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The Center for the Study of World Religions

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Event Series Religion in Times of Earth Crisis

Religion in Times of Earth Crisis: A Procession of Catastrophes

Zoom

Environmental catastrophes can create a break in the experience of time, they can rupture the possibility of collective meaning. Yet for communities shaped by colonialism and racism, this rupture can only be understood in relation to the past, as an event in the “unceremoniously archived procession of our catastrophes,” to use Édouard Glissant’s words. Histories of colonial and racial devastation teach us that environmental futures are linked to our pasts. We may describe them as “ancestral catastrophes,” as Elizabeth Povinelly suggests. In this session, Mayra Rivera explores the question, “How may we engage those stories in ways that honor our pasts and open possibilities for different futures?”

Speaker: Mayra Rivera, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Religion and Latinx Studies
Moderator: Diane L. Moore, Diane L. Moore, Associate Dean of Religion and Public Life

Event Series Religion in Times of Earth Crisis

Religion in Times of Earth Crisis: Ancestors and Climate in Our Boston Backyard

Zoom

Two hundred years ago, the residents of metropolitan Boston faced a climate crisis. White settlers had destroyed the region’s pine forests, triggering dangerous disruptions to both water and carbon cycles. Activists responded by creating forest parks on previously disrupted landscapes. But many of these activists were themselves descended from the settlers who had caused the harm they sought to heal. In imperfect yet instructive ways, they blended ecological care with new forms of ancestral devotion. Gradually they learned what indigenous communities had long known: that care for the more-than-human-world is inseparable from care for our ancestors. In this session, Dan McKanan, will discuss these stories and how they can help contemporary Bostonians, and others, recognize that what makes a place wild is not the absence of humans but the presence of ancestors.

Event Series Religion in Times of Earth Crisis

Religion in Times of Earth Crisis: Animal Stories, in Crisis

Zoom

Across the Indian Ocean world, communities have shared stories while encountering legacies of modern state-centrism, colonial capitalism, post-colonial environmental destruction and religious reform. Muslim communities, among others, have shared stories of religious environments and animals that were inherited, transmitted, and reinterpreted in light of evolving ecological crises. These stories of multispecies ancestors and colonizers, Islamic conceptions of the environment, and narrative traditions of Islamic ecological care have confronted cycles of crises with visions of pasts and futures. In this session, Teren Sevea will discuss the question, “Can listening to these stories compel us to re-evaluate our academic approaches to religion and environments and the relationship of religious pasts and presents, in our time of crisis?”

Event Series Religion in Times of Earth Crisis

Religion in Times of Earth Crisis: Apocalyptic Grief: Reckoning with Loss, Wrestling with Hope

Zoom

Human-caused climate change already contributes to manifold global disasters. As the planet inevitably continues to warm, these disasters will be routine and unrelenting. Addressing the reality of loss must become a basic spiritual task of our climate present and future, along with summoning the resolve to respond to all our losses. In this session, Matthew Ichihashi Potts will consider the apocalyptic roots of the Christian tradition in order both to diagnose how Christianity has contributed to the present crisis, as well as to suggest possibilities for a different way forward. Through particular attention to grief and hope as religious categories, and with specific reference to various moments and movements from within the Christian tradition, Potts will reflect upon the spiritual crisis at the heart of climate catastrophe and suggest the potential for a religious response.

Speaker: Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church
Moderator: Diane L. Moore, Diane L. Moore, Associate Dean of Religion and Public Life

Event Series Religion in Times of Earth Crisis

Religion in Times of Earth Crisis: The Practice of Wild Mercy: Something Deeper Than Hope

Zoom

Can personhood be granted to mountains, lakes, and rivers? What does it mean to be met by another species? How do we extend our notion of power to include all life forms? And what does a different kind of power look like and feel like? Wild Mercy is in our hands. Practices of attention in the field with compassion and grace deepen our kinship with life, allowing us to touch something deeper than hope. Great Salt Lake offers us a reflection into our own nature: Are we shrinking or expanding?

Speaker: Terry Tempest Williams, HDS Writer-in-Residence
Moderator: Diane L. Moore, Diane L. Moore, Associate Dean of Religion and Public Life

Event Series Religion in Times of Earth Crisis

Religion in Times of Earth Crisis: Reflecting on Religion in Times of Earth Crisis

Zoom

This session will be a discussion among presenters reflecting upon the insights shared throughout the series. In addition to identifying themes and throughlines among sessions, we will return to the overarching questions that framed this collaboration: What can an expansive understanding of religion provide in these times of Earth crisis? What is the role of the study of religion in times of catastrophe?

Panelists: Mayra Rivera, Dan McKanan, Teren Sevea, Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Terry Tempest Williams
Moderator: Diane L. Moore, Diane L. Moore, Associate Dean of Religion and Public Life

Event Series Thinking with Plants and Fungi

Thinking with Plants and Fungi: Planta sapiens and human impatience: are we patient enough to learn how smart plants are?

