Foreskin's Lament

No, not the absolutely hilarious book, Foreskin's Lament, by Shalom Auslander, but a similar issue: to snip or not to snip, that is the question. Whether tis nobler...ok...maybe Shakespeare is a bit overboard (although, not snipped would be my guess in his case).

Salon.com has an interesting article, full with necessary cutting puns, about a documentary on the variety of views on exposed or covered glans:

The great foreskin debate

To snip or not to snip? That was the question facing new parent Danae Elon, who didn't just wrestle with the controversies of circumcision -- she made a documentary about it.
By Joy Press
April 30, 2009 | New parents face an endless barrage of questions: which prenatal tests, what kind of diapers, which nursery school? But one choice is irrevocable: to snip or not to snip? That is the daunting question, one freighted with intense cultural and religious meaning. And yet people often don't give it much thought at all.

For someone like me, a nonpracticing Jew married to a non-Jewish husband, it was a confusing moment. Neither of us had been raised in a religious household, and neither had set foot in a house of worship except to attend the occasional wedding. But I felt myself tempted by the lure of ritual and tradition. Jews consider circumcision a commandment from God, practiced over thousands of years -- who was I to cut my son off from that? My husband, meanwhile, considered it an antiquated ritual lacking sufficient medical justification (an opinion similar to that of the American Academy of Pediatrics). On top of that was the fear of robbing one's child of something -- nerve endings, sexual feeling -- that can never be returned. It's an issue that American couples continue to wrestle with; although the number of boys routinely circumcised in the U.S. has decreased dramatically (one study shows the rate at 57 percent, down from a 1960s circumcision rate of 90 percent), the majority of parents still opt for it.

The documentary based upon this conundrum, "Partly Private" (hmm..what she mean by "partly"?) by Danae Elon is playing at Tribeca.

The part I couldn't get over, and still can't, is what do they do with all those foreskins?

She introduces us to a broad cast of characters, from the mohel (a Jewish specialist who performs the procedure) who keeps all of his clients' foreskins in a jar, to the anti-circumcision activist who expresses his own penile trauma in a children's book, to the employees of a skincare company who use discarded foreskins in their antiaging cream. "Every bottle is not a foreskin," one of them assures the camera.

Wait? The Mohel actually keeps all of them...in a jar!?!?! What?! That's, eh, kind of gross. Does he like to pull them out and look at them from time to time or something? He collects foreskins? So, when he's breaking the ice, and someone asks, "What's your hobbies," he says "collecting foreskins." And which skincare company is this? And what is it about the foreskin that keeps people from aging--noting that the target market for antiaging creams is female. So, think of that next time you use your cream: you are rubbing your face with discarded foreskins. Perhaps check the ingredients on your cream--does it include foreskins?

Elon also ventures further afield, visiting the Italian town that once supposedly housed Jesus' foreskin (it was stolen) as well as a Turkish party hall called Circumcision Palace, where she films dozens of little boys (aged 6 to 9) dressed in white suits going under the knife in front of their families and friends. Finally she journeys to Hebron on the West Bank, looking for the exact spot where Abraham is said to have received the order from God, and finds instead a wasteland decimated by war and religion. As she says in the documentary, "Did he really say to Abraham, 'Cut off the tips of your dicks?' What if we got it all wrong?"

All of this serves as research for Elon's own charged decision, which she has to make not once during the film but twice. When the movie opens, she is pregnant with her first child. Her husband, Philip, a French-Algerian Jew, feels the strong pull of tradition, and she ambivalently goes along with his desire. But when she gets pregnant with another boy after several years of immersion in the topic, she is forced to decide what she really believes is best for her son's penis.

I have heard of the relic of Jesus' foreskin. It's divine, don't you know?

You read the rest of the article on the link above.

Otherwise, for an academic treatment, you might want to check out the provocatively titled, Why Jewish Women Aren't Circumcised by Shaye J.D. Cohen.

Dancing in the Dark

...writing a poem you can read to no one
is like dancing in the dark.
(Ovid, Black Sea Letters IV.2.33-4)

"A God's Inside Me": Poetry, Prophecy, Inspiration

Inspired poets' predictions do not fail of fulfillment:
a new laurel-wreath for Jove while the first's still green!
These are now my words you read (I'm away on the Danube,
its waters drink for the ill-pacified Goths):
no, this is the voice of a god, a god's inside me,
it's a god that makes me predict and prophesy!
(Ovid, Black Sea Letters III.4.89-94)

Ovid claims inspiration...in a very literal sense. A spirit is in him, a god's inside him. The god possesses him. Poetic inspiration and prophetic inspiration are inseparable: each divinely inspired, each folding into one another. Inspired speech is heightened speech, poetic speech. They flow from the same source: Apollo.

