Wonderful prospects

You may be wondering how my courses are going, since i haven't posted much about them, and we're mid-way through second week. Not to worry: no news is good news! I'll tell you more about the Job and the Arts lecture next week, when we actually get to the Book of Job!

In Religion & Ecology, this is the week we encounter the three main texts/approaches which the syllabus braids. Yesterday we read the first six entries in Spiritual Ecology: Hearing the Cry of the Earth, a bouquet of inspiring calls to action plucked from different traditions around the world. The editor, Sufi Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, provides minimal context for them, since they "speak a single note of love for the Earth." A native American chief, a Catholic theologian, a Zen monk, an African chief, scholars and scientists; it's an impressive roster. (I didn't share with the class the pages of tributes at the front of the book, luminaries from all lands and traditions.)

I registered some scholarly misgivings about this decontextualization, and tomorrow will recall David Abram's argument, encountered last week, that oral traditions don't fix things in a final form because they are organically responsive to an ever-changing reality. For Abram, to be really ecological is to forswear, ultimately to lose interest in, the specious promise of a truth divorced from ongoing relationships and processes. But we're newcomers to the discussion, and the sense of shared resolve Vaughan-Lee achieves with his assembled excerpts was welcomed by many of the students. "Are the selections wonderfully the same or wonderfully different?" I asked a little sneakily. Both, one student replied gamely. Wonderful's a place to start.

Tomorrow we read an introductory chapter each from field founders' John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker's Ecology and Religion and, representing the next generation, Grounding Religion: A Field Guide to the Study of Religion and Ecology. For Grim and Tucker, religion matters because 90% of the world's communities belong to religions. For Whitney Bauman and the other editors of Grounding Religion, religion matters but also who defines it, how, and what's included/excluded.

These different approaches overlap, of course. Tucker is excerpted (with Brian Thomas Swimme, discussing Journey of the Universe) in Spiritual Ecology, and the project of Spiritual Ecology makes more sense when you've encountered Grounding Religion's suggestion that religion may appear outside "religions" - and that the global environmental challenge may require something beyond the scope of any of them. But Grounding Religion's critical questions about who defines, who's included, etc., will be important also. Wonderful for whom? how?

We'll see how we do tomorrow. All but two of the students are new both to the theological-interfaith kind of work Grim and Tucker represent and the academic concerns and questions articulated by Bauman.

(The photo, by the way, is of the view between cars of the Q train as it crosses the 
Manhattan Bridge to Brooklyn at sunset, looking back over the Brookyln Bridge.)