Travelogue, Sun-Date 2/2/10 C.E.

It has been over a month since the new year (and new decade) started and I have yet to throw in my two cents on this blog. Shameful of me, this is. I am sorry. (It's not like you missed me, though. Right?) Now, with my sincerest apologies having been offered to you up front, I wish to make a few statements addressing this issue.

First of all, I hate blogging. I love writing, even though I do not do it as frequently as I should, but I do not like, maybe hate, perhaps even loathe blogging. Blogging, to me, is an entirely different beast than journalism or academic writing or creative writing. In fact, the semi-serious style of blogging that takes place here, and the pseudonymous nature of our (the three authors') identities, simply stinks like a passive-aggressive way to make one's voice to be heard. "Hey, look at me! I've got something pretty cool to say about this stuff, but I don't want to say anything too revealing about my intellectual position for fear of future academic and professional repercussions. ... But, just in case I do let my guard down and let something slip, then you probably won't be able to trace it back to me without some difficulty because of the 'fail-safes' that I've/we've put into place. Na-na-na-na-naaaaaa-na, Ha-ha-ha-ha-haaaaaa-ha." [That last part was spoken in my best Eric Cartman voice.] But, really, I'm not sold on my critique of all of this, primarily because I haven't given it too much thought. I'm thinking and writing impulsively this morning. In short, I'm letting my guard down for a short bit and letting things "slip."

Another reason why I have been reluctant to write here, one which is undoubtedly tied in to the first point, is that I am reading/studying for my PhD qualifying exams while simultaneously working on two papers and my dissertation prospectus. In general, I am generally feeling as if I am simply not cut out for this gig. I know, I know. This is an existential crisis that has been experienced and played out in the minds of many others and that has been expressed in many, many different places and forms (blogs, books, articles, movies, songs, etc.). I guess that now is simply my time to go through this. I am very reluctant, however, to have this blog be one of the primary places that I play out the already exhausted existential drama of a young scholar feeling "unfit for duty." It would probably end up sounding like a terrible cover of an old classic blues song.

In case you haven't noticed, my real reason for not liking the act of blogging is my existential subservience to a particular mindset - an ontological reality, if you will - that is as problematic as it is powerful: Fear. My fear, as should be clear thus far, is centered upon and constantly orbiting around Failure. I weave these webs of self-fulfilling prophecies using a thread of self-stifling thought that I eventually just throw myself into. (It may feel as if I am being thrown into it but, in reality, I just hurl myself into my pretty web. It is, after all, my imaginary kingdom.) And as I hang there, caught in my own web of weighty being, I can do nothing more than consume my own negative bulls--t, getting more and more "stuck" as time goes by, hoping and dreaming that someone will arrive to cut the threads and set me free. (Wow... When did I become so jaded?)

But it's not that easy. Others cannot simply arrive by my side and just cut me loose, pat me on the shoulder and say "Now go on your way, good sir. And next time, be careful when you weave your web." Well, on second thought, I guess that there are times when others can step in and help me out when I get stuck, and it definitely feels like an easy out when it happens. But I believe that the easiest way to break free from the "stuckness" that I think myself into is also the hardest: I need to think my way out of it. Those webs are woven by a thread that is borne from my thoughts, from my creative imagination. Maybe, then, I simply need to fine-tune my thoughts in order to catch something other than myself in my lovely existential web of consciousness. Maybe I need to form and reform my thoughts, to express them in such a way so as to free me from the fear of failure that blocks me along my academic and professional path. Maybe in the end, this blog, this thing, this at once seemingly unreal yet hyper-real place that I detest, is not as bad as I make it out to be. Maybe this is one of the places in which I will find my freedom from my fear of failure. Maybe the act of blogging will help me get over that fear and unglue myself from... myself. Maybe, just maybe, I'll find salvation here. (Did I mention that I also am driven and characterized by a penchant for oscillating between extremes?)

There are a few things that have crossed my radar over the past month or two about which I may share my thoughts with you in the near future. These include (in no particular order): a conversation that I had about Tiger Woods (among other things) with a very cool guy on a flight from LAX to NYC in mid-December; the movie Avatar and S. Brent Plate's recent blog about it for Religion Dispatches; Georges Bataille and the hope for integrating consumption theory in the study of religion; Bataille, Roger Caillois, and Paul Ricoeur as the proper philosophical companions to cognitive and neuroscientific approaches to religion and consciousness; and, to name perhaps my biggest fetish from this past summer, Alan Moore and the metaphysical reworking of American comics and literature in particular, and, by association, film. (Screw you, Hollywood - and by "screw you" I may actually mean "thank you," especially for giving me the opportunity to say "screw you.") For now, let me just say "Thanks" for taking a stroll through the mindscape of a tumultuously confused graduate student, and "I'm sorry" if I just wasted your time. Until next time./?/!

