Ethics Without Transcendence: Criteria for Planetary Becoming By Whitney A. Bauman If we are going to have a radically immanent understanding of reality such as found in forms of new materialisms, among many other animist or pantheist ways of thinking, then we ought to begin to articulate how we navigate Read more
A Watersheds Moment By Gary Slater The phrase “watershed moment” is used so commonly that it’s easy to forget how, if at all, actual watersheds come into it. If the metaphorical fit of watersheds with moments works well enough that the phrase has successfully become a cliché, there are nevertheless Read more
Thinking Past the Anthropocene By Whitney A. Bauman As Sylvia Wynter, Aph Ko, and many other decolonial theorists argue (not to mention post-humanists, indigenous scholars, queer theorists, and other critical theorists of race, gender, sex, and ableness), the “human” of “the humanities” in modern western educational institutions was based upon Read more
On COP26 and the Need for Parareligion By Justine M. Bakker Earlier this November, thousands of people—country leaders and activists, climate experts and NGOs—traveled to Glasgow for COP26, the 26th annual UN global Climate Summit. As world leaders were debating inside and negotiating an agreement that many criticized as, to Read more
Calling All Solarpunks! Symmetrical Myths and Rituals for Survival By Morgan Tomalty We are living in a moment where progress is no longer forward, but on we trudge down that doomed path. The “end of history” promise is of a globalized world as the ultimate social and economic antidote, but Read more
Apocalypse Anymore? By Catherine Keller No doubt the Trump presidency incited my Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy and Other Last Chances. Finishing final revisions only weeks after the 2020 U.S. election, I was relieved as I went through it to realize how little of it was about him. He remains a Read more
Seeds of Connection, Seeds of Change: Botanical Folktales for Ecological and Relational Storytelling By Anna Perdibon “Plants prepare for the winter through fruits and seeds, and through discarding what they don’t need. The clearing-out begins,” writes Lisa Schneidau in her collection of botanical folktales. Every year autumn for me is 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
Offshore: Descending into the Blue Humanities By Justine M. Bakker Purely coincidently, I started writing this blog on “World Octopus Day,” which occurs every year on October 8—a date that fits the eight-armed creature so remarkably well that one wonders if it has ever been otherwise. It turns out it Read more
Progress for Whom and What? By Whitney A. Bauman Steven Pinker’s recent book Enlightenment Now argues that despite all recent, post-modern claims to the contrary, we can still be certain that reason and science are making the world a better place than it was before. One also hears echoes of Read more