Saturday, May 30, 2009

Outings

We had to run some errands over the last couple of weeks and so have some pictures to put up.

Our friend Aimee took us around Insadong the other day so we could do some souvenir shopping.
David eats some Pat-ping-su (bean frozen water--a desert with ice, beans, and some other fruits and sometimes ice cream, very good on a hot day) while admiring the card Aimee made for him. She also made me a beautiful little notebook for my birthday.
Aimee, David, and Arlene next to a Stawberry Girl.
Same as above but me instead of Aimee.


I had to go the library at Yonsei University (the first university in Korea). Arlene takes a picture of David in front of a monument.

David in front of another monument.
David and I in front of a monumnet for a person killed in the democracy movement. Please notice the Mystery Science Theater 3000 "Push the Button Frank" shirt (given to me by Chris and Beth) that I am wearing).

David prepares to eat a 40 cent cup of ice cream from Burger King. It was delecious!

David and his little friend at church.




Attempting to escape from church!

David at the playground. He enjoys it a lot more than is apparent in this picture.

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Continuation of Why I do what I do

My friend Heather made some interesting comments in the combox of my past on "Why I do what I do." They were so thought provoking I decided to make them into a post.

Heather said:
I agree with much of what you've said here: It's very important to understand other cultures (other people, really. This also touches on your point about religious people being dehumanized. Nonreligious people also are dehumanized. Human beings are really freaken good at dehumanizing the "other."), in a real way, not some superficial way.

I agree here with you and I think I need to state things more clearly in this regard. I specifically focused on religious people for several reasons. Most of the subjects of my study are religious people who lived at a time when that was the norm so my sources do not lend themselves to focusing on how non-religious people are dehumanized. A lot of my focus is on how one religious group (Confucians) persecuted another religious group (Catholics) so it’s hard to work in the issue of nonreligious people. I think a lot also has to do with audience and experience. Basically, nonreligious people (as nonreligious people) are more likely to be dehumanized in a religious environment but my research and teaching has taken place mostly in secular environments so I have not focused on that issue. I think that if those factors would have been different I might have focused on a different subject. I should have stressed though that I don’t want to only convince people they we should not dehumanize “religious people” but that we should not dehumanize anyone.

I wonder what you mean, though, about the intersection of religion and violence. Are you talking more of a situation where we're looking at people who justify violence with religion in a more rounded way, as opposed to resorting to easy caricature? Or are you saying that sometimes it's OK to use violence in the name of religion? Or are you saying both?

This is a good but difficult question. Basically, I’m a historian of religion, not a theologian or philosopher so I look at the issue a bit differently. I’m not so interested in saying what we should and should not do (though I do sometimes get into that) but in what people do and why. So my goal is to look closely at people who do justify violence with religion to see how they do it. I basically want to make two major points. The first is that we need to look in a more rounded way, not resorting to easy caricature (to use your words). The second is that we often think in terms of specific issues rather than general principles. I think your average American would say religion should not justify violence. However, if I give the American Civil War/Battle Hymn of the Republic example I think in the end most Americans would agree that it was perfectly acceptable for religion to justify violence for the purpose of emancipation. That’s in a large part because today we tend to see religion justifying violence in cases where we don’t think that violence is justified (religiously motivated terrorism for example). So I want us to think more deeply about this issue.

In regards to using violence in the name of religion, that’s a bit more difficult. As a Catholic Christian I believe there are cases where violence is justified (just war theory and self-defense for example). At the same time, I’m uncomfortable with the idea of violence taken on behalf of defending Catholicism as a religion (and dead set against using torture and death or the threat of death to such ends). However, I’m still unsure about some issues. For example, religious freedom (at least for Christians) in East Asia basically came because of raw physical force and/or other non-violent forms of coercion. That’s something I need to study more about.

