If anything, the practice of a religious naturalist is experiential.  The initial impulse of a religious naturalist inclination in a spiritually open person often hangs squarely on experience – the incredible majesty of this bodymind, this moment, this nature, this sunset, this reality, this universe. To come into a relationship with the world in the way that religious naturalism urges, we must first perceive it. Paying close attention, then, to our ability to perceive should be a formative plan for religious naturalists. 

Listening to recorded music is a low-cost, portable and very accessible way for people to experience being.   One beauty of spirituality that takes nature as its ground, is that simple existence and simple experience can be seed for spiritual becoming. The quotidian act of laying down on the floor with headphones on and focusing one’s biological brain (made of nothing but cells and evolved over millennia) on the patterns of compression and rarefaction of the air in the ear canal that are playing on your eardrum (which is made of cells, similarly evolved, very much a part of nature) can bring a wonderful religious naturalist practice into ones life.  

One recent recording by the a Capella vocal ensemble Chanticleer seems to fit hand-in-glove with this religious naturalist sensibility and I wanted to take this opportunity to bring it to the attention of The Religious Naturalist Association.   The recording features a single piece:  The Rivers are Our Brothers, composed by Majel Connery.  As one might expect from Chanticleer (which has won Grammy-awards), it is flawlessly performed, yet as deeply soulful as their most religious work.  A gem of an album, it ought to make its way onto every religious naturalist’s playlist. 

Ascription of human characteristics, or even human identification with nature is usually probably anathema to the average religious naturalist.  Despite this I assert to you that The Rivers is wonderfully anthropomorphized (take the names of the movements, for example: “I am the air” and “I am a mountain” … the entire lyric follows in the same mode.  The piece is described on her website as “a song cycle on ecological responsibility told from the point of view of the land.” and “The songs in the cycle take a first-person view of nature, ascribing human qualities and feelings to elements of the landscape: water, trees, mountains, rivers, etc.”  What she has managed to do is, instead of bring nature down to a human scale, to expand our notion of humans as part of nature, to ascribe to humans the qualities of mountains, trees and rivers, and to create art that manifests as care, love concern and embeddedness in nature. 

Connery is a musicologist who has published in the journal, The Opera Quarterly.  Her PhD dissertation in musicology, written on a Mellon Foundation fellowship, was on the topic of Peter Maxwell Davies:  The Revelation of Peter Maxwell Davies – Theology and Theatricality in the Mid-Century Stage Works.  Davies was a naturalist composer in his own right. I remember a visit he made to St. Louis when I was around 19 years old. He lived in the Orkney Islands in Scotland and I will never forget his ornate verbal description of the islands, the ocean, the wildlife, and his description of his effort to meld the experience of living there (verbal and nonverbal) into his compositions.  Spirituality and nature perfuse both Davies’ and Connery’s work. 

Originally commissioned by Musica Sierra as part of its Musical Headwaters Program, The Rivers was first conceived as a set of songs, featuring Connery as the vocalist, and with a minimal accompaniment (the recording of this version features Ben Matus on vocals and bassoon and Edwin Huizinga on violin).  She has also performed the song cycle with the Brothers Balliet https://www.dougballiett.nyc/brothers-balliett. In transforming and recomposing the song cycle to a set of choral pieces to be performed by one the preeminent choirs in the USA, a thing that defies categorization and stands alone has been created. Connery wrote both the words and the text, in a total creation – something that is unusual in the world of contemporary concert music. 

It’s worth a listen! 

Listen to The Rivers on Spotify HERE.

Or iTunes HERE.

by Jason Keune

Amythia: Crisis in the Natural History of Western Culture 
Loyal D. Rue, University of Alabama Press, 1989

A review and commentary by Ursula Goodenough

Circa 1991 I wrote the review of this book that appears below. It was apparently never published; I’ve only come upon a handwritten version.

Given that my encounter with this book directly launched my exploration of a religious naturalist (RN) orientation and two editions of my book The Sacred Depths of Nature, its influence on me was profound, and my explorations, in turn, undergird the many articulations of RN that have emerged in the past 20 years.

