OK, and One Good Thing

 OK--that was a heckofa negative post I made earlier.

A student reminded me this week of Philippians 4:8--"whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things."

Here's a commendable thing. This last week, amid the abominable rhetoric and actions of the government in targeting mostly law-abiding immigrants, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints issued a brief statement reaffirming some core principles. The gist:

1. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints obeys the law.
2. We follow Jesus Christ by loving our neighbors. The Savior taught that the meaning of “neighbor” includes all of God’s children.
3. We seek to provide basic food and clothing, as our capacity allows, to those in need, regardless of their immigration status. We are especially concerned about keeping families together

This. This is not bad. I hope other Christian bodies follow suit. 

 

Moving Fast and Breaking Everything

 I'll say this for the Trump II Administration: they're living up to their promise to do a lot of things all at once. 

Trump declared today that his long-rumored Tariffs Against Everyone (Canada, Mexico, China) start tomorrow. Folk on  excitable (but not necessarily wrong) left websites. Musk has apparently taken over HR servers at the Office of Personnel Management, reinforcing "go on your dream vacation by resigning now" emails to government employees. Federal websites are being purged of information about HIV, trans care, climate change, and other Trump-no-like-them topics. Trump is doubling down--without a shred of proof or justification--on the notion that DEI is to blame for the air disaster on Wednesday night. NSF grant processes still seem frozen. The CDC is prevented from communicating about HIV/AIDS, and CDC employees were frantically archiving data from its webpages before they're purged. We seem on the brink of voting in anti-vax, anti-medical-research Robert F. Kennedy as HSS Secretary (threatening iffy GOP Senators like Bill Cassidy if they don't confirm him). The DOJ fired dozens of employees involved in prior Trump-focused investigations, and the FBI is readying a purge of all FBI folk involved in investigating Trump's multiple crimes. The ICE raids continue, now with talk of deporting those arrested to Guantanamo.

I'm not even mentioning everything. Not two weeks in, and Trump shoves down our collective throats a multiple-constitutional-crises-at-once shot with a ruin-the-economy-as-quickly-as-possible chaser.

My guess is that they're betting on a combination of reliable propaganda dissembling (from Fox News et al.) and just plain exhaustion to make this all seem normal. But I have trouble seeing how, for example, driving out 70% of federal workers will do anything but cause basic governmental collapse. Nothing will work. Trump will have broken the government. 

I get that's what some of his supporters want--or at least what many of them think they want. The right since Reagan at least has ginned up deep hatred of government while at the same time fomenting ignorance about just what the government is and what it does. Will people like it when (for example) their tax returns take longer to come in right as prices are skyrocketing, interstates degrade, air traffic control disappears, medicare and social security admin grinds to a halt, etc., etc.?

The hopes I see on the left right now involve faith in the millions of brave/industrious government workers doing . . . things?  . . . to preserve vital pieces of government informational infrastructure, like scientists storing seeds underground to replant after the apocalypse passes. There's some thought, also, that swift legal challenges can freeze or slow a lot of Trump's plans. And then there's the grim, leopards-eating-faces schadenfreude hope vested in the inevitable "find out" phase that's coming (perhaps as early as next week!) after all this f-ing around. 

Surely, this line of hopeful thinking goes, Trump won't be able to deflect blame for the immediate and painful consequences of choices made by his move-fast-and-break-everything crew. Surely popular backlash will come for him. The cost of doing so many things all at once--loudly and publicly--is that you burn away any scrap of plausible deniability. You can't claim that it's not your fault when you boasted about doing all the things.

Surely.

I don't know. As long as Trump can convince his base that he's doing this most to the groups that deserve it (marginalized folk, brown folk, immigrants, queer folk, poor folk), I think his base will swallow it. As long as the billionaires he's surrounded himself with perceive continued profit for themselves, I think his funders will support it. As long as the politicians he's wrapped around his fingers see their careers as reliant on him, I think they'll allow it.

And schadenfreude? I don't anticipate much of that. The leopards dine on everyone's faces, not just those of the ones who voted them into power. Hard to say "I told you so" when you're shrieking through the jagged hole where your lips used to be.

Rough times ahead.

The Search for Reds

 Today's mood has improved over yesterday's, which is good. After I posted the down-in-the-dumps post, I did push myself to do a short workout, take a shower, and . . . well, absorb the news about the helicopter-passenger jet collision in Washington, DC. God be with the victims' families. 

Today's press conference by President Trump featured the expected bromides about togetherness in tragedy before (apparently--after I stopped listening) detouring into the expected scapegoat for the crash from the administration: Biden (and Pete Budigeig) and DEI. He offered no evidence or substantiation, of course, even after some (admirable) pushback by some reporters. Trump is well beyond the need for proof. Apparently, so are his supporters. Some news media are instead noting how the FAA chief had stepped down at Musk's command on Jan 20, how air traffic controllers had been suffering from overwork and shortages for years, how the (again, Musk-spawned) scare letter to all federal employees yesterday provide at least some points of curiosity--for other people, obviously, not for Trump or his administration.

Just before sitting down to write this (after cleaning up yet more of Solo's projectile barfing--I'm really worried about our little guy), I read the report of a national call from Braver Angels (the depolarization group I'm part of). The call concentrated on the results of a long survey/study about one of the major problems Braver Angels faces: red (i.e., conservative) recruitment. The results identified two familiar reasons. First, reds report feeling unwelcome in BA spaces, usually thanks to offhand comments from uncareful blues. Second, many reds simply don't see why BA is worth their time and trouble; it's all talk and no action. I've heard the latter expressed by many of our red attendees. 

With effort, I quash my first reaction--how far back to we need to bend over in order to make reds feel welcome? In no other realm of society or politics do I ever see reds worrying about whether they're making blues feel welcome. Looking beyond that, I think there are some other issues going on--at least where I am--that contribute to the red-recruitment problem.

The first is that partisan sorting into reds and blues (Braver Angels's longstanding default) leaves out a great many self-identified independents, often (but not exclusively) of some flavor of libertarian. Now, a lot of times BA will label these (or encourage them to self-label as) red. But that shade of red doesn't fit well. 

One of the solutions offered by the BA official in charge of the call (whom I know as a really stand-up red-identifying guy) involved including a prominent red, a podcast host, on the call. But this prominent red is described as having "a personal relationship with a Trump nominee for the NIH"--the nominee being of course Robert Kennedy. Here's the thing: Kennedy is much more libertarian than MAGA red. He's kissed the ring enough to be NIH nominee (he'll likely get through despite a long history of cackle-brained, anti-vax opinions). Trump has recruited more libertarian bros like Kennedy and Musk into his circle this time around. I'm assuming that this podcast host falls more into that red-leaning libertarian mold, not the bright-red MAGA. (Checking Wikipedia--apparently he's been described as libertarian but now rejects that label--which is still different than a full-on-Trump loyalist a la Kash Patel.)

It remains to be seen how stable such libertarian-authoritarian bonds will remain. Libertarian authoritarianism is increasingly a thing, but it's not quite the same as MAGA white-nationalist-Christian-fundamentalist authoritarianism (not that everyone is white or Christian in that group, e.g., Patel). Some fractures between them have so far been slight, and it may be that Trump's main feat this time around involves forging and maintaining that fusion between "no government telling anyone what to do" and "no government telling me what to do--but definitely telling those other people what to do."

In any case, I don't know that we have that many dyed-in-the-wool MAGA Trump supporters in the organization. When I hear folk complain about BA being "all talk, no action," I hear more the libertarian streak than the authoritarian streak. 

Why is that? Well, one reason is that I don't hear the authoritarian streak at all. Religious fundamentalists and [substitute whatever gradation of white nationalism you'd like here] just don't come to Braver Angels meetings so far as I can see. And why would they? What's in it for them?

There's a difference, in other words, between "BA is all talk and no action, so it's not worth my time" and "BA is interested in getting the two sides to talk to and work together for the common good--and thus it's not worth my time." If you really believe that you have a deadlock on the True and the Right and that the other side really is just fundamentally Wrong and Malicious--well, it's immoral to work with them or talk to them. Authoritarians do not care to depolarize. They aim to conquer, and anything that reeks of compromise is a turnoff.

Frankly, I think both modes of thought--no government at all! and much stronger government that makes others do what I want!--represent dealbreaker positions for Braver Angels, which if anything embraces democratic governance moderated by protected liberties.  

As for the second objection--blues are mean--well, I agree that's a complaint I often here (more at the national level than at local levels). But again, I'm not sure it means what we think it means.

More tomorrow.

Stress, Turnaround, Shutdown

 Some days I can get honked at for a stupid driving maneuver and shake it off. Some days, like this evening, I can get honked at--rightfully--for merging without looking sufficiently and decide that's enough driving and being conscious for today. I turned around and went back home without the groceries I was going to get. 

I should get my eyes checked, my partner suggests. It's not (or not only) that I don't see well at night--who does? It's that I'm just not a good driver. Even when I look, I miss things. I'm being hard on myself. 

I just really hate driving.

And it was a long day. 

And I'm tired. 

I did start applications to seminaries. Turns out getting my transcripts is easier than it used to be thanks to electronic systems. I asked my recommenders to recommend me. I just need to finish a statement (only 500 words--that's so short!). And then wait.

My partner thinks my anxiety about applying made me extra sensitive to driving stuff.

Maybe? But really, it just seems like I'm getting worse at driving--or, well, worse at handling the stress of driving. It seems I'm avoiding and honking at inattentive or unsafe drivers more myself, too. And I don't navigate well at any time of day. I don't deal with other drivers being impatient with me well. 

