California Institute of Integral Studies
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Hope in Queer Spiritual and Religious Landscapes
No full textPanel Summary:
This panel delves into the intersection of queerness and religious/spiritual perspectives, exploring themes such as queer animality and eco-spirituality in biblical interpretation, queering kinship with a focus on disability and ecology, envisioning queer possibilities within the Chthulucene, radical hope and futurity in queer religiosity, and collective rituals in more-than-human worlds.
Dr. Ken Stone: “‘Like Fish Caught in a Terrible Net’: Queer Animality, Ecospirituality, and Biblical Interpretation”
Presenter bio: Ken Stone is Distinguished Service Professor and Professor of Bible, Culture, and Hermeneutics at Chicago Theological Seminary. He is the author of, among other books, Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies (Stanford University Press, 2018) and Practicing Safer Texts: Food, Sex, and Bible in Queer Perspective (T&T Clark/Bloomsbury, 2005) and co-editor with Teresa Hornsby of Bible Trouble: Queer Reading at the Boundaries of Biblical Scholarship (Society of Biblical Literature Press, 2011). In recent years his teaching and research interests have turned in the direction of Queer Eco-Spiritualities, with particular attention to the roles that animals and animalities, and queer biblical interpretation, can play in such eco-spiritualities.
Dr. Julia Watts Belser: “Queering Kinship: Disability, Ecology, and the Elemental World”
Presenter bio: Julia Watts Belser (she/her) is Professor of Jewish Studies at Georgetown University and core faculty in Georgetown’s Disability Studies program, as well as a rabbi and longtime activist for disability, LGBTQ, and gender justice. Her research brings classical Jewish texts into conversation with disability studies, feminist and queer theory, and environmental justice. She is the author of several scholarly books, including Rabbinic Tales of Destruction: Gender, Sex, and Disability in the Ruins of Jerusalem (Oxford University Press, 2018). She also directs Disability and Climate Change: A Public Archive Project, a project that partners with grassroots disability leaders to document the way that disability communities are responding to climate change. Her latest book, Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole (Beacon Press, 2023), won a National Jewish Book Award. She’s an avid wheelchair hiker, a devoted gardener, and a lover of wild places.
Dr. Laurel Schneider: “When the Spirit is Dirt: Queer Imagining in the Chthulucene”
Laurel C. Schneider is Professor of Religious Studies and the Graduate Department of Religion, as well as affiliated faculty in the Gender & Sexuality Studies department at Vanderbilt University. She received her BA from Dartmouth College, her MDiv from Harvard Divinity School, and her PhD from Vanderbilt University. She currently serves as Vice President and member of the Board of Directors for the American Academy of Religion. Among other scholarly books and publications, she is the author of multiple essays in queer theologies and of two monographs, including Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity (Routledge, 2007). Most recently, she co-wrote Queer Soul, Queer Theology: Redemption in Real Life with Thelathia Nikki Young (Routledge 2021). She works on queer theories of multiplicity and Christian theologies from a postcolonial, anti-racist and liberationist perspective, and is a student of Native American religious and philosophical traditions. When she can be there, she shares her home with Emilie Townes and Winnie the dog on Martha’s Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts.
Emily Stevens: Queering Religion: Radical Hope, Futurity, & Queer Witches
Presenter bio: Emily is a doctoral student (Candidate, by the time of the summit) in Human Sexuality at California Institute of Integral Studies. She received her bachelor\u27s and master\u27s degrees each in psychology and gender studies and has published research on the topics of queer health and intimacy, queer family formations, and queer religiosity. Much of Emily\u27s work in psychology, gender studies, and sexuality, have led her to an interdisciplinary overlap where religious studies have often come into play. Emily’s current research asks how queer religiosity may inform broader cultures and psychological worlds in order to provide more effective healing modalities for queer populations. Her work is informed by intersectional feminism, crip theory, queer theory, critical sexuality studies, and decolonial contexts.
Moderator: Erin Vigil, PhD Student in Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion at CII
Ecological Possibilities in Queer Lifeways
No full textThis panel explores intersections of queer identity and ecological concerns, discussing transformative approaches, challenges to medical perspectives, ancestral connections, and support for LGBTQIA+ students in understanding climate change
Consciousness and the Reality of Monsters in Horror Movies: Dehumanization and What Monsters in Horror Films Say About Us
Get PDFThis essay responds to Carroll’s The Nature of Horror from the perspective of transdisciplinary phenomenological film theory, largely developed by Edgar Morin in the 1950s. It argues that Carrolls’s reduction of the phenomenological value of horror films to an unreal category minimizes and even dismisses the inherent value of horror films. Morin, Allan Combs, and others offer more integral and transdisciplinary methods for art interpretation and functionality. They help us understand how monsters in horror films can stand as mirrors and reflections of the monstrous in ourselves and society. Thus, the transformational function and value of film is revealed and understood, even when the film is about scary monsters
An Integral Approach to Philosophy of Nature
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Quantum physicists and quantum biologists enjoy a mathematically-inspired romance with the wonders of nature at the quantum level. Recognizing the romance of mathematics and the quantum-to-cosmic level relational energetics of Nature can lead to a more integral, romantic, and even embodied phenomenology of the intelligence inherent within Nature’s relational and embodied energies. Approaching this quantum nature of Nature from the more romantic, wholistic views of the right hemisphere of the brain, rather than from the fragmenting views of the left hemisphere of the brain, one can begin to discover the self-organizing abilities of the energies of Nature at all levels of scale. In far from equilibrium states, energy is available for systems to self-organize at all scales, from a single particle on up to galaxies. This integral and romantic view of Nature from quantum scales to cosmic scales reveals a fractal intelligence inherent within all levels of the self-organizing systems of Nature. Indeed, Nature is self-organizing, or Self-organizing at all levels of scale. Everything in Nature occurs as a system, from quantum wave functions to the Universe as a whole. This integral systems philosophy recognizes Nature not as some “thing” that has been intelligently designed, but as a living cosmos embodying intelligence in all levels of being, such that Nature is intelligent. Ecosystems are the perfect example of the expression of Nature’s self-organizing intelligence, for if ecosystems were not wise, collapse of ecosystems would have been the norm, rather than the exception for hundreds of millions of years on Earth. Moreover, the inherent vibratory “felt states” of Nature can lead to an embodied phenomenology of the self-organizing wisdom of Nature
