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 […]
Archive for the ‘Spirit matter’ Category
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 »
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 […]
Reassembling democracy?
Posted in Spirit matter, tagged Anthropocene, Chernobyl, democracy, ecopolitics, Reassembling Democracy conference, sacrifice zones, zones of alienation 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:
Returning to Sedona
Posted in Eco-culture, Science & society, Spirit matter, tagged Arizona, Claiming Sacred Ground, Coconino National Forest, eco-pilgrimage, ecological management, environmental management, heterotopia, landscape, National Forests, political ecology, Red Rock Country, sacred landscapes, Sedona, Sedona Verde Valley Red Rock National Monument, U. S. Forest Service, vortexes, vortices 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 […]
Interview & autobio
Posted in Process-relational thought, Spirit matter, tagged Adrian Ivakhiv, autobiography, Buddhism, Dzogchen, interviews, Lacan, meditation, pagan studies, paganism, Peirce, post-traditional Buddhism, religion, Shinzen Young, spirituality, Whitehead, Zizek on May 31, 2016 | 4 Comments »
Interviews are funny things: you have to think on the spot, but later realize how deeply and profoundly imperfect (!) was your choice of words. The Imperfect Buddha Podcast has an interview with me in which host Matthew O’Connor (of Post-Traditional Buddhism) and I talk at length about Buddhism, process-relational metaphysics, panpsychism, social constructionism, cognitive science, […]
A process view of “religious Nones”
Posted in Spirit matter, tagged Bron Taylor, cosmopolitanism, dark green religion, Foucault, mestizo, non-fascist life, polytropism, religion, religious Nones, spirituality, tuteishyi on May 18, 2016 | 4 Comments »
While I’ve done no formal surveys, my best guess is that about half my students here at the U of Vermont (at least those in Environmental Studies) would fit into the category of “religiously unaffiliated,” the so-called “religious Nones” — a category that now makes up almost 1 in 4 Americans and over a third of those […]
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