Extensively revised and in full color. Each chapter begins with an accessible story about the dynamics of Nature: the origins of the universe, the planet, and life; the workings of cells and organisms; the patterns of biological evolution and the resultant biodiversity; awareness and feelings; sex and intimacy; multicellularity and death; and two new chapters on human evolution and morality/ecomorality. Each is followed by a reflection on the spiritual sensibilities elicited by these science-based understandings, generating the foundations for a non-theistic religious naturalist orientation.

http://sacreddepthsofnature.com/

Between Birdsong and Boulder – Poems on the life of Gaia

Between Birdsong and Boulder (https://birdsongboulder.com/) is a collection of poems that covers the science-based story of the cosmos in lyric form. It follows the arc of life on Earth personified by Gaia – her birth, her nurturing presence, her tenacity, her ultimate fate. 

The book opens with an invitation, Will You Come, Too? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpKJNHcIUmk) and a Prelude, So It Goes. The main body is divided into four sections of poems. The first, Who Grapples with Angels and Demons, pursues the story of humankind out of the mythical Garden. It moves from lament for the lost cradle, through migration to dominion and the coming of a modern consciousness. 

The second section of poems, From So Simple a Beginning, reinterprets the Genesis days of creation in light of current science. It follows the unfolding of our universe from the Big Bang to the first light and the formation of stars and planets. With the birth of Gaia in Earth’s Hadean Eon, the poetry traces the major turns of evolution through multiple cycles of creation, destruction, and re-creation, from primitive cells in the Archean oceans to the flowering of life across the globe. 

The third section, When Gaia Arises to Cleanse the World, speaks in a prophetic voice to the growing destruction of our present epoch and Gaia’s eventual recovery in a time beyond the Anthropocene. It foresees an Edenic age when sentience lives in harmony with Gaia.

The final section, The Science of Remote Abysses No Longer Shelters Man, is haunted by visions of a world running down. Poems explore the far future, from a time beyond humans to the death of Gaia and the ends of Earth, the sun, the stars themselves. The book ends with the breath of hope in a dark, empty void and an Epilogue, Beyond the Elegant Equations.

Running through this collection are hints of transcendence beyond scientific paradigm and religious doctrine. Evoking the rhythms of scripture, the poems express a sense of wonder at the enormity of it all, yet find a quiet comfort and belonging in our niche between the ephemeral and the everlasting – between birdsong and boulder. 

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.”