Today's session of "Religion & Ecology' was one of those charmed times when everyone is present, and everything we've been through together converges. We were revisiting claims about the importance of stories - for knowing who we are, for motivating ecological engagement - which e encountered already in our first week. This time, we were reading Whitney Bauman's reflections on the limitation of one particular story often told in the religion and ecology world, Lynn White's "Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis," and indeed of any single story. But to get there we revisited the otther stories we've been telling and retelling, including stories about stories and storytelling, and so we reviewed Journey of the Universe and Robin Wall Kimmerer's rendering of the story of SkyWoman and the creation of Turtle Island, and then read through the always eye-popping first two chapters of Genesis (with its two creation narratives!), before turning to White (whose claim isn't that Genesis is at fault, but is often thus caricatured) and finally to Bauman's queer, post-colonial Indonesia-informed suggestion that we might be better off with an archipelago of stories. Everything bumped up against everything else: exciting, illuminating!Thursday, February 22, 2018
Island hopping
Today's session of "Religion & Ecology' was one of those charmed times when everyone is present, and everything we've been through together converges. We were revisiting claims about the importance of stories - for knowing who we are, for motivating ecological engagement - which e encountered already in our first week. This time, we were reading Whitney Bauman's reflections on the limitation of one particular story often told in the religion and ecology world, Lynn White's "Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis," and indeed of any single story. But to get there we revisited the otther stories we've been telling and retelling, including stories about stories and storytelling, and so we reviewed Journey of the Universe and Robin Wall Kimmerer's rendering of the story of SkyWoman and the creation of Turtle Island, and then read through the always eye-popping first two chapters of Genesis (with its two creation narratives!), before turning to White (whose claim isn't that Genesis is at fault, but is often thus caricatured) and finally to Bauman's queer, post-colonial Indonesia-informed suggestion that we might be better off with an archipelago of stories. Everything bumped up against everything else: exciting, illuminating!