‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’: How We Perceive the World and Why This Should Change By Kocku von Stuckrad I just finished reading Helen Macdonald’s excellent new book, Vesper Flights. This collection of short stories about how we experience, approach, and interact with the worlds of other animals and plants masterfully reveals Read more
Emotion for Change: An Interview with Sara Michieletto Sara Michieletto is an Italian violinist who has performed worldwide, including with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the BBC Orchestra. She has collaborated with highly acclaimed conductors such as Muti, Maazel, Masur, Pretre, Gardiner, and Chung. Since 1998 she has played the Read more
The Iris Book Award: Prize Ceremony, Reading, and Discussion On 26 September 2020, The Center for Religion & the Human at Indiana University Bloomington presented the Iris Book Award to The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors (Viking, 2017) by David George Haskell. Books considered for the award are 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
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
In the Midst of a Global Pandemic: A Conversation about Dependency, Interconnectedness, and Planetarity 15 May 2020 Dorothea Green Lecture Series, Steven J. Green School of International & Public Affairs The current Covid crisis, among other things, highlights our dependency upon human others: not just medical workers, but the people who Read more
Rethinking Personhood Beyond the Human: An Online Counterpoint Conversation on Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day, 22 April 2020 A special event, featuring David Abram, Teya Brooks Pribac, Whitney A. Bauman, and Kocku von Stuckrad Many regard the celebration of the first Earth Day, on 22 April 1970, Read more
Rewilding Cultures: Self and Spirituality By Jay Johnston Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoo, © Jay Johnston 2018 The term ‘rewilding’ is in danger of being absorbed into buzzword oblivion. Its initial radical remit tempered, popularized, and expanded to such a degree that its meaning is so multifarious it borders the meaningless. The Read more
Climate Strikes as Rituals to Save the Earth By Sarah M. Pike Last month, hundreds of thousands of young people around the world walked out of classrooms and into the streets to draw attention to climate change and to protest government inaction. Focusing on Friday, September 20th as a day Read more
Let’s Get Metaphysical: A Response to James Miller on Cosmology and Practical Action on the Environment By John J. Thatamanil Photo credit: “Yin Yang” by Sapperlott is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 In a July 16th blog for this site, I suggested that religious believers who are broadly theistic need some compelling account of Read more