This short entry is simultaneously a critical reflection, a word of congratulations and a note of appreciation.

A few weeks ago, after over a year of proposal revisions, committee meetings and public, university-wide hearings, the City University of New York approved a new Bachelor’s degree program in Religious Studies at Medgar Evers College. While I recently relinquished my responsibilities in order to devote full energies to finishing the dissertation, I have had the privilege of teaching in Medgar Evers’ newly formed Department of Philosophy and Religion for the past couple of years and to also participate in the development of this degree. Before I offer some thoughts on the process I want to first commend and congratulate the college’s president, Dr. Edison Jackson, Dr. Darryl Trimiew, department chair, and my friends and colleagues who teach in the department, on the approval of this important new degree program. At a time when studies show that questions of religion and spirituality are increasingly being asked on college and university campuses and when scholars are suggesting that religious literacy of students is at an all time low, the foresight of President Jackson to initiate a degree program that will equip students to think critically about the myriad religious traditions that surround them – from the religious right to “radical” Islam – deserves commendation. Congratulations are in order indeed!

Back in 2005, during my first days at Medgar Evers College, I was pleasantly surprised by the organic relationship that the college seemed to maintain with Brooklyn’s Crown Heights community in which it is located. That the school was created, amidst civil rights pressures that made their way onto college campuses during the 1960s, with an explicit mandate to serve the black diaspora that is Central Brooklyn, Medgar Evers College stands in stark contrast to so many elite universities located in close proximity to their respective ‘Hoods. It is indeed a rare example of a concretely “engaged” academic institution that balances critical thinking, knowledge-building and community development. I will remain grateful to the administration, faculty and staff at this great college for their investment in me as a professor and person during this formative stage in my career.

One of my earliest memories at Medgar Evers was the greeting I received from a couple of senior faculty, both of whom I now count as colleagues, at an orientation session. Their warm welcome was quickly followed by a somewhat sarcastic warning of a growing concern among faculty that President Jackson, who is also an ordained minister, was trying to build a seminary within the college. Never mind that nothing in the degree proposal resembled even the most remote concern with protestant proselytizing, much of this cynical thinking continued to plague the degree-making process. Given the historic relationship between HBCUs and the Black Church, perhaps such anxieties were in part warranted. For more on the spiritual ties between these two institutions, check out the blog of a good friend of mine, Jonathan L. Walton. Indeed, the case of Medgar Evers College, both an HBCU and a public college, does raise unique questions regarding the separation of church and state. However, rather than being concerned with a Christianizing of students, for which there was no evidence, such a program should have received applause, along with constructive criticism, from the outset. In addition to the quality faculty in the department – including an Islamicist, a social ethicist, a womanist scholar, historian of American religion and a philosopher – on its way to approval the degree program received support and feedback from faculty who teach religion and theology across the country, including the president-elect of the major organizational body that supports scholars of religion. Yet within the City University’s politics it was subjected to the unwarranted attacks of scholars who possess little to no background or training in the field, but felt nonetheless entitled to deem the program insufficient and theologically misguided.

In light of the religious intolerance of the post-9/11 world in which public discourse has been increasingly infused with explicit God-talk, it is essential that students have the resources necessary to cultivate a critical lens towards religious traditions both within and beyond their most immediate communities. However, in contrast to legends of religious studies professors who’ve made it their business to create a crisis of faith within their classrooms, it is equally important that faculty respect the religious traditions of their students as much as they do the theories of deconstruction detailed on their syllabi. Moreover, while students need be familiar with the multiple languages of the United States’ religiously plural society, it is increasingly important that they be able to make sense of a national history in which the Christian tradition has all too often been conflated with state power - in troubling ways, to say the least. More particularly, given that the method in which authority continues to assigned in black communities also evidences an explicitly Christian cast, it is even more essential that students at a predominantly black college like Medgar Evers be able to sort through the convoluted and confusing convergences of racial and religious rhetoric that float across the airwaves. The curriculum and faculty in Medgar Evers College’s new Department of Philosophy and Religion demonstrate both the competencies and commitment to perform each of these urgent tasks.

