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The Row Boat

"Had we but world enough, and time..." *

Religious Studies Needs Art

12/17/2005 15:12:49

Religious studies, the academic thing, needs art!

Well, either art or politics, one or the other. But because of my temperment, art seems to me vastly preferable to politics. Nevertheless I do think that politics needs religious studies.

I should have gone to the last AAR meeting, then I'd have a lot of evidence to support my conclusion. As it stands I only have my department to refer to and the books they make us read from other departments.

But academics for its own sake has no vocation in the United States. In France, I remember being amazed browsing at a beautiful bookshop in Nice where there was a full stand of academic philosophy journals, as if people actually bought them and read them! People whose careers don't depend in it! Well, thankfully or not, that is not the case in the United States.

Right now, so far as I see it, the accomplishment of religious studies departments is that they sometimes produce clergy or popular writers and they teach classes about religion that engineers and premeds take as electives. These are wonderful things, and I'm sure these classes have a lasting effect. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the religious studies enterprise has its blinders on its research, whether figuring out what religion is or trying to decide whether Jesus was married to Mary Magdalen. Or lastly, whether affluent white people should be agnostics or not. This one seems to preoccupy them tremendously.

But the American university, despite itself, is a pragmatic institution. It exists to make good things, and if it didn't, its tax credits would go the way of the Quagga. It does a great job so far making gadgets and pharmacuticals and experimental poetry. If it is going to actually be part of the American university for much longer (the fundamentalist politicians will not let this grace period last for long), religious studies is going to have to start producing more than translations of the gospel of thomas.

Besides, any good reconstructed post-marxist knows that a community says what it is by what it produces.

Fortunately, religion is a constructive thing. It makes cathedrals and mystic fools. There should be a great deal of material there. Performance art would be an excellent place to begin - enactments.

Plus if we learned some actual skills I would be a lot less frightened of graduating after next semester.

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erotics of art - 12/17/2005 19:56:24
Posted by Nathan

an addendum:

I remember the first time my freshman year when I read that sentence (in my dorm room, sitting in that horrible chair, before rearranging the desk) at the end of Susan Sontag's introduction to Against Interpretation, "In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art." Then, at the very beginning of my studies, how little in detail I knew that is true today! Really it is madness what "theory" (so to speak) has done, acting as if the author was no human being at all, had no meaning behind his or her words... I suppose an erotics of religion is the analogue.

See this article from the Chronicle Review.

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