This started as the lead-up to a "recent reading" post, but that post became long and I'm not done with it yet, and because another book I've read covers chronologically-earlier related material, I'll probably post about that one first - so I'm going to pull the intro from the aforementioned post and just shove it out here on its own.
The two books are on ancient Jewish religion, which was one of the first things I studied in religious studies, and which became one of my primary focuses once religious studies officially became my field, so I initially began that post by asking:
So how did I get into religious studies?
As I was reminded recently, I gave up on education, in the sense of sitting in a classroom with teachers educating me, pretty fucking early. In fourth grade, I'd been placed in a small accelerated reading program -- this was separate from and in addition to the "gifted and talented" program (which wasn't called that in my school, but you understand what I mean by it) -- which grouped a couple of fourth, fifth, and sixth graders together in a very small class to write essays and do other projects. It was harder work than anything I would do again until ... college.
That really isn't an exaggeration. The learning curve was ridiculous: that first year, my mother had to sit with me when I wrote some of these essays, not writing them for me but asking me, okay now what, what do you want to say next, just forcing me to do it, like pulling teeth. There was no hand-holding here -- nothing about the "I read a book about Fudge, I liked the part where his dad said 'eat it or wear it'" experience of third grade prepares you to suddenly write a structured essay that actually takes a position on something, and if you weren't ready to write the essay, well, no big deal, the class wasn't mandatory. Feel free to go back to gen pop.
As hard as it was, though, here's the thing: it wasn't merely difficult. Writing essays, talking about books like The Plague Dogs, talking about Copernicus and Galileo because we were reading The Trumpeter of Krakow, this was qualitatively different work than I would have been doing in fourth and fifth grade otherwise -- grades where we still had show and tell, for Christ's sake. I was learning differently, I was being taught differently. As a result, my expectations were really raised. Everything from leaving that program until college consistently failed to meet those expectations.
Everything from then on made it very clear that the system knew only one way to deal with gifted and talented students, or the larger category of honors students, or "the college track," or whatever category you like: quantitatively different work. Work that was merely difficult at best (and rarely even that), "busy work" at worst. I didn't mind this as much in my math work, where it just meant I got to algebra quicker, got sent to the high school to take courses, eventually was in sight of the math credits I would need to graduate high school and so intentionally slowed down. Math classes, at that level, lend themselves to this approach.
But teaching "smarter" kids by just giving them more work, more books to read, than the other kids, instead of trying harder to teach them, teaching them better, teaching them differently ... well, after this early experience in elementary school, I wasn't satisfied with the quantitative approach. I especially suffered from whiplash -- I was just talking about this yesterday to a fellow classmate of the same program who went through the same thing -- because although this was a small town, the junior high was administered by a separate school board (presumably because it serves two towns instead of one), and had no comparable program, no gifted and talented services at all. So we went from this very small, very advanced class to suddenly being dropped back and doing work more primitive than we had done for the previous three years. Three years is a long time for a seventh grader. It's very, very difficult to care about your academic performance in a circumstance like that.
(Here's the thing: I get that devoting extra resources to a small number of possibly gifted kids is maybe not the best use of public funds and human capital. Education of supposedly smarter children is a dicey game anyway: very often childhood intelligence is like childhood height, in that Jack may hit his growth spurt before James does, and may go through a few years of being ridiculously better at basketball as a result, but by the time they're in college everything's balanced out -- James is just as likely to be the same height or taller. The difference is that we can see height, and Jack doesn't walk around thinking of himself as taller than everyone else if he's five nine, but we all know a lot of smart kids who grew up to be ordinary adults who feel entitled to be correct all the time. How many is it worth putting up with in return for the genius geneticist who would've slipped through the cracks otherwise? I have no idea. So as an adult I can acknowledge both my own experience of malaise as a smart kid and my recognition that the system didn't necessarily owe me anything different.)
So I went through the usual teenage malaise fuck-all-these-grades-anyway stuff a couple years early, and by the time I got to high school two years later -- which seemed to take forever -- the only thing I cared about was getting to the other end of the tunnel as fast as possible. I dropped out of all the honors classes in order to reduce my workload to a per-credit-hour minimum, and loaded up electives in lieu of study hall and gym in order to maximize my credits, to increase the odds of my being able to graduate by the time I turned 18, which would happen the summer after my junior year.
The thing I might need to underscore is that what I had given up on here was the idea of other people teaching me. I had no particular sense that the school system knew how to do so in any way other than giving me more to do than other students, or that more than a handful of its employees felt any differently. The school seemed primarily concerned with managing me, which had begun immediately in junior high. Meanwhile, I was doing ample reading on my own, which is one way I was in fact able to graduate.
