Faces in the Moon, Armies in the Clouds

Today I found out about a new “structure” for teaching writing, called the Jane Schaffer method. You can find an outline of what this looks like online. I’m struck by the regimentation of this method, not only suggesting how to structure particular paragraphs but dictating the transitions and content down to the sentence level. Although he spells her name wrong, this critic hits some of the problems with trying to teach writing through strict structures. He seems concerned that people will lose their creativity and love of writing. I think the issue is even deeper, as such rigid structures suggest to students that ideas are best conveyed in tight little packages like this.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve found teaching principle and structure invaluable to helping students learn how to write better. I try to teach more open structures, though, that really focus on developing principles, and I make sure that students understand that these are exercises, what the principles are we are working on, and how they can be used in real writing. The problem with structure is when the teaching of structure is divorced from principle, when students learn this as an arbitrary structure, the right way to do things, or, most likely, the right way to perform properly to impress a teacher and get a grade.

Learning to write in constraints is important. When we move on to professional, academic, journalistic, or even creative and personal writing, we write through a set of constraints built off of the expectations of our readers and our cognitive processes as humans. Readers make evaluations about our writing, and as a result take in information, based on how we relate to those constraints. When teaching structures, it is also good to convey to students that this is also an exercise in learning a set of constraints and fitting to them, learning to enter into them and make them sing.

But when we build our structures too rigidly, students lose this. They are overwhelmed by the structure to the extent that they fail to get the principle. If its too tight, they view structure as something that you want to package your ideas into, rather then something that is really in the service of communication and expression.

The other danger is the hidden demon of evaluation, that a teacher can succumb to the temptation to use conformity to a rigid structure to evaluate a student rather then really engaging with and evaluating the effectiveness of a student’s writing. It’s a real temptation. Evaluating student writing is hard work.

While at a institution sponsored party for the students in the residence hall I worked in at Penn, I remember a conversation with a student who was doing an internship with the CIA. Somehow we got on the topic of my research. I was in the process of gearing up for my ethnography on the ritual magic lodge, and I told him about this, which made him really excited. Knowing he was doing the internship with the CIA, I told him about the conspiracy theories that attributed the Ordo Templi Orientis much greater power then they actually have, claiming that they run the CIA, etc.

“Well,” he said, “we [meaning the CIA] really do use occult practices.” I honestly didn’t take him very seriously, but I entertained his conversation anyway, “Really?” “Yes,” he said, “we use psychics and remote viewing all the time. It works you know, and we use what works.”

Now, I honestly don’t think this student had any direct experience to substantiate this, but the fact is that both the military and the CIA have explored the use of psychic and occult techniques. It’s unsurprising that, given budgets with little oversight, someone might be able to divert funds to projects that might otherwise be nixed. Even in budgets with substantial oversight, people are able to fund their pet research projects. So, you end up with projects like STAR GATE, a project funded by the CIA at Stanford to explore the possible use of “remote viewing.”

As someone who studies occultism, esotericism, and magic in the context of contemporary religious life, I’m intrigued by this phenomenon. It’s an interesting intersection of media, underground knowledge communities, and actual institutional practices that provides insight into the way humans use narratives of hidden power to reconcile incomplete data sets and narrate their experience of their relationship with political entities. I’ve never been able to figure out how I would actually represent this complex field, though.

And perhaps scholarship isn’t the best venue. Fortunately, the artist Suzanne Treister has taken up the challenge and put together a project called “HEXEN2039″ which the web page claims “uncovers or constructs links between conspiracy theories, occult groups, Chernobyl, witchcraft, the US film industry, British Intelligence agencies, Soviet brainwashing, behaviour control experiments of the US Army and recent practices of its Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command (PSYOP), in light of alarming new research in contemporary neuroscience…”  It strikes me that a representation that includes the experience of fabrication and construction within the narrative captures the reality of this part of our culture better then a clear, determinate one.

Reading over a report in the Global Politician about the exhibit (the only one I could find on Google News), I was intrigued to see Treister’s own experiments, and the fact that she specifically went to Enochian work and Aleister Crowley:

Treister experimented with remote viewing by studying the techniques of John Dee, the 16th Century controversial consultant to Queen Elizabeth. She uses a scrying stone. The term scrying comes from the English word descry, which means ‘to make out dimly’ or ‘to reveal.’ Incidentally, Treister actually used John Dee’s stone, a crystal ball with a value of ?50,000, which was stolen from the Science Museum in London in 2004. “The first remote viewing drawing I made was of the floor plan of Aleister Crowley’s house in Scotland before I could find an image. I verified later that in fact it had a similarly unusual structure”, Treister says.”I am not sure about the veracity of other later drawings, many were unverifiable, but also this is not necessarily the issue, it’s more about the idea that these phenomena are researched seriously by the military, and in that sense all this becomes a real part of the world.”

The Little Professor has a nice bit of advice on how to best use an academic listserv when you have a question about your research.  It probably suggests a bit more caution than I would advise — as much as I find digressions spurred by an inadequately formulated question annoying, I also have found good resources and ideas there — nevertheless, I have found that the academic listservs I participate on are able to reach a much higher level of discourse when people do their homework as they are writing.

Thanks, by the way, to Chas Clifton for pointing this out for me on an academic listserv we are both on.

