{"id":1543,"date":"2013-10-19T14:36:55","date_gmt":"2013-10-19T18:36:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/?p=1543"},"modified":"2013-10-19T14:41:21","modified_gmt":"2013-10-19T18:41:21","slug":"the-templeton-foundation-boycott-eschew-avoid-just-say-no","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/?p=1543","title":{"rendered":"The Templeton Foundation: Boycott, Eschew, Avoid . . . Just. Say. No."},"content":{"rendered":"

Roxanne, you don\u2019t have to put on the red light . . .<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I was a member of a swanky sorority at Emory for about five minutes. \u00a0I was enamored with three older girls who had played Rizzo, Frenchy and Patty to my Sandy in the Emory Ad Hoc theater performance of Grease, and I was flattered that cool girls wanted to be friends with a country mouse like me. \u00a0I mean, some of the girls in their sorority smoked cigarettes, and some had boyfriends whose families owned private jets. \u00a0But I quit the sorority during my sophomore year.<\/p>\n

I learned two lessons in that one year of sorority life that have proven useful. \u00a0First, language matters. \u00a0If someone tells you not to worry your pretty little head about the specific words being used in any language game, suspect that game is off-kilter. \u00a0Our peer \u201cchaplain\u201d in the sorority was Jewish. \u00a0Michelle (not her real name) was truly gifted as a wise mentor. \u00a0She would have made a wonderful rabbi. \u00a0But in her role as \u201cchaplain\u201d Michelle had to direct rituals made from a cheap-baroque mishmash of vaguely Trinitarian theology and pseudo-Greco-classical tripe about Father Trident. \u00a0I nearly broke up with snorts of laughter during one of our most solemn, candle-lit rituals, because the sorority\u2019s whole language system was utter nonsense. \u00a0It seemed all wrong, on multiple levels. \u00a0Michelle should not have had to employ that weird, pretend-Christian-Greek-Myth script in order to serve as our guide. \u00a0Christian girls in the room should have been, at the very least, aesthetically grossed out by the absurd liturgy. \u00a0Really, we were on the verge of adulthood, and we were all repeating words we could not actually mean, because they didn\u2019t actually mean anything. \u00a0Sunday School Sandra Dee that I was, I remember worrying for days over the ways that terms ostensibly central to and embedded in my own faith had been used and reshaped into spiritual spam (spam meaning fake meat, not internet trash) by our \u201cfounding sisters.\u201d<\/p>\n

Second, language matters. \u00a0Sisterhood? \u00a0Was that what sorority life was about? \u00a0Sisterhood? \u00a0During our first \u201crush\u201d I thought it was creepy that we were to rate each potential \u201csister\u201d on a scale from 1 to 5. \u00a0Mind you, this was after visiting with a young woman for a total of about ten minutes. \u00a0In between \u201crounds,\u201d we scribbled notes to ourselves on little spiral pads we\u2019d hidden in the cushions under the couch. \u00a0This didn\u2019t seem quite the right way to initiate real friendship. \u00a0Then, during the arduous (very earnest) conversation to sort potential sisters from discards, I noticed an icky pattern. \u00a0A few, influential, older sisters repeatedly used a term that I could not understand at first. \u00a0Certain young women were named as future \u201cassets\u201d to the sorority. \u00a0Assets? \u00a0How could a person be an asset? \u00a0I knew what \u201clegacy\u201d meant. \u00a0That meant that someone\u2019s mother had been a member, and so she was already a sister, really. \u00a0But an asset? \u00a0Eventually, as one particular argument heated up, it became clear what the term meant. \u00a0The acceptance of a young woman I will politely categorize as having mean-girl, competitive tendencies toward other women was contested, and her fervent advocate insisted that, as an \u201casset,\u201d this new sister would help us beat out another popular sorority for the coveted \u201cfirst mixer\u201d spot with one of the most affluent fraternities on campus. \u00a0Blech. \u00a0Really? \u00a0My \u201csorority\u201d was sort of like a brothel, and we were assessing possible \u201cfriends\u201d for how well they would attract groups of moneyed young men. \u00a0We were, in effect, pimping one another out.<\/p>\n

