Stories, places: storied place and placed story

Stories, places: storied place and placed story . . . the universe is not simply a place but a story –a story in which we are immersed, to which we belong, and out of which we arose. –Brian Swimme & Mary Evelyn Tucker ABSTRACT For a while now I have been ‘wondering’ about, pondering the link between story and place, inhabitant and colonizer: the inextricable and intractable connections that come into being between them. And so in this short diffractive piece where a constellation of concepts (space, place, story, performance, hospitality, refrain, vibe, power to/power over, rhizomes etc.,) come together with no one ‘truth’ privileged, I hope to explore those connections and provide some compelling examples of story as place and place as story with particular reference to one particular place, a school, and the inhabitants of one particular classroom in that school in Cape Town, South Africa. For in schools where matter, in all its forms, is ‘storied’–has its own story to tell–and storified, stories matter.

Narrating a Sacred Universe. A Study of The Universe Story through the Hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur

This essay examines the use of language in narrating a sacred universe, focusing specifically on the text of The Universe Story by Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme. It applies the narrative hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur, who argued for the role of narrative in influencing a life through its creation of a world, to the text. It focuses specifically on Ricoeur’s five traits of a phenomenology of the sacred. This step in Ricoeur’s hermeneutics is a reminder that religious language has been shaped by demythologisation, and this in turn impacts any attempt to articulate in language what is interpreted as an experience of the sacred. In designating the universe as sacred, The Universe Story is confronted with the task of narrating such an experience. In examining the language of the text, this essay analyses how this is preformed and the effectiveness of such an approach.

Post-Materialist Integral Ecology

This essay is an example of a post-materialist science in the work of molecular biologist Candace Pert. Post-materialist science supersedes materialist-reductionist science and integrates spirituality with materiality. This discussion is motivated by the author’s experience as an academic in a New England institution. Integral ecology is entangled with post-material science as in the work of cosmologist Brian Swimme, Thomas Berry and Mary-Evelyn Tucker. The last part discusses the author’s creation of a non-profit organization in the Peruvian Upper Amazon. The work of her center is a response to requests by the local indigenous leadership for an alternative to their slash and burn form of agriculture. The alternative is the regeneration of a pre-Columbian anthropogenic Amazonian soil known as Terra Preta do Indio (black earth of the Indians) in Brazil, which integrates materiality and spirituality and offers the possibility of food security and sovereignty as well as climate mitigation.