Catholics, Single-Issue Politics, and a Visit from Karl Rove

ART REMILLARD

It’s election season in Pennsylvania and that means it’s time for some good ole’ fashion single-issue politics. Case in point: Mercyhurst College in Erie, PA, where last week Senator Hillary Clinton spoke before a crowd of over 2,000. Prior to her arrival, Erie Bishop Donald W. Trautman criticized the college “for not reflecting the pro-life stance of the Catholic Church regarding abortion.” In protest, the bishop announced that he would not speak at Mercyhurst’s graduation next month.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette responded disapprovingly in an editorial, which read in part…

Bishop Trautman . . . has the same right to free speech as anyone else and he
also has his own duty as a bishop to speak out on moral issues of the day. But
none of that makes his rebuke of the college wise. For one thing, it amounts to
taking political sides. For another, it is based on a considerable misunderstanding. Mercyhurst College. . . was not endorsing Mrs. Clinton's views on abortion by inviting her, no more than a newspaper endorses every letter to the editor or op-ed article in the forums it provides for free expression. As it happens, Mrs. Clinton never mentioned abortion; her speech was about economic issues.

The editorial also reminds readers of President Bush’s visit last year to St. Vincent’s College in Latrobe, PA.

Although Mr. Bush has been pro-life in the sense of seeking to protect the
unborn, the seamless garment of his philosophy is tattered by his pro-death
penalty stance and his instigation of a foolish and unjustified invasion of
Iraq.

Faculty, students, and alumni from St. Vincent’s protested the event. But the editorial didn’t mention whether any bishops denounced Bush’s presence at the college. I doubt there was any such proclamation. Nevertheless, the Post-Gazette went on to state my own thoughts on the matter, that universities and colleges (whether religiously oriented or not) should enthusiastically welcome public figures such as Clinton and Bush. Their voices stimulate the intellectual atmosphere, making for great conversations afterward.

Still, if Bishop Trautman and those sharing his politics wish to reclaim their “seamless garment” moral credentials, they’ll have a chance soon enough. An e-mail just arrived in my inbox announcing that Karl Rove will be speaking this Wednesday at my school, St. Francis University. This should be interesting...

Fill in the Book Title Contest

PAUL HARVEY

A while back Ed Blum started a comment-off on this blog, his entry being best titles in American religious history. Unbeknownst to us, Jon Pahl's blog entry on Jeremiah Wright would sweep the field of comments, the leader so far in this blog's history.

I'm just back from a highly excellent weekend with the Young Scholars in American Religion in Indianapolis. I'll have something more serious to say about that later. For the time being: While there, eminent Young Scholar and blog contributing editor Randall Stephens sent off a number of witticisms that seemed to me possible "before the colon" book or article titles. Your task: to fill in the rest of the title. It will be sort of like those last-page-of-the-New-Yorker contests, where you are given the cartoon and asked to create the caption.

So here are four [update: now five] titles, from Randall's bottomless store of quips; you fill in the rest in the comments section. Give me the rest of the book or article title.

1) The Halls of Powerlessness: [fill in favorite deprecatory joke about academia here] . . . . .

2) Stop, Drop, and Holy Roll: . . . . . . . . [fill in the blank]

3) The Devil-Busting Satellite: . . . [from an actual quote on TBN, but apply it as you wish!].

4) The Pantheon of AntiChrists: . . .

5) Anthems of Cultural Captivity: . . . . . .

And for you Young Scholars who follow this blog: I did go undefeated in touch football play this weekend. Not to rub it in or anything . . .

Hardwood and Habits

HARDWOOD AND HABITS

BY MICHAEL PASQUIER

As many of us spend the weekend watching college basketball (and many of us who won’t), take a few moments to view a short piece on Immaculata College and the origin of modern women’s basketball. You may already be familiar with this story, thanks to Julie Byrne’s O God of Players: The Story of the Immaculata Might Macs. Kelly Baker also wrote an earlier blog related to Byrne’s book and an upcoming film). ESPN produced the 6-minute video, which includes player interviews, game footage, and nuns banging on buckets.

Blog Editor and Contributing Editor Win Creativity Award!

Kelly Baker Wins FSU Graduate Research and Creativity Award

From the Florida State University Department of Religion Page:

Kelly Baker, a Ph.D. candidate in American religious history, currently teaching at the University of New Mexico, won the FSU Graduate Research and Creativity Award for 2007-2008. Kelly will defend her dissertation on the Ku Klux Klan shortly. This is the second consecutive year that a Religion graduate student has won this prestigious university award. Last year, Michael Pasquier won. Pasquier’s dissertation, also in the area of American religious history, will be published by Oxford University Press.

