Postdoctoral Fellowship Opportunity

Laurie Maffly-Kipp sends along this fellowship opportunity at UNC-Chapel Hill.

The Carolina Postdoctoral Program for Faculty Diversity

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

In the department of religious studies

As part of a continuing commitment to advance scholars from underrepresented groups in higher education, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Carolina Postdoctoral Program for Faculty Diversity is pleased to announce the availability of postdoctoral research appointments for a period of two years. The purpose of the Program is to develop scholars from underrepresented groups for possible tenure track appointments at the University of North Carolina and other research universities. Postdoctoral scholars will be engaged full-time in research and may elect to teach only one course per fiscal year. Applications for study in any discipline represented at the University are welcome. The Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has a special interest in candidates with expertise in Medieval/Early Modern Christianity, Religions of the Americas, or South and Southeast Asian religions. For more information about our programs, please visit our departmental website at http://religion.unc.edu.

The stipend is $36,262 per calendar year. Funds are available for research expenses, including travel. Interested applicants who will have completed their doctoral degree no later than July 1, 2010 and no earlier than July 1, 2006 are eligible to apply. Preference will be given to U.S. citizens and permanent residents. This program is funded by the State of North Carolina.

Interested applicants should apply online at http://research.unc.edu/red/postdoc.html. Directions for the electronic submission are provided at the website. Any questions may be directed to Application2010@unc.edu. The application deadline is Thursday, January 7, 2010.

A Muted Call for Sacrifice

A Muted Call for Sacrifice: A Clear Call for Responsibility

By Jon Pahl, Ph.D.

Barack Obama's December 1 speech to the Cadets at West Point on Afghanistan was not what I expected. After years of listening to, and critiquing, George W. Bush's civil religious rhetoric, I worried that the current President would succumb to a cynical appeal to military "sacrifice." Instead, that theme was remarkably muted.

Far more prominent was the way the President invoked his inaugural theme of responsibility. He began with his own duties as Commander in Chief. He clarified the responsibilities of Afghanis, Pakistanis, and other international partners. And he held up the moral and civil values he expected his fellow Americans to demonstrate, including the military.

Obama did invoke a rhetoric of sacrifice near the end of his speech. He cited the "service and sacrifice" of "our grandparents" that launched the U.S. under Franklin Roosevelt into the current era of global interconnectedness. Then the President cited the "unbroken line of sacrifice" by men and women in uniform on behalf of Lincoln's "government of the people, by the people, and for the people." That was it for the favorite theme of the Civil War version of American civil religion.

Obama might have been tempted to use, and I fully expected to hear, the rhetoric of "sacrifice" in relation to the service of soldiers in Iraq. Instead, the President praised their "courage, grit, and perseverance." At the same time, Obama realistically acknowledged the "costs" of war, as he recalled signing letters of condolence, visiting "wounded warriors," and meeting the "flag-draped caskets" of those who died.

If he avoided pandering by cloaking military policy in religious rhetoric, the President did not avoid addressing moral questions. Obama first focused on the legitimacy of the war in Afghanistan. It was defensive. It was approved by Congress (overwhelmingly). It had international support. And it was undermined by the war in Iraq that "caused substantial rifts between America and much of the world."

The President then defended his deliberate approach to designing a strategy in Afghanistan. It did not delay necessary resources. It allowed him to "ask the hard questions." And it engaged key partners. It was, in a word, responsible. "I owed the American people--and our troops--no less," he concluded.

If his own responsibility was one theme of his speech, another clear theme was the responsibility of Afghanis and Pakistanis. He used the words "responsible" or "responsibility" nine times. Five of those times he related his favorite theme to the Afghani people. They had "responsibility for their own future." It was our goal to "transfer responsibility" to the Afghanis. And "success in Afghanistan is inextricably linked to our partnership with Pakistan."

The President also identified responsibilities of the international community. He claimed "a broad coalition" of 43 nations in support of his policy. And he recalled his Nobel-inspiring vision of a world in which nations renounced weapons of mass destruction. "Every nation must understand," he claimed, "that true security will never come from an endless race for ever-more destructive weapons--true security will come for those who reject them."

