11 posts tagged “religion”

It's very difficult for me to write my Religion 301 paper.

I am attempting to draw a method out of the theory of pragmatism, following (of course) the argument Rorty makes: theory should not be a bed on which to lie, it should be a tool with which to shape your own and others' view of the world.

I am then going to envision how it would apply to a real-life study of religion, specifically the study I have been considering for Religion 399 -- a study of online religious communities.

Plenty of problems are going to come up, of course. At least, they're problems as far as I can see: the problem of what to do with the subject of the study (is it ethically right for me to try and convince them of my own point of view about them? But as far as pragmatism goes, radically privileging each person's understanding of right, isn't that what
I'd have to do?) and the problem of "keepin' it P.I. (public intellectual)" as Cornel West would say (mustn't I write my work so that those outside of academia can understand it?).

The paper is, at the very least, going to be an interesting intellectual exercise for me, since I typically consider myself a pragmatist. It will allow me to explore some of the philosophical underpinnings of doing academic work before I have to actually write my thesis, which is going to be very helpful. And even if that wasn't what Mike envisioned when he assigned the paper, I have a hard time bringing myself to feel too bad. I feel like Religion 301 is intended to problematize one's thinking about academic writing just before one embarks on the thesis process -- it's only right that I attempt to apply those lessons as my final paper.

But I am so very tired of writing!

So, now that my grandmother's surprise party won't be spoiled, I can blog about where I was this weekend (missing the Owl fight, Fetish Ball, and I'm sure all kinds of revelry).

I left Friday afternoon for Sacramento to surprise my grandma for her 78th birthday. Went home, saw Danny Schmidt play in Sacramento (just as good as when he plays in Portland -- and now my parents are fans), ran along the American River while my dad biked behind me looking silly (I had forgotten how much I missed the American River: it's really just about one of the only things about Sacramento that I missed), successfully surprised Grandma at a big party in a beautiful mansion in the Delta -- she didn't even know there would be a party, much less that I was coming home for it. Got to see my cousins whom I missed horribly, especially Carrie-lou. Didn't get to see one cousin, Gus, still stuck on his air base in Abilene, TX. Poor guy. Fortunately that meant I didn't have to wrangle his friends who all think I'm "hot," one of whom was planning on coming up with him. (I'm sure his friends are nice. I just didn't want to deal with it.)

On my way back I had an eeearly flight, so today I've been awake for five hours already. Aren't you glad you're not me? When I got in the cab to go home, because (a) I sure wasn't riding the bus with all my luggage after getting off a 6 AM flight and (b) Nick might love me but no one, including me, could expect him to love me enough to pick me up at 7 goddamn 20 AM, I got one of those great cab drivers who launches into their own weird religious beliefs when you tell them that you're studying religion. (Much better than the guy sitting next to me on the plane, who was some kind of banker and just muttered about colleges being too liberal. He went to Chico State. I refrained from comment, nodded, smiled, and went back to Derrida and dozing.) The cabbie had been raised Pentecostal, had a heavy Eastern European accent, and possessed some truly strange misconceptions about the doctrines of other faiths (you know, those damn Buddhists, always... having abortions?...) and some deeply strange ideas about the power of positive thinking. Still, he was a nice guy, happy as long as I was willing to listen to him rant and nod and smile and actually pretty tolerant, comparatively. (He called Muslims "Koran people" but repeated over and over, "they follow their traditions, you know? I respect that. I like that. They follow the word of God.")  When I got home he didn't want to let me pay, but couldn't afford not to. He wouldn't take a tip no matter how much I pressed him, saying that he tried never to charge students and especially not religious students. I wanted to leave the money in his trunk or something, so that he would have to take it, but I couldn't think of a way to do that without his next passenger just picking it up for themselves. So I just shook his hand and, when he told me he'd pray for me and asked me to pray for him, promised I would. His name was Andrei.

This is pretty entertaining.

I'm not totally sure how I feel about it, but you know. It's pretty interesting anyway.

Well, what's been going on here? - I started a new blog, with a bunch of friends, called Dido Revisited. It's on "gender, the media, and the western canon," and anything else, and it's been eating a lot of my blogging energy. I'm glad we started it, though, for sure. Looking forward to it continuing. The LiveJournal feed, for my LJ friends, is at "msbunburyist2" -- the title has very little to do with the content, apart from the fact that it's the second blog at which I pontificate. Long story behind that title, and very boring, so I won't share it.

It seems like lately I've been babysitting a lot. I finally took the plunge and got myself some MOO minicards, because I don't have any business cards I can give people that aren't admissions office branded/that have my real contact information. Also, if I'm asking people for $10 an hour to watch their kids, I had better look professional doing it. In reality, of course, this is all just excuses for getting cool flickr business cards, but you know, I can live with that. I'm looking forward to seeing those come in the mail.

