Author: Clayton Mitchell

The site visit is to the grand opening and inauguration of the community center of the Hindu Cultural and Educational Center on 1960 East Army Post Road in Des Moines. On Saturday, October 1, from 1:30 to 6:00 pm, this Bhutanese Hindu community will offer a “cultural program” including cultural songs and dances, bhajans in which visitors can participate (religious singing and dancing), guest speakers and dignitaries, and an introduction to the community. Modest but comfortable attire is recommended. Visitors will need to remove shoes and should not point outstretched legs (feet) toward the statues (murti-s) of the Gods.

On Sunday, November 13, members of the local Bahai’i community will visit to Drake University to speak about the Bahai’i faith and conduct a Bahai’i service. The event, which will take place in the second-floor “Reading Room” in Cowles Library from 4:00 to 5:00 pm, will feature a “devotional portion” (reading prayers and writings), an “administrative portion” (reporting news and items of interest), and a “social portion” (sharing of food). Attendees are invited to participate or just to observe. This is the third “Meet My Religious Neighbor” event of the semester, most of which feature “religions without sites.” (MMRN is co-programmed by CultureALL, the Des Moines Area Religious Council, and Interfaith Alliance of Iowa.)m, will feature several presentations, darshan (sacred viewing of a Jain tirthankara), aarti (sacred waving of flame), and Jain vegetarian “snacks.” This is the second “Meet My Religious Neighbor” event of the semester, most of which feature “religions without sites.” (MMRN is co-programmed by CultureALL, the Des Moines Area Religious Council, and Interfaith Alliance of Iowa.)

James “J.” Hughes Ph.D. is a bioethicist and sociologist who serves as the Associate Provost for the University of Massachusetts Boston (UMB), and as Senior Research Fellow at UMB’s Center for Applied Ethics. He holds a doctorate in Sociology from the University of Chicago where he taught bioethics at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. Since then, Dr. Hughes has taught health policy, bioethics, medical sociology and research methods at Northwestern University, the University of Connecticut, and Trinity