Author: Stephen Keating

@stephenmk - I'm a PhD Candidate at Chicago Theological Seminary in the Theology, Ethics and the Human Sciences program.

Systemic problems have systemic solutions: plagiarism edition

~ Stephen Keating ~ 2 Comments

Last semester I had an inordinate number of instances of plagiarism. The majority of them came on papers that were almost wholly personal reflection, so I was really troubled by what had led to this occurrence. There’s no doubt that high schools (probably due to systemic problems like underfunding) are not teaching good writing practices like we all wish they should. However, there’s not much I can do to fix high schools. What I can do is setup my own students for success.

My strategy this semester was to put a couple of one page papers towards the beginning of the course, and I told the students that they must cite at least one source in their paper. So far, I’ve only had once instance where a student used a quote without attribution. But even then, I’m able to help them fix the paper which hopefully will prevent this from happening at the end of the semester on the final paper.

I’ll report back after final papers come in, but this strategy seems to be working so far.

Understanding Religion Syllabus

~ Stephen Keating

Marika inspired me to post my syllabus for the semester: Understanding Religion. This is my second semester teaching introductory religion courses at Montclair State University, and I’m much happier with this syllabus than the one I put together for World Religions (I was a *very* last minute fill-in for a retiring professor). Some of the assignments this time were borrowed from fellow professors.

Anthony wrote a helpful post about teaching intro to religion with some great comments, especially by Beatrice and Amaryah, that helped a lot. I have the Herling theory intro book on hand and may assign some short pieces while we move through the fiction. Also, in the second or third class I showed the “Religion” episode of Master of None (Season 2, Episodes 3). It was a great way to challenge what students think of when they use words like religion and belief. The discussion of Get Out–which I’m putting right before Scientology for better or worse–happens Wednesday: excited to see what students make of it when they have “religion” specifically in mind.

Anyways, you can find the syllabus here.

End of Year Boredom: TV Open Thread

~ Stephen Keating ~ 6 Comments

Hello fellow legacy media users, I’m at home procrastinating on finishing my syllabus for Intro to Religion for the Spring, so let’s chat TV. I won’t pretend to be a critic or anything and list out 10 shows, but here are my favorites from 2017 in no particular order:

  • The Young Pope – I seem to remember it was a hard sell to get Katie to watch this with me, but once we started we were both totally hooked. If the Cherry Coke Zero scene doesn’t immediately reel you in, it’s probably not for you. The last two episodes, especially, are beautiful and surprising. Also, maybe my favorite title sequence ever?
  • The Leftovers – Adam and I have had some chats about this show. We agreed that it captures something about what it means to be a fundamentalist that is never portrayed in TV or film–empathy towards religious fanatics while neither succumbing to liberal condescension nor romanticization. Truly great character studies.
  • Insecure – Issa Rae makes me laugh. This is another show that bursts through the typical Hollywood stereotypes. Also, along with Master of None’s portrayal of New York, I love the way that LA is a character in the show. Insecure’s camera work, both of people and places, is excellent.
  • Master of None – Probably doesn’t belong amongst these other shows, but I really liked this season. At times it seemed like Aziz could have pushed the characters a little further and gotten to a really interesting place, but the whole thing is worth it for the Thanksgiving episode.

Dear readers, what did you watch this year?

The Prince of This World event wrap-up

~ Stephen Keating ~ 1 Comment

pid_23793My thanks to everyone who participated in the book event. This has been a fun and varied conversation about Adam’s excellent book. In case you missed it, Adam has responded to each post in the comments sections. The Anselm discussion below Linn Tonstad’s post was a particular highlight. If you’re coming to these posts after the fact, you might start with Dotan Leshem’s reflection which provides a nice summary of the text.

Some Seasonal Thoughts on the Passion of Torture by Bruce Rosenstock

Thinking, Willing, Blaming by Linn Tonstad

In the Shadow of Eleggua by Jared Rodríguez

Freedom, Responsibility, and Redemption by Amaryah Armstrong

After the Eschaton by Marika Rose

All Too Humans by Dotan Leshem

 

All Too Humans: The Prince of This World book event

~ Stephen Keating ~ 1 Comment

This response in our book event on Adam’s The Prince of This World is by Dotan Leshem, senior lecturer in the School of Political Science at the University of Haifa.

The Prince of the World is a very ambitious and most welcome book. It offers an important contribution to the re-emerging literature that seeks to criticize the modern West by conducting a genealogy that traces its constitutive concepts in (Judeo)Christianity and in doing so forces the reader to rethink the present. Adam Kotsko does so by narrating a history of a (surprisingly) neglected figure in the abovementioned literature–Satan. In the first part of the book, Kotsko samples what he identifies as exemplary texts that capture the essence of seven different “paradigms.” Each comprises the pre-modern history of the devil, beginning with the deuteronomistic paradigm and ending with the medieval, of which the first six are the summarized in two tables (P. 44, 95). This historical narrative that follows the twists and turns of the role assigned to the devil in Judaic and Christian theology allows Kotsko to turn in the second part to a more elaborate discussion. This discussion deals, in most parts, with the problem of evil and free will of which the devil himself occupies a relatively small role in medieval Latinized Christianity with excursions into modernity. In his conclusion, Kotsko focuses on demonstrating how secularized modernity is very much trapped in a world molded in the middle ages, which for Kotsko, if one may use this term in a naïve way, is the source of all contemporary evil. Admirably, Kotsko goes one step forward from where most critical accounts in general–the genealogical ones in particular–stop and sketches some notes towards a new paradigm. Continue reading “All Too Humans: The Prince of This World book event” →

Thinking, Willing, Blaming: The Prince of This World book event

~ Stephen Keating ~ 6 Comments

This response in our book event on Adam’s The Prince of This World is by Linn Tonstad, Yale Divinity School. 

pid_23793Adam Kotsko’s The Prince of This World traces the subterranean logic by which the devil developed first as God’s opponent, then as God’s hench-fallen-angel/chief torturer in the bone-chilling settings in which the joy of the blessed in heaven is enhanced by their contemplation of the eternal torments of those who, unlike them, were not so fortunate as to have been the objects of God’s predestining, grace-filled will. Kotsko treats a wide range of figures in the book, offering creative reinterpretations not only of explicit treatments of the devil’s making and undoing, but of implicit ways in which a place for the devil came to be in Jewish and Christian imaginaries.

Kotsko is an admirably clear writer, organizing a stunning amount of material in accessible, yet never uncomplicated ways. I found the final chapter and the conclusion particularly interesting. Kotsko’s suggestion that one way to break the cycle of demonization in which we are trapped may be to allow even the devil to be redeemed strikes me as a promising option for reconfiguring the relationship between Christianity and hell-driven modernity, bent on the production of carcereal spaces and disposable persons. The interruption of various forms of production of the less-than-human is an urgent, indeed essential project, not only but certainly also in the current political climate in the United States. Continue reading “Thinking, Willing, Blaming: The Prince of This World book event” →

Some Seasonal Thoughts on the Passion of Torture: A Response to Adam Kotsko’s The Prince of This World

~ Stephen Keating ~ 4 Comments

The first response in our book event on Adam’s The Prince of This World is by Bruce Rosenstock, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

I’m beginning to write my response to Adam Kotsko’s wonderful new book, The Prince of This World, in the midst of my preparations for Passover, Pesach in Hebrew. It’s one of the strange coincidences of our so-called Judeo-Christian heritage that the Septuagint transliterates Pesach as Pascha, creating a proper name with the accidental appearance of having a root in Greek, found in the verb paschein and the noun pathos, meaning “suffer” (Latin patior -> passio). Although Pesach in Hebrew is derived from the verb pasach, to skip or limp, and has nothing to do with suffering, there is nonetheless a clear thematic connection between the festival of Passover and suffering: the “cry” of the Israelites under the lash of the Egyptian taskmasters reaches God and prompts his redemptive response. pid_23793The Book of Exodus does not represent the suffering of the slaves as a punishment, nor does it seem intended to have an educative purpose. To be sure, the Book of Deuteronomy does enjoin Israel to remember their historic suffering in Egypt when, every Sabbath, Israel releases slaves and animals from their painful burden of forced labor. Prompted by his “knowledge of the soul [nefesh] of the slave,” the Israelite householder was supposed to imitate the redemptive action of God. He was supposed to lift rather than assume the burden of pain. Suffering, in other words, was not thought to be in itself redemptive. Action, not passion, redeems. That, arguably, is the message of Passover. The rabbis mentioned in the Haggadah as spending the whole night recounting the Exodus were, in fact, plotting an action against the Romans, one whose end was to lead to the martyrdom of the most famous member of the that group, Rabbi Akiba. His skin was flayed by iron combs (pectines). This is a point that Adam makes: action and passion reverse redemptive valences when the human body is unmade through the machinery of torture. This is the theme that I want to develop in my comments.

