This is a brilliant summary of my issue with meme theory from Harvey Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity:

Originating in a set of radical proposals advanced by the biologist Richard Dawkins, memetics has come to embrace a great variety of competing arguments. There is no consensus, at yet at least, on such basic questions as what constitutes a “meme,” whether an agreed definition is necessary in the first place, and even whether memes are located in minds or in the environments that surround them (or both). Not only are there diverse notions of what memes are and where they can be found, but there is no agreement on the general aim of memetics: is it to explain something, to describe it more precisely, to provide an inspiring metaphor for the analysis of some other process, or what?

© Robert Fischer for Living Leadings, 2011. | Read the Post on Living Leadings | 2 comments
Post tags: Harvey Whitehouse, memetics, Richard Dawkins

After a long delay, I finally sat down and recorded the presentation that I gave at the Peace and Justice Studies Association national conference. People have been asking for it, but life has been busy, and it is just now here.

The basic question is how game theory can inform nonviolent activism, and how nonviolent activism might inform game theory. I go through much of the history of game theory without getting bogged down in mathematical notation.

As always, it is published under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 license. More information here:
Peace Games: Game Theory and Peace by Robert Fischer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License. In short, feel free to pass it around.

You may want to download the file in order to avoid some squishing action in my lame player. The full-quality version is downloadable here.

Related posts:

1. Presenting on Game Theory and Peace
   at the Peace and Justice Studies Association
2. Negative versus Positive Peace:
   A World of Difference
3. Nobel Peace Prize Presentation Speech for the Society of Friends
4. Moving through 2011:
   Ending the Spring, Looking to the Fall

© Robert Fischer for Living Leadings, 2011. | Read the Post on Living Leadings | No comments yet
Post tags: Game Theory, Martin Nowak, Negative Peace, Peace, Peace and Conflict Studies, Peace and Justice Studies Association, Positive Peace, Retributive Justice, Robert Axelrod, Satyagraha, Satyagraha matrix, Tit for Tat

[EDIT: Said atheist has since deleted the tweet. It's still appearing in my timeline, though, and appears here.]

These kind of exchanges are really frustrating, and they’re really much more common than they should be. The ardent atheists that I have encountered pride themselves on being grounded in truth and rationality and reality and all that goodness (over and against the crazy-ass theists and their delusions). If you really want to be grounded in truth and careful thought, then you need to catch up on the careful thought about truth which is out there. There’s a long history and significant work in the philosophy of knowledge, and if you’re going to start condemning people because of their ways of knowing, you should really have a handle on what you’re talking about. Right now, as I hear many atheists talk, I wish they’d just catch up — often, their arguments about epistemology are like someone coming into a physics conversation and arguing for luminiferous ether.

Here is my take on a mandatory reading list if you really want to engage in conversations about truth. The ordering is significant: I think that if you want to have your mind appropriately blown, you need to move in roughly this order. (Of course, this order happens to be roughly the order I encountered things, so take that recommendation with a grain of salt.)

• Descartes, Discourse on Method — Seriously, it’s short, it’s accessible, it’s well-written, and it’s the basic blow which sets up both modernism and postmodernism.
• Heidegger, Being and Time — This gets at the basic difference between that-which-is and that-which-seems-to-be (my words, not his). This book is one that I keep coming back to, because just when I dismiss it as being simplified or impractical or something, it somehow comes back and grabs my imagination.
• Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge — A brilliant analysis of science and knowledge conversations in general. Although I don’t necessarily agree with all of it and it makes me squirm in a bunch of places, my critiques are mainly more of form than core content.
• MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? — You may need a running start into this book via MacIntyre’s After Virtue, but this is the more important text when it comes to discussing truth. Most importantly, it lays out an actual and effective technique for engaging in conversation with someone whose worldview is so thoroughly different.
• Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe — A vital check on the presumption of the universality of science as a means of description and conception.
• Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript — If you make it this far: Kudos, and think of this as the boss fight of the list. Kierkegaard here lays out the most sustained and thorough attack on objectivity-as-knowledge, and although Kierkegaard is no doubt more devotedly Christian than his pseudonymous authorial personae, I find myself often in deep sympathy with the authorial personae, and it’s a position that I think many agnostics and open-minded atheists can appreciate. (I actually encountered this book first, but it’s such a massive beast and such a deep and shockingly ahead-of-its-time text that it made it onto the list last.)

