Polymorphic or Polydoxic Christianity? Perhaps Neither.

April DeConick, in the comments of her posts, has expressed some concerns with the term "polymorphic." Firstly, she notes that she had considered it before coming up with "polydoxy," and her reasons for rejecting it are:

1. Primarily, it is the same problem with "Christianities"--it just denotes varieties, but does not give any hints pertaining how these groups interact with one another or how they understand themselves. Although, I should note, "polymorphic" is not as grammatically jarring as "Christianities" or "Judaisms."

2. There is nothing particularly Christian about polymorphic--something I consider in its favor, but if one is trying to capture the interactions exclusively between Christians rather than Christians and other groups or just all groups in antiquity, then something with a more Christian ring, with "doxy" or "praxy" would be preferable.

I consider the first point the real potential problem with "polymorphic," and I would be willing to relinquish it for that purpose--its lack of teeth.

In contrast, "polydoxy" indicates a particular character of these groups--they are all claiming to be Christian and the "correct" Christianity against other forms. In this sense, if I have read April's blog entries correctly, this term denotes the specific interaction of jostling for primacy or the polemics of various groups claiming to have the correct understanding of rites and beliefs against the others. "Christianities" and "polymorphic," therefore, appear too benign to capture such polemical interactions, ranging from subtle to intense.

My question as a novice in this field to a seasoned scholar such as April would be this: does "polydoxy" conceal as much as it reveals? Meaning, is the Hobbesian "all against all" or polemical jostling various orthodoxies the only type of interaction that the sources reveal? Or does it capture just a portion of 2nd and 3rd century forms of Christian interactions?

But if this IS the case, perhaps the term "polyorthic" more correctly captures the interactions--it does not impose a false division between belief and practice, and it focuses on various groups claiming they're "right." And it is odd enough to catch people's attention!

It is an interesting topic to brainstorm.

Plurodoxy, Polydoxy, Polypraxy...

April DeConick, on Forbidden Gospels, has opened up an issue of how to refer to primarily 2nd and 3rd century Christianity, saying that we need a new term. She writes, and I quote at length:

"Orthodoxy did not exist as a totalitarian entity, although each type of Christianity may have thought of itself as orthodox while everyone else were heretics. So the discussion of heresiology is important to maintain, as long as one understands that the heretic is so only from the point of view of one party. An orthodox Christianity doesn't emerge until the fourth century. Even then, it struggles through council after council, swinging from Arian to anti-Arian for over fifty years. Not until the fifth century are the major lines put into place that will determine the shape of "orthodox" Christianity for the centuries to come.

"Heterodoxy is not any better because it describes religions that deviate from the orthodox. Since we don't have orthodoxy yet, we can't have heterodoxy either.

"Sectarian and cult language don't work either, because sectarian requires that there is some parental tradition that is being deviated from. Cult also suggests deviance along with innovation.

"So what do we have? Multiple forms of Christianity, although this isn't quite right either, because many of these forms are competing with each other and some forms of Christianity are stronger and more dominant in certain geographical locales. So what we have is plurodoxy. That is multiple forms of Christianity that are competing for the orthodox position and/or that consider themselves to be the orthodox position. From this vantage point I think we can better narrative Christian origins and the standardization of Christianity that eventually comes to dominate as orthodoxy in the fourth and fifth centuries."

Basically, as DeConick points out, 2nd and 3rd century Christianity is very messy. To study it, one has to navigate a variety of beliefs, practices, and groups who combine them and interpret them in ever-changing ways. And, as she also points out, the groups are of different size, strength, and shift across the geography and time. She offers the term "plurodoxy," although right now, on her blog, "polydoxy" is winning out, it seems, since plurodoxy combines the Latin (plural) and Greek (doxa), whereas polydoxy is all Greek. I tentatively suggested the inclusion of "polypraxy" alongside of this term, since "polydoxy" tends to privilege doctrine and beliefs, even if it does not necessarily exclude practice. But I fear that the focus on "doxy" and "praxy" imposes a false division between them that did not exist in antiquity, since, for example, our earliest Christian creeds derive from the ritual of Baptism, and DeConick notes that the Christological debates are as much about the Eucharist as anything.

