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Posts Tagged ‘religion’

Enchantments to come

Posted in Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , on March 21, 2011 | 1 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 […]

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Religion & the Japanese tragedy

Posted in Eco-culture, Media ecology, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , , , 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 […]

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Religious (re)turns in the wake of global nature

Posted in Cultural politics, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , 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. […]

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Green pilgrimage & global civil religion

Posted in Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , on October 5, 2010 | 7 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

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conversions

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

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found object

Posted in Spirit matter, tagged , , 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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the remainder…

Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , on April 13, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

For an indication of why I’m interested in the “more” that object-oriented philosophers grapple with, the “remainder” beyond what can be accounted for of an object or phenomenon through relational accounts, I thought it would be appropriate to share a few paragraphs from my 2001 book Claiming Sacred Ground.

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Cracks in Charles Taylor’s ‘immanent frame’

Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged , , , on August 7, 2009 | 12 Comments »

I recently worked my way through Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, which, since its publication in 2007, has become one of the most widely reviewed and critically lauded books on religion and secularism — and which, in a tangential way, was one of the provocations that led me to start this blog in the first […]

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Chernobyl, May Day, & the (r)evolution of risk society

Posted in Eco-culture, Politics, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , on April 26, 2009 | 34 Comments »

Today was the 23rd anniversary of the nuclear accident in Chernobyl, Ukraine. I had been invited to give a sermon at a nearby Unitarian church connected to both this anniversary and the May Day (Beltane) that’s coming up in a few days, and my thoughts, in preparation, revolved around how both of those dates, along […]

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immanence, transcendence, religion, imagination, politics

Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on December 14, 2008 | 2 Comments »

On the surface, “immanence” would appear to favor certain religiosities (paganisms, pantheisms, animisms, earth spiritualities) over others (transcendentalist monotheisms, rigid dualisms, Buddhist “extinctionism,” et al). But its resonance works within traditions as well: towards panentheistic strains of Christianity, where the Christ is seen as in-dwelling, where Easter is the rebirth of nature and life as […]

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nice piece on Huxley

Posted in Spirit matter, tagged on December 8, 2008 | 1 Comment »

Jeffrey Kripal’s piece on Aldous Huxley in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education captures a piece of the tug of war (cultural war?) over spirituality since the 1960s. It’s interesting that East Europeans are rediscovering Huxley, now that Orwell would seem less relevant. Perhaps there’s a correlation between authoritarianism (as embodied by Soviet-style socialism and […]

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