Transcript
Speaker 1:
Already, one of the pleasures of this room is people from different parts of life, people who do theology and ethnography and critical studies. Some colleagues, old and new. We're glad to have you, and I already know professor Patton well enough to know that she enjoys a conversation and she's up for real challenges. So please be actively thinking about how you want to join us for the Q&A, for the public conversation after our panelists speak. We're here today to celebrate new research, and a new publication by this year's AAR president, Laurie Patton. Her new book is entitled, Who Owns Religion? Scholars and Their Publics in the Late Twentieth Century. The book is forthcoming extremely soon from University of Chicago Press. So soon that somewhere in the room, some copies. The rest of us, we'll wait until our holiday lists are really crystallized and make that purchase for agnostics, polytheists, monotheists celebrating the holidays.
Speaker 1:
This is an important book for thinking about what we do as practitioners, and who we are as participants in larger global cultures. It's a book that expands out from Professor Patton's scholarship in South Asian history in particular, and begins to think across a series of case studies from the 1980s through the late 1990s. These are case studies of encounters in which scholars were subject to at times violent responses by those communities they had lived with, they had studied, they had analyzed, written about. Those communities acting back, often critically, violently even, against the scholars that had put forth their research. A new dimension of power and a new dimension of criticism emerged. This is a work where Laurie Patton is thinking about the responsibilities of the writer, and the need for more rigorous thinking beyond our available infrastructure of bureaucracy in the university on the one hand, and the Wild West of the internet and of hate mail and the reality of domestic terrorism, international terrorism, on the other.
Speaker 1:
She's moving with her usual skill and challenge from these local cases of a colleague receiving hate mail, to these global of emerging new technologies of the internet, emerging discourses such as post-colonialism and the calling out of imperialist practices by communities that feel exploited, and calling also for reconciliation practices that allow for anger and difference but that do not end with mutual silence and antagonism. We look forward to this esteemed panel commenting on her work, and then to a response from Laurie Patton herself. I'll just spend a few minutes on each of our panelists, many of whom are well known. Our first speaker will be Mark Juergensmeyer. He is a professor, now emeritus or partially retired. No? Wrong.
Mark Juergensmeyer:
Still teaching.
Speaker 1:
Still teaching? My apologies.
Mark Juergensmeyer:
Don't force [inaudible 00:03:51].
Speaker 1:
I will not, I will not.
Mark Juergensmeyer:
Who've you been talking to?
Speaker 1:
I guess I come from Boston to California and I'm like, "Aren't we all kind of just, you know, relaxed?" I apologize. He's an affiliate professor of Religious Studies at University of California Santa Barbara, and he has founded there the Global and International Studies program, and a Global and International Studies program, the Orfalea Center. More or less. One of his most important books that has had international attention is his widely read Terror in the Mind Of God: The Global Rise Of Religious Violence. That came out from University of California Press and in its fourth edition, is published in 2017. He's coming to us as someone who has spoken with religious activists, including violent religious activists, to understand more about their rationale for why violence seems to them the appropriate response to felt injustices.
Speaker 1:
We have also tonight, Leela Prasad. She's hailing from Duke university. Her research focuses on anthropology of ethics, focusing on South Asia in particular. Her research is on colonialism and decoloniality. She looks also at prison pedagogy, thinking with Gandhi, and her book Poetics of Conduct: Narrative and Moral Being in a South Indian Town, was published by Columbia University Press in 2007. Her second book is entitled The Audacious Raconteur: Storytelling And Sovereignty In Colonial India. We have also with us, Eric Owens. He is the director of the International Studies program and associate professor of Theology at Boston College.
Speaker 1:
His research explores a variety of intersections of religion and public life, including public theology, citizenship in global context, and the challenge of fostering the common good. Among the co-edited volumes put forth in his name, one work is Gambling: Mapping the American Moral Landscape. Another, Religion and the Death Penalty: A Call For Reckoning, and finally, The Sacred and the Sovereign: Religion and International Politics. Thank you to our panelists, and thank you again to Professor Patton for being here, opening up our worlds for discussion and for bringing this careful research for our consideration. Thank you. Professor Juergensmeyer.
Mark Juergensmeyer:
Thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to be here. The first thing I want to say is, go read this book. No, I'm not kidding. Everybody in this room, go read this book. I say this not just to the people in this room, but to our vast video audience that is watching it. if you're watching this in video, lying on your couch in kind of a half in slumber, jump up, run out and get a copy of this book and read it. I'll tell you why. Not only is it fun to read, I told Laurie that it interrupted my sleep as I flew back from Copenhagen the night before last, and I ignored the stupid TV movies and channels. I just couldn't put this book down.
Mark Juergensmeyer:
Not only is it full of interesting ideas, it's full of interesting stories. She gets into the cases, each one of these cases is kind of riveting, how this develops. So it's worth reading, but it's also worth reading even if you don't think that you are in peril. Even if you don't think that in your having done your mundane academic work, you wake up some morning and find your house surrounded by angry members of a religious faith who are burning torches and demanding to see you because they think you've offended them in some way. That could happen to you. All of the cases in this book were just normal people doing their mundane work, who woke up one morning and saw their house surrounded by people with angry torches. You should read it for that reason, but even if this is never going to happen to you, you should read it because it probes deeply into the issue of the relationship of religious studies scholarship within the larger world.
Mark Juergensmeyer:
It locates and makes us think about what we do within the context of the public sphere, or the chaotic public sphere or the 'public space' as Laurie Patton calls it, trying to differentiate it from the Harbermasian concept. By the way, I find your discussion about the Harbermas's public space and the role of religion to be very, very interesting and very useful. So you should all read this book. As I read it though, I had one question that kept on rebounding in my mind and that was, why now? Because it's not just in the United States and it's not just for the academic discourse on religion, but around the world. There is this kind of hardening of the rhetoric about religion, and the sharpening of the notion of religious identities being priority. In that sense, it has to be the right kind of identity, and being pure to a kind of rigid purity that didn't really exist even a couple of decades ago.
Mark Juergensmeyer:
We see this happening in Christianity in the United States, where mainstream Protestantism is kind of disappearing in the wake of a whole new strident evangelicalism. We find this in places like even among Buddhists, in places like Myanmar and Sri Lanka. Buddhists are supposed to be the nicest people on the planet, but they're urging people to kill each other in Myanmar because they're not true to their idea of what pure Buddhism is. Hinduism in India with the rise of the BJP. In Islamic countries. Indonesia used to be the most moderate of Muslim societies. Yet recently there's a hardening of rigidity and the Ahmadiyya people are being excluded in an awful kind of way because of this sense of being the right kind of Muslims. So this is happening everywhere, and why now? I found a hint of the answer in chapter three of Laurie's book, where she talks about cultural identity, and how this opposition to religious studies research in many cases is linked with notions of religion as being a primary element of cultural identity.
