A few quick reflections on the Charlie Hebdo affair… 1. In the age of social media, we are all producers of images and meanings. The difference is only a matter of degree. 2. In a globalized world, those who traffic in media ought to have some knowledge of the cultural and ethical implications of their trafficking. 3. […]
Posts Tagged ‘religion’
A cultural cold war wind
Posted in Politics, tagged cultural values, environmentalism, fundamentalism, gay rights, liberalism, Olympics, religion, Russia, Sochi on January 20, 2014 | 2 Comments »
I predicted back in 2010 that globalizing and technological trends would lead disparate religious traditions to find common ground on socially divisive issues like abortion and gay rights. Just as environmentalism, feminism, and indigenous rights were partnering various more liberal church groups with environmental and social justice organizations, contributing to the development of an “eco-egalitarian” global […]
SAR “Nature, Science, Religion” volume out
Posted in EcoCulture, SpiritMatter, tagged anthropology, cosmopolitics, nature, religion, science on May 20, 2012 | 1 Comment »
I received my copies in the mail this week of the book that arose out of the School of Advanced Research seminar on “Nature, Science, and Religion: Intersections Shaping Society and the Environment.” It’s a handsome volume, whose contents provide a level of cross-cutting conversation that, I think, is rare among edited collections. Catherine Tucker […]
‘Self-help,’ James Ray, and spiritual culture
Posted in SpiritMatter, tagged religion, self-help, spirituality on June 23, 2011 | 1 Comment »
The news that self-help guru James Arthur Ray has been found guilty of three counts of negligent homicide brings to an end (of sorts) a saga that began with three deaths and numerous injuries at an October, 2009, sweat lodge ceremony outside Sedona, Arizona. Since I’ve written a handful of articles and half a book […]
Enchantments to come
Posted in SpiritMatter, tagged biosemiosis, disenchantment, enchantment, Kauffman, Kerouac, religion, semiosis on March 21, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Thoughts for a spring equinox… Complexity theorist (and colleague of mine here at the University of Vermont) Stuart Kauffman takes stock here of the Enlightenment and sings of a re-enchantment to come. Disenchantment and re-enchantment are long-running tropes in the intellectual currents of modernity, which I’ve frequently explored in my writing (see here for a […]
Religion & the Japanese tragedy
Posted in EcoCulture, MediaSpace, SpiritMatter, tagged animism, eventology, imagination, Japan tsunami, nature, paganism, pantheism, religion, ritual, Shinto, spirituality on March 16, 2011 | 7 Comments »
Just as the Haitian earthquake was followed by a welter of religious interpretations (fundamentalist Christians blaming sinful Haitians for it, Vodoun practitioners weighing in on the events, etc.), so the Japanese quake-tsunami-meltdown trilogy is offering evidence of humanity’s interpretive propensities. You may have already seen the YouTube troll video satirizing right-wing Christian responses, which scandalized […]
Religious (re)turns in the wake of global nature
Posted in SpiritMatter, tagged cosmopolitics, cultural ecology, ecology, environmental philosophy, religion, religion and ecology on January 8, 2011 | 4 Comments »
I’m reorganizing the piece I wrote for the School of Advanced Research workshop on science, nature, and religion so that part of it will fit into the introduction of the book we are producing (which I’m co-writing with the workshop organizer and chair, Catherine Tucker) and the rest will make up the book’s concluding chapter. […]
Green pilgrimage & global civil religion
Posted in SpiritMatter, tagged ecopolitics, ecotheology, fundamentalism, global civil religion, globalism, globalization, left politics, pilgrimage, religion on October 5, 2010 | 5 Comments »
I’m getting ready to head to Spain, where I’ve been invited to give a talk on “green pilgrimage” at the Fourth Colloquium Compostela. Here’s a brief overview of what I’ll be speaking about. Green Pilgrimage: Prospects for Ecology and Peace-Building
conversions
Posted in GeoPhilosophy, SpiritMatter, tagged eventology, process-relational thought, religion on August 7, 2010 | 1 Comment »
What a lovely, touching post Tim Morton has written about his conversion to object-oriented ontology. Since my days of doing religious-studies fieldwork, I’ve always gotten ripples of that nameless mixture of joy, pleasure, and sad melancholy — that feeling of being existentially touched, even pierced — whenever I’ve been around people undergoing conversion experiences (whether […]
found object
Posted in SpiritMatter, tagged faith, religion, spirituality on April 14, 2010 | 1 Comment »
I’ve had more than my share of occasions to write and speak about faith, but it’s generally been about others’ faiths, not my own. Summarizing one’s own can be tricky, at least if one prefers to deal with substance and not with labels. The term itself is slippery: is it intended to cover beliefs about […]
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