With these thinkers under your belt, I think we might be able to have a conversation in 140 character tweets on the issue of belief. But otherwise, it’s going to take a lot more work to try to get anywhere, and some of the claims I make (like the ultimate subjectivity of all knowledge) will seem really weird. Unfortunately, the truth is that our experience of reality is just plain weird — if you consider carefully what is going on when we know something, you end up deeply enmeshed in your own preconceptions, presuppositions, and interpretations. This makes knowledge and means of knowledge (including empiricism and its expression in western science) as contextualized and culturally loaded. I’m willing to have deeper conversations on this point, but just not over Twitter.

© Robert Fischer for Living Leadings, 2011. | Read the Post on Living Leadings | 3 comments
Post tags: atheism, Chakrabarty, Descartes, Foucoult, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, MacIntyre, reading list

Search Terms Reaching Here:

• finding christ in the quaker church

Related posts:

1. Sermon: Possessing the Church
2. Got a question?
   "Ask a Quaker..."
3. My Quakerism and Christian Theology
4. Dear Fellow Christians:
   This is what we sound like to everyone else.
5. Evangelism Starts at Home

© Robert Fischer for Living Leadings, 2011. | Read the Post on Living Leadings | No comments yet
Post tags: "Finding Christ in the Quaker Church", anthology, book, request for advice

You probably want to download the file and play the downloaded version: the file is big and your player probably won’t stream the file, so if you just press “play”, it might take a minute or two for the sermon to actually start playing.

Search Terms Reaching Here:

• social justice issue matthew 9:35-10:23

Related posts:

1. My Sermon: "Vain Worship"
   (Now in MPEG format)
2. Preaching August 1st, 2010:
   "It Takes All Kinds"
3. Dec 5^th:
   "The Nativity of Jesus:
   For Grown-Ups"

© Robert Fischer for Living Leadings, 2011. | Read the Post on Living Leadings | No comments yet
Post tags: Matthew, Matthew 9:35-10:23, Occupy Wall Street, Preaching, Preaching class

The press is everywhere. We are all press. You can’t ban us all. Kicking out the “official” press just forces them to speak more directly to the witnesses and to capture their stories and air them as the truth.

#OccupyWallSt has now done exactly what it intended: it revealed that the system was ignoring the people. The people refused to be ignored any longer, so now the system has to oppress the people violently and openly. The only other choice the system has is to change.

So, for fear of change, the system has to tighten its grip. It has to destroy libraries. It has to disguise itself and lie to “infiltrate” something that is totally open and visible. It has to deploy riot police to beat unarmed little girls. It has to do 2 AM evictions and lock totally uninvolved people in their homes like they are criminals. It has to attack our own soldiers, because the soldiers know the truth better than anyone else.

But the sick part is that these actions are not killing #OccupyWallSt. These actions feed it, because it shows that the #OccupyWallSt protests were right and just from the first moment — there really is something broken in this system. There is violence in this system, and all it took was rejecting that violence to coax it out of its hole. In the light of day, though, that violence cannot survive.

The system cannot win. We are eternal.

Related posts:

1. Questions on the Death of Osama Bin Laden

© Robert Fischer for Living Leadings, 2011. | Read the Post on Living Leadings | No comments yet
Post tags: eviction, Mayor Bloomberg, Occupy Wall Street

Please keep in mind that this is going to be performed aloud, not printed, and that shaped a fair bit of the way the translation is rendered: spoken English still makes sense with a more fast-and-loose grammar, especially given inflection.

Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their churches and proclaiming the blessings of the kingdom and healing all disease and all infirmity. But seeing the people, he felt compassion for them, since they were rent and cast down as though they were sheep not having a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “Although the harvest is abundant, yet the workers are meager: so beg the Lord of the Harvest to cast out the workers into the field.” And summoning his twelve disciples, he gave to them authority over unclean spirits, in order to cast them out and heal all disease and all infirmity.

(The names of the twelve sent out are these: First, Simon called Peter; and Andrew, his brother; and Jacob the son of Zebedee; and John, his brother; Phillip; and Bartholomew; Thomas; and Matthew the tax collector; and Jacob the son of Alphaeus; and Lebbaios; Simon the Canaanite; and Judas the Iscariot, the one who turned him over.)