Fortunately, despite ill-informed criticisms of the proposal’s content and disrespectful assaults on the character of the college’s administration, the democratic processes of the City University of New York approved this innovative new program. And the students of Medgar Evers College promise to be all the better for it! What follows is a story on the program from insidehighered.com:

At CUNY, Religious Studies, or Religion?

The City University of New York Board of Trustees approved the creation of a religious studies major at Medgar Evers College on Monday, over the objections of CUNY faculty leaders who said the new program would blur the separation of church and state by focusing not on the study of religion but on the practice of certain religions.

Medgar Evers, a predominantly black college in Brooklyn, is now set to enroll its first class of students in the interdisciplinary program, which culminates in a B.A. in religious studies, this fall. The program aims to help students “explore how religion functions in and shapes the modern world and how it empowers, enlightens, limits, complicates, inspires and conflicts modern society,” the program proposal says. “Degree candidates will study and analyze the most important standard texts and investigate contemporary and historical religious practices from a global perspective, with emphasis on religions of the African Diaspora.”

The religious studies program has considerable support on the Medgar Evers campus and was approved by the college’s faculty in May 2006. Charlotte Phoenix, the college’s interim provost, said that the institution’s history of activism means that “if in fact there was faculty opposition [to the program] on this campus, everyone would have heard about it.”

At Monday’s meeting, Frederick P. Schaffer, senior vice chancellor for legal affairs and general counsel at the CUNY system, said he “saw nothing” to back up the concerns of some members of the University Faculty Senate who feared that the program might violate the Constitutional separation of church and state. The concerns, he asserted, were based not on the proposal but on the religious backgrounds of the program’s faculty and of the college’s president. Edison O. Jackson, the president of Medgar Evers, is an ordained minister who serves on the ministerial staff of an African Methodist Episcopal church in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Faculty leaders, however, cited a range of perceived problems with the degree program as conceived by Medgar Evers. At a June 4 meeting of the trustees’ Committee on Academic Policy, Programs and Research, Lenore Beaky, vice chair of the systemwide University Faculty Senate and the senate’s representative on the board committee, read a statement from the senate’s executive committee that called the Medgar Evers proposal “seriously deficient in several important respects.”

One concern, Beaky said, was that “the proposal appears to promote the practice of religion to teach religion rather than to teach about religion.” The program, she added, “would be unconstitutional [because] as a public university we cannot violate the separation of church and state by favoring either religion or any particular variety of religion.”

The program, Beaky said, was “geared to … community experiences more suited to the practice of African-American protestant religions,” rather than the academic study of religion. She pointed to the religious affiliations of the college faculty who would teach in the program, as well the Christian affiliations of all of the scholars and others from whom Medgar Evers sought endorsements in its proposal.

Of the nine faculty members whose C.V.s are included with the proposal and who are to teach in the religious studies program, five focus their work on Christianity or African-American churches. Three others are scholars of philosophy and the fourth studies Islam in the black community.

The committee also criticized the affiliations of experts who wrote letters in support of the program that Medgar Evers officials cited in their proposal. Of the seven letters, four came from academics, all of whom focus on Christianity. Emilie M. Townes, a professor of African-American religion and theology at Yale University’s School of Divinity and president-elect of the American Academy of Religion, wrote that Medgar Evers was “an ideal place” for a religious studies major. Another letter came from Christine E. Gudorf, a professor at Florida International University and president of the Society of Christian Ethics, of which Darryl Trimiew, the chair of Medgar Evers’s department of philosophy and religion, is vice president. The third letter was from Marie A. Failinger, a law professor at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn., which is affiliated with the United Methodist Church.

The fourth letter was from Barbara Austin-Lucas, a professor of religious education at Alliance Theological Seminary in Nyack, N.Y., run by the Christian and Missionary Alliance, and president of Women Organizing, Mobilizing and Building, a faith-based aid group. Her son, Hakim Jabez Lucas, is a lecturer in philosophy and religion at Medgar Evers.

The other three letters came from community leaders, including the executive director of the local YMCA and Lonnie F. Oates, a minister of the Christian Church, who wrote that his church is “in great need for better educated church members and a preparatory program for our ministers.” He added: “A degree in religious studies would be a sound foundation for their preparation for Seminary…. Religious studies graduates would provide us with needed potential staff members and would of course be welcome in our churches for lay minister positions in education, evangelism and community development.”

