I’ve long been receptive to the idea that we need a spiritual, or even a religious, movement to address the climate crisis. Of course, I define both “spiritual” and “religious” quite broadly, and am well aware of how both terms have been shaped within histories that are Eurocentric and dominated by monotheistic, Christian, and more […]
Archive for the ‘Spirit matter’ Category
Deep Adaptation & its critics: a question of reality
Posted in Eco-culture, Spirit matter, tagged Deep Adaptation, ecospirituality, environmentalism, Jem Bendell, Open Democracy, radical environmentalism, religion and ecology, societal collapse, spiritual environmentalism, spiritual movements on July 18, 2020 | 6 Comments »
On being a mortal
Posted in Spirit matter, tagged beliefs, Buddhism, Christianity, cosmology, humanism, immanence, indigenous philosophy, mortality, perspectives on life, reincarnation, religion, transcendence, world philosophy on May 21, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
Some people believe you’re born from nothing; you live, which is something; and then you’re gone again, back to nothing. (Here’s a poignantly compressed version of that, a life in under 6 minutes.) Others believe you’re part of a much larger thing, which keeps recycling itself (including you). Maybe there’s progress or development over the […]
Comments on process-relational meditation
Posted in Process-relational thought, Spirit matter, tagged Buddhism, experience, meditation, mindfulness, pre-G, Shadowing the Anthropocene, Shinzen Young, spiritual practice on April 17, 2020 | 4 Comments »
Part Two of my book Shadowing the Anthropocene (open access to all) outlines a system of “bodymindfulness” practice rooted in the mindfulness meditation system of Shinzen Young, but extended triadically to account for the active nature of living. Here are a couple of comments on and tweaks to that system, which I’ll refer to as […]
The (un)binding & (re)bounding of worlds
Posted in Anthropocene, Spirit matter, tagged boundaries, environmental change, more-than-human world, other-than-human world, Peder Sather Workshop, Reassembling Democracy, religion and ecology, ritual, ritualizing on March 2, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
The following is a short essay I wrote for the Peder Sather/Reassembling Democracy workshop on “Environmental Change and Ritualized Relationships with the Other-than-Human World,” held at UC Berkeley this past December. There are physical boundaries between humans and specific nonhumans—fences, walls, windows (of homes, gardens, kennels, zoos, abbatoirs, safari vehicles, camera lenses, guns); and there […]
Long-term civilizational prognosis: a hypothesis
Posted in Climate change, Manifestos & auguries, Spirit matter, tagged abduction, C. S. Peirce, civilizational crisis, climate crisis, climate emergency, eco-religion, global civil religion, global disorder, globalism, Latour, politics of meaning, religion, Varela on October 14, 2019 | 3 Comments »
Here’s a hypothesis: If the human community exists in some more or less unified form in 880 years (in the year 3000 by our calendar), that feat will have been accomplished, at least in part, in and through the emergence of an ecological religion. What does this mean, and how could we test it? Religion, […]
So, here we are…
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Spirit matter, tagged Christianity, ClimateJustice, globalization, hope, Jonathan Franzen, Matthew 25:40 on September 8, 2019 | Leave a Comment »
Wow, what a reaction the article described here has gotten… This version includes a follow-up comment below. Jonathan Franzen’s “What If We Stopped Pretending?” articulates an important point about hope and hopelessness in the face of climate change. Franzen suggests that an “all-out war on climate change” no longer makes sense because the scenario for […]
(Mc)Mindfulness?
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged Buddhism, McMindfulness, mindfulness, Peirce, political ecology, practice, process-relational thought, Shadowing the Anthropocene, Shinzen Young on June 22, 2019 | 2 Comments »
A Guardian article making the rounds on social media argues that the mindfulness movement has become “the new capitalist spirituality” — “magical thinking on steroids,” which instead of overturning the “neoliberal order,” now “only serves to reinforce its destructive logic.” This “McMindfulness,” as Ronald Purser calls it, has been “stripped of the teachings on ethics […]
Pointing to Omega?
Posted in Spirit matter, tagged anti-racism, Christianity, cosmology, Eucocentrism, eugenics, evolution, evolutionary theory, Peirce, racism, spiritual evolution, Teilhard de Chardin, theology, Thomas Berry, Whitehead on May 22, 2018 | 3 Comments »
Okay, so I watched Harry and Meghan’s royal wedding (not so much intentionally as to enjoy the loving company of my co-habitants) and was impressed by the tension between Bishop Michael Curry’s sermonizing on love and the dour and perplexed faces of many of the royal-loving Brits in the audience. Diana Evans’ Guardian piece gets […]
Comparative ‘practicology’: Philosophy as a way of life
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged Foucault, Hadot, philosophy, practices of the self, practicology, self-cultivation, spiritual practice, spirituality on January 21, 2018 | 21 Comments »
This course (an Honors College course I’m happy to be to teaching this year) is already in progress, but I’d be curious to hear any comments on it. What would you include in a comparative overview of spiritual practices? What’s missing? Self-Cultivation and Spiritual Practice: Comparative Perspectives This course introduces students to the comparative study […]
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