Classes are going really well. I've been spending a lot of time in Second Life attending religious functions and so on for my Junior Seminar. It's deeply interesting, but I was shocked to discover that this week I've gone to a Catholic bible study and a Unitarian church service and poked around an evangelical Christian site and read the Torah at a replica of the Western wall and tried to get into a mosque (it was "locked," probably because of griefers; I'm going to try and contact some of the people in Islamic groups on Second Life to see if they would be willing to let me in. There's a guy going by the name Drown Pharaoh who is studying Islam online who I think would be really neat to get to know -- I hope that he's cool, because this is getting more intensely interesting by the moment). There's even a group of hermeticists on Second Life, who I haven't yet contacted but want to.

Anyway, my life is becoming more virtual-reality centric. Interesting. If anyone is on SL, my name is Lenore Lemmon. I look nothing like myself as I have no attachment to my avatar's appearance and change it quite frequently. Right now, I have ridiculous giant purple pigtails. I think I might tone it down a bit soon, maybe go bald. It's interesting to contradict gender distinctions in SL. No one really expects it, and they look at you funny when you do, and I like that. Much less potential for actual harm than if you do so in real life.

Curious anecdote: at the Unitarian service a griefer ran through with a paddle and a virtual strap-on, dancing lewdly through the whole thing and whacking people with the paddle. In response some of us offered the griefer friendship, which he (I say "he" but it was merely a male avatar, maybe not a man behind the avatar) declined. It was amusing to turn the other cheek like that -- much easier to do in a virtual world than in the real world. In any case, it was interesting that he picked the Unitarians to bother. You'd think that anti-religionists would, you know, bother a group that wasn't the UUs. (What do radical Unitarians do? Burn a question mark in your front yard!) Then again, he was probably just wandering around being a jerk.

Last night I went to a Lutheran 11 o'clock service with my aunt, who was raised Lutheran and went to eleven o'clock services her whole childhood. It was lovely.

Did you know that the words above the gates of Hell in the Divine Comedy are not actually "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here"? They're much longer:

All right, I'm done freaking out about the mistake in my qual. I guess that after being in the library for pretty much five days straight, even the smallest snafu makes it seem like the world is about to end...

Self-painted-polaroid

On the plus side, once I decided that studying any more would make my head explode, I re-installed the Adobe creative suite on my new-ish computer and made the photo manipulation on the right. It isn't particularly complex, but I think it turned out well. It's actually three separate photos combined: a Polaroid, a self-portrait in which I looked particularly demonic, and a boring but pretty image of Multnomah Falls that I took when I went hiking up around there with Matthew this summer. It felt pretty nice to be using Photoshop again, since I used to be pretty good at it --  I'd touch up all my photos and some of my friends', all that jazz. I miss my Wacom tablet, though; it was pretty tedious doing even just this little manipulation with the trackpad.

I've finished all the papers I need to write for the end of term, and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Tomorrow morning is my Greek final, and for the first time this year, I really feel like I know the material. I'm sure it will end up kicking my ass anyway, but it's a good thing that I've been studying so much, even if it's been driving me a little crazy. Then, on Wednesday I have my qualifying exam oral defense, and on Thursday I have a Latin final. The Latin is just the Pro Caelio, not very difficult; the oral defense is, well, an oral defense. Nothing I can't handle.

The atmosphere in the library has been really wonderful this year. I think it's because this is the first year that I've really applied myself during finals week, really spent lots of time sitting at my carrel staring my work down. For those of you unfamiliar with Reed, every finals week students set up a "stim table" in the library lobby -- ginseng, tea, coffee, maté, multivitamins, ramen, PB&J, and a sound system playing "The Eye of the Tiger" every hour on the hour. Some students carry on a rather ridiculous tradition of doing lines of wasabe. Yes, you heard me: they snort lines of wasabe. It's a little surreal. Anyway, I never really appreciated the stim table before now. Not because I need their coffee or their tea, though it's pleasant to have hot water on demand in the lobby. No, it's the sense that we're all in this together. Everyone's equally tired, obsessed with their work, and in need of validation. Unhealthy? Totally. Affirming? In a strange, strange way, yes.

On another note, so this post isn't entirely self-obsessed, here's a link to an interesting translation of the Tao Te Ching. Anyone know how good it is, how much it represents what the message of the text really is? It sure sounds good and is very accessible, but that doesn't mean that it's right. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

I've completed my qualifying exam (well, except for the oral defense, which happens on Wednesday). Thank heaven! In the course of this experience, I've learned many things, to wit:

1. Sallust is incredibly boring. Seriously. You'd think that he would be interesting since, you know, he's talking about a conspiracy to overthrow the government, but nope. Boring, boring, boring.
2. Almost every word in Latin, ever, can be read as having implications of effeminacy.
3. If you try hard enough, you can work fortunatam natam me consule Romam into absolutely any paper. You just have to really, really want to make fun of Cicero. All things are possible with the holy spirit of mockery.
4. LaTeX is only moderately scary. BibTeX, on the other hand, is just about the scariest thing ever invented. Holy shit! Please, please, please don't eat my bibliography! I don't know what that error message means! I'm your willing slave, BibTeX, I'll do anything you want me to, just please tell me what to do in good -- plain -- ENGLISH!
5. You cannot, in fact, make things italic in HTML by typing {\it this}. That only works in LaTeX.