Guilt As An Inherent Feature of Relaxation

BY ART REMILLARD

In a recent conversation, a colleague reminded me of an oft-forwarded e-mail entitled, "You Might Be a Graduate Student If..." While I received the forward often at Florida State, I never saved it. So (instead of doing real work) I performed a quick Google search, which led me to this list. Many of the items still apply to my post-graduate student life. Here are my top three picks. Feel free to add your own...

1. You understand jokes about Foucault.
2. You have accepted guilt as an inherent feature of relaxation.
3. Your friends and family become concerned because although you can now recite, word for word, the most popular theories in your field, you have lost all semblance of common sense.

New Book: On Zion's Mount

KELLY BAKER

Jared Farmer, an assistant professor of history at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, has a new book of interest for our blog from Harvard University Press. On Zion's Mount: Mormons, Indians and the American Landscape explores the encounter between Mormons and the Utes in Utah, both the "legend" and the reality of this relationship. Here's the book description from Harvard:

Shrouded in the lore of legendary Indians, Mt. Timpanogos beckons the urban populace of Utah. And yet, no “Indian” legend graced the mount until Mormon settlers conjured it—once they had displaced the local Indians, the Utes, from their actual landmark, Utah Lake. On Zion’s Mount tells the story of this curious shift. It is a quintessentially American story about the fraught process of making oneself “native” in a strange land. But it is also a complex tale of how cultures confer meaning on the environment—how they create homelands.

Only in Utah did Euro-American settlers conceive of having a homeland in the Native American sense—an endemic spiritual geography. They called it “Zion.” Mormonism, a religion indigenous to the United States, originally embraced Indians as “Lamanites,” or spiritual kin. On Zion’s Mount shows how, paradoxically, the Mormons created their homeland at the expense of the local Indians—and how they expressed their sense of belonging by investing Timpanogos with “Indian” meaning.

This same pattern was repeated across the United States. Jared Farmer reveals how settlers and their descendants (the new natives) bestowed “Indian” place names and recited pseudo-Indian legends about those places—cultural acts that still affect the way we think about American Indians and American landscapes.

The Harvard site also contains an excerpt of this new title (located here).

Course Adoption Season and Special Offer!

Course Adoption Season and Special Offer!
by Ed Blum

Even though we have just entered Spring, the Fall Semester is not far off, and this means course adoptions. Since my undergraduate days at the University of Michigan, I have loved the selection of books. I remember walking up the stairs at Shaman Drum Bookshop to find in packed shelves the texts for my new classes. Perhaps Professor Juster assigned The Kingdom of Matthias (“oh, this looks sexy,” I would think to myself). Or perhaps Professor Montoya (sadly, she is now at New York University) would have us read Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee (“Dee Brown… I thought he was a basketball player for the Celtics,” my undergraduate and basketball-loving mind would turn). I would thumb through the books, looking at what had been underlined, what the author looked like, who blurbed the book and had I read any of their material. Sometimes there would be random phone numbers in the book; one time a “break up” note that led me to wonder if it had ever been delivered. The world of books, authors, and readers was a magical and mystical one to me, one that I wish had been explained more fully. Now, as a professor, author, teacher, and reader, I find the selecting the texts as much fun as finding them and the process of interacting with readers just as mystifying. And this brings me to the point of my post. I want to propose interactive sessions between authors and readers – professors and students – either through email dialogue or through phone conference calls.

This past year, I have had several wonderful teaching experiences with colleagues who have used one of my monographs in their course. One two occasions, I conducted conference calls with the students to discuss the book – why I wrote it, what I left out, what they thought of the material, what their impression was of Du Bois or of post-Civil War America. On several other occasions (mostly local), I had the chance to sit down with students who had read my material. On all occasions, the times were marvelous. The questions were brilliant and insightful. Some of the comments I wished I could lift and cram into the books. Some of the students I wished I could cram into my own classes. And so… I had an idea. What if I offered that kind of activity to any professor or teacher who adopts one of my monographs for class? Would that be an added and fun incentive for folks to teach it? Would that be a way to break down the barriers between authors, teachers, and readers? So let’s give it a shot.

If you decide to adopt Reforging the White Republic or W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet for any class next year, just drop me an email at eblum AT mail DOT sdsu DOT edu, and we will set up a time for an interactive dialogue with you and your students. Also, I want to invite any other scholars who are interested in this kind of arrangement to post their comments here and let other readers know.