What needs to be rectified is that few of the articulators seem to have read Amythia, or at least it is not listed in their bibliographies. It has placed at the very bottom of amazon.com’s buyer rankings for decades. 

Following the review, I offer a short commentary on the book’s history.

REVIEW

This eloquent book can be praised at two levels. 

First, as literature, it is a technical tour-de-force. Rue is a philosopher who has mastered the pace of the Socratic argument and the important abstractions within western intellectual history. As a sideline, he also writes pithy op-ed pieces for the Des Moines Register in a style somewhere between Tom Wicker and Garrison Keillor. The combination is terrific. He will present us with several pages of philosophical discourse or church history, with careful attention to methodological detail, and just as we sense our attention wandering a bit he steps in, rings out a few punchy declarative sentences, pulls it all together, and sets up for the next round of Augustine or Luther. As a result we have a clear sense that he is in control, that we will not be abandoned. At key moments Rue anticipates our responsiveness and draws us into a dialogue, the hallmark of a perceptive teacher. The writing itself is clear and often powerful, particularly in the second half of the book where Rue really picks up steam and eventually switches from the passive to active voice.  In short, the book is masterfully crafted; it has a life of its own.

The second level of praise is for the argument itself. The title gives a name to our state of cultural malaise, our absence of collective meaning. “The [Abrahamic] myth from the past has lost its power to capture the modern imagination.” “Cut off from the public network of shared commitments and objective values, we find ourselves alienated in a universe of oppressive privacy, in a kind of self-enslavement.”

After defining the problem, Rue proceeds with a graceful account of the evolution of life, human life, human mind, and human culture, as if to make sure we are all grounded in the same science-based reality. This reality then becomes the context in which any new myth, or meme, must survive.

He then takes us on two journeys, one through western intellectual history and the other through the history of the Judeo-Christian church, tracing the evolution of our myths and lifting up their resilience, the thesis being that for any myth to survive it must have both distinctiveness and plausibility. He identifies the most durable myth as the concept of Covenant – the relationship between humanity and the source of existence – and documents that this concept has undergone numerous transpositions during the natural history of western culture.

The major crisis of our times, then, is that whereas the “source of existence” has traditionally been termed God, “there is no longer any point in being mealymouthed about it; the personal metaphor of God is dead. To continue to talk as if our world were in the caring hands of a transcendent intelligence takes us well beyond the acceptable limits of plausibility in contemporary culture.” Hence the challenge is to affirm a Covenant, the meaning of existence, in the absence of God.

Rue quickly goes on to point out that we are nonetheless still free to consider what has been regarded as God’s activity, namely, the creation and unfolding of all that there is, and use the word evolution to describe that activity. Hence he calls upon modern mythmakers, notably artists, to present the concept of evolution in forms that will inspire self-transcendence and a reunification of human culture.

In his final chapter, Rue proposes that we use the church as an institution for sponsoring and supporting such mythological change. We are basically urged to take over the church – some would say subvert the church. For readers who have dismissed the church as hopelessly entrenched in the mythology of salvation this may sound far-fetched, but a visit to one of the more enlightened churches in your community may offer a real surprise: many are actively focused on the Amythic dilemma and poised for fresh input. I am hardly saying that “a new venture in mythopoesis” is as yet sweeping our religious institutions, but it could happen, and it would be far more likely to happen if Amythia were put forward as required reading. 

COMMENTARY

When Loyal Rue wrote Amythia  in 1989, lifting up the salience of what he came to call Everybody’s Story, he was unaware of Thomas Berry’s 1978 book that called for the adoption of what he called The New Story. Berry continued to articulate this theme for the rest of his life, albeit he did not speak of RN by name, often in collaboration with his students Brian Swimme, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and John Grim, who created an enchanting film called The Universe Story. His life and work are commemorated here and in a highly engaging biography. 