Mark Juergensmeyer:
It's a very interesting and useful section of her book, but thinking about it, it struck me that just a couple of decades ago, we wouldn't think that way. We would think in terms of national identity, we'd be proudly American or Indonesian or Egyptian or Indian, or whatever. What's happened that has eroded our sense of identity, of location with national identities, and forced us to seek other kinds of patterns of identity formation? Why is this so global? Of course, globalization is part of the answer. That increasingly in a world of multiculturalism where everybody can live everywhere and can, and where everybody can immediately be in contact with everyone and can, the whole notion, not just the artifact of the nation state and the confidence of that, but also the whole idea of nationalism as a source of the primary identities for people, has been vastly eroded. In that lacuna and that need for some kind of a social location of one's identity, ethnic and religious communities have come to the fore.
Mark Juergensmeyer:
With that, the kind of stridency of knowing that you're a part of the pure, the right religion, the right ethnicity, and the kind of exclusivism and the alienation that comes with it. I see this really quite interestingly in the case of the Sikhs, as this is the section of the book that struck me most closely because this is the area that I know most about, having lived in India, having lived in the Punjab for several years, being very close to the Sikh community. A lot of my writings have touched on Sikhism. In fact, in the interest of pure disclosure, I should say that I was an outside reader of the dissertation of Harjot Singh Oberoi, the dissertation that then became the book that became the source of this controversy. I've known Harjot for a long time, and another of the readers of that dissertation was his mentor, Hew McLeod.
Mark Juergensmeyer:
McLeod in fact had gotten into even more hot water than Harjot... As you mentioned in your book... With an earlier book, came out in late 1960s on Guru Nanak and the Sikh religion, where he talked about the origins of Sikhism and trying to locate it within the context of this particular period of medieval Hinduism. Initially, Laurie, you'd be interested to know that there was really very little controversy over this book. I remember in the 1970s going to the Golden Temple in Amritsar and they handed out as an official statement from the Golden Temple, a little pamphlet on the teaching for English-speaking people on the basic ideas of Guru Nanak. It was from McLeod's book, so it was at that time regarded as... and rightly so... was regarded as a great friend of the Sikhs. He had created an Institute for Christian and Sikh dialogue at Baring College in Batala.
Mark Juergensmeyer:
He himself had basically abandoned his Presbyterian faith and even though he came as a missionary, he really embraced the Sikh tradition. He didn't become a Sikh, but for him it was really a family home. To then, as the decades proceeded, to be increasingly alienated by this community was... I know because I knew he was a friend all those years... is a personally troubling thing. He went, "Why? Why me? I love Sikhs. Why are they treating me this way?" What happened in those intervening years? You mentioned this in your chapter, but I want to highlight, and that's the rise of the Khalistan Movement.
Mark Juergensmeyer:
The Khalistan Movement emerged for reasons that I've talked about in an earlier book, that is occurring around the world, of the loss of the sense of Indian nationalism as the dominant paradigm, social paradigm of identity, and the rise where there's Punjabis of the sense that, "We Sikhs have to become our own home, our own community. We have to..." After all, as they said, "The Muslims got Pakistan, the Hindus got India. What did we get? We need to have our own Khalistan, our own separate religious nation." This rise, this is new. There were religious politics among the Sikhs and there'd been other movements for more Sikh autonomy, but this idea of there being a separate Sikhs nation, this was a new thing.
Mark Juergensmeyer:
I think it was a part of a global pattern of the identification of religious identities with nationalism, in a way that then alienates minority communities and try to purify the community around a very strict and simple idea of what that religion should be. Ironically, this rise of Khalistan, which then was the context... This is 1980s... which then was the context for this, not only the increasing alienation of McLeod but also singling out Harjot Singh Oberoi, his student doing the same kind of thing, as yet another manifestation of this kind of anti-Sikh community by suggesting that there wasn't a pure Sikh identity from the very beginning, it evolved in some way.
Mark Juergensmeyer:
We're scholars of religion, we all know that religious traditions evolve, but you don't necessarily know that or wouldn't think about it if you're a member of a religious community who wants to assert that from the beginning of time immemorial, you have been a distinct religious identity; you are not Hindus, you're not Muslims. Even though there was a time of fluidity of religion, and the late 19th century was one of them, and in fact it was Hindus and Muslims who were first asserting through the Arya Samaj and through the Muslim organizations, that they were distinct communities, in part because of the British emphasis on wanting to know what the communities were.
Mark Juergensmeyer:
The census became the most political act, because then you had to identify what you were because then political proportion... Yeah, yeah... of seats would be done on communal boundaries. I don't want to blame the British on everything. There were other forces at work as you point out in your chapter, but this was the context then of in the late 19th century, which eerily is similar to the same kind of urgency of a sense of wanting to claim a religious identity in 1990, just a hundred years later. Paradoxically, the very kind of thing that Oberoi was reporting on as a historian a hundred years ago came back to haunt him in a sense, the story of a hundred years later with the same kind of sense of the rejection of the fluidity of religion.
Mark Juergensmeyer:
So, what to do? I want to close my comments with just telling you a story about just two weeks ago when I was in India. I was back in India for about 12 days and I went back to the Punjab. When I was there, I visited an old friend. I mean, literally an old friend, 93-year-old Jagtar Singh Grewal. Grewal was a great scholar. Laurie very rightly mentions Grewal's work in the chapter on the Sikhs, as somebody who is a scholar, kind of differed with McLeod and showed that he also agreed to some extent, that there was a kind of founding community from the very beginning. That way, his work was more acceptable by the Sikh community. But he always said, "If you disagree, we have to disagree on academic grounds and intellectual grounds. You have to have the historical proof, you have to argue as scholars argue."
Mark Juergensmeyer:
He and McLeod were best of friends, really to the very end. They were always close despite this kind of academic difference, and I always have maintained my friendship with Grewal, so I was eager to see Grewal and even at 93 I asked him, I said, "Well, what are you working on now?" Because I assumed that we academics are always working on something, right? Even at 93, we're working on something. Yet another book, yet another project. He said, "Well, I'm revisiting my book, Guru Nanak in History," which is the book that kind of counteracts McLeod. He said, "I'm making some changes." I said, "A new source material or interpretation?" He said, "Both."
Mark Juergensmeyer:
He said, "One of the things is that, you know, it seems to me, much more clearly now than before, that Nanak lived in a situation of fluidity of religion. And he saw the kind of variation in religious tradition that really, we don't know, it's so different from our world today." He said, "For example, the term 'Muslim' and 'Hindu'," he says, "What I've discovered is that when Guru Nanak uses these terms, he's not talking about everybody. He's talking about Muslim theologians or Hindu Brahman theologians. That's what the word 'Hindu' and 'Muslim' means in Nanak's rhetoric." I said, "Well, this is a very interesting finding."
