Online Zoom Forum: Rachel Carson: The Spiritual, Ecological, and Social Vision in her Life and Work.
Date: Wednesday 2 October 2024.
Time: 7pm-9pm (UK time).
Event Description:
Format: There will be five talks, each of 12 minutes, followed by 20 minutes of discussion among the speakers and the chair, followed by Q & A.
Chair:
Dr Michael Williams:
Bio: In 1998, Dr Michael Williams undertook a self-study storytelling apprenticeship through the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh.
In 2005, he exchanged a rewarding role as an English teacher for an uncertain life as an itinerant storyteller.
Despite the challenges and setbacks, Dr Williams persevered and founded a successful storytelling and coaching practice.
He has worked with adults, young and old, as well as with a variety of community and corporate clients across the UK, Europe, the Middle East, and Canada.
In recent years, he has focused his work on those with chronic illness and seniors suffering from loneliness and social isolation.
In 2018, Dr Williams became a certified End-of-Life Planning Facilitator and Trainer for Before I Go Solutions/MyGoodbyes.
He’s also a popular online workshop leader and speaker and is the 2024 Storyteller/Writer-in-Residence at the Adelaide Hunter Hoodless Homestead near St. George, Ontario.
Dr Williams currently lives in Hamilton, Ontario where he is writing a collection of memoir stories.
Speakers:
Prof Lisa H. Sideris:
Title: Wonder and Idolatry in the Spiritual Worldview of Rachel Carson.
Description: My paper will discuss some of the religious and spiritual sources of Rachel Carson's understanding of wonder.
Carson understood a sense of wonder and mystery at nature as an antidote to human arrogance and enchantment with ourselves and the artificialized worlds humans create.
I will trace some of the key religious and spiritual influences on her sense of wonder and consider how wonder framed a social and moral critique that culminated in her polemical and pioneering work, Silent Spring.
Bio: Lisa H. Sideris is Professor of Environmental Studies at UC Santa Barbara.
Before coming to UCSB, she taught in the Religious Studies Department at Indiana University, the Faculty of Religious Studies and School of the Environment at McGill University in Montreal, and the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Pace University in New York City.
She teaches a variety of courses in environmental ethics, science and religion, and nature spirituality, as well as courses focused on the emerging ethical issues of the Anthropocene.
She is author of Environmental Ethics, Ecological Theology, and Natural Selection, and Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World, and co-editor of a collection of interdisciplinary essays on the life and work of environmental pioneer Rachel Carson, titled Rachel Carson: Legacy and Challenge.
Prof Sideris’s research focuses broadly on the ethical significance of natural processes, and the way in which “environmental” values are captured, or obscured, by narratives and perspectives from religion and the sciences.
Her recent research examines the role of wonder in contemporary scientific discourse and its impact on how humans conceive of and relate to nature.
She is especially interested in the mythic, religious, and ethical dimensions of the so-called Anthropocene and its attendant technologies, such as geoengineering and de-extinction.
The overarching question that drives her research is how to articulate a vision of the human that is appropriate to the environmental challenges we collectively face.
She is actively involved in a number of international research initiatives in the environmental humanities, and serves as President-Elect of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture.
Prof Mark Stoll:
Title: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring as Presbyterian Sermon.
Description: Rachel Carson came from a deeply Presbyterian background. Although she left the church as an adult, typically Presbyterian motifs and moral rectitude infuse all her work, none more than Silent Spring.
Mark Stoll sketches religious influence on Carson and highlights the ways that her greatest work works as a moral sermon.
Bio: Mark Stoll is Professor of Environmental History at Texas Tech University in Lubbock,Texas.
His latest book, Profit: An Environmental History (Polity, 2023), tells the long story ofthe mounting ecological toll that capitalism has exacted.
Stoll’s earlier work explored unintendedways that religious belief has shaped ideas about nature and the environment.