Ovid's Battered Love

I've been reading Ovid's Tristia and his Black Sea Letters, and this passage struck me in the beauty of its description of Love's decrepitude:

Sleep, that common repose from cares, possessed me,
my slack limbs were sprawled out the length of my bed--
when, suddenly, the air was vibrant with beating pinions,
and the window creaked softly open. In alarm
I started up, propped on my left elbow, slumber
gone, driven clear from my thumping breast.
There stood Love, one hand grasping the maple bedpost,
with a sad expression, not how he used to look,
no neck-chain, no hair-comb, locks in wild disorder,
not neatly pinned back as of old,
but hanging loose around his bristled jawline,
wing-feathers ruffled (or so it seemed to me)
like those on the back of some homing pigeon, fingered
by too many rough hands.
(Ovid, Black Sea Letters III.3.7-20)

His description of sleep as something that possesses rather than a state is what initially drew me into the passage, as if sleep is a spiritual entity, a god, that can possess you. Moreover, in these letters and poems, Ovid complains of chronic insomnia, so the sweet sleep coming over him must have seemed a relief, perhaps something as powerful as possession. Then, he awakes to see the god Love flying through his window; nonetheless, the poetry retains its dreamlike quality. It is like waking up into a dream--something that happens, for example, to Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment. I find that, in fact, as frustrating as insomnia--to wake up into a dream, to have nested dreams or dreams within dreams within dreams (I think I've had as many as four nested dreams--a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream--before I could get out of them into full consciousness--that is, if this is not also a dream). Ovid has had a long relationship with Love. His description indicates long familiarity--how he knows that Love does not look like his old self. He looks scruffy, feathers drooping, having wild hair, and general unkempt appearance. And what do we make of being "fingered by too many rough hands"? This familiarity, of course, comes from Ovid's famous Art of Love, the series of seductive poems that provided the reasoning (but probably not the true reason) for his exile. Love here mirrors Ovid's own self-descriptions of his own failing, increasingly emaciated appearance in other poems. Love mirrors Ovid, as, in fact, Ovid often equates himself with the books he writes. Is Love, too, in exile? Has Love felt the full force of Caesar's wrath? Been banished from Rome? Or, do we see, as Love awakens Ovid, as an unkempt Love awakens the emaciated Ovid, the source of Ovid's insomnia? If only he hadn't written that poem to provide a pretext for his relegation to Tomis on the Black Sea? Or is Love a prophet (III.83-4)

How (Not) to Write a Thesis?

Passion of the Christ 2

Morton Smith's Translation of Hekhalot Rabbati Online

Jim Davila posts that Morton Smith's translation of Hekhalot Rabbati is available online here. It is in .pdf format.

I have had a copy of this for years; indeed, for years it has circulated among Columbia graduate students. My copy has Alan Segal's marginal corrections. I, of course, made my own marginal notes. A few years ago, however, Alan lost his copy (I think), and so we had to run copies of my copy for a class. And so we sent out copies of Smith's translation with Alan's notes, with my notes on that, and presumably a new set of notes on those notes would be made by students in that class. The whole notes on notes on notes sounds very Rabbinic.

Just So You Know, Women's Studies is NOT, I repeat is NOT, a Religion

From Salon:

Judge: Women's studies isn't a religion

A suit is rejected against Columbia University for offering classes on feminist history.
Tracy Clark-Flory

Apr. 28, 2009 |

Feminist students at Columbia University can breathe a sigh of relief, ready their highlighters and crack the spine of that intimidating Judith Butler tome: A lawsuit against the school for offering women's studies classes has been tossed out.

Self-declared antifeminist lawyer Roy Den Hollander argued that the university was violating the first amendment by teaching a "religionist belief system called feminism." He called the program “a bastion of bigotry against men" and argued that nationwide classes about women's history were “spreading prejudice and fostering animosity and distrust toward men with the result of the wholesale violation of men’s rights due to ignorance, falsehoods and malice.”

As a graduate of a same-sex college, where I took too many women's studies classes to count, I will admit that these courses have their faults. I was often the student in the back of the room squirming in discomfort at statements that lacked intellectual rigor. Any challenges to the party line felt unwelcome. (This led to a rebellious period where I read everything that Camille Paglia had ever written, while scribbling affirmatory, self-justifying exclamation points in the margins.) There was indeed extremist religious fervor in some of the feminist theories we studied -- but, uh, that was also true in my seminar on world religions. And, as any college graduate knows, the truth is that any discipline can be inappropriately politicized or politically correct.

None of that means the subject matter -- in this case, women's and feminist history -- isn't worth studying. If anything, it suggests that the classes should be more daring, and open to disagreement and debate. In short: They need to be better. But Denn Hollander, who has dedicated his legal career to "guys'-rights cases," argues that women's studies classes are, by definition, discriminatory. He might as well argue the same thing about, just for starters, African American, Jewish, Asian and Middle Eastern studies (and perhaps he would if he weren't so consumed by his campaign against feminism).

Luckily, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan wasn't having any of this. In his decision, he rebutted Denn Hollander's "central claim" that "feminism is a religion." He wrote that courses on feminism are "no more a religion than physics" -- or, more relevantly, the study of world religions -- "and at least the core of the complaint therefore is frivolous." Denn Hollander shot back: “The only thing frivolous and absurd is men looking for justice in the courts of America." Yet, somehow, I'm sure we'll see much more frivolity from him in the near future.

-- Tracy Clark-Flory

Or you could turn the argument inside out: everything is religious in a way, particularly secularism (but that secularism and religion are mirrors of each other is old news). Anyway, it is not religion, but is extraordinarily important in religion.

I don't particularly find Judith Butler's writing intimidating; Gender Trouble is fairly concise and clear.

"Defending Academe" against Mark Taylor

David Bell has a rejoinder to Mark Taylor's NYTimes Op-Ed article:

Defending Academe
Is America's system of graduate education really the Detroit of higher learning?

David A. Bell, The New Republic Published: April 28, 2009


Mark C. Taylor's yawp of pain about academia in The New York Times yesterday is a handy compendium of virtually every complaint currently circulating about the American university system. We are, he claims, overspecialized, obsolescent, irrelevant, and rigid. We learn more and more about less and less, while mercilessly exploiting successive generations of graduate students whom we then cast out into unemployment or the wilderness of adjuncting. In short, we stand with the auto manufacturers and (one might add) newspapers in the ranks of ill-adapted social dinosaurs awaiting extinction. "Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning," writes Taylor, who is a professor of religion at Columbia University. And to deal with this crisis, Taylor calls for a revolution of Jacobin proportions. Abolish tenure! Impose mandatory retirement! Eliminate departments! Introduce new regulations! Above all, replace our current system with a supple, flexible set of interdisciplinary research webs that can be focused on the most pressing problems of the day: Academia 2.0, so to speak. To add insult to injury, Taylor offers as an exemplar of everything that is wrong with Academia 1.0: a graduate student who is apparently writing (please hold your guffaws) a dissertation on the medieval theologian Duns Scotus's use of citations.

It's worth noting a few glaring contradictions in the piece. Taylor calls for bringing representatives of different disciplines to bear on such pressing problems as water supplies, even as he is demanding the elimination of the disciplines themselves. Yet the very word "interdisciplinary" implies a disciplinary base. Presumably Taylor himself would not want academics or policy-makers to address (say) the issue of radical Islam without the sort of knowledge of Islamic history and theology that a Department of Religion is best able to provide. Nor do I think he would want dams constructed by engineers who have degrees in Water, as opposed to Engineering. There is also the problem of simultaneously abolishing tenure and introducing sweeping new external regulatory systems on universities. Might not this combination have a certain, unfortunate effect on academic freedom? But then, academic freedom is a concept that goes singularly unmentioned in Taylor's piece.

More fundamentally, it's worth asking if the American university, and its system of graduate education, is really in quite the dire position that Taylor describes. Highly placed academics do have a tendency these days to decry their own supposed obsolescence. The former president of my own university, William Brody, liked to compare academia to the buggy whip industry. But where, exactly, is the proof of this obsolescence? Admissions to top American universities and college remains as competitive as ever--no matter how much, it seems, tuition rises. Despite an academic job market that has been anemic at best and disastrous at worst for more than 35 years, top Ph.D. programs still receive far more qualified applicants than they can hope to admit, include a rising proportion from overseas. America's position in basic research, as measured in such things as Nobel Prizes, seems unchallenged. European academics generally regard the American academic system with untrammeled envy, while their own university systems go through crises that make ours look minor in comparison. Academia has suffered from the current economic downturn, just like virtually every other sector of the American economy. But this is the sort of "obsolescence" that Chrysler and The New York Times can only dream of.

Yes, the internet is certainly changing the way students learn. But those who prophesize the simple displacement of the university as we know it by online learning often know very little about how online learning actually works. Those of us who actually oversee online learning programs know that when they are done well, they involve just as much faculty effort and expertise per student, and just as much investment per student, as classroom learning. There are no simple economies of scale. So not surprisingly, the institutions leading the way in effective online learning are in fact the traditional universities, and they have, if anything, gained strength from the process, not the reverse. In my own university, these new courses of study generate profits that help to support, yes, traditional forms of graduate education.

As for the argumentum ad Duns Scotus, there are two responses. First, it is absurd to think of academic overspecialization as a peculiarly modern disease, and to conjure up some lost scholarly golden age in which every professor wrote articles of broad sweep and import. The quickest glance through the back issues of any academic journal shows that scholarship has always tended, for better or worse, to advance in slow, methodical increments. Is writing about Duns Scotus's use of citations any worse than writing about the exact placement of a particular regiment at the battle of Fontenoy, or the precise language of a particular medieval capitulary, or any of the other subjects that obsessed earlier generations of scholars? What matter are the overall projects and contexts that a particular piece of scholarship contributes to. Maybe we don't really need to learn more about this particular thinker's use of citations--but perhaps the study will contribute to a larger point about how modern forms of scholarship, verification, and knowledge itself developed, and that would not be so trivial. The historian Anthony Grafton once published a history of the footnote, and a grand (and entertaining) piece of scholarship it was.