These twelve Jesus sent, transmitting the charge to them, saying:

“Do not follow the path of the Gentiles, and do not enter into the Samaritan cities, but rather journey on for the sake of the sheep, the perishing of the House of Israel. As you journey on, proclaim that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand by healing the sick, raising the dead, cleansing the lepers, casting out demons.

“You took without cause; give without cause — do not acquire gold coins nor silver coins nor brass coins for your wallet, nor a bag for the road nor a second coat nor sandals nor a staff, for the worker is worth his food.

“Whichever city or village you enter in to, inquire who is worthy in it, and remain there until whenever you leave. Entering into the house, greet it, and if this house is worthy, establish your peace upon it; but if it is not worthy, turn your peace back to yourself.

“Whoever does not receive you nor hear your words, as you leave that house or that city, brush off the dust from your feet. Truly I say to you, the ground of Sodom and Gomorrah will be more tolerable than it in the time of judgment.

“Behold! I send you out like sheep into the midst of wolves. Therefore, become wise like the serpents and pure like the doves. But beware of the human beings, for they will turn you over to the courts and punish you in their churches.

“You will be lead to the governors and the kings on account of me as a testimony to them and to the nations. But when they turn you over, do not worry how or what you are to say, for it will be given to you in the hour what to say, for you are not the speaker, rather the Spirit of the Father is the speaker through you.

“Brother will turn over brother to death, and father, children; and children will rise against parents and put them to death. You will be hated by all because of my name; the one who remains at the end of this has been saved, and so if you are persecuted in this city, flee into another, for truly I say to you, you could not exhaust the cities of Israel until the Son of Man appears.”

Search Terms Reaching Here:

• snippets 13 bible

© Robert Fischer for Living Leadings, 2011. | Read the Post on Living Leadings | No comments yet
Post tags: Bible, Matthew, Translation

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

—Major General Smedley Butler, USMC (Ret), War is a Racket

Search Terms Reaching Here:

• smedly butler armstice day

Related posts:

1. Smedley Butler on War
2. “Friendly Prophets”, Day 1 Recap
3. Inaugural Gardening Day:
   The 2011 Season Begins!
4. Negative versus Positive Peace:
   A World of Difference

© Robert Fischer for Living Leadings, 2011. | Read the Post on Living Leadings | No comments yet
Post tags: "War is a Racket", Armistice Day, Smedley Butler, Veteran's Day

You probably want to download the file and play the downloaded version: the file is big and your player probably won’t stream the file, so if you just press “play”, it might take a minute or two for the sermon to actually start playing.

Search Terms Reaching Here:

• vain worship

Related posts:

1. Sermon: Possessing the Church
2. Preaching August 1st, 2010:
   "It Takes All Kinds"

© Robert Fischer for Living Leadings, 2011. | Read the Post on Living Leadings | No comments yet
Post tags: Matthew, Preaching, Preaching class, Vain Worship

(If you’re curious or textually inclined, the manuscript is here.)

Related posts:

1. My Sermon: "Vain Worship"
   (Now in MPEG format)
2. Sermon: Possessing the Church
3. Preaching August 1st, 2010:
   "It Takes All Kinds"

© Robert Fischer for Living Leadings, 2011. | Read the Post on Living Leadings | No comments yet
Post tags:

Related posts:

1. My Quakerism and Christian Theology
2. A Simple Question
   About Jared Loughner

© Robert Fischer for Living Leadings, 2011. | Read the Post on Living Leadings | No comments yet
Post tags: Interview, Quakerism, Rachel Held Evans

The instantaneous creation of over six thousand victims shocked us. It led the politicians of the United States of America, like the elders of Israel in 1 Samuel 8, to call for a strong leader who could lead us into war. In the face of so many innocent deaths, we offered patriotic prayers. We turned to violence and war. We would eradicate the hatred of us by killing those who hate us.

Like Samuel, some prophets of our age warned us about what we were doing, what we were giving up, and what we were taking on. The prophets warned us that succumbing to fear would transform the USA into a country where hate and bigotry become powerful and influential forces. They warned us that the economic toll of the military’s needs would be disastrous to our nation’s struggling livelihood. They warned us that the consolidated power would be abused, invasive, and turned to the ends of the powerful against the good of the populace. They warned us that thousands upon thousands would join the six thousand who died on that day. Despite warnings, we still called for a strong leader to lead us to war: someone who could save us from this threat, who would keep us safe and be our salvation. Just as when the Israelites were calling for a king, God granted us our wish and the prophetic warnings have come to pass.

