The walls speak

This iteration of the College for Congregational Development is taking place in Thomas Berry Place, a retreat center on the campus of the Passionists in Jamaica, Queens. The place was renovated and named for the ecological mystic Berry in 2022, but the building is older, dating to the 1950s. A mural in the dining hall ambitiously represents the four sources of Berry's inspiration - indigenous knowledge, women, ancient traditions and science - but artistically it is less interesting than stained glass windows in the main hall where our plenary sessions take place. In deep colors glowing against brooding black when backlit by the light of the afternoon sun, their figures are bursting out of their frames into the brighter margins of distressed panes on either side, where various other symbols float (including a little demon impaled on a sword). Is the central figure Saint Paul of the Cross (1694-1775), founder of the Passionist Order? I'm hoping someone can tell me more about them.

The man who wasn't there

As the College for Congregational Development moved into its first full day, one of the trainers for the team I'm on was called away. The rector at Christ Church San Marcos in Tarrytown, he learned that an ICE operation was taking place in front of his church, a sanctuary church.

For the rest of the day, all our thoughts were with him and his community - and all our communities in this time of peril.

He was able to rejoin us at the retreat center in Queens by the time of Evening Prayer. He assured us that everyone in his community was safe and accounted for, but deeply shaken. And all is not well. 

What happened, according to a local news source:  

un­masked agents hand­cuffed an oth­er­wise uniden­ti­fied male—pos­si­bly some­one seek­ing refuge at the church. “We were ad­vised,” wrote [Tarrytown Police John] Chief Bar­balet, that they did not have a ju­dicial war­rant. Who the in­di­vid­ual was, what his le­gal sta­tus was and where he was taken are all ques­tions left unan­swered, pend­ing a re­sponse from ICE’s me­dia in­for­ma­tion of­fice in Wash­ing­ton.  

Who is that man, "possibly seeking refuge in the church," snatched from the street in broad daylight? Where is he now? How can we go on without knowing? Our hearts are breaking. This is life in America today.

CD + OD

Next adventure! As part of a team from my church, I'm spending the next week at the Thomas Berry retreat center in Queens as a student in the intensive College for Congregational Development. (We all committed to going back for another week next summer.) A project of the Episcopal Church, CCD brings together the fields of congregational and organization development. I'll tell you more about both of them when I have a better grasp. For starters the 40 or so of us (mostly from the Diocese of New York, which is sponsoring this cycle) populated this iceberg with visible and invisible challenges to the vitality and sustainability of congregations "of all sizes, locations and conditions." Organization development, we were promised, will bring the hidden factors "above the water line." Icebergs beware!

SAN --> JFK

無人

As my California sojourn winds down, had a chance to visit the Huntington again today. In the exhibition hall of their lovely Suzhou-inspired Chinese garden, painter 王滿晟 Wang Mansheng has created an immersive set of landscapes to explore, ink on silk so fine you can see each from both sides. There are no human forms or structures in the 

paintings of "無人 Without Us"; instead we encounter the effect of human intervention in the shapes of other viewers - and the way the silks gently saw as human bodies move the air. It's a transporting experience. But Wang's imagining a "pristine" nature before and, potentially, after humanity seems as much American as Chinese.

Trajectories

Crest Canyon crossings

SDBG

Plants at play at San Diego Botanical Garden

16:9

How have I come this far without realizing I could easily change the image aspect of photos taken on my iPhone? Thanks, sis!

Extension

Consolation of the sea

Bicameral mayday

When the omnibus reconciliation bill that has somehow taken the place of a properly announced and debated budget (how did they manage to break that norm too?!) was passed by the House, I felt the end of American democracy was near. In the meantime the Senate parliamentarian has, I think, stripped away the effort to kneecap the judiciary, but the reckless Supreme Court majority has since filled in the gap. Republican Senators in smoke-filled rooms have only made the bill even more regressive on care of the needy, fossil fuels, the terrorization of immigrants and the redistribution of wealth - not to mention national debt. And what gave me the worst chills remains, and the President's decision to celebrate the day at Florida's own future CECOT confirms the reality of the threat: they're building concentration camps. And we pay.

SBMA

Two works from the lovely Santa Barbara Museum of Art resonate with my experience bringing reflections on the religion of trees to the ISSRNC. On the one hand, it felt a little like the teeny tiny artist - painting a tree - oblivious to the all-enveloping weeping woman in David Alfaro Siqueiro's "The Aesthete in Drama" (1944); his canvas is about the size of each of her welling tears. Is focusing on trees irresponsible sentiment-ality in the face of climate catastrophe?