This isn't a great trajectory, I know. I'd prefer not to retreat back to the olden days where I lived in active dread of the next time I had to drive somewhere. Is this a new old-age thing for me? Just getting more anxious about driving? Ugh.

Maybe I just need some sleep. There are times when unconsciousness just seems like a better place to go. 

If I were not me, I'd be telling myself to try to do some exercise. Move a bit and then decide how I feel (still not like driving, but maybe not just "stop all conscious thought ASAP"). I'm healthy enough not to want to respond to stress by shutting down.That response is likely an indicator that I'm pretty stressed out otherwise about something else (The Awfulness, for instance). 

So. I dunno. Signing off for now, maybe to do a little exercise in the name of resisting the decline into anxious paralysis.

The Inevitable Frustration of Complex Systems

 SO. I'm in a slightly better mood today. Partly I just had greater and longer contact with a number of people going through acute crises rather than The Awfulness we're all going through.

Partly it was my decision to apply to seminary. To get everything in by the Feb 1 deadline might be...optimistic. I have to see if I can get a transcript from my grad school, create a CV (it's been years), and ask folk if they could write me letters of recommendation...

I suppose I also made the choice NOT to apply to our fall conference, at least not a plenary session. I actually had a half-formed idea that I think I could whip into shape if I tried... It's based on John Gall's Systemantics (the antics of systems) about how complex systems tend to produce novel and unexpected problems borne out of their very complexity. The go-to example involves how the massive housing unit built to protect the US space shuttle from weather proved to be so tall and large that the interior generated its own micro-climate, which in turn required a fix. 

I've been thinking about how so many of our complex systems--legal systems and health care systems most, but also universities--manifest such antics. Watching from afar as my brother-in-law spent the last few weeks in a hospital, it reminded me so much of my time overnight in a jail (long story). I remember having the same thought on those occasions I accompanied my best friend through long ER ordeals as he suffered a kidney stone. 

In those systems, you're going through one of the most intense and unpleasant experiences of your life. But for everyone surrounding you, the professionals charged with your supervision and care and (most importantly) release, it's another dreary, underpaid/overworked day on an exhausting job full of whining and recalcitrant humans like you. Everything gets slower. Processes that could happen in ten minutes take hours, in part because they're dispersed over multiple agents and mediators and departments and couriers, all with hundreds of other things to process on their plate. And these systems feature unique bottlenecks--irreplaceable experts like surgeons or radiologists or specialists--whose time is limited. An item to be processed can land in someone's in box and sit there until next week, when the expert again rotates into the system.

It's miserable. You want to burn it all down and start over. 

I'm most apt to blame such problems on bad actors (e.g., people not doing their jobs), malicious systems (willfully underfunded or substandard pieces, as in most US prisons), and/or perverse incentives (such as the profit motives driving insurance companies). And those do exist! 

But even a system that minimizes such shortcomings is bound to seem slow, uncaring, and byzantine once it grows past a certain point of necessary complexity. That's systemantics (I think--I confess I've not yet read the book). 

I've thought about systemantics for a while, but I really got spurred into thinking about it thanks to a skeet (which I really need to find) that, in effect, warned left-progressives against letting their righteous frustration at malicious systems burgeon into a cynicism about all systems. Any fix for the problems we really care about, the skeet noted, will require systems even more complex, layered, and detailed than the present ones.  A more just legal system is unlikely to be smaller. A more just health care system--even with for-profit insurance structures excised--would be much more complicated in order to work. 

Like my friend PY has said, I believe in systems. But there's a bit of inevitable friction--and thus a necessary amount of systemantic grace--that we need to incorporate into our interaction with systems.

But I don't think I should get to that abstract this week. I could, as I told my therapist. Yes, he agreed, but it would not be reasonable to do that AND apply to seminary.

More tomorrow

Every Day a Little (More) Death

 On Bluesky, someone skeeted that they had forgotten how it felt to wake up to awful news about our President every day. 

These first seven days have offered a crash course refresher in the worst way. The elaborate, performative cruelty of ICE raids and ICE arrest quotas already sullies our soul. But the ways Trump's government seems to be following the Project 2025 philosophy of federal nihilism--just stop doing everything--boggles the mind (to use a phrase from a Reagan-appointed judge swatting down Trump's attempt to overturn the 14th Amendment).

Asylum cases frozen. People who have "waited in line" to immigrate "the right way" having doors suddenly slammed in their faces. (This on top of the fact that no "line" exists, just a Sisyphean ordeal of endless paperwork and assessments and wait times and deadlines). National Science Foundation review processes frozen--for a week? for all time? The CIA lurching back to the mostly unpopular-with-experts, mostly not-as-well-supported theory that COVID came from a lab leak--not because the evidence changed but because their conspiracy-minded director changed. Hegseth the administratively unqualified and shockingly immoral confirmed as Secretary of Defense on a 50-50 vote with Vance breaking the tie.

A friend of mine who works for Catholic Charities ESL program had tears in her eyes as she related how terrified and confused her clients were as sources of assistance suddenly dried up overnight. Horror stories of victims and raids will fill timelines for weeks to come before Trump loses interest, declares victory, and moves on to some other shiny object.

Trump seems to be living out the Moon Knight meme where he throws oddly shaped blades, bellowing "Random bullshit go!" The list grows larger and more outrageous every day: Shipping ICE victims to foreign countries in shackles and military jets. Colombia's president objects, Trump proposes outrageous tariffs, they work out a deal (more humane travel), and Trump declares victory for his super-smart tough-guy moves. Installing billionaires and rewarding pretty much anyone else who gave him money with lucrative positions of power (all while claiming to be an enemy of the elites). Gutting DEI programs, terrorizing trans people, firing (illegally) inspectors general, instituting loyalty tests and purges.

And of course there's the idee fixe du jour of (somehow?) acquiring Canada and Greenland. It's another of those "can't tell if strategy or demented" moments. No one seems clear what playing hardball (i.e., issuing crude threats) to friendly nations would gain for the US aside from extremely painful trade wars. 

Bird flu is making eggs even more expensive and difficult to buy. Tuberculosis seems to be spreading in Kansas City--but no one seems too alarmed thanks to the Trump administration's moratorium on health messaging from key federal agencies. 

That Trump and his crew throw a ton of chaff into the air, "flooding the zone" with bullshit, to drain attention away from their really alarming agenda items is not new. But this time there's the sense that a there's less chaff. They're flooding the zone not with distractions but with the deep, vast sweep of their actual agenda. 

I get that all this is likely to cause so much pain that the 2026 midterms might wipe out Republican majorities. But I fear that the damage to institutional trust and to previously reliable Overton Window sensibilities will be impossible to repair.

I have trouble imagining a future. 

Yeah yeah, I know: discipline of hope, our despair is their victory, apathy and cynicism and exhaustion and surrender are the intentional results of all the crap. But, man: it's week one of four long years. 

I have trouble imagining a future.

Clearing Out the Crap

 Whew! This is the second night in a row that I've nearly forgotten to blog here. Usually this means that I've been writing in some other venue. 

I read somewhere once that every writer has about a million words of crap in them that they have to get through before they start writing good stuff. I write this blog in part to clear out my own backlog of crap-words. 

Most days this blog helps get the gears of writing and thinking going. On some days--like yesterday and today--my work in other areas of my life has obliged me to write already. I wrote a sermon yesterday. I wrote several backgrounder bits for my PhD seminar today. My writing brain thus tells me I've done my exercises for the day.

But no--discipline demands that I write here as well.

I find myself reclaiming and re-preaching the gospel I once evangelized about constantly: writing is a mode of thinking. My students come to me mainly with the misconception that writing consists of the one-time report you make about what's already in your head. So much of the writing they've been expected to do has them regurgitate information they've been taught. Writing really does function as a report in those cases. Do you know the respiration cycle? Explain it to me in a paragraph. Such writing has its place.

But I find students run into a wall when they attempt that kind of writing for classes like mine that require them to create, structure, and communicate an argument or an analysis. They sit down to write what they assume already exists in their head--another report--and find instead they don't know what they think about it. The mental report they want simply to copy onto the Google Doc or Word Doc? It doesn't exist. 

These students (and, to be fair, many students already know or sort-of know this already) miss the idea that writing functions as a way of finding out what we think. It's a tool for thinking, not reporting. 

I had drifted away from this truth in my teaching. Sure, I would tell students they need to take lots of notes, do a lot of pre-writing, before attempting an analysis. But few of them actually seemed to take that advice. Students lead busy lives. They don't necessarily see the benefits of doing writing as thinking. After all, writing takes energy and time. It's exhausting, like calisthenics. And, as in calisthenics, writing seems so much harder for students who have avoided it. Their writerly muscles lack the strength and stamina for long runs of productive writing. 

I recognize that, in my classes now, I'm asking them to start doing pushups when they really dislike pushups. 

Nevertheless, I persist. Why? Generative AI. Among my many gripes--some curmudgeonly, some more well founded, I fixate currently on the fact that Generative AI/LLMs sell themselves as an end-run around the hard work of writing. Why do all those pushups, lift all those weights, train in all those HIIT cardio rounds, when you can just ask Gemini or Claude to produce the report you'd eventually have gotten to? But the end-run around the work of writing also misses the benefits of thinking. As sci-fi author Ted Chiang argues, having AI write for you is like bringing a forklift to the gym. Sure, the weights get lifted, and--hurrah--you feel no aches, but your muscles don't develop. You miss the point of a gym in the first place. 

I've explained this to students. Some get it. Some nod and seem to at least consider it. And others, I know, will simply decide that they would prefer not to do that exercise, thank you very much. 