But finally it was the responsibility of Americans that was, appropriately, Obama's chief theme. The American people are "not as young--and perhaps not as innocent--as we were when Roosevelt was President," the current President admitted. "We have made mistakes." For a standing President to humbly admit a lack of innocence on the part of Americans is as rare as it is, well, positively Lincoln-like in its responsibility.

To admit an absence of innocence does not signal weakness. It signals a deeper strength than pompous piety. "Our security and leadership does not come solely from the strength of our arms. It derives from our people." And those people "must draw on the strength of our values."

This means that a responsible way forward in a "time of great trial" is not to invoke people's "deepest of fears," but instead to call people toward "the highest of hopes." That means not only promoting values in rhetoric, but "living them at home." And that means "prohibiting torture" and "speaking out on behalf of human rights." It means, in my favorite phrase from the speech, that in a new era of responsibility, "right makes might." There is, in short, a "moral source of America's authority."

Spoken at West Point, before Cadets to whom he might have pandered, Barack Obama reaffirmed the reasons he united a nation to elect him as America's first African American President. He remembered that "our union was founded in resistance to oppression." And he grounded American authority not in some pious projection of innocent transcendent power, but in moral suasion that must show "restraint in the use of force."

It remains to be seen whether Barack Obama's hope can unite Americans again. Even if the war is just, and responsibly waged, one wonders if the President can do without heavy appeal to the pious rhetoric of "sacrifice" employed to justify war by so many of his predecessors in office. I, for one, am thankful for the effort.

Jon Pahl is Professor of the History of Christianity in North America at The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, and the author of Empire of Sacrifice: The Religious Origins of American Violence, due out any day now from New York University Press.

Going Rogue Zionist Style!

by Matt Sutton

This post is more derivative than usual. It started as an article in the Baltimore Jewish Times, which got picked up by a Baltimore Sun blog. Now, for your reading pleasure (and because Harvey likes it when I write about Palin) here it is for you.

Apparently Barbara Walters asked Palin last week about the Obama administration’s opposition to Israeli expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Palin's answer:

“I disagree with the Obama administration on that,” the former Alaska governor told interviewer Barbara Walters. “I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon because the population of Israel is going to grow. More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead. And I don’t think that the Obama administration has any right to tell Israel that the Jewish settlements cannot expand.”

What makes this especially interesting is that it is totally contrary to actual Israeli immigration trends. According to the original blogger, Michael Felson, "Since 2002—the year in which the major wave of immigration from the former Soviet Union came to an end—there has been a consistent downward trend in immigration to Israel. By 2006, immigration was down to 1980s levels, during which time 9,000-24,000 people immigrated annually. And in 2008, the number was 13,681, representing the lowest ratio of immigrants to Israelis since the establishment of the State – 1.9 immigrants per 1000 residents."

This, of course, raises the question: what is Palin's source of information? You guessed it. The books of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Revelation. That serious political candidates take premillennial apocalypticism seriously is great news for me; but it might not be such good news for the country (or the Palestinians). Sarah: keep rogue-ing it up!

Risk, Wisdom, and Education

Paul Harvey

Earlier this week I was reading through files for colleagues at my university coming up for their 2-year, 4-year, and tenure reviews. The files here include a complete record of student teaching evaluations, and (contrary to the propaganda generally dispensed about higher education) teaching is taken very seriously as a part of regular faculty reviews.

Reading through these evaluations is always a fascinating exercise in seeing how students think about teaching, and teachers, in various disciplines. Going through the file for one colleague who is very obviously a superior scholar and teacher, I was struck by one set of teaching evaluations which complained, sometimes kindly and sometimes bitterly, about “having” to read material which “is personally offensive to My Lord,” as one student put it. I think this student was referring probably to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or maybe Howl, both of which were on the syllabus for a particular class. Or maybe something else, I’m not sure. With the kind of mindset of these students, it’s pretty hard to read anything without getting offended somehow -- all those Greek gods having sex, all that love poetry in the Bible and in medieval literature, all those n- words in Huckleberry Finn, all those nasty deaths in All Quiet on the Western Front, and don’t even get me started on William Faulkner or Queequeg in Moby-Dick.

