{"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":"

\"DavidNew on the website of the Social Science Research Council, 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’s also an incredibly gracious person who I’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’s own:<\/p>\n

In graduate school, I studied with the eminent scholar of Confucianism 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’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’s a sign of moral maturity to be able to say: “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’s bigger than me as an individual.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"DavidNew on the website of the Social Science Research Council, 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’s also an incredibly gracious person who I’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’s own:<\/p>\n

In graduate school, I studied with the eminent scholar of Confucianism 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’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’s a sign of moral maturity to be able to say: “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’s bigger than me as an individual.”<\/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","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"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}]}}