In "After Religion" I argued that the American world religions discourse codes Buddhism as "religion at its best" and Islam as "religion at its worst," so that if students wanted to free themselves of the baggage of these assumptions they needed to learn something about theese traditions, especially Islam. It wasn't enough to note that Buddhists can also "go bad," that Islam - in Sufism, for instance - can also charm; this leaves the spectrum in place, and the default judgments. Really what was needed was to get a rich enough understanding of the complexity and variety of traditions, practices and ideas involved to see the fatuity of understanding them as all part of a single "world religion" - but we didn't have time for that! (The grad student's talk on her research on Russian Islam opened some eyes, though.) Instead I planted some seeds. Last week we'd considered some Buddhist ways of looking at - past, through - "religion" and "world religions," and this week it was the turn of some Islamic ideas.
This enabled me to underscore that, since our interest is broader than those things classified (and perhaps distorted) as "religions" and "spirituality," these takes might provide new understandings of other things - such as science and art. We'll see if anyone follows up...
In "Religion and Ecology," four hours later, we were wrapping up a discussion of the "honorable harvest" in Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass and discussing an essay on "African American Religious Naturalism" by Carol Wayne White. They're not part of the same conversation but we made them so with the help of Donna Haraway, quoted by White revelling in the fact that 90% of what she considerers her body has non-human DNA. The human is part of constellations of coexistence, consortia of consortia of symbiotic beings. Life requires the taking of life, but, to be sustainable, is part of broader reciporcal agreements between species: if we care those who feed us, the Native traditions Kimmerer shares tell us, they will count on our care and continue to feed us. Unlike consumption, "harvest" can be "honoarable" - part of a relationship of mutual care.
By the same token, refusal of the fact that we are unthinkable without the species we depend on and which depend on us - as if living with, on and for others is contingent, questionable, best abstracted from - is one of the sources of the nature/culture binary that has led to the othering and exploitation of women, people of color, and the non-human world. But, with Kimmerer, White and Haraway together, it's clear this can't be overcome through mere argument or attitude. Our lives must be rebuilt in terms of relationships. And this is something human beings might be able to do because (as White argues) we seek a purpose in each of our lives (something African Americans have had to assert even against floods of dehumanizing commodifying structures and ideas), and so can trace and maintain these interconnections as a way of fulfilling our destiny as what she calls a "sacred humanity" which revels in its inseparability from all life.
Do we settler descendants feel either that interdependence or that need to find cosmic purpose as keenly as do Kimmerer and White - or, for that matter, the beauty of Allah's or the Buddhas' world?