Mark Juergensmeyer:
But then I said, "What about everybody else? What about people we think of as Muslims and Hindus?" Grewal thought for a second. He said, "Oh, well, they're just people. They're just people. They don't have a strong sense of identity, a strong label. They're just people." At the end of the book when Laurie talks about our sensitivity as one response, but I think also we as scholars have something to contribute to the larger discussion in the public square, and that is to be able to see that for many people in many, many moments in religious history, to be associated with religion was not something... A point of pride or distinctiveness. It was simply something one did as a person. They weren't Hindus and Muslims and Christians and Jews, they were just people. So Laurie, thank you for that wonderful book, and go out and read it. Please. I'm not kidding. Go out and read it. Thank you.
Speaker 4:
I just want to start by echoing marks, refrain. Yes, go out and read this book. But this is my second engagement with this book. Just a week ago Laurie Skyped into my class, my graduate seminar on Theorizing Religion at Duke and we had a lovely conversation about the issues that come up in this book. And I can tell you how much it struck a chord with a very diverse group of students, Hebrew, Bible, religion and modernity, Asian religions, myself, that it makes conversation across the board and for lots of different reasons. But Laurie's book... So this is a bit more of a formal response, the kinds of questions that came up in that moment and then specific questions I do have about the book. So Laurie's book reminded me of a 1995 documentary film I love to show in my classes, when I get a chance, I show this film, called Whose Paintings? directed by professor Jayasinhji Jhala, a visual anthropologist at Temple University. The film shows Jhala and Alwin Belak, an art collector, together looking at collection of paintings in Belak's affluent apartment in Philadelphia.
Speaker 4:
Jhala is also a Raj, [inaudible 00:22:30] from the Northwestern state of Rajasthan and Belak is a Russian Jewish American collector of Rajput miniature paintings from India, from the 16th to the 19th century. The conversation unfolds into parallel but connected streams. For Jhala, the paintings evoke memories of his ancestral hometown in Rajasthan of his family's devotional traditions and he situates artistic flourish in the paintings within the lived practices of a bygone Rajput era. Belak tells the story of how he acquired each painting for how much and how each painting displays skill and mastery over the medium. He clearly loves the paintings, the miniatures and knows the history of the art form as their very civil conversation about the paintings unfolds, we realize that they are in fact speaking to each other, but also past each other.
Speaker 4:
It reaches, it's most dissonant, although subtly dissonant point when they look at the paintings of a goddess. Belak places it in the year 1660 in the region of the Punjab Hills. And he describes it as a depiction of a Shakti, a goddess atop, a dead man whom she has just revived. In my hands, he says, is something, this is Belak, is something beautiful, something important, something mysterious, something that is seminal. And Jhala identifies the goddess in the paintings as his clan goddess who meets up with his ancestor in a cremation ground, they marry and the family line begins and he places this year as 1190. They establish nine kingdoms, he says, in India and 14 principalities and Gujarat in Rajasthan and in Madhya Pradesh, British. And then in his words, he says, and how progeny the biological descendants of this union number, something like 45 thousand people today. So when I look at the painting, Jhala tells Belak, it's not the abstract idea I get, but a very particular idea and the hymns that come to my mind, my daughters say their prayers on their way to public school in Princeton and they recite a verse that goes something like this. And Jhala recites the [shloka 00:24:42] or a hymn and then there's this beautiful moment where he's singing the song as he looks at this painting. But the jacket cover for the DVD tells us that a silent refrain generated by the discourse makes the film an inquiry into questions about cultural patrimony. It asks, what are the rights and obligations to individual community, nation, and to the world at large with regard to our traditions and to the possession and value of artifacts. Now, when this question turns volatile, you must read Laurie's book.
Speaker 4:
So Laurie's book, similarly is a very searching and very timely, even urgent study of the silent refrains and articulations around the critical question, who owns religion? She teases out the questions' echoes what is a religious or secular community? Who are its publics and when do they form? Why do they form? Why do collisions occur between publics and can these collisions be preempted? In her words, the book is, and I quote her, I want to liberally quote you, so I'll just quit doing this. So you'll recognize your words. Yeah, you do that. Okay. This is Laurie's collaborative enterprise. In her words, this book is a historical phenomenology of public of the public spaces that have erupted when real scholars meet real communities in dissension and where their roles and rivalries are put into high relief. So I turned to specific questions that are brought up by this general point.
Speaker 4:
So I'm struck Laurie by how your book, which you say is a phenomenology of public spaces can also be read as an epistemology of hurt, hurt that underlies eruptive public space hurt whose roots are often elsewhere. The six case studies in the book vividly show that there is collective hurt and there is individual hurt. It is carried through historical memory. It bears a materiality, it is generated by disclosures of secrets. It's spawns unbelonging and outcasting and in short, hurt is a residue, an affect, a material reality and it is also a long lasting agent. Read from the perspective of an epistemology of hurt, one of the most tantalizing issues embedded in your analysis, I think is where does this hurt reside? Where does this hurt reside? Especially when the interpretation of religion, which is the ground under scrutiny in this book, is a shifting terrain to begin with.
Speaker 4:
What strikes means strikes me rather forcefully, read in the comparative fashion in which you set up your case studies, is the role of world colonialism in generating that hurt, a fact that will forever impact the study of religion. Yet I do appreciate your caution when you say, quotes please, the traces of colonialism and interpretation takes shape in very different ways and that's, it's sort of a casual thing in there, but nothing in that book is casual I think. In the Sikh, Muslim and Hindu cases she says sexual and historical interpretations were seen as functions of the neo-colonial interest of the West, while in the native American case, she looks at, the wounds of colonialism are quite near in space and time quite close to the heart and the mind, I close quotes there.
Speaker 4:
For some native American perspectives, the white scholar might well be continuing the unfinished imperial acts of US colonization says Laurie. So my question is, can epistemic hurt ever be undone? Can it only be creatively transformed into some form of narrative justice so that the spiraling violence at some point stops? Also no matter what you write about, it seems to me, if there is a context, however distant of colonial experience, can it ever become totally irrelevant to interpretation? My second question, if I can run with your central metaphor of eruption, I think your book invites us to reflect on the simmering discontent that proceeds in eruption. For example, she talks about the relentless violence against first nations committed by the American state, which is embodied in the white man, the colonial States fracturing of the Sikh community followed by the Indian states raid and the Golden Temple. These acts trigger a simmering discontent, call that history maybe, that gathers power over time until it achieves a critical mass that sets off this eruption.
Speaker 4:
So my question is, and this is the question it's provoked for me, is do scholars have the responsibility to consciously muddle and delimit the genres in which they write, so that for example, they acknowledge historical truth and truth, and one account is also, but also acknowledge it as theological truth in another account? Right, so you have the idea of mother earth, which is one of the examples that she brings up as an invention in one of the case studies and it's a true invention, if you will, from one perspective in the context of political conflict between white people and native Americans, but it's also not true in the context of indigenous spirituality who just don't think of mother earth as an invention. It's a real thing. She's a real being. I found your treatment of secret publics absolutely fascinating, especially the idea of secrecy within religious traditions. Secrecy can mean many things, she points out, to scholars across language cultures at different times.
