Just listened to this conversation, and wow! So rich. Thanks for sharing, Bruce.
This conversation made me wonder whether large scale restoration work—projects working on landscapes made barren from industry, and replanting native plants likely to thrive in that soil/climate/site conditions/region, with often rapid cascading
effects through fauna—and even home-bound ecological mindfulness—both engendered through learning about and having native plants in your personal awareness of your surroundings and embedded in our collective consciousness—might feed into a new post-metaphysical
ecology of practices for a religion that is not a religion.
I find it a precious experience to transform our modest yard from a lawn and into a space that supports a plethora of insects, birds, mushrooms, and animals. I relish in sharing this awareness with my son, who brightens up as we talk about all
the plants and bugs and birds.
Maybe this type of restorative ecological stewardship could serve as a way for us to be less anthropocentric in our view. “Sorry, we have sort of been breaking this, I’m gonna try to do what I can to clean it up, fix it up, and give it back”.
We can educate ourselves about our regions various ecosystems and allow native plants to provide the substrate to allow balanced micro-ecosystems form around them.
We can in a way attempt to give back land to serve a diversity of life, instead of merely to a colonial manicured sense of “natural” order, and practical pleasure.
Cheers,
Aydan
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For the fourth episode of Re/thinking Religion, John, Bruce, and Layman turn from reflection on grieving the death of God and the loss of the transcendental sacred, to grieving the state of the world and the impending loss of the immanent sacred. They
discuss Nietzsche's insights into the pervasiveness of affective nihilism in modern cultures, and the strengths and shortcomings of his prescriptions; the problem of "god surrogacy," in a world that has lost its center; the dynamics of a culture of make-believe
and the impediments to facing collective cultural shadow; the process of grieving the state of the world and our implication in many of its crises, environmental and otherwise; the radical challenge of moving beyond anthropocentrism in our social organization
and self conception; and much more.
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