On this anniversary, the wounds are fresh again. The images of terror and panic are new in our minds all over again. Relived traumas reinforce the pain. We also have the additional weight of our past decisions that tripled the count of dead through our direct actions. The weight presses the pain deeper into our psyche. It is oppressive.

On this anniversary, we have a chance to take a new choice. We cannot change the past, but we can take the pain we feel in the present and use it to make a better future: one of peace, one powered by a force more powerful than hatred and division. We can learn how to do that by looking to another anniversary commemorated today. The other anniversary is of an event one hundred and five years ago today.

One hundred and five years ago today, another war started. This war was a new kind of war, a war that demonstrated that there was a force more powerful than tanks and mortars. The new war was based on faith in God, on faith in the power of martyrdom and truth to prevail over the most despicable and systematic acts of humanity’s sin.

The Muslim people who make up Afghanistan were key and powerful soldiers in this faithful war. This war drew one hundred thousand Muslims of the area into a movement called the Servants of God, dedicated to building up the destitute and to gaining freedom against a deadly oppressor. This new way of waging war converted the people of Afghanistan, then violent resistors and victims of oppression, into a force for peace and social betterment. This new way of waging war all started one hundred and five years ago, on the other 9/11.

The other 9/11 is when a man named Mohandas Ghandi launched of a new kind of war: one called “Clinging to Truth”. Believing that people are fundamentally relational, this war is based on exposing the truth of a situation and forcing people to cope with it. Exposing the truth of a situation may mean accepting violence done upon you without returning any in kind, a shocking concept in our age of industrialized state-advocated killing. Yet there is a tremendous and well-proven power in the witness of innocents, and in the power of innocence to triumph over death. Waging war through witness and relationship freed three hundred and fifty million people, and rippled throughout the twentieth century, especially informing the careers Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, Jr. We see it in the Middle East today with “Arab Spring”. To paraphrase XKCD: “Peace. It works, Brothers.”

So on this 9/11, we have a choice. We can myopically focus on the pain of ten years ago and victimize ourselves all over again, or we can see the pain of ten years ago in light of the revelation of a century before. We can choose to entrust our salvation to a strong earthly leader and the ways of the nations, or we can choose to put our faith in the empowerment of people.

If you would like more information about the other 9/11, see the Metta Center’s Hope Or Terror?: Gandhi and the Other 9/11.

Search Terms Reaching Here:

• robert fischer on gandhi

Related posts:

1. A Simple Question
   About Jared Loughner
2. I am a pacifist because
   I can't sit by and do nothing while people suffer

© Robert Fischer for Living Leadings, 2011. | Read the Post on Living Leadings | No comments yet
Post tags: 1 Samuel 8, 9/11, Gandhi, Michael Nagler, Nonviolence, Positive Peace, War

A couple StorySLAMs ago, Alicia and I were judges at the StorySLAM. (Our judging team name was the Judgey McJudgersons.) At the end of that night, the MC announced that the theme for the next week was going to be “Heat”, and I knew I had to tell my story about the Night of the Fire God, which was the death of one of my Boy Scout uniforms…and nearly my own death, as well! I spent all month working on the story, and it seemed to go well. You can hear the story in the player below, or find me on the Monti’s archive.

Related posts:

1. Our God of Action
2. God Bless You, Prospect
   For You Have Blessed Me
3. Prophets Bible Readings

© Robert Fischer for Living Leadings, 2011. | Read the Post on Living Leadings | No comments yet
Post tags: Durham, Fire God, Humor, North Carolina, The Monti

For those that don’t know, I really admire Hugh Hollowell and his Love Wins ministry to the homeless. One of the recurring themes that Hugh keeps trying to communicate is that it’s not the Big Ideas and the Grand Gestures that make awesome love: it’s all the little things and the tiny changes. (For an example, see his post It’s the Small Things.)

I have also recently joined with the Society of Friends, and have been spending my time there and reading a lot of Quaker theology. A key part of Quaker theology is that God is experienced in the day-to-day, and so theology is a contextual and not an absolute practice: that is, one shouldn’t be making universal claims, but instead focusing on the immediate problems and the guidance that God is giving about how to live as the Kingdom of God right now about this context. These ideas are also echoed in J.C. Kumarappa and Leo Tolstoy’s take on theology, as well as Gandhi’s philosophy.

