I’m very grateful for all the work that students and faculty have done to make this a fantastic conference. The organizers also arranged for the student papers to be live-streamed, and archives of those video feeds are still available. So, if you are interested in hearing my paper (“The Logos of God and the End of Man: Animality as Light and Life”) or excellent papers from Erika Murphy and Terra Rowe, then here they are! My paper begins at about 38 minutes in. Other student papers are also available if you search “DrewTTC” on the site.

Apologies and hand-wringing are certainly appropriate for the paucity of posts here lately, but drama about that sort of thing doesn’t usually mean that more posts are on the way. I can’t promise that it will get a lot better, but I’ll post some news here and again for the few hopeful souls that pop by.

In addition to the information in the flier above (which I’ve pasted below for those who don’t want to squint at the tiny, tilted text) there is a website for the conference which has been recently updated with lots of information—including the conference program and paper titles.

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Fordham Graduate Theology Conference

Marginal Persons and the Margins of Personhood

Keynote Speaker: Virginia Burrus of Drew University

Saturday April 30^th, 2011; 12-7 PM

12^th Floor, Lowenstein Tower (60^th St. and 9^th Ave.)

Free and open to the public

People find themselves on the margins of societies for a wide range of reasons. Some self-locate at the margins, some are forced there by birth, disadvantage, or structural malice. Moreover, even enlightened, “liberal” discourse about the “marginalized” often makes questionable presumptions about the location of the “center” against which margins are measured.

Who or what counts as a “person”? When and where do they count as such? As they are variously drawn, the boundaries around personhood cut between animals, angels, God, and even some humans. Negotiations concerning the attributes, capacities, and narratives that make for a “good” person are as ethically and politically freighted as they are interminable.

The 2011 FGTC brings together questions in these two veins—marginal persons and the margins of personhood—particularly as religion and theology play a role in any answers given. Presenters from Fordham, Yale, Harvard, Princeton Seminary, and Boston University will offer an exciting range of papers on the ways in which religion both establishes and resists, both defines and confuses, both cements and liberates the margins where persons are found.

Virginia Burrus will give a keynote lecture at 6 PM entitled, “Saints and Other Animals: The Limits of Humanity.” She is the author of many books—including Saving Shame: Martyrs, Saints, and Other Abject Subjects and The Sex-Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography—and a recent president of the North American Patristics Society.

A few weeks ago, I received the good news that my paper proposal was accepted. The abstract that I submitted is below:

‘Marvel at the intelligence of unthinking creatures!’: Animal Subjectivity and Religious Perfection in Gregory of Nazianzus and Nemesius of Emesa

What generates the collective intuition (or instinct?) that humans are religious subjects while fellow creatures are not? Is it more than parochial hubris?

My paper examines the interplay of subjectivity and instinct in order to argue that, for Gregory of Nazianzus and Nemesius of Emesa the perfected mode of religious subjectivity is structurally identical to the instinctual “subjectivity” of animals (a subjectivity nevertheless disavowed), such that the subject approaching God becomes more ‘animal’ not less.

Answering the claim that bees and ants rationally arrange their societies for the benefit of each and all, Gregory and Nemesius quickly explain away this apparent rationality by externalizing the source of this animal behavior. Each argues that the creative Logos of God implants instincts for rational behavior within ‘irrational animals.’ God’s wisdom is on display, not the faculties of these creatures. Gregory and Nemesius thus inscribe the gap between human beings and other animals as the difference of discursive rationality and freedom: the human is free and reflective while other animals act on instinct. The instinctual behavior of animals appears rational because they are acting out the implanted rationality of God, not because they possess reason.

