the annual Christmas banquet for faculty and staff. Given budget shortfalls and belt-tightening that has happened across the college, this made good sense to everyone I talked to. And today on NPR's "All Things Considered," Jenny Gold reported that this was a growing trend across industry in the US this year. As she opened:

You may not have to worry about the awkward encounter with your boss at the office holiday bash this year. Scores of U.S. businesses plan to forgo their annual holiday party as a response to the slumping economy. That means no top-shelf scotch, no co-workers getting down on the dance floor, no heaping platters of hors d'oeuvres.

(Alas, the annual Christmas banquet at Calvin College has never included any of these things, except for the awkward encounters with top-level administrators.)

But these cancelations might be their own kind of gift. Indeed, they might provide an opportunity to remember that Advent is, in fact, a penitential season. As I pointed out last year, the Christian liturgical year is in tension with the Hallmark calendar. While "the holiday season"--with its parties, feasting, and consumer indulgence--ramps up around Thanksgiving (or earlier!), Advent is a season of expectant waiting and penitential reflection on why we need the Savior we await. As Joseph Bottum rightly notes in his lament, "The End of Advent,"

What Advent is, really, is a discipline: a way of forming anticipation and channeling it toward its goal. There’s a flicker of rose on the third Sunday—Gaudete!, that day’s Mass begins: Rejoice!—but then it’s back to the dark purple that is the mark of the season in liturgical churches. And what those somber vestments symbolize is the deeply penitential design of Advent. Nothing we can do earns us the gift of Christmas, any more than Lent earns us Easter. But a season of contrition and sacrifice prepares us to understand and feel something about just how great the gift is when at last the day itself arrives.

The cancelation of the corporate Christmas party in the opening weeks of December might be a tiny opportunity to participate in this discipline, which looks forward to the inbreaking of the Feast. Granted, our economic situation isn't likely to change much in Christmastide, but perhaps our Advent denials can store up for a brief Christmastide abundance.

Lest We Forget: On NOT Picturing the War in Iraq

This month's Vanity Fair has an informative article by Seth Mnookin on the New York Times bureau in Iraq. The Times is one of the few news outlets with a substantial presence to report the war (CBS news, for instance, has no full-time correspondent in Iraq), at a substantial cost. I found Mnookin's observation about photography to be particularly interesting and unsettling:

In the past several years, the military has used its ability to refuse to accept reporters on embeds as a way of controlling what images come out of Iraq. One example of this occurred over the summer, when a credentialed photographer who posted pictures of dead American soldiers on his Web site was told he could no longer work in areas of the country controlled by U.S. Marines, even though his work had not violated any of the coalition forces’ official rules for media members. A recent Times story found that, five years into a war that has resulted in more than 4,000 American combat fatalities, fewer than a half-dozen graphic images of dead American military personnel have been published.

Canada: The Movie

From Vanity Fair: "Not to be outdone by its colonial cousin Australia, the Commonwealth of Canada has commissioned its own 300-minute tentpole, starring Alanis Morissette and Dan Aykroyd as lovers divided by language, ideology, and the great Molson-Labatt debate." Read the rest.

Fish on Academic Freedom, Again

Stanley Fish's most recent column on academic freedom is worth a read, even if one might not agree with him. The hook is a new book by Finkin & Post, For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom (Yale, 2009). The authors first distinguish between academic freedom and the sort of freedom secured by the First Amendment. As Fish summarizes,

“We argue that the concept of Academic freedom . . . differs fundamentally from the individual First Amendment rights that present themselves so vividly to the contemporary mind.” The difference is that while free speech rights are grounded in the constitution, academic freedom rights are “grounded . . . in a substantive account of the purposes of higher education and in the special conditions necessary for faculty to fulfill those purposes.”

That seems clearly true to me, and explains alot of confusion about academic freedom. (It seems to me that the AAUP is unable to make this distinction.)

