On sincerity and Christmas Festival

This is the weekend of the 101st St. Olaf College Christmas festival.  It is a big deal on our campus.  Four 'performances' of 90+ minutes of Christmas/Advent music by five choirs and the orchestra.  That involves several hundred students and several thousand in the audiences.  Some of those folks also come for a ritualized meal that draws upon immigrant memories: lutefisk, lefse, meatballs, potatoes, and the like.  Many of them show up in nordic sweaters: Dahl of Norway or Oleana or the variety designed especially for St. Olaf College with a lion motif.  Of course it goes without saying, but must be acknowledged, that this event both fosters school spirit and raises money. (Now by ticket sales and by encouraging donations beyond the ticket price.)

Along with the festival itself we have other annual customs.  The student newspaper will need to publish an opinion piece mocking the sweaters and declaring that lutefisk tastes awful.  This is not news.  While the sweaters are warm, they are also a sort of costume.  As costumes go, I prefer them to those wedges of fake-cheese people from Wisconsin wear or the face-paint sports fans don for big games or even to many Hallowen costumes.  (In fact I even own a sweater more like the red one here than the black one, but I never wear it during Christmas festival week.)

Moreover, very few people love the taste of lutefisk.  Only a few more still have any memory of eating it for any but ritual holiday occasions.  (I admit that I never eat it, nor did I as a child since my mother loathed the stuff and my father's Swedish Baptist family didn't have the tradition.)  However, anyone who sets foot on the campus is invited to join in the meal or to buy a sweater.  While these are markers of community membership, that membership is relatively open here. 

So, I wonder, why does this editorial appear year after year?  Why do the same jokes echo annually?  I suspect it might be because we are so unaccustomed to an invitation to participate in a sincere event, devoid of irony or exaggeration.  The festival/concert itself is such an invitation.  Yes, it is a performance, but fueled by hope and devotion rather than self-promotion or satire.  So rare is this that it requires the balance of jokes and critique provoked by the easy targets of flocks of people in wool, Norwegian sweaters and by that meal.  No doubt there is also a bit of the inevitable student poking at alumni involved as well.

I suspect that we need that editorial every year.  The festival does have the potential to inflate our self image, to be pompous, to give the impression of exclusivity.  The sweaters, like many costumes of membership, can be a little silly.  The food, like Thanksgiving turkey, it chosen for symbolic reasons at least as much as for nutritional or stylish ones.  And, at the same time, I'm grateful to be invited out of the fashionable irony of the age into 90 minutes of (almost) pure sincerity and offered the opportunity to dwell in the hope that is at the heart of advent waiting and Christmas' story. 

If you'd like to hear the concert: check here.

American Studies event

Tomorrow afternoon (Friday) there is an American Studies event with cakes to eat and books as door prizes.  No doubt many AmCon students will be there.  There will be lively, interesting conversation.  Alas, after dropping off my pumpkin spice bundt cake and some books, I will dash off to Tomson Hall to talk to "Lang & Lit" about Lars W. Boe.  In view of Boe's interest in fostering students' self-understanding as Americans and their participation in American life, somehow it seems wrong to be talking about him rather than participating in the American Studies event. 

What is the starting point?

Yesterday in my American Religion class we discussed Sylvester Johnson's article on nationalist, African American religious groups, e.g. Nation of Islam and others.  His assertions about the legitimacy of these groups as religions and their ethnogenesis offered a new angle on much of American religion.  In particular the repeated motif of some American's as the "new Israel," however, I have a hunch that there is much more to reconsider.

Perhaps I mentioned Marcus Garvey and Rastafarians in 1984.  Frankly I don't recall doing so.  But even if I did I'm certain that I was not able to consider that they, and similar movement, offered an instructive lens on the Pilgrims or Italian Roman Catholics.  Nonetheless, there is much to learn if we begin with the expectation that all religious groups in the USA are, in some sense, inventing an identity and a mythology to support it.  Some, like Joseph Smith, find buried resources, others make do with what they bring in their luggage, but everyone uses what they can put their hands on to cope with the [new] world in which they find themselves. 

The article also caused us to back up and ask about what various American groups have expected from their religion and to notice how this has shifted over time even within the broadly defined group that descends from those Pilgrims.

The large scale contours of American religion

In the midst of this first run at offering Religion 260, American Religion (non-seminar) I found my notes from the last time I offered something similar, spring 1984 at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. (That was just months after I'd passed my comprehensive doctoral exams.)  Immediately I noticed that in that earlier version of the course I was much more concerned, perhaps preoccupied, with insuring that my students absorbed many, many discreet pieces of information about American religious groups and their development. This time I'm much more interested in the patterns.  Or, one might say I'm more interested in plotting the contours of the landscape rather than focused on the individual data points.

Of course one can not plot the contours without the data points.  Perhaps this is a bit like the old discussion about trees and forests.  I'm now more interested in my students having a sense of the forest and being able to find their way among the trees.

Why?  I have a hunch that teaching religion 121, our introductory course in reading the Bible, and American Conservations has a great deal to do with my shift from pieces to patterns.   I'm relying less on students finding the material intrinsically interesting and am more concerned with how understanding what has been might help us understand what is.

And, I suspect that our current concern with religious pluralism raises questions about the past that push us toward the forest rather than the trees.   As we move through the 'text book' and more focused scholarship I find myself noticing connections and comparisons that had never occurred to me before and considering lines of questions that are novel to me.  For example, how do various groups and individuals expect to gain access to the sacred?  Can we trace developments and chart various options?  There is the classic Protestant expectation that this comes through reading the Bible, but also Deist reliance on reason not harnessed to scripture.  And how to compare the  state of revivalist ecstasy to the ritually indued trance of Mother Ann's work or the Ghost Dance?

Nothing better than new ideas! 

Sunshine Boys

Last night we saw The Sunshine Boys at the Guthrie, directed by St. Olaf's Gary Gisseleman.  It was spectacular!  The house was pretty full for a Wednesday night and the laughter was huge and frequent.

Neil Simon's portrayal of these two old vaudevillians in a story about their relationship makes excellent use of the vaudeville conventions.  Their story includes a steady stream of gentle misunderstanding mixed in with bits from their old routine so that the audience experiences a particular comic perspective on life.  In this well acted production, it was the perfect entertainment in the midst of a hot summer.

As the actors took their bows, there was also a tender moment as the two mature actors who play the entertainers interacted with the young actor who plays the nephew/agent.   Here we glimpsed a doubling in which the relationships portrayed seemed to mirror the relationships among the players.