Theological imagination foreclosed as “tower” opens

The tower of Union Theological Seminary stands on the corner of 122nd and Broadway between Riverside Church covered in scaffolding and a semi-lit monstrous luxury condo building. (Image by author)

I want to try and capture a moment of reverie. A moment followed by quiet disillusionment. And followed still by a hopefulness and potential refusal. Bound up in that disillusionment—in this case the witnessing of something uninteresting and sclerotic—was the heady ecstasy of understanding toward possibility, the revelation at the other side of the phenomenon Stuart Hall notes when he says, “the world is fundamentally resistant to thought, I think it is resistant to ‘theory.’ I do not think it likes to be thought.”

This thought, a theological imagining. 

About two years ago—fixed emotionally in the pandemic, on the roof of our apartment the white heat on my orange eyelids, or alternatively at any time desperately riding the bike I desperately purchased—I looked south on Harlem’s grid. I did this again and again for about a year: either from that roof, leaves going neon to brown-yellowed ombré to slop and gone; or up at night amid the red and white shine of Broadway. 

And then, all at once, a gentle unconscious nagging shot to my conscious mind, perhaps firing neurons in my cortex, and erupted into my fingers and into a Google search: 

Columbia skyscraper

Skyscraper near Riverside Church

Tallest building in Harlem

Harlem behemoth

New skyscraper near 120th street 

Late in the fall of 2021 I continued looking downtown from my apartment building near 140th street, Hamilton Heights south toward Battery Park, D.C., and I eventually I could not avoid what I initially had (not) registered before: the rising, sparkling—firm rebar—edifice positioned directly over Columbia’s Morningside campus, north of Barnard, near Union Theological Seminary. In fact, it was Union Theological Seminary, something I only understood after glancing at the search results.

In a flurry of excitement, in my naivete, I began to fantasize something new. And I was moved. That skyscraper, that I had in fact heard about fleetingly when I enrolled four years prior but had never registered, was finally bursting hard and concrete toward the sky to stunning heights. In my mind, joyfully and creatively. Connecting several dots—a few of them in retrospect, ephemeral—I wondered in awe how Union managed a skyscraper with as many floors as Goldman Sachs’ headquarters at 200 West Street. I became excited for a dear friend finishing his PhD at Union: what fantastic expansion was his seminary undertaking and what might that entail for his remaining scholarship? 

What seductive, refulgent, transcendent religious experience, ritual, or exegesis might be performed on tabletop or against window forty flights up? Pulling from the earth or the heavens the traditions inhabited by Thomas Merton, or Martin Luther King Jr., Paul Tillich, Thich Nhat Hanh—all connected to Union or Morningside Heights in their ways—what magic or grace or vibrating emptiness was the seminary making manifest in this glinting structure 4650 feet high? And how bizarre! Dietrich Bonhoeffer, again Paul Tillich, and Lynn de Silva might all celebrate the knowledge and theory, critique and just praxis about to be enacted on 122nd street. What bursts of creativity might be strategically unmoored or midwifed, interpreted high above the bedrock of Harlem, itself world-historic? Just what futurities might be imagined? 

It just struck me—in that slowed moment in time, in reverie—as bizarre in maybe the best ways. In a boardroom above cloud cover?! Neat! What heady mix of capital and just sitting, fine table wood and satori, might bring unto us something new?! 

But. Nah.

None of this was true. Not even remotely. What truly happened was that Union Theological Seminary was struggling direly financially and sold its air rights to a firm that would design a largely private and luxury condo (some admittedly well-deserved accommodations for faculty and staff are parceled on the lower floors). From Dirt.com:

And now, a historic refectory (a.k.a a formal dining hall) is being reconstituted as an indoor pool as part of Claremont Hall, a 41-story mixed-use tower currently being constructed on the grounds of Union Theological Seminary in Morningside Heights…In an innovative move, [Union Theological Seminary] decided to sell the campus’ air rights and allow for ‘a beautiful, slender building that is visually in keeping with the neighborhood’ to be built at its northwestern corner along Claremont Ave…“We’re a New York City institution and we have a New York City-sized problem. But fortunately, we also have a New York City-sized answer. God is calling us to have another 100 years and air rights are the answer to that call.” 