I have seen with my own eyes a similar phenomenon in the theological academy. \u00a0I have watched some scholars promoted, chosen, or screened as possible \u201ccolleagues\u201d due to their ability or inability to curry the favor of large donors. \u00a0To combine \u201cTheological\u201d and \u201cAcademy\u201d is strange enough for a Christian, in that we are trying to figure out ways to understand, teach, and practice a faith that circles around a savior that did not screen his friends very well. \u00a0But when you add big money and stir, you have real potential for confused categories and, as a colleague politely put it, \u201copacity.\u201d \u00a0And, when you add big money given according to the dictates of an eccentric gazillionaire who sought to correct Christianity itself with his own version of spirituality<\/em>, things become really weird<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Try a mental experiment. \u00a0If Sun Myung Moon proposed to create a new discipline at the intersection of two major concepts, let\u2019s say \u201cEconomics and Geography,\u201d I would guess many scholars in the U.S. whose disciplines tangentially touch on either broad term would think twice before bragging they had been successful in securing a grant from Mr. Moon. \u00a0But, perhaps because Sir Templeton has a \u201cSir\u201d and an English-gentlemanly-ish sort of name, Christian scholars have practiced all sorts of new linguistic gymnastics to fit ourselves within this late-Lord\u2019s dream project of \u201cReligion and Science.\u201d \u00a0We have tried to modify our language to make ourselves into assets.<\/p>\n

One story is indicative of a pattern. \u00a0Years ago, a young scholar who was poised, I was told, to \u201credefine the whole fracking field!\u201d (paraphrase of a salty colleague) came to Duke and gave an interview lecture that really did redefine the field, but, in the process, also unequivocally named the moral turpitude of an industry headed up by a man we were courting for more money money kissy kissy. \u00a0This scholar was not an asset. \u00a0\u00a0He did not get the job. \u00a0But, I contend that he would have made a good colleague. \u00a0He is to this day unselfconsciously curious about ideas and people. \u00a0He is generally more interested in reading and thinking and teaching and finding ways to communicate with other human beings than making himself sexy for some funder. \u00a0I am not sure it is a virtue, per se, on his part. \u00a0It is more a charism, really. \u00a0He is dispositionally suited to being a nerdy scholar. \u00a0I think he would have helped students to lose their fears more fully in the sometimes joyful, sometimes arduous process of learning and discovering an old fashioned thing called truth. \u00a0He would have been a good teacher and a good colleague. \u00a0But he didn\u2019t fit into the right dress.<\/p>\n

In the case of dancing with the Templeton Foundation in particular, scholars end up in a bizarre guessing game about how Sir John Templeton\u2019s legacy will influence decisions about which projects will be funded. \u00a0I submit it is problematic for a scholar to be trying to match her steps to follow the lead of a donor. \u00a0Period. \u00a0Full stop. \u00a0It wastes lots of mental energy, and energy in the wrong direction, to learn how to follow a lead gracefully. \u00a0(Robert Thaves rightly noted the trickiness of such work, when he said Ginger Rogers had to do everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards, and in high heels.) \u00a0But, now let\u2019s make that leading dancer really, really weird, his decisions randomly extravagant and\/or unpredictably dismissive, and you have the current situation in a created field of something called \u201cReligion and Science.\u201d \u00a0You have many, many creative, curious scholars, young and old, using up our precious time and our beautiful, God-given brains trying to train for and follow a dance that doesn\u2019t make any sense. \u00a0\u00a0If I were going to sabotage a generation of Christian thinkers interested in questions that circulate around faith and questions that circulate around how the non-human world is properly understood and cared for or appreciated or protected or whatever, I would come up with precisely a scheme like this one we have under a colossal entity called the Templeton Foundation. \u00a0This scheme would work really well during the Second Great Depression, right? \u00a0Given that every humanities scholar is trying to find a way to justify her very existence on the university planet of money money kissy kissy?<\/p>\n

I am irrationally hoping my former sorority sisters don\u2019t find out that I said we were pimps and prostitutes. \u00a0I still remember many of them with gratitude. \u00a0(The ones from Ad Hoc theater helped me think well about what thinking means, and what friendship means.) \u00a0Some sisters might recognize themselves in my description. \u00a0Others will no doubt be really pissed off and defensive. \u00a0No one wants to be compared to a pimp, much less a hooker. \u00a0I do hope that a few scholar friends will take a deep breath before defending themselves, and consider the possibility that the gifts that pulled them into the academy in the first place have been ill-used in the nebulous project that is Sir Templeton\u2019s. \u00a0I hope that a few readers will find themselves reassured that they are not crazy for thinking that this game, this dance, this ritual of money-getting or losing is messed up. \u00a0We are not just bitter losers or gloating gainers for noting that something happens to the very definition of collegiality when a crucial sector (or two) in the Western academy is defined by one single, large, confusing foundation. \u00a0The ramifications for Christian scholarship may be less immediately obvious for theologians, perhaps, than for engineers in the field of mechanical engineering, which is dictated by funding from the massive defense industry. \u00a0But, as a Christian that takes my faith very seriously, I would submit that defining \u201creligion\u201d as a field is as loaded for the misuse of power as making bombs. \u00a0Christian scholars should jealously guard our capacity to think faithfully. \u00a0We should insist on working with our unhampered imaginations engaged, dancing forward, inquisitively, rather than backward, with one eye toward whether we are impressing our donor. \u00a0Our intellectual lives should prompt our students well to explore their own crucial, unique questions about what it means to be Christian and to think faithfully in this glorious, scary, intricate world.<\/p>\n

