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.

Public Transportation provides freedom of movement

This morning each of the three people in my household had some reason to go to "The Cities."  Two had specific places to be and even some responsibilities in different parts of the metro and I just wanted "city air," even if it was going to be really hot air.  There was a book I wanted to buy and a 25% off coupon I wanted to use at the kitchen store, but I didn't have a schedule. 

So I caught a ride up with my son and a ride back with my husband and in between . . . I used an all day  (6 hour) MTC pass!  No looking for a parking spot.  No watching out for drivers less responsible than me.  Just wait a few minutes for the light rail or the bus and let someone else drive.  In the time allotted to me I wandered in the Mill City farmers market where I purchased a pound of Spanish grilling onions for later and a yummy pastry with spinach, pear and blue cheese that I ate immediately; I bought the book; I had brunch at the Local, sitting on Nicollet Mall; I walked through Loring Greenway, Loring Park, and the Sculpture Garden; I cooled off in the Walker Museum shop; I had peach and vanilla ice cream at Sebastian Joe's; and I used the coupon to acquire a special pitcher for infusing water with fruit and herb flavors.

Yes, I was restricted by the routes and the schedules of the MTC, but all in all I managed to accomplish quite a lot and I experienced the service as freeing and relaxing.  

California Missions

In anticipation of a possible visit to several of the northern California missions I'm reading up.  On my shelf I had some old stuff, purchased years ago when I went to San Juan Capistrano; this was intended for the tourist trade and presented a rather rosy picture along with the some old photographs.  There is however more recent scholarship, such as Steven W. Hackel's Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis, that I'm finding informative and fascinating.

Converting California by James Sandos offers this useful characterization of earlier portrayals as either Christocentric Triumphalism or Christophobic Nihilism.  He attempts to steer a third course that gives credibility to both the Franciscans and the people they encountered.  This approach parallels recent developments in mission history more globally and will be useful to my teaching about missions and Christianity in the India those explorers were looking for.   Of particular interest for my courses on Christianity is his highlighting the differing meanings members of these two groups attributed to baptism and the distortions that arise from assumptions that baptism was a sign of total conversion. (I also learned quite a lot about venereal disease and the development of musical notation.)

I'm also interested in the function of the missions in the mythos of California.  Sandos points out that once California became part of the United States the history of the missions provided a past for the region, a past that was neither British nor Protestant but that nonetheless could be told as a romantic encounter between Europeans and Native People.  Helen Hunt Jackson's novel, Ramona, did this work.  So too efforts to restore the ruins of the missions in the early 20th century, sometimes from practically nothing, provided Californians and other Americans with cultural destinations akin to other historical sites.   Hence that Sunset Magazine book I bought at San Juan Capistrano and what I suppose that I would have learned about the missions if I'd been an elementary school student in California in the early 1960s. 

Are these also sacred sites either in some universal sense or for American public/civil religion?  Along with the effort to canonize Juniperro Serra, the founder of the first nine missions, that is a provocative issue but one I'm fascinated by as I ruminate on what would constitute a sacred site in the USA.  Certainly these are locations were Franciscans intended to do holy work and there are spaces there designated for religious ritual.  The question, however, is a larger one about how these places are regarded a century-and-a-half after their secularization.  Are they analogous to battlefields?  Certainly some sort of battle was done.  Are they places that enshrine our national values?  Which ones?  Are they places where we are still brought face-to-face with the transcendent or with the realities of our own humanity which is both noble and limited?  Even harder to answer but well worth contemplating if we are to have a way of thinking of our past (and our future) that is neither triumphalist nor nihilistic.  

getting cool

St. Paul, MN July 1935

A radio news story reports that in a major American city efforts to restrict the visible presence of homeless people (notice: not to address the fact of homelessness) include laws prohibiting sleeping in public, eating in public, and feeding people in public.  The public policy issues related to how we address homelessness deserve to be commented upon, but that is not the point of this post.  Rather, in the midst of an intense and prolonged heat wave this story recalls how people coped with heat in the pre-air conditioned era: they slept outside, sometimes in public places, they jumped in bodies of water, they wrapped themselves in damp sheets.  Generally hot weather drove people into places where they saw more of each other rather than into the refuge of their own houses.  Now the cost of getting cool is not only a higher utility bill and the environmental side-effects of increased energy usage, it is also reduced social contact.

I write this, of course, sitting in my newly air-conditioned office in a newly refurbished 130 year old building.  And I don't wish to sleep outside with the mosquitoes.  So I wonder how my predecessors reacted when the days and nights were hot.  Did they keep working as if the temperature were mild?  Did they stop often for a long drink of water?  Did they give up cooking and eat only raw vegetables?   Did they repair to the Canon River or Heath Creek for an afternoon of wading and splashing?  Were those the days when Boe sat in Rolvaag's back yard smoking cigars and planning for a Greater St. Olaf?

