{"id":677,"date":"2009-04-01T10:15:09","date_gmt":"2009-04-01T14:15:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.therowboat.com\/?p=677"},"modified":"2009-03-31T22:24:44","modified_gmt":"2009-04-01T02:24:44","slug":"agency-as-a-vocation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/2009\/04\/agency-as-a-vocation\/","title":{"rendered":"Agency as a Vocation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-678\" title=\"David Kyuman Kim\" src=\"http:\/\/www.therowboat.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/03\/kim.jpg\" alt=\"David Kyuman Kim\" width=\"209\" height=\"209\" srcset=\"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/03\/kim.jpg 209w, https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/03\/kim-150x150.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 209px) 100vw, 209px\" \/>New on the website of the Social Science Research Council, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ssrc.org\/features\/questions\/kim\/\" target=\"_blank\">the interview I did last winter with David Kyuman Kim<\/a>, a philosopher of religion who grapples with political agency, race, identity, and virtue. He&#8217;s also an incredibly gracious person who I&#8217;ve been very priviledged to work with at the SSRC. Central to both his work and his way of life is the challenge of claiming traditions as one&#8217;s own:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In graduate school, I studied with the eminent scholar of Confucianism <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Tu_Wei-ming\">Tu Weiming<\/a>. I used to refer to him as the original Confucian evangelical. He travels the world arguing for the revival of Confucianism as a living tradition. A critical moment came for me when I took a moral reasoning class with him. At some point I realized, \u201cMy goodness, I&#8217;m a Confucian!\u201d I had been raised as a Confucian without being called a Confucian. All the categories of piety and reciprocity, the devotion to ritual, right practices, and certain kinds of respect\u2014these were practices and ideas that I had always been living. Finding a moral and religious vocabulary is a very powerful experience. It&#8217;s a sign of moral maturity to be able to say: &#8220;I have this intellectual identity, I have this spiritual identity, I have this moral identity, all of which place me in a lineage, in a genealogy, in a tradition that&#8217;s bigger than me as an individual.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-678\" title=\"David Kyuman Kim\" src=\"http:\/\/www.therowboat.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/03\/kim.jpg\" alt=\"David Kyuman Kim\" width=\"209\" height=\"209\" srcset=\"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/03\/kim.jpg 209w, https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/03\/kim-150x150.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 209px) 100vw, 209px\" \/>New on the website of the Social Science Research Council, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ssrc.org\/features\/questions\/kim\/\" target=\"_blank\">the interview I did last winter with David Kyuman Kim<\/a>, a philosopher of religion who grapples with political agency, race, identity, and virtue. He&#8217;s also an incredibly gracious person who I&#8217;ve been very priviledged to work with at the SSRC. Central to both his work and his way of life is the challenge of claiming traditions as one&#8217;s own:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In graduate school, I studied with the eminent scholar of Confucianism <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Tu_Wei-ming\">Tu Weiming<\/a>. I used to refer to him as the original Confucian evangelical. He travels the world arguing for the revival of Confucianism as a living tradition. A critical moment came for me when I took a moral reasoning class with him. At some point I realized, \u201cMy goodness, I&#8217;m a Confucian!\u201d I had been raised as a Confucian without being called a Confucian. All the categories of piety and reciprocity, the devotion to ritual, right practices, and certain kinds of respect\u2014these were practices and ideas that I had always been living. Finding a moral and religious vocabulary is a very powerful experience. It&#8217;s a sign of moral maturity to be able to say: &#8220;I have this intellectual identity, I have this spiritual identity, I have this moral identity, all of which place me in a lineage, in a genealogy, in a tradition that&#8217;s bigger than me as an individual.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[54,21],"class_list":["post-677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-conversation","tag-office"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=677"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":679,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677\/revisions\/679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}