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Sermons in stones: John Muir, American environmentalism, & Swedenborgian ecology
This talk, taken from my recent book, traces some of the religious roots of American environmental imagination in the work of the conservationist John Muir, and others in the early Sierra Club – arguably the first bona-fide national environmental organization in the United States. While Muir’s nature spirituality has been examined via his Transcendentalist inheritance (Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson), and is often correlated to Zen Buddhism, little attention has been given to the significance of Muir’s encounter with ideas he found in the 18th century Scandinavian scientist-turned-mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg. Paying attention to the importance of Swedenborg for Muir, I argue, can illuminate certain tensions that lurk at the heart of Muir’s aesthetic project to find “sermons in stones,” (in his words), and to read wilderness landscape as a kind of sacred text: a metaphoricity inevitably entangled in colonial violence and the dispossession of native Calfornians from their ancestral homes in Yosemite Valley, and elsewhere.
Date:
13 June 2022, 16:00
Venue:
Maison Française d'Oxford, 2-10 Norham Rd, Oxford
Speaker:
Devin Zuber (Berkeley, California)
Organising department:
Oxford Centre for the History of Science, Medicine and Technology
Organiser contact email address:
hsmt@history.ox.ac.uk
Part of:
Oxford Centre for the History of Science Medicine & Technology (OCHSMT) Seminars and Events
Booking required?:
Not required
Audience:
Public
Editors:
Laura Spence,
Belinda Clark