However, Fish (and the authors?) seem to then assume that "higher education" is a rather monolithic phenomeon. Or, to put it otherwise: the authors rightly ground academic freedom "in a substantive account of the purposes of higher education." They then define the mission or purpose of "the" university as the generation of new knowledge and the modeling of "independent thought." As Fish summarizes,

If the mission of the enterprise is, as Finkin and Post say, “to promote new knowledge and model independent thought,” the “special conditions” necessary to the realization of that mission must include protection from the forces and influences that would subvert newness and independence by either anointing or demonizing avenues of inquiry in advance.

Threats to academic freedom, on this account, include any "forces" that would mitigate this mission and subject it to the strictures of "public opinion." But this does not secure the freedom for professors to say just anything (e.g., to hijack a class on organic chemistry with rants about the war in Iraq or Prop 8 in California).

But on this point I find two interesting lacunas in the discussion: First, Finkin and Post's definition of the university's "mission" seems to exhibit a couple of tensions. On the one hand, the mission seems largely defined by research, whereas Fish's examples tend to focus on the classroom. Finkin and Post's definition of "the enterprise" focuses on the generation of new knowledge and seems to have little room, or at least little account, of the centrality of an education. Second, when this "enterprise" does include education, it's reduced to the liberal mantra of modeling "independent thought," in which case it seems that we're right back in the terrain of First-Amendment-like ideals of autonomy and freedom (often couched in the ruse that we are teaching students how to think not what to think; alot of partisan ranting gets smuggled into the classroom under the guise of "critical thinking"). Thus Fish praises the book because it "declares that while faculty must 'respect students as persons,' they are under no obligation to respect the 'ideas held by students.'" That might sound like its tweaking the student-centered, liberal ruse, but at the end of the day what it still can't entertain is this radical notion: that education might only be an education insofar as it constitutes a formation. (Indeed, one of the things the other Stanley [Hauerwas] emphasizes throughout The State of the University is that an education can't not be formation; the question is, formation to what end?]

Second, can Fish--and Finkin and Post--imagine a multiplicity of kinds of institutions of higher education? They seem to assume there is this thing called "the university"--which has multiple outposts or branches across the country--and all of those microcosmic instantiations of "the university" participate in this definition of "the enterprise." But might there be institutions of higher education that, in fact, embrace the project of education as formation, as inculcation into a tradition and its imagination, precisely as the ground for 'critical thinking?' (Every "critique" presumes some criteria.) Might there be universities which, suspicious of the empty ruse of "independent thought," are honest and up front about their enterprise as educating a people toward a substantive telos, a particular vision of the good life? Couldn't we imagine universities that acknowledge the traditioned nature of all our inquiry, and which seek to generate new knowledge, but do so in accordance with the rigors and "thickness" of an acknowledged tradition--a tradition which is not seen as restrictive and limiting, but rather which opens up the world for us? And wouldn't that be exactly the mission and "enterprise" of Christian and Catholic universities? Otherwise, why should they exist?

Finkin and Post suggest that our understandings of "academic freedom" must be grounded in a "substantive account of the purposes of higher education." I agree; I think we just need to acknowledge that there is not one set of purposes that define higher education as such. What counts as higher education, and what defines the task of higher education, is itself contested and multiple. Different institutions will have different understandings of that mission and enterprise. Academic freedom at the Christian university will be grounded in the articulation of the purpose of the Christian university. Within that mission and task, we will still prize "academic freedom," but it will be a bounded freedom (in good Augustinian fashion). The "boundaries," however, should not be subject to the whims of "public opinion," even public opinion within the church. For instance, it should not be subject to the hobby horses of trustees or presidents or "concerned parents." Academic freedom should flourish within the bounds of "Catholic" Christianity--defined by the thickness and time-tested-ness of the creedal and confessional tradition, not the current whims of radio preachers or talk-radio pundits.

Such an account cuts both ways; that is, such a model is an equal opportunity offender, because it resists the whims of both the left and the right. For instance, I find trustees and "concerned parents" often get hooked on hobby-horse issues that reflect current neo-conservative fixations (e.g., homosexuality, free markets, or [still!] creation/evolution). On the other hand, I find my more predictably "liberal" colleagues--even at a Christian university--tend to be easily co-opted into the agendas of (what passes for) the left in this country, and basically end up assuming, and even fighting for, a classically liberal notion of "autonomy" (which is why these professors, even though they're at a Christian or Catholic university, are largely allergic to the notion the notion of education as formation).

