This Special Issue explores how contemplative practices, and the academic study of contemplation, can sensitize us to the ecological worlds in which we are embedded, and offer practices of attention and action that entail meaningful responses to ecological change. Broad and marshy in scope, authors in this special issue are invited to think with the concept of an ecotone, the transitional space between different ecosystems, as a way of conceptualizing the novel, interdisciplinary, and multi-perspectival approaches to ecology made possible under the rubric of Contemplative Studies. Invited formats for contributions therefore include research articles, short-form explorations, translations, annotated descriptions of contemplative practices with guidelines for contemporary use, and creative multimedia projects (visual art, video, music, and design).
Contemplative ecologies seem to face two liabilities of injustice. This essay examines how Contemplative Ecology may matter for multispecies justice by following Pope Francis’s attempt to redefine human dominion in contemplative terms for the sake of response to climate and extinction crises. That theological shift is accompanied by elevations of Indigenous governance rights and of rights for nature, although neither is endorsed fully or consistently. Ambiguities in this case can illuminate overarching questions about the relation of contemplative practice to ecological justice.
What does a particular place and its unique yet integrated life-force do for our lamentation amid ecocide? Do we suppose that nature mourns for us? Restores us to full resurrection? I avoid either/or solutions as at best a misplaced romantic optimism and at worst escapism enabling capitalist exploitation. Rather, I draw upon Christian mystics Julian of Norwich, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and John of the Cross alongside contemporary nonfiction authors Robert Macfarlane and Annie Dillard to move us beyond metaphor into the material. Masters of holding complicated paradoxical truths in real bodies and time, they wake the dying and entice us into spiritual practices as poets of apocatastasis, postulants of apophatic energy, and epistemologies of integration.
Nan Shepherd (1893–1981) was a Scottish novelist, poet, educator, and mountaineer. Her primary work of nonfiction, The Living Mountain, concerns the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. More than a work of natural and cultural history, in this book Shepherd also recounts engaging in intentional practices for cultivating attention and sense perception. Although these practices and goals are uniquely her own, this paper will also consider the potential influence of a Victorian-era publication summarizing Buddhist teachings. In contrast to previous scholarship on Shepherd, this paper contends that we would do well to resist characterizing Shepherd’s experiences in the Cairngorms in Buddhist terms.
The strange and alluring idea, that “Love’s deepest abyss is her most beautiful form,” shared by many of the apophatic tradition, reflects the sense that the abyssal is essential to the work of love, and that love can only be known by relinquishing the narrow conception of the self and becoming lost in the depths. The idea of the abyss has reemerged in our own time as part of a painful grammar of loss: a way of engaging and responding to social, political, cultural, environmental, spiritual, and personal losses too deep to name but impossible to ignore. It has also become critical to the work of reimagining the immense value of what we are losing, rekindling our capacity to love what is most precious to us, and helping us recover a sense of a shared life with all sentient beings. And it has become part of an emerging “contemplative ecology of darkness”—a radical spiritual practice that can help us learn again how to behold ourselves and other living beings as part of a larger whole.
Building on the works of the Sufi philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr and the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, this article argues that the climate crisis signals a deeper spiritual and existential crisis beyond technological solutions and carbon reduction strategies. Departing from conventional problem-solution narratives, it frames climate change as a crisis of human self-understanding and our relationship with the more-than-human world. By integrating Sufi ontology with ethics, it advocates for an interconnected vision of life by treating everything in nature as alive and spiritually meaningful.
This article comprises an introduction to and annotated translation of passages from the Unimpeded Sound Tantra (Sgra thal ‘gyur) and one of its earliest known commentaries from the twelfth century. The passages describe divination practices involving the interpretation of elemental signs that manifest as omens in the sky to determine a community’s collective karma and destinies. The article explores how these materials invite reconsiderations of Buddhist contemplatives as world-abdicating renunciates, emphasizing instead a vision of contemplative life immersed within the overlapping social domains of human, non-human, and more-than-human beings.
Have you ever been stopped in your tracks? Have you ever been confronted with something so far outside of your understanding that you were disoriented by it? Have you been shown to be absolutely wrong, when you were certain that you were absolutely right? Have you been touched by reality in a way you cannot…
by Jazlee Crowley, Brenna Rose Prevelige, and Dee Denver
Transdisciplinarity has emerged as a focal interest in academia over recent years and is conceptualized and applied in many ways. Transdisciplinary approaches aim to dissolve the traditional silos of academic fields, deeply integrating disciplines from the outset of a project. We are a team of transdisciplinary scientist-scholars investigating species across the web of life that include trees, slugs, microscopic worms, and fungi.
by Brenna Rose Prevelige, Jazlee Crowley, Dana K. Howe, and Dee Denver
Transdisciplinarity has emerged as a focal interest in academia over recent years and is conceptualized and applied in many ways. Transdisciplinary approaches aim to dissolve the traditional silos of academic fields, deeply integrating disciplines from the outset of a project. We are a team of transdisciplinary scientist-scholars investigating species across the web of life that include trees, slugs, microscopic worms, and fungi.
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