"Things Do Things"

Emily Clark

Those of us who were in Atlanta for the AAR have had nearly a week to recover from our self-inflected wounds of staying up late and social networking over lagers and ales. We have also had a little under a week to digest the wide-ranging, quality panels and papers we had the opportunity to hear. One Saturday afternoon panel that continues to stick out for me was the Author Meets Critics panel for Thomas Tweed’s Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion. Though the book came out in 2006 and in 2009 the Journal of the American Academy of Religion published a review symposium, including a response from Tweed, this 2010 session in Atlanta drew quite a crowd. Based on his years in the field of religious studies and American religious history, Tweed defines religion as “confluences of organic-cultural flows that intensify joy and confront suffering by drawing upon human and suprahuman forces to make homes and cross boundaries.”

Unfortunately Ivan Strenski (of University of California, Riverside) was unable to attend, but the three other respondents/“critics” led off an engaging discussion that ranged from scholarly moral obligation to the agency of “things.” Chip Callahan (University of Missouri) reflected on Tweed’s book in light of his current research on the religious lives and worlds of New England whalers. Callahan found Tweed’s work helpful because his use of dynamic water metaphors allows us to focus on the everyday lives of our actual subjects. Marie Marquardt (Agnes Scott College)’s reflections on Oscar, a Mexican migrant “outsider” living in the US who she met during her fieldwork, demonstrate how a theory or definition that is itself “on the move” resonates well with subjects who are on the move. Also recognizing Tweed’s dynamic definition, Grant Wacker (Duke University) spoke about the “positionality of the observer” and the “motility of data,” along with amusing anecdotes from his years of working with/near Tweed in North Carolina.

During his response and the Q&A session following, Tweed reflected on his past projects and his forthcoming book on the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. He spoke of the moral obligations we as scholars have to our subjects, living or dead. Both ethnographic work and archival work exists in a world of “moral entanglement.” Tweed also drew our attention to the significance of artifacts – for “buildings perform roles” and “statues have agency.” “Things do things.” Scholars of material culture have long called for the importance of stuff, but material culture can easily be overlooked by discussions of power and authority. Tweed’s short but poignant phrase “things do things” got me thinking about destroyed things. I’ve blogged before about Hurricane Katrina and Avery Gordon’s notions of haunting, as the absence of pre-Katrina buildings lends a ghostly presence to the Crescent City. Not only are dwellings important, the Q&A also prompted Tweed and the respondents to reflect on those who are excluded from home. In addition to looking at how/why some people are unwelcome from particular dwellings, destroyed dwellings and our subjects’ response to their destruction and absence is significant. Do they rebuild? Do they move? Do they forget? Or how do they remember? Non-things do things too.

Wading Back in the Troubled Waters

Paul Harvey

A few notes on Katrina, religion, and the weird trifecta coincidence of Katrina, MLK’s speech in 1963, and Glenn Beck’s picnic on the mall.

First, the NYT has an interesting piece on the Katrina and black churches in New Orleans, focusing specifically on the Lower 9th. Of some 75 churches there before the storm, a great number have closed down, many likely for good. About a dozen struggle to remain, their tenuous hold a symbol for the tenuous hold of the recovery outside the touristed zones. Amid the more chipper pieces the paper ran on various pieces of good news about the recovery, this gives a piece of reality on the other side. The article chronicles the efforts of one pastor who is trying to fire up his congregation again, an uphill battle for sure. This article makes a nice accompaniment to the special issue of the Journal of Southern Religion, on religion through the storm. The issue includes (among many other goodies) Tulane professor Randy Sparks’s piece on religion and recovery in post-Katrina New Orleans. And it gave me a nice reminder about perhaps the single most compelling video production I’ve seen on Katrina, Trouble the Waters, which we’ve blogged about here before. And I mean no disrespect to Spike Lee’s outstanding efforts there in When the Levees Broke and, more recently, his revisit to New Orleans, timed for the Saints to march in and BP to spill its guts out. When the Levees Broke is a great film, but for total immersion viewing it’s hard to beat Trouble the Waters (plus it’s giving me the title for a book I hope to start to work on next year).