This line ofresearch culminated in his book Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of AmericanEnvironmentalism (Oxford U.P., 2015), which explores the religious and cultural roots ofmodern environmentalism.
Throughout his career, Stoll has investigated how the same culturaland social forces that caused the environmental crisis also fostered an environmental movement.
Stoll’s books, articles, and essays have been widely praised and translated.
Kathleen Noone Deignan, CND, PhD:
Title: Rachel Carson and Thomas Merton:
An Ecological Conversion Story in Letters.
Description: In 1963, just before Rachel Carson’s death, she received a letter of profound recognition from the celebrated Trappist monk, Thomas Merton. Reaching out with “every expression of personal esteem” and commending Carson on the “fine, exact, and persuasive book,” Merton writes:
[Silent Spring] is perhaps much more timely even than you or I realize. Though you are treating of just one aspect, and a rather detailed aspect, of our technological civilization, you are, perhaps without altogether realizing, contributing a most valuable and essential piece of evidence for the diagnosis of the ills of our civilization…. Your book makes it clear to me that there is a consistent pattern running through everything that we do, through every aspect of our culture, our thought, our economy, our whole way of life.
Kathleen Deignan, CND, a long-time disciple and student of Merton’s, will share his correspondence to the esteemed mother of the environmental movements now sweeping the planet.
Bio: Kathleen Noone Deignan, CND, PhD is a sister of the Congregation of Notre Dame and Professor Emerita of Religious Studies at Iona University in New Rochelle, New York where she taught from 1980 – 2021, and now serves as founding director of the Deignan Institute for Earth and Spirit, a multi-faceted project in support of the cultivation of global citizens for the emergence of a global ecological civilization.
A GreenFaith Fellow since 2008, Dr. Deignan is an alumna of Fordham University where she studied with her mentor Thomas Berry earning a Master’s Degree in the History of Christian Spirituality and a Doctorate in Historical Theology.
Her publications include ChristSpirit: The Pneumatological Eschatology of Shaker Christianity, When the Trees Say Nothing: Thomas Merton’s Writings on Nature, Thomas Merton: A Book of Hours, Teilhard de Chardin: A Book of Hours, and numerous published articles on integral ecological spirituality.
She is presently composing Thomas Berry: A Book of Hours.
President Emerita of the International Thomas Merton Society, Sister Kathleen animates The Merton Contemplative Initiative at Iona University, and is co-convener of The Thomas Berry Forum for Ecological Dialogue to honor and promote the legacy of her mentor, Thomas Berry.
She sits on the board of The Berry Foundation.
Catherine Bush:
Title: Rachel Carson and the Concept of ‘Aunt Care’.
Description: As someone who chose not to be a mother, I’ve searched for models of care for others and for the land that aren’t conceptualized through the parental.
Rachel Carson, often derided by critics of Silent Spring as a ‘spinster,’ was embedded in complex webs of care, involving both the human and more-than-human.
I’ve written about my own relationship to “aunt care,” arguing for this as a vibrant conceptual model, focused on the altruistic care of those who are not “our own,” and how such a model is essential at a time of climate and ecological unravelling.
I will discuss how I’m using the idea of ‘aunt care’ to engage with Rachel Carson's legacy and reimagine Carson in my novel-in-progress.
Bio: Catherine Bush is the author of five novels, including the widely acclaimed Blaze Island, Accusation, and The Rules of Engagement, and the forthcoming story collection, Skin (2025).
She is at work on a novel inspired by the life of Rachel Carson.
The recipient of numerous fellowships, she has been the 2024 Writer-in-Residence/Landhaus Fellow at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society in Germany and was a 2019 Fiction Meets Science Fellow, also in Germany.
An Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, she lives in Toronto, Canada.
Jeanne Cecil:
Bio: Jeanne Cecil is the Rachel Carson Homestead Association Executive Director.
An archive recording will be made for the EICSP archive.
NB: There will be no refund if you cancel your booking.
Cost: By Donation:
Contact: Neill Walker, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
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