Zoom

Plants have long been deemed passive organisms with “hardwired” or “inflexible” behavior. However, a growing body of empirical research reveals that plants exhibit cognitive capabilities traditionally attributed to animals. And yet, controversies over these scientific findings have recently intensified.
In this talk, Paco Calvo will reflect on the current challenges faced by the field of plant signaling and behavior, including risks of underdelivering and strategies to avoid biases that may lead to overinterpreting results. This talk aims to spark multidisciplinary dialogue around the question of plant cognition and event sentience, and to foster renewed scientific curiosity into the rich cognitive landscape of green companions.
About Paco: Paco Calvo is a renowned cognitive scientist and philosopher of biology, known for his groundbreaking research in the field of plant cognition and intelligence. He is a professor at the University of Murcia in Spain, where he leads the Minimal Intelligence Lab (MINT Lab), focusing on the study of minimal cognition in plants. Calvo’s interdisciplinary work combines insights from biology, philosophy, and cognitive science to explore the fascinating world of plant behavior, decision-making, and problem-solving.

Thinking with Plants and Fungi: “The Quest for the Plant Script, a Talk by Author Sumana Roy

Common Room, Center for the Studies of World Religions 42 Francis Avenue, Cambridge, MA, United States

Why have our writers, artists, thinkers, and scholars been compelled to turn their attention towards the ‘plant script’ in the last one hundred years? Beginning from Jagadish Chandra Bose’s “torulipi”—the handwriting of plants or the plant script through which he hoped plants would write their autobiography—and moving through Rabindranath Tagore’s songs about the language of flowers; to poets writing about the syntax of the falling of leaves to artists trying to coax a vocabulary out of plants or creating a “tree alphabet,” Sumana Roy shall speak about the quest for the plant script, its codes, its compulsions, and its intimate histories.

Reading Group: Thinking with Plants and Fungi

CSWR Conference Room, 42 Francis Ave., Cambridge, MA

Meets biweekly from 3-5 PM at the Center for the Study of World Religions.
Recent scientific research has shed light on the sophisticated ways in which plants and fungi sense, make sense of, and interact with the world. Alongside these discoveries is a wave of interest in the “more-than-human” humanities, this scholarship raises fundamental questions about the nature of the human and the non-human: what is mind, where does it extend, and how? How do plants and fungi trouble our understanding of “thinking" – and perhaps cause us to reconsider what it means to be human? How do we ethically work with them? What cultural frameworks give us opportunities to think about next means of engagement? In its third year of gathering, this reading group will explore these questions and more. Past scholarship has included works by leading thinkers such as Emanuele Coccia, Monica Gagliano, Suzanne Simard, Michael Marder, and more.
Email plants@hds.harvard.edu to be added to the reading group mailing list
Instructor's bio:
Natalia is an herbalist, wildlife rescue & rehabilitation apprentice, and Ph.D. candidate in the Study of Religion at Harvard University, where she recently completed a Master of Theological Studies degree with a focus on the intersection of ecology and spiritual practice. She researches relational ontologies, posthuman ethics, and diction on personhood in scientific discourse, specifically neuroscience. Her secondary work is in Celtic Studies on trans-species soul migration in mythology and plants addressed in the vocative in Old Irish poetry.
Her work has been featured in New York Magazine, The New Yorker, Time Out New York, Vice, For The Wild, and more. For more information + publications, visit selkieprojects.com.
Subsequent meetings are: 9/26, 10/10, 10/24, 11/7, 11/21

Gnoseologies: Postapocalyptic Futures: Visionary Landscapes in Northern Peru ~ A Conversation with Anthropologist Ana Mariella Bacigalupo

In this conversation with Gnosologies host Giovanna Parmigiani, Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, Professor of Anthropology at the University at Buffalo, shows how sentient mountains and lakes (Apus) channeled by Northern Peruvian shamans address the greatest challenges of our current climate crisis: overcoming our anthropocentrism, our sole focus on human welfare, and justice for humans at the expense of the planet. Bacigalupo argues that by healing epistemic fractures between subject and object, matter and spirit, humans and ecosystems, Apus teach us planetary ethics, restoring our belongingness to the earth.
Bacigalupo discusses how Apus also offer a collective vision of humanity’s future as climate change ravages the world. By decentering the human and gaining awareness of the inevitable end of the space-time of modern industrial civilization and humanity—and of a world that will continue to exist without us—Apus inspire us to respond to the climate crisis. When we accept that humanity will ultimately be destroyed by climate change events, Apus reason, we might mitigate our suffering by engaging in ethical, reciprocal, multispecies relationships to postpone the end of humanity and to reimagine our existence as insects and birds in a post-human world.

Bacigalupo asks, “What could be the implications for our climate crises of truly decentering the human? How might sentient landscapes define and advocate for collective ethics and climate justice? And what kinds of postapocalyptic visions could trigger our moral responsibility toward the earth?”