Interestingly, however, when each of these authors turns to describe the proper goal of human life (approaching God through disciplined contemplation)—a calling in which humans are supposedly most differentiated from other animals—they describe a mode of subjectivity indistinguishable from that of the beasts ‘left in the dust.’ The perfected human being has so ordered her life through contemplation and discipline that her whole being aligns with the Logos of God. With nary a second thought, the divine Logos pervades her disposition, desire, and behavior because any resistance from her personal, subjective logos has been abandoned. One might say that God’s Logos has become her own most native and natural instinct. Two questions follow: What difference remains between this perfected religious subjectivity and the instinctual subjectivity of other animals? If the difference is not categorical, what remains of that purportedly exclusive possession of humankind—a religious subjectivity with an independent rationality? Is it more than parochial hubris?

“It does not seem to me that the Gospel is speaking of the firmament of heaven as some remote habitation of God when it advises us to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect, because the divine is equally present in all things, and, in like manner, it pervades all creation and it does not exist separated from being, but the divine nature touches each element of being with equal honor, encompassing all things within itself.”

If there is a heaven, it is to be seen in the dignity borne by each bit of being; not infinitely elsewhere, but breaking out from within the dishonor and decay with which we are more familiar.

The call for papers is below; if you know of anyone who might be interested, please pass this along or print off a copy for yourself by clicking here: FGTC call for papers.

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:: Call for Papers ::

Marginal Persons and the Margins of Personhood

Fordham Graduate Theology Conference

Saturday April 30^th, 2011

Fordham University, Lincoln Center, NYC

Keynote Address: Virginia Burrus (Drew University)

The Theology Graduate Student Association at Fordham warmly invites submissions from graduate students in the disciplines comprising religious studies and theology. Students whose research is primarily textual/biblical, sociological, historical, philosophical, ethical, or constructive are all invited to submit and attend. Examples of topics within the scope of the theme include:

The dynamics of marginalization: the involvement of religion in economic, political, or colonial exploitation/liberation; religious hybridity or self-location at margins; boundaries drawn with religious rhetoric—past and present; the exclusion and erasure of people from the historical record; the value, function, and criteria of orthodoxies and heresies.

The notion of ‘personhood’ in religious contexts: the definition and significance of personhood as a category; the propriety of conceiving of God as personal; controversy over the “persons” of the Trinity; the relation of animals and angels to personhood; the unique rights of persons, and the politics of recognizing personal rights; religion as a “personal matter,” not a public concern; personhood as rhetoric or ontology.

Abstracts, no longer than 350 words, should be sent via email to fordhamtgsa@gmail.com by Monday, March 21^st.

Presentations will be 15-20 minutes, with subsequent time for questions/discussion. The conference will conclude with a keynote address from Virginia Burrus. Professor Burrus is a scholar of late-ancient Christianity at Drew University. She is a former president of the North American Patristics Society and the author or editor of eight books, including Saving Shame: Martyrs, Saints, and Other Abject Subjects and The Sex-Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography.

Complete conference schedule and further information will be available at the conference website (click here).  Questions may be directed to fordhamtgsa@gmail.com.

The Hippopotamus — T.S. Eliot

THE broad-backed hippopotamus
Rests on his belly in the mud;
Although he seems so firm to us
He is merely flesh and blood.

Flesh-and-blood is weak and frail,
Susceptible to nervous shock;
While the True Church can never fail
For it is based upon a rock.

The hippo’s feeble steps may err
In compassing material ends,
While the True Church need never stir
To gather in its dividends.

The ‘potamus can never reach
The mango on the mango-tree;
But fruits of pomegranate and peach
Refresh the Church from over sea.

At mating time the hippo’s voice
Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd,
But every week we hear rejoice
The Church, at being one with God.

The hippopotamus’s day
Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts;
God works in a mysterious way–
The Church can sleep and feed at once.

I saw the ‘potamus take wing
Ascending from the damp savannas,
And quiring angels round him sing
The praise of God, in loud hosannas.

Blood of the Lamb shall wash him clean
And him shall heavenly arms enfold,
Among the saints he shall be seen
Performing on a harp of gold.

He shall be washed as white as snow,
By all the martyr’d virgins kist,
While the True Church remains below
Wrapt in the old miasmal mist.