Terrible Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Writing

If I were a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad writer I would have included a footnote in my title that would allow you to find your way here, and then I would have added a footnote to the footnote to let you know that I thought of the book mentioned in the first footnote due to my just having read the dissertation that you can find here. Alas, I don't know how to use footnotes in blog format and apart from that terrible, horrible, no good, very bad opening sentence, I don't consider myself a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad writer. (Okay, aside from that first sentence and a series of stories I wrote at the age of seven about a huge blue monster named Lore that treated my home state of West Virginia as Godzilla did Tokyo.) Therefore, you will find absolutely no footnotes anywhere in this blog entry.

If you find yourself saddened by the lack of footnotes here, though, you can find all the footnotes you could ever want in the book chapter entitled "The Profanity of Law" by Nomi Stolzenberg, contained in the book Law and the Sacred edited by Sarat, Douglas and Umphrey. In a 45-page chapter (and these are fairly small pages, mind you), you will find 155 footnotes. That's almost four footnotes per very small page. Couple this with the fact that Nomi Stolzenberg seems afflicted with the academic curse of writing terrible, horrible very long sentences, and you get an average of one footnote for every other sentence. Stolzenberg also manages to string together half a dozen footnoted sentences in a row in several places. If I wrote like Nomi, the first sentence of this paragraph would have been footnoted (instead of including my source in the text, which I prefer), followed by footnotes at the end of every other sentence in this paragraph that you would then flip through several pages to look-up only to find "Ibid" written over and over again.

What futher boggles my mind is that the footnotes take up an additional fifteen pages at the end of the chapter. That's a full third of the number of pages that make up the chapter itself. Keeping in mind that the font used for the footnote pages is a good deal smaller than the font used for the regular pages, and it's not unreasonable to think that 50% of all the material of the chapter is contained in the footnotes. While I abhor plagiarism as much as the next guy, something is definitely wrong with this picture. Somewhere along the way, academic writing became an exercise in sourcing ourselves to death.

Stolzenberg is afflicted with an additional academic writing curse--the curse of the neverending disclaimer. The first five pages of the 45-page chapter (1/9 of the text, for those frightened by math) could best be described as a disclaimer that states all the things that the chapter is not. If a student turned in a paper with such a rambling, convoluted introduction about what her paper was not, I would hand it back and say "Write me a solid paragraph with a bold thesis statement and that outlines how you will argue for that thesis." I wish the above mentioned editors had done the same here.

Instead, some very bad academic must have told her she had to include all the standard academic disclaimer cliches that it won'e make any "naive attempt" to take on some "impossible task" of actually saying something that might be open to the charge of "resting on false universalizations and overgeneralizations" and of course that any claims made rest on categories that "never really existed" because it's all "amorphous, heterogeneous and discontinuous" and that any conclusions made within should be treated as tentative at best and don't make any claim to be a statement of anything true or important but are merely offered up for you to ponder what they might mean although I promise they don't really mean anything.

Perhaps I am picking on Stolzenberg unfairly. I could have picked pretty much any of the other authors in the book as well, but unfortunately, after reading 45-pages of words that don't really attempt the impossible and hopelessly naive task of "making a point," I must confess I was less than enthused about reading the rest of the material as closely. I did manage to skim most of a later chapter that was afflicted with yet another academic curse (at least in Religious Studies and some related humanities departments), the curse of taking Freud seriously and trying to advance his disproved psychoanalytic project.

I'm not going to give you any disclaimers or advance a tentative non-conclusion. The kind of writing that I've described here is just plain bad. No one should write that way for any reason. No one should take such writing seriously, nor should anyone assign such writing as required reading for others. Anyone who is written six footnoted sentences in a row should immediately stop, delete three of them, and say something that is your own idea! Furthermore, if something is your own idea, you should not feel compelled to search all the books ever written to see if someone else somewhere has also had the idea and then give them credit for the idea you had all on your own. Don't be afraid to make bold arguments, and don't apologize for doing so. If information is vitally important, include it in the body of your text. Otherwise, don't make me flip back and forth every other sentence to read something in a tiny font.