It’s not unusual to hear about these kinds of complaints, yet it always amazes me that these same students would not balk at “having” to read the Old Testament, with its graphic details of rape, pillage, incest, and human sacrifice, not to mention some erotica that makes Howl seem pretty tame by comparison.

In this particular case, I think I only took notice because there were about 6 or 7 student evaluations in a row that demanded there be “alternative” reading assignments, or that students not be “forced” to read material that somehow offended them. These were not offered as suggestions, but with more insistence: when a piece of literature crossed some of their personal religious values, they felt it their right to demand that they not have to encounter it, at a public university. I’m paying your salary, after all (actually about 8% of my salary, but that’s a subject for a different post). It's a strange sense of entitlement, indeed, to demand not to be educated in literature, in a class on literature.

It’s easy enough for me to brush this stuff off. I don’t get a lot of that in my classes; history books tend to be dry enough that I count myself lucky if students read them at all, and "offensive" material is understood to be just bad sinful stuff that people did in the past. Some years ago, though, I had a student complain about the great novel Invisible Man; in fact, she just refused to read it after an early scene in the book which portrays (with great humor and satire) an obviously allegorical dream that involves some incest. The student persuaded herself that she could read no further, never mind that Invisible Man is surely one of the cleanest (and most hilarious) books in all of American literature. Her loss, I thought, and moved on.

I also didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the evaluations for this one colleague earlier this week, whose sterling record spoke for itself. But I did think about it tonight, reading our own blog contributor John Fea’s nice short blog essay What is a Liberal Arts Education? Risk and Wisdom.

John draws from Mark Schwehn’s Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America., a kind of ur-text of the Lilly Fellows Program. John’s students at Messiah College evidently share a lot with students everywhere. John writes:

Unfortunately, too many students today are unwilling to engage in the kind of risk-taking that is essential to education. Many of the students I teach at Messiah, and especially their parents, do not understand what education at a liberal arts institution is all about. They think that college is a place where "cherished beliefs" should be not be challenged, but affirmed. They want to have a four year experience in which they are told that everything they have ever believed about life, God, society, etc... is true. If this is what college is about, then what is the point? Students can participate on championship sports teams, make friends, have meaningful social experiences, find a spouse, play in the band, or learn certain specialized and technical skills, but I wonder: will they really be educated? Why not just send students to vocational schools so they can gain the necessary knowledge needed to do this or that job and live a comfortable middle-class life.

At any academic gathering I attend where teaching is discussed, we all have our own “war stories” that reprise some variation of the theme John describes above. John continues to hope that education in its truest sense can happen at liberal arts colleges:

Having said that, I think it is essential that this kind of education--the kind of learning that truly transforms--happen in a safe environment where students can work through this transformative time in their life with caring professors who love them and want to walk alongside of them. This, it seems to me, is the genius of a small, residential, liberal arts college. For the students who come to Messiah College, it is what makes their college experience "Christian."

Those of us at state universities (if you can call an institution which is 8% supported by state tax dollars a "public" institution, and it's only at that high a level thanks to the temporary infusion of stimulus dollars) can sometimes experience a bit of this as well. A few years back, attending a reunion for those fortunate enough to have been Lilly Fellows in Humanities and the Arts at Valparaiso University (1993-95 for me), I gave a short talk for this gathering entitled “On Being a Scholar of Religion in the Historical Guild at the Public University Amidst a Charged Atmosphere of Religion, Politics, and War.” I was referring to Iraq then, in the title; obviously I could be referring to Afghanistan today (some of my students are on their way there, very shortly). I reflected in that talk on the virtues of academic guilds (whatever their faults) in providing some space for the life of the mind in the midst of the prevalent propaganda about higher education.

Our students at a public university obviously won’t have a college experience designed to be “Christian,” but I’ll walk alongside any of them who want to take some risks, and ideally gain some wisdom. I laughed when I read the narrow and ridiculous evaluations of my colleague’s class; they liked this colleague as a teacher, but they wouldn’t even risk thinking about the reading material (including some classics of American literature) that was assigned. Today, thanks to John’s post, I laughed less and contemplated more about how to pursue my vocation when cherished beliefs are only to be affirmed and not even questioned, much less challenged or deepened.