Observing the 4th of July

Sometimes in 101 we have assigned a personal essay about observing the 4th of July.  Most of the students wrote about family celebrations with a few references to parades and community fireworks.  There was a domestic, happy quality to these tales.  That is the sort of event on the surface of the poem, "Immigrant Picnic," by Gregory Djanikian, though the poem also hints at the personal loses involved in even the least traumatic relocation. 

The custom of public orations for the 4th seems to have fallen out of practice.  Only at Holden Village have I experienced a public reading of the Declaration of Independence such I have read about in descriptions of historical and fictional Independence Day observations in the 19th and early 20th century.  A powerful example, surely one of the great American speeches, is Frederick Douglass' "What to the American Negro is the Fourth of July?"  He lauds the nation's ideals, honors its founders, and points directly at its failure to enact its best commitments.  Here is James Earl Jones' reading the speech. VIDEO LINK

Even if slavery is outlawed, there is much in these words to inspire us decades later, to remind us that even as declaring independence was followed by a war to achieve it, so too proclaiming equality and freedom requires daily effort to make those ideals into reality.

where we live

If you are wondering how to describe where you live, here is help from The Brookings Institution, Census.gov, City-Data.com, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Endhomelessness.org, Federal Bureau of Investigation, StateoftheAir.org

Credit: Nelson Hsu, Natalie Jones, Melanie Taube, Tanya Ballard Brown / NPR

The opposite of all. . . .

Is having nothing the opposite of having it all?
Is having enough the opposite of having it all?
Is sharing the opposite of having it all?

What is all?

'Maybe young women don’t wonder whether they can have it all any longer, but in case any of you are wondering, of course you can have it all. What are you going to do? Everything, is my guess. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications. It will not be anything like what you think it will be like, but surprises are good for you. And don’t be frightened: You can always change your mind. I know: I’ve had four careers and three husbands. . . .

"Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women. Thank you. Good luck. The first act of your life is over. Welcome to the best years of your lives."  

Nora Ephron @ 1996 Wellesley College Graduation

Is "having it all" the second-wave, feminist version of the American Dream?  The longing for "having it all" and the possibility or non-possibility has been bouncing around cyberspace a lot in recent weeks because of Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Atlantic Cover Story “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”.  I've been reading some of the discussion.  Frankly, it makes me uncomfortable. It reminds me of the old goal of getting a bigger part of the pie.  One reason, an ethical one, this makes me uncomfortable might be that the difficulty having it all (or even a bigger piece) seems to be one of the first world problems that pale in comparison to the desire to have some food, a place to sleep, and a modicum of safety.  Another reason. a theological one, is that I think human beings are limited creatures and that living with certain kinds of limits may be a form of righteousness; this is not to deny that there are limits that are unjust and should be addressed, even shattered.  

Without trivializing, I mention that death is one of the limits we all face.  Human life does not last forever.  This week Nora Ephron confronted that limit and as people, especially women, have responded to her death many of them have referred to the commencement speech she gave in 1996 at her alma mater.  The quotations above are from that talk.  Read the whole thing!  Like Ursula K. Le Guin's "Left-Handed Commencement Address" delivered at Mills College in 1983, this speech goes beyond the trite to the heart of important life issues.  (LaGuin goes further to question the notion that success is to be pursued.)

I find two points in Ephron's assertion that women in the class of 1996 might be able to have it all useful and true, despite my fundamental skepticism about that claim.  First, she admits that this will be messy and complicated then advises embracing the mess and the complications.  She does not expect this to be easy or assume that making it easy is someone else's job.  Second, at the end of her remarks, she urges her listeners to make making a difference for other women part of what is included in their "all."  Thus, she appears to be in sympathy with those Americans who assert that the American Dream is bigger than having everything for one's self and that it includes contributing to the public good.

And that reminds me of another remarkable American woman from an earlier phase of woman's rights, Frances Willard.  As the president of the WCTU her motto emphasized action more than possession:  Do Everything!  (Wish I could find the photograph of her at her roll top desk, piled high with all the paper involved in doing everything.)  Notice that Ephron mixes doing and having and a careful reading of Slaughter might also distinguish between the two.  

It is who I am...Catholic and gay

Christine Quinn, NYC council woman and likely mayoral candidate on Weekend Edition.

