Stags, Stones, and Stakes: A Point/Counterpoint Conversation with Jay Johnston Point: From Regimes of Mastery to Creative Confusion By Kocku von Stuckrad Jay Johnston’s new book with the enigmatic title Stag and Stone: Religion, Archaeology and Esoteric Aesthetics is a stunning and elegant piece of scholarship. It carries on musings Read more
Braiding Art, Animism, and Animation: Alisi Telengut’s The Fourfold By Anna Perdibon A flowing sound of wind and waves. A transforming image. Blue. Red. White. Green. Grey. A voice of an elder woman. The story begins. An Ovoo, a shamanic stone altar, opens the scene of the animation film The Read more
Anything Goes… What Trumpism and the Covid-19 Pandemic Can Teach Us About Climate Crisis By Oliver Krüger These days, we Europeans are quick to diagnose a post-factual age in light of recent events in the United States. In the European media, the chaotic Trump presidency and his broad support from Read more
Invoking the Sacred: Between Conflict and Peace in Climate Conflicts By Joram Tarusarira The impacts of climate change are increasingly undermining human, national, and international security. The modern obsession with positivism and technical approaches to addressing climate-induced conflicts neglects the deeper, more spiritual dimensions that motivate and propel actors in Read more
Anthropocentrism and Quietism: Scylla and Charybdis for an Integrated Migration-ecological Ethics? By Gary Slater When seeking to develop an ethics that integrates concern for ecological devastation with international migration, rich material abounds. Worthwhile responses to these challenges can be found that range from the empirically rigorous to the culturally potent Read more
At the End of the World (in a Van) By Devin Zuber Currently making its rounds through cinemas this spring (2021), Chloé Zhao’s haunting Nomadland is a creative adaptation of Jessica Bruder’s 2017 non-fiction book of the same name (subtitled “Surviving America in the 21st Century”), which deals with the Read more
Thoreau’s Ethics of Delight By Alda-Balthrop-Lewis I have been thinking about what Henry David Thoreau, a man so often described as “saint of the woods,” would make of us. He’s been a kind of companion to me through the last seven years, and I hear him sometimes—in an interior wordless Read more
Why Journalists and Academics Need One Another By Michael Scaturro Recently, I interviewed a businessman who is spending his fortune lobbying politicians to ban microplastics, which threaten ocean life and may be toxic to humans. One of his quotes struck me. “Academics,” he said, “Are doing a really good job Read more
Sub/Urban Farming, Democracy, and the Environment By Laurie Shrage In the late 1990s, a few college students began a regenerative agriculture project that has now become a small farm on a college campus in a suburb of Los Angeles. They did not ask their college administration for permission to begin Read more
Democalypse Now: Unveiling our Chances By Catherine Keller What, no more apocalypse? Has the dramatic lurch into catastrophe—white supremacist mobilization, COVID-19, climate denialism—suddenly petered out? Its causes and its supporters aren’t disappearing; their idol Trump wasn’t convicted. But they can no longer claim sovereign superpower. And yet: the roaring red Read more