In Freemasonry, there is a very similar idea: the idea that one is circumscribed by the Grand Architect, and that being circumscribed means one cannot move beyond certain boundaries, and so beyond those boundaries are things one should simply not worry about. Instead, focus the attention to identifying and working within those boundaries, because that is where you can actually do some good.

Yet with all those influences, it took a summer at Urban Ministries of Durham to really understand what all these people were talking about. The amount of abstraction that exists in our lives is immense, and these abstractions form this illusory sense of importance and helping. It is a hard idea to communicate, but it was shocking, difficult, and yet strangely freeing when I finally met that reality. It’s like I’ve been unplugged from the Matrix.

The thing to realize is that people go on being human even when all the abstractions are gone. When money is effectively gone, and politics are effectively gone, and even the abstraction of property ownership is gone, then people still continue to be people. There are people who can’t be said to “own” anything, because all they have immediate claim to is what they are carrying, and even that could be taken from them without any recourse. These are people without property rights. And yet they are still people. They live their life. They are even happy — some are happier than certain property-owning friends I have.

This is not to say that we would all be happier if we were homeless, or if property as a concept was annihilated: those are conversations for another time. But this is simply to say that property rights are an abstraction, and not innately good or bad in and of themselves. Therefore, spending your time and effort defending property rights is not necessarily helping people. It’s indirectly helping at best, and most of the time, the abstraction is so all-encompassing a view that the questions about what helps and what doesn’t is not particularly present.

The same can be said of politics, the economy, the country, political parties, denominations and cultural sects, and all of the myriad abstractions which we build up and clutter our lives with. They’re not real, and so they do not have any weight except insofar as they impact people. Otherwise, they are a distraction, and they are keeping us from that which is truly important: caring for each other in meaningful, truly helpful ways.

Perhaps most shocking is that money itself is an abstraction. Making money as a goal is as pointless as making twos. Thinking in terms of money as anything other than a means to a greater end is simply placing priorities where they do not belong. People can get food and shelter and live their life and be a human being with no money at all. Realizing that at a deep level fundamentally changes the way one perceives all the purported crises and the anxiety and the panic of 21st century life. It also fundamentally changes what a solution looks like, because solutions have to be statements about helping human beings directly, not about somehow aligning the mystic abstraction properly in order to gain access to Utopia.

People enmeshed in abstractions — myself very recently among them — see themselves as helping people directly in all this preaching and blog posting and punditry. But it is simply not directly helping people. I use the term abstraction because it is an accurate description, but also because the abstractions draw away from the reality, and that’s literally what the root of “abstraction” means. Focusing on these abstractions is not addressing what truly is needed at the deepest core, because it always seems to assume that we are homo sapien abstractus. But we aren’t. We are human beings, and we will continue to be human beings no matter what the context. So solutions have to be about human beings themselves.

I wish I could mass produce this paradigm shift. I wish there was a red pill I could offer people to make them see. I wish people could get it. Because once you get it, everything is different. Every conversation is different. Shaking off the abstractions comes with a huge sense of responsibility born of the existential need of so many people, yet when you shake off the abstractions, you are free.

Search Terms Reaching Here:

• JC Kumarappa
• love wins ministries
• urban ministries of durham

Related posts:

1. Dear Fellow Christians:
   This is what we sound like to everyone else.

© Robert Fischer for Living Leadings, 2011. | Read the Post on Living Leadings | No comments yet
Post tags: Freemasonry, Hugh Hollowell, J.C. Kumarappa, Leo Tolstoy, Love Wins Ministries, Society of Friends, Urban Ministries of Durham

With the GRE behind me and my field education formally ended (although I will continue to be involved at Urban Ministries of Durham), now it is time to shift towards rocking this upcoming semester and submitting my applications. It’s going to be a crazy Fall…

© Robert Fischer for Living Leadings, 2011. | Read the Post on Living Leadings | No comments yet
Post tags:

Imagine my shock, then, when I checked out the schedule to see if I wanted to go…and my name was one of the presenters!

My presentation is Peace Games: Game Theory and the Understanding and Application of Peace. Follow the link for more, but it’s basically about game theory, concepts of “peace” and “altruism”, and Satyagraha. I did all the research for it and outlined it, but now I actually have to write that paper.

If you’re at all interested in the nuts and bolts of peace and nonviolence, this conference is going to have all kinds of stuff for you. So come check it out.