Although she claims that "multiple forms" is not quite right (and I do not see why "multiple forms" cannot capture issues that she refers to, such as different power bases and geographical dispersions), I prefer the term "polymorphic." It does not have the specific religious reference that "doxy" and "praxy" has, but it does get across the "many forms" that Christianity takes in this period, and what is more, since "morph" has accrued a sense of change, it potentially connotes the fluidity of groups as they interact, change through their interactions, as they write their polemics, and jostle against one another, some emerging stronger in some areas and others coming out on top in others, but it is a process.

Moreover, the generic aspect of "polymorphic" has the benefit of being applicable not only to polymorphic Christianity, but also can capture the interactive developments within 2nd temple Judaism and beyond. If, indeed, one can speak of a Mediterranean religiosity or perhaps some larger patterns that find various expressions in Christian, Jewish, Egyptian, Syrian, Greek, and Roman religious "forms" as they interact, imprint themselves on one another, jostle, and reformulate each other (which is how I have been increasingly seeing things as of late), it could be more beneficial that doxy and praxy.

But that is just my two cents.

Catholics and Evangelics for McCain

In the previous post, I noted the disenchantment of many evangelical voters with the GOP, many leaving to become Democrats and others Independents. In this post, one sees the persistence of GOP loyalty among both conservative Evangelicals and conservative Catholics.

Anyone who knows anything about the past 500 years of history realizes that Catholics and Protestants haven't always gotten along very well (again, I like to understate things). But the politics of the past two and a half decades has shown a rapprochement not necessarily in terms of ecumenical understanding (which usually occurs among more liberal-leaning believers, although not exclusively so), but in terms of political expediency.

Thus, Texan Evangelical leader, John Hagee, has recently made anti-Catholic remarks and has recently endorsed John McCain. Prominent Catholic figures on the conservative side have pushed McCain to reject Hagee's endorsement. McCain, however, needing Evangelical voters (who have generally looked askance at McCain), has accepted the endorsement while noting that he does not support everything Hagee says and does.

Hagee, though, has issued a formal apology to William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Civil and Religious Rights, saying: "Out of a desire to advance a greater unity among Catholics and evangelicals in promoting the common good, I want to express my deep regret for any comments that Catholics have found hurtful." The "common good" they are promoting is, in fact, the Republican party. Donohue has accepted the apology, saying that in conversation with Hagee, he thinks Hagee "has seen the light." Thus, while tension remains between the "papists" and the "schismatics," they put aside their differences with each other and even with McCain in order to have a united political front, all the while the Democratic party is torn in two with its extended Primary season.

For more on this story, see this article from Yahoo.

Evangelicals for Obama

In recent years there have been growing fissures between Evangelical Christians and the GOP, an association that has been rather strong since about 1980. These fissures are evident especially (but not exclusively) among younger Evangelicals. They still dislike abortion (understatement of the year), but they seem to balance it with other issues that are more characteristic of Democratic concerns: poverty, environment, social justice, and immigration. In addition, a growing number oppose the war in Iraq. They are also sick of people like James Dobson, founder of "Focus on the Family," supposedly being considered a representative voice.

While there are fissures and many Evangelicals are leaving the GOP, not all are joining the Democratic party. Many seem to be caught in the middle and see no party that really aligns with their mixture of concerns. Yet, come November, there may be many Evangelical votes going for Obama. Moreover, more conservative Evangelicals, like Dobson, have had a difficult relationship with the GOP nominee, McCain, and Dobson has even claimed that "if" McCain is the nominee, he's sitting this election out--thank God!

For more, see this article from the Seattle Times.

Cinco de Mayo

By the way, I almost forgot, but today is the Mexican Independence Day! Happy Cinco de Mayo! As someone in my class said today, there should be a huge party on the U.S./Mexican border, perhaps around the wall on the Rio Grande! In any case, it is a good excuse for a party!

