Download Nature, Technology and the Sacred by Bronislaw Szerszynski PDF

By Bronislaw Szerszynski

In a severe reinterpretation of the assumption of the ‘disenchantment of nature’, this provocative and well timed publication argues that modern rules and practices touching on nature and know-how stay heavily sure up with non secular methods of considering and appearing. utilizing examples from North the USA, Europe and in different places, many derived from unique learn, it reinterprets a number ‘secular’ phenomena when it comes to their conditioning by way of a posh sequence of modifications of the sacred in Western background. The modern practices of environmental politics, technological threat behaviour, substitute drugs, vegetarianism and moral intake tackle new value as websites of fight among diversified sacral orderings. Nature, know-how and the Sacred introduces a extensively new course for today’s serious discourse pertaining to nature and expertise, person who reinstates it as a second in the ongoing non secular background of the West.

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This same dynamic – of the simultaneous shifts towards the radical otherness of the divine and towards its intimate entwinement with empirical reality – is also found in the emergent new science of nature. As nature is stripped of symbolic meaning by both Reformation thought and the emerging natural sciences, the divine is at once removed from direct intervention in natural processes, and also given new and intimate roles in relation to the newly discovered mechanical universe. With spiritual agencies no longer present and intervening miraculously in the physical world, the direct action of God himself is seen in the ordinary and routine operations of nature.

In terms of institutional religion, this may well be the case, in that all of the major traditions have engaged in environmental self-reinterpretation in recent decades, and thus offer sacralized readings of the human relationship with nature (Oelschlaeger, 1994; Gottlieb, 1996). , 1998; Taylor, 2001a, 2001b). And as we will see in later chapters, there are lots of even more informal ways in which nature is sacralized in the private sphere – such as in the aesthetic experience of nature, in contemporary ideas of health and healing, and in green lifestyles.

2004 7:42am page 27 Nature, Secularization 27 world as ontologically self-sufficient, as characteristics of the monotheistic divine were incorporated into the understanding of the empirical world. The emergence of this ‘absolute profane’ thus has to be understood not as the end of the sacred, as the final, closing event of its repeated transformations – the suicide of the sacred, as Gauchet would have us believe. Instead, it is an event within the ongoing history of the sacred in the West. Thirdly, the contemporary sacred has another important feature that marks it out from earlier epochs: its internal plurality.

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