Consider boycotting the Templeton Foundation, and using all of your individually fabulous gifts NOT trying to figure out how to get a grant from them, but instead trying to think through how the questions your students ask reverberate back into your own high-beam focus of scholarship, or trying to think about which novel might be sufficiently complicated to bring two divisively entrenched colleagues together to have a good, old fashioned argument about real words; or trying to bring your idiosyncratic interpretation of fascinating subject X, Y, or Z to a group of students in your local high security women\u2019s prison; or reading the real words of your faculty handbook and thinking through how to organize with your colleagues to make your workplace more conducive to human flourishing.<\/p>\n

One final word. \u00a0A colleague once announced bluntly and loudly to me, in a public place, that he would \u201cbe perfectly happy to take money from Adolph Hitler!\u201d \u00a0After gulping back some startled tears, I suggested to him that we put Hitler aside for now, and just discuss the funder (not Templeton) in question at the time. \u00a0This colleague then accused me of thinking myself better than Mother Teresa. \u00a0Huh? \u00a0It was confusing. \u00a0(He is a rather loud and imposing colleague.) \u00a0When I came home and related, with exasperation, that this conversation had taken place, my older daughter didn\u2019t miss a beat. \u00a0\u201cYou should have told him he is no Mother Teresa!\u201d \u00a0That\u2019s just it, isn\u2019t it? \u00a0Mother Teresa may have been able to take big, weird, random and\/or very ill-gotten money without reshaping her brain in order to try to figure out ways to get more of that money for her projects in the future. \u00a0If Mother Teresa had danced with Sir John Templeton, she would have led the damn dance. \u00a0But Mother Teresa is pretty rare. \u00a0I am no Mother Teresa. \u00a0And I bet you aren\u2019t either.<\/p>\n

If enough of us join in on this effort, it won\u2019t be lonely. \u00a0You won\u2019t be the one, obstinate sister (or brother) in the club who refuses to spend her energy trying to \u201cwear that dress tonight.\u201d \u00a0(For those of you who are really nerdy, God bless you, that is a lyrical reference to a song by the Police, called \u201cRoxanne,\u201d which is a meditation on the book of Hosea.) \u00a0So, let the awkward, human friendship and dance that is true scholarship continue. \u00a0May the fakery and hookery end.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Postscript:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Some of the arguments against the Templeton Foundation involve the apparent aversion, among their decision makers, to actual history; to tradition-based Christianity; to congregation-based Christianity; to trenchant cultural, specific theological, or historical criticisms of particular forms of scientific inquiry, technology, and\/or marketing; and to any plausibly trenchant inquiry that begins from a suspicion of hierarchy, capitalism, or \u201cscience\u201d as a \u201cthing\u201d (to quote a friend). \u00a0I am sympathetic to these content-based criticisms of the Foundation. \u00a0However, I wanted in this piece to draw attention to the befuddling form and the encompassing scope of the Foundation.<\/p>\n

A few articles that might be useful, regarding more content-based criticisms.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.insidehighered.com\/news\/2013\/05\/21\/some-philosophy-scholars-raise-concerns-about-templeton-funding<\/a><\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.steamthing.com\/2008\/11\/boycott-the-templeton-foundation.html<\/a><\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/mark-oppenheimer\/prop-8-templeton-foundati_b_151267.html<\/a><\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.epjournal.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/EP09921152.pdf<\/a><\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.motherjones.com\/mojo\/2011\/09\/koch-brothers-million-dollar-donor-club<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Roxanne, you don\u2019t have to put on the red light . . . I was a member of a swanky sorority at Emory for about five minutes. \u00a0I was enamored with three older girls who had played Rizzo, Frenchy and Patty to my Sandy in the Emory Ad Hoc theater performance of Grease, and I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10,101],"tags":[176,179,165,177,178],"class_list":["post-1543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics","category-theology-2","tag-academia","tag-christian-scholarship","tag-real-talk","tag-science-and-religion","tag-templeton"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7EotM-oT","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1543"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1543\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1545,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1543\/revisions\/1545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}