But one can't hold the writers entirely responsible. I also advance without apology the argument that readers need to get a life and not jump all over someone who doesn't cite every source that they personally have ever read. Academics often act like junior high students trying to prove how "cool" they are for having read everything written since Homer. "OMG! She so did not mention that Obscuro of Hoocaria once had an idea very similar to that in the forgoteenth century as documented in the journal article by Nobig Dealy published in the Totally Unreadable Journal of Academic Minutiae! OMG! OMG! OMG! We are so not hanging out with her at the next conference!"

Don't be that guy. Don't write like that. And don't ask me for any footnotes.

Right Questions, Left Answers

While I have officially lived in southern California for more than four years now, it's always quite a change coming back to UCSB after a long break at home. Right now it's absolutely amazing to me that I'm able to type this entry while sitting outside under a tree in January. I'm not even wearing a jacket, and my new netbook (thanks, Santa!) is in no danger of being damaged by wind, rain, sleet or snow.

This blog entry has little, if anything to do with the weather however. Instead, I want to focus on some thoughts I've been having as a result of my long train ride home and back again. I've been writing a series about the train ride on another blogging site, DailyKos, and I'd hope that if you find this one interesting you might take a gander at what I've written over there. But I chose to write this entry for America's Gods because 1) it in some ways continues the train of thought (pun intended) I began in my previous entry here, and 2) because fatedplace suggested I write a "welcome back" blog entry.

I've been having a thought that goes something like this: I feel like the "religious right" has the right questions but the wrong answers, and that the "secular left" has the right answers but the wrong questions. Now, before you quickly tear apart that last statement for its over-generalization, vagueness, indeterminacy, over-simplification, absurdity and outright falsity, let me try and explain a bit more clearly (though perhaps no less falsely) what I mean by way of a story.

Just before I began writing this entry, I was sitting here finishing up my lunch at The Arbor in the heart of the UCSB campus. I was reflecting on one of the things that I think I learned on my train ride—that in the modern world we have far too few honest, thoughtful and long conversations with other people, especially people we tend to disagree with on important topics. And it was at that moment that two young men approached me and asked if I'd be willing to participate in a "survey" of sorts and have a discussion for five or ten minutes on the topic of spirituality and religion.

I'm a fairly shy person, and I almost declined based on that alone. I was also pretty sure that they were committed evangelical Christians who would at some point move the "survey" into an opportunity to talk to me about the saving power of Jesus Christ. It turns out I was right about that, but I'm still glad that I didn't send them away.

These young men were respectful, thoughtful and genuinely open to hearing what I had to say. They began with a fairly standard, "What do you think is the biggest problem in the world?" which I was sure would move on to a "What do you think the answer is?" and segueing into why they felt their religion held the real answer. I was mostly right about that as well. But I'm still glad that I didn't send them away.

The reason that I didn't send them away was that my train ride has led me to conclude that one of the biggest problems in the world today is that we don't have deep conversations. We especially don't have them with people who think radically differently than we do. We not only listen to thirty-second sound bytes about the world, we tend to hear them only from our own cable news networks and websites of choice. The train never lets you get away with that. There's no cable, no internet, and you don't get to decide whether the person sitting next to you in the dining car or in your seat is of the same political or religious persuasion as you. And it sems that almost every year on the train, I have at least one great, long, in depth conversation with someone that on the surface, at least, disagrees with me on virtually every major issue of the day.

So instead of sending them away, I gestured for them to sit down and stay as long as they wanted. I answered their questions as honestly as I could, speaking truthfully about what I personally believe (or doubt). I fought back any hesitancy I had about sharing too much with undergraduate students about a topic that I still have to teach. I wasn't in the classroom and I wasn't representing the opinions of UCSB, the federal government or anyone else. I was just talking to two young men who wanted to talk about religion. Real religion. Lived religion. Not religion from some neutral, academic standoffish academic standpoint. Religion as it pertains to you and me and the two of them and every human being who has ever looked up at a starry sky and wondered if there was a "something more" to life. This was just the kind of conversation I was talking about having in my previous entry, when I lamented the fact that being in religious studies
sometimes felt like being forced to cut myself off from my own spiritual life.

They didn't try to convert me and they didn't warn me that I was going to hell. They did state their own personal conviction that Jesus Christ was something quite more than just a human being and that whether this is "true" or not really does matter—even if they're wrong. I asked them to share the "results" of their "survey" on what they took the spiritual pulse of the UCSB campus to be. Their answer wasn't very surprising. While they've met many different people of many diverse faiths, the most common thing they find is that most college students don't think much about spiritual questions at all. Most college students, and I would say most adults these days, spend little time thinking about religious, philosophical or moral questions. Life for many students at UCSB is just one big party at night and one big bureaucratic nightmare to navigate during the day. Many never question the purpose or meaning of any of this at all. And
that's why I'm glad I didn't send those young men away.

At the very least, they're wrestling with these issues. They're asking other people to think about them, too. They're listening to the thoughts other people do have on the matter, and they are sharing their own religious faith in a way that I can admire even if I don't share their understanding of Christianity. And in my opinion, they are place importance on the right kinds of questions—What is the truth? What is the meaning of life? How should we live here on this Earth? What is moral to do and not to do?

These questions and their answers matter. They matter when it's time to create a state or federal budget. They matter when we must decide where to shop, where to work, where to live and how we live when we get there. You can't answer any questions on utilitarian grounds without first arriving at certain values that can be put into the equations. And I think that if we focus solely on material goods and physical comforts that we will quickly destroy the world that provides them.

Too many on the "secular left" ignore many of these questions. They tend to either focus on material utility and constantly wonder why working class and middle class people "vote against their own interests" in elections or adopt a very sophisticated post-modernist take that says it's all construction anyway and to each his own (though rarely being so tolerant in practice—there's often a strong hint of paternal "Oh those silly religious people who don't realize they've just constructed their own reality!"). They've given up on any kind of objective meaning that we might meaningfully attempt to seek out and discover. And this is the reason I never feel at home among them.

But there remains the fact that I don't share the answers of the "religious right" either. I think they're looking in the right places but they've found all the wrong solutions. Or at least most of them. And I can't understand how they continue to vote against "their own values" by supporting candidates who lead us into unnecessary wars and think of charity as a weakness.

In conclusion, let me say that I have not endeavored to either clearly define the terms like "secular left" and "religious right", nor have I tried to "adequately problematize" them in good academic fashion. I've used them as nebulous words used by so many others who don't really know what they mean and don't really know anyone who would fit squarely into either category. I'm trying to engage in discussion that matters to our larger culture, and I'm trying to find some common ground between groups that are increasingly living in separate worlds even when they are right next door.

I'm glad I didn't send those young men away because I reaffirmed my conviction that no person fits a stereotype. Fundamentalist Christians are just as capable of being thoughtful, decent, respectful and curious as well-educated academics are of being dogmatic, self-assured and unkind. And we'll never move forward on the very real political and religious and moral issues that impact us all if we never even sit down and ask each other the right questions.

Vacation is over

I took a distinct break after the term ended. Not only did I need a break, but I'm trying to gain momentum for a big push to check lots of things of my list starting in January. I've got to submit the second draft of my dissertation proposal--a major revision--and pass a language exam, study for my comprehensive exams, and submit a number of conference proposals to try to beef up my resume in anticipation of job conventions next fall.

Bloggery, as you will have guessed, was not high on my list as I prepare to do these things. I was otherwise occupied with snorkeling in a tropical destination, vacationing with the in-laws, renewing my passion for reading (which must be continually stoked in preparation for marathon reading sessions), buying presents and sending holiday postcards, making a vain attempt to clean my office space, taking over some duties on another totally non-academic blog, and making sure I take enough time to mentally prepare myself for the next three months.

Things have gone fairly well. My proposal for a regional conference was rejected, but my proposal for a national conference next fall was accepted. I missed two important deadlines in the last week while I was trying to grade papers, but I was invited to join a steering committee for a professional society. I haven't made much progress on my revision, but I have a clearer sense than before of what its needs and where I'm going. Most importantly, I've done some serious thinking about my career goals that may make a significant difference in what kinds of jobs I look for. I also managed to pare down 1,000 blog entries on Google Reader to a paltry 300 or so. I'll be making a John Fea style "best" of short-list, but more than a few deserve replies or links or rebuttals and so on.

Here's the "new year" plan, which coincidentally happens to be the "new decade" plan. Let's start big first:

Academic Plan:

1. I aim to be ABD by the end of March. 
2. I aim to have 2 chapters of my dissertation written by November 1. 
3. I aim to present at a minimum of 3 conferences by November 1. 
4. I aim to submit at least 2 book reviews by September 1. 
5. I am to have at least 1 article R & R by November 1 and another by January of 2011. 
   
6. I aim to finish my degree before the start of the 2011-2012 academic year. 
7. I aim to put my toes in the job pool in fall of 2010 with hopes of having a job for the academic year of 2011-2012.
8. I aim to apply for at least 2 major dissertation writing fellowships/grants in 2010. 
9. I aim to avoid trying to work full-time and finish my dissertation, despite accruing more debt. 
10. I aim to remember the mantra--good enough is good enough--unless it is my first book or major article we're talking about.
    

Bloggery Plans:

1. I want to blog about the job market for teaching positions (to solicit advice). 
2. I want to blog about the books I'm reading for my exams (to keep my on task).
3. I want to blog about syllabus creation (as a practical exercise). 
4. I want to blog about religion bloggery (because moderate self-promotion is a virtue).
5. I want to blog about technology in the classroom (because we need more of this). 
6. I want to blog about Obama's civil religion (because I dislike the petty use of civil religion).
7. I want to blog about the Monteral AAR (because I still have 15 pages of conference notes).
8. I want to blog about the dissertation proposal process (because I find it desolate and despairing).
9. I want to blog about my dissertation "stuff" (because writing is writing is writing is writing). 
10. I want to blog with more interviews and conversations (because a voice in the wilderness is not my style.)

That is all. See you in 2010. Please let it be a good one.

When Those Who Teach Can't Do

I know, I know. I messed up the old saying. But I did it on purpose. It's one thing to say that those who can't do, teach. And while it's derogatory and untrue and everything else, I've been thinking about the relationship between doing and teaching about over the past few weeks. While there is a huge difference in any field between doing and teaching, it seems that the difference is especially interesting when your field of study is Religious Studies. The field exists in no small part due to a kind of negative distinction made at its inception, that what whatever Religious Studies is, it is NOT theology. We don't do theology. We don't teach you how to be religious. We just teach about religion. So please, Supreme Court, let us teach about it in public universities while being funded by public money. And the Supreme Court saw that it was good.

I'm not sure, to be honest, that I have a coherent thesis about what this unique relationship between teaching and doing means for this particular field. But like I said, I've been pondering quite a bit because things just keep happening that almost force me to think about it. So let me share some of those events, conversations, thoughts, experiences and the like and say a little bit about the questions each event raised in my mind. Perhaps you can even share some of your own at the end. And perhaps you can help me figure out what I think I think about being in a field where I feel some compulsive need to tell people I'm not doing the thing I'm supposed to be an expert about.

First experience: I have a new roommate. He's in the Brynn School in a program that combines environmental science and economics with the goal of educating people for going "out there" in the "real world" to effect positive (and hopefully profitable) change. In that program, the teaching is most definitely geared at the doing. Many of the professors are not professional academics. Instead, many of the teachers and lecturers and guest presenters are business people, political appointees to environmental oversight departments, field researchers and the like. And the experience they have of actually applying their knowledge in the midst of real world institutions is considered invaluable. But in religious studies, wouldn't such a thing be unthinkable? Would you hire a retired bishop to come and teach the history of the Roman Catholic Church? Would you hire the administrator of a faith-based advocacy group to come and teach Religion and Politics? Would you hire an imam to teach Islamic theology? These are rhetorical questions for the most part, but as I think about them I can't help but wonder if our own field lacks something that other fields possess if they can actually turn to the experts at doing to come and teach. Does anyone else agree?

Second experience. I go to an Orthodox service for the first time in my life. I went because my girlfriend had a class assignment to observe a religious service from a religion that was not her own. I just tagged along, freed from having to be a professional student for once. I just wanted to have the experience. But the whole time I felt uncomfortable. I'm supposed to know all about rituals, and I even read up a bit on the Divine Liturgy before going, but I realized as I sat, or stood, (or sat again, or which one was it I'm supposed to be doing?) that I had no idea what was going on. I could tell you all about the schism of 1054 and the filioque clause and the importance of the Theotokos in Eastern Orthodox theology, but I knew nothing about being an Orthodox Christian. (Or very little, to give myself some credit and avoid hyperbole.) And I wondered: How does someone who doesn't participate in ritual, in worship, in the re-telling of myths and the life of a community ever hope to understand it well enough to teach about it?