Eliot works out a fantastic reversal over the course of the poem. As Mary Midgley (whose book Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature led me to Eliot’s poem) points out, we have a tendency to think about animals in their actual behavior  and humans in their ideal behavior. Hippopotami are bloated, awkward, and fartsome, while human beings intone immaculate hallelujahs.

By the end of the poem, however, the rarified hubris of the pure Church has turned to an isolating fog. Building a community, or a spirituality on the principle of excluding the animal (whether one’s own human animality or the animal others whom we meet face to face) may also thwart God’s love, which bends to bodies as bloated and fartsome as our own.

This afternoon I was reading through Derrida’s final seminar (now published as The Beast and the Sovereign) and in the 12th session of that seminar came a discussion of the first chapters of both Genesis and the Gospel of John. Of course, both of these texts are heavily freighted so far as the relationships among God, humans, and other animals are concerned. Derrida’s circuitous thinking inspired a (theologically loaded) translation of John 1:1-4 that I’d like to try out (significant elements italicized).

Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος. οὗτος ἦν ἐν ἀρχῇ πρὸς τὸν θεόν. πάντα δι’ αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο, καὶ χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἕν. ὃ γέγονεν ἐν αὐτῷ ζωὴ ἦν, καὶ ἡ ζωὴ ἦν τὸ φῶς τῶν ἀνθρώπων· καὶ τὸ φῶς ἐν τῇ σκοτίᾳ φαίνει, καὶ ἡ σκοτία αὐτὸ οὐ κατέλαβεν.

“In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. This word was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through this word, and apart from this word not one thing came to be. That which came to be by this word was animality, and this animality was the light of humanity. The light appeared in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

Now, clearly this is pushing the usual semantic range of ζωὴ, at least as we are accustomed to hearing it. Still, I think that this translation has some merit.

Etymologically, ζωὴ [life] is the animating force of the ζωόν [living being, animal]. ζωὴ is emphatically not something that is exclusive property of human beings, but is the animating force in which both humans and animals are alive. Classically, when someone comes to define just what it is that an ἀνθρωπος [human] is, being human is described as being some kind or another of ζωόν [animal] (for two famous examples, ζωόν πολιτικόν [the political animal], ζωόν λογον εχων [the animal having speech/reason/discourse]. ζωὴ, then, is a necessary element of being human, but can’t belong to humanity alone.

Furthermore, John is most certainly quoting and riffing on Genesis here. The λόγος [word] is clearly the speech of Elohim, at which all creation emerges (not just the human mode of being).

All that to say, to imagine that the life of which John speaks here is something that belongs only to human beings precisely as human beings (e.g. a “spiritual” life that has nothing to do with animals) is a stunning bit of prejudice. The life which is the light of humanity is not a life that excludes, or comes in distinction from the life which is the life of animals. In order to reinforce this point, we might remember the oft-made point that the λόγος becomes σὰρξ [flesh] in order to dwell among us, not (literally, at least) ἀνθρωπος [human].

If this line of reading is viable, then one of the first things that we need to theologically reconfigure is the significance of God’s λόγος, and of God’s being as λόγος.

Traditionally, in both Greek philosophy and much of the Christian tradition, among creatures λόγος  has been an exclusive property of humanity, and a direct connection with God which excludes all other creatures. The human is rational, articulate, speaking, discursive [all valid translations] whereas other creatures are not. This is so much the case, that one can name the class of living beings which are not humans (every non-human living being that falls under the label “animal”) simply by saying “ὁι ἀλογοι” [those who lack λόγος].

Now, if the divine λόγος can be thought as animating creatures other that humans as Genesis and John perhaps suggest, then using λόγος as the boundary that divides humanity from all other creatures is a stunning bit of hubristic appropriation. To claim λόγος as something that belongs to us and to us alone is to cut ourselves off from the rest of creation, and perhaps, from God’s presence to the rest of creation.

