Ecology, Ecstasy, Mysticism
Virtual Session
Description
How should Spring bring forth a garden on hard stone? Become earth, that you may grow flowers of many colors. —Rumi
The soul is all things. She has being with the stones and growing with the trees and feeling with the beasts and understanding with the angels…For the soul goes on growing without end. —Meister Eckhart
Earth…you no longer need your springtimes to win me over—One of them, oh even one, is already too much for my blood. Namelessly I have belonged to you from the first. —Rainer Maria Rilke
The relationship between nature and spirituality is equally ancient, new, and not yet fully realized. (In this sense it has a close kinship with literature, philosophy, political ideas, and most other preoccupations of the Humanities.) Although since the 1970s eco-criticism and environmental activism have been moving away from metaphysical (read: anthropocentric and -genic) orientations, recent work in the areas of eco-theory and environmental humanities more broadly has begun returning to questions of how caring for the natural world bears upon issues of religion (e.g., Wendell Berry, Elizabeth Johnson, Norman Wirzba, Bruno Latour’s posthumous writings, Timothy Morton’s latest book).
Much of this work is in implicit or explicit dialogue with two ancient, interwoven concepts: ecstasy and mysticism. The first involves a basic pattern of “stepping outside” [ek-stasis] one framework of being, while the second concerns various forms of union with another (traditionally divine, immaterial, or infinite) essence. Although ecstasy and mysticism are probably most often associated with disciplines like theology, philosophy, and poetry, they also have ecological valences that have been attracting increased attention within scholarship about the crossing of thresholds between the human and the non-human.
The proposed seminar hopes to pursue these and related topics by exploring whether contemporary issues surrounding nature—including climate change, environmental justice, and the relationship between political engagement and aesthetic theory—can find points of contact with the ancient, multivalent, and multicultural conceptions of ecstasy, mystical union, and other associated experiences. Does one set of concerns presuppose or supersede the others? Can new gains be made in environmental discourse and activism by invoking religious and spiritual paradigms? Or do these paradigms require, à la Carl Schmitt, recalibration with secular categories? Above all, how do links between nature, ecstasy, and mysticism appear within literature, philosophy, and art? Paper proposals that address these or related questions from all literary, philosophical, theological, cultural, historical, and artistic angles are welcome. Please submit an abstract (300 words) accompanied by a brief vita for consideration.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Craig Carson holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Irvine, was a Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago, and is now Associate Dean in the Adelphi University Honors College with tenure in the Department of English. He is the author of the book, The Aesthetics of Democracy (Palgrave, 2017), and has recently been presenting work as part of his “imperial cosmologies project” on the natural law, imperial legal theories, and the Dutch East India Company, as well as work on the history of information technologies, including a book chapter on Epicureanism, the Cartesian subject, and the New Science entitled “Machine-Learning Ecologies & Self-Organization,” forthcoming in Learning Under Algorithmic Conditions, University of Minnesota Press [2025- 2026]:
https://www.adelphi.edu/faculty/profiles/profile.php?PID=0542
Speaker Bio
Professor, Dept. of Languages and Literatures; Dept. of Catholic Studies
Sacred Heart University (Fairfield CT USA)
Research and publications: medieval (Christian) spirituality; medieval (Christian) hagiographic studies; late antique and early medieval literature (eco-crit and spatial studies lenses); interfaith medieval studies (western Christianity and Islam); medieval mysticism (western Christianity and Islam)
Speaker Bio
Beatrice Marovich is an associate professor of theological studies at Hanover College. She writes about big cosmic mysteries, and more than human worlds. Her first book Sister Death: Political Theologies for Living and dying was published with Columbia University Press in 2023. Her second book, which is forthcoming, is called More Than Human Power: On the Afterlives of Theology.
Speaker Bio
Alexander Sorenson is a lecturer of Comparative Literature and German. His research is grounded in the environmental humanities and explores the interfaces of literature, philosophy, and eco-criticism.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Ruoshui Zhang is a final-year PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, specializing in comparative literature. His research explores the intersection of modernist poetry, 20th-century Franco-German philosophy, and Daoist thought, with a focus on the writings of Wallace Stevens, Gu Cheng, Heidegger, Nancy, and Laruelle. Ruoshui's work has been published in *French Studies Bulletin*, and he has presented at international conferences on poetics, mysticism, and philosophy.
Speaker Bio
Thomas Carlson is Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he also directs the university's Humanities and Social Change Center. His research and teaching focus on modern philosophy, religion and secular culture, and the history of Christian thought. He is the author, most recently, of With the World at Heart: Studies in the Secular Today (2019, University of Chicago Press) and, with Mark C. Taylor and Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Image: Three Inquiries in Technology and Imagination (2021, University of Chicago Press).
Speaker Bio
Speaker Bio
William Zeng is a second-year English Literary Studies PhD student at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Broadly, he is interested in literary theory and post-structuralism. At the moment, he is curious about the term "theory": why so many literary studies departments in the United States turned to it in the 70's, and what this turn consisted of -- a productive (mis)reading of earlier twentieth-century French philosophy?
Papers
Speaker Bio
I am a recent graduate of Lund University with a Master's degree in Philosophy of Religion. I also hold an Undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Film Studies from the University of Glasgow. Currently, I am in Kyoto attending the Interfaith Studies in Japan Programme (ISJP) on a scholarship until the end of the year.
My master's thesis, which explores Paul Ricoeur's concept of "Original Affirmation," can be accessed via the following link: https://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/search/publication/9174939
My research interests focus on contemporary European philosophy, phenomenology, existentialism, religious and spiritual experience, and environmental ethics.
Speaker Bio
Professor Dr. Kate Rigby (Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities) is Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Cologne, where she leads a research hub for Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities, and visiting scholar in the Research Centre for Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University. Her recent books include Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonization (2020) and Meditations on Creation in an Era of Extinction (2023).
Speaker Bio
I am Suvankur Sukul, a PhD candidate at the University of California Santa Barbara. I hold an MA from the department of South Asian Studies, University of Chicago. I am currently developing a project on theorizing the lineaments of the salvific in interpreting environmental disrepair in Global Anglophone literatures since 1945.
Speaker Bio
William B. Smith Dean's Professor of Philosophy at WPI. Author or editor of 21 books and 150 articles in political philosophy, environmentalism, religious studies, ethics, contemporary spirituality, the Holocaust, and feminism. Two books of fiction, both of which received Nautilus Book Awards for fiction. Editor of 5 academic book series and on the editorial boards of two leading environmental journals