An Intercultural Whatever professor at Florida Atlantic University made each of his students write JESUS on a piece of a paper and then throw it on the floor and stomp on it.
http://www.upi.com/blog/2013/03/22/FAU-student-suspended-for-not-stomping-on-Jesus/2111363965625/
One of them refused to do it and complained to an administrator. The student was thrown out of the class.
– is once again on the receiving end of a spanking delivered by a Jewish newspaper. “Moral bankruptcy… exists at the institution… [Yeshiva] must immediately undertake an independent investigation which examines moral issues at the institution.”
The author reviews some – not all – of the scandals emanating from Yeshiva just over the last few years. He wonders why Yeshiva covers them up, denies them… UD has asked why Yeshiva refuses to respond to angry public letters from alumni, fails to change its incestuous form of governance…
Far from being willing to examine its structural corruption – a corruption will which continue to generate scandals – Yeshiva shows every sign of believing itself to be morally superior.
How long can a large complex organization remain delusional?
UD gives it another five years before it will be put in some form of receivership.
… is out front on the latest Yeshiva University scandal – a decades-long cover-up of sexual abuse. And the cover-up continues.
[A Yeshiva alumnus] said he was dismayed when [the Yeshiva-appointed investigator] told him that her report might be delivered to the Y.U. board orally rather than in writing. He said he was even more alarmed when [she] said that unlike the [Penn State] Freeh report, which was disseminated publicly the same day it was presented to the board, she “could not say whether… the board would release the report to the public.”
[The alumnus] sent a letter, signed by 18 Y.U. high school alumni [the abuse took place at Yeshiva's high school], to the chairman of the university’s board on January 3, asking that the investigation follow the blueprint laid out by the Freeh report. By January 8, the chairman, Henry Kressel, a managing director at a private equity firm in Manhattan, had not responded.
When a reporter from the Forward called Kressel on January 7 and identified himself, Kressel cut off the call. Kressel’s assistant later directed the Forward to Y.U.’s press office. (Y.U.’s press office did not respond to several questions, including a request to know who on the board is overseeing the investigation and when the board might decide to make the report public.)
Other high-ranking Y.U. officials declined to speak to the Forward. Reached at his New York home, David S. Gottesman, a billionaire investor and a Y.U. chairman emeritus, said: “I don’t talk to reporters. I never have.” Another chairman emeritus, Ronald P. Stanton, who made his fortune in agrochemicals, said, “I have no comment, sorry.”
… Seymour also declined to respond in regard to whether any member of her investigation team has any past or present ties to Y.U….
Yes, Yeshiva, following its long-established M.O. (denydenydenydenydeny), is covering itself in glory once again.
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Brava to this Yeshiva professor who takes advantage of her tenure (keep this in mind when considering the benefits of tenure) to go after Yeshiva. I’m sure Yeshiva will punish her in other ways; but they can’t fire her.
We now can see that there is a paradigm of institutional cover-up, and have named institutions that stand in that line: the Roman Catholic Church, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish organizations, Penn State, Syracuse University, the Citadel, Poly Prep Country Day School, the Horace Mann School, and now my own employer, Yeshiva University, among many others too numerous to name. At the same time, the paradigm is crumbling before our very eyes. No institution can expect to protect its secrets of abuse and assault any longer.
… between the author of an article about him (“Harold Bloom is God”) and a reader of the article.
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Your article states that Bloom was born in 1930 and then goes on to assert that he “voted for Norman Thomas every time he ran for president.” Thomas ran for president in 1928, 1932, 1936, 1940, 1944 and 1948, thus making it highly unlikely that Bloom ever voted for him. Had you done even the most minimal fact checking — say by following your own link to the Wikipedia article about Thomas — instead of indulging Bloom in his self mythologizing, your profile would have been much more interesting.
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Fair enough, Mr. Schwartz. The article has been updated.