Speaker 4:
For example, the esotericness of Ismaili Ginans that you look at. Actually it should also, just as an aside mentioned that if this is something that we can discuss, I really liked the way in which you've summarized all the cases and somebody as an act itself of negotiation was something that leaped out at me. How do you tell the story of a conflict makes a big difference to how you interpret the conflict itself. So the esotericness of Ismaili Ginans was historically connected to the survival and legitimacy of the community within a wider Islamic fold. And in the Ramakrishna mission, one reason why tantra had come to occupy the realm of the unspoken from one account at least was colonial contempt of tantra practices.
Speaker 4:
So the question is knowing why some something cannot be surfaced, so to speak, is critical to figuring out scholarly construction of silence and disclosure. So my question here is the following, just as there are hidden transcripts, as James Scott calls them, are they also secret transcripts which need to be deciphered through rules and understandings that are tacit, how do you go about that? When secret publics are violated by moving data from a secret public to a visible public will in ethical framing restore, or is it even sufficient? Or will it inevitably estrange scholars and communities? That's a question.
Speaker 4:
So, on a related point and we can maybe just move that to the discussion, I'm intrigued by the language of moderation proposed by Ronald Grimes in the native American case that you have, on whether the issue of non-natives could teach native American materials. And this is a question that one can take to a whole bunch of different contexts and Ronald Grimes, who's a native American scholar, a scholar of native American traditions, important difference there. The internet conversation he initiated with the democratic intent of involving native Americans and other scholars posed three questions. So these are his three questions, which Laurie reports should or should not European Americans be teaching courses on native religions of North America? And the two questions that I have something to think about is, the second question is if we should not, he says, why not? And what should be the results of our deferral? The third question if we should, how best can we proceed, and my question, Laurie, is, would it have made a difference, if Grimes had replaced the we with a they? You know, in the first question he talks about European Americans and then shifts to the we, and the our there. Does the problematic insider outsider conceptualization ironically get deepened by writing on behalf of a white community.
Speaker 4:
Also, I mean frankly, why is an art co-teaching with native experts a possibility to the fact that they don't have PhDs? Who cares? I mean, they have the knowledge, right? And finally your conclusion begins to outline an outline, a possible ideal of a big tent approach. And this is a conversation that we had just begun to have in that when you Skyped in to the study of religion, as you say, and this is Laurie's words, I'm Catholic on approaches to the study of religion and think it important to include as many of them as possible. In doing so, we should commit to making inevitable, the inevitable tension this big tent produces creative and not destructive. Scholars have the right to be exclusively critical or adamantly sympathetic and everything in between, but we no longer have the right to be surprised when the communities make and publish their own opinions about us. [inaudible 00:13:02].
Speaker 4:
And this sort of interestingly, in an interesting way, took me back to the example of you know, of Eliade as one of the ancestors of the public, the idea of the public and you identify him as an ancestor in the evolution of the public sphere, which I thought was a really complex choice. A really good choice was so full of ambiguity, but the difficulty I have appreciating is hierophany, on its own terms, is a shadow that falls on it by his published fantasy of artists, teachers [inaudible 00:13:31] in Bengal Nights. Bengal nights had hurt her enough. For her to come all the way from Calcutta to the university of Chicago to confront him about it. The shadow, Eliade's novel had conducted a real betrayal that could only be refuted by a counter-novel that she wrote.
Speaker 4:
If my reading should be just as capacious as writing in the big tent, that you talk about, then I will need to engage Eliade, as a scholar of the global South, as a woman and as a scholar from the global South, also, with these long shadows casting their grim forms on his work. So I do feel that. The big tent to me it seems it's a space to create locality. How is locality created after one acknowledges that others are already in the tent? This leaves me with a concluding, overarching question, I wonder if the big tent approach also means solutions are to be found in a proximal space, which means that knowledge is identified and described through consultative practice and that disagreement is expressed through capacious writing strategies such as, maybe through juxtaposed accounts of things. I stop there. Thank you. Thank you for this fabulous book.
Speaker 3:
Anybody [inaudible 00:35:59] . Thank you to you both. Thank you, Laurie, for letting me be a part of this conversation and for the pleasure of reading and such a terrific book. It's an honor to be on the stage with such terrific scholars all the way down the row here and I echo their comments that this book comes at a really great time for the American Academy of Religion to be discussing this and for all of us who are thinking about our various publics that we're accountable to and that we wish to address, and Laurie has an enormous amount of good things, important things to say to all of us as we move through this space. I want to give myself a little timer to make sure I'm not too late.
Speaker 3:
I want to start with a few comments about big ideas because this book is filled with big ideas and that's one of the things that makes it so rich and such a pleasure to move through at a reasonable pace. One of the terms that I won't linger too much on, but that penetrates the entire book is the concept of the eruptive public space and that's something that [Leila 00:37:13] mentioned already and this is akin to [inaudible 00:37:15] Moss' notion of the wild sphere, she makes some important distinctions. But the eruptive public space is set in contradistinction to the public sphere, which has norms and rules as part of a discourse. And the book is about occasions when eruptions occur in this public space that are challenging to everyone involved, to the religious communities that are being written about and written for and to the scholars who are, who are doing the same.
Speaker 3:
And I have found that this concept of eruptive public space has stuck with me and left well beyond the academic terms to where now I'm walking down the street and I say that, a music festival by our hotel is an eruptive public space. When the fire alarm just went off, that was interruptive public space. So congratulations, you've created a new concept for me that I will carry with and my wife will be upset about for years. A few other appreciations of the big ideas of the book. I recall Tom Tweed's presidential address, I know you'll be giving yours shortly. A couple of years ago, Tom Tweed spoke about the distinctions and the conflicts among scholars of religious studies and theologians and this book really reaches back into some of that conversation in really important ways. Not only does Laurie work with Tom's conception of, of dwelling and moving across religious traditions but the thinking about constructive and critical approaches, the relationships between scholars who do both and their communities that they speak to.
Speaker 3:
It's just important and I want to raise that up as an area that all of you should take a look at. The second appreciation I have for, that I won't linger on, is that she mentions something that is especially important to me and that is a religion in public schools. You appropriately note that religion in public schools, in K to 12 schools in particular are examples of frequently eruptive public spaces, if ever there were some you mentioned and I certainly agree completely and that's important because these spaces, these school debates and things are proxy fights for broader principles of religion in the public sphere in democratic society. And we can see values and principles enacted in these debates about what we ought to teach our children and why and how. And although that wasn't a core part of this text, I think those of us who work in that space have learned a lot, can learn a lot from this book and apply it there.
Speaker 3:
One other thing that I noted along the way is that you speak several times about how adjunct and contingent faculty, which is something in the American Academy of religion, is working to support in much bigger and broader ways thanks to Laurie's leadership. You mentioned that adjunct and contingent faculty are really often more likely to be engaged in the public sphere, partly by nature of the multiple types of jobs they do, but also in their orientation. And that as a result she feels that they're extra contingent and exposed to this eruptive public sphere. And the tenured faculty has what she calls a moral obligation to support adjunct instructors in their public engagement and to protect them if they're writing controversial research, whether that's in the Academy or in think tanks or in other places. So I just wanted to lift that up as a measure of appreciation and a charge to all of you tenured folks sitting in the hallway here.