Beaky also complained that students would also be required to do internships “requiring them to work closely with professionals, practitioners, and/or graduate professors in their field of choice in order to obtain hands-on experiences in the professional practices related to religious studies,” at least some at community and faith-based organizations. The proposal, Beaky added, confirmed that the program is “geared more toward the personal development of students — development as agents of change — rather than of their critical understanding of religions,” as would be expected of a liberal arts major in religion.

Manfred Philipp, chair of the University Faculty Senate and a chemistry professor at Lehman College in the Bronx, also criticized the program’s “sectarian” focus. At a public hearing on June 17, Philipp asked why there were no specific course offerings on Roman Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity and other Christian branches, while there were several courses on the religions of African-Americans and Caribbeans.

Phoenix, the college’s provost, responded by calling the groups Philipp listed as “sects” and suggesting that students could take independent study classes to learn about those groups. In an interview, she also proposed that students could do internships with those groups or research about them to fulfill the major’s requirements, adding that “the courses in the proposal are just the ones we’ll have at the beginning, but as the major grows, we’ll add more classes and more specific classes.”

Philipp also contends that the program offers several courses on “a specific brand of Christianity” — the Protestantism found in black churches — including a required upper-level course called “African Traditional Religions.” Students concentrating in philosophy and religion would also be required to take “Black Philosophical Thought” and students in the religion and social justice concentration would be required to take “Caribbean Religions and Social Justice Movements” and “The Role of the Church in the Black Community.” Other than a class on Buddhism and Hinduism required of the philosophy concentrators, all of the other required classes are surveys, such as “Peace Education,” “Religious Ethics” and “Philosophy of Religion.”

But Phoenix defended the religious studies major as “a way to explore how religion functions in and shapes the modern world.” It was not intended to be “an exhaustive look at every religion in the world — there’s no way we could cover them all,” she said, but rather a course of study focused on the “social science perspective” on modern religion.

“Our program is in no way trying to prepare students for seminary or sectarian studies, because that’s not what most of our students want,” Phoenix added, explaining that a survey of students interested in the religious studies major found that students were more likely to want to go to law school or to pursue non-profit or social service jobs than to go on to study divinity or become clergy members.

Jeremy Leaming, a spokesman for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said “the fact that some faculty say it may not be a very well-rounded program at the moment doesn’t amount to a violation of the separation of church and state.” Unless there is evidence that the program’s faculty are “trying to proselytize or inculcate Christianity or another religion,” he said, there are no grounds for objection to the religious studies program.

“Public universities,” Leaming added, “must ensure that religious study courses are just that, academic courses on religion, and not classes that should be taught at a bible seminary or a bible college.” He declined to comment further without more information on the program at Medgar Evers. -Jennifer Epstein

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Let me begin with a confession, my wife and I have an addiction. Or maybe it’s just the closest thing we have to a date night or family ritual. For the past several years, every Sunday evening from roughly 9pm on, we’ve done everything in our power to find ourselves parked on the couch or sitting up in bed, tuned in to HBO.

While the shows have changed, the writing and characters have remained troublingly endearing.

There have been sitcoms full of the seductions of celebrity culture, such as Sex and the City and it’s more recent male equivalent, the Mark Wahlberg-inspired Entourage.

In contrast, there have been a series of heavier, dare I say “darker,” series; including Carnival, The Station Agent, The Sopranos, Big Love, The Wire and the deliberate meditation on death, Six Feet Under, from which too many scenes to mention remain fixed in my imagination…

But as this summer approached I began to have pre-withdrawal symptoms. The Sopranos was coming to a final end - an end which would disappoint us all; and The Wire was not scheduled to return for at least another few months. This meant that I would have to be sustained through the summer heat by thirty minutes of the superficial Hollywood stylings of Vinny Chase and his motley crew. I’m ambivalently loyal at best to Big Love, but that’s a moot point since its recent move to Monday nights.

Do you feel my pain yet?