Originally I didn't have any particular intention of going to college. I wanted to be a writer, and had sold my first pieces in high school, and had been dumb enough to turn down a possible book deal at an embarrassingly young age for reasons that made sense at the time. None of the jobs that required a college degree interested me as a backup, and the experience of going to college sounded like a waste of time -- more to the point, it sounded like a continuation of high school. I agreed to check out some college campuses with my father, but this was mostly because it was a fun excuse for a road trip to Maine (Bates, Colby, I forget where else) and a trip to Boston (Harvard and MIT). Trips to Boston were like gold to me as a teenager, because they meant stops on Newbury Street, which meant Newbury Comics, records, maybe Doc Martens.
But! What changed my mind about college was hearing about Hampshire College -- famous for its lack of grades (my grades had been borderline for years and I stopped opening report cards after a while), its lack of majors, its lack of required courses -- from a guidance counselor whose daughter had gone there. Hampshire was the opposite of my high school experience -- moreso than I realized, since although it requires very little of the students, if you do opt to participate, the level of work, engagement, and investment is very very high. (Hampshire had the same effect on my expectations of college that the aforementioned reading program had on my expectations of education -- I've taken college courses at six schools not counting my current online classes and only a handful of graduate classes came close to what Hampshire expects of you. Everything else, including 90% of my graduate experience in two different programs, fell far short. I should note, though, that everything I say about Hampshire pertains to the Hampshire of the early to mid 90s, given that things have changed since.)
So I jumped at Hampshire. I applied early ... early something, whatever the term is for "please let me in without graduating high school," but because of my total disdain for academic performance, studying, and attendance, my math grade was barely passing. I was accepted to Hampshire -- not for the spring semester I had applied for, but for the following fall semester, contingent on either a high school diploma or bringing that math grade up. (Hampshire doesn't even offer math classes, so it never occurred to me the math grade would matter!)
I panicked for about a day, and then I just got mad. Not at Hampshire, at the stupid fucking school, for being so stupid. I went into the guidance office and I said, look, I need to graduate by the end of the year, but I don't want to take any classes, really. We need to make this happen or everybody's just going to look ridiculous. Well, I was already stuck with physics and math because those were year-long classes, but by getting credit for the advanced classes I'd taken, and this thing here and that thing there, and gym credit for an Outward Bound program (which wound up canceled, which is a whole nother story), it pretty much worked out. It worked out the rest of the way thanks to a teacher who was willing to do some independent studies for me because I was skipping her classes -- purely because of my own burn-out and unwillingness to come to school, nothing against her at all. Those independent studies were a) the missing ingredient that racked up the credits I needed to graduate high school on a schedule acceptable to me without actually, well, continuing to attend high school, b) for the first time since fifth fucking grade, the first really interesting reading I did in a school environment (Kerouac and the Beats, Toni Morrison, The Color Purple, Scott Momaday, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, I forget what else), c) an excuse to buy a bunch of books at the newly opened Barnes and Noble.
And this brings us forward to the religious studies issue.
Hampshire is the only undergraduate college I interviewed with, and when they asked me the standard "what are you interested in?" question, I said "human sexuality and American Indian studies." I didn't really know why I was interested in either of those things, except that this Barnes and Noble was a big deal. A big bookstore, not just the mall bookstore or the library, meant whole bookstore sections that were new to me -- like exactly those, American Indian studies and human sexuality, and I had picked up random books in both sections just because they existed to be read. As part of the independent studies I went on from there, picking up books on BDSM and queer studies and shamanism and witchcraft and my first Paglia book -- like being a college kid, or at least a pre-internet college kid, just grabbing all this stuff that was outside the canon of what had been handed to me to date.
The intersection of this meant reading about berdachism and talking about that in my college interview, and my interviewer correctly pointed out that if you want to do serious study of American Indians, you are best off going to a college that is located somewhere where American Indians actually live in appreciable numbers. And furthermore, that they were getting tired of white people fascinated by berdachism wanting to come hang out on the reservation to learn about gender.
But it was a very productive conversation in which we talked about why I was interested in what I was interested in, and the interviewer pointed out that a lot of the things I found interesting made it sound like I would also enjoy comparative religion.
That was my introduction to the field -- the existence of the field, I mean.
Now, at Hampshire I actually wound up a pop culture "major" (like I said, Hampshire doesn't have majors, but it's not worth getting into the specifics), when I wrote a paper on Batman and discovered the Journal of Popular Culture and the joys of writing about things like comic books and so on. In the meantime I took a few classes here and there. Some religion, some philosophy, some history. The idea of actually "majoring" in religion didn't appeal to me -- I was at that stage where I had forcefully rejected the Christianity I had grown up with and was reading Drawing Down the Moon and stuff like that.
I dropped out of college, I dropped back into college.
They made me a "drama and communications major" at the University of New Orleans, because they didn't know what to do with "pop culture major." They classified all of my Hampshire classes as nonspecific "elective credits," which I didn't discover at first. Going from an experimental private liberal arts college to a public university was a bigger culture shock than high school to college had been, in a lot of ways. It took me a while to figure out what I was expected to be doing, what I actually could do, what I wanted to do.