Nathaniel Deutsch, of Swarthmore College, recently wrote an op-ed piece in the New York times advocating that the State department help Mandeans in Iraq re-settle in the United States. He points out that because of the turmoil produced by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the community is literally disintegrating, and as Mandeans settle in other locations they forced to either hide their religious identity or give it up completely.

I first became aware of the Mandeans when I read Kurt Rudolph’s Gnosis years ago in a graduate seminar on the subject. He treats them as one of the only, if not the only, living tradition with direct continuity to the ancient religions that were grouped together under the sign of “gnosis” by early church writers.

As Deutsch states:

The Mandeans are the only surviving Gnostics from antiquity, cousins of the people who produced the Nag Hammadi writings like the Gospel of Thomas, a work that sheds invaluable light on the many ways in which Jesus was perceived in the early Christian period. The Mandeans have their own language (Mandaic, a form of Aramaic close to the dialect of the Babylonian Talmud), an impressive body of literature, and a treasury of cultural and religious traditions amassed over two millennia of living in the southern marshes of present-day Iraq and Iran.

It certainly would be a tragedy if this tradition died off, adding an intellectual and spiritual tragedy to the already real human tragedy of so many Iraqis, whether Mandean or otherwise, are experiencing now.

A little while back, I posted regarding a decision by the Federal Prison Bureau to remove all religious books not fitting a small set of lists. The New Yorks times reported yesterday that they have decided, at least temporarily, to put the books back on the shelves.

What is interesting, but unsurprising if you reflect on it, is that it seems that it was conservative pressure that caused the prison bureau to back down on its decision. Remember the significant contribution of evangelicals to getting the now defunct Religious Freedom Restoration Act in place, and you will realize the importance many conservative Christians recognize for basic religious freedoms.

After the details of the removal became widely known this month, Republican lawmakers, liberal Christians and evangelical talk shows all criticized the government for creating a list of acceptable religious books.

This is only a partial victory for advocates of religious freedom in prisons, though, as the bureau seems to be still considering making such lists to limit materials–a move that I think is particularly entangling because it puts the bureau in the position of deciding what is a “valid” representation of any religion.

The bureau has not abandoned the idea of creating such lists, Judi Simon Garrett, a spokeswoman, said in an e-mail message. But rather than packing away everything while those lists were compiled, the religious materials will remain on the shelves, Ms. Garrett explained.

Well, conservative critics are having troubles rallying an outcry against Columbia. I have to say, they played their cards well, both emphasizing the need to engage even radically contrary views and having the president of the university give a grilling introduction to the leader.

And at the end of the day, we need to trust truth to come forth, as it seems to have here. As Dana Milbank wisely responded to those who protested giving him a platform:

But that objection misses a crucial point: Without listening to Ahmadinejad, how can the world appreciate how truly nutty he is?

The main page that this blog is a part of, religiousthought.com, has been reconfigured now as a wiki. This will make it much easier to organize and update information about my academic work. I will continue to maintain this blog with wordpress, but may transform the look in the long run to bring it into greater alignment with the wiki.

In demonizing Mr. Ahmadinejad, the West has served him well, elevating his status at home and in the region at a time when he is increasingly isolated politically because of his go-it-alone style and ineffective economic policies, according to Iranian politicians, officials and political experts.

How true. This from the New York Times.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is set to visit Columbia University tonight. It’s a brave move by Columbia, I’ll grant them that. It’s easy for us to criticize them, to see this as giving support to a man who is a holocaust denier, who helps perpetuate divisiveness across the world more then piece. Yet, I think I’m most impressed with Columbia’s commitment here to providing their students with an opportunity to encounter, directly, a world leader who seems so at odds with their own values.

To me, this is really the substance of humanistic higher education, of learning to account for, to engage with, those human values we are geared to reject. This doesn’t mean we have to learn to accept those values as valid, only that we must learn that they are substantial and real, and that we must seek ways to engage with them in dialog instead of violence. In inviting Ahmadinejad, Columbia takes up that challenge and confronts their students with that challenge. They stage the reality of democratic values within their domain, not only in giving him the platform, but in creating the opportunity for the protests that will happen.

Bill O’Reilly may be tired of free speech. I’m not. Our ancestors spoke truth that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, that this democracy game is not an easy one to play, and free speech can certainly be demanding. Yet, as with most of the best challenges in life—love, work, family—it is the substance of that challenge that shows us the integrity of the value.

For campuses, the integrity of the value is also its tie to truth. We cannot find truth, if ideas are pushed away because they are simply repugnant to us. We must come to understand their normality, to bring them under the rubric of understanding, even if that understanding ultimately leads us to rejection. And that is, at the end, the work Columbia does here: They normalize Ahmadinejad. They take away his demonic power. They make him another piece on the board of the world politics.

The New York Times article I cited above is actually one the best pieces of analysis I have read yet on Iranian politics. What is rare, and refreshing, about the piece is that it does a real political analysis of the Iranian system. It emphasizes less the Islamic aspects of that system, then the persistence of the revolutionary ideology. In a time when analysts would like to give a simple narrative of Islam verses the West, this article does more: it shows us that the issues we face in Iran are primarily political ones. It helps readers understand that Iran is a complex political system. It does the work of real reporting and analysis.