Listening to the Snake; or, On Having a Spine

The western prohibition of reflection on what we call today religion begins not with a banned scholarly monograph or a taunted academic, but with a myth about a transgressive desire for mature moral knowledge and a subsequent sexual emotion, namely, Adam and Even\u27s shameful sense of being naked after accepting the serpent\u27s gift of the knowledge of good and evil. Elsewhere, I have explored some of the ways that western religions thought has sexualized this foundational myth in order to take up this gnosis as my own and explore the problems and promises of sexual desire, gender difference, sexual orientation, love, mortality, and -- above all -- the inescapably transgressive nature of radical thinking about religion in the contemporary academy

Directing Modernist Spirituality: Evelyn Underhill, the Subliminal Consciousness and Spiritual Direction

Outlining an alternative trajectory for modernist spirituality to that traced in Pericles Lewis’s 'Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel' (2010), I argue that modernist religious thought, far from playing heir to the long march of secularization, was in fact conditioned by a late-nineteenth-century cultural crisis that issued in a range of religious experiments and renewals, one of which was Evelyn Underhill’s 'Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness' (1911), a text that not only brought together mystical traditions and scientific discoveries, but also used this interdisciplinary remit to counter existing secularizing perspectives. An important dimension of Underhill’s work was its collaborative nature; it offers, I argue, not access to rarefied enlightenment, but rather a bold attempt to navigate a treacherous religious landscape

Better Horrors: From Terror to Communion in Whitley Strieber's Communion (1987)

Trauma, Trick, and Transcendence in the Life of a Horror Writer: The Case of Whitley Strieber. This essay treats the theorization of horror in Whitley Strieber's Communion (1987). It also pushes us to consider more honestly and forthrightly the question of “real monsters,” that is, the phenomenology of encounters with fantastic presences routinely experienced in the environment. Historical contextualization of Strieber's abduction experiences in the Hudson Valley region and theories of other species from Charles Fort to William James are invoked to radicalize the question further

Taking sustainability to heart––towards engaging with sustainability issues through heart-centred thinking

There is still much to be done to motivate people to actively engage in issues related to sustainability (ICCiP). While it may seem obvious that thinking about the world in a different way creates the possibility of arriving at new awareness, this paper suggests that such a seemingly ordinary observation shines the light directly on a major obstacle to engagement with sustainability. More broadly, this paper demonstrates the importance of the humanities in helping to understand how human beings make meaning in the world (Kripal 2014) linking directly to issues of sustainability in terms of how people connect with each other and the world at large. Taking an imaginal approach, and honouring a metaphorical mode of investigation (Voss 2009), this paper positions the heart as an organ of perception able to comfortably move between different ways of engaging with the world. Using the metaphor of epistemological duality with reference to cultural history (McGilchrist 2009; Bound Alberti 2010) as a guide, this paper moves to explore two important ideas; first how a taken-for-granted, epistemological approach towards the world (McGilchrist 2009) could be creating barriers to engage effectively with sustainability, and second, how the separation of body from mind, and heart from brain, when taken as a metaphor, could further guide this understanding. This paper moves towards the suggestion that when re-considered as an organ of perception (Corbin 1971; Hillman 2007), the heart has a key role to play in guiding people towards different ways of understanding, and subsequently engaging with sustainability