It is always easy to take scholarship out of context and mock it as trivial and irrelevant. We could mock Mark Taylor himself just as easily. Here, for instance, is a sentence taken out of context from his book Journeys to Selfhood: "While the interpretation of the discontinuous moment represents an account of the fullness-of-time alternative to Hegel's pregnant present, and the insistence on the irreducibility of the Absolute Paradox is directed against Hegel's implicitly rational Mediator, Kierkegaard develops the notion of contemporaneity to correct what he regards as problematic implications of the Hegelian sociocultural and philosophical mediation of the God-Man's positivity." While certainly ripe for parody, to mock this passage for its obscurity is actually a philistine and ignorant gesture, no better than mocking expressionist painters for their dribs and drabs of paint. Taylor is a serious scholar, whose language here suits the serious philosophical purpose of his book. Perhaps his young Duns Scotus-studying colleague is a serious scholar as well, who doesn't deserve mockery on the op-ed page of The New York Times.

American universities obviously face serious challenges--all the more since the recession began. But to collapse all of those challenges into one single, facile analogy to Detroit does no one any good, except the yahoos on the right who delight in dismissing academia not simply as trivial and obsolescent, but as morally corrupting and unpatriotic. These critics would love not simply to restructure the humanities, but get rid of them altogether. Let's not make their work easier for them.


David A. Bell is a professor at Johns Hopkins University, where he is dean of faculty, and a contributing editor at The New Republic.

As noted in my previous post, Fors Clavigera makes some similar criticisms.

By the way, if you have ever read a late antique or medieval text, citation is extraordinarily important; in fact, it is where most of the creativity lies--if you were presenting a new idea and something insightful, you almost had to bury it in the notes (in fact, it is one of the easiest ways to escape censure other than pseudonymity, the latter on which I believe Taylor wrote his own dissertation). The same holds true for the Enlightenment philosophes: read a section of Diderot's encyclopedia; the footnotes and cross-references are golden, scathing, and hilarious, while the main text is banal. Perhaps, therefore, the newest "zone of interest" (to borrow Taylor's idea) should be on footnotes and citation methods.

"Those Ignorant Atheists"

An article at Salon reviews a new book by Terry Eagleton, in which he throws down with "Ditchkin" (Dawkins and Hitchens), claiming that atheism has gone downhill since the good old days of Nietsche.

April 28, 2009 | Here is how British literary critic Terry Eagleton begins his brisk, funny and challenging new book: "Religion has wrought untold misery in human affairs. For the most part, it has been a squalid tale of bigotry, superstition, wishful thinking, and oppressive ideology." That's quite a start, especially when you consider that the point of Eagleton's "Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate" -- adapted from a series of lectures he delivered at Yale in April 2008 -- is to defend the theory and practice of religion against its most ardent contemporary critics.

But Eagleton, a professor of English literature and cultural theory who divides his time between the University of Lancaster and the National University of Ireland, is determined not to commit the same elementary errors he ascribes to such foes as biologist Richard Dawkins and political journalist Christopher Hitchens. (Those two, collectively dubbed "Ditchkins" by Eagleton, are the self-appointed leaders of public atheism and the authors of bestselling books on the subject, Dawkins' "The God Delusion" and Hitchens' "God Is Not Great.") Atheists of the Ditchkins persuasion have raised valid points about the sordid social and political history of religion, with which Eagleton largely agrees. Yet their arguments are fatally undermined by their own unacknowledged dogmas and doctrines, he goes on to say, and they completely fail to understand Christian faith (or any other kind) except in its stupidest and most literal-minded form.

A few years ago, I read an article by a Roman Catholic theologian who wryly observed that the quality of Western atheism had gone steadily downhill since Nietzsche. Eagleton heartily concurs. He freely admits that what Christian doctrine teaches about the universe and the fate of man may not be true, or even plausible. But as he then puts it, "Critics of the most enduring form of popular culture in human history have a moral obligation to confront that case at its most persuasive, rather than grabbing themselves a victory on the cheap by savaging it as so much garbage and gobbledygook."

As Eagleton ultimately admits, the discount-store atheism of Dawkins and Hitchens is something of a useful straw man, and his real differences with them are, in the main, not theological but political. Still, attacking them in broad and often hilarious strokes -- he depicts Dawkins as a tweedy, cloistered Oxford don sneering at the credulous nature of the common people, and Hitchens as a bootlicking neocon propagandist and secular jihadist -- lends his book considerable entertainment value. More importantly, it also allows him to develop an extended interpretive summary of what he describes as mainstream Christian doctrine, a subject about which (as he repeatedly reminds us) the Ditchkins duo, along with the Western intellectual elite in general, knows almost nothing.