The other is contemporary Iraqi-American painter Vian Sora's magnificent canvas "Woodlands" (2020), an evocation (the caption explained) of the great forests of ancient Mesopotamia, continuing: A striking, tall form - a majestic tree - glows with the intensity of neon orange. Does its otherworldly hue signal the mythic power of a thriving forest, or does it gloomily foreshadow its eventual disappearance? 

 

The captioner thinks a later painting indicates the answer is the latter as the magnificent forests of Mesopotamia [were] decimated by deforestation and a cyclical climate that became hotter and drier. But maybe it's both. If our conference was full of gloom over human fecklessness, many of us reached out to other than human persons, not just as tragic victims of anthropogenic harm but as our necessary partners in the relationships which must be rebuilt and reimagined if we are to begin healing. Trees in particular are world-builders!

Ready for liftoff

 

On Santa Cruz Island yesterday

ISSRNC

ISSRNC was good fun! This society, soon to celebrate its 20th anniversary, was established to add a social science dimension to emerging work on religion and ecology, as well as more attention to religion beyond the world religions, and is going strong. Perhaps a hundred anthropologists, philosophers, indigenous activists, development economists, literary scholars, geographers and ethicists and even a few theologians gathered to think together about our conference theme "Religion, Migration and Climate Change."

The International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture was founded by the enterprising editor of the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, Bron Taylor, who is otherwise best known for arguing that our time is seeing the birth of a new science-friendly nature religion which he calls "dark green religion." Correlatively he has argued that the supposed ecological "greening" of older religions is superficial; as "agricultural" religions oriented beyond the natural world, the "world religions" cannot outgrow a fundamental suspicion of nature. 

All of these themes were replayed in different ways during this conference. A Lifetime Achievement Award was offered to Catherine Albanase, the historian whose 1990 Nature Religion in America, 2008 A Republic of Mind and Spirit and 2023 The Delight Makers established a long-standing tradition of (settler) American "metaphysical" religion enthusiastic about the energies of nature and less connected to European traditions than imagined Asian and indigenous ones; the New Age turns out to be quite old, with lots of baggage. A special panel revisited the "Greening of Religions Hypothesis," work conducted a decade ago by Taylor and some collaborators analyzing 700 social scientific articles to determine if an environmental turn had moved the needle on established religions' indifference to nature: they found no significant progress in 2016, and report none since then either. But "Dark Green Religion" is alive and well in natural history and art museums!

Beyond this it was an intimately interdisciplinary and multigenerational gathering with papers on a plethora of parareligious subjects, from water spirits in Nepal and post-Christian pilgrimages to sites connected to Mary Magdalene to the theological meaning of the economists' category of the "resource curse," from something called critical surfing studies to the environmental devastation caused by successive enlargements of hajj facilities in Mecca to the religious imaginations of climate refugees in the Sundarbans and ICE detention. California butterflies, Indian Ocean sea turtles, struggling English cuckoos, the supposedly "de-extinctioned" dire wolf, and the soon to be extinct Virginia saltmarsh sparrows were mentioned too. (Someone talked about trees, too!)

An intellectual feast! And there was the optional excursion to Santa Cruz Island, too! But the overall mood was subdued. It's a tough time for religion, nature and culture. One keynote address bemoaned the incapacity of UN programs to take seriously the "intangible" religious loss and damage being caused by climate change. Another (which I missed but a friend told me about) reported on some Amazonian shamans' announcing that the world had had enough of human beings and we were all going to perish, although some of us might have a future reborn as other animals.

But then our conference was taking place in June 2025, when generations' worth of environmental progress is being aggressively scrapped in the US even as climate catastrophe approaches new tipping points globally - and when communities of researchers like us are under unprecedented assault by state and federal government pogroms. As green and even dark green religions stall, anti-environmental cults abound. When the long-awaited recognition of some mountains and rivers as legal persons came up, someone who studies Catholic traditions in West Virginia suggested the next question was who gets to appoint their legal representatives: someone might report that a given mountain was eager to share the mineral wealth God had filled it with. And the dark side of American "metaphysical religion," an ignorant mysticism of affirmations and whiteness, reigns in the White House.   

This all makes interdisciplinary work on ecological relationships, environmental justice and the spiritual state of the planet that much more urgent. Our human and other than human kin need it desperately. "Religion" needs it too...