Anyway, much to my surprise, my cravings have been staved off by the newest arrival to HBO’s portfolio: enter John From Cincinnati, the story of a ghost town of a surfing community in Southern California. Never mind that my race politics continue to complain, “No Black People?” - it’s at least more plausible than the paucity of color in older shows set in New York City (i.e. Friends and Seinfeld).

Nonetheless, this show has it all.

“Great” Acting: Bruce Greenwood (Double Jeopardy et al) Rebecca DeMornay (continuing her work in The Lords of Doggtown), and two 90s sitcoms legends: Ed O’Neill (best known as Al Bundy) and 90210’s Luke Perry.

Painful Dialogue: Actually it’s more like juxtaposed monologues, full of phrases that are fragmented and incomplete, which quickly turn into enraged outbursts that produce emotional shutdowns on the part of their “victim.” These are truncated conversations in which it’s never quite clear that any shared meaning is achieved. This, in fact, is what brings the community of Imperial Beach together - their shared confusion amidst efforts to make sense of the mess of their lives. Thus far the show’s clearest human connection – where folks actually appear to be on the same page – is between trickster-figure John and surf-prodigy Shaunie Yost, in the form of a silent session of “scratch feet on ground and spin around” that produces mutual smiles. Maybe this a nod to Gospel stories of Jesus’ privileging child-like faith? Who knows, but here are a few of my favorite “religious” phrases thus far from the show’s namesake:

John- “the end is near,” “See God…” and “We are all frail vessels… Room 24 will give up its dead and the debt shall be forgiven.”

and one from Luke Perry’s Link- “Trust the devil you know, Mitch.”

Spirituality: there are resurrections, miraculous healings, ghosts, trances, visions and levitating bodies that will capture the attention of religious traditionalists, spiritual searchers and those just fascinated by “paranormal” occurrences.

Human Complexity: All of the deep questions, suffering, loss, death, dying dreams, community, family conflicts, and, of course, drugs, rock and roll and sex (strangely without gratuitous sex scenes). All without the aid of black and brown youth and their blasted rap music! Who knew?

A couple of closing thoughts: Set in Imperial Beach, CA - which I’m told is the first U.S. outpost north of Tijuana - Mexico is the shows constant “absent presence.” The show’s only non-white characters are either Spanish-speaking or speaking with Spanish accents, presumably of Mexican descent, and they show up as prisoners, gang-bangers and “illegals” shuffling just north of the border. The one recurring non-white character is the manager (played by Luis Guzman) of a motel with only one tenant - the squatting, drug-addicted surf legend, Butchie Yost. Between Butchie and the motel’s psychotic owner, poor Ramon’s day job is simply to clean up the shattered lives of broken white folks. While he is no “Magical Negro” - a character ubiquitious to the big screen (i.e. Will Smith in Bagger Vance, Michael Clark Duncan in The Green Mile, etc) making possible the salvation of “the man,” there is a clear family resemblance. The only magical person on this show is John (from Cincinnati?) , who arrives mysteriously from nowhere, produces cash from empty pockets that always corresponds to the dollar amount requested of him, carries a platinum credit card incapable of being maxed out, and enables others to performer miraculous healings.

A Few Questions

While the show’s driving “religious” metaphor is clearly a new age spirituality of the surf, does John represent a subtle endorsement of the popular prosperity gospel? Or perhaps the writers are aware of the historical overlap in the United States between these two traditions?Does the show’s disjointed, never resolved dialogue denote a nod to a postmodern spirituality that accents fissures and breaks and takes a nod from Rilke’s word’s to the young poet, “love the questions…” - community of seeker-surfers?

Must focusing upon spirituality (i.e. John) require a denial or downplaying of politics (i.e. U.S. immigration policy)? Must they be mutually exclusive? Must spirituality, as a contrast to both the religious right and left, be so deeply personal at the expense of emptying out any political consciousness? Or maybe the writers mean to critique the blind-spots of white privilege that shape the largely self-absorbed concerns of the show’s central figures, almost all of whom find it difficult to step out beyond their individual agendas.

These are just a few preliminary thoughts on a great new show. I know there must be some book out there on surfing as a metaphor for life, but for now I have refrained from researching it, content simply to ride the wave of my new HBO fix. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Official HBO Site: www.hbo.com/johnfromcincinnati/

Fan Site: home.earthlink.net/~mypix2007/jfc/index.html

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Hello Everyone!

