Month: February 2020

This week we discussed Moten’s idea of the uncommons and Warren’s arguments on ontological terror. The key learning objective was to establish the centrality of blackness in reading religious texts, to shift the marginality of blackness when reading religious texts.  With the readings, we engaged means and ways of belief, relationality, the need to destroy the category of Being, anihilation, faith, science, metaphysics, fugitivity, imagery, pessimism, terror, hope, spirit, emancipation, creativity, containerization, and worldviews, among others, in order to understand the importance of both that centrality, and the urgency of that shift.

By Sunday evening, please post your brief comment on this week’s readings and discussion.

What are sacred spaces? Sacred places? How do they correspond with geography, politics, mapping, history, myth, distance, materiality, origin, ephemera? How is a sacred space constituted in the transit or translation of a self, a subject, an individual, into a community? What role does community play in the material part of the sacred? What role does belief play in the constitution of rituals and, with it, of the hierophanic?

In composing your reflection, make sure you note how the chapter you read intertwines with premises established by MacDonald’s “Introduction” and Nancy’s chapter.   To keep this from putting undue pressure on your reading and writing for this coming week, this post does not have a regular deadline; you can post it the last day of Spring Break, March 11.

This week we traded readings, angles, and arguments about the bridge (standing, broken, going) between religion and literature. We considered terms such as mimesis, reproduction, and mechanicisms; gender, bias, and dyads; evolution, humility, the sublime and ambiguity; solitude and theories and interpretations of antiquity; hell, purgatory, and paradise; children’s literature and the sacred; performance and interpretation of sacred texts; the Renaissance and comparativisms; authority, the archon, phalós and logós; searches and anxieties of origins; infinite horizontal reproduction; roots, ginger, holograms, virtuality, and rhyzomes; and religious and literary canonicity, among others.

By Saturday, please review your notes on the essay/chapter that you had assigned, and write a reflection threading those notes with our class discussion. If you were absent, please imagine that threading.

This week we engaged in discussion nine very different readings that represented nature in myriad ways: as a place, as background, as a type/style/way of doing things, as decor, as animalia, as animality, as pleasure, as a founding sign for legal arguments, and so on.

Discussion in class was guided by five questions relating to various definitions of nature, animalia/animality, marriage, sex, sexuality, gender, and theory, among others.

For your reflection, please choose one or two of those questions and post a comment, question, refutation, or argument that rehearses possible answers to that/those question/s. Yes, you can post a question as a possible way to answer the original question. By Saturday at five, please.