Insightful reflections on the value of government officials working together instead of as opponents, but to me more interesting for Quinn's comments about the nature of faith.  Asked if she considers leaving the Catholic church since it does not approve of her sexual identity, she replies with something like this: You can't leave your faith, it is who you are.  Moreover she states simply that when she wakes up in the morning she is Catholic and gay.  Her tone suggests that this is the fact, not a problem, and that others who might regard it as a problem should just get over their problem.  Perhaps there is a bit of lurking essentialism in her comments and yet there is also something very appealing about her recognition that faith is something deep and shaping, not merely a choice one makes as if buying a car or ordering dinner.

Generational happiness

My Am Con students wrestled mightily with the reality of Americans' seemingly unending dis-satisfaction.  We noticed it in Quicksand and in Ragtime both set more or less in the early 20th century.  (Enich coined a fine term for it; if he reads this, perhaps he'll add it in the comments.) By the end of the fourth semester they were also working on coming to terms with gap between national ideals and aspirations and the realities of national life.  Angels in America gave some of them a handle on this problem.  Hannah's admonition that one must have an "idea" about America combined with Belize's declaration that he did not have to love America gave them a way to recognize that the gap is not always reducible to collective (or even individual) hypocrisy.  There is also something of a "work in progress" quality to the nation, its culture, and its people.

Perhaps these realizations come at a particular developmental stage, to each generation in its own time and in its own way.  Poet Carl Dennis hints at something like that in his poem, "Our Generation," which I take to be about the generation labeled the "boomers."  Here he manages to shine a gentle light both on the pursuit of individual happiness and on the few who notice the gap between the county in theory and the country in fact.  He does it gently and with quiet hope.

Our Generation

Whatever they'll say about our delinquencies,

They'll have to agree we managed to bridge the gap

Between those who arrived before us

And those who followed. We learned enough

At the schools available to fill the entry-level positions

At the extant sawmills our elders managed,

At banks, drug stores, freight yards, and hospitals,

Then worked our way up to positions of trust.

There we were, down on the shop floor

Or up in the manager's office, or outside the office

On scaffolds, washing the windows.

Did we work with joy? With no less joy

Than people felt in the generations before us.

And on weekends and weekday evenings

We did our best to pursue the happiness

Our founders encouraged us to pursue,

And with equal gusto. Whatever they say about us

They can't deny that we filled the concert halls,

Movie houses, malls, and late-night restaurants.

We took our bows on stage or waited on tables

Or manned the refreshment booths to earn a little extra

For the things we wanted, the very things

Pursued by the generations before us

And likely to be pursued by generations to come:

Children and lawns and cars and beach towels.

And now and then we stood back to admire

The colorful spectacle, the endless variety,

As others before us admired it, and then returned

To fill our picnic baskets, drive to the park,

And use the baseball diamonds just as their contrivers

Intended they should be used. And if we too

Crowded into the squares to cheer the officials

Who proclaimed our country as fine in fact

As it is in theory, as faithful a friend to the planet

As any country we cared to name,

A few of us confined to a side street,

Carried signs declaring a truth less fanciful.

A few unheeded, to be sure, but no more unheeded

Than a similar few in generations before us

Who hoped that the truth in generations to come,

Though just as homely, would find more followers.

Carl Dennis
The Kenyon Review
New Series, Volume XXVII Number 2
Spring 2005

Religion in the USA

I'm working on my syllabus for Religion 260: American Religion.  To that end I've been reading, along with other things, the Columbia Guide to Religion in American History.  I concur with one reviewer's judgment that while one generally does not expect a reference work to be summer reading, several of the chapters in this volume are compelling and fascinating enough to qualify.  The chapter by Andrew M. Manis on "Civil Religion and National Identity" is among those. I learned lots and will learn more from the book and from works included in each chapter's bibliography.

Coming to the book immediately after three days in a workshop on teaching writing, I admired the writing in several of the chapters and will use examples to illustrate a clear, informative, engaging introduction and generally admirable writing.  For example, Mark Noll begins his chapter on theology this way.

"Americans have changed the world much more by action than by thought.  In the religious realm, it is the same."

Ten things that will make you happy

So it is self-help-y.  So what.  That is a venerable American genre.  We recognize it in Ben Franklin and it endures til today.  And if the pursuit of happiness is a right claimed in the Declaration of Independence, then what better goal for a self-help guide/poster than moving toward happiness.  Moreover, these are ten things that SCIENCE tell us will make us happy.

Notice especially #10 which points us toward the notion that happiness is built upon public virtue rather than achieved by self-indulgence.

