"I feel the need--the need for speed"

It's almost disturbing how many times in a day I find quotes from Top Gun making their way to the tip of my tongue. (This is one of the aspects I recall from The Reluctant Fundamentalist: how young financial analysts spoke in Top-Gun-ese to one another with such fluency and understanding, like a secret language insulated from generations ahead and behind.)

Sadly (why "sadly?"), I don't think any movie seeped into my conciousness (and unconscious) like Top Gun. Even now, I can't resist the allure when it's playing on TBS. A couple of years ago I made a pilgrimmage to the bar in San Diego which was home to the famous "carnal knowledge" scene. Indeed, it was a treat for me to introduce my two older boys to the movie about a year ago--though I think they remain puzzled my its special spell on me (what's their Top Gun?).

What is it about the movie? How is it that Tom Cruise still seems to just ooze cool when I watch it (leaving Kelly McGillis hanging in that elevator scene)? That Goose seems like a friend to die for, whose own death is heartbreaking? Or is it the fact that this was the first silhouette of a kiss I saw that involved a tongue (!)? I confess I lack any critical capacity on these questions. It's too close to me--too tightly woven into the warp-and-woof of my memory and self-understanding.

Indeed, it shapes my language. The quips and tropes of the movie come to me like the cadences of the Book of Common Prayer. Whereas my younger brother, fascinated with weapons and war, could quote every bit of dialogue from First Blood, I absorbed the dialogue of Top Gun like a second language. What a treat, then, for me to find this page at IMDB.com which, in archiving "memorable quotes" from the movie, seems to pretty much cover the entire film. It's hard to select any particular favorites, but who can forget:

Charlie: Excuse me, Lieutenant. Is there something wrong?
Maverick: Yes ma'am, the data on the MiG is inaccurate.
Charlie: How's that, Lieutenant?
Maverick: Well, I just happened to see a MiG 28 do a...
Goose: We!
Maverick: Uh, sorry Goose. WE happened to see a MiG 28 do a 4g negative dive.
Charlie: Where did you see this?
Maverick: Uh, that's classified.
Charlie: It's what?
Maverick: It's classified. I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.

or this exhcange (followed by Val Kilmer's weird jaw clench):

Iceman: You two really are cowboys.
Maverick: What's your problem, Kazanski?
Iceman: You're everyone's problem. That's because every time you go up in the air, you're unsafe. I don't like you because you're dangerous.
Maverick: That's right! Ice... man. I am dangerous.

These and a hundred others could roll off my tongue without thinking about it. I suppose the only thing that's "sad" about this is that the Psalms don't come to my lips nearly as easily.

Wolterstorff Redux: An Update

As I noted earlier, I made several contributions to the Immanent Frame symposium on Wolterstorff's Justice: Rights and Wrongs. Wolterstorff generously wrote a response to those three pieces entitled "The Fine Texture: A Response to Smith." And Immanent Frame has now posted my reply to Wolterstorff, "'Bob and Weave': A Response to Wolterstorff." Here's a snippet:

Nicholas Wolterstorff’s calm, careful, humble response to my posts might make me look like an overly pugilistic polemicist. But I think he’s just from a different school of pugilism. (As a Canadian and long-time hockey player, I think pugilism is a great way to spend a Friday night, with beers afterward.) Wolterstorff is a careful student of the “bob and weave” school of philosophical polemics, turning ill-advised haymakers into merely glancing blows. I, on the other hand, tend to be a student of the George Foreman school of philosophical polemics (and frequent user of his grills to boot!): I’m easily sucked in by rope-a-dopes. Why stop now?

Read the rest of "'Bob and Weave': A Response to Wolterstorff."

Post-Secular Conference at Yale

Folks on the East Coast might be interested in attending an upcoming conference at the MacMillan Center at Yale University, "Exploring the Post-Secular," April 3-4, 2009. It's free and open to the public.

It's a working conference, bringing together an interdisciplinary collection of scholars to share drafts of what will eventually be chapters of a book. I'll be presenting a paper on the Friday afternoon, entitled "Secular Liturgies and the Prospects for a 'Post-Secular' Social Science." (I don't know if I'll have time to discuss it--my draft is 40 pp. long--but a long section of the paper explores the "secular liturgies" found in the so-called 'postmodern' literature of David Foster Wallace, Nicholson Baker, and Cormac McCarthy.)

The context or rationale for the conference is described this way:

There has been a great deal of talk in recent years suggesting that we have entered a “post-secular” age. Much of this is a response to the resurgence of politicized religion on the world scene. But what, if anything, does the term “post-secular” even mean? Have we really entered into a post-secular age? And if so, what implications, if any, does this have for the social sciences? Do these developments imply a new approach to the study of religion? A wholesale reconstruction of social science? A shift towards social philosophy? Is there such a thing as “post-secular social science”?

This conference brings together a number of analysts of religion and its entanglements with the world in an attempt to assess these questions. We will address the possible meanings of religion and of the various terms with roots in the term “secular”: secularism, secularity, secularization. Without some grappling with the question of what religion is, it is very difficult to say what secularity or secularization might entail. We will explore the extent to which the “return of religion” is a product of an actual upsurge of religiosity around the world as opposed to greater scholarly attention to religion. We will also examine the ways in which the global religious situation may compel us to reconsider how we think about both religion and social science.