"bootlicking neocon propagandist and secular jihadist"--that's gold!Biologist Stephen

Jay Gould's famous pronouncement that science and religion were "non-overlapping Magisteria" has sometimes been viewed as a cop-out, or as a polite attempt to say that the former is real and the latter imaginary. Whatever Gould's intentions, Eagleton agrees wholeheartedly, and finds this view entirely consonant with Christian theology. Dawkins is making an error of category, he says, in seeing Christian belief as a counter-scientific theory about the creation of the universe. That's like saying that novels are botched and hopelessly unscientific works of sociology, so there's no point in reading Proust.

Christian theology cannot explain the workings of the universe and was never meant to, Eagleton says. Aquinas, like most religious thinkers that came after him, was happy to encompass all sorts of theories about the creation, including the possibility that the universe was infinite and had always existed. Indeed, Aquinas would concur with Dawkins' view that religious faith is irrelevant to scientific inquiry. But there are questions science cannot properly ask, let alone answer, questions about "why there is anything in the first place, or why what we do have is actually intelligible to us." That is where theology begins.

If you haven't read Proust, just fill in your favorite classic author. I found his depiction of U.S. religiosity particularly interesting:

Among the many extraordinary positions Eagleton takes in this book, perhaps nothing is more startling than the highly original claim that the United States of America is not religious enough. All right, I am paraphrasing -- what he actually says is that our nation's nauseating, wall-to-wall public piety is strictly pro forma. It's a kind of ideological window dressing for a social and economic system based on the ruthless exploitation of human beings and natural resources, which is about as far from the teachings of that radical Jewish carpenter from Nazareth as you can possibly get.

In one of Eagleton's most ingenious turns of phrase, he describes contemporary Christian fundamentalists as faithless, because they specifically lack the kind of performative faith mentioned above. Philosopher Slavoj Zizek has described fundamentalism as a species of neurosis, in which a person keeps demanding proof that he is loved and never finds it sufficient. In trying to shoehorn anti-scientific hokum into schoolbooks, or wasting money and time on a "creationist science" that strives to prove that the Grand Canyon is less than 6,000 years old and that Noah, for reasons unknown, kicked T. rex off the ark, fundamentalists have become the mirror image of atheists. Unsatisfied with the transcendent and unknowable nature of the Almighty, they've stuffed and jammed him into a dinosaur diorama.

This is what I have been saying for a while now: militant atheists of the "Ditchkins" variety and fundamentalist christians are merely mirror images of one another. They both read the Bible in a the same, literalist manner, and perform what I tend to call genre misrecognition--most poetry, for example, about the nature is NOT actually scientifically sound, but it was never meant to be. Same with Genesis 1. It is a liturgy; it is a poem.

Now, the kicker: everyone has faith in something, even, shall I say, scientists have to make "assumptions" about the universe and demonstrate a certain degree of faith. But that is nothing compared to the progressivist view of history, often viewed today as naive, demonstrated by "Ditchkins":

Much of the anti-religious fervor of the Ditchkins school, Eagleton says, derives from a high-Victorian idealism, in which humankind rides the upward-bound escalator of progress and civilization, held back only by the forces of unreason and irrationality. Its adherents see an absolute dichotomy between faith and reason, one that lacks any rigorous philosophical underpinning or an understanding of the inescapable relationship between the two. Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Fichte have all observed in different ways that unspoken assumptions about the world around us (that is, faith) are the precondition of all knowledge in the first place. As for the Enlightenment narrative of steady upward progress from superstition to reason, Eagleton is certainly not arguing that the first is superior to the second. He is suggesting, rather, that the escalator can go up and down at the same time.

What the rationalist myth sees in the modern age are the tremendous advances made in curing disease and in increasing agricultural yield, which neither believer nor atheist wants to do without. It views Zyklon-B and the hydrogen bomb as momentary setbacks, if it notices them at all, and it generally avoids comment about the contradictory and confused economic system our allegedly liberal-humanist age has produced. It's a system, as Eagleton sees it, that pretends to be entirely logical but produces a cruel and irrational result: the poor made poorer and the rich much richer. And what are the greenhouse effect and the melting of the glaciers, if not artifacts of the Enlightenment?

We were sent a man who preached a message of love and we killed him; we were given a beautiful blue-green planet to live on and we killed it. What do we do now?

Heavenly Liturgies: Apocalpyse of Abraham

For my chapter on the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, I am revisiting other texts that discuss, depict, or allude to heavenly hymns. Most apocalyptic texts refer to heavenly liturgies sung by heavenly, divine beings (most people call them "angels"), but very rarely tell us what these heavenly beings actually say. When they do report the content of such hymns, they tend to be highly indebted to, or in fact are verbatim quotations of Isaiah 6:1-4:

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.” The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the hose filled with smoke.