Related posts:

1. Peace Games:
   Game Theory and Peace
   (PJSA Presentation)
2. Negative versus Positive Peace:
   A World of Difference
3. Nobel Peace Prize Presentation Speech for the Society of Friends
4. Moving through 2011:
   Ending the Spring, Looking to the Fall
5. A Simple Question
   About Jared Loughner

© Robert Fischer for Living Leadings, 2011. | Read the Post on Living Leadings | No comments yet
Post tags: Altruism, Game Theory, Nonviolence, Peace and Conflict Studies, Peace and Justice Studies Association

There is a blog post on the atheism-theism debate which I’d like to create, simply so that people who want to have that conversation with me can leap over the initial formalities. At this point, though, I’m kinda lacking the motivation. I’d also like to try to communicate what my summer at Urban Ministries of Durham means to me, but every time I sit down with that one, I’ve been struggling to put something down into words. Also, there’s the issue of trying to decide what doctoral programs I’m going to apply to, and what the rest of my life is going to look like as a consequence. The sheer magnitude and complexity of that kind of decision has also left me dumbfounded.

Despite all that weighty silence, there is an experience I’d like to share. Earlier this summer, I found myself not taking much of an interest in anything, even those things which I previously enjoyed. I was also somewhat irritable and felt fatigued almost all of the time: life was a slog. It came as a surprise when my shrink suggested that this was depression, since I did not feel particularly “down and out”. Unlike my experience of depression as a teenager, this depression did not have an attendant sense of worthlessness or despair. But having now been on an SSRI, B12, folate, and fish oil for about a month, things are getting better. Even some things I didn’t realize were problems—like some obsessive and anxious thoughts which were intrusive but “seemed reasonable” at the time—have been put into perspective. I’m still having trouble being particularly interested in things, including socializing. But my energy is starting to come back, which is making it easier to balance my lifestyle in a more healthy way.

I’m sharing this for a few reasons. First, if you thought I was irritable near the end of last academic year or going into this summer, or if you’re wondering why my open source project contributions or social involvement have dwindled, this is why. Second, I wanted to be open about my use of psychiatric medication to supplement my lifestyle changes and other therapies, because there is still a stigma associated with the use of psychiatric medication, often borne on an illusory sense that everyone else can live their life without any help. Finally, if life is seeming really hard even though things are objectively going well for you, you may want to consider the possibility that you’re experiencing a low-grade depression and seek help for that.

Related posts:

1. I Just Have Nothing To Say
   (In 100 Words)

© Robert Fischer for Living Leadings, 2011. | Read the Post on Living Leadings | One comment
Post tags: Antidepressants, Metablogging, The Future, Urban Ministries of Durham

• Theology in the Black Church Tradition (J. Cameron Carter) — Highly recommended course on the black church from a highly recommended professor.
• Intro to Christian Preaching (C. Campbell) — The mandatory preaching class so that I don’t walk out of Duke and into a pulpit and embarrass myself.
• Theorizing Religion (D. Morgan, Religion Department) — A course on 19th and 20th century academic conceptualizations of religion.
• Religion, Politics, and Memory (M. Hassan, Religion Department) — A lately-offered course which Dr. Hassan describes this way: “In general terms, I am hoping we will discuss how different religious communities conceptualize the bonds that tie them together (what constitutes a community? the ummah? the global church? etc), investigate theories of collective memory (how can entire people “share” a cultural memory of the past?), and examine poignant moments in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions of symbolic destruction and reconstruction: the intertwining of faith, community, and politics. I hope the course will attract a broad spectrum of graduate students with diverse areas of expertise and primary interests to enrich the discussion.” She’s looking for more students, so if that sounds interesting, sign up: it’s one of the RELIGION 399 offerings.

I’m technically cleared to take 5 classes next semester, so I’m thinking about also taking God’s Ministry of Reconciliation or Theology of Las Casas. If I were to do that and I get into a doctoral program (two huge “if”s), then I’d be able to take just 1 class next semester (Church History 14), and that might be nice to take a bit of a break. I could spend some time focusing on stuff other than additional classes.