I've also completed my Greek paper. It's basically a big, long truism, but I don't care: I'm not going to trash six pages of well-written blather for that reason. Actually, I'm not sure whether or not it's a truism, since I'm at that point where I have no ability to assess my own work anymore. I'm just going to go with it for now, since my world will be full of pain and suffering if I have to rewrite it, and frankly I have enough pain and suffering as it is.

Now I'm on to the last paper I have to write, "Sexuality in Defixiones from the Athenian Agora." I spent about thirty minutes trying to figure out how to say "Curse tablets written against criminals" in Latin, and I still haven't figured it out. Eventually I just emailed Nigel. That simple statement sounds easy, but I promise you it isn't, especially when defixiones (which means "curse tablets") is a bizarre word and I can't figure out its gender or declension.

Oh well.

Anyway, the good news is that this paper isn't due for another week, and since all my research is finished I'm going to be fine in terms of writing time. I'm mostly concerned about my Greek and Latin finals now, since I need to do very well on them. To that end, I am now going to study, instead of writing in my blog.

ETA: Oh, man! Nigel is my hero. He suggested defixiones vindices, that is "vengeance curse tablets," because the text of the tablets usually goes something like "may that jackass who stole my cloak at the baths never have a day's luck with it." And that works just fine. Super-professor-man, to the rescue!

I've got these really strange mixed feelings about religion lately.

I felt compelled to respond to a person who said that all Christians who aren't universalist are evangelizing jerks, and by "evangelizing" I here mean "Have YOU heard about the miracle of JAY-sus?! He can HELP you!"

That bothered me. I guess that it bothered me because I used to be, you know, basically a universalist Christian, though I didn't talk about it that way. It was just too wishy-washy for me, ultimately. It wasn't really what the Bible said, even if you pare the Bible down to the gospels, which is what I tend to do. I know too much about Biblical history to blindly follow the letters. I think they're interesting, possibly good guidance in some cases, but I don't think that they really have that much bearing on what Jesus said or did. I wish I could have that kind of blind faith, because it's a lot harder to try and piece together a historical Jesus from the snippets that we have than it would be to take the Jesus of megachurches everywhere, but I can't, no matter how much I pray. And I don't think I'd want to, anyway.

I guess maybe it's time for me to start thinking of myself as a "Jesus follower," not a "Christian." Because as much as I think that it's good to preach "Christ crucified," I don't think that it's good to start worshipping the apostles as though they were Jesus. And that's what people do -- they really do, I think. It's Paul, Paul, Paul, and no thought to the fact that Paul met Jesus once and once only, in a vision. Maybe that makes him more qualified to interpret the Bible than I am, but I'll take my chances.

This is getting off-topic.

What I'm trying to say is, I think that becoming a "Jesus follower" has been a really good thing for me. I feel like it's had actual fruits in my life, and I like William James' idea of judging religion by its fruits, not its roots. I party less, I behave more kindly, I am more honest. I believe I'm a better person now than I was at the beginning of last summer, when I converted.

And yeah, I've said that to people. I'm saying it now.

But it really bothers me when someone tells me that saying those things makes me unable to co-exist with other religions. As if I feel a compulsion to make myself obnoxious, to go up to my friends and tell them that their beliefs are wrong. As if I believe that God put me on earth to convert people. I don't. I believe that I ought to speak the truth as I see it, if someone asks me. I believe that I ought to not obscure my religious beliefs, if they come up in conversation. But I won't bring them up on purpose -- see the difference? I won't try to talk people into coming to church, or praying with me, or doing anything like that, unless they ask -- see the difference?

Frustrating. I don't know how to make things better, because I know I'm not being the intolerant one. I guess it's hard for some people to understand that you can think a person is wrong and still respect them wholly.

So, here's my spring class schedule:
Tuesday-Thursday: Special Topics in Roman History, 2:40-4 PM.
Tuesday: Religion Junior Seminar, 6:10-9 PM.
Monday-Wednesday-Friday: History of Religions, 11-11:50 AM.
Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday: Latin 210, 12-12:50 PM.
Weight Training: Anytime I darn well please.

I'm pretty happy with this schedule, although Tuesday is going to be awful. I don't know why Steve insists on teaching Junior Sem so late, but I'm not happy with it. I'm also going to have to rearrange my work schedule; I think I'm going to try and have my lunch from 11-11:50, so that I can go to class but otherwise work all day. That'll be fine. We'll see. I guess I could otherwise split my work time between Monday and Friday, but I'm lazy and prefer to have just one work day a week.

Anyhow, I'm excited about leaving Greek and taking the Special Topics class, which is on women this year. It's going to be really fun, and this way I have a class with Steve, a class with Mike, a class with Sonia and a class with Ellen -- some of my favorite people at Reed, and not too much with any one of them. (I love you, Ellen, but having you in both Greek and Roman History is pretty intense!)