Eventually, as I've recently explained, I wound up with an English degree, which was nearly a double-major in English and philosophy. The reason for the English degree was largely because so many of my Hampshire credits, once I sat down with the undergraduate adviser and we pressured the right people into classifying them as something more specific (so that I could get graduation-relevant credit for them), either transferred as English credits or transferred as something relevant to the requirements of an English degree (humanities classes). So once I was done with that process, I was some science and math classes and a few specific literature classes away from completing the English degree's requirement.
(One of the crazy things about the math requirement, about the way "required courses" work in general whenever these things come up, is that although you had to do X credits of math courses beyond Math 10XX -- I forget what it was, probably a certain number of classes excluding developmental math or something -- they didn't give a shit if they happened to be courses you'd already taken, so to speed up the process I just took the same fucking classes I'd taken in junior high, because that meant I didn't have to show up for class or study or anything, I just came in when it was time for tests. Who was served by this, really?)
But what I really enjoyed by then was history.
I moved to New Orleans on short notice: the university couldn't notify me of my acceptance as a transfer student until they could enter into the computer how many credits I had and therefore what class I was in, because these were issues that affected which classes I was eligible for and how I registered for classes -- issues that were foreign to me coming from Hampshire, where we still stood in line all day to register for classes in person, and where "classes" in the sense of freshman, sophomore, etc., didn't exist. I was accepted only a few weeks before the summer semester began, and wanted to move right away -- UNO is not normally a residential campus, but there's a token dormitory that's sort of horrible.
The summer semester is extremely constricted -- the dining commons isn't even open for dinner, so they just offer a handful of classes, presumably aimed at people who are a few credits short of graduation. But it only took two classes to be considered full-time in the summer, if I remember right, which for me meant The Philosophy of Sex and Love and The Bible as Literature -- the latter a low-level English class that, as it turns me out, did me no good in terms of moving me closer to graduation, but at the time I didn't know that. I just reasoned that I knew the material already, since I'd read the Bible several times, so it would be a good lightweight course while I was getting my feet wet and looking for an apartment.
What I didn't know was Biblical criticism, and while that class didn't get serious about it, it did introduce me to it. Meanwhile, the philosophy class included some Catholic theology. The groundwork was starting to be laid, and when I took some history classes with the university's resident Egyptologist on the ancient Near East -- and later most of the other classes he taught, but notably the ones on early Christianity and on ancient Egypt -- I became hooked on ancient history, and especially on ancient Israel and early Christianity. (An attempt to learn Greek was foiled by the fact that the class was aimed at students who already knew Latin, though that wasn't technically a prerequisite.) UNO didn't have a religious studies department, so I just took all the relevant history classes -- most of the ancient history classes, a lot of European history, the two-semester Religion in America survey -- and almost everything in the Philosophy department, along with some Anthro. (I remained at UNO as a grad student in the history program, and later entered another graduate program in Indiana.)
So it was a long road to get to religious studies, and although my interests in religion and history originated separately, when I first really became interested in religious studies at the college level, it was in an ancient history class -- which is why those interests have been intertwined since, and why I have tended to approach religion as a historian.
The original questions that interested me in religious studies were historical -- was there a United Monarchy period in ancient Israel, what were the earliest Christian communities like and what were the characteristics of their faith, what was John the Baptist's movement all about and to what extent and in what form did it survive him -- though like everybody I found Big Ideas like the Axial Age and the Great Awakenings intriguing. There was a lot of "what was it like" work going on in the field at the time -- the Jesus Seminar's core publications came out in the mid and late 90s, just before I started grad school and joined the Westar Institute (host of the Jesus Seminar) as an associate member, and the Seminar for all intents and purposes disbanded after the death of founded Robert Funk in 2005, the same year I finished grad school.
In the meantime, the public became aware of and briefly fascinated by "Jesus totally did it ... with a LADY" theories first popularized in the 1970s by conspiracy books like Holy Blood Holy Grail and immortalized by Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. Between that and the rediscovery and publication of the Gospel of Judas, all of a sudden a lot of the popular attention on early Christianity was centered on gnosticism, a thing that always makes me grit my teeth in frustration -- that's a long topic in of itself, but the waters are muddied there, and it's dangerous to refer to an "ism" where there really isn't one. The works of Elaine Pagels, far and away the most prominent on gnostic groups in antiquity, have left a lot of people with a lot of misconceptions that tend to be exploited by those conspiracy books.
The biggest change in the field since I finished grad school is the loud, saloon-door-kicking, "I can lick any son of a bitch in the house" arrival of New Atheism and the redirection of energies toward addressing it, in no small part because this is an easy way to get a book or paper published, which is how academia works. (There has also been an important trend in the neurology of religion, such as it is, though not as important as some headlines have made out.) It's unfortunate in that it directs efforts away from actual scholarship -- anthropologists don't spend a lot of their time justifying the existence of anthropology or arguing about the contents of their field with non-anthropologists. But like I said, when Publish or Perish reigns, people under its aegis have to follow the money. Or the reward, in any event.
Okay, I think I've bulked this entry up enough at the top and bottom that it no longer counts as an intro to the other post. But I will finish that one up soon.
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