You cannot remotely indict the Seminary here, in my opinion (outside perhaps some particularized decision-making): this is an indictment of a system so complex and hegemonic that stretches all the way back to the dawn of modernity, or perhaps the enclosures (but certainly to Reagan/Thatcherism’s introduction and quick hegemony of social life and loosed free markets), and, after “collisions, schisms, and mutations,” arrives here at this particular neoliberal epistemic moment with its “problem of the individual.” This particularly banal capitalist assembly in Harlem rises from the policies and at times realpolitik, at times automatic, expansion of an amalgam of social, economic, and political articulations. A social and political system with its dominant, sclerotic ideology, at this point devoid of imagination or improvisation or (ir)rationality. 

Economic viability via condo, here the seminary’s only option, stands in for creativity or breath or care or revery or riot or refusal. Here imagination is foreclosed.

And so I am writing here because of the violence registered as soundless and mundane in this moment of revery’s unraveling. 

Here, a foundation-breaking as the necessary evil of existing as a theological seminary in Manhattan in America. A predicament worthy of deep compassion. But I think reframed, one that can be seen as violently unimaginative. As aggressively boring and limited and mystifyingly silent, no matter how “smart” the machinations surrounding it are: the air rights shuffling and deal making that went into making it material.

At the outset of Arthur Jafa’s film, Dreams Are Colder than Death, American cultural theorist, poet, and NYU professor Fred Moten, after summoning Hortense Spillers, C. L. R. James, and Cedric Robinson, says, “Black Studies is a critique of Western Civilization.” A critique of all of it: of how we are together, of how we are organized and how we might organize. And certainly of those contingencies that lead to the erection of this façade. A critique of what Moten calls the “problem of the individual” that we have inherited from the modern political imagination of what it means to be human, individualized, atomized, and self-sovereign. Unexamined, we are beholden and nearing sublation. 

Sylvia Wynter, the Jamaican novelist, critic, and philosopher, is particularly instructive here, as she titles the second section of her essay, “On How we Mistook the Map for the Territory”: “On Exoticizing Western Thought, Visibilizing Its Framework(s), Its Invention of Man, and Thereby Also of Our ‘Unbearable Wrongness of Being,’ of Desetre.” This is an embrace of that which is good or functional or liberatory in modernity, certainly, but also a provincialization of an epistemology taken for Nature; a provincialization endemic to any project trying to imagine some alternative, some way to breathe. (And also, so that we don’t have to look at a fucking stone sky scraper, hidden like a blushing child during hide-and-seek, unless it is in service to Union’s mission, and not capital’s.) Wynter writes, “We presently live in a moment where the human is understood as a purely biological mechanism that is subordinated to a teleological economic script that governs our global well-being/ill-being—a script, therefore, whose macro-origin story calcifies the hero figure of homo oeconomicus who practices, indeed normalizes, accumulation in the name of (economic) freedom.” The story and art of capital looms large in our lives, and looms large analogically in cement and rebar over a seminary courtyard on Broadway. 

David Graeber, the American anthropologist, speaks of the sclerotic nature of our present moment, as the “militarization of American capitalism” that has led to an evacuation of imagination: “the creation of a vast apparatus of armies, prisons, police, various forms of private security firms, the final touch a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the maintenance of hopelessness, a giant machine designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures.…To begin to free ourselves, the first thing we need to do is to see ourselves again as historical actors, as people who can make a difference in the course of world events.” The stakes here on Broadway seem low: what better aspiration in Manhattan, or on this blue planet, than stretching towards and aspiring to a life abated by that condo and its gorgeous blue pool? Yet this banality in luxury, in amenity, is subsidized at the cost of human life, energy, and sociality. 

Maybe part of the spiritual tradition is to have these moments of revelation: witnessing an alternative 460 feet in the air… 

Wynter continues: “Humans are, then, a biomutationally evolved, hybrid species—storytellers who now storytellingly invent themselves as being purely biological.” This heartful or counter-violent intervention provincializing or exoticizing this modern episteme, offers room for breath, breath towards a thing perhaps riotous that can do something to make supple this rigid and banal orientation toward capital. “The Renaissance humanist mutation and resulting eventual disappearance of the theo-Scholastic order of knowledge reveal that our own now purely secular and purely biocentric order of knowledge can also cease to exist.” And in this theological imagination we touch the palm of something different. See, as vision. Breathe. And through it, imagine new ways to be human together.