Third experience: The rainbow. It's an experience that I almost dare not share. There's a part of me that thinks it's now forbidden to share it. But on a human level, it feels like one of the most important kinds of experiences there is. I saw a rainbow. That's not that amazing in and of itself. But I had just spent the previous day talking about how I felt completely empty spiritually. That I wished I had even an ounce of the kind of faith I often read about in the people I study (and maybe just an ounce, as a pound of faith can take you to really awful places). I felt convinced in the middle of my Philosophy class on Meta-ethics that the nihilists were right and that everything's just from a point of view and morality and love and everything else are just a delusion. And as I walked across the campus I prayed to a God I've rarely been sure is there. And I told him (or her) that she (or nothing at all) should give me a sign. Show me that I'm not alone, that this world does have meaning and beauty and joy and that we're all a part of something larger. Make it rain. Make it pour down rain here in this dry place where the sun is always out. But I didn't expect anything to happen.

Still, I did feel a single drop. And as I reached the next class, all the way up on the fifth floor of South Hall, I gazed out the hallway windows toward the mountains to the north. And though it was not raining, there was a rainbow arching up from behind the mountains into the sky overhead. And I just stopped in my tracks and walked over to the window and looked at it. Thoughts about how certain phenomena end up being "deemed religious" floated into my mind. I told myself that it was just an atmospheric phenomena that could be explained scientifically. I wondered if anyone else saw it. I snidely told the God that I sometimes believe in that I had asked for a downpour and not a rainbow. But there it was all the same. And...it felt like an answer.

And now I have this firsthand experience that fleshes out so much of what I taught about in Religious Studies 15B a couple of years ago. If I were in any other department in the world I might talk about it and feel fine. But in this department, in this field--I feel like I'm not supposed to. Maybe I'm wrong about this. I don't know why I have this feeling, but it's there. And yet, it's the kind of experience that I also feel like I should talk about.

And this goes right into my fourth experience: The meaningless class. I'm supposed to lead discussion sections. And it's very difficult. I only blame the students so much though. In part, I can't help but wonder if I should blame the field that can only talk about and never actually do. I'm up there at the front of the room, we're discussing "the problem of death" and what it means for human life and no one even seems interested. But then again, we're not doing anything to connect it to THEM and to their LIVES and their own DEATHS. I'm asking them to talk about how the Tibetan Buddhists view death or how the epic of Gilgamesh pictures death or how someone else who's already dead thought about death. I'm not using those things to get them to discuss their own thoughts and feelings on the matter. And maybe that wouldn't be a very academic thing to do in any field. But I think that if Religious Studies studies anything that other fields do not (we already have history and economics and political science and anthropology and psychology and language), it's that it studies the way people find (or make) meaning in their lives and deaths. And it seems to me that few of these undergraduates are ever asked to reflect on the question of meaning in their own. And that's very sad to me, and something that I think a good education should instill.

But then I wouldn't be teaching about anymore, I'd be doing. And doing is something the teacher of religious studies can't do. Can he?

Hidden in Plain Sight: Oh Noes, it's the New Age!

Listening to a lecture today about New Age and New Spirituality, I realized how rampant these ideas are in recent blockbuster films. This is a delayed insight, one which reveals that my own scholarly interests sometimes obfuscates what is hidden in plain sight. Let me offer several examples taken from recent past:

1. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008): This rather silly addition to the Indiana Jones franchise takes advantage of the New Age in several obvious ways. Aliens, you say? In Peru? Why sure! Didn't you know that Shirley MacLaine--yes, the same one from Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry (1955), The Apartment (1958), Sweet Charity (1969) and dozens of other major films--received spiritual guidance from Peruvian masters who had long known about extra-terrestrial visitors to South America? Or that plenty of New Age folks, like the author of this lecture, Joshua Shapiro, are explicit in drawing connections between Peru, crystal skulls, and UFOs: "To me, there is a strong connection with the Crystal Skulls and the UFOs and I believe the skulls are another strong piece of evidence which shows the existence for UFOs." The Indiana Jones franchise, which first exploited rumors (and some evidence) of Nazi interest in the supernatural and para-psychological in Last Crusade (1989) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), needed something different to re-frame its narrative in a Cold War motif. The move to the New Age seems only natural for the post-1960s search for long-lost religious symbols and power. [Incidentally, the Russian/Nazi motif is done far better in Hellboy, which I have previously written about.] This may or may not have been an improvement over the orientalism of Temple of Doom (1984). Temple of Doom had the advantage of feeling antiquated. Using a shock-and-awe strategy to discomfort viewers with monkey brains, insects, beating hearts pulled from bodies, occult-style Hinduism. The Crystal Skull just felt silly, and its application of New Age beliefs about the links between "native" peoples and extra-terrestials should be seen not only as a poor storytelling, but also as a thinly veiled colonial project (a la Phillip Deloria's Playing Indian.) American audiences yearned for a hearty archaeological adventure, but instead they were handed a trite and superficial plate of New Age goodness wrapped in a condescending imperialist shell.Yummy!
2. Knowing (2009): Another interpretation of New Age alien infatuation appears with the re-reading of biblical texts to identify certain passages as indications of historical accounts of alien encounters.  Others have noted the odd mix of UFOs and Christianity present in this film, particularly Gary DeMar at The American Vision. Where DeMar uses this as an opportunity to discuss materialism, atheism, and American millennialism, I see a much stronger connection to the New Age interpretations of the Bible that begin after the first public accounts of crashed alien spacecrafts in the late 1940s. Those accounts were surely influenced by the mounting tensions of Cold War, but also fueled by scientific experimentation with rocketry and (understandable) fear of Soviet superiority in science education and the arms race. Consider what DeMar says about the Biblical roots of this terribly acted and directed Nicholas Cage stinker from earlier this year: Ezekiel’s vision of “wheels within wheels” gets special attention by the UFO enthusiasts as it does in the movie Knowing (2009). All the necessary spaceship “nuts and bolts” are present: “fire flashing forth,” “glowing metal,” a description of a spaceship that had passed through the earth’s atmosphere (1:4); “living beings” with alien characteristics (1:5–6, 10–11); “burnished bronze” for spaceship landing legs (1:7); the ability to hover (1:12); and a propulsion mechanism “that looked like burning coals of fire, like torches darting back and forth among living beings” (1:13)." Thank the Lord! The Bible is proof that aliens have been here and that they'll come back to save the chosen few. Here New Age goodness is unable to pry itself away from its Biblical sources, and ends up with a mixture of precognition implanted in the "chosen" people and their descendants. Destiny is all about genetics, which is just as easily read as members of the true tribes as it is about the purity of those selected to re-build humanity in a better world. The end of the world is here, but our alien masters will save us. Messiahs from beyond is a theme that rings true from the Theosophical Society down to the more recent end of the Heaven's Gate NRM/cult incident that coincided with the arrival of comet Hale Bopp. I'm sure Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp were not pleased and more than a bit shocked by that group's actions. Knowing saves the children through the actions of benevolent alien intercessors, but kills off faithful Christians and atheists alike. It's a mixed message that sits uneasily between critiquing both atheistic materialism (as totally wrong) and religious piety (as providing nothing other than hugs as the world ends).
   
3. 2012 (2009): Of course, millennialism has moved quite far from the confines of Christians who believe in the coming of an age rule by Christ. Taking advantage of misreadings of the Mayan cyclical view of history, we have seen a flood of interest in 2012 end-of-the-world scenarios. It's Y2K all over again, as well as pretty much every year in the past. I'd like to make something very clear here--the study of history shows us that practically EVERY generation in EVERY society likes to talk about how the golden age has passed and everything has gone to pot. We're doomed! While the religious character of such predictions is America's religious bread-and-butter, there is no stopping the stranglehold of the American imagination of disaster imported from every corner of the globe. That the predictions have come from Central America this time, rather than from Europe or the Middle East, is novel. I'll grant you at least that much, but the scientism used to justify these disaster scenarios is pure New Age. From the late 19c to the present there have been innumerable attempts to prove Metaphysical beliefs as scientific in character. Chakras, Auras, clairvoyance, channeling, mesmerism, magnetism, and other beliefs have been subject to scientific scrutiny for well over a century. It is not the prediction that things will end in 2012 that is unique to the New Age, although I won't deny that turning to the Mayan calendar carries much of the same baggage as #1 above, but rather that the new film and the discussions it has generated about how the world might end are framed in pseudo-scientific language that should make even a grade-school science student blush. As I heard last night while flipping channels on the TV, the "continents might reverse themselves in orientation, moving North America and Europe and Asia to the southern hemisphere." I mean, seriously, folks, did you not pay attention when they taught you the basic mechanics of plate tectonics or the composition of the Earth? The attempt or need to justify one's beliefs through science is among the more unique aspects of New Age and New Spirituality, one that is most evident in its embrace of quantum physics, string theory, and the search for a theory of everything. We see yet again that the scientist--so cocksure that the world is a reasonable, rational place--is put in his place by the cosmos. 