Speaker 3:
Okay. My questions for the author here, revolve around three main categories. One of them is scholars themselves, one of them is universities in which the scholars congregate and one of them is the democracy that needs to be restored thanks to the universities and scholars that participate in it in some ways. My main question, and again of course this book is so rich that we could talk for days about it, but I'm going to focus on one question or one metaphor that Laurie uses when discussing the scholar and that is the scholar as a wise fool.
Speaker 3:
I've been wrestling with your portrayal of the religious studies' scholar as a wise fool, which has been portrayed in many classical dramas and religious traditions and perhaps the wrestling that I've done is most likely to be due to a deficient classical literacy on my side. But perhaps there might be something else too of concern that I'd like to raise and maybe hear a little more from you on. You note that the wise fool and the scholar of religion each has multiple masters between whom they must move while speaking a truth that some of those masters may not be interested in hearing. There was also a double function of the fool. You right both to entertain his master and to minister to the master's sense of self importance, a role that at the same time allowed the fool relative license to criticize. So too of the scholar of religion, she continues, serves many masters simultaneously and wears masks of advocacy and criticism.
Speaker 5:
"... [inaudible 00:42:01] and wears masks of advocacy and criticism depending on the content." And skipping into another portion, "So if scholars are to cross and dwell, even momentarily, within different publics, as wise fools have done in literature and history, they need to orient themselves accordingly. Whether empathizers or critics, re-presenters or explainers, and there can and should be room for all of these approaches," she says, "scholars need to grow wiser about their academic environments, the publics they might engage and the public spaces they might create, and the eruptions potentially contained there in."
Speaker 5:
Now, I think all of that makes enormous sense and I am on board with that I think, but I am concerned about what I take to be some other chief characteristics of the wise fool. That he rejects learning and elite knowledge, that he can be recklessly honest without reference to context, and perhaps sly or surreptitious in the work that he performs. And that he's employed, maybe not primarily, but at least substantially, as an entertainer. And to me, again, especially without classical knowledge of Indian literature, it seems to me that these characteristics are incongruous with the vision of the thoughtful and self-reflective scholar that you enjoin us all to be. And I'd love to hear a little more about that.
Speaker 5:
Second of all, around the university, Laurie presents an ethics of public scholarship and a form of university ethics that we all ought to be attentive to. And she asks, "What is the role of universities? Is it to create knowledge or to make the world better?" And, of course, that might be a false binary. And she says we all think that universities ought to do both, unless I think you're Stanley Fish. But nevertheless, it's attention that she says we ought to embrace and hold together in some ways, but asking ourselves which of these we ought to emphasize.
Speaker 5:
I think here the new AAR guidelines on publications, tenure and promotion are really important. And again, Laurie has been a driving factor behind this. These will impact the way that we understand research, teaching and learning in the coming generation. And they relate to this very question of what ends a university ought to serve and what communities, what publics universities ought to serve.
Speaker 5:
Laurie writes that each of our institutions has different understandings of its own publics, or whether that's universities primarily, but not always, relations to town, religious communities, et cetera. And scholars of religion need now, to take the time to learn what these publics are. And I would simply add that I think that, those of us who work in universities, need to embrace a more expansive notion of those publics. Not forgetting, for example, that taxpayers in this country at least, subsidize a nonprofit status of every university, and that they do so with the understanding that universities will work to the public good to some degree. Colleges and universities are large and influential social actors, and to suggest that they are merely containers for truth or vessels for research is missing the obvious fact that they have important roles in society to play; local, national and international and that can't be avoided.
Speaker 5:
The first time that I heard Laurie speak about her theories of public scholarship and scholars in public, was two years ago when we convened the first Conference of Centers for Religion and Public Life, and they did their third meeting this past Friday. And I think that these centers are interesting in the new knowledge economy, as places where reflection about public scholarship and scholars in public can take place. However, Laurie has a warning, she says, "We need sustained reflection about the nature of the academic community in which the individual scholar operates and about its relationship to the public sphere. Such reflections are part of what many recent writers have demanded in making a more ethical university." And she goes on, "The new dynamics of readership," meaning engage readers from outside of the university life, "and eruptive public spaces, have become part of our scholarly lives and no matter how many vibrant centers, focusing on religion and public life, we create, in our educational practice we are not preparing our students for that reality."
Speaker 5:
And so, I think that, A that's a terrific charge, but B, and still the centers for religion in public life have a certain space that can be made and encouraged for this theorizing to happen. It's true that it's not enough and the centers frequently aren't educating, aren't taking students and teaching classes. But they have become important sites of knowledge creation, conversation about the future of universities, and places where different publics, donors, religious communities, et cetera, come together in ways that are different than the traditional department, whether that be religion or religious studies or humanities. And as a result, I think that they might still provide certainly no salvation, but at least a space for movement in the coming decades.
Speaker 5:
The third category I'd like to talk about, is scholarly ethics and democratic renewal. Laurie writes that, "Advocacy for the study of religion to exist in the academy, no matter how broadly rooted, is not enough. Nor is the simple intellectual resistance to academic structures of power that may threaten the study of religion. Another form of activity is also necessary," and that's, "reflection about, and understanding of, the forms of pluralism that constitute the worlds both within and outside the academy. Such reflection is no longer a luxury, or even an important scholarly pursuit, it is a democratic necessity."
Speaker 5:
And in a footnote, buried in the many hundreds of pages back in the end, she approvingly quotes David Cooper, who remarks that, "The cultural disciplines have been cut off from meaningful participation in democratic renewal, education for citizenship and the public problem solving." And she adds, "If scholars of religion understood themselves to be more connected to these processes, there could be a great revival of humanistic thinking in the public square."
Speaker 5:
So, looking out at the state of American democracy today, it's distressingly common to feel like the state of our national politics is a dumpster fire, or maybe an eruptive public space, right? So, my question on this point is the following. Do the eruptive public spaces of religious studies, mirror the eruptive public sphere where our politics now reside; the zone without rules, untethered from norms of political disagreement, deliberative democracy, commitment to civil principles, and if so, is this coincidental?
Speaker 5:
I am out of time and I'm not going to go into my other point about the Williamsburg Charter, but I'll hang it out there, in case those of you in the audience are aware of it and wants to talk about it later. She references this Williamsburg Charter around the importance of religious freedom in American democracy, and how the principled way in which people who disagreed seriously about the application of those principles, came together to create an agreement about how to sustain those principles for dialogue and conversation and politics. And she speculates that perhaps an academic Williamsburg Charter might be something that could be pulled off within religious studies departments. And I'll leave that hanging in the air to see if someone else wants to pick up on it. Thank you for a pleasurable read and for enlightening me on so many things. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 6:
Thank you so much Eric and Leila and Mark. I mean, it's blowing me away how wonderful your reads are in each of these, and how deeply insightful. I think all of you should have written my book after listening to all of you. And Mark, thank you so much for that wonderful summary. I kept writing down as each of you were talking, "Is that what I did? Okay, that's great. I'm so glad I did that."