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Mr. Fishbane, you have indeed updated the article. However, its new assertion that “Mr. Bloom, a lifelong man of the Left, said he voted for Norman Thomas,” fails to point out the impossibility of that claim, a not unimportant fact given the article’s characterization of its subject as God.
AWKward.
Penn State, to be sure, had Sandusky Blitz ice cream; but Yeshiva University’s scholarship named after a rabbi alleged to have been a notorious abuser of children (just like Sandusky, although Sandusky was not a man of the cloth) is something else again.
UD can find no reference at all to Macy Gordon at Yeshiva’s website. No surprise there.
LOL. Well, the lawyer for the three California professors suing to keep a valuable set of very ancient bones above ground isn’t diplomatic, but my sense is that he’s pretty much got it right. Strictly legally, the Kumeyaay tribe may be able to bury the two skeletons, though they don’t seem to be ancestors; but “No other set of New World remains… holds such a high degree of research potential.” They’re way old.
UD thinks a compromise is in order, maybe involving a ceremony that would not involve, or that would delay, burial.
“[A]s one gets older, and parents and peers begin to die, and the obituaries in the newspaper are no longer missives from a faraway place but local letters, and one’s own projects seem ever more pointless and ephemeral, … moments of terror and incomprehension seem more frequent and more piercing, and, I find, as likely to arise in the middle of the day as the night,” writes James Wood, in a New Yorker review of a book about secularism.
Like André Comte-Sponville, who, in The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, celebrates as ‘atheist spirituality’ the experience of Rilkean moments of self-dissolution which allow one to feel the true being of the world and one’s natural place in it, the contributors to The Joy of Secularism (its cover archly done up to resemble The Joy of Cooking) argue that secularism is “not a negative condition, not a denial of the world of spirit and of religion, but an affirmation of the world we’re living in now; that building our world on a foundation of the secular is essential to our contemporary well-being; and that such a world is capable of bringing us to the condition of ‘fullness’ that religion has always promised.”
One of Joy‘s contributors, Bruce Robbins, extends Comte-Sponville’s ecstatic immanence, his worship of the earth and of humanity’s habitation upon it, beyond the mystically experiential, arguing that religious fullness – of meaning and value – may be derived from social action. Wood writes:
[Robbins] faults Charles Taylor for assuming that modern secular life “is beset with the malaise of meaninglessness.” Weber’s word for disenchantment, Entzauberung, actually means “the elimination of magic,” but it is a mistake to infer the loss of meaning from the loss of magic. If a malaise besets contemporary life, Robbins writes, it may have been produced not by the march of progress but by the faltering of progress — “by the present’s failure to achieve a level of social justice that the premodern world did not even strive to achieve.”
Here, Robbins, like many secularists, aligns himself with Camus’ existential defiance of meaninglessness through the free, creative, ascription of meaning to a Sisyphean world – a meaning which, founded on the human, and on the love of the human, would inevitably have social justice at its core.
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But Wood points out that all the secular – indeed, all the religious – affirmation and comfort in the world can’t really stop us asking our “tormented metaphysical questions.” (Why is life so short? So inexplicable?) As Adam Phillips, a contributor to the Joys volume, says elsewhere:
There are parts of ourselves – that don’t want to live, that hate our children, that want ourselves to fail… [T]here is something strange about humans: they are recalcitrant to what is supposed to be their project.
Indeed we prove recalcitrant even to the foundational project of spiritual calming, or at least spiritual clarity; we continue to harbor hatred of, and rage at, our stingy, undisclosing world. Wood quotes a passage from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse:
For one moment she felt that if [she and her companion] both got up, here, now on the lawn, and demanded an explanation, why was it so short, why was it so inexplicable, said it with violence, as two fully equipped human beings from whom nothing should be hid might speak, then, beauty would roll itself up; the space would fill; those empty flourishes would form into shape; if they shouted loud enough Mrs. Ramsay would return. “Mrs. Ramsay!” she said aloud, “Mrs. Ramsay!” The tears ran down her face.