Thanks once again for the generosity of feedback in the week leading up to the launch - the love is much appreciated.

By now perhaps you a have a theory; if not, hopefully you’ve at least asked yourself: “Why did this brother choose to launch his site on 07.07.07?” Well, since you ask, indulge me for a moment…

Whether it’s the poetic appeal – never mind if you’re a biblical literalist or Darwinian by design – of the earth being spoken into existence in six days followed by one of divine rest…

Or you’ve been out on those corners praying for that lucky roll of the die,

Whether you were listening to Minister Farrakhan move the crowd at the Mall in 1995 when he started laying down those numbers…

Or you’re a gospel music loyalist waxing nostalgic of Fred Hammond - before he
signaled the move of black churches to praise and worship music - on his second to last
album with Commissioned (circa 1991),

Whether you witnessed pre-break up Erykah Badu and Andre 3000 name their first born…

Or you’ve had to fight the itch of that long seventh inning stretch in your marriage,

There’s just something about that Number – a near universal appeal that appears to be attributed to the number seven.

Now, I’m no numerologist, but it was still all too difficult for me resist the resounding resonance with which the number seven seems to be celebrated. And just in case none of the examples in my above litany sold you, let me share, more personally, just a few reasons why I chose to launch my site on this the seventh day of the seventh month of the seventh year of the new millennium.

First of all, I am nearing the start of my seventh and hopefully final year (pray with me!) of what has been an extremely rewarding time of doctoral studies at Harvard University. They say seven years is average at Harvard… so call me average!

Second, seven is a number that many religious traditions treat as significant – just check out wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_(number) – so this choice also reflects the fact that religion and spirituality, in all their diverse manifestations, take a primary place in both my personal biography and intellectual journey.

And third, it has also been seven months since the passing of my mother, Patricia Ann Wallace, and amongst other things this site has afforded me the opportunity to memorialize her life on the web and to acknowledge the tremendous wealth of her spirit, to which I am an heir. Check out the page dedicated to her (www.josefsorett.com/patricia-ann-wallace-tribute/) on this site to learn more about this remarkable woman. We miss her dearly!

At the church I grew up attending, seven was believed to be the number of completion – and thus of new beginnings as well. In a year that promises us all a host of new beginnings – as well as important endings – I am excited to start this on-line dialogue.

Staying steady with the number seven, I’ve decided to define my launch into the blogosphere by an initial series of seven blog entries. Don’t worry, not all at once.

Here’s a glimpse of what you can expect from posts in the days and weeks to come:

Today: Reflections on Human Frailty: Life, Death and My HBO Addiction

Coming Soon:
Towards the (Post) Hip Hop Intellectual
Race, Religion and Politics in the City University of New York
“I Ain’t Here to Argue About His Facial Features…”
Left, Left, Left, Right, Left: Culture Politics, Policy and the Poles of Public Morality
The Art of My Eclectic (Personal) Fashion Sensibility
Muhammad Walks an Underground Freeway to the Club

Before I get to the first post, I want to quickly acknowledge one of my closest friends, who also happens to be my personal technology consultant: Joselin Mane. If you like what you see on this site, check out www.litbel.com for the best techie I know (website design, hosting services, etc.). While academic trends of late have highlighted the history of intersecting afro-latina/o diasporas (See: Future of Black Studies), this site has been an exercise in building black & Latina/o partnerships. In the process of learning to work this website, Joselin claims that he has been teaching me to fish… bacalao, I guess? If you can’t swing the cod fish, then try some Platanos and Collard Greens.   Either way, Mucho Amor a mi hermano dominicano de otra madre!

Okay, enough with the self-less plug. It’s now official, www.josefsorett.com has been launched. And while it’s surely anti-climactic at this point, check out my first blog entry, Reflections on Human Frailty: Life, Death and My HBO Addiction, which will post at 7am.

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Welcome to my blog! As I post interesting stories and current events and pose questions along with random musings, I invite you to conversation. Please read on, let me know your thoughts, and make recommendations for future discussions. Looking forward…

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