Embracing the Magicality of Science By Kocku von Stuckrad A few weeks ago, Renny Thomas argued on this blog that “rituals and prayers are very much part of the public imagination of science in India.” Many readers from Europe and North America may have the impression that this observation differs Read more
Religious Rituals and Scientific Laboratories: The Case of India By Renny Thomas Science and Religion are often perceived as mutually exclusive, but historical and anthropological scholarship shows that there exist different forms of receptions. What is sometimes called the ‘conflict thesis of science and religion’ certainly has its limitations to Read more
Counterpoint Turns Two—Looking Back and Looking Forward By Whitney A. Bauman & Kocku von Stuckrad Exactly two years ago, on 25 August 2018, we launched Counterpoint: Navigating Knowledge with an event in Berlin that addressed “Contrapuntal Responses to Culture Wars, New Nationalisms, and the Challenges of the Anthropocene.” After Counterpoint’s Read more
Re-storying Metaphors as Decolonization By Daniel Bryan In their seminal article, “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang speak to many of us who read this blog, calling for activist scholars, educators, and organizers to reconsider adopting the words “decolonizing” and “decolonization” in their vital work Read more
Mucho, Mucho, Mucho Amor, For the Planet By Whitney A. Bauman I have been thinking about planetary erotics lately. By that I mean the love of bodies, internal and external to us. As David Abrams suggests, biology and the biosphere are all only possible because of that most basic attraction Read more
This is Not a World of One: Our Separability-Amid-Situatedness By Marcia Pally What’s the disconnect? I’m sitting in Washington Square Park in N.Y., which I treat as my “backyard” as its curving paths and grand old trees are a block from my door. All sorts of folks are walking, cycling, Read more
Green Spiritual Technologies: Putting the Anthropocene Era to Rest (One Day a Week) By Jonathan Schorsch The shutdown forced on much of the world by the Coronavirus pandemic has focused attention even more urgently on questions related to work: economic inequities, exploitation of workers, work’s meaningfulness, the quality of the Read more
Immediacy and the End of Modernity’s Ends By Whitney A. Bauman Several recent blog posts have touched on the meanings of end times and apocalypses. One in particular hoped for an apocalypse, in the sense of a new world being uncovered. I want to add to this discussion of the Read more
How the Soul Became Consciousness By Kocku von Stuckrad The soul is a strange thing. Depending on which expert you trust, you might regard the soul as the immaterial essence of our existence, as a material substance wired into our bodies, or neither, because the soul is too vague to Read more
The World’s Gone Missing By John J. Thatamanil The world’s gone missing. We’ve lost it altogether. But how? It can’t be misplaced, can it, like car keys or a cell phone? Strangely, that is precisely the predicament in which we now find ourselves. Philosophers and theologians have always disagreed about Read more