#10: Give It Away, Give It Away Now! Make altruism and giving part of your life, and be purposeful about it. Researcher Stephen Post says helping a neighbor, volunteering, or donating goods and services results in a “helper’s high,” and you get more health benefits than you would from exercise or quitting smoking. Listening to a friend, passing on your skills, celebrating others’ successes, and forgiveness also contribute to happiness, he says. Researcher Elizabeth Dunn found that those who spend money on others reported much greater happiness than those who spend it on themselves.

HERE for a more easily read version.

American Dream: Radio Reflections

HERE the first in an NPR series on the American Dream.

The American Dream is an implicit contract that says if you play by the rules, you'll move ahead. It's a faith that is almost unique to this country, says Michael Dimock of the Pew Research Center.
"When Germans or French are asked the same questions about whether it's within all of our power to get ahead, or whether our success is really determined by forces outside our control, most German and French respondents say, 'No, success is really beyond our control,' " Dimock says.

This bit identifies something we may have underplayed in our class' focus on perpetual dis-satisfaction: the expectation and confidence that satisfaction (success or happiness) is obtainable, more precisely that these are within our personal control.

Current discussion, including the linked story, suggests that this confidence is on the decline.  That observation raises related questions: what is the basis of the confidence and its loss?  How possible has it been for the average American or for most Americans to get ahead in past decades?  And how much of that was in individual's control?

Now I also wonder about the effect of declining confidence on our willingness to be generous to others?  Is it the case that when individuals feel that the deck is stacked against us that we become less willing to give others help?  If so is that because we figure that there is only so much good luck available and we want to keep ours for ourselves?  I recall reading about this notion of limited luck in an anthropological article about fishing cultures, more specifically about pre-modern, peasant Norwegian fisherfolk.

semester's end

The 2010-12 cohort of American Conversations has come to its conclusion.   Students have gone on to their summer's activities.  Some are anticipating study abroad next year.  Others will be back on campus.  The formal program's completion does not signal an end to conversation or reflection upon perennial issues.

I may continue to make posts here on related topics, but only now and then rather than on a regular basis.

on first drafts

This from Patricia Hampl's essay "Memory and Imagination," in which she writes specifically about memoir so the point might need a bit of  adjustment for other genres.  Nonetheless, I offer it at a time in the semester when many students might benefit from the encouragement she gives.

"For me, writing a first draft is a little like meeting someone for the first time.  I come away with a wary acquaintanceship, but the real friendship (if any) and genuine intimacy--that's all down the road

"A careful first draft is a failed first draft.  That may be why there are so many inaccuracies in the piano lesson memoir...

"The real trouble: the piece hasn't yet found its subject; it isn't yet about what it want to be about.  Note: what IT wants, not what I want.  The difference has to do with the relation a memoir -- any writer, in fact -- has to unconscious or half-known intentions and impulses in composition."

The advise, the encouragement?  Well, it is to get something on the paper so that you can think about it and learn from it.  The first draft may not even be worth cleaning up; it may require a new start; but it will have done its work of helping you to find out what there is to be said.

NPR TED talks on Happiness: choice and action

THREE TALKS about happiness:

Barry Schwartz: Does Having Options Make Us Happier?   
Only some of the time, but raising expectations can also contribute to dissatisfaction and having too many options may be paralyzing.   But, my students assert that this is NOT true for them.  At least most of them did and one agreed that when the analysis is applied to buying jeans (the example Schwartz gave from his own experience), she experiences something like paralysis and would prefer not to undertake the task.  Another confessed to something similar when selecting a movie on Netflix.  Others suggested that Schwartz may be accurate for people of his generation, but not for theirs.  They have always had so many choices, so they are not paralyzed or rendered dissatisfied.  In the midst of the exchange, I wondered if the parallel between jeans, or shampoo, or coffees and big ideals is valid.  That is to suggest that dissatisfaction with consumer goods may be debilitating, but dissatisfaction with with the nation's current reality relative to is highest ideals can (indeed should) motivate action.  

Kathyrn Schulz: Why Should We Embrace Regret?  Schulz uses the example of the tattoo she got when she was 29 to explore the value of regret which is not precisely the opposite of happiness.  Rather she suggests that regret can be a reminder that we can do better.  Her remarks are of interest in conversation with our discussion in class about ways to understand Americans' failure to bring our best ideals to reality.  The assertion that honest recognition of that failure can be the basis of renewed effort resonates with her suggestions about the value of regret for individuals.

 

Malcolm Gladwell: What Does Spaghetti Sauce Have To Do With Happiness?   The shift from expectation of universals to recognition of varying preferences for such things as the viscosity of tomato sauce and the taste of mustard and the roast of coffee.  Has this given us more pleasure?  Can insights drawn from research on food preferences be used to promote conflict resolution?