Anyway. No great writing or thinking tonight, I fear. But at least there's some crap cleared out for future thinking.

Short Blog Due to Sermon

 Blar! I spent so long writing my sermon that I neglected the blog. Hm.

Maybe that's allowed? If I do lots of writing otherwise... Nah. 

This will be short, though, as it's after midnight now. I wrote about the last of four messages God repeats throughout scripture. The Rev. Rich Villodas came up with these (unless he got them from elsewhere). They are 

I love you

I am with you

Do not be afraid

You can come home.

I wrote about homecoming, mostly using Luke 15's parable of the Prodigal Son and relying heavily on Henri Nouwen's The Return of the Prodigal Son. And Psalm 137. 

Right now,the sermon is . . . fine. It'll need another look-over tomorrow morning. It's too long, as most sermons are. 

But God grant me the grace to be a good instrument for your words. May I step out of your way, and may you speak your messages through me as you would.

More tomorrow.

That Ugh Feeling at the End of a Week

 Ugh. It's strange how much one day of actual going-to-school work this week just it out of me today. Today's post may just devolve into meandering.

In my defense, I've worked steadily over this last mostly snow-closed week: creating assignment structures and prompts for class (I nearly said "creating content for class"--double ugh), grading stuff, writing on my sermon for Sunday, keeping up with my workout schedule (i.e., something every day). And I even succeeded at accomplishing non-productive-but-joy-giving things like setting up my Star Wars Lego and many of my transformers. 

The standard question I asked today: how was the snow for you? Most of my students responded with some variation of "delightful." And I agree. This was a delightful week in so many ways. I felt like I had permission to not do anything except stuff that gave me joy. Partly I was responding to the Big Depression from the Inauguration. (This continues as more and more news items about the wrecking-ball approach to governance this administration adopts.) 

It set me back to go back to work today. I mean, I always enjoy teaching, and today I taught one of my favorite little lessons (dramatic irony). But it seems to have wiped me out. 

Why don't I do something else? Because so much remains to be done--more assignments to grade, more feedback to give, more letters to write, a stack of applications to our program to process--and this blog to write, a workout to do (maybe), and even some old transformer purchases to unpack. Even joy has become A Task. Perhaps I'm getting sick? Free-floating anxiety? 

Or just tired because I worked hard today? 

Or depressed because of all the things? 

...aaaaaand BOOM I just remembered a big letter of rec I still haven't written for a colleague. That wasn't the cause of my down-tired-ness. But it does add a load of guilt on top of everything. Sigh.

OK: priorities. I need to finish the sermon for Sunday. I need to respond to blog stuff with my grad students. I need to fill out a form for one of my advisees. That's likely tomorrow's thing. 

I need to work out, maybe just a recovery routine. 

This is why I don't play with my toys much. Always something else to do. I don't know how I think I'm going to fit in seminary. I can't even put "apply to seminary" on this week's schedule. 

Ugh. Maybe workout will clear my down-ness. That happens sometimes. 

Ugh.

Values and Noncompliance

Robert Mann, in his substack today, articulates many of my own thoughts about Bishop Budde's message this last week. He also quotes from Kristin Du Mez's substack, where she collects several right-wing criticisms of Budde. Most boil down to (1) she disrespected the president and the event, and (2) she's a bad person and a bad representative of Christianity. 

Much of the latter criticism relates to her gender. A good bit of US evangelicalism (the Southern Baptist segment, mainly) opposes ordaining women for pastoral leadership or preaching. (Other streams of evangelicalism, e.g., Pentecostals, believe differently.)   "Women's ordination," tweeted Reformed professor Joe Rigney, "is a cancer that unleases [sic?] untethered [sic?] empathy in the church (and spills over into society).”* 

I concur with Mann's assessment:

I cannot imagine more loving and gentle words from a pastor to a president. She was full of respect for Trump and his position. Her words overflowed with all the love and concern for the oppressed that Jesus commanded.

Mann goes on to recommend a book by Budde, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith. I'll have to get that.

A different writer I follow, Timothy Burke (the professor, not Tim Burke the journalist), also wrote today about brave, decisive moments--moments of noncompliance. Specifically, Burke criticizes the wave of administrative compliance with new (Trump administration) directives, such as those gutting DEI programs. The force of administrative compliance in a complicated bureaucracy like a university, Burke warns, creates its own unthinking momentum: 

What has hidden inside many compliance regimes is the misuse of compliance to justify voluntary, values-driven, sometimes blatantly ideological interpretations of legal and regulatory requirements and to shield those decisions from any questioning. 

The response, Burke suggests, involves clarifying and acting on personal, professional, and institutional values. In the absence of rules or regulatory bodies to ensure equality, diversity, and inclusion, Burke argues, we must choose to do these things ourselves not out of administrative compliance but because they're the right things to do. It's right to recognize and redress systemic injustices and inequalities. It's right to make the necessary trade-offs to ensure wide accessibility and representation in our institutions and disciplines. 

Such a need for re-valuing values offers an opportunity for faith. The world where religion (and the Christian Church especially) feels itself becoming increasingly irrelevant is also the world in which one set of values/worldviews (white cis-het masculinist evangelical nationalism) presents itself as the only game in town and expects mute compliance. Against this expectation, Christians like Budde get to say, decisively, bravely: No. There are other values, deeper and richer sources of being that connect us to the whole human community, that align us with the Creator's love for all humanity, that take as their model the Redeemer's life of service and sacrifice. 

Noncompliance with the expectations of Trumpian nationalism will read as disrespect, no matter how gently they are phrased.

More tomorrow.

*I was confused here. What's wrong with empathy? So I did a bit of research. A Fellow at New Saint Andrews College, Rigney, I learned, has publicly criticized empathy as a sinful corruption of Christian compassion. Here's my first-impression summary of his take: whereas Christian compassion cares for the good of the suffering person, empathy (in Rigney's view) cares for the feelings of the suffering person. I can see how such a view would help buttress an opposition to LGBTQ+ rights. I'm guessing the reasoning goes something like this: queer and trans folk are confused about what's good for them. Christian cis-het orthodoxy is good; queerness is harmful. Queer/trans folk say that their feelings are natural and good, insisting that those who do not tolerate their expressions of identity and orientation wrong them because they deny queer/trans feelings. Christian compassion a la Rigney would lovingly insist on cis-het Christian holiness. To be pro-queer, as Bishop Budde is, in Rigney's view represents a sinful displacement of compassion by secular empathy, caring about the queer person's feelings rather than for their temporal and eternal good. That's my guess, anyway. I of course disagree, but that's a different post. I'm less certain how calling for mercy for immigrants (not acceptance, not amnesty--mercy) commits a similar sin.

Bishop Budde's Plea

 I've been thinking a lot about the minor kerfuffle that's emerged around the sermon delivered during the Inaugural Prayer Service at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, Jan 12. The Episcopal Bishop of Washington, the Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde, delivered the message. She gave a brief, less-than-15-minute homily about unity, perfectly generic and tuned to the event's ecumenical vibe. 

She made news, though, for her final bit:

"Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you. As you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and Independent families, some who fear for their lives. And the people, the people who who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. They may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes, and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurdwara, and temples. I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away, and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land. May God grant us the strength and the courage to honor the dignity of every human being, to speak the truth to one other in love, and walk humbly with each other and our God for the good of all people in this nation and the world."

Various news outlets have characterized the sermon as "confronting" or "calling out" Trump. Spokespeople for the new President's administration have lambasted Budde for injecting politics into the event, making the service political. Trump himself went on Truth Social to gripe about the "so-called Bishop" who was a "Trump hater": "She brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way. She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart." Other of his supporters have suggested that she (or the Episcopal Church) owes him an apology. GOP Congressman Mike Collins (Georgia) tweeted, "The person giving this sermon should be added to the deportation list."

In subsequent interviews, Budde has declined to comment on Trump's reaction, reinforcing that she does not hate Trump and that she simply plead with him. "I don't feel there's a need to apologize for a request for mercy," she told NPR. 

Now, it is true the Budde has in the past made news criticizing Mr. Trump. In 2020, after his staged photo op in front of the National Cathedral where he infamously held a Bible upside down, she spoke out against him. Yet, according to Religion News Service, Budde was among those defending the National Cathedral's decision to host Trump's first Prayer Service back in 2017. RNS quotes her from then saying that she was "trying to create a church where we actually speak to people who see the world differently than we do."

On Bluesky and other lefty places, of course, Budde is being hailed as speaking truth to power. In an era that seems to have lost its taste for the large-scale left-progressive protests of the first Trump administration, say many skeeters, it falls to those people with platforms like Budde to voice the concerns of those whose pleas go unheard.

Alongside from the familiar not-surprised-but-still-disappointed feeling, I admit a grim curiosity about exactly how pro-Trump Christianity (especially evangelicalism) will spin this. I mean, I expect the typical double standard: right-wing, white-nationalist Christianity is just normal, but any talk about mercy or consideration for those on the margins qualifies as inappropriate politicking. The new elements I'm seeing include a few truly creative takes on the Good Samaritan parable and the command to "love your enemy" quoted on Bluesky and elsewhere. Such interpreters craft twisted takeaways that exempt Christians from having to love as the good Samaritan did (e.g., See, the Good Samaritan is Jesus, not humans, right? No human could be expected to do what the Samaritan in the story did.).

Bishop Budde is correct: a plea for mercy--especially a plea to a leader who campaigned on mercilessness--is bog-standard Christianity. If the Trump administration doesn't want those kind of messages, perhaps they should stop going to Christian services. 

Snow and the Space at the Top of the Stairs

 It's still snowing as I write this.