Now as an academic in looking at religion and violence my question would be how a religious believers uses his or her religious tradition to justify violence and whether or not the way they are using it is logically coherent. For example, there are two books by a Zen Buddhist priest named Brian Daizen Victoria in which he criticizes Japanese Buddhists, especially Zen Buddhists for defending the legitimacy of Japan’s Empire (especially the invasion of China) in the 1930’s and 40’s (I think he actually starts as early as the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 but he might go even earlier). In any case, Victoria criticizes their doctrinal approach using early Buddhist scriptures that have a more pacifistic approach. The problem is that Victoria, as a Zen Buddhist faces a bit of a problem. I’m not an expert on Zen but my understanding is that it emphasizes direct enlightenment over Buddhist scriptures. Moreover, at least some Zen thought is antinomian, declaring that there is no such thing as right and wrong, that true enlightenment leads us beyond that. In any case, the Zen Buddhists Victoria criticizes would have just pointed out that the scriptures Victoria quotes are inferior to their own enlightenment. The thing is, as far as I understand it, the Japanese Buddhists who justified the empire and its expansion were actually acting consistently with Zen Buddhism while Victoria is not. In other words, it is quite consistent in Zen to allow violence (and historically Zen Buddhists have done just that). If Victoria wants to criticize Zen then he needs to come at it from a different angle (basically he’d have to show that the basic ideas of Zen are wrong which would be difficult for him as a Zen priest to do!). I could be way off here in my example, but my main point is that my interest isn’t so much whether religion should justify violence but how individuals and religions as a whole justify violence and how logically coherent their arguments are.

Kangri

Another frined of ours from Vancouver came to visit us. Kangri and I took Korean literary translation classes for a year.

Kangri's cat necklace enabled her to make friends with David very quickly. David loves cats and actually can say "cat". Though it sometimes sounds more like "gat".
Kangri and David reading a book.

Kangri and I meet with the famous Korean translator, Brother Anthony of Taize.


My birthday

I turned 31 on May 20th. My birthday had an interesting start. I left the house at 7:30 in the morning to go to Seoul National Unviersity to give a guest lecture on Korean Catholicism at Professor Sem Vermeersch's graduate class on Korean Religions. It was a lot of fun and a good experience. Sem took me out for lunch afterwards and we ran into Hilary. After that I came home. We went out for dinner at Pizza Hut. Here in Korea it's a kind of gourmet pizza place. It was really good.

Us at Pizza Hut. We had a mini bbq chicken pizza with cheese crust and chicken pasta. Our meal also came with salad bar which had an interesting cocunt drink dessert. You basically dipped cereal or nuts into the drink and then ate it. Arlene made hers into a kind of halo-halo.
David and I enjoying my gifts. I got cologne and a hershey bar. Yummy!

My birthday cake.


Visitors from Vancouver

Our friends Annerose, Kijoo and Inae, as well as their daughter Carolyn came to visit us a couple of weeks ago. We all went to the same church in Vancouver.

Our lunch, "All Meat" and "Blue Ocean" pizza. Blue Ocean pizza has shrip and salmon and other types of seafood on it.
David and Kijoo.

David and Annerose.
David and Carolyn.
Carolyn gives David a hat.

Miscellaneous pictures

The last few weeks have been rather busy and so I have a backlog of photos that I wanted to post but wasn't able to until now.
Our apartment is going through some renovation right now. This is the view of our hallway from our door.

One of Arlene's Filipina friends came to visit us with her son. We had a really good time. David really liked them and so when they left he got really upset. He wandered around the apartment looking for them for quite awhile!

My old landlord, Mr. Min, from Iksan (where I studied Korean at Wonkwang University) came to visit us.


Our friend Aimee presents on her research at the Fulbright forum. She studies Korean paper making. In this picture she is talking about making paper into cords which can then be woven together.



Here are some paper baskets woved out of the cords.












Jiyeon's family

On May 17th Arlene, David and I went to mass at Myongdong Cathedral. They have one at 9am in English said by an Irish priest. After that we rode the subway to Suseo station and were picked up by our old friend Jiyeon (she was in the Music School at IU) and her husband (who graduated with a phd in chemical engineering from Purdue). They then took us to their parent's house. They treated us to a wonderful lunch and we had a really good time together. The only problem was that David did not want to sleep and so we had to go back a bit earlier than expected as he was getting a bit too rambunctious.

Jiyeon, her husband and her mom and dad.
All of us in front of Jiyeon's parent's house. It's really gorgeous. You can't see it here but below those railings they have a stream!
As you can see, they have a really beautiful house.