FSU Symposium in Religion: Proposals Now Due 12/7

Kelly Baker

Just a small note to say this is a fabulous conference for graduate students to test out their work. I enjoyed participating and going, and this is great way to prepare for larger national conferences (and the audience is very supportive). The FSU graduate students organize a mean conference with time for discussion and getting to know one's peers in the field(s). The added bonus is both of the speakers, which includes the illustrious Katie Lofton, one of our contributors. Plus, the title for this year is awesome

DEADLINE EXTENSION to Dec. 7, 2009

The Florida State University Department of Religion’s 9th Annual Graduate Student Symposium has partnered with the Society for Women’s Advancement in Philosophy’s 6th Annual Conference to present an interdisciplinary graduate student symposium to be held February 19-21, 2010. Graduate students are invited to submit an abstract (300-800 words) with a list of key terms and a CV to Brooke Sherrard by Monday, December 7th, 2009.

Sects and Sexuality: Issues of Division and Diversity

In addition, we would like to formally announce our Key Note Speaker, BERNADETTE BROOTEN, Kraft-Hiatt Professor of Christian Studies at Brandeis University and recipient of both a MacArthur Fellowship and a Ford Foundation grant on sexual ethics and religious traditions. Her works include _Women Leaders in The Ancient Synagogue: Inscriptional Evidence and Background Issues_ (Scholars Press, 1982) and _Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism_ (University of Chicago Press, 1996).

The symposium will also feature comments by KATHRYN LOFTON, an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies at Yale University. Her first book, _Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon_, is forthcoming from the University of California Press. She is currently working on her second monograph, _The Modernity in Mr. Shaw: Modernisms and Fundamentalisms in American Culture_, which examines the formation of sexual identity through the life of one Presbyterian fundamentalist, John Balcom Shaw (1860-1935).

We encourage submissions from graduate students in all levels and fields with interdisciplinary interest in the study of Religion and Philosophy. We also welcome a variety of methods and approaches, particularly in regards to (1) Religion, Ethics, and Philosophy; (2) American Religious History; (3) Religions of Western Antiquity; (4) History and Ethnography of Religions (specializing in Asian, African, Mediterranean, and Western European Religions); and (5) Philosophy dealing with Race, Class, Sexuality, and Gender.

Original Sin and Everyday Protestants

I'm happy to announce our newest contributor on our permanent rolls: Steven Miller. Steven is no stranger to the blog, having posted here before (more recently on the Billy Graham/Richard Nixon tapes), and we've discussed his excellent book Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South in a number of posts. For his first post as contributor, Steven assesses a new book by Andrew Finstuen. Welcome to Steven!
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Short Review of Andrew S. Finstuen, Original Sin and Everyday Protestants: The Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, Billy Graham, and Paul Tillich in an Age of Anxiety (University of North Carolina Press, 2009)

The Age of Original Sin; Or, Listening to The Hour of Decision while Reading Christianity and Crisis And Summoning The Courage to Be

By Steven P. Miller

In the postwar United States, the word “crisis” appeared at least as often as “spin” and “network” do today. The early Cold War was a period of brooding about anxieties abroad and at home. American social critics lamented, collectively, an affluent society of organization men and status seekers wearing gray flannel suits and living in ticky-tacky houses. Through the lens of religious history, historian Andrew Finstuen offers a fresh perspective on the postwar crisis. For Finstuen, the postwar years were a golden age of public theology, a period when “lay theologians” took seriously the great Protestant questions of faith, grace, and most importantly, original sin (6). They listened to Billy Graham, to be sure, but many of them also read Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr. While Finstuen acknowledges the obvious differences within what he aptly terms this “curious trinity,” he argues that Niebuhr, Graham, and Tillich “shared a common theological principle: behind every sinful act was the indisputable, universal condition of individual sin” (47). The popular resonance of that shared principle, Finstuen argues, contradicts caricatures of 1945-1965 as a period of conformity. Rather it was an “original sin moment” reflective of “the sincerity and sophistication of religious thought and devotion at midcentury” (2; 186).