Look, I've lived in Minneapolis. I know what "real" snow looks like, what "real" cold feels like. The snowstorm we're having (it looks to be at least 4 inches, probably much more) doesn't reach "significant" on a Twin Cities scale. But here in Southern Louisiana City, it's--well, we're getting more than I've ever seen in this state.

It's beautiful, sure. Our interstate is just outside my bedroom window. I never don't hear the constant hum-rumble (sometimes a vibration I feel) of cars and trucks going 24/7. I can see it from my window. It's silent now, an eerie sensation. 

Hopefully I can find my old Lego snow speeder and take some fun shots in the snow.

But at this point, with heavy snow scheduled for the rest of the day, I'm getting a little worried.

I hope the power holds. I hope people stay off of roads.

I hope our unhoused population finds some warm refuge. 

I think about all the time and money I spent looking for a heated mat for our outdoor cat on Sunday. I found one--extra-large--for an exorbitant price. It fit into the cardboard box we set up for her under a heat lamp. We plugged it in, waited, and found it didn't work. She's making due (happily) with the heat lamp and a medical heating pad we had.

And then I think of the unhoused person sleeping at the top of a staircase at our church on Sunday. We let her be--she's a friend of the church, and we're happy to turn a blind eye to let her get out of the wind when she can. We have funds to help folk, and do help unhoused people get food. But we're not set up to offer shelter. We don't keep buildings heated when no one's there. The regulations for our preschool/afterschool preclude us from allowing just anyone into spaces. 

All of these excuses ring pitiful and self-serving in the face of the record-low temperatures we're to get tonight: 9 degrees. That's significant even by Minneapolis standards. And I don't think the city has plans or means to accommodate folk without access to heating. 

I can't even leave to bring supplies to the relatively sheltered spaces at church due to the roads.

But I spent hours finding supplies for an outdoor cat. That's not without value, I know. But in no way can the plight of a stray cat compare with people suffering without shelter. Baton Rogue, like so many other places, has decided that unhoused people need to be put out of sight rather than helped.  I'm not single-handedly responsible for housing the unhoused. I can't snap my fingers and force the city in to funding and maintaining workable shelters, building more affordable housing, or de-stigmatizing poverty and need. 

But surely I could have found a plug-in pad that worked or step up a heat lamp for a space at the top of the stairs.

I hope the snow ends soon. I hope the sun returns. 

May God who sees all grant these beloved ones warmth and care, and my God forgive me for not participating in that providence. Help me do better, Lord.

Pre-Storm Breakfast and Some Pampering

 I keep wanting to start blogs with "The storm is coming," but I don't want the Q-Anon connotations That brings. 

But really and truly: the storm is coming tonight. I mean the winter storm, where we're expected to get 2-4 inches of snow? Maybe? Or maybe ice? Or "snow showers" mixed with sleet and freezing rain? So much depends on one or two degrees either direction.

My city sits right on the demarcation line between "snow" and "ice" on all the radar forecasts, so who knows? Everything will freeze for at least a few days, no matter what happens. The whole city is scrambling to prepare: flooding stores, emptying shelves, stocking up on non-perishables. Foods that need refrigeration pose no problem. If electricity winks out, just put the stuff outside or in the car. The problem involves reheating. 

We have a fireplace in our house. We've never used it, but the prior owner says he often had a fire in there in wintertime. I give it the side-eye myself--not because it seems suss but because of my ignorance of all things fireplace related. Is the chimney cleaned out? Is the flue open? How would I know if the flue is opened? What exactly is a flue? Do I have an ember screen? (I don't think so?) Pokers? My partner wants us to have a duraflame log or two just in case, but I don't know. I can all too easily imagine our house burning down because we couldn't go 12 hours without central heat.

Meanwhile I have one last-minute set of errands to run today, and all of them involve my best friend. I hope to get one last fancy breakfast with him at our current favorite place. Then we hope to get mani-pedis. Will anywhere be open today due to MLK Day? Due to the coming storm? Dunno. But we'll try. 

He'll go for both mani and pedi. I'll probably stick to pedi. I want to give my feet and toes some love. I went so long thinking they were ugly. My genetics predispose me to hammer toes and calluses, and age twists my feet toward boniness. I had a few years where I ran a lot, which was murderous on my feet and toes. Nowadays I have only to walk a bit one day to find that I can barely get down the stairs the next day.

Thus: my toes are due some love. And by "love" I mean the professional scraping and filing and cleaning and pampering that folk at those places know how to do. It's an absolute indulgence--a pretty dear one, too--but I'm doing it today in the spirit of joy-producing activities.

Yeah, I got a lot of work after this, even with the likelihood of closed schools Wednesday. I have to write a sermon. I have to put a ton of stuff online. I need to think about pitching a paper to a conference, writing an article, recovering my book project from its purgatory, cleaning my office...

But for now: food and pedis.

The Fragility of Outrage and the Necessity of Attention and Joy

 It's the day before the presidential inauguration. The left-progressive sites and thinkers I follow brim today with advice for those of us dreading the next four years. Most of it boils down to "don't give in to despair" and "make a joyful practice part of your daily life." 

The Guardian featured advice from various folk. Ece Temelkuran (a veteran of Erdogan's takeover in Turkey) urges vigilance: This time around, she writes,

you’ll notice that the new morality created in the White House trickles down to the people. The fundamental moral values you assumed were non-negotiable will be debated shamelessly. They will not right away cancel women’s rights, but they will begin to float questions about those rights. They will not destroy the rule of law tomorrow afternoon, but you’ll hear Trump’s pundits say how courts are slowing down the process of “making America great again”. Trump will not walk into the White House with military boots, but here and there, you’ll see more police violence on campuses and hear people saying, “Well, the protesters were crossing the line anyway.” The political debate will be turned into such a mess that you’ll forget that in the 21st century, fascism comes to power not with goose steps but through elaborate dance moves.

This echoes counsel from the last round in 2017: Keep insisting, This is not normal. One of the hard lessons I learned from the last four years relates to the fragility of moral shock and outrage. So many of us thought that January 6, 2021, signaled the End of Trump as a serious player in US politics. The white supremacist fascist undercurrents so many of us saw in his MAGA populism finally breached the surface, breaking windows, beating up security personnel, and claiming the rotunda for themselves. He can't come back from that, surely. 

Oh, but he could. Oh, but he did. The Orwellian rewrite of Jan 6 and of Trump/MAGA demonstrates how weak even the hottest outrage is given time. Trump will be sworn in in the same rotunda that the Q-Anon Shaman occupied four years ago. 

And I get that we have to balance This is not normal! with a serenity-prayer awareness of those things that are not in our control. I don't say we should accept this shift, but we at least must endure it, adapt to it.

Temelkuran again:

Meanwhile, in about one or two years, you will have shouted “No” so often and against so many things that you will be exhausted. Many will ask again, “So, where is hope?” However, you’ll realise that this time, it is not hope but something more essential that is lost: faith – in politics and your people. And that is the loss that will turn you into a neutral element, a zero in the political equation.

So, this is a friendly warning to stop the emotional spiralling in its early stages. Try to put self-sabotaging emotions in the freezer for four years. Your job is not to have quarrels with Trump supporters now or get pissed off with your side. If I may, your job is to replace your anger with attention. Trump surely will drive you crazy every day with new outlandish stuff, but that is only showmanship. The dangerous bit happens through the change in the institutions. Keep your eye on the institutions.

Loss of faith, she says, is somehow worse even than loss of hope. It reminds me of my psychotherapist sister's distinction between burnout (you're working to hard/doing too much) and demoralization (you no longer believe in the worth or goodness of the thing/institution you work for). Demoralization strikes harder, deeper, she says, because we can't self-care our way out of this loss of faith. 

"Replace anger with attention." I think of my favorite quote from Dorothy Parker: "The cure for boredom is curiosity." Brady Whitton (pastor at First UMC in Baton Rouge) calls curiosity--focused, open attention--one of the few things that can get us out of the armadillo-ball defensive curl caused by fear, hate, anomie, and acedia.

Attention taxes energy reserves, though. I can't keep my sensors fully open all the time, not when a proven tactic of Trump, Inc. involves broadcasting polluted messaging. By design, the firehose of falsehoods where truth gets mixed up with nonsense chaff and toxicity, attempts to burn out our capacity for attention and curiosity. The defense here involves cultivating protective respite. We require joy-causing (non-useful! non-productive!) practices not as some kind of luxurious self care but as essential spiritual nutrition. 

I'm gonna try to get some of that in today and tomorrow, letting myself think on better things (MLK's legacy, for instance) than the coming freeze.

Driving Nerves

 If I haven't mentioned it already: I hate driving.

Don't get me wrong. I like being able to drive. I appreciate having the capability to get into my car (I also appreciate that I have a car) and go wherever I'd like.

But the actual driving? I find it stressful. I always have. I learned to drive very late. Unlike most other teens, I was not eager to take the wheel. My family went through rough times during my learning-to-drive years (the early 90s). We owned an old blue Toyota Corona--not Corolla, CoroNA. Bless its mechanical heart. It got us where we needed to go, mostly. But take your foot off the gas at all, and the thing died. Stopping anywhere but your final destination required combining the break with a constant revving of the engine, as if starting a street race. More than once I would forget, or get the combo wrong, or something. I have vivid memories of my father panicking as we shuddered to a halt in the middle of a busy intersection.

I drive with two feet--on an automatic--to this day. I drive with panic and shame as well. I get very nervous changing lanes, turning out onto a busy street, navigating a four-way stop, or--worst of all--turning left without an arrow. Most of the time I flatly refuse to turn left without a protected light. I'll happily make a block of right turns to avoid it.

I was twenty before I took a driver's test thanks to my friend A. I used her car. I passed only because the weary, done-with-all-this old instructor neglected to make me parallel park (a feat I still could not manage today). 

In college, for a few years, I had custody of my family's next vehicle, a 1979 Ford cargo van that we had been gifted by a kind elderly woman. She had many dogs, whom she loved dearly and spoiled with every indulgence she could manage. The van, as we got it, consisted of a driver's and passenger's seat up front, with the cargo space in back covered in archeological layers of rugs, all matted with various canine extrusions. The smell . . . took a long time to leave, lingering well after we had peeled the rugs off the bare floor.

I didn't use the van much. The lack of any windows made merging so much more thrilling, and I cared not for those thrills. On those occasions where I'd venture off campus to a store or somesuch, I'd spend the entire time shopping with my heart racing, dreading the necessity of the trip back. 

For most of grad school, I relied on Minneapolis's public transit system--and my partner, who drove in any weather with perfect confidence. I drove his car only a few times then. This changed as we moved to Florida for a few years. I'd help out with long drives now and then (highway driving outside of cities is usually fine for me). 

All this changed when he got a job in a big metropolitan area, and I got a job in--well, the mid-sized city where I still am. He couldn't have a car, and I needed one. Thus, I got his. I went from near-zero driving to driving all the time overnight. And, like all other awful learning curves, I eventually got to where I can drive without it being a source of dread--mostly.

But there are still days like today, where driving to a new location and navigating parts of the city I don't know well in heavy traffic lead me to abandon my tasks and get home. Home--where I can be glad that I drive while still hating to drive.

Long Weekends and Coming Ice/Snow Storms

 Hurrah for Friday! 

It's a three-day weekend already, with MLK Day on Monday. And then, just today, my southern university announced its closure for Tuesday as well, perhaps extending into Wednesday. Mirabile dictu: snow! Or . . . ice, maybe? In any case, freezing temperatures will sweep down into the swamp lands, terrorizing us warmbloods with lows in the mid-teens. They tell us we're sure to awaken Tuesday morning either to a winter wonderland--3-6 inches (!!) of snow--or a winter nightmare: several inches of freezing rain destined to paralyze traffic, down power lines, and sheathe every surface with a coating of ice. 

We don't know which we'll get on Monday night/Tuesday morning. Snow would be lovely! I haven't seen accumulated snow here in over a decade. Ice would be dreadful. Our infrastructure--never a strong point in my cherry-red state--protects against flood, not ice. I think of all the hanging oaks in our neighborhoods, with their gnarled, tentacular branches extending outward in every direction. Beautiful! Shady! Add inches of ice, though, and each limb becomes a potential bomb ready to crash down from the sky. 

And the driving! I'm typing from the second floor of my house, and still I wonder if I'm far enough away from the roads to be safe. From my bedroom windows, I can see and hear the constant traffic of the interstate, which cuts through town almost completely elevated. Friends who have lived here longer than I tell of an ice storm in the nineties that shut it all down. You know those signs that say "Bridge may ice in cold weather?" The interstate here is almost all bridge, and in that storm (and perhaps in next week's storm), it was almost all ice.

A worse possibility lurks, my meteorological friends tell me, in a dreaded ice/snow combo: an inviting, snowy surface hiding (and insulating) a nasty layer of ice. Thanks to the snow, the ice stays, melting only a bit under the sun and mixing with the wet snow, only to re-freeze overnight Tuesday/Wednesday.

Snow or ice, we will have a hard time either way, methinks. My partner has an MRI scheduled early Tuesday morning. I have a dentist appointment later that day. I suspect both may need rescheduling--a much bigger deal for the MRI, of course. 

We'll be in a worse fix, though, if the power fails. A few years ago, my sister and brother-in-law up in Oklahoma City endured three weeks without power thanks to an ice-storm decimating main powerlines into their neighborhood. They invested in a natural-gas-powered generator that guarantees they stay toasty no matter what. We have nothing of the sort here (no natural gas hookups). Our only comfort lies in the fact that our freezes don't last long. Temperatures inevitably rise. But it could be a tough few days for us and the cats.

Oh, well. 

Meanwhile: I'm preaching next Sunday! More on that later.

Moments of Relief and Types of Fun

The ending of the first week of school, especially heading into a three-day weekend, feels like the completing an especially arduous workout. It's the same high feeling I get after finishing a long paper or article revision. A task that gobbles up time and energy and worry, a job that becomes the overriding focus for a week or more, suddenly gets done! The syllabus is done because it has to be done. The course happens, ready or not. And lo, it's fine! Hurrah!

I'm in the honeymoon moment between completing the syllabus/first week and the first load of real work and grading. Vacation time! 

The illusion this moment cast dissipates once I start thinking of next week's workload. Oh, yeah. I have to do this all again next week! New priorities emerge--I'm preaching at my church on the 26th, so I need a sermon!--that form their own stress-times and energy drains. Hopefully these too will result in some sweet if illusionary release. 

I use a trick sometimes when I run a long distance (for me "long" means, like, 4 miles): I keep imagining crossing my finish line. How good it will feel to get to stop running! Similarly, How good it will feel to finish this [syllabus, paper, class, etc.]. 

I suspect the trick only works because the activity itself stimulates or feeds my soul even as it demands psychic and physical energy. If I hated running, actually despised every second of it, then the eventually the ending would lose its motivating power. If class planning or writing provoked nothing but stress, I would (I hope) eventually recognize that the relief doesn't justify all that suffering.

I read once about a taxonomy of different kinds of fun, a typology that circulates in some extreme recreation circles (e.g., ultra-marathons, tough mudder events). Type 1 fun means that you enjoy an activity during and after the activity. Event and memory equally give pleasure. Type 2 fun consists of activities that feel miserable in the moment but acquire a glow of "glad I did that" afterward. The 5Ks I have run (and the 4-miles I run sometimes) feel bad and often require me to do the imagine-the-end trick. But I cheer that I did them and would willingly do them again. Solid type-2 experience. 

Type 3 fun--well, I've read different accounts. The link I gave insists that type 3 has no fun at all, in memory or afterward. Yet other sources have suggested that type 3 does qualify as fun, that it doesn't equate to "bad experience." 

Perhaps the difference between type 3 fun and "awful" involves regret. We all have experiences that we would never repeat and never even wish on others: a serious injury or illness, the death of a family member or friend, the consequences of a poor decision, or a destructive calamity. I don't think these fall into even a type-3 fun box. We already have boxes like "tragedy" or "disaster" to cover that type of experience.

Yet I can imagine ordeals or seasons of life that, while tough to endure and even painful to remember, nevertheless end up in the realm of "worthwhile" and "not regretful." I mean, something that causes you to say, "I don't want to experience that ever again, but I don't regret doing it that one time." 

Truthfully, I struggle to think of something quite like that for me... Grade school, maybe? I hated it. I would hate to be transported into my younger self to re-experience it. But neither would I want that experience excised from my memory.

The learning curve of gaining a skill sometimes feels like a type-3 experience--or several of them in succession. You suck at something, sometimes for a long time, before you gain competence and expertise. The learning often contains very little fun, and the memory of those early attempts makes you wince. In Elden Ring, you die a thousand times before you "git gud"--and then you die 1,000 more times. You make peace with dying, adopting a zenlike attitude that turns type 3 slogs into type 2 journeys with relief (defeating a hard boss, for instance). I stopped playing Elden Ring long before I got good at anything except riding the mount (Torrent) around and enjoying the scenery. I respect my best friend, who burned his way through the type 3/type 2 phases of countless bosses before cheering at his well-earned victory. What I would experience as type-3 or even regretful instances he sees as just another mile on the marathon.

I suspect we all have different boundaries about when an experience works as Type 3 or just regretful. 

More tomorrow.

Course Shenanigans

 There's shenanigans afoot at my university. We noticed this semester that our gen-ed offering, our freshman-level intro class, is having trouble attracting students. Usually this class is one of our most reliable engines for student contact hours. Most degree programs require students to take an arts credit. Theatre has historically been a fun option for them. I have gripes about our standard 100:1 student:instructor ratio, but I have faith in the basic integrity of the course. My colleague handles the super-large section; her superpower is crafting a high-quality course even at that scale.

But this semester? Low, low enrollment. Nothing about the course has changed. We poked into sites like ratemyprofessor to see if there was some groundswell of resentment at the course. Nope.

The only big factor we can detect is a different arts credit, an intro course offered in a different department unrelated to my college. This course is 100% online and asynchronous. It has over 1,500 students with a single instructor. The scuttlebutt (which I can't confirm) is that the whole course has only one TA assigned to it.

There's no practical way to assess students' performance in this course except through a massive use of automated and easily cheated exams. 

A student familiar with the class raved about it. It's apparently on several "best class at LSU" lists--not because the class teaches good things but because it's easy. It's as close to a zero-effort way to get through three credits of required coursework as you can find. 

I feel so tired and outraged and tired and disappointed . . . and tired . . . thinking about this class. 

On the one hand, I have to wonder what the professor in charge--whom I do not know--must think or feel about this. Surely they can't be under any illusions about the quality of this course or its reputation. But the alternative is that the course was specifically designed to be a high-enrollment easy A. I hate classes like that. They cheapen every other class--especially other gen ed courses, especially arts gen ed courses. They reinforce the already strong sense among students and populace that higher ed (and especially higher ed in the arts) is basically a scam, a series of meaningless, frustrating hoops to jump through in order to get the degree (which is in turn seen and assessed purely in terms of a key to a well-paying career). Universities are just money-hungry, goes this line of thinking. Look at increasing tuition! Student loan debt! The cost of textbooks! And why? Just so graduates can feel superior for having endured this expensive battery of meaningless busywork.