A pdf of the program and schedule is available here. It includes a contact for registration and further information.

The meeting is co-sponsored by the MacMillan Center Initiative on Religion, Politics, and Society, the Center for Comparative Research at Yale University, the Social Science Research Council, and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

A-Political Science?

NPR commentators this morning seem positively giddy about the news that today President Obama will sign an order overturning the Bush administration's restrictions on embryonic stem cell research. They seemed particularly fond of the mantra that this administration would be guided by "science, not politics"--and that Obama's administration would further "separate" science and politics.

This, of course, is taken to be the "enlightened" position, in contrast to the neanderthal policies of the Bush administration which let science be controlled by political ideology. In other words, according to this line, science under Bush was governed and controlled by politics. Instead, we need to liberate science from such unscientific controls--we need to liberate science to be a-political. Indeed, it seems that Obama will suggest the inverse: that our politics and policy needs to be governed by science. The paragons of the Enlightenment couldn't have put it any better.

But methinks this Enlightenment could use a little further enlightenment. Perhaps Obama's address will be more nuanced than the NPR buzz about it, but to suggest the liberation of science from politics is a naive conceit. There is no a-political science. (I might suggest that David Axelrod add a couple of books to the Air Force One library: Bruno Latour's We Have Never Been Modern and Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy). That's not to say, of course, that science can't be hijacked by ideology; clearly it can. But the alternative to ideological science is not pure, a-political science. The best we can hope for is an honest, attentive science driven by "good" politics--and the latter, of course, is the source of much debate. The NPR/Democratic ruse about a pure, a-political science indicates a naive politics at best.

Proof(s) of Happiness, Books of Sadness

I've just finished correcting the page proofs for The Devil Reads Derrida--and the proofs for Desiring the Kingdom are now staring at me from the desk with an accusatory glare.

This is my favorite stage of book production. The manuscripts were sent off months ago with a "Good riddance!" of exhaustion and frustration, cast out into the world with an angst and insecurity that masks itself in temerity. By that time, the manuscript--usually overdue--has been hanging around like a smelly uncle who wore out his welcome months ago. During the final stages, all of its blemishes and failures and irritating ticks swell and overwhelm your perception of the book, so you tell yourself that you're just "too close" to it and look forward to seeing it with fresh eyes upon its return to your desk.

By the time a marked-up, copy-edited version of the manuscript is returned, it's just a more blemished, disheartening version of what you sent off. Except now an editor--sometimes with red pencil--has seen all the same failures and pockmarks. Your worst fears are confirmed and now you're mired in attention to these details, struggling to still find that "distance" you were hoping for. It still reeks of that unwelcome uncle. It even still looks the same--it looks like a document you generated from your printer, or it's simply a photocopied version of your manuscript. This doesn't feel any closer to being a book; it feels even further away.

But then a few months pass. You're quite glad to have sort of forgotten about the thing. And then a box arrives: crisp, taped, with a distinct shape, the publisher's address emblazoned on the top of the label. You know what's inside: the page proofs.

It's hard to articulate the transformation that takes place. For me, it recalls the experience of moving from dot matrix printers to the crisp Times New Roman of laser printers. My academic career tracked this development. I've gone from having an electric typewriter, to an amped-up version of an electric typewriter that actually had a kind of disk system, to a dot matrix printer that rattled its high-speed labor across reams of paper connected by a perforated fold. Dot matrix already wowed me a bit: here was my introduction to fonts. But then I saw someone printing with a laser printer in a Times New Roman that looked like a book! This seemed like the grail itself: the work spit out from the laser printer seemed to come with the imprimatur of "publishing."

When I finally finished my master's thesis, I felt like this was a sort of coming of age because it was printed on a laser printer in Times New Roman. It will seem crazy, but this was a gift to me, in a very tangible way. At the time (indeed, during the entirety of my master's degree), I was working the night shift at a feedmill in Cambridge, Ontario. The business manager was incredibly kind to me, and offered to let me print my thesis from his laser printer. I was thrilled and grateful. I had never seen the words in crisp Times New Roman during the whole process, and here at the end, it emerged from the printer with the shape of what felt like "a book." (It would later be published as The Fall of Interpretation.)

Now we're used to the banality of Times New Roman. That's the mundane shape of the manuscripts that leave our desk. But I'll never tire of cracking open the page proofs. This "thing" that's been hanging around your neck like a millstone, sometimes for years, now looks like a book. I even love the marginal cut lines and marks for the printer. It's always made me feel like "a writer."

And so I relish page proofs. Though I also enjoy it while I can, because I know what's coming: that inevitable, post-partum-like depression when the actual book is in your hands.

On Wolterstorff's "Justice" @ Immanent Frame

The Immanent Frame is staging an interdisciplinary symposium on Nicholas Wolterstorff's magnum opus, Justice: Rights and Wrongs--in part, no doubt, because Wolterstorff argues that there can be no sufficient secular grounding of rights.

I'll be contributing several posts to the symposium. The first--"The Paucity of Secularism?"--is online today. The next couple will appear throughout this week. The ensuing posts will begin to articulate a critique of the project--or at least some of the readings that undergird the project.

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.