Saturday, May 16, 2009

Why I'm doing what I'm doing

The other day I was asked why I thought what I was studying was important. I think that’s a good question and I should be able to provide a good answer. Unfortunately it’s the type of question that is so basic we often don’t ask it. I gave what I think was a pretty decent answer when asked but I wanted to think more about it. Then I thought I should post it since a lot of the people who read this blog wonder what it is that I’m doing and why.

First, I should say a bit about what I’m studying and how I plan on sharing what I learn with others. Right now I’m focusing on my dissertation. Writing a dissertation involves picking a very limited subject and then trying to become an expert on it. This is how it works. I study Asian history and I focus on Korea. In Korean history I focus on religion, especially during the Chosŏn dynasty (1392-1910). Then I focused further and look at Catholicism. Specifically, for my dissertation I will be looking at two Catholics, Alexius Hwang Sayŏng, who was executed in 1801 because he wrote a letter asking for the Bishop of Beijing to send an invasion force to Korea to force the Korean government to stop killing Catholics and Thomas An Chunggŭn who was executed because he killed Itō Hirobumi, the first Resident-General and one of the main movers behind Japan’s colonization of Korea (he also framed the 1889 Meiji constitution so killing him was kind of like killing someone the stature of James Madison). By studying their lives, and how Koreans today look at them I hope to explore a wide variety of issues, particularly the relationship between nation, state, religion, and violence. My main questions are why do people choose to carry out violence and how do they justify it. My hope is to eventually publish my dissertation as a book or at least publish some articles on it. Basically, doing research and publishing is an important part of how I communicate what I have learned. The main audience though will be really limited, mostly people who study Korea or religion academically. I doubt I would ever write anything that would be considered popular, though I do hope one day to write a history on Catholicism in Korea that a general audience would enjoy (but that would mostly be limited to Christians, Catholics in particular).

But that’s only half of it. I hope to be able to get a job as a professor so that I can teach. So my other audience will be students. The thing with teaching is that I won’t talk all that much about my specialty. I’ll be teaching courses on religion in Asia, Asian history, and the like. If I’m lucky I can teach some classes that focus on Japanese or Chinese history and if I’m really fortunate I can actually teach some that only deal with Korea. I will most likely never teach a course that focuses only on Catholicism in Korea or even just on religion in Korea in general.

So when I talk about why what I am studying is important I am thinking in terms of both researching and publishing, as well as teaching undergraduates (and hopefully some graduates).

First, just in the most general of terms, here is why I think why I think the subject matter I am studying (and will hopefully teach) is important:
1) All true knowledge is good
2) This material can encourage people to think deeply
3) This material can encourage self-reflection and criticism (humility)
4) I want to inculcate a sense of responsibility and agency in people (and in myself); what we do is important, we are free agents but we must carefully think about our choices and bear responsibility for them
5) Remind people of our obligation to do good and find truth
6) Encourage the restraint of power (and the will) by reason
7) Encourage people to reflect on our mortality

This may seem rather broad and at first to have very little to do with what I study. However, much of what I study has to do with the harm we human beings cause when we forget good and pursue power. I study a lot of propaganda and it’s amazing how people are so good at dressing up the greatest of evils in the most beautiful of language. I want to learn how to cut through that and encourage others to do the same. That’s just one example but basically, I think the history I am studying can help in the above.

