What am I working on? In recent years I've described my interests as having moved from philosophy, ethics and theory of religion in the direction of the newer field of religion and ecology. I'm not part of any scholarly (or unscholarly) tribe, though, and my training leads me to chip away at any general term like ecology or - especially - religion! Why suppose any of these terms, each emerging from contingent and contested histories of definition and exclusion, can help us see beyond the limitations of our forebears, the structural biases of our cultures, the ideological torque of "the academy"? My reflection and teaching on the Anthropocene didn't help, raising questions about the salience and sustainability of even relatively new concepts and fields before itself crumbling under questioning!
This isn't quite the first such post, but this picture - taken on north Torrey Pines Beach last week - can serve as a promissory note. That's not a tree, of course, and yet it looks that way to us. It tells us that there's something to the form of trunk and branches that may apply to more than trees! But this pattern in the sand is also delightfully unlike a tree. What I've learned is known as "dendridic drainage" starts not at the "trunk" but in the tributary "twigs," which flow together to form "branches" on their way to converging as a "trunk." Quite different from the way trees grow - if not from the way many people draw trees). What to make of this? Is "this" even a thing? More soon!
So it's not without trepidation that hereby plight my troth to "Religion of Trees" as what I am working on, the next project etc.! I have to stop myself from adding scare quotes to its constituent terms, at least at first. It may be the interference patterns of those two rarely conjoined terms that make it an intriguing topic to people I mention it to. I'm going to try to write a short blog essay on some element or issue in the interference pattern each week this semester.
This isn't quite the first such post, but this picture - taken on north Torrey Pines Beach last week - can serve as a promissory note. That's not a tree, of course, and yet it looks that way to us. It tells us that there's something to the form of trunk and branches that may apply to more than trees! But this pattern in the sand is also delightfully unlike a tree. What I've learned is known as "dendridic drainage" starts not at the "trunk" but in the tributary "twigs," which flow together to form "branches" on their way to converging as a "trunk." Quite different from the way trees grow - if not from the way many people draw trees). What to make of this? Is "this" even a thing? More soon!