Speaker 6:
And I should let everyone know in this wonderfully intimate conversation, which would have been different in a different public space, that I didn't want to bother anyone, because I know how everyone's busy. And so, I thought it would be better for this to be completely spontaneous. And so, I have heard all of these remarks for the very first time right now, and so I'm responding in that way.
Speaker 6:
So again, thank you and thank you all so much for being here and being interested in these topics. I'll begin by saying that it took me 14 years to write this book, actually 15, and maybe that actually isn't a record, it probably isn't. But, my editor at the university of Chicago... I started to write it in 2004 with a completely different motivation, which was to really remark upon what was happening around us, and think about the specifics of the cases as a current commentary on what was happening. And then, many things happened. I got distracted by Sanskrit translation, and academic administration, and other books, and so on. And my wonderful editor, Alan Thomas, at the University of Chicago Press kept asking very nicely every dinner at the AAR, how I was progressing. And he would say very nicely, "Maybe you could turn to this project now?"
Speaker 6:
And I was very straight with him that, there were several things that made it difficult, in addition to my enthusiasm about other things. And one of them was, exactly what Leila was talking about, which is, that the hurt that was clear on all sides of these controversies, an injury was something that was very hard to carry for 14 years. And so, I carried it over time, rather than in a very big way in a small amount of time. I think that's probably one reason why it took so long to write.
Speaker 6:
And the second thing that I started to say in about 2009 or 10 to my editor was, "Well, the good news about this, is that if I still stick with these six case studies, I'm going to be writing intellectual history by the time I finish the book." Which, in fact, is exactly true.
Speaker 6:
And I mentioned in the book this wonderful way of thinking about, and difficulty of writing, recent intellectual history, because everybody who was there, as Mark's wonderful response shows, remembers what happened. Or there were people that were at that committee meeting, and so on. So that's another thing. Though, I do find that now that 30 years have passed, and certain cases, where I was writing more recent cases, they're now more remote. It does provide a certain reflective repos, which helps in any number of cases.
Speaker 6:
I just came from a panel on what's happening at the border and the weaponization of the Mexico border. And that was what it felt like to have been writing these histories in 2003, '4. So I think, to answer Mark's question, "Why now?"
Speaker 6:
So important. You're absolutely right, there is a hardening and rigidity, but I do feel that there are moments when histories of conflict need to be described. And I also think, to Leila's point, that the history of the healing of conflict, needs to be raised up. And I want to say more about that later.
Speaker 6:
And, I will say this more tonight as well, but I do think that, unless we embrace this as a regular occurrence, I don't want to say necessarily a norm, but a regular occurrence... 40 cases have occurred, by my count, and I'm sure there are others I don't know about, since those cases. And so, given that's the case in the last 20 years, that's two or three a year, that means that we are living in an entirely new reality that we need to acknowledge and think about differently. So that's the basic answer to why now, and I hope that people write other books that are much better than this one around public spaces, as we all begin to think differently and embrace the idea of public spaces as an everyday part of our training.
Speaker 6:
The other reason, and I didn't mention this much in the book, but I really hope to, and that is, does anyone know what happened in Paris after the French Revolution, and there was so much bloodshed? How did Paris get itself back together? Or, because I grew up in Salem Village, does anyone know what happened after all the women and men who were hung as witches died and the communities and churches still had to meet and worship?
Speaker 6:
In both cases, the local healing was what mattered. In the French Revolution, there's an Israeli dissertation about this. There were salons, literally interfaith, inter-world-view salons in people's living room, that emerged as the way that Paris got back on its feet. And in the case of Salem, where I grew up, Joseph Green succeeded Reverend Paris in the church that had created the accusations and spawned the accusations of witchcraft. And he totally rearranged the seating and made everyone sit in a different space. And it was an everyday act of peace building in that local space, that I think the history of conflict then raises for us, the epistemology of the healing of conflict, which is going to be forever imperfect. But I do think that it's an important thing for us to think about and raise for ourselves.
Speaker 6:
To Mark's to other questions that I think are so important. This idea of why religion has become a primary cultural identity rather than the nationalist identity, I think is a function of the global. I think that's a really brilliant insight. I wish I had said it, and I'm glad you had that insight after reading my book. But in addition, I also think that globally now, the English word religion has become a public cultural resource as well as a private resource and to be protected. And so you have this very interesting, powerful combination of religion as a public cultural good as well as a private good to be protected. So you've got it on both sides in political theater. And I can see that now as a very powerful tool, and I mean in the absolute most respectful sense, for an alienated minority group. That would be the first place I would go.
Speaker 6:
So, I think your insight is really wonderful there. And your comment about Hugh Macleod's work being involved with very little controversy initially, I was very struck by that, because I think that is true. And part of the heartbreak of each of these case studies, and others as well, that when they came out initially they weren't necessarily controversial, and over time, because of changing situations within the communities, became controversial.
Speaker 6:
And that's something that I think is very powerful, important, as you said, Mark, for all scholars of religion is, as you think about, and must think about, and reflect on your relationship to the public spheres, and to your readerships, and to the communities about which we all write, that's going to change rapidly. So that, even though your book is published, and is therefore more eternal in a ironic sense, but it certainly is long lasting. Those words, and the way people will read those words, will absolutely change over time. All the more reason for us to reflect on the public sphere and the eruptive public spaces that emerge for us.
Speaker 6:
I also was quite reassured and thrilled, because this book was foolish in in all sorts of ways, in the sense that it was comparative. I did try to be as deep as I possibly could with each case study, knowing very well that there were only really one case study that I could say I was expert in, and that was that of Jeff Kripal's work, Kali's child. But it was somewhat terrifying. But I also felt that it was important to start with a big idea book doing as much respectful, specialist work in each of these cases as I could.
Speaker 6:
So, I'm somewhat reassured that I made a specialist like you think differently about one particular area. I think, it is important for us to create a relationship between a generalist book and a specialist book, and perhaps the role of the generalist is to make the specialist think differently about one thing. That's it. Just one thing would be fine.
Speaker 6:
I also would say that the way you talk, Mark, and I'll end my response to Mark with this, that the idea that emerged in your conversation with [Graywell 01:00:09], about this not being a point of pride and distinctiveness for regular folk, for religious identity simply being something that was much more a flag that the elite might have wrapped themselves in, in particularly disputatious moments. I think that's a very powerful point. I will say that the disputation around the question of elites in the histories the scholars I wrote about were embarking upon, was definitely part of the theme of many of the critiques.