I think what I am studying is also important in terms of the study of religion and world history:
1) It’s important to become familiar with various cultures. By that I don’t mean simply eating their food and admiring their native dress. I mean to deeply understand what is often a very different understanding of the world.
2) I want to expose people to a different way of thinking about things that seem familiar. For example, we tend to think of Catholicism as a religion that was always on top and was often persecuting people. However, in Korea, it was the Catholics who were getting slaughtered. Moreover, they died not for something they saw as oppressive but as something they saw as liberating. For example, one thing that has struck me is that there isn’t much of an appreciation for perpetual celibacy in western culture. However, the first Korean Catholics embraced the idea that one could leave a fruitful life as a single person in the service of God. I think by studying such differences we can better reflect on our own culture and history.
3) Often religion is understood rather mechanistically and the human side is left out. By studying Korean Catholics, and the difficult choices they had to make when their nation, state, and Church often demanded very different things of them will help make religion and religious people seem more human. Too often religious people, especially if they belong to “cults” or to unpopular religions are dehumanized.
4) I also want to take the issue of religion and violence seriously. Often people who use religion to justify their use of violence as legitimate are portrayed as crazy. However, when Juliet Ward wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” she used religious language and concepts to legitimate violence. So I think we need to look more closely at this issue.
5) Religion and politics are the two things that are usually considered impolite to talk about. They are both considered very private, especially the latter. However, I think they are so important that we need to talk about them. I can do that by studying what I am studying. Furthermore, since it’s a bit more distant from our own lives I can get people to look more objectively at it (it might be hard to objectively look at Fundamentalist Christians in the US for Americans but by studying them in Korea and then applying what is learned to the American context I hope to build some understanding).

I think my work is also important for Asian and Korean history:
1) Catholicism must have been seen as important or the Korean state, which was not particularly wealthy, would not have persecuted it. It must be stressed that many martyrs were old men and women and that even some kids were martyred. Many were also extremely poor and were basically the lowest in society. Such people weren’t a threat but the state sought them out and butchered them. That’s because their ideas and their connection to the outside world made them dangerous.
2) The time period I’m studying is one where the Chosŏn dynasty was falling apart. The state had to turn more and more to violence because the old stories it told about itself were no longer enough to convince people to act the way the state wanted them to.
3) I want to show a different picture of how thing work through studying two Korean Catholics in depth. Often we take our own culture and way of life as natural when it fact a lot of it might simply be the result of the accidents of history.
4) Religion is often written out of Korean history because it brings up division whereas there is a tendency to emphasize unity. I hope to embrace and show these divisions and what they mean for life in Korea.
5) It’s also just good for us to know more about Korea and to consider religious history when looking at Korea.

I think this list needs more work but I think it gives a general idea of what I am trying to do and how. I welcome any comments or criticisms!

Friday, May 15, 2009

Videos from our trip to Kyongboggung



David pushing one of Hilary's twins.



Dance practice.



Changing of the guards, the first video.



Changing of the guards, the second video.

Pictures from Kyongboggung

Last weekend Arlene, David and I met with our old friends Hilary and Jack and their children, Dahin, Oliver, and Ronan. Hilary is a professor at Seoul National University.
Kyongboggung palace.

The Throne.

David and one of Hilary's kids try to push down a pillar.

Hilary and Jack take a picture of their kids and their niece Henny.

Arlene pushes Dahin in a stroller.
Arlene and David in front of a pavillion on a lake.

David pushes one of Hilary's twins.

The pavillion.
David as a guard.

Arlene as a military official.

A tree gets an iv.

Friday, May 8, 2009

War Memorial

Arlene, David, and I went to meet our friend Na Tata at the Korean War Memorial. It's an interesting place. It's very pro-American/pro-UN so I got to see a historical view that isn't as visible now as it used to be. It was really interesting.

Arlene, Na Tata and David in front of one of Admiral Yi Sun-shin's famous Turtle boats which helped drive back the Japanese invasions of the 1590's.
Arlene and Na Tata holding the fort.

various cannons

More cannons

Mortars

Various suits of armor. I initially thought the "cotton" armor on the right was to wear under the armor on the left but I think it's actually it's own suit. I would much rather wear the one on the left.


In the UN/Korean war room there are life size figurines representing the soldiers of each of the various countries that sent troops to Korea. Each country gets one. Interestingly enough, the soldier representing the US is black. I'm not sure why this is because in my experience Koreans tend to think "American=white". Perhaps that is changing. Later on we went to visit Youngsan army base and a large number of the soldiers were black so I wonder if that is why.

A Filipino!
Soldiers give candy to children.

David and I on a troop carrier.


The three of us on a captured North Korean motorcycle.

David aims a North Korean artillery piece.

David takes me for a ride.

Why David isn't allowed to drive yet--he can't see over the hood!


Time to get out!

Arlene and David in front of a plane.