Does this suggest that the primary mode of New Age in the movies is hubris? That might be one interpretation. After all, we could look to other films such as Phenomenon (1996) and Drag Me to Hell (2009) as representatives of the poles in the influence of the New Age on Hollywood's films. The first, starring Mel Gibson as a man who receives god-like powers from a brain tumor that may have been caused by a cosmic spark, mixes parapsychology into a morality/love story in a mediocre concoction that warmed the hearts of children (somewhere, I'm sure). The second, a dark and rather ugly film about the supernatural consequences of small slights to gypsies, plays on the basic practices of the New Age (tarot and palm reading) while having taken just enough from Caribbean and Western European folk religion to make it plain that combinative religion is alive and well.

These films are all characterized by heroes or anti-heroes whose personalities are insufficient to deal with the mixture of religious and scientific faith that surrounds them. Poor old Mel is just a good ole boy who has just been given a massive dose of brain booster. Too much for the poor farmer to handle. The star of Drag me to Hell, Alison Lohman, fails to grasp that the spiritual world cannot be kept out of the "real" or regular world. Even a bank--oh so innocuous and safe--becomes the site for the clash of the spiritual and material worlds. The same could be said about the examples above. Of the three films, only Indiana Jones seems somewhat cavalier about his E.T. encounter. After all, the world isn't about to end and, well, he saved the day despite being to old to do anything helpful or interesting. It was hubris, after all, to accept the part. Oh, and greed. We must not forget about greed.

My Problem With PowerPoint Presentations

For the second time in three quarters, I am a Teaching Assistant in a course that requires students to make PowerPoint presentations during discussion section. I have also noticed that more and more professors are using PowerPoint for their lectures as well. I am aware that PowerPoint is utilized quite frequently in the business world, too. But I am becoming increasingly convinced that PowerPoint (and it's Open Office counterpart, Impress, which does the same thing for you without you having to give a penny to Microsoft!) is slowly destroying America. And after that, the world.

I'm not just saying this because I have lost so many hours of my life now to watching decidedly mediocre student presentations that utilize PowerPoint. No, it's not out of resentment that I have decided to take this rather radical position that we should altogether abolish (or at least strictly regulate) the use of PowerPoint. I think there are very good, very rational, very clear reasons why this new medium does more harm than good.

First, we're already altogether too used to staring at screens. I'm staring at one right now (and so are you, if you're reading this!). We stare at TV screens, computer monitors, scoreboards, weather tickers and cell phone displays all before lunch. PowerPoint presentations are just one more set of flickering images that we stare rather passively at during our day. No one looks at the presenter or the professor. They're all staring at the the magical slides that dance across the screen. No one listens to what the presenter or the professor says; they're all scribbling down the notes they read off the screen. It's just one more way in which people are slowly removed from the world and turned into electronic data. I find that even most of the student PRESENTERS are staring at the screen. They don't read from their notes or from a pre-prepared speech. They don't look at their audience (though this would be depressing anyway, as their audience would all be staring past them at the screen) or even the TA who is grading them. They look at the screen and read the slides to the people who are already reading them.

This is really my biggest problem with the medium known as PowerPoint. It usually ends up as another TV program to watch, or another YouTube video to browse. It tends to hinder rather than to facilitate HUMAN communication.

And secondly, I think this plays into another major pet peeve of mine. Today's students (and today's people in general) are all about getting down the facts in quick, bit-size pieces. The professor might read a passage from a beautiful ancient text, or a student might tell an amusing anecdote to lighten the mood but both will be forgotten. Student are by and large waiting for the next set of bullet points that they will faithfully copy down in a hurry in order to memorize those points for the next multiple choice test. They increasingly see all information in this way--as points of data that can be digested and assimilated and later repeated back for a cookie. News tickers do this to the news. Twitter does this to everyday life. And PowerPoint does it to academics.

I, myself, prefer chalk. I prefer to only use the chalk to write down a few key terms without definitions so that people then have to listen to what I say. I prefer to engage in a discussion that can't be summarized in a few bullet points. And I hope that more and more people will choose to prefer the same.