In his most recent book chapter, Rue notes that the RN trajectory is being played out in numerous guises, as recorded in the many other chapters in the book. And although RN terminology is not usually used, many progressive church congregations have adopted robust eco-minded orientations and projects, as extensively recorded here; they retain their monotheistic credos, to be sure, but the RN impulse is manifest. Also ascendent is an awareness of the nature-centered indigenous, pagan, and East Asian traditions where the human is embedded in the natural world. Notable also is the formation of many on-line associations that adopt an RN perspective, as accessed here . The vision offered by Rue in the last chapter of Amythia has taken root in many ways since he offered it 35 years ago.

Importantly, Rue developed the Amythia perspectives in four subsequent books, listed below, that display the same level of mastery and have enjoyed far wider readership. Hopefully this review will encourage an exploration of his RN roots.

By the Grace of Guile 1994

Everybody’s Story 1999

Religion is Not About God 2004

Nature is Enough 2012

EVERYBODY’S STORY:  WISING UP TO THE EPIC OF EVOLUTION

Loyal D. Rue.  State University of New York Press, 1999 (SUNY series in         

Philosophy and Biology, D.E. Shaner, Editor)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreward by Edward O. Wilson

Preface

Introduction

Part I:  How Things Are

1. The Organization of Matter
2. The Organization of Life
3. The Organization of Consciousness

Part II.  Which Things Matter

4. What Matters Ultimately?
5. What Matters Proximately?

Epilogue

Biographical Notes

Index

Each of the growing number of books that explores the religious potential of the scientific worldview carries, by definition, the imprint of the training and perspective of the writer:  Thomas Berry’s lens is that of a historian of religion, Brian Swimme’s that of a mathematical cosmologist, Wilhelm Drees’s that of a theologian, mine that of a molecular biologist, and so on.  In Loyal Rue’s offering, “Everybody’s Story:  Wising Up to the Epic of Evolution,” we have the perspective of a philosopher of religion who is deeply versed in the western philosophical and religious traditions and has also taken the time to understand not just the core features of the scientific worldview but also its implications.  The result is a most valuable contribution to the project, one that should become a particularly important addition to the reading lists of courses in religion and science because it is brief, accessible, masterfully written, and eminently incisive.

The book is in many ways the sequel to Rue’s two previous books.  In “Amythia” he argues that our culture lacks, and needs, a metanarrative to live by, but he stops short of offering one, perhaps because he first needed to write his second book, “By the Grace of Guile,” where he takes on the postmodern critique of metanarratives and makes the case that the important property of a metanarrative is not that it be True but that it be adaptive.  In “Everybody’s Story” he goes ahead and “tells” the epic of evolution, minimally but evocatively, and then employs the careful logic of his trade to demonstrate why it is that this story is adaptive, how it has the potential to best optimize both personal wholeness and social coherence, the two proximate goals of a human life.

How does Rue frame his argument?  

He begins with a familiar but compelling lament of our global problemmatique, and concludes that “a set of global, systematic, immediate, and chronic challenges calls for responses that are likewise global, systematic, immediate, and enduring.”  He lifts up the centrality of core Myths in the functioning of their resultant cultures, reviews the major Myths that have come to us from the Axial period and, while acknowledging their crucial historical role in expanding human solidarity and cooperation, points to their inadequecies as foundational narratives for the future.  “Our calling is no less than to achieve for our time what these ancient traditions did for theirs, that is, to transform social and psychological realities in ways that effectively redress the global problematique.  To do this this we must find the courage to be no less radical in our storytelling than were the Axial prophets and poets.  Their achievement is our source of courage and hope for a new Axial Age.”

So what would such a story tell?  “Any story claiming moral relevance to the global challenge will not only factor in the mundane conditions of our existence, but will go beyond this to proclaim them sacred.”  And then, as have others in this emerging tradition, he embraces the evolutionary story.  “The universe is a single reality – one long, sweeping spectacular process of interconnected events.  The universe is not a place where evolution happens, it is the evolution happening.  It is not a stage on which drama unfold, it is the unfolding drama itself.  If ever there was a candidate for a universal story, it must be this story of cosmic evolution….This story shows us in the deepest possible sense that we are all sisters and brothers – fashioned from the same stellar dust, energized by the same star, nourished by the same planet, endowed with the same genetic code, and threatened by the same evils.  This story, more than any other, humbles us before the magnitude and complexity of creation.  Like no other story it bewilders us with the improbability of our existence, astonishes us with the interdependence of all things, and makes us feel grateful for the lives we have.  And not the least of all, it inspires us to express our gratitude to the past by accepting a solemn and collective responsibility for the future.”

