31 August 2014

10 questions - Adam Parsons

Adam Parsons is a doctoral candidate in Modern U.S. History at Syracuse University. He studies evangelical political radicalism from the 1960s through the 1990s and writes on topics touching that period more broadly. He was on the editorial board of the Red Egg Review. His work has appeared on various blogs, including U.S. Intellectual History and The Way of Improvement Leads Home. He and his wife have recently returned to their native Columbus, Ohio, where they are renovating a house originally built for employees of Samuel Prescott Bush's steel mill. For the moment, Adam's dissertation title is Everyday Apocalyptic: Radical Politics and Evangelical Society, 1969-2000.
As someone who grew up in the American Baptist Churches, an ecclesial environment in which radical politics and Evangelicalism sometimes met, I am fascinated with Adam's work. He has long been one of my go to sources for questions regarding American religious history. Adam is a socialist and an Orthodox Christian. Here are Adam's answers to my 10 questions:


1. A friend offers to make all social/vocational/financial arrangements in order that you may spend 3 months in the location of your choosing. Anywhere in the world. Where would you go, and during what season? AP: Am I going by myself or taking my family along? If alone, I'd go, no questions asked, to Nicaragua during the dry season. My wife and I spent a little while down there last spring, and I loved it. Murals everywhere, people friendlier to Americans than we have any right to expect, and posters in tourist areas recounting Jesse Helms's evil deeds. It's a country about the size of Ohio with mass transit, usually cooperatively operated, which goes just about everywhere. Almost as significantly, beer runs around $1.75 a liter. The one big problem - and it's a big one - is the country's particularly acute strain of machismo, which is aggressive enough that it became uncomfortable for my wife and the other women we were travelling with. With my wife? I love the western Yucatan: fewer tourists, more Mayan food, and fantastic architecture and plazas. But if it's all paid for, my inherited attraction to maximizing free rides would probably win out and I'd go somewhere more expensive and move around a lot. Brazil, maybe, or northern Europe. 2. A friend who has suffered considerably in recent years asks you to recommend a novel that you found moving, and/or which helped frame how you view human life. Which novel would you recommend? AP: After years of futile attempts to train myself to read literary fiction, I've started to resign myself to the fact that my weighty reading will usually be non-fiction, and my fiction reading will usually be speculative. Until recently, I would have offered A Canticle for Leibowitz here, but lately I've been taken with Dan Simmons's Hyperion, a novel about the evolution of God modeled on the Canterbury Tales and set in a future in which Teilhard de Chardin has been canonized. 3. You may have any (living) musician or group of musicians in the world come perform a concert at the location of your choosing for you and your friends and whomever else you would invite. What musician(s) at what venue would you choose? AP: I'm going to abandon pretense again here. The Hold Steady, with Franz Nicolay back, at Carabar, a beat-up little venue not too far from my house. 4. If you had to work with your hands in order to make a living (trade, craft, manual work of some sort) what tactile vocation would you like to do? AP: My wife and I are renovating a house right now, and I've spent a lot of time figuring out which tasks I like best. A few months ago I had no idea just how much I would come to enjoy rough plumbing. It's relatively easy to pick up the basics, with a huge store of interesting little things to learn - and there's just something about the satisfaction of supplying running water. 5. Describe a garden, or a field, or a forest that was or is important or notable in your life. AP: The town I grew up in had, for the first decade or so of my life, only one public park. It housed a shelterhouse, a ball diamond, a swimming pool, soccer fields, and volleyball courts, and was the site for fireworks and log-sawing competitions on the Fourth of July. It also had a walking trail through a relatively young forest, but no clear sign of where the park ended and bordering properties began. My brothers, our friends, and I would explore those woods, often pushing through until they ended – at first in unmown fields, but later in tract housing. Now there are barely 200 feet of woods between the soccer fields and someone's backyard swimming pool. 6. You may have a meal and drinks with any living person on earth with whom you have never had a conversation. Name the meal, the drinks, and the person. Oysters, in Paris, with... No, really: Columbus-style pizza and malty, high-gravity beer with Ta-Nehisi Coates. 7. Name a painting that has moved you (and perhaps tell us why). AP: Rico Lebrun, Crucifixion. It's not the single most impressive painting I've seen, and probably not in the top five, but it hangs in the lobby of the geology building at Syracuse University. I would pass it often on my way to teach. Larger than life, opposite displays of petrified wood and geological layers, it felt both inviting and subversive: the crucifixion as Guernica.


8. A student tells you that she plans on memorizing one poem, and intends to recite that poem at least once a week for the rest of her life. She asks you for your recommendation for said poem. What poem do you recommend? AP: At my alma mater, all freshmen were required to memorize John Donne's Holy Sonnet 10. I still think it's a pretty good choice. 9. Describe your ideal quotidian evening? [Nothing special, but as you like things to go.] AP: A little reading, the tail end of happy hour with friends, late dinner, then some time in my hammock on the front porch. 10. You are on a nose-diving plane that is obviously going to crash, bringing about your certain death. You intuit that you have between 30 and 60 seconds before you lose consciousness. What words come to mind during this last bit of time you are alive? AP: This is a testament to the value of forcing students to memorize poetry. Whenever I'm faced with the reality of death, the opening of Holy Sonnet 10 springs to mind: “Death be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for, thou art not so, For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow, Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.”

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