Beautiful, joyous, vigorous, wise Mrs. Ramsay must be summoned from the dead to share her wisdom about life, and to tell us why she, so vigorous and good, had to die; yet she stays as silent as the friend Donald Justice addresses in his poem, Invitation to a Ghost:
Whisper to me some beautiful secret that you remember from life.
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“The main condition of absurdity,” writes Thomas Nagel in a 1971 essay, The Absurd, “is the dragooning of an unconvinced transcendent consciousness into the service of an immanent, limited enterprise like a human life.” He anticipates the problem with Comte-Sponville’s atheist spirituality: we simply seem constituted toward transcendence, toward the positing and sensing of so much more than this. We try to allow ourselves to be dragooned (a gloriously absurd word, that) back into the limited enterprise of a human life, but we remain unconvinced; as soon as we get there, a collision occurs “between the seriousness with which we take our lives and the perpetual possibility of regarding everything about which we are serious as arbitrary, or open to doubt.” When we’re truly earthbound, our curious but rather impressive “capacity to see ourselves without presuppositions, as arbitrary, idiosyncratic, highly specific occupants of the world, one of countless possible forms of life” is activated.
Hence our absurd predicament: We may have trouble believing in heaven, but we are, most of us, entirely unable to believe exclusively in earth. For us, things seem always to ramify, things are fraught, things are always spiraling outward with transcendent implication. Caught on an earth which ever catches us up, we’re in a predicament, writes Nagel, both “sobering and comic.”
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If there’s not much disentangling absurdity discursively, there’s its aesthetic treatment (hence Wood’s recourse to Woolf), in which this dilemma is staged in ways that elucidate it and reconcile us to it.
In his preface to a selection of Philip Larkin’s poems, Martin Amis attempts to account for Larkin’s status as the best-loved of post World War II British poets. It’s odd that he’s so loved, given his sour – even ugly – personality, and what Amis rightly calls the “militant anti-romanticism” of the poems.
Seamus Heaney’s misgivings are probably representative: Larkin is “daunted” by both life and death; he is “anti-poetic” in spirit; he “demoralises the affirmative impulse.”
Yet of course Larkin, more powerfully than any other poet of his time, places himself precisely in the thick of absurdity; he is the emblematic sober and comic stick in the mud.
His greatest stanzas, for all their unexpectedness, make you feel that a part of your mind was already prepared to receive them – was anxiously awaiting them. They seem ineluctable, or predestined. Larkin, often, is more than memorable. He is instantly unforgettable.
We absorb him like that because he captures our recalcitrance to our projects, and even makes this recalcitrance sing. We recognize ourselves in Larkin’s resigned irony because so often that is exactly where we are. Larkin doesn’t whisper to us beautiful secrets; but he whispers our strange and even somehow beautiful truths.
.. and author of a series of books on strength conditioning, has killed himself.
He suffered from depression.
He jumped off the roof of the New York Athletic Club.
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On the same day, an opinion piece in Emma’s city’s newspaper, The New York Times, features this phrase:
suicide is generally wrong
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Indeed the opinion piece’s headline makes the wrongness of suicide paramount. It asks:
WHAT’S WRONG WITH SUICIDE?
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This is the writer’s second column, in the last couple of days, on suicide. In neither column does he even begin to hint at a justification for the claim that suicide — assisted or non-assisted — is wrong. Let’s see if we can do that.
There is an obvious religious way in which suicide is wrong. You are born by God, you live by God, you die by God. For many religious, taking your death into your own hands is – like abortion – denying the will of God in regard to the most basic of human realities. It is a sort of grotesque disobedience, a usurpation of divine powers, essentially unforgivable in its extremity.
Other spiritual traditions may not bring so punitive and outraged a rhetoric (and indeed damnation) to suicide, but they may well see it as … not exactly wrong, but, as the Buddhist Matthieu Ricard explains:
[W]anting not to exist any longer is a delusion. It’s a form of attachment that, destructive though it is, binds you to samsara, the circle of suffering existence. When someone commits suicide, all they do is change to another state, and not necessarily a better state either.