2 Enoch 21:1 (J) repeats this verbatim, but it is being sung by cherubim, seraphim, with six-winged and many-eyed creatures; these creatures’ features can also be found in the adaptation of the holy praises in Rev. 4:8: “And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all round and within, and day and night they never cease to sing, ‘Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come.’” This passage takes the basic angelic liturgy of the Isaiah excerpt, and combines some terminology from Ezekiel 1 (the “living creatures”) and perhaps gives a referent to the revelation of God’s name in Exodus 3:14: the was, is, and coming one perhaps referring to the LXX translation of “he who is.”

By contrast, the Similitudes of Enoch provide a more unique, but just as brief, window into heavenly speech:

And him, the First Word, they shall bless extol, and glorify with wisdom. They shall be wise in utterance in the spirit of life and in the Lord of the Spirits. He placed the Elect One on the throne of glory; and he shall judge all the works of the holy ones in heaven above, weighing in the balance their deeds. And when he shall lift up his countenance in order to judge the secret ways of theirs, by the word of the name of the Lord of the Spirits, then they shall all speak with one voice, blessing, glorifying, extolling, sanctifying the name of the Lord of the Spirits. And he will summon all the forces of the heavens, and all the holy ones above, and the forces of the Lord—the cherubim, seraphim, ophanim, all the angels of governance, the Elect One, and the other forces on the earth (and) over the water. On that day, they shall lift up in one voice, blessing, glorifying, and extolling in the spirit of faith, in the spirit of wisdom and patience, in the spirit of mercy, in the spirit of justice and peace, and in the spirit of generosity. They shall all say in one voice, “Blessed (is he) and may the name of the Lord of the Spirits be blessed forever and evermore.” All the vigilant ones in heaven shall bless him; all the holy ones who are in heaven shall bless him…. (1 Enoch 61:7-12; trans. F.I. Andersen; OTP)

The text continues in the same manner. This, in fact, sounds much like the compilation of praises found in the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, except that it is set as an eschatological future event. The temporal dimension is extraordinarily important, as is the mentioning of an enthroned elect one, which sounds much like a Christian intervention—although, in fact, in the Songs themselves, there is a highly exalted divine being, seemingly second to God, who occupies his own tabernacle; this figure may be Melchizedek (a suggestion tentatively put forward by Jim Davila), although the text is too fragmentary for any sure conclusions, the same figure who in 11Q13 is the eschatological judge. For the Songs, the temporal dimension is also extraordinarily important, but it is not eschatological; it is the Sabbath: the sabbath is the most holy time, and it is when one can evoke the most holy, heavenly sanctuary. In fact, perhaps they also resonate with the Berakhot from Qumran.

All of this, however, is to lead up to a hymn that I actually cannot do much with in terms of my dissertation, but I find interesting nonetheless, from the Apocalypse of Abraham 17:8-21:

Eternal One, Mighty One, Holy El, God autocrat
self-originate, incorruptible, immaculate,
unbegotten, spotless, immortal,
self-protected, self-devised,
without mother, without father, ungenerated,
exalted, fiery,
just, lover of men, benevolent, compassionate, bountiful,
jealous over me, patient one, most merciful.
Eli, eternal, mighty one, holy, Sabaoth,
most glorious El, El, El, El, Iaoel,
you are he my soul has loved, my protector.
Eternal, fiery, shining,
light-giving, thunder-voiced, lightning-visioned, many-eyed,
receiving the petitions of those who honor you
and turning away from the petitions of those who restrain you
by the restraint of their provocations,
redeemer of those who dwell in the midst of the wicked ones,
of those who are dispersed among the just of the world,
in the corruptible age.
Showing forth the age of the just,
you make the light shine
before the morning light upon your creation
from your face
to spend the day on the earth,
and in your heavenly dwelling place
(there is) an inexhaustible light of the invincible dawning
from the light of your face.
Accept my prayer and delight in it,
and (accept) also teh sacrifice which you yourself made
to yourself through me as I searched for you.
Receive me favorably,
teach me, show me, and make known to your servant what you have promised me.
(trans. R. Rubinkiewicz; OTP)

I include this in the discussion of heavenly liturgies because Abraham (being guided around the various firmaments) recites this along with his angelic guide, "And the angel knelt down with me and worshiped" (17:2). The conjoining of human and heavenly worship is not unique to this text: it is suggested already in Jubilees in which Sabbath observance is the response of the angels to God's creation; in turn, they teach this practice to humans. Jubilees 2:17-33 highly emphasizes that humans worshiping God on the Sabbath are doing so in conjunction, together with the angels in heaven. It is as if Jubilees provides an etiology for the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice themselves.

Nonetheless, this hymned prayer stands out from so many others because of its length--it is far longer than the praises found in the other apocalyptic texts, which just tend to riff on the trishagion or qedushah or "three holies" from Isaiah 6. This text looks like it stands somewhere between the later Nag Hammadi texts, particularly at the beginning with all the self-originate language (something that sounds like a lot of the "Sethian" texts, such as the Three Steles of Seth), slowly merging with a good old fashioned Psalm. Is this an Egyptian text? Does it stand somewhere between older Jewish (mixed with Christian) interests and emergent Sethian liturgies? I wonder. This is part of the reason I find this hymn so interesting, although it ended up having little bearing on my current research (it will get a footnote, so don't worry). Just some proof that those studying good Nag Hammadi texts cannot operate in a vacuum, but must consider a wide range of ancient literature, even the admitted messy "pseudepigrapha" with their tortuous transmission histories.