Millennium School: An Experiment in Transpersonal Education for Early Adolescents
Get PDFThis article describes the design, curriculum, culture, and values of an experiment in transpersonal education for young adolescents, the Millennium middle school in San Francisco, CA. The overarching design of the school was to help children exiting the latency period of child development, who exhibit the rudiments of Wade’s Authentic consciousness or Maslow’s Self-actualization motive stage, consolidate that level rather than losing it, as the vast majority do, because of social pressures that make earlier stages of development more adaptable in most contemporary societies. Early adolescence is a time when peer pressure, individuation from the family, and puberty are strong influences driving ego development, but it is also a time when existential questions about self, reality, meaning, and purpose open up possibilities for transpersonal development. Millennium is an attempt to further that development
The Nondual Realization of Advaita Vedanta Does Not Support a Psychological Theory of Consciousness
Get PDFAdvaita Vedanta is seen as something of an authoritative source for nondual philosophies and theories of consciousness that postulate a pure featureless awareness at the base of mental experience. These approaches deviate from both the lineage-based teachings of Advaita Vedanta and the necessary standards of science, constructing compromises that fall short of traditional fidelity and psychological rigor. Dialogues between psychology and Advaita Vedanta need to delineate clearly between a sensate phenomenology of experience and spiritual interpretations that may be implicit within experiential descriptions
The Role of Personality In Moving Encounters with Sacred Art
Get PDFIn Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions, the material world is understood to contain access points to the transcendent. An icon may move the awestruck believer to emotional engagement and reflection on moral and religious themes. Personality dispositions potentiating the experience of being moved in religious aesthetic contexts have not been thoroughly studied. The present article describes the development and testing of a cross-sectional study into potential belief and personality-related predictors of being moved by sacred art in a lab environment evocative of a holy site. Ninety (90) Christians in Canada and Greece completed personality measures and viewed and rated thematically matched Latin and Byzantine icons. Findings suggest impacts of attachment, imaginativeness, and traditional vs. mystical dispositions in resonance with sacred art, and point to a secure, mystically oriented perceiver. Those who tended towards structured religious lives also presented with a personality profile favouring logical problemsolving. The paradigm applied the social psychological tradition of an evocative lab situation and use of psychometric tests to pressing questions in aesthetics and transpersonal psychology. This study offers a replicable methodology, inviting further empirical inquiry into the experiential texture of being moved and predictive relationships among individual differences at play in moving encounters
Polarization and the Algorithmic Undertow: Integral and Critical Realist Perspectives
Get PDFThe recent election in the United States has underscored, in dramatic fashion, the depth and intensity of polarization that has taken hold, not only in America but across the globe. While political division is not new, the character and scope of today’s polarization suggest deeper, complex dynamics that resist simple explanation. At the Institute of Applied Metatheory—and in the Blue Sky Leaders program, a new trans-disciplinary leadership certificate program at CIIS—we explore how these dynamics may become clearer through multiple metatheoretical lenses. This paper brings together insights from Integral Theory (IT) and Critical Realism (CR) to examine the underlying generative mechanisms driving our increasingly divided information landscape and to understand why traditional approaches to bridging these divides often fall short
Colic as Trauma Release? A Comparative Exploration of Play Therapy in Children With and Without a History of Colic
Get PDFColic, characterized by excessive, inconsolable crying in early infancy, has long puzzled researchers and clinicians. Traditional approaches have predominantly relied on medical models, yet they have failed to provide satisfactory explanations or effective treatments. This blinded comparative qualitative study took a novel approach by asking: What are the womb and birth experiences of colicky babies in relation to the prenatal relational trauma between mother and fetus or within the fetal environment? The sample comprised 23 mother-child dyads, 10 children with a history of colic and 13 without, whose histories and interactions unfolded through 10 videotaped sessions of Experiential Play Therapy. Children with a colic history engaged in far less traumatic reenactment than those without, and those born vaginally in both groups re-enacted less trauma than those born via caesarian section. These findings suggest that colic may be the natural release of accumulated pre- and peri-natal trauma rather than an illness or condition requiring treatment resulting in a healthier child than non colicky children whose trauma impacts have not been expressed or released
Judaism and the Transpersonal
Get PDFThe interplay between Judaism, especially its mystical tradition, and transpersonal psychology is examined, focusing on two major aspects. The first concerns stages in the spiritual journey, which are analyzed for their psychological import. The stages are symbolically depicted in the biblical narrative of the Exodus from Egypt, a journey from slavery to freedom. Here the Hebrew term translated as wilderness is seen to act as a code word, applying to five successive stages each of which I analyze in psychospiritual terms. The role of the divine feminine, the Shekhinah, is emphasized on account of Her specific role in exile and return. The second area explored is more historical, detailing ways in which Jewish and Kabbalistic ideas have impacted western culture in directions that underpinned the later rise of transpersonal psychology