It angers me that there's a class that, intentionally or not, seems perfectly designed to reinforce that narrative. I don't know the professor's story. I don't know their mindset here. But from the outside it's hard for me not to imagine they (and their department) have kind of sold their soul.

And on another level, I'm disappointed that students for the most part see this as a good thing. Why not take this easy course? I'm busy and stressed out with my real classes (or my real life). I don't want to have to look at some pictures or listen to some music or go to some long-ass boring play just to declare myself more educated. If I can get this hoop out of the way easily (and with a little cheating), why not? 

Now--reality check--when I was an undergrad, yeah, I'll admit there were a few times I bypassed a harder course to take, for instance, the non-honors option of a gen ed. But I never cheated, nor would I have been OK with a course in which cheating was widely seen as the legitimate path through the class. I do think I did invest time and effort and curiosity even in courses that I didn't think of as integral to my main studies. I don't think--perhaps I'm rose-coloring things--that I looked at any class as an utter waste of time. I took them, in other words, in some degree of good faith.

It's disappointing to me on a deep level that so many students--inspired, I know, by an overwhelming flood of pressures and perverse incentives--are just willing to take classes basically in bad faith. And it's worse when those classes seemed designed in accordance with these bad-faith expectations. 

Why has no one stopped this clearly broken course? I asked. The answer, it seems, is that no one really cares. Enrollment is enrollment. The scam continues. 

Surely I'm being ungenerous here. Certainly there's a lot I don't know. But, well, it's depressing times.  

More tomorrow.

Gen Ed Intro Class Blues

 Every semester, our department offers a few "general education" classes, courses that students beyond the theatre major can take to fulfill one of their gen ed credits, in this case fine/performing arts. We offer these classes, on the on hand, we want students from every major to have some exposure to and perhaps participation in the fine and performing arts. It's part of the ideal of a liberal arts education, where you broaden yourself by partaking of studies in subjects you likely won't pursue a career in.

I taught our main course in that vein--Intro to Theatre--many times, mostly in my early career days. It's the class we hand to graduate teaching assistants and junior/adjunct faculty. That's too bad, really. I heard the a speaker from (oh, what was it) the National Science Foundation once reflect that gen-ed "intro" classes were misnamed. "We call it 'Intro to Biology' or 'Intro to Geology,'" he said (I paraphrase), "But in fact we should realize that these are probably the last courses in the sciences that students will ever take." The same applies to every gen-ed course: English, History, Sociology, Economics--and of course Theatre. This is our one chance to catch them.

It's odd, then, that large state universities like mine seem to do their best to make gen-ed credits as awful as possible. Each section is huge--a hundred or more people in a large auditorium. See, historically, the coin of the realm in the interdepartmental (and intercollegiate) scramble for resources is SCHs (Student Contact Hours). The more butts in seats per class, the better. Most arts courses for majors are necessarily small: a studio for clarinet or cello, a small acting class, an intimate study in advanced ceramics techniques. We'd be hopelessly underfunded, then, but for our super-big gen ed courses. These we have relied on to make up for our small numbers. Thus Intro to Theatre has often been in the top-ten highest enrollment classes at the university. We've had as many as 1,000 students in the fall semester across 5-6 sections of Intro. That's many times as many majors as we have.

Not that I'm exactly pleased about this. We often stock these classes with our least experienced teachers. (That's not to say they're bad teachers, our grad TAs and adjunct/junior faculty, just that--on average--they're less experienced, less supported, and less paid than other faculty.) Oh, there are exceptions. One of our best professors heads up our fall super-section of Intro; she's assisted by a bevy of grad TAs. Other departments have professors who specialize in these large-scale courses. But I do have to tell prospective PhD students that they'll likely find themselves the instructor of record for a class of 100 non-majors as one of their first TA assignments. That's not an ideal pedagogical scenario, but that's been the way of things for a while.

This semester, though, we've had a lot of trouble getting even to 100 students per Intro section. We're not exactly sure what's going on; nothing about the class has changed recently. But one big factor appears to be another arts gen-ed class: Intro to Fine Arts. That class has one instructor and over 1,500 students. It's 100% web-based. Rumor is that there's only one TA assisting the professor (I don't know if that's true). 

An undergrad who's taken the course had nothing but praise. It's apparently famous as "best course at LSU"--not because it's a quality course but because it's so easy. Cheating is rampant, that the class is ridiculously simple. Thus it's beloved. Thus it's sucking up all the students who might otherwise be taking Intro to Music or Theatre or some other arts course.

More tomorrow.

And then there

First Day of Classes spring 2025

 As always, I finish class planning not so much because I've completed the task but because the first class happens. What I have is what they get, barring some modifications.

I'm . . . OK with my syllabi. Both feel like very new preps, even as I've taught an earlier version of script analysis for over a decade now. Things feel risky, but also a little exciting? A lot will depend upon my discipline in keeping up with daily grading (or weekly in the case of the PhD class). Low-stakes writing works best, in my experience, when I demonstrate early and often that what they write--the ideas and questions they express--matter. Otherwise, students get the sense that it's meaningless busywork.

So: discipline. I have been good at that at points in the past, so I know I can do it.

I came home, crashed, and then had another coffee--much later than I usually do. I have that just-completed-a-huge-task burst of energy. I did the dishes, took out the recycling, cleaned the cats' litter boxes, and even found the old, old version of our programs comprehensive exams.

Comp exams, for those who don't know, are the ordeal exercise that PhD programs put students through as they finish their coursework and transition to dissertation writing. It's the pivot between "PhD student" and "PhD candidate," aka "ABD (All But Dissertation). 

No matter where you go, they're a bundle of anxiety, stress, and exhaustion. Historically--in this program and in others (like my own PhD program)--comps or comp-equivalent exercises were used to prove that the student wields an encyclopedic knowledge of the field. As we came to question that expectation, we shifted to the more-defensible-but-still-questionable metaphor of a mental rolodex of names, events, texts, and theories that any Theatre PhD should have at their beck and call. "If you're at a conference," we'd tell students as an example, "and someone presents a paper on rasas, you as a PhD should be able to link that concept to Sanskrit theatre." 

As I explained to my seminar this morning, we as a program and as a field are stepping back from that image of what a PhD in Theatre is or should be. As I've written about here, the model of "encyclopedic knowledge of world theatre history, literature, and theory" is a mirage. There's just too much. We now tailor comp exams more to a student's history of study. Have they retained info about the studies they've engaged in while in the program? Can they take a meta-critical perspective about these studies--comparing, contrasting, evaluating, and synthesizing them? Can they demonstrate the ability to do the research necessary to discover, evaluate, and assimilate new information?

I shared with them the very first comp exam I helped to grade here at this institution. It was spring 2006. The comp exam at that time consisted of a list of 100 terms from (mainly) Western/European/North American theatre history, literature, and theory. It murdered students. I mean, of course it did! Looking at it now, there are a few (a handful) that even I could only guess at. I'm not sure what that kind of test does except for demoralize someone. 

I'm glad we stepped away from that model. I'll be happy when our new curriculum gets approved and we can step away from even our current model. 

But what if anything should replace it?

Class Prep Week: finished. nearly finished. I must be nearly finished.

 A short post this evening. I've finished my contemporary theatre grad syllabus!

I'm not super-happy about everything, but at this point it's like we say with dissertations: a good syllabus is a done syllabus. 

We'll see how it goes tomorrow.

Now on to the other two classes...

Class Prep: Mushbrain--but a plan!

 OK. I think I have a possible plan for the grad class. It's gonna be a combination reading/discussion group with a pedagogical focus. 

It meets twice a week--Mondays and Wednesdays. Most Mondays, I'll have them read a play paired with a critical piece (usually an article focusing on teaching that play and/or contextualizing/problematizing it). I have many, many more such pairings that could work than I have room for. I gotta cut down.

Most Wednesdays, there will be two presentations by students. Students will sign up for two of these presentations at the start of the semester. One will be a "keystone" presentation where they teach us a lesson on some especially influential or significant play, artist, movement, and/or event. Ideally, this will be one we've all heard of, perhaps from prior to 2000 (or at least prior to 2010). I'll have a suggested list, but they're welcome to do something different if they'd like. The other presentation for each Wednesday will be something else--a "hidden treasure" (I'll think of something else to call it). Here is where they can either suggest and have us all read a relatively recent play (last 20 years or so) that they think will become important--or argue for the recovery/recuperation of some artist/group/event that we (and most canon/class formations) overlook.

Additionally, each week, students will post a "sitrep" (Situation Report) on a blog they'll create just reflecting on their thoughts from the prior week.

The two big projects at midterm and finals will be some kind of annotated syllabus that they'll create--perhaps one for a general ed "contemporary dramatic lit" class and one for a special topics course of their own devising that generally deals with theatre/performance of the last seventy-five years.

The hard--hard hard hard--thing right now is, as always, what do I leave out? I have so much extra that i'm thinking of cutting down student reports in favor of just having more that I provide. I'm trying to take Jill Dolan's advice: assign less. I want the class to be rewarding, not a slog.

Perhaps I should do only one or the other rather than both on the Wednesdays?

Aaaand there's also the undergrad script analysis to get ready before Monday. But not right now. My brain=mush.

G'night!

Class Prep: Lots of Article Reading

 All day long has been me downloading scholarly articles onto my hard drive and into my brain in preparation for deciding what goes into my contemporary theatre seminar.