Teaching and Funding

In the previous post, I pasted my closing comments to the "Instituting Religion" conference from April 10, and my friend Jodi raised some issues in the relationship between funding (and academic advancement) and teaching, noting that as long as research is the primary means of advancement within academe that teaching will get the short end of the stick. She also raises several important issues of the relationship between pedagogy and theory (bringing theoretical savvy to teaching and practical teaching experience to theory), between research and teaching (bringing research into teaching and teaching issues into research), and speaking in general about the contingency of context for these issues (concerning the type of school, its funding structures, and so on).

Given all of these interrelationships, I thought it would be appropriate to announce to my blog-reading public my situation next year: I will be teaching Literature of the Humanities next year at Columbia, which, according to most people I have known who have taught it, is an intensive teaching load (at least for the first-year teachers in the program). Yet, this program will fund me to finish my dissertation (although the teaching load will put me behind my original research schedule). I am very excited for the opportunity to teach in Columbia's Core next year! I do hear that it is great teaching experience and a great overall experience. In fact, some of the people I have spoken to have said that the way they teach Lit Hum, forcing people to slow down and do very close readings of texts from Homer to Virginia Woolf, has forced them to reconsider their own reading practices for their dissertations--forcing them to be much more careful readers in their own fields based upon their situations in the classroom. I do hope to be able to bring insights from my own work (at least from a standpoint of reading practices or ways of organizing large blocks of texts) into conversation with the texts I'll be teaching. Since I work on the interrelationship between the Sabbath and the Sanctuary in ancient Jewish and Christian literature, I'm sure I'll be able to find a time/space bridge (via Bakhtin's Chronotope perhaps).

Instituting Religion: Closing Remarks

Finally, here are my closing remarks that I gave during the closing round-table discussion:

I originally envisioned this conference as an ongoing dialogue. And I attempted to implement this in the very organization of the panels. The panels, in some ways, can be seen as interactive, with later panels commenting on the topics of earlier panels. With this in mind, I created the closing discussion as a “respondents’ panel,” in which the respondents could take the insights from their panels and put them directly into dialogue with one another in order to identify cross-panel themes as well as identify a few gaps in the conference, providing fertile directions for further inquiry. (Unfortunately, our third respondent, Jack Hawley, could not be with us, and so I am going to fill in for him, but by no means are my comments or interests reflective of his.)

Bracketing issues suggested in the call for papers but not really discussed today, one key aspect of the institutional shaping of religion that has briefly emerged in this conference and should receive serious sustained interrogation as we move on from this setting is pedagogy. In fact, I was discussing this with Adam Lobel, and told him if I were to organize this conference all over again, I would have called for a panel on pedagogy. Indeed, we are primarily hired as professors in order to teach. And so how we teach what we teach and navigate the vagaries of funding, student interest in particular subjects, student expectations of certain topics, and institutional habits of course development (even how course titles are negotiated between student interests and “inherited” courses) will shape how religion is understood as we present it primarily to our undergraduate students.

When it comes down to it, who reads our research? How many people will read my dissertation and our scholarly monographs? Versus how many people will we teach? And, in this instance, how textbooks for such courses are used (or ignored) and how those books present “religion/s” to students, whether upheld or deconstructed by the instructor, have great impact, in my opinion, for the dissemination of our understandings or misunderstandings of what we study. We should think of how we communicate (or do not communicate) with our students engaging both their and our assumptions (Luke’s discussion of competitive economies of knowledge may be helpful here). Thus, in teaching, how we do what we do develops in interaction with institutional habitus (so to speak) as well as student interest and expectation. The exact analysis of these interactions at various institutions would be an important contribution to the concerns we have investigated today. (Adam’s analogy [given in the discussion period of the first panel] of seminar reading practices versus Buddhist monastic reading practices of the same text producing different forms of knowledge illustrates this point quite well.)