Studying Rome While It Burns

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is a provocative, engaging, and important paper. I am glad to have read it and been challenged by it, and I hope it will be published and many more scholars will have the same experience.

The author stakes out a bold position, contextualizes it in dialogue with other scholars, and thinks through its implications. This is a solid work of scholarship. (This is mildly ironic given that it is, in some ways, arguing against traditional scholarship.) I recommend publication. 

While I do not have any particular edits or changes to suggest, I do think there's room for some clarification, and so hope it is helpful to pose four questions:

1.) Who is the audience for this essay? The journal focuses on the study of religion and the call focuses on "religious studies/theology," but I'm not sure anything in the text of this article is focused that way. The central sources are an ecologist and scholars of indigeny, but both are introduced in such a way that it seems the audience is assumed not to be part of either field. Does the author want to make an argument to all academics? To humanists? To scholars of religion? I wonder if making the audience explicit —and appealing in some ways directly to whatever the audience may be— could be helpful.

2.) Would it be helpful to distinguish and offer some thought between leaving academia and "guerilla" academics? I thought for much of the essay that the author would argue against academic work, would suggest that, in our time, scholarship and teaching are not the most meaningful work and we should do other things. But the end of the essay talks about the value of continued teaching and proposes "work in a guerilla fashion" (7).  I imagine other readers will similarly wonder if the best response to the concerns raised here might be to leave the profession entirely.  Would the author want to offer any guidance or insight?

3.) Can more be said about what, specifically, this argument looks like in practice?  On p 5, the author appeals to the reader "more as a person than as a professional" and encourages us to learn from scholars of Indigeny to "attend closely to place, especially the place where we live." I was surprised that the author said nothing about the place where they live, about how their own life or work has been or could be shaped by this advice. For an appeal from "a person," the essay says very little personally about the author. Perhaps there are good reasons for this. If not, could more be said about the author's own place and how it has shaped them?

4.) Could the approach to reintegrative praxis be explained more fully? My sense is that something happened in the editorial process here, as one practice is discussed and labeled "first," but then the author then decides not to list any more. It is, at best, an abrupt shift in the direction of the section. If possible, more detail on why this decision was made would be helpful. (Why is the question of belonging relevant to these practices but not the other ideas in the essay? Why is "slow down; go outside" appropriate for inclusion, but other practices are not? Where would the author recommend that readers go to learn more such practices?)  

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The author poses a challenging set of questions regarding how humans, especially those connected to higher educational institutions, need to not just adapt our thinking in the face of the mounting climate crisis, but moreover our teaching practices, aims in education of our students, and our own practices to engage and embody a “transformative pedagogical” agenda.  This will be centered in a deeply personal engagement by academics to “slow down” and “go outside” and engage our students to build resilience and to “learn and practice adaptive creativity” for what is coming.

In many ways this is a highly creative essay exhorting academics to learn and embody new teaching practices and indeed go through an eco-centered personal reflective process of reintegration of self with the living world—its places and beings—around us.

A concern is the broad generality of claims.  Statements about “the crisis,” the Academy, humanities professors, Indigeny, “normalcy in America,” resilience theory’s stress on our need for “reintegration” remain on a very broad level.

The crisis is stated but the drivers of the crisis are not described, drivers like population surge, over-consumption, trying to feed 8 billion people by expanding agriculture and cutting into forests and natural ecosystems.   The author locates the need to teach and help prepare students for adaptation to the mounting impacts of the crisis, such as learning barter skills, and skills of creative community building.  Gardening isn’t mentioned.

The stress seems to be that the crisis is so advanced that all we can do is learn better and teach better how to adapt. But what about teaching students about societal policies that allow hope of mitigation of the scale of the climate impacts. 

This essay paints a radical vision of a transformative educational reintegrative agenda.  But the students I teach will need jobs and we who teach them feel some responsibility in helping them to be prepared to compete for jobs.  This sounds very prosaic but it is a real responsibility that many teachers and professors feel.  We who teach in the humanities and especially in religious studies or theology typically play a role in helping students majoring in business, pre-law, pre-med, sciences or social sciences gain some greater breadth and exposure in history, value clarification.  This is perhaps  a reformist agenda but it is a more realistic and modest vision of what can actually happen in a humanity’s class across a semester.

I believe that a broad critique of Academia boarders on an essentialist reduction of the diversity of actors—teachers, profs, deans, staff—that together make up the professionals who make up colleges and universities.  I can surely join the author in recognizing that many parts of the modern Academy support a growth agenda of the national economy, seek to help students get jobs and thus support the general market dominance of current society.  But many academics also pose resistance to many of the consumerist biases of our society and try to do something else. 

The author draws on the work of indigenous scholars of Indigeny that valorize a “place-based, community of beings experience of the world.”  It is said that it is not a “knowledge problem,” but a “conduct problem.”  That suggest that categories of ethics might have relevance.  “It takes discipline, patience and practice to change habits.” 

We can be inspired by the world view of indigenous scholars but it seems difficult to expect suburban or urban students to develop the same level of emboded engagement with natural ecosystems like indigenous peoples whose core practices in a pre-modern, pre-industrial revolution were mostly agricultural and place-based. I find much of ecological teaching needs an equal stress on history-based appreciation of the rapid rise of climate change impacts and species endangerment rates.  Realistically in a semester most of what I do is only able to be done in a classroom in which I have capability of showing power points and short videos. I do take them to our campus learning garden and to our geothermal building to hear about our biodiesel project and other aqua fish raising project.

I find some of the author’s assertions too bold.  He/she states “normalcy” in America is characterized by separation rather than relationship and emphasizes control over collaboration and competition over cooperation.”  Each of these categories are broadly drawn and our complex society is a mixture of these categories. 

Finally this essay makes only a very weak tangential connection to religion and its practices. One could link practices and the need to develop new adaptive “habits” with Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s discussions of virtues and their connection to habits.  One could link the indigenous views of Native American communities to the pre-industrial practices of all European, Middle East and Asian communities, whose base was agriculture and who stayed in place.  That would mean that the Medieval thought forms of Christianity, Judaism and Islam might be put in a helpful conversation with the voices of indigenous scholars as allies.  That might suggest that the moral foci of indigenous thinking is a radical contract to dominant American religious views, but is an opportunity to try to recover truths that are embedded in the Medieval traditions of those religious heritages.  Instead of prophetic indictment where indigenous scholars point to the truth to put down the dominant modern practice of diverse religious communities in America, it would be a highlighting of indigenous sensibilities regarding our relationship to nature as an opportunity to encourage Christians, Jews, Muslims and secular people to recover a spiritual and moral sensibility that remains embedded in their own history.

I feel it would be best to cut  down the broad sweep of this essay and concentrate on development of some of its pieces.  A tighter paper on ecologically responsible pedagogy seems a natural. One on what indigenous voices might show Christians, Jews and Muslims about their own pre-modern histories might be another.  Place-based thought forms might connect to studies of Tibetan and Christian monastic community traditions.

The author is to be commended for their passion and vision.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The text is very well written. Some technical elements that could be enhanced are sufficiently justified by the genre of the article. Although being a more free essay, the work engages with relevant and up to date bibliography and weaves a very sound and profound analysis of Academic ambiences. By opening dialogue with the call for papers, the work criticizes Academic activities that are just activities and do not attempt to face more fiercely the issues they address, are presented as incoherent by the author. In this sense, the essay presents a valid critique to Academic labour, based on consistent Academic basis, so that Academic debate may be provoked. 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf