collegial scholarship

i spent an incredibly wonderful weekend last week with several colleagues as we began to shape a book project. what continues to resonate in me is the great spirit of collegiality as we exchanged potential essays and ideas over the course of the two days we spent together. there was much laughter and much piercing analysis as we worked through each other's work and pointed to the strengths and the places we wanted to see each other develop. it was a time of respect as well as challenge. it was, in the best sense, collegial scholarship.

many of us were and are being exposed to a completely other style of academic rigor. it is one in which one seeks to tear down another's work to prove how "smart" we are or how well we can use rhetoric and insight to embarrass and demean. this kind of last wo/man standing mentality is far from tackling each others' ideas with scholarly rigor. to my mind, it is a form of cowardice that hides our insecurities and blindspots. genuine academic rigor requires that we read a thinker's work with care, precision, and thoroughly.

i welcome the day when a womanist thinker's corpus is read in it's entirety by colleagues who think that reading a sound bite of her work is the same thing as mastering wittgenstein by reading absolutely everything by him and about him. exploring the deep levels of meaning of cannon's emancipatory praxis or riggs' mediating ethic cannot be understood by reading one article by them. these are dense concepts that require much more reflection than i see in work by folks like mcgrath and company.

this past weekend confirmed for me that genuine collegial work pushes us to think harder and deeper not only about our work but also the work that others create. it involves risk and a willingness to grow and explore new avenues of thought. it produces deep work--not niceness. the slash and burn mentality that passes for scholarship for far too many folk does little to help us think more deeply. it does, however, usher in a small and narrow scholarship that reifies disciplines but does little to give them new life or provide new insights.

public intellectuals

i recently participated in tavis smiley's 10th anniversary state of the black union (sobu). each february, smiley assembles two large panels to discuss issues relating to black folks in the u.s. i believe there were 10-12 folks on my panel alone. most of us did not get to say much, so i had to make the most of my brief air time--a challenge for a seminary professor who is used to unpacking things slowly. it was a fascinating experience on a variety of levels as i saw some of the behind the scenes technical aspects of the broadcast (yes, i'm a bit of tech geek) and i also finally met folks whose work i respect and use like lani guinier, randall robinson, and julianne malveaux.

cspan still has the panels up at http://www.cspan.org/Watch/watch.aspx?MediaId=HP-A-15942

however, it was a conversation i had a 2 fridays ago with one of the listeners to the broadcast that prompts my musings. she is a 70+ year old black woman who is a retired lawyer and lives in the atlanta area. when she finally reached me, she thanked me for my two sets of remarks on the panel (obama is not god and we should stop treating him that way and get to work helping him govern--this is what democracy is about--the active participation of citizens and the black church should stop preaching prosperity gospel and get back to the business of being prophetic and help black folks work together to face the contemporary challenges to and in black life today). she was, as many of us have experienced, a wise older woman who has seen much, done much, and has insightful analysis and critique about what's going on today. i enjoyed our conversation as she talked about organizing the women in her area and in her church to tackle the problems they face. in a message she left for me before we were able to talk, she said that "I'm having a meeting of women only at my house on Saturday evening to help
black folks stop believing that God works like the Pizza Hut delivery man." in short, she is a fired up mature black woman who speaks her mind with precision and then acts on her convictions.

one part of our conversation continues to resonate. she told me that she has watched the sobu each of the 10 years it has been on c-span. the broadcast is one of the most popular that cspan does and they devote 6 hours of programming to it each february. it reaches millions each year and there were 6,000 folk in the l.a. convention center this year where it is broadcast. my caller stated that in all her years of watching and appreciating what many folks had to say, i was the first person who took her phone call from all the panelists that she has tried to contact to thank them for their remarks. my first reaction, after being a bit stunned at this news, was to try to explain that after exposure like that, it's hard to sort out whose calls to take because all manner of folk call or write. she stopped me (are we surprised?) and reminded me in no uncertain terms that if any of us put ourselves out there in public spaces to speak our mind, we need to willing to listen to and respond to the reactions we evoke.

she has a point and i'm still chewing on it.

opening musings

today, i'm thinking about the economy and impact that it is having on higher education. i am very lucky to be teaching and working at a school that has financial resources and will weather this recession. we are making cuts, to be sure, but they are not as draconian as some schools where fine religious studies departments like that at the university of florida are facing extinction. there are at least two trains running here--the first is that many of colleagues in higher education still do not understand that not just anyone can teach religion or research it well. the study of religion is as complex as any other discipline in the academy. thinking of it as derivative, secondary, afterthought is to fail to educate students well and we let our own ignorance pass as expertise rather than a blind spot that needs to be corrected. second, when folks with this lack of awareness become administrators, this turns deadly. administrators who have never had an engaged conversation with colleagues in religious studies, taken a religious studies class, or engaged in careful and thoughtful reflection on the ways in which the study of religion as an impact on how we order our political associations, cultural leanings, and social structures (to name just a few), are ill equipped to make careful decisions about how to make budget cuts. it is ironic that at the very time at which we need to be educating students about the religious worldviews of peoples, is the very time we see this education as expendable or able to be done by scholars in other disciplines.