Speaker 6:
But I also will say that, part of the eruptive public space that we see, are... In the conversations that people have in these eruptive public spaces, is the question of whether they've read the book and how elite they are. And regular folk will be insulted by this idea, is a very common trope in global discourse. And some people, two things have been said in this space around regular folk. One is, they don't even need to read the book to be insulted, or it doesn't matter that they haven't read the book. And the other is, "I've read the book cover to cover and I'm still insulted," right? So, both things are happening there.
Speaker 6:
I will say on that final note around fear that, I have taught this in graduate seminars in two or three places before it was published, before Leila used it in a seminar just a week or so ago. And, I was very anxious about, not only re-traumatizing people who might have been part of the controversies, or from traditions that were part of the controversies, but also, terrifying graduate students, because they feel like I'm portraying a field in which there is all this difficulty. And so, my first seminar where I taught some of the chapters, I asked the graduate students how they were feeling, and they said, "Oh no, we love it. We're finally relevant." So, that was very good to hear, that comment back.
Speaker 6:
So Leila, your thoughts and your comments are truly insightful and compelling, and I really can't do them justice in the way that you ask them, but I'll try to do them a little bit of justice here. The first thing is your story about [Chala 01:02:42] and [Blalock 00:02:14]. That movie reminds me of Anne Feldhaus's wonderful story of doing. She has composed and written Marathi dictionaries in Maharastra. She is basically a fluent Marathi scholar beyond many native Marathi speakers. She's extraordinary. And she-
Speaker 8:
Many native Marathi speakers, she's extraordinary. And she was doing research on river sources and women who honor the river in Maharashtra and she was having a conversation with a woman at a river side, a shrine, and she said, the woman said to her in Marathi, it's so wonderful because people can actually connect with each other on so many different levels. For instance, you're speaking English and I'm speaking Marathi, but we still understand each other. And Ann said, no, I'm speaking Marathi, and she said, that's what I mean, you're speaking English and I'm speaking Marathi and we still understand each other. So there is that... the thing that kind of interests me now is not that we continue to talk past each other, but the fact that we stay at the table and still talk, right? There still was a conversation that happened in the end even though Ann never was able to persuade her that she was speaking Marathi.
Speaker 8:
So I think your notion of the epistemology of heard again, I wish Leila had written the book, absolutely right, and what a beautiful way to... it took my breath away to hear that phrase. That is exactly what I was trying to do. And I think your question about can it ever be undone or only creatively transformed is absolutely correct. I think that it can never be undone. I think my answer to you is no, it can never be undone. And given that it can never be undone, all the more important for us to tell the story, and of course imperfectly and badly, but nonetheless to tell the story.
Speaker 8:
And I want to say when you phrase the question, can it ever become totally irrelevant? I'm thinking all the time as an educator about the relevance of liberal arts and sciences to education and I've decided I hate the word relevance and irrelevance. But the idea of scandal, which is also part of this book, one of the early definitions of scandal was a gross irrelevancy to the court. So there's something very powerful about the question of becoming irrelevant, and I think one of the things that you see in the controversies in this book is when there's a charge of irrelevance on either side, it actually is a way of kind of indirectly underscoring the profound impact and the profound relevance. It's almost like the only way that you can neutralize something so hurtful that occurs in these eruptive public spaces is by calling it irrelevant.
Speaker 8:
So the answer is, can it ever become totally irrelevant? Absolutely no. And that word irrelevance is itself an illustration of the power of some of these controversies. The question about do scholars have a responsibility to think about both historical and theological implications of their work? I took your question to mean if there's in fact a historical statement that you know will be upsetting to a theological community of discourse, or the other way around, how do we manage that and do scholars have a responsibility to state that?
Speaker 8:
I'm not sure in my big tent perspective that I want to argue that scholars have a responsibility to state it in their work, but I do think they have a responsibility to reflect about it, yes. And I think I wouldn't want to create a norm, I myself as a scholar feel that I do have a responsibility to state it, but as a leader of a big tent, I wouldn't want to impose that on others. But I do think, as you mentioned, we don't have the right to be surprised anymore, and where I will create a norm very passionately is around our obligation to reflect on our multiple publics in ways that we haven't yet.
Speaker 8:
To your point, Leila, about the hidden transcript and the emergence from secrecy that becomes part of the history. I think yes, it will inevitably change the history of a group when something that is secret emerges out of secrecy, like in the Hindu and in the Somali cases. I think the question then becomes, how traumatic that... it's like being outed by others in the question of sexual orientation, and I think to honor... the answer is yes to your question and then the question then becomes for a scholar, how do you assess the trauma of that for a people as well as for an individual?
Speaker 8:
To your question about moving from a we to a they, I should say that you nailed one of the difficulties of writing this book because you always have to worry about your audience, and I worried a lot of times. A friend of mine in India called this the solipsistic book because it's about scholars. But I chose not to interview any of the scholars involved or any of the community members because I wanted it to be about the record in the public space and in the public sphere, what people had chosen literally on all sides to publish. So that made it easier.
Speaker 8:
But I frequently thought about the voice of this, decided to live with the we of the scholarly we, but knowing very frequently, and this is something I say in the book, every single reader will have different sympathies depending on where their own scholarship lies, and some will feel that the communities were very unfair and not appropriate in their critiques, and some will feel that they were justified. So I tried to create as much of a sense of a we in the book as I could, but I am sure that there are times when it's still a solipsistic book.
Speaker 8:
And finally I want to just underscore, before I get to Eric's questions, the big tent and the way in which we manage the big tent. I'm a big fan of Chantal Mouffe's agonistic democracy, and I think that one of the things that she speaks about very powerfully is the idea that we can and should create places of contestation that are as intense as if the world was to break apart. But because of the local nature of those contestations, the world will not break apart. There's a possibility of loyalty in the agonism.
Speaker 8:
And I think that that I find extremely persuasive, and I think that's why your turn to the local, in the work that, your JAAR piece and others, and local relationships I do think is one of the major ways that we can move forward in the Academy, building on those local relationships so that the possibility of the continuity of relationship occurs and we don't just descend into silence. I think that's one of the key ways in which the intensity of those conversations can be maintained, because if they're big, they can't be maintained. So I do feel that very strongly.
Speaker 8:
Finally to wrap up, Eric's questions are excellent. I will share with you the... I originally conceived of this entire book as different kinds of fools in the study of religion and different ways that I could think about each controversy as related to a particular kind of fool, Cordelia and the fool in King Lear, the Vidushika in classical Sanskrit drama, and I realized that I had to completely stop that idea for two reasons. One is I gave a lecture on this material at the American University in Cairo, and a graduate student from an American university here in Indiana came up to me afterwards and said, oh I really loved your talk, but I need to know from you, how can I be a better fool? And I just kind of went, no, I don't... that's going to be hard to translate.
Speaker 8:
And I do think you're right that this question, the tension there of rejecting learning and elite knowledge, being sly, being an entertainer, I think my use of that is a very light touch metaphor, which is what I was trying to do in the book instead of make it the heavy conceptual apparatus, was to say that there are times when we... the effect of what we do is about rejecting learning, for some people. It is about rejecting some understandings of elite knowledge or replacing one form of elite knowledge with our own elite knowledge.