Here, suicide is just sort of stupid, since it doesn’t accomplish the surcease you’re after. On the contrary, it almost guarantees the unpleasantness of your next go-’round.
If you’re not part of a spiritual tradition in which the will of God or karmic action prevails, in what way is suicide wrong, or ontologically mistaken, and therefore to be rejected?
Here are three possible ways: One is the harm argument; a second is the antithetical-to-life argument; and, finally, there’s the cowardice argument.
Harm: Everyone knows that suicide hurts other people. When suicides write notes (apparently Tom Emma did not), they almost always include the words I’m sorry. Weighing on their minds as suicides do the deed is the shock and despair and guilt they’re handing people who love them, and they routinely ask their forgiveness.
Just as for the religious you are, in killing yourself, denying yourself to God, for human beings you are denying yourself to them. The act is the ultimate taking. Hence, suicide is wrong because it is cruel beyond reason.
Antithetical to life: In his memoir, Experience, Martin Amis writes that “because of what I do all day ,… suicides … are antithetical.” An artist, a writer, creates, makes something out of nothing. Her material is us — living breathing human beings and their ongoing dilemmas — and she needs us to be there, to keep at it.
When we check out, we take the air out of everyone’s tires. We threaten the fundamental, unthinking commitment we’re all supposed to have to the human comedy and our part in it. Life is good… or at least interesting… or at least compelling in its pleasures. Something like that. Each suicide is thus an intimately demoralizing act for the rest of us. Why persist? Why create? Who says life is good? Suicide is wrong because in killing oneself one ontologically puts at risk all of us.
Cowardice: Old age, people like to say, is not for sissies. All of life is full of challenges and deficits and sorrows and anxieties, and old age is of course rife with them; but, as the cliché suggests, only a sissy would take the easy way out. Life, under any circumstances, is a gift. Your life is a gift to you, and to others. Suicide is wrong because its commission makes you a supreme sissy, someone whose unseemly fear of existence itself blights your very being.
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UD would argue that none of these three arguments succeeds in marking suicide as wrong.
A USA Today reporter asks the author of Onward Christian Athletes about “college sports evangelism” post-Tressel.
[B]ig-time college sports are a mess and a poor platform for the promotion of religious virtue. The central idea of sports ministry — use sports and famous athletic figures to promote the faith — seems more problematic than ever in view of what’s happened with Coach Tressel. …With regard to the concept of using sports as a platform to promote faith … At a certain point, the platform no longer works as a vehicle to promote Christianity, because the platform is corroded and decayed.
As you know if you follow this blog, UD is about to teach a course on beauty. She has assigned, among other texts, this Oxford anthology.
As she thinks about this course, she’s writing a series of blog posts about art, aesthetics, ethics. Here are a couple of sample entries.
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The George Washington University School of Engineering, the Elliott School of International Affairs, Columbian College of Arts and Sciences — her students in this course come from all over.
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UD has also been gathering news articles of interest to people interested in beauty. There’s the Council Bluffs sculpture controversy, generating coverage from as far away as Australia. There’s the Vogue oil spread.
The wee story of the Wee Frees in Scotland isn’t about the visual realm. It involves efforts on the part of some congregants of this austere Presbyterian denomination to change the way they sing in church.
Which is acapella. And only the psalms. No hymns. No musical instruments. Just the Old Testament psalms, in unison, or sometimes with mild harmony. Sounds like this.
Here’s a whole page of their singing.
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What’s being held on to when people hold on to this as their sole musical worship?
I’m reading Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil while I’m here in Savannah. I’m only a couple of chapters in.
Having just visited Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home, Midnight etc. seems a good title for all of O’Connor’s work.
I’ve taught her short stories for a couple of decades, and you know what? They don’t grow on you.
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It’s not that I’ve stopped admiring the artist. No one saw better than O’Connor what a short story was, and what it could do. She powerfully influenced Don DeLillo and many others.
