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Faith after the Anthropocene: A Prehistory
The Editor’s Column of the current issue of PMLA (134.3) opens with Wai Chee Dimock sharing a little of her experience recuperating from a serious accident last fall. Many things came to me during my four weeks at Spaulding Rehab: consolatory e-mails, cards, some flowers, and a care package from PMLA that kept me going for the entirety of my stay. What I never expected was a translation of a story by the Japanese writer Shiga Naoya, sent by Scott Miller, dean of the College of Humanities at Brigham Young University (BYU) and the translator. Dimock goes on to describe the Shiga piece and what moved her about it, lighting on a phrase, “collateral resilience,” that describes her impressions of the story and of what BYU specifically enables in its educational mission. I quote here one of the article’s paragraphs: Collateral resilience has no better ground than this university. Faith-based education is central to the mission of BYU: languages, however honored and flourishing, serve an instrumental function. Still, what can be done on this footing is not trivial. For the field coverage here is impressive even as a side benefit, allowing most of the primary languages of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas to be taught: Akan, Aymara, Bengali, Bicolano, Burmese, Cakchiquel, Cambodian, Cantonese, Cebuano, Dari, Fijian, Guarani, Haitian Creole, Hindi, Hmong, Ilangot, Indonesian, Japanese, Javanese, K’iche’, Korean, Laotian, Malagasy, Malay, Mandarin Chinese, Maori, Maya, Mongolian, Navajo, Pashto, Persian, Quechua, Samoan, Swahili, Tagalog, Tahitian, Tamil, Thai, Tongan, Twi, Urdu, Vietnamese, Waray, and Xhosa. Given this critical mass of spoken tongues, a further side benefit is the emergence of indigenous languages as a galvanizing force at BYU: not a relic...
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Transcendence, Presence, Blackberry
Last month on this blog, I remarked on the cognitively dissonant revelations that sometimes break into our daily quotidian lives regarding collective, global, or cosmic concerns. I described in that post how some scholars view our efforts to manage this dissonance through personal meaning absolutely absurd, while others offer ways of countering it through personal conviction and familial relationships. This month, as my final contribution as an intern for the Humanities Center, I would like to take a different tack on the issue—this month, I would like to consider not how texts remark on this divide, but rather how media can present experiences that initially increase this dissonance yet simultaneously function as tools to help us to manage it. Looking back over my undergraduate experience, I can pinpoint specific personal instances of literary and artistic transcendence—situations in which my experience with media has been wholly indescribable in words—untranslatable. I use the word transcendent here not only in a strictly religious sense (although those experiences are completely valid), but instead in a mode of taking me out of myself, reminding me of the world outside of my mind, connecting me to spheres that seem greater than my own life and even greater than my own language. In doing so, I realize the complicated position in which I’ve placed myself: language isn’t enough to describe these experiences, and yet in order to evidence my own interactions in this vein, I will have to attempt that very thing. I beg your patience as I do so, drawing upon your own personal experiences to supplement my inadequate renderings. I also recognize that scripture is explicitly meant for these very transcendent purposes; in this...
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The Power of Re-Reading
As the end of the school year approaches, I typically look forward to having more free time, and, after two busy semesters, look forward to reading things of my own choosing. While I enjoy reading student papers and perusing research materials, there is something refreshing about reading things I choose to read. I may pick up a new book, but I often find myself turning to something I have read before, an old favorite text I want to read yet again. I do this, I think, because of the comfort of reading something I have read and enjoyed before, such as classic mysteries by Arthur Conan Doyle, John Mortimer, or Agatha Christie, or popular works like the Harry Potter books. I know how they turn out, and somehow knowing they will resolve most of their plot threads and not leave me hanging (and thinking) satisfies me, perhaps because so much of life doesn’t lend itself to such immediate or neat resolution. The experience of re-reading these texts brings me a sense of pleasure and fulfillment so central to pleasure reading. But there are many other texts I find myself rereading on a regular basis because I teach them each year. The texts are familiar, but the experience of working my way through them changes as new groups of students read them and discover and then share in class the insights they have uncovered. While some observations come up time and again, each year new ideas enter into the conversations of learning we have, and each class responds with fresh energy and newfound enthusiasm for texts that are new to them, though familiar to me. I find myself energized by...
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Pleasure, Transcendence, and the Problem of Beauty
“Beauty” is an unusual term. According to Webster dictionary, beauty is defined as “the qualities of a person or a thing that give pleasure to the senses or to the mind.”1 However, pleasure is also a problematic term. Eating a tub of ice cream might bring someone pleasure, but is it beautiful? Perhaps so. Serial killers might also find pleasure from murder, but most reasonable people certainly wouldn’t define that as a form of “beauty.” If it’s simply a matter of positive sensory experiences, the term beauty becomes void and meaningless due to the endless variability of taste, opinion, experience and perspective. If it’s only about pleasure, “beauty” becomes an ideal that is neither distinguishable nor reasonably sought after. There’s a popular idea that art, therefore, is an avenue towards the ideal or transcendent, intended to be beautiful or masterfully executed. The English philosopher, Sir Roger Scruton, created a documentary in 2009 called Why Beauty Matters, which proclaims his own stance on the topic. According to Scruton, since the twentieth century, art has become degenerate, degraded from the likes of Michelangelo or Rembrandt into art that is meaningless, unnecessarily crude or outrageous. He cites modern art examples such as Marcel Duchamp, who presented a urinal in an art exhibition in 1917, or Piero Manzoni, who submitted a can of his own feces to a similar venue. Scruton demands a call back towards art that exemplifies the human form in its full, representational glory. He insists that art’s truest form is art that is pure, Christian, inspiring and wholesome.2 The problem with this frame of thought centers around the same issue that made modernism flop and postmodernism take root. Call it Satan’s...
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Events
Education Week 2019
When: Monday, Aug 19, 2019
Where:
more event details ->
On Being Vulnerable, Part II: Faith after the Anthropocene
When: Friday, Sep 13, 2019
Where: JFSB B192
more event details ->
Colloquium: Greg Thompson
When: Thursday, Sep 19, 2019
Where: 4010 JFSB
more event details ->
Humanities Center Blog
Faith after the Anthropocene: A Prehistory
The Editor’s Column of the current issue of PMLA (134.3) opens with Wai Chee Dimock sharing a little of her experience recuperating from a serious accident last fall.
Many things came to me during my four ...
continue reading ->
Transcendence, Presence, Blackberry
Last month on this blog, I remarked on the cognitively dissonant revelations that sometimes break into our daily quotidian lives regarding collective, global, or cosmic concerns. I described in that post how some scholars view ...
continue reading ->
The Power of Re-Reading
As the end of the school year approaches, I typically look forward to having more free time, and, after two busy semesters, look forward to reading things of my own choosing. While I enjoy reading ...
continue reading ->
Media Gallery