I can’t and won’t argue it out here in full (beyond what I’ve already tried to indicate in John’s text), but I’m laboring to work out a theological thesis. Namely, that it is the concern to foster and defend an exclusively human λόγος (our own rationality, our own speech, our own mode of thought) which actually cuts us off from the divine λόγος which is present in animals (and everything that has come to be). The “rationality” which we imagine as the dividing line between “us” humans and “them” animals is also the pathology that cuts us off from God’s activity in and for creation. Our autonomous λόγος is not the opposite of, but is precisely the expression of our παθος. In (my [per]version of) John’s terms, the darkness that cannot and will not overcome the light is the autonomous human λόγος that cannot and will not eradicate the ζωὴ [life, both animal and human] which is God’s work.

Salvation, then, would be imagined not as a process whereby one’s animality (desire, lust, embodiment, etc.) is overcome and abandoned in an approach to God (who is perceived the opposite of all of these things), but rather as a forsaking of the autonomous human λόγος (which can only end in death) for the life-giving λόγος of God. Perhaps the λόγος of God saves human beings by integrating them more deeply into the life [ζωὴ] which is the life of all creation. Perhaps becoming a child of God (John 1.12) entails becoming more animal rather than less.

I would enjoy conversing about any of these books if anyone has thoughts or opinions to share.

Theology:

James Keating and Thomas Joseph White, eds., Divine Impassibility and the Mystery of Human Suffering, 357.

Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology I, 300.

Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, 223.

David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism, 467.

James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 254.

Sallie McFague, The Body of God: An Ecological Theology, 274.

Ernst Troeltsch, The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions, 174.

Arthur D. Yunker, Toward a Theology of Pipesmoking, 73.

Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation, 225.

Adolf von Harnack, What is Christianity?, 301.

Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology, 285.

Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology I: The Triune God, 245.

Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 252.

Walter Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel, 280.

Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology II: The Words of God, 380.

Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, 470.

Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be, 197.

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I.1: The Doctrine of the Word of God, 503.

Graham Ward, Barth, Derrida and the Language of Theology, 258.

Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, 287.

Wolfhart Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 552.

Karl Barth, The Humanity of God, 96.

Paul F. Knitter, One Earth Many Religions: Multifaith Dialogue and Global Responsibility, 218.

Marjorie Hewitt Suchoki, The Fall to Violence: Original Sin in Relational Theology, 168.

Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing, 310.

Alastair McFadyen, Bound to Sin: Abuse, Holocaust, and the Christian Doctrine of Sin, 255.

Jean Daniélou, Philon D’Alexandrie, 214.

Anna-Stina Ellverson, The Dual Nature of Man: A Study in the Theological Anthropology of Gregory of Nazianzus, 113.

Thomas H. Tobin, The Creation of Man: Philo and the History of Interpretation, 197.

Simone Weil, Waiting for God, 151.

Celia Deane Drummond and David Clough, eds., Creaturely Theology, 294.

Philosophy:

Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, 499.

Georgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, 102.

Kelly Oliver, Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human, 364.

Catherine Osborne, Dumb Beasts and Dead Philosophers: Humanity and the Humane in Ancient Philosophy and Literature, 262.

Religious Studies:

John Esposito, Islam: The Straight Path, 335.

Ancient/Medieval texts:

Nemesius of Emessa, On the Nature of Man, 273.

Gregory of Nazianzus, Festal Orations [1, 38, 39, 40, 41, 45], 195.

Augustine, Confessions, 347.

Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Man: Theological Poetry, 176.

Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ [Orations 27-31 and Letters 101, 102], 175.

Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory Nazianzus [Orations 8, 14, 20, 26, 38, 39, 42, 44, and asst’d poems/letters], 273.

Evagrius of Pontus, Evagrius of Pontus, trans. Robert Sinkewicz [Includes: Foundations of the Monastic Life; To Eulogios; On the Vices Opposed to Virtues; On the Eight Thoughts; The Monk: a Treatise on the Practical Life; To Monks; To Virgins; On thoughts; Chapters on Prayer; Reflections; Exhortations; Thirty Three Ordered Chapters; Maxims], 369.

Evagrius of Pontus, Antirrhetikos, trans. David Brakke, 190.

