April 7th is Study Day

Monday is office day for me, time to get as much reading and writing done for the week as I can.  I had a lengthy study session on Saturday as well so I am getting close to being ready for classes.  I will be on campus on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday.  This week, I am out on Wednesday doing a site observation visit for Golden Apple (joyful duty.)

I read two books this past weekend.  The first was Creation and Fall by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer has been an enduring interest for me for forty years.  I first read The Cost of Discipleship when I was in my twenties.  Sometime after that I read Letters and Papers from Prison.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Most readers are probably aware of his story.  Bonhoeffer was already well known by the 1930's because of his theological writings.  He studied with Niebuhr and developed a great affection for the African-American worship experience in Harlem.  When the Nazis assumed power in Germany, Bonhoeffer returned to his homeland and became a leading figure in the anti-Nazi movement.  He was implicated in a plot to assassinate Hitler, imprisoned, and executed in the weeks before the Allied victory.  

Creation and Fall is made up of two lectures he gave in 1932.  This mostly prayerful meditation on Genesis seems to me more of an exhortation to return to faith in the Word of God than to be an effort to break much new ground theologically.  The most interesting theme is Bonhoeffer's assertion that creation is only fully understood in terms of the resurrection.  This Christocentric approach differs markedly from last week's reading from Levenson with its focus on El Shaddai and his creative struggle with Leviathan.

Also this weekend, I plowed through Outline of a Theory of Practice (Pierre Bourdieu 1972).  Bourdieu is proposing a theoretical framework for sociologists and anthropologists that will eliminate the subject-object duality.  His central idea is that of habitus, the "systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them" (The Logic of Practice 1990).  What intrigued about this is the connection to Aristotle, and then to Aquinas.  Aristotle describes hexis, a structure of the mind characterized by dispositions, taste, and sensibilities. Hexis was translated into Latin as habitus, the term that Aquinas uses and identifies with virtue. Aquinas defines virtue several different ways but the most useful general definition he gives is "a virtue is a habit that disposes an agent to perform its proper operation or movement.”  I think Bourdieu would be partly happy with this, insofar as the habitus "disposes an agent to perform."  Bourdieu would say that the principles of habitus are "generative."  I think were Aquinas (and Aristotle) differ from Bourdieu is that they do not seem the same collective embodiment of habitus that he claims.  The difference may come from the fact that Bourdieu is studying social structures and thus is inclined toward the communal.  There may be a deeper reason though.  Because of his roots in Weber and Marx, Bourdieu understands structures to be the products of culture and history where Aquinas will see dispositions and virtue as coming from the reason an faith of the individual.  Despite this difference, I think there chance for some profitable work in seeing Bourdieu in terms of St. Thomas.  

Pierre Bourdieu

In a wild swing away from the German theologian and French anthropologist, I also needed to prepare for my unity on Modernist American Poetry in the National Louis class.  We will still be discussing The Great Gatsby this week but I needed to prepare the packet of poems and study questions.  I have decided to include (after much internal debate):

• Carl Sandburg--we live in Chicago after all so Chicago Poems and some of the WWI poems.
• Langston Hughes--several selections but I included "a dream deferred" because of the new production of Raisin in the Sun.
• Gertrude Stein--"Susie Abado" and a few others.
• T.S. Eliot (do we consider him American or British?)  I went with Prufrock although I wish I could discuss The Waste Land in terms of Gatsby.
• Wallace Stevens--The Snow Man
• ee cummings--In Just-- and a few others.
• Marianne Moore--Poetry
• William Carlos Williams--Just to Say
• Ezra Pound--Villanelle: Psychological Hour

It seems like I am forgetting someone I included but it is of no great consequence.  There were so many others who could have (and should have) been added but I had reached the number of pages I might reasonably assign.  I hope my readers who object will feel free to add on names.

Next to read is "Eating Animals" by Jonathan Foer.  I am trying to make sure that Alice and Saul do not see the title of this essay.  It would upset them.  Back to Northwestern tomorrow for a class in "Love and Evil."