Atheists Coming out of the Closet...So to Speak

The NYTimes has an article on the rise of atheist organizations throughout the U.S.

In keeping with the new generation of atheist evangelists, the Pastafarian leaders say that their goal is not confrontation, or even winning converts, but changing the public’s stereotype of atheists. A favorite Pastafarian activity is to gather at a busy crossroads on campus with a sign offering “Free Hugs” from “Your Friendly Neighborhood Atheist.”

For those in the dark, a "pastafarian" refers to the parodic followers of the flying spaghetti monster: may you, too, be touched by his noodly appendage. I think the name of "atheist evangelists" is quite interesting...quite telling of the orientation of some of the groups. Do click on the hyperlink above: the article shows a rich variety of non-belief.

The End of the University as We Know It

The chair of my department, Mark Taylor, just contributed the following article for the NYTimes about the state of graduate education and the university as a whole and his suggestions for the future (some are radical, others are more easily implemented):

April 27, 2009
OP-CONTRIBUTOR
End the University as We Know It

By MARK C. TAYLOR
GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

Widespread hiring freezes and layoffs have brought these problems into sharp relief now. But our graduate system has been in crisis for decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation of modern universities. Kant, in his 1798 work “The Conflict of the Faculties,” wrote that universities should “handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.”

Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.

The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these students having futures as full professors.

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.

In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.

The other obstacle to change is that colleges and universities are self-regulating or, in academic parlance, governed by peer review. While trustees and administrations theoretically have some oversight responsibility, in practice, departments operate independently. To complicate matters further, once a faculty member has been granted tenure he is functionally autonomous. Many academics who cry out for the regulation of financial markets vehemently oppose it in their own departments.

If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured. The long process to make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative can begin with six major steps:

1. Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs. The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex adaptive network. Responsible teaching and scholarship must become cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural.

Just a few weeks ago, I attended a meeting of political scientists who had gathered to discuss why international relations theory had never considered the role of religion in society. Given the state of the world today, this is a significant oversight. There can be no adequate understanding of the most important issues we face when disciplines are cloistered from one another and operate on their own premises.

It would be far more effective to bring together people working on questions of religion, politics, history, economics, anthropology, sociology, literature, art, religion and philosophy to engage in comparative analysis of common problems. As the curriculum is restructured, fields of inquiry and methods of investigation will be transformed.

2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties as well as serious political and economic challenges. These vexing practical problems cannot be adequately addressed without also considering important philosophical, religious and ethical issues. After all, beliefs shape practices as much as practices shape beliefs.

A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture. Through the intersection of multiple perspectives and approaches, new theoretical insights will develop and unexpected practical solutions will emerge.

3. Increase collaboration among institutions. All institutions do not need to do all things and technology makes it possible for schools to form partnerships to share students and faculty. Institutions will be able to expand while contracting. Let one college have a strong department in French, for example, and the other a strong department in German; through teleconferencing and the Internet both subjects can be taught at both places with half the staff. With these tools, I have already team-taught semester-long seminars in real time at the Universities of Helsinki and Melbourne.

4. Transform the traditional dissertation. In the arts and humanities, where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text. As financial pressures on university presses continue to mount, publication of dissertations, and with it scholarly certification, is almost impossible. (The average university press print run of a dissertation that has been converted into a book is less than 500, and sales are usually considerably lower.) For many years, I have taught undergraduate courses in which students do not write traditional papers but develop analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games. Graduate students should likewise be encouraged to produce “theses” in alternative formats.

5. Expand the range of professional options for graduate students. Most graduate students will never hold the kind of job for which they are being trained. It is, therefore, necessary to help them prepare for work in fields other than higher education. The exposure to new approaches and different cultures and the consideration of real-life issues will prepare students for jobs at businesses and nonprofit organizations. Moreover, the knowledge and skills they will cultivate in the new universities will enable them to adapt to a constantly changing world.

6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure. Initially intended to protect academic freedom, tenure has resulted in institutions with little turnover and professors impervious to change. After all, once tenure has been granted, there is no leverage to encourage a professor to continue to develop professionally or to require him or her to assume responsibilities like administration and student advising. Tenure should be replaced with seven-year contracts, which, like the programs in which faculty teach, can be terminated or renewed. This policy would enable colleges and universities to reward researchers, scholars and teachers who continue to evolve and remain productive while also making room for young people with new ideas and skills.

For many years, I have told students, “Do not do what I do; rather, take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it.” My hope is that colleges and universities will be shaken out of their complacency and will open academia to a future we cannot conceive.

