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Archive for the ‘Spirit matter’ Category

Flow, river, flow… (a Covid-era tribute)

Posted in Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 11, 2020 | 7 Comments »

One of the most frustrating things about losing a family member during this pandemic has been the mandatory self-quarantine — the one that’s been imposed on me for crossing a national border to get here (to the Toronto area where my father was living up until a few days ago), and on my sister who […]

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Image ecologies, spiritual polytropy, and the Anthropocene

Posted in Spirit matter, Visual culture, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 29, 2020 | 2 Comments »

An article of mine by that title has appeared in a special issue of the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture on “Popular Culture, Religion, and the Anthropocene.” The article contains the theoretical core of the book I’m currently writing on image regimes. It builds on my work in cinema and media […]

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Comments on process-relational meditation

Posted in Process-relational thought, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , 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 […]

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The (un)binding & (re)bounding of worlds

Posted in Anthropocene, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , 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 […]

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Long-term civilizational prognosis: a hypothesis

Posted in Climate change, Manifestos & auguries, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , 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, […]

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So, here we are…

Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , 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 […]

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(Mc)Mindfulness?

Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , 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 […]

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Pointing to Omega?

Posted in Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , 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 […]

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Comparative ‘practicology’: Philosophy as a way of life

Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , 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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Ontology, decoloniality, and the people-land nexus

Posted in Eco-culture, Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 5, 2017 | 7 Comments »

Here’s something I’ve written to accompany a reading and discussion of Arturo Escobar’s piece “Thinking-feeling with the Earth: Territorial Struggles and the Ontological Dimensions of the Epistemologies of the South,” which I proposed as my suggested reading contribution for an intro graduate class in Environment and Society. I’m sharing it here as a brief think-piece.  […]

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Reassembling democracy?

Posted in Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , on December 6, 2016 | 8 Comments »

Here’s the abstract I’ve just sent in for the keynote I’ll be giving at the Reassembling Democracy: Ritual as Cultural Resource conference in Oslo in February:

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Returning to Sedona

Posted in Eco-culture, Science & society, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 20, 2016 | 1 Comment »

Three things have drawn me repeatedly to the red rock landscape around the small north-central Arizona city of Sedona. First, and most obvious, is the landscape itself, which counts among the most distinctive and stunningly beautiful in the world. Second is the set of processes that landscape has set in motion in the conditions of late capitalist […]

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