I've taught this seminar several times before, and I've never been exactly satisfied with it. It's technically a history seminar, but there's just no way to do justice to the last seventy-five years of global theatre history in fifteen weeks (fourteen, really, with holidays and whatnot). I looked over all my past attempts today. They stretch back to the aughts. I see I started with a doggedly chronological march through key eras. Then I shifted to a thematic focus. I shunted the march-through-history back to a "crash course" that took up the first few weeks. Students would absorb all that the standard theatre history texts had to say about the eras we studied. I'd give them a week or two to do that and then threaten them with some kind of test. The real test, of course, was me looking at their notes, seeing if they'd taken care to learn what they needed to.

I dislike that activity. It always felt necessary--Well, I can't have a history class without them knowing the basic history, right? You have to have a starting point to trouble, don't you?--but it caused such stress and tension for students. It's like their comp exams in miniature, even as it was supposed to help them prepare for said exams.

I'm trying to do away with that exercise this semester.

As I've mentioned previously, we're formally stepping back from the expectation of an encyclopedic knowledge of theatre history. This seminar--like all our era-based history seminars--is transitioning to a more modular, special-topics course. I've been approaching this course's planning as if it simply were one of those special topics courses. "What if you get a job at a college/university," I pitched, "and got assigned a course along the lines of 'modern drama' or 'contemporary theatre' or 'today's plays'? What do you teach?"

My aim was to attract students beyond just our PhD program. Currently there aren't enough PhD Theatre students in coursework to make a course work. (There's a general lull in applications to PhD programs in Theatre, but that's another topic.) I wanted to appeal to folk in English, Comp Lit, Womens/Gender/Queer studies and the like. As it happens, my class is half theatre grads (PhDs and--unexpected--MFAs) with a few outsiders thrown in. There's even an especially precocious undergrad there.

So: having promised a special topics course, how shall I deliver? I think I have a sufficient number of articles and plays to choose from. How do I arrange the course? What will their main assignments be? What do I want them to take from this course?

In my mind, I'm thinking that the main big deliverables from students in the semester will be teaching materials: perhaps an annotated syllabi--two or three, I haven't decided on; perhaps a portfolio of syllabus, teaching philosophy, and sample lesson; or perhaps a conference-length presentation/manifesto. I'll also try to do a lot of low-stakes writing throughout, perhaps via a weekly blog. The course is two days a week. I'd ideally like to do one day of case study--a play or playwright (or perhaps an event or topic) paired with an article (preferably about teaching said playwright/play/event/topic). The other day, after the first week or two, would involve students signing up to share (1) a keystone play/playwright/event--a play/playwright/event that influenced other work/artists; or (2) a hidden treasure item--an event/site/play/artist that they think could or should become a keystone. Maybe I should include an option of a hands-on lesson?

The other assignment will be weekly status reports (blogs) where they reflect on the topics given.

Different students are taking this class at different levels; some are pass/fail while others are fully enrolled. I'll have tiered expectations for each level.

Now: how do I structure the weeks? I have two days to decide!

Class Prep: Lots of Low-Stakes Writing

 So, after finally letting go of the need to absorb any more play scripts--it really is just procrastination at this stage--I sat down and reformatted my script analysis course (both sections). I've made the class both shorter and longer. I took out some of the play readings; there are now 11 instead of the usual 13. And I took out one of the four analysis papers. With this additional breathing room, I inserted at least a day between each play I assign. My thinking is that we'll discuss the play one day and then, on the following day, we'll use that script to unpack/explore some facet of script analysis. 

I've also both cut down and vastly expanded the amount of writing students do. A class I taught this last semester turned out to be one of my favorite courses I've ever taught. I structured the class around lots of low-stakes writing and responses. Students brought in "sparks" for the day's material. A spark could be a quote that stood out, a substantive reaction, a question--just about anything so long as it demonstrated a real engagement with the material. Occasionally, students were required to go beyond a spark and bring in a "rabbit hole report"--a bit of research about something the material for the day inspired them to look into. A few students (those contracting for an A) had to do at least one "lagniappe report"--essentially a longer, deeper rabbit hole report on some bit of extra material not formally assigned. 

What made all this work so well, I think, was the work I put in compiling each class day a list of some of the standout sparks comments/questions. I'd begin each next class by sharing these. I could see students light up when they recognized that I was reading their contribution. I think this practice gave students a sense that their reactions mattered, that the sparks weren't mere busywork. 

It was, of course, a lot of work on my part.

What I was doing, in the lingo of writing instruction, was creating a lot of low-stakes writing assignments. Students would get either "Satisfactory" or "Unsatisfactory" on these assignments. If they were Unsatisfactory, I'd let them know what the problem was and give them the chance to revise. They had to be in class to turn them in, and I accepted handwritten ones provided I could understand the handwriting. Nearly all of them were handwritten, which frankly cut down on any suspicions on my part that they were AI-generated. I also gave students a few minutes at the top of class to do these exercises. If the didn't read the material, they'd get a U and the chance to revise. (Revisions were more work, though, so as to dissuade them from just backlogging U's.)

What if, I thought to myself, I made my script analysis class more like that class? Every day would have some kind of low-stakes writing--some they could bring to class prewritten, some they'd write in class. And I could--would have to--again do the hard work of grading every day and compiling responses to share the next day. I'd also need to get students into the habit of bringing something to write with and write on every day. 

I'm still thinking through exactly how to realize this in a script analysis class. A lot of this class is going to be experimental--on my part particularly. And it's going to be a lot of work--though I may be able to grade again mostly on S/U status. 

But: I'm also thinking I may need to let go of contract/ungrading in favor of the simpler (less pedagogically responsible) numerical grading system...

And then, aside from that, I really need to get my grad class sorted! Lots of article-reading hours tomorrow. 

Class Planning: Lowering Expectations, Reading More Plays

 So--I'm  a little fried. Over the past few hours, I have skim-read a lot of one-act plays (how many? two dozen? thirty?), searching for pieces to complement the standard, old-fashioned one-acts I use to start my script analysis class with.

My standard starts are Trifles by Susan Glaspell (classic, naturalistic, fun), Overtones by Alice Gerstenberg (on-the-nose, but expressionistic fun), and Florence by Alice Childress (typically Childressian excellence regarding white representations of Black people in art).

The problem: this class I've taught for over a decade has historically involved four to five big analysis papers. I've been able to handle grading these largely thanks to the help of a graduate teaching assistant (TA). The class is generally well regarded--hard but good. In the last few years, though--COVID is the convenient watershed--my experience of the class has degraded a bit. Students are finding reading and writing much harder. I've dialed back my expectations on assignments, dropped from five to four analyses, and focused more on helping students revise work. 

I've also adopted an "ungrading" policy. Students contract for the grade they want (A, B, or C, with options for plusses and minuses in each). Assignments are basically "satisfactory" or "needs revision." Every assignment can be revised. In theory I like this arrangement better. In practice it's a lot more work for me and my TA. Add to this mix the pernicious influence of generative AI (LLMs like ChatGPT), and assessing writing in class just becomes orders of magnitude more difficult. 

On top of this, enrollment in the course has, semester after semester, grown, blowing out enrollment caps. I had over forty students last semester in a single class. That was a lot for my TA and to keep up with. This semester, I proposed two smaller sections. Both are full at 26 apiece. But for a number of reasons, there's no TA to spare this semester.

So: I screwed myself over. I now have 52 (at least) students and no TA help. There's just no way I can do the same amount of work I've been doing. I have to revise the class completely, which has made me no end of grumpy. 

In truth, though, the class needed a refresh anyway. I'd prefer to have done this refresh over the summer, but [shrug emoji]. And I hate that my refreshing/revisioning is going to be driven less by what is best for the students and as much/more by what is doable for me by myself.

My inkling at the moment: I'm going to slow way down. We'll take our time with individual plays, and perhaps read more of them. They'll do less outside work on them and do more work in class on them (lots of worksheets). I'll have only two or three big writing assignments, all with elaborate scaffolds/steps. I'm thinking of calling these steps "table read" (initial ideas/prewriting) "blocking" (prewriting/outlining), "dress rehearsal" (first draft), and "opening night" (final draft). 

I don't know if I can keep the ungrading component. I may need to retreat to the safer (though less pedagogically justifiable) waters of numerical grades. 

In a way, my reading more plays at this point is just putting off the inevitable, avoiding rethinking the class from top to bottom. 

But after tonight: no more lollygagging.

Class Prep: Looking for Scripts that Ring Bells

The week before school starts every semester involves heavy research. I read as many plays as I can, as many articles as I can find. It's like I'm cramming for a test, as I tell my students not to do. I like to use new and little-known plays for class, mostly because the chances of my students finding online summaries or essays on them is so low. I've discovered quite a few ones I adore thanks to New Play Exchange. Sometimes you have to go through several before finding one that works. 

"Works" means I feel an inner resonance, like a bell rung, at the end. It means I love the play. Admittedly it's easier to feel that when reading published and produced plays. Such works have generally already gone through several layers of workshopping and refinement. I remember feeling it the first time I read Gidion's Knot by Johnna Addams, Skeleton Crew and Pipeline by Dominique Morisseau, The Ghosts of Lote Bravo by Hilary Bettis, Cambodian Rock Band by Lauren Yee, and most recently Primary Trust by Eboni Booth. (What a lovely gem of a play Primary Trust is!)

But I feel especially proud when I find a ringer script in NPX. Often it's a play that's long, so long I wonder if I want to read it at all. But then it turns into Marianas Trench by Scott Sickles or Even Flowers Bloom in Hell, Sometimes by Franky D. Gonzales or Crying on Television by R. Eric Thomas or House of Joy by Madhuri Shekar. These become some of my favorite plays, at least for a time. And I put them into my course and see how they fly.