Related posts:

1. Fall Semester Classes
2. Moving through 2011:
   Ending the Spring, Looking to the Fall
3. Next Semester and the Rest of My Life:
   Out of Social Sciences
   (for the moment)
4. A Spring 2011 Class Cancelled:
   Divert to Dodge!
5. Spring 2011 Classes
   (as of Registration)

© Robert Fischer for Living Leadings, 2011. | Read the Post on Living Leadings | One comment
Post tags: Course Schedule, Duke, Preaching, Registration

Related posts:

1. On Silence and SSRIs
2. On to Applications
3. Presenting on Game Theory and Peace
   at the Peace and Justice Studies Association
4. On Abstractions and Actually Helping

© Robert Fischer for Living Leadings, 2011. | Read the Post on Living Leadings | No comments yet
Post tags: Metablogging, Stan Goff, Urban Ministries of Durham

I happily grant that contemporary feminist theory is about the reality of gender. But in practice, the female gender identity is given a pride-of-place in the way it is considered within feminism.

The Gloria Steinem piece cited in a previous comment on the original post is a perfect example of the imbalance: what feminism offers women is a better understanding of themselves; what feminism offers men is a better understanding of women.

If feminism is genuinely growing towards genderism, that kind of imbalance needs to be rectified, and feminism needs to be able to offer men a better understanding of themselves, too. And this is going to start with viewing the masculine gender identity as subject in and of itself, not just a target.

Feminism, coming from its civil rights roots, has long been focused on proving that the feminine gender identity has many of the same qualities as the masculine gender identity, and so the distinction between the two is lost—or, at least, the feminine is expanded to encompass the masculine. This works really well for making the case that purportedly universal truths aren’t, and so oppressive laws are unfounded.

Unfortunately, this specifically sets up the feminine gender identity as the subject and the masculine gender identity as the target. While the feminine gender identity has expanded through feminism, the masculine really hasn’t been helped at all by feminism. This is especially problematic now with the enshrinement of certain female traits in men as the gender of “gay male”—so much so that straight male apparently need to borrow some “queer eyes” in order to have a fashion sense. Men have been put into two boxes: gay and heterosexual, both of which carry strict social expectations. The proof of this lies in looking at popular portrayal of gay male couples such as in “Modern Family” or “The Birdcage”: there is one who has feminine qualities (gay) and there is one who has masculine qualities (straight). As a man, you can be masculine (straight) or feminine (gay): pick one.

Now, those “boxes” for males (both straight and, increasingly, gay) are really a gilded cage of presumed social dominance and automatic privilege, and so complaining about the box is a bit bogus. But if feminism really wants to make itself about all gender and not just about the female gender, then it is going to have to engage in the project of revealing the truth about those boxes the same way it revealed the truth about the “Feminine Mystque”-exposed early 20th century feminine box.

A major difficulty in this whole project is that the male gender identity is privileged, and so to speak of male gender identity qualities that have real-world impacts—e.g. whatever it is that makes men disproportionately incarcerated—may well sound like you’re stepping on toes, and may well require nuancing some of the long history of work done to conflate and problemetize gender identities. The feminine gender identity has expanded to encompass the masculine, but the masculine has not expanded except as the bifurcation into “gay”. (As the joke goes, “women can do anything men can do; men can do anything men can do, too.”) To work on expanding the privileged gender identity is to go against the traditional sensibility of feminism, but it is necessary work if feminist theory is going to speak to the truth about gender.

If that work is being done—if there is a “masculinism” subset of feminism which seeks to understand those with male gender identities and to understand the problems that predominantly face males—then I haven’t really seen it. It’s desperately needed, and it seems to be a worthy project, and I am extremely interested in working with those in the feminist movement who seek to expand its boundaries and make male gender as much as female gender a subject of advancement and support. But I just don’t see it right now, so although I grant the theory of feminism may well be universal in scope, it’s just not there in practice.

At the end of the day, the work in feminism is predominantly still about women, and men are alien and secondary in the discipline. Since men are objects and not subjects of the discipline, the only appropriate role to take is chivalrous cheerleader.

[In an example of why I love the internet, someone immediately commented that there is a discipline called "masculinities" which goes at exactly these issues, including addressing many of the key things I'm looking for. I had never even heard of it. How can I be a graduate humanities student with a fondness for gender theory and have missed this until now? To what extent is "masculinities" prevalent in feminist conversation? Are the fields growing together, or simply parallel sibling disciplines?]

© Robert Fischer for Living Leadings, 2011. | Read the Post on Living Leadings | 14 comments
Post tags: "Should I <3 Feminism", Duke Divinity School, Feminism, Gender