Speaker 8:
So I think it's as much a phenomenological description as it is a normative description, and I probably could have been a little clearer about why I was using that metaphor. I thought it was so evocative for trying to give an image to the state that we're in, a poetics if you will of the public sphere, which I'm going to talk about tonight. So I think that was what I was trying to do there. Probably could have been more accurate and specifically descriptive.
Speaker 8:
Around the question of universities, you were absolutely right. I think my main focus about not theorizing public reality has to do... was a critique of departments. The centers are doing exactly what we should be doing. My hope would be that those centers don't have to be separate centers. At some point if they're successful, they should be integrated into departments to think about that work. And I want to be very clear that I'm not advocating for total relationship with and sympathy with publics at all. I want to make a lot of room for the scholar who doesn't want to engage with the public at all, but I don't want to make room for a scholar who doesn't want to think about the public. That's where I would draw the line.
Speaker 8:
And finally around democracies, the question of whether the eruptive spaces in religion mirror politics. I think to a certain extent, yes. The way I would... I mean the answer is obviously yes at a certain level. However, I do think that what we are clearly unable to do in public life right now is a grand dialogue. But I do think that there is so much happening, and Krista Tippett writes about this in another space, where the local dialogues are working. And that's back to what I think Leila has argued for so eloquently. That where I think we are failing miserably is at that national level, but I wonder whether if even as scholars of religion, if we participated in the local level, whether we might actually have the beginning of something constructive to build on. So I'll end there and thank you again for your comments.
Speaker 9:
Well thank you so much. Did any panelists want to clarify or reiterate, or do we feel like that was well responded to? Excellent. I want to respect Lori's energy going forward to make a plenary panel tonight. Would you be willing to take any questions or should we close it?
Speaker 8:
Absolutely, I love it.
Speaker 9:
Okay. We welcome your thoughts, your counterexamples, your alternate theorizings, your appreciations. Any questions out there? It's a little hard for us to see, so if you could stand up and introduce yourself, thank you.
Phil:
[inaudible 00:11:39], I have not read your book.
Speaker 10:
Go out and read it, Phil.
Speaker 8:
Most people haven't.
Phil:
[inaudible 01:14:55]. But a few things that this made me think about is one, I'm aware in my own work of a certain amount of self censorship, and I think any of us [inaudible 01:15:13], and I think that's a problem you know, that the selection of how this might sit with a certain public [inaudible 01:15:29]. I don't know if that's going to be discussed in the book or not.
Phil:
The second thing is that scholars, in would occur in a certain media frenzied environment, scholars often can't anticipate what it is that is going to give offense. You may write something that you think is just absolutely unobjectionable and somebody will pick up on one sentence somewhere, someone who perhaps doesn't really understand a certain style of academic rhetoric or maybe even has, you know, linguistic problems with English, and it can suddenly get blown up and tweeted and put on a website that so-and-so has made this terrible comment, you know? So that again I think leads to a kind of caution that can really hamper the scholarly endeavor.
Phil:
And the third thing is of course, just the role of media in this, the role of social media, which I assume you probably talk about in the book, but that has tremendously, you know, encouraged eruptive episodes.
Speaker 8:
Yeah. Do you want me to respond or should others jump in? Okay, yep. I'd be happy to say a couple of things. The first is, I want to come back to the self-censorship question in a second, you're absolutely right, and that's part of I think Mark's story and others about books that are written in ways that seem to be as thorough as possible, anticipating communities, engaging with communities, loving communities, living with them for years, all the things that you know and teach better than any of us. And so, yes. And I think that is... my purpose in writing this book is not to try and solve that problem, but at least to go so far as to name it and then think about what the vocabulary is that we need to begin to live with it. Because I'm not sure that it can be solved, but it needs to be lived with differently, I guess, and it needs to be named. So that would be the first thing.
Speaker 8:
And I didn't feel that I could name it without a tradition of theorizing about the public sphere, which is why I turned to Habermas and the critics of Habermas, which are really recent. There are, you know, edited volumes on Habermasam religion literally in the last two or three years that I was just voraciously memorizing because it gave me a vocabulary to begin to assess what our current situation is. So that's the first thing. Jim Lane is an example of it, the sweet aside that he made that became the fence and the occasion for violence.
Speaker 8:
And then around social media, yes, there is an entire chapter, the two... as a cultural historian, my argument is that it's the rise of the internet and the move toward multicultural politics of recognition at a global level that Mark was talking about, those are the two factors that have caused where we are. It seems intuitively obvious to so many, but it felt like, again, it needed to be named and then placed within a lineage. So the second chapter is looking at W.C. Smith and Eliade, Leila mentioned this, as our intellectual ancestors, but reading them not in the usual ways, but mining their archives.
Speaker 8:
So I spent some wonderful time at the CSWR in the Eliadian papers in Chicago looking for their understanding of the public sphere and their radio addresses and their talks in Romania at salons and all the stuff that they did as public intellectuals, and I learned so much about ideas about the relevance of the study of religion to the public sphere from our ancestors.
Speaker 8:
But the thing that we know is that they lived just before what I would call the liberal paradox, which is... and W.C. Smith wrote one article about this at the end of his life, and that is that there is a sense that the liberalization, Eliade's lineage aside, it wasn't even a side, it was part of my chapter, but at the height of their careers, they believed in the liberalization of the public sphere. Period. That was their thing. And they hadn't confronted the liberal paradox, which is what do you do when you are writing and embracing, to use Mark and Leila's terms, a group whose intolerance you can no longer be tolerant of, which is Wendy Steiner's formulation of the liberal paradox.
Speaker 8:
So they lived before the multicultural politics of recognition exploded, the liberal paradox and the internet, the same thing. So yes, that chapter is very much part of that. There's an innocence to Ron Grimes beautiful attempt in the first online forum, it was really, it just kind of, it's lovely, about how to make it all better through online conversation, which didn't happen but it is important to look at the history.
Speaker 8:
And the final thing about self-censorship, again my response would be yes, absolutely reality. I would say if you have the stomach for it, then don't self censor, but you've got to understand, you need to reflect on what's going to happen, and what may happen may not necessarily if in fact you don't self sensor. So I think an awareness of the cost of self censorship, as well as the cost of not self centering, is good for all of us to reflect on. So that would be the way I would put that. And do I like it? No. Do I think it's important to be acknowledged as part of our lives now? Yes.
Speaker 8:
And I think it's really good for people to imagine, what would this look like if I didn't censor at all? Not out of anxiety necessarily, but simply reflection on publics, and what would this look like if I censored too much? Again, as a reflection on the public sphere.
Speaker 9:
I want to again thank Laurie for this wonderful book. Remind you, December 3rd it will be available and pre-orders are being processed so you can request your volume now. But let's have a round of appreciation for this wonderful volume.