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Forum on "The Burdens of Church History"
In Institutional Dream Series (Sleeping in Public), 1972-73, Laurie Anderson slept in eight different public places in order to measure their institutional impression. In her experiment Anderson used dreams--ostensibly her own--"to see if the place can color or control my dreams."1The short answer was--yes. Institutional Dream Series is an exploration of the self as medium. In sleeping and recording her sleep on the beach at Coney Island, in the halls of night court, at the bureau of immigration and naturalization, and in the women's bathroom at Columbia University Library, Anderson's performance suggests that vulnerability to bureaucratic structures and organizational schemes is not something to be avoided but studied.2For there is pleasure, fear, and wisdom to be found in such exposure.
Anderson's experiment speaks from an odd angle to Laurie Maffly-Kipp's 2014 Presidential Address to the American Society of Church History. Maffly-Kipp's reminder in "The Burdens of Church History" that organization comes in many shapes and sizes is a welcome one. Maffly-Kipp echoes the call, issued by Harry S. Stout and D. Scott Cormode a few years back, to tend to the "possibilities of redefining institutional history so it becomes a mediating perspective that encompasses both structural and cultural history, thus pointing the way towards an inclusive social history of religion."3I appreciate Maffly-Kipp's insistence on the analytic primacy of church because it redirects attention to cognition and passion and effervescence amidst organizational environments. So despite the fact that I may fall under Maffly-Kipp's description of a "scholarly free agent"--I wholeheartedly endorse her insistence that we must leave "ourselves open to alternative understanding of what constitutes church history itself."4
The thread that I find most fascinating in Maffly-Kipp's address is her demand for more fine-tuned reflexivity: about the need to tend to--"in our scholarship"--the historicity of categorical transition underway and the future of any movement. This reflexivity is, in part, the burden of church history. It is a burden that we should not (because we cannot) jettison.5And it is a burden that generates all manner of urgent theoretical questions: What kinds of practices have suited particular forms of an institutional imaginary?6What kinds...