Evagrius of Pontus, Evagrius Ponticus, trans. A.M. Cassiday [Includes: On the Faith; Great Letter; Letters 7,8,19,20; Foundations; On Thoughts; A Word about Prayer; Scholia on Job; Scholia on Ecclesiastes; On the 'Our Father'; Scholia on Luke; To the Virgins; Excerpts; Aphorisms; Definitions; On Prayer], 250.

Origen, De Principiis/ Peri Archon, 342.

Philo of Alexandria, De Mundis Opificio, 60.

Philo of Alexandria, De Gigantibus, 10.

Biblical Studies:

Martin Kähler, The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ, 154.

Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins, 357.

Ethics:

Larry Rasmussen, Earth Community, Earth Ethics, 364.

Wesley Smith, A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy: The Human Cost of the Animal Rights Movement, 310.

Biography/Memoir:

Sara Miles, Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion, 285.

Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness, 286.

Fiction/Literature:

Chaim Potok, The Chosen, 272.

Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev, 369.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 90.

Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, 242.

Toni Morrison, Beloved, 277.

C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 382.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 458.

Shusaku Endo, Silence, 201.

Danielle Ganek, Lulu Meets God and Doubts Him, 275.

Charles Johnson, Oxherding Tale, 176.

Self-Help (Self-defeat?):

Marty Nachel, Home Brewing for Dummies, 391.

First things first. The books that I settled on, after so much assistance from friends were:

o      Sara Miles, Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion (New York: Ballantine Books, 2007).

o      Augustine of Hippo, Confessions [Read books 1-10, skip 11-13] translated by Maria Boulding (New York: New City Press, 2001).

o      Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1997).

o      Shusako Endo, Silence, translated by William Johnston (New York: Taplinger, 1967).

o      Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha, translated by Susan Bernovsky (New York: Random House, 2008).

o      Simone Weil, Waiting for God, translated by Emma Crawford (New York: Harper Collins, 2001).

o      William L. Andrews, ed. Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986).

I was really pleased with the way that the whole project turned out. While some of the students had a hard time with their texts (predictably, those who were coming to Augustine for the first time), the vast majority of them brought some insightful analysis to the stories that they encountered. It was a lot of work to write prompts for each of the books that would lead the students into the sort of critical thinking I was hoping for, but that work seemed to have paid off in some really great papers.

The best part of the project, however, was the class discussion day. Regardless, it would have been hopeless to expect the students to have read anything else the day that their papers were due, but I wanted to give the students an opportunity to share the results of their hard work anyway. So I had the students sit down in groups with the others who had read the same text and share their own unique arguments; Is Simone Weil “religious” or “spiritual” in her intense devotion to Catholicism and simultaneous refusal of baptism? Does narrating your conversion through the metaphor of hunger and filling rather than pollution and cleansing  (as does Sara Miles), and participating in Communion prior to being baptized change the actual experience of being converted? The students had some productive disagreements here.

They then split up into groups with students who had read different texts, in order to summarize the plot of their story and reprise their own argument once again. At the end of this group work, having encountered a wildly diverse range of “conversions”, we were able to have a great conversation as a class about what takes place in a conversion, and more fundamentally, about the boundaries of what counts as  ”religion” and “religious” and what it takes to cross those boundaries.

There are a number of things that I’ll change as I teach the course again this Spring, but this assignment will remain as a central element.

The students will have the opportunity to choose between a range of texts, and I want there to be a pretty broad representation. At this point, here are the texts I have listed for them to choose from:

Augustine of Hippo, Confessions [books 1-10]

David James Duncan, The River Why

Shusako Endo, Silence

Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha,

Mother Teresa, Come Be My Light

Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

I would like to add another text (and perhaps replace Duncan, though it’s a phenomenal book), one authored by a woman, because the list is a little dude-heavy at the moment. Being thoroughly embedded in an androcentric/patriarchal atmosphere, I have not been able to think of another good woman’s conversion narrative (preferably penned by a woman) that I’d like to include, and so I’m asking for help. Do you have any that come to mind?