Regardless of how one responds to Finstuen’s thesis (I find it compelling), his book is notable for its blend of intellectual history and what the author, in an important move, calls “popular lived theology” (191). In a memorable opening chapter, Finstuen (drawing from postwar theologian John Bennett) identifies not one, but two postwar religious revivals: the “captive revival” of Dial-A-Prayer, the American Way of Life, and The Power of Positive Thinking; and the “theological revival” of Tillich, Niebuhr, and—Finstuen argues—Graham (13-46). Finstuen has read widely in Life, Look, Newsweek, and other contemporary periodicals, which served as surprising forums for the theological revival. Even more strikingly, he has delved into a treasure trove of unpublished letters to his curious trinity, uncovering an American moment when an Alabama high school valedictorian asked Niebuhr for commencement speech ideas, a Virginia homemaker wrote to Tillich about the “essential and the existential,” and seemingly everyone unburdened their souls to Graham (166). Finstuen thus is able to offer a fresh perspective on familiar figures. From the vantage point of lay theologians, Niebuhr emerges as “less a realpolitik political philosopher than a prophet-pastor”; Graham as “less a theatrical revivalist . . . than a genuine evangelist communicating both the severity of sin and the power of Jesus Christ to conquer sin”; and Tillich as “less a liberal, abstruse theological experimenter . . . than a translator of the classic doctrine of original sin for a modern age” (190). Finstuen’s largely affirming treatments of all three are rich, nuanced, and deserving of close study.

I cannot avoid quibbling with a few of Finstuen’s arguments and suggestions. His efforts to refute popular and academic criticism of his subjects—especially Graham—make the book unnecessarily defensive at times. In a way, liberals—theological, political, and otherwise—are easier historiographical targets these days than evangelicals. By the close of Finstuen’s original sin moment, liberal theology seems a god that failed. Yet it was viable enough to soon serve as a foil for postliberal theology, among other things. The labels “prophet” or “prophetic,” which Finstuen employs to describe Niebuhr and (occasionally) Graham, remain tricky. When applied to American society as a whole, they can suggest a degree of activism that, to cite but one example, both Niebuhr and Graham lacked on the issue of civil rights. Some readers will take issue with characterizing Graham as part of the theological, rather than the captive, revival. However, Finstuen should be commended for taking the evangelist’s jeremiads seriously.

Finstuen’s book transports readers to a time when big questions mattered—and when nearly everyone posed them. It is a period well suited for his methodology. The best works of intellectual history make unexpected, yet insightful connections using a comparative framework. The best works in the lived religion tradition demonstrate the limits of employing conventional categories of theological analysis. Finstuen succeeds on both fronts in this creative and thought-provoking study.

Horace Clarence Boyer: How Sweet the Sound

Paul Harvey

Horace Clarence Boyer, pioneering scholar of the history of black gospel and the author of How Sweet the Sound: The Golden Age of Gospel, died earlier this year, and a celebration of his life and work appeared today on NPR; hear it here. Boyer started How Sweet the Sound when, as a student at Eastman School of Music, he was discouraged from studying the African American gospel tradition because there were no materials available for such a work. Boyer used his connections and early performing career (including appearing as a warm-up act for Mahalia Jackson) to create the materials, a well from which scholars have since drawn.

Boyer was also a contributor to We'll Understand it Better By and By, edited by Bernice Johnson Reagon, where he took a bit of his work on the pioneering composer Charles Albert Tindley (a key figure in reviving and bringing back to life the older tune "I Shall Overcome," which later became -- well, you know what it became) and presented it in a gem of an essay for this volume. In this volume he also did the same for Lucie Campbell, Tindley's contemporary and author of numerous gospel classics. And then he did the same for Thomas Dorsey, William Herbert Brewster (author of "Move On Up a Little Higher," which Mahalia Jackson turned into a classic recording), and Roberta Martin.

Boyer was hugely influential for my own work, and the interview above brings his voice back to life.