During his telling of the story he pauses to challenge the coherence of such perspectives as the Anthropic Principle and Intelligent Design, but his trajectory is in the main a constructive one.  He stresses the crucial and as yet only dimly appreciated point that the hallmark of evolution is the creative process known as emergence (something more from nothing but), a dynamic that is particularly important in biological and cultural evolution where the instructions for generating emergent properties can be remembered and transmitted (albeit by distinctive kinds of mechanisms).  “Sometimes the magic and the glory are less in the thing itself than in how it comes to be.  And so it appears to be with the self.  It took nearly four billion years of biotic evolution and a hundred thousand years of cultural evolution to organize selves who are capable of composing and comprehending this sentence, and neither you nor I had anything to do with it.  For what it is worth, to be a self is to inherit a fortune of organization.  Our part is merely to invest it.”

It is apt to quote here a passage that Rue recently posted on META.  “Some analysts of religion argue that stories function to support, enrich and extend our religious belief systems.  In other words, structural beliefs are primary and narratives are secondary.  This is simply not the way it works.  Myths are primary and persistent, while theological interpretations and clarifications of them are derivative, variable and provisional.  Show me where the narrative impulse comes from and I’ll give you an explanation of religion.”  It is in this spirit that Rue writes his concluding section, “Which Things Matter?”  With broad strokes he argues that given the epic narrative, what ultimately matters is viability, that what proximately matters is personal wholeness, social coherence, and the integrity of the biosphere, and that these are best achieved by a set of moral precepts that he outlines.  I happen to agree with his proscriptions; other readers may draw up different lists.  But compilers of competing lists will be challenged to argue their case with the same intelligence and clarity employed by Loyal Rue.  He has set a high bar.

And what does Rue do with theism?  In his Epilogue he writes, “There is nothing in the substance of everybody’s story to rule out belief in the reality of a personal deity.  At the same time, such a belief is not an essential part of everybody’s story.  There will be theistic versions of the story, and there will be nontheistic versions as well.  Those who take the theistic option will have at their disposal a range of images that may be used to arouse motivational systems.  But I have confidence that everybody’s story, unadorned by theological imagery, has the potential to arouse us to serve its imperatives.  Let us see.” 

Book review of Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom

Jason Keune 

In Maggie Nelson’s new book, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, she invokes, or rather curates, a vast landscape of contemporary thought and thinkers in an expansive exploration of a rich, yet elusive concept.  One such of her favorites, Donna Harraway admonishes us that “it matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots; what thoughts think thoughts…think we must, we must think.” Nelson takes this concept to heart and makes it manifest in this book, which is a success in what it tries to do.

But isn’t freedom an empty, tainted concept?  Don’t we know what it is?  She lays out her agenda right at the beginning: she is going to “stick with freedom” for two reasons.  First, a long-standing frustration with its capture by the right wing (think about the freedom in “Freedom Summer” and Women’s Liberation being converted over a few short decades to the freedom of the American Freedom Party or Operation Enduring Freedom).  Second, reservations about emancipatory rhetorics of past eras that freedom is thought of as a future state, an event horizon instead of a constant, unending continuous practice.   She navigates both in tandem with great skill and troubles the concept in a way that is at once disorienting and comforting.  

The book should be of interest to religious naturalist readers since the last chapter, (which we seem to be being prepped for through the three earlier chapters) is about climate change.  But not only that.  She takes it as a fundamental truth this whole thing we’re in is more of a “we” than an “I.”  And not only that, but that we are also dependent on “nonhuman forces that exceed our understanding or control”; increased entanglement can “offer sustenance” but also “be painful”.  These concepts pervade the other chapters, which take on art, sex and drugs.  