Her prose is stately and muscular and she can do it all: Irony…
But irony doesn’t really say it. What she’s got is a stealthy point of view, slinking among pity, amusement, disgust, horror, and indifference.
She foreshadows her outcomes elegantly, but her images amass a symbolic force that can only be called appalling.
She writes hilarious, spot-on, dialogue, but the spot she’s on about is so stupid as to be fundamentally mute.
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Above all, there’s no denying the consistency and depth of O’Connor’s denunciation of humanity.
Flannery O’Connor seems unable to forgive us for remaining elusive in regard to our own suffering and in regard to what O’Connor takes to be our salvation. Unlike the much kinder James Merrill, who writes in his poem “Santorini” that most of us cultivate “an oblivion that knows its own limits,” O’Connor believes we’re blind fools blundering through existence in the baddest of bad faith. Bestially dumb to human and spiritual realities, we receive our inevitable epiphanies as cartoonish hammer blows to the head.
Here is Flannery O’Connor on the subject of Simone Weil:
The life of this remarkable woman still intrigues me while much of what she writes, naturally, is ridiculous to me. Her life is almost a perfect blending of the Comic and the Terrible, which two things may be opposite sides of the same coin. In my own experience, everything funny I have written is more terrible than it is funny, or only funny because it is terrible, or only terrible because it is funny. Well Simone Weil’s life is the most comical life I have ever read about and the most truly tragic and terrible. If I were to live long enough and develop as an artist to the proper extent, I would like to write a comic novel about a woman—and what is more comic and terrible than the angular intellectual proud woman approaching God inch by inch with ground teeth?…
By saying Simone Weil’s life was both comic and terrible, I am not trying to reduce it, but mean to be paying her the highest tribute I can, short of calling her a saint, which I don’t believe she was. Possibly I have a higher opinion of the comic and terrible than you do. To my way of thinking it includes her great courage and to call her anything less would be to see her as merely ordinary. She was certainly not ordinary. Of course, I can only say, as you point out, this is what I see, not this is what she is—which only God knows. But I didn’t mean that my heroine [in a short story or novel] would be a hypothetical Miss Weil. My heroine already is, and is Hulga. Miss Weil’s existence only parallels what I have in mind, and it strikes me especially hard because I had it in mind before I knew as much as I do now about Simone Weil. …You have to be able to dominate the existence that you characterize. That is why I write about people who are more or less primitive. I couldn’t dominate a Miss Weil because she is more intelligent and better than I am but I can project a Hulga.
At least Nabokov, in writing about Lolita, acknowledges her power over Humbert Humbert as much as her primitiveness. At least he gives Humbert moral awareness. O’Connor needs to assume a world of moral morons over whom the writer has absolute control.
Simone Weil, with her ethical profundity along with her absurdity, can’t be aesthetically dominated; she can’t be tossed so easily onto the ship of fools and made to float along with everyone else.
Of course for O’Connor Weil is a fool -a particularly pathetic one, in fact, because she exemplifies the sinful pride that lies behind trying to use your mind to understand divinity: She was a “proud woman approaching God inch by inch with ground teeth.” What I’ve always seen as most impressive and human about Weil – her attraction to faith and her resistance to it – O’Connor sees as a pitiable farce, a comic parable about human vainglory and the way it blocks our acceptance of cosmic mysteries.
I see how in extreme and self-destructive gestures like starving herself in sympathy with suffering people Weil becomes an object of interest for O’Connor, who in story after story features extremists and compulsives doing weird self-destructive things in an hilariously distorted belief that they’re being spiritual, or, even worse, doing these things out of no belief at all, but rather out of some deeply obscure, deeply stupid need for self-expression. Weil, O’Connor writes, “parallels” such characters…. Yet how unkind of O’Connor, who routinely condemns the tawdry and deluded class snobbery of characters like Mrs Turpin in “A Revelation,” to see Simone Weil, of all people, as a mere variant of that.