But now imagine that we're thinking about a Christian university community whose 'boundaries' (and hence horizons of possibility) are defined not by some 20th-century "Statement of Faith" abopted from a radio evangelistic ministry, but rather the Scriptures and historic creeds and confessions of the church (Apostles' Creed, Nicea, Chalcedon). In fact, imagine such a Christian university bound itself to confessions that included historical Reformational documents as well (say, something like the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Canons of Dort). Then this university would situate itself in the thickness of a tradition that ranges from the first to sixteenth century. The "tradition" that informs its mission and task is catholic and thickly specified, and provides an untold wealth of resources for thinking about and grappling with the world--a generous platform to launch rigorous programs for generating new knowledge from within these horizons of possibility--even to generate knowledge and discover things about the world to which the so-called "secular" university would remain blind (which is precisely why I think this tradition is enabling, not 'limiting' or constrictive).

Well, what would this mean for either the conservative trustees or the 'liberal' professors? It turns out that "the tradition" undercuts both. On the one hand, the conservative trustees and "concerned parents" will be hard-pressed to find their hobby-horses making a run in the tradition. Further, it should be noted that many of the conservative trustees and "concerned parents," who often seem quite commited to the laissez-faire ideals of the "free" market will find that this tradition also constitutes a radical critique of the notion of "freedom" operative in said market. On the other hand, the 'liberal' professors who just assume autonomy as an ideal will find that the tradition's understanding of freedom constitutes a radical critique of the quasi-Enlightenment models they've assumed.

What we will find in this tradition, however, is a thick sense of who we are called to be as human beings re-created in the image of God, which provides a rich foundation for imagining the shape of an education that constitutes the formation of a people who desire the kingdom.

"Desiring the Kingdom" Cover

I'm very pleased with the cover for Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Baker Academic, 2009). The art & design folks at Baker Publishing Group are very receptive to suggestions and invite my input on most projects--and then always pull together a clean, pleasing design.

I'm particularly thrilled with the fact that we'll be able to use this image. This is a tapestry in the Quest for the Holy Grail cycle by Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. Volumes 2 and 3 in the trilogy will also include images from this cycle. I think the pieces are stunning. In fact, I made a pilgrimmage to the Birmingham Museum this past spring to try to see them in person, but they are kept in very controlled storage. The colors and detail are sumptuous and the theme of the "kingdom" runs through them with a sense of enchantment. I hope the book does something similar.

Just for Fun

I remember when my daughter, Maddie, took this picture--in the field beside a farmhouse we stayed at in northern Italy. I just think it's such a cool shot. She added the text for her website, I think.

"Speed Racer," Common Grace, and "Progress"

Last night my boys and I watched the Wachowski brothers' latest offering, Speed Racer. I quite enjoyed their (perhaps indulgent?) visual forays, variously hovering between surreal and camp. (I confess to also kind of enjoying the cheap chimpanzee comedy shtick.) But I also found myself strangely intrigued by a melodramatic, almost cliche line uttered by Racer X to Speed:

"It doesn't matter if racing never changes. What matters is if racing changes us."

The context is the corporate corruption of the WRL, which is rife and systemic. It has always been this way, and Speed despairs that it might always be. And it's not clear that winning within the system will really change the system. But at the same time, X and Speed both have a compulsion to race, and that compulsion can only work itself out within the system. (One might say that the corrupt system owns all the tracks.) So given that context and compulsion, the question becomes an issue of assimmilation: "What matters is if racing changes us." Now, granted, this could sound like a kind of Stoicism. But I don't think it is, because Speed and the entire family are trying to imagine racing otherwise--and are trying to embody a different kind of team, and different kind of racing, and different kind of practice within the corporate system. But if Racer X is right, one doesn't necessarily work out this impulsion in order to "transform" the system ("It doesn't matter if racing never changes.").