Mark C. Taylor, the chairman of the religion department at Columbia, is the author of the forthcoming “Field Notes From Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living.”

I had not realized what his current research was on...living and dying...huh. He has implemented the "zones of inquiry" already in my department, to bring people from different subfields together on issues such as sacred space, blood, etc., creating reading lists to begin with on how these issues have been dealt theoretically and important works in different religious specializations. I think this makes sense for a religion department especially, and since religion departments are multidisciplinary in themselves it could provide an interesting testing ground for broader implementation in the university.

I do wonder, however, if his proposal of specialization among specific universities--having one be stronger in French, another in German--stands at cross-purposes of his problem with specialization within universities? Nonetheless, I agree that communication between universities (and between departments, programs, or even the "zones of inquiry") needs improvement.

Overall, I think he is right that something needs to change in higher education, whether it includes these proposals or we take whatever he suggests, do with it what he could never imagine, and then tell him about it.

UPDATE: The last I checked, Mark Taylor's article has generated 344 responses, and the editor is not taking any more. Not surprising that such provocative proposals would elicit such a wave.

In addition, see the response by James K.A. Smith at Fors Clavigera.

Freedom of Forbidden Fruit

They wondered why the fruit had been forbidden:
It taught them nothing new. They hid their pride,
But did not listen much when they were chidden:
They knew exactly what to do outside.

They left. Immediately the memory faded
Of all they'd known: they could not understand
The dogs now who before had always aided;
The stream was dumb with whom they'd always planned.

They wept and quarrelled: freedom was so wild.
In front maturity as he ascended
Retired like a horizon from the child,

The dangers and the punishments grew greater,
And the way back by angels was defended
Against the poet and the legislator.

(W.H. Auden, Sonnets from China II)

But Who's the Tyrant?

Epitaph on a Tyrant

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
(W.H. Auden)

My mind automatically wanders to ancient Rome: to Augustus whose pax was really a pacification; to Caligula (but not much a poet); to Nero, who played the part of the poet. Or is it a combination of all of them? A meta-tyrant? It is quite interesting how many dictators are writers: Julius Caesar has his Gallic Wars; Augustus has the Res Gestae; Mand arcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations--that actually would be a good fit for the description. Of course, looking to Auden's own context, Hitler had Mein Kampf; and, for those who didn't know, evidently Saddam Hussein wrote pseudonymous novels, such as Zabibah and the King. Literature written by dictators is now called "dic lit." This little poem captures all of these figures.

Ovidian Odyssey, Odyssean Ovid

Instead
of the warlord from Ithaca our educated poets
should write about my misadventures: I've undergone
worse troubles than he did. He wandered for years--but only
on the short haul between Ithaca and Troy;
thrust to the Getic shore by Caesar's wrath, I've traversed
seas lying beneath unknown stars,
whole constellations distant. He had his loyal companions,
his faithful crew: my comrades deserted me
at the time of my banishment. Hew as making for his homeland,
a cheerful victor: I was driven from mine--
fugitive, exile, victim. My home was not some Greek island,
Ithaca, Samos--to leave them is no great loss--
but the City that from its seven hills scans the world's orbit,
Rome, centre of empire, seat of the gods.
He was physically tough, with great stamina, long-enduring;
my strength is slight, a gentle man's. He spent
a lifetime under arms, engaged in savage warfare--
I'm accustomed to quieter pursuits.
I was crushed by a god, with no help in my troubles:
he had that warrior-goddess by his side.
And just as Jove outranks the god of the rough ocean,
so he suffered Neptune's anger, I bear Jove's.
What's more, the bulk of his troubles are fictitious,
whereas mine remain anything but myth!
Finally, he got back to the home of his questing, recovered
the acres he'd sought so long; but I,
unless the injured deity's wrath diminish, am sundered
for everlasting from my native soil!
(Ovid, Tristia 1.5.56-84; trans. Green)

Sing, Muse, of the man of many metamorphoses...

Ovid's Tearful (Tristia) Transformation (Metamorphoses)

Ovid, famous in his own day for his Art of Love, but today for his Metamorphoses (Transformations), reflects on his Metamorphoses in his tearful Tristia (Lamentations), which were written after he was banished from Rome, exiled to the Black Sea:

There are also fifteen books of Metamorphoses, worksheets
lately saved from my exequies:
To them I bid you say that the new face of my fortunes
may now be reckoned one more
among their bodily changes: by sudden transformation
what was joyful once is made fit matter for tears.
(Ovid, Tristia, I.1.117-22; trans. Peter Green)

There is a certain painful, sad commentary here. At the end of his Metamorphoses, Ovid basically says that he (and his book--he equates them) is the only thing that will endure, not change. His exile, his separation from all his friends, from his homeland, changes him physically, psychologically, and emotionally, transforming his joy into tears. His persona in the Metamorphoses has, itself, transformed through dislocation.

Amazon.com Reports Better-than-Expected Earnings

I would like to think that I have had a hand in helping here.