There is so much about her in this book – it’s not just theory – she weaves the thought into the concrete of her life in a way that I found appealing and real.  She addresses the reader frankly and openly in ways that sometimes make her look like a hero – giving up drinking for example, and thereby entering a world of perspective and depth (one envisions possibly the world in which this book could come into being).  Other instances of this interweave put her in a darker place of an anti-hero – but all the stories are seamless with the thinking.  

And when it comes to climate change and ecological destruction, and the utter despair that it often engenders, Nelson says we’d be best to “ride the blinds” – a concept that comes from a book by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney that refers to a hobo’s hiding between the cars to evade capture by police.  A conceptual riding of the blinds gets us out of the need to get everything into “story” mode – that the arc of history is bending towards justice, or imagining far off worlds in which art takes over technology, or that “scare us off the course”.  When we “drop the story”, we can get into a good thickening of time, of folded time or intergenerational time; a time that becomes more palpable.  This in turn invites care-oriented attitudes that are open-ended and don’t require tying ourselves in knots about some future state, but rather recognize how “temporal abundance” of living in the moment always involves “making choices about lessening or increasing future suffering.”

Nelson makes claims that may clash with many RN’s basic beliefs about climate change, but undeniably articulates with RN themes in ways that are fresh, complex, and compelling.  This work is an achievement and I recommend you give it a serious read.  

I’m writing to recommend a book. Finding the Mother Tree – Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, Dr. Suzanne Simard.

Simard has put together summations and descriptions of her experiments and findings from her career as a forest ecologist that started as a child in a timber family working, living and rambling in the forests of inland B.C. I first was exposed to the workings of mycorrhizal networks as a student in the OSU Watershed Stewardship Program. I believe some of the course work was being based upon what Simard was publishing back even then. Her information is therefore not new news; but, having decades worth of experimentation and publication gathered together in sequence is valuable. And the conclusions and implications that Simard now articulates in summation are most timely. Conclusions about altruism, cooperation, competition, diversity, and patience.

Simard relates the nature of mycorrhizal networks, the vast variety of specialized and generalist fungi, the networks’ ability to pass communication, to pass nutrients, and the dramatic differences to be found where the networks flourish as compared to where they are weak or absent. She describes the fascinating interconnections fostered by these networks that exist between Mother Trees and kin, between species kin, between “strangers”, and between trees dying and those yet young. She presents her learnings on the relationship between dead salmon and the forest again facilitated by the mycorrhizal networks.

The book is, in my opinion, a bit weighted down by the autobiographicality of it. Along with a vast amount of research and learnings we also get to follow her love life, motherhood, her health, her conflicts with the timber industry and misogyny. But it is a minor complaint. This is a wonderful book if forests fascinate you like they do me. Or if you are just interested in the interrelationships abounding in nature and by what there might be to learn from nature about interrelationship, cooperation, and community.

A particularly fascinating little bit is where Simard discovers that, consistently, stressed or dying trees do not suck nutrients from the plants surrounding them in a bid to recover but rather accelerate the rate at which they pass nutrients outward helping newly established trees and the entire surrounding community to thrive.

Hope you enjoy,
Carl Axelsen
Portland

I shared a poem recently and it came from this remarkable book by Dara McAnulty – Diary of A Young Naturalist. It is probably more about autism than nature. But I am stunned by the brilliance of this young autistic man whatever the intent of his writing. I’m left thinking perhaps it is the rest of us who are intellectually and emotionally deficient, not the autistic.

Would I rave about it if it was not by an autistic 16 year old? Maybe not quite so much; but, that is due more to the impact of revelation than an evaluation of the content. Dara paints the pages with his descriptions of and reactions to the common aspects of the natural world around his suburban Irish homes. I’ll certainly not think about autism or the natural world the same way again after being exposed to the brilliance of his reflective mind.

And beyond that, Dara simply nails it as he denounces the loss of species, of habitat, of biodiversity. His passion, while amplified by his autism, does not feel overwrought considering the impact of human development of the Earth’s vital systems.

One of the quotes on the cover is by Aimee Nezhukumatathill. “This book will change your life if you let it. Go on, let it.” I don’t know about life changing but my view of “common” nature and autism and the potential of young people has been altered in a good direction.

Carl Axelsen