“To look at the worst will be for [the writer] no more than an act of trust in God,” writes O’Connor; but actually I think she means to look for the worst. It was O’Connor’s strange mission to make us trust the actions of grace even in regard to the most lost among us (the wildly popular tv series, Lost, apparently featured O’Connor’s work); yet how can I trust a writer for whom it’s always midnight in the garden of good and evil? Who cannot grant us any clarity at all?
“The reader wants his grace warm and binding, not dark and disruptive,” O’Connor writes, with characteristic dismissiveness. Instead of seeing life as one long squalid torpor disrupted by a probably fatal but somehow spiritually bracing blow to the head, the reader will insist on something different… But that something different is not necessarily the kitschy grace that O’Connor imagines we’re after.
“He allows you to see that life is full of different moods and emotions… Whatever you do… however long you live… there’s one thing you’re sure of … that you’ll go … That’s the language Purcell is wonderful at speaking…. He’s writing this devotional stuff for church, and in the middle of it you suddenly realize you’re hearing the song of an anguish.”
Pete Townshend, in this
interview, is far
better than UD‘s
been at explaining – as
she’s tried to do, all these
years on this blog – why
Henry Purcell is the fairest
one of all.
She has never studied anthropology. She has never done field work. She does not understand the people of Kansas and environs, and she never will. If you can make sense of this Kansas City Star commentary, which presents itself as a tribute to outgoing Kansas State president Jon Wefald, you’re a better man than I.
[A recently disclosed Kansas State University audit] paints Wefald, Krause and Snyder [background on these people here] as shady, clueless and drunk on power.
… My impression is that Wefald, Krause, Snyder and anyone connected to Kansas State athletics during the school’s “football powerhouse era” cashed in on the record and off. [Dump the quotation marks.]
Even Tim Weiser, who had little to do with the golden era, received a no-questions-asked $500,000 loan. Thirteen payments to Krause, Snyder, Weiser and others totaling close to $1 million cannot be accounted for or explained.
The $3 million secret buyout Krause agreed to give Ron Prince seems to be part of a pattern of financial mismanagement at K-State under Wefald’s presidency.
… “The Miracle in Manhattan” now has an enlightening postscript, “The Madoff in Manhattan.”
… My opinions of Jon Wefald and Bill Snyder have not changed. I respect them immensely. I’m astonished by their accomplishments. But I always regarded them as human and therefore flawed. Greed, arrogance and a sense of entitlement can invade their mind-set as easily as yours. [Yeah well. Here's where I start getting all confused. I don't claim to have an unimpregnable mind-set, but - as God is my witness! - my mind-set is set at an entirely different frequency from Bernard Madoff's... So point one, if you're saying any of us could do with money and power what Wefald and the others did, you can kiss my royal Irish arse. Point two, if you retain immense respect for mad arrogant fools who steal your tax money and make your university a national joke, you are pathetic.]
… I suspect the audit would’ve remained private had Wefald and Krause not renamed Snyder as head football coach on their way out the door. Re-installing Snyder as the unofficial president of the university was/is a serious impediment to Schulz. [Let's pause right there. Did you get that? Did you get the point that at KSU the football coach is the real president of the university?]
… K-State’s athletic department has been completely out of control for years… [But so are you, Kansasfolk, so are you. At least the people of Romania finally found it in themselves to get rid of the Ceausescus. And, you know, you don't see Romanians running around today still worshipping them and finding themselves astonished by their accomplishments...]
For generations, students at the University of Texas have believed that if, on your way to a test, you see an albino squirrel on campus, you’ll get an A.
But a biology professor at UT says: “The squirrels — at least the ones I’ve seen on campus — are not true albinos… I have actually seen several color variants of squirrels on campus with light-colored hair but all with normally pigmented eyes. … There are squirrels that lack or have reduced production of eumelanin, or black pigment, which are known as amelanistic squirrels.”
Not only that, but a student comments in response to the article:
I saw an albino squirrel and had a threesome later that night ….