For any number of reasons, some scripts that I really enjoy just fall flat with students. I continue loving them but take them out of rotation for use with undergrads. I love The Nether by Jennifer Haley, for example, but her Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom--which I also love--just poses fewer mental roadblocks for students. Others prove pretty durable. Students never tire of Diana Son's Stop Kiss, and 'night,Mother by Marsha Norman--for all its iffy representation of epilepsy--keeps their attention. 

Some scripts I have to take out of rotation because students (or at least a few students) like them so much they propose them for our season. This happened with Jen Silverman's The Moors as well as Gullem Clua's Marburg--and now with Haley's Neighborhood 3. I hate to lose these (at least for a four- or five-year stretch), but I'm also pleased that they sparked someone's interest.

And then there are plays I keep in rotation even if they aren't the students' favorite. I use Eugene Scribe's The Glass of Water every semester (I took this cue from Shelly Orr) because (1) I like it, and (2) it so neatly encapsulates the well-made play format so many of the other scripts I choose alter or reject. Few students enjoy that one, exactly, but many come at least to appreciate it. Susan Glaspell's Trifles is ubiquitous and dated but rock-solid as a starter script for the semester (I put that alongside Alice Gersternberg's Overtones and Alice Childress's one-act Florence). Jackie Sibblies Drury's Really doesn't enjoy the popularity of her better-known (and Pulitzer Prize-winning) works, and it confounds students. But the way she plays with time and ambiguity is so rewarding.

Some plays I put in precisely because they'll confound students, usually by refusing to resolve ambiguities or explain themselves. Caryl Churchill's Far Away is a favorite of mine (just about any Churchill would work). A little-known play called D Deb Debbie Deborah by Jerry Lieblich is so, so delightfully complicated. 

Not every script I use is one that resonates with me immediately. My perspective as a white cis US guy (a minority with outsized power) is limited, my bell (like everyone's) is tuned better to certain frequencies than to others. I try to remember that most plays aren't made for me, in other words. I wasn't immediately bell-rung with Jaja's African Hair Braiding by Jocelyn Bioh, for example, but I appreciated Bioh's craft and noted how the script checked several of my preferred boxes at once (interesting structure, centers African diasporic voices, centers women, recently popular). I put it in last semester. And as students engaged it, it grew on me. It'll likely be in my rotation for a while. 

I write this having just read another one tonight that rang a bell: Juan Ramirez, Jr.'s Calling Puerto Rico. An agoraphobic man uses ham radio to reach out to both a friend on the International Space Station and his estranged grandfather on Puerto Rico just as Hurricane Maria hits. I'll need to give it a night or two to reality check myself, making sure I'm not just reacting out of personal resonance. My father was a ham radio operator, learning that hobby while serving in the air force on a base in Puerto Rico. I've been through a number of bad hurricanes here in the South myself. I'll need to do some thinking to see if this script is just one I liked or one I liked that would also be useful in class.

More tomorrow.

Careful Work and Stormy Skies

I didn't get much more work done on classes today. My best friend contacted me about a Lego half-day to finish up our prior projects before the semester started. I took him up on that.

I got a bit done--mostly errands and some minor administrative tasks. There's almost always tasks that need to be done but don't really matter much, at least not as much as finishing a syllabus. But when you're stuck on syllabus-writing, as I am, you welcome distracting tasks. They keep you busy and give you some vague feeling of productivity even though they are at heart distractions.

I also recognize I'm in a bit of a depression season. I have really, really low-grade depression most of the time. "Dysthymia," my therapist tells me, "if you need a label." Most of the time it's just a low mood and a ramping up of my usual Eeyore outlook on things. Occasionally it blossoms into something a bit more nihilistic, marked by some really awful internal monologues.

I've adopted a metaphor (simile, I suppose) I heard from Stephen Fry. Depression, he says (I paraphrase--see here for the original), is like the weather, a rain shower or thunderstorm. On the one hand, you don't want to deny that it's storming when there's a storm. You wouldn't stroll outside and defiantly talk about how sunny things are as the downpour soaks you. You have to accept that, yes, it's raining. You take steps to adapt: staying indoors, bringing an umbrella, driving carefully with wipers and lights on, and even monitoring reports for anything worse.

But on the other hand, he continues, depression is like a storm in that it passes eventually. (He's talking about his depression;mileage varies, of course.) You don't assume that even a bad storm is just here forever. "Well, I guess it's raining from now on." (Imagine Eeyore voice.) It won't. It'll pass. It's out of your control when it'll pass, just like it's out of control that it rains or storms at all. But pass it will.

Usually, when I'm in a depression shower, I try to let myself off the hook of having to make any big decisions. My perspective when depressed isn't great. It's hard to see in a torrential rain. I'm prone to catastrophize, to make decisions not in my best interests, to gum up my own works in ways I rue later. So usually I try to wait out the storm before deciding things.

But time is short. I gotta make some big decisions about my script analysis class--a big cloud in my depressive stormy skies right now. Having two packed sections with no TA means I need to cut back on grading. How will I record attendance? Can I even teach writing (with planning and revision phases) as I'd planned to do? How do I keep the class rigorous and rewarding for students? Can I keep my ungrading practice? How do I make it through the semester without burning out?

I don't know. I have to determine how to do this, but my stormy weather is giving me some unhelpful suggestions. 

Perhaps my storm will pass in the next few days, giving me enough time to adapt. B

But I suspect I'll just need to do some careful work in the rain.

Class Prep: Canon Questions, Continued

 An anthology I'm most of the way through now that's helping me envision my seminar on contemporary dramatic canonicity is Troubling Traditions: Canonicity, Theatre, and Performance in the US, edited by Lindsay Mantoan, Matthew Moore, and Angela Schiller (Routledge, 2022). I think this book might form the backbone of my course. The contributors are diverse, thoughtful folk. Their contributions are intentionally conversational, mainly edited exchanges and interviews (with some bibliographic tags). 

It's the kind of book ripe for use in a seminar; instructors can pick and choose which essays most resonate with their course. Everything is pretty self-contained, like a streaming series that consists of bottle episodes. As with many such series, some themes and academic tropes recur. Several entries revisit the etymology of canon (from the Greek term for a measuring reed or stick). Multiple authors  nod to the term's Christian-Biblical connotations, and a few (such as Kuftinec and Rauch) even indulge in some dad-joke punning with the military homophone. (I adore dad jokes.)

Audre Lorde crops up many chapters. Well, what crops up is a piece of one quote from one essay by Lorde, that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" (from the essay titled by that clause). Usually the quote gets used as a way to dismiss works within a traditional (i.e, white, male, cis-het, Euro/US-centric, non-disabled, well-off) canon--or canons altogether. That's not exactly what Lorde is talking about in that essay, but it's not not what she's talking about, either. 

Most of the contributors seem to be writing in the wake of the "We See You, White American Theatre" manifesto/statement of 2020, which calls out professional and university theatres (and theatre-makers) for their failure to walk the walk of antiracist (and anti/decolonial) talk in terms of their seasons, audience outreach, and production practices. Says Bill Rauch (white cis artistic director of first Cornerstone, then Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and now the Ronald O. Perelman Performing Arts Center): "I took every single sentence of that letter personally. As I should have. That is the point."

For several contributors, the weariness with playing nice with/kowtowing to mainstream (white) expectations manifests as well-earned fed-up-ness with the canon(s) handed down to them. "The American Musical Theatre Canon," argues Brandon Webster in a chapter about the canon of musicals, "fails every non-white student who comes in contact with it, in spite of the fact that it's used as the primary took for training and education, both as musical history and pedagogy." Other authors dispute the need for the idea of a canon at all, pointing out that canons are by nature exclusionary, that their intended function is to distinguish the worthy/sainted from those who aren't. As such, they are necessarily operations of power. Not everyone can be canonized. Canons ensure most folk are left out.

Some contributors take a nuanced approach, asking (as Webster does) what a new canon might look like. A few scholars (like Carrie Sandahl) cop to liking parts of the canon they were taught in undergrad and grad school even as they now recognize its exclusionary functions. Finn Lefevre, writing about queer canons, echoes this sentiment, rejecting the notion of simply eradicating 

And some selectivity is necessary given constraints of time/energy/resources. Lefevre references Umberto Eco's notion that we have to have some way to "make infinity comprehensible." It really isn't possible to include everything in a season (or a semester). We produce and teach some things rather than everything. Nor can we simply pretend that we can simply swap some other, non-white identity as the core of a new or better canon. Replacing a white canon with, say, a Black trans disabled canon might provide a valuable respite (especially but not exclusively for Black trans disabled folk), but the master's tools keep their potency. Adopting such tools, as Lorde says, "may allow us temporarily to beat [the master] at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change." 

Sukanya Chakrabarti moves deftly through such considerations, arriving at an idea drawn from Robert Dale Parker, who argues that any selection system (like a canon) should "not only represent what it systemizes but also advertise the limits of its own systematicity." "Any stable canonizing projects for queer theatre," writes Lefevre, "necessarily mark themselves in one specific moment of queerness. What was transgressive at that moment will someday, and possibly even through canonization itself, become naturalized. A queer canon today will be queer theatre history tomorrow, and a new canon--or several--will emerge." 

We might have to earn to hold canons loosely, as we are learning to do with so many other linguistic and conceptual tools that help to make infinity (and ourselves) comprehensible.

I think I'm going to assign the whole anthology. It's a winner.