Continue reading “Some Seasonal Thoughts on the Passion of Torture: A Response to Adam Kotsko’s The Prince of This World” →

Take me to the multiverse that doesn’t have Donald Trump

~ Stephen Keating ~ 1 Comment

This is a guest post by Lisa Gasson-Gardner. Lisa is a PhD student at Drew University. She is writing about revelation, affect, and evangelical politics.

MaryJaneRubenstein-WorldsWithoutEnd-coverI did not watch the August 6th GOP debates (though I cannot get over this video of Trump) but I did do a search for mentions of science, particularly of climate change from the event. What came up was not claims about how God created the world and would not allow climate change to destroy the planet (or about how young the earth is or whatever), but silence. Science reporter Seth Borenstein specifically watched the debates to fact check claims about science. The fruit of his two hours of television watching? Nothing. Rather than outright antagonism against the claims of science, the GOP candidates simply avoided the topic all together. This is, of course, not to say that the individual candidates have not said some insane things about climate change. Here’s Trump saying on Twitter in 2012 that China invented climate change to make US manufacturing “non-competitive.” Trump’s comment is not about religion, but rather about production—about money. Add to this blatantly capitalistic take on climate change the fact that only two of the GOP candidates faced 13,000 evangelical Christians on July 27th at the annual convention of the Southern Baptists in Nashville, TN and it appears that the relationship between certain kinds of evangelical Christianity and the Republican party might be changing. (This is not to say there wasn’t plenty of God-talk during the debate, but see: here and here.)

Two goals of Mary Jane Rubenstein’s book Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse—both having to do with power— are relevant to the shifting relationship between Republican politics, certain kinds of fundamentalist Christianity, and science. My aim here is to draw out the political/ethical layer that is so important to Rubenstein’s work and to think about its implications for contemporary politics. Continue reading “Take me to the multiverse that doesn’t have Donald Trump” →

Introduction: Worlds Without End book event by Catherine Keller

~ Stephen Keating ~ 2 Comments

This introduction comes from Catherine Keller. 

Mary Jane Rubenstein’s

Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse

MaryJaneRubenstein-WorldsWithoutEnd-coverThere are many second books that this multigifted philosopher of religion might have written. Why this one? Mary-Jane Rubenstein could have staged another round of the dazzling conversation staged in her first, Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe. With Derrida, Heidegger, Nancy she had probed Western philosophy’s tendency to parlay its initiating wonder into a calculating certainty: that is, to shut down the wonder that provokes philosophy in the first place. She reopens awe—and so philosophy itself: just where it reveals the extraordinary in the ordinary. Just where, tinged with Kierkegaardian fear and trembling, ethics and theology enter the dance. But then why has she escaped the universe of continental philosophy of religion for the physics of the multiverse?

Or has she? For here, the most everyday—the matter of any material world—turns almost unthinkably strange. Speaking of incalculability: our home universe of 15 billion galaxies each with about that many stars is already unheimisch. But now a growing number of astrophysicists postulate an infinite universe—worse, a possible infinity of universes. Rubenstein lays out for us—any of us who might follow An Und Fur Sich, for instance–the multiplicity of these new theories, and at the same time, because she is a nosy philosopher, an entire genealogy of multiverse theories that includes atomists, stoics, Aquinas, Cusa, Bruno, Kant…

If it is the wondrous weirdness and the irreducible multiplicity that had attracted her—cosmic support for the boundless pluralism and the ethical indeterminism wanted now, wanted philosophically—she delivers it. Continue reading “Introduction: Worlds Without End book event by Catherine Keller” →