On Katrina, politics, and religion, my thunder has been stolen by Tenured Radical’s post today Five Years After Hurricane Katrina, What Would Jesus Do?, which comes with the added bonus of a Johnny Cash clip from YouTube (always a good thing). “Looking back over the last five years,” she concludes, “we need less God and more politics: by that I mean not less faith, and all the forms of ethical community that faith can provide, but we need to end the lie that you can substitute faith for politics.” This and much else at the post is so much better than what I was struggling to come up with that I’ll just point you there. To her post, I would only add the point that the most effective use of religious rhetoric in twentieth-century America has been to provide the spiritual inspiration necessary to move recalcitrant political institutions (hence the connection between the March on Washington and the Civil Rights Bill; or social Catholicism and the New Deal). But presumably that is what she means by “all the forms of ethical community that faith can provide.”

I was thinking along these lines today as I’m in the midst of reading Alison Greene’s excellent dissertation “No Depression in Heaven” (recently completed at Yale, under Glenda Gilmore), a searching history of religion and politics in Memphis and the Delta through the Depression years. The hapless rhetoric of evangelicals through that era was especially resonant given the same vapid speechifying at the Glenn Beck picnic this weekend. Also fascinating in her work is to see the churches basically cede authority to NGO’s (the Red Cross in particular) and, as the New Deal progressed, governmental agencies. The evangelicals basically said 1) the Depression just shows that we need a revival – that the nation needs to “turn back to God”; 2) in the meantime, don’t look to us for relief, because we ain’t got any; if you need food, go someplace else, because there’s too many of you to serve; 3) only God, not politics, can save us; 4) but Jesus is coming soon anyway. Obviously this applies to only part of the diverse religious formations through that time period, not (for example) to the religious left, and actually not to some of the premillennialist Pentecostals who had another agenda going on. But at the very least, these evangelicals implicitly understood that, for all their rhetoric about turning back to God, ultimately governing authorities might have answers, not to mention indispensable resources, that they just didn’t have. Perhaps they might have even given an ear to Tenured Radical’s conclusion:

What would Jesus do? Throw Glenn Beck and every money changer like him out of the temple, that's what, and get back to what government is supposed to do: help people take care of themselves, make politics a vehicle for loving one's neighbor (not blaming him, or seeing if she needs to be deported) and protecting Americans from those who prey on the simple, the weak and the vulnerable. Until we do, the waters will keep on rising.

Five Years and an Oil Spill Later

[Emily Clark is a Ph.D. Student in the Department of Religion at Florida State University. She is also the new managing editor of the Journal of Southern Religion. You can expect great things from Emily in the not-too-distant future!]

Five Years and an Oil Spill Later

Emily Clark

This upcoming Sunday marks the 5 year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall on the American gulf coast. The aftermath of the storm–the outrage, the rising death toll, the fundraising, the widespread donations of time and money to rebuild, and the levee investigations–largely languished in the national media as time passed. Interest would perk up again when Brad Pitt finished another house, and with the recent interest in the HBO show Tremé, the public eye will incline towards the Crescent City that Care Forgot in the approaching days.

In addition to its Tremé style jazz, New Orleans is also famous for its historical haunting and ghost stories. A former New Orleans resident–the folk artist, musician, and street preacher Sister Gertrude Morgan who died in 1980–remains today in the city she evangelized in a ghostly form. According to sociologist Avery Gordon, “to write stories concerning exclusions and invisibilities is to write ghost stories,” and the scholar’s investigation of these social ghosts leads “to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life.” As the floodwaters receded from the Lower Ninth Ward (her former neighborhood), they resurrected a Sister Gertrude Morgan specter. Created and propagated largely by current Preservation Hall owner and creative director Benjamin Jaffe, the spectral Gertrude Morgan exists in a specific cultural context: post-Katrina New Orleans. Jaffe’s initial uncertainty about staying in his hometown and the city’s subsequent rebuilding efforts, particularly his artistic contribution to the city’s cultural revival, swirl about his spectral evangelist. For him, she became a symbol for the enduring love, acceptance, and creativity he reveres about his beloved city. She is an icon for authentic New Orleans culture in the post-Katrina world–a symbol for the city she viewed as sinful and most in need of her didactic message (click here for more on Morgan and Katrina).

In 2009, the Journal of Southern Religion released two issues of its typically annual periodical. One of these installments was a special issue entitled “After the Storm,” an exposé on religion in the American South in light of and responding to Katrina. Including articles, poetry, and the visual arts, this particular edition of JSR demonstrated, in the words of guest co-editor Tracy Fessenden, that “New Orleans isn’t going away.” The editors of the JSR encourage you to revisit or explore for the first time this special issue. Five years after the storm and one oil disaster later, religion in the gulf continues to raise difficult questions about power, identity, and social forces. Not only that, the South furthermore remains key to our constantly-developing and ever-nuancing picture of American religion.