So this got me thinking a bit (and I'm very much thinking out loud here): How much of the Reformed agenda of "transforming" culture is secretly--and perhaps essentially--informed by a kind of myth of progress? To what extent does the "transforming culture" agenda have to assume that "racing can change," so to speak? And is that warranted?

In re-reading Kuyper recently, I was astonished (one might say appalled) to see his shameless 19th-century progressive confidence in "the West" (all thanks to Calvinism, of course). (How much of this is due to an implicit post-millenialism of some sort?) In general, I think Reformed "transformers" assume both the "racing can change" and "racing will change," to stick with the filmic metaphor.

But I just wonder: is that warranted? On what grounds? (I should note that even if it's not warranted, that doesn't thereby entail the truth of some dispensationalist pessimism about creation and culture per se, as if everything but the soul is just destined to "burn up.") What can we expect from "the earthly city?" (Nota bene: Augustine's "earthly city" is not synonymous with creation or temporality; it's origin is the Fall.) I suppose I find myself with little confidence in any "progress" in the earthly city apart from eschatological renewal and transformation. And within such a system, what matters is that "racing" not change us.

New Book: The Logic of Incarnation

Some Fors Clavigera readers might be interested in a new book that has just appeared from Wipf & Stock: The Logic of Incarnation: James K.A. Smith's Critique of Postmodern Religion, edited by Neal DeRoo and Brian Lightbody. This grew out of a conference that engaged my work at Brock University in St. Catherine's, Ontario. Drawing together philosophers, theologians, campus ministers, and other practitioners, the took takes up various facets of my engagement with postmodernism and religion, including my critique of the "religion without religion" school of Caputo (on the theoretical side) or Pete Rollins (on the practitioner side, so to speak). I contribute a long first chapter ("The Logic of Incarnation: Towards a Catholic Postmodernism") that sort of provides an overview of this critique of Derrida & Co.'s "logic of determination" and the alternative I describe as the "logic of incarnation." I also contribute an Afterword that responds to each of the chapters.

The original conference was great fun, and this book was a way to revisit those conversations--as well as an opportunity for me to clarify some issues, respond to some criticisms, and get to say some things I haven't elsewhere. (It's also a treat for me to see Neal, my former student, bringing this to fruition. Thanks, Neal!)

Poetic Musings at AAR

I usually enjoy the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, the yearly gathering of scholars in religious studies and theology. But this year I found it a slog. I'm not sure if this is a reflection of the meeting or of my own personal ambivalence about the very project. But the drone of papers occasioned in me a kind of ennui I've not experienced there before (the book exhibit was a bit of a tonic). In fact, during one very-long paper I was so bored and disheartened that I took up poetic doodling. I hope this was only a phase, or the bad fish talking--otherwise, I've got serious professional issues on the horizon!

A poem inspired by a theological presentation at AAR:

Babel's babbling and confusion
comes home to roost in
the many gurgling tongues of the
theologians,
chattering self-importantly,
most sincerely,
with an idolatrous cleverness.

Serious and sober,
yea "evangelical,"
conservative
but really just a DJ--
riffing and mixing,
generating a cacaphony of theologemes
that dance and dangle
between piled names.
A show of erudition,
gesticulating about 'communicative action'
and saying...what?

Nothing.


For which I give thanks.

For never has the vocation--
or is it just my desire?--
of the poet felt more clear.

For I am befuddled by this Babel,
foreign tongues of barbarians.

From its rambling , "rigorous" confusion
I want only to fall into the
clarity of Franz Wright,
the lucidity of Anne Sexton,
the bumpkin simplicity of young Donald Hall.

Compared with the muffled but incessant
utterances of the theologian,
poetry rings with the clarity of
crunchy leaves in the quiet of a
frost-covered autumn morning.


God, of course, is no theologian.
He is a poet hidden and violated,
muzzled by the theologians.
As long as there are theologians,
God's existence will remain in question.

How long, O Lord?
When O When will you silence the theologians--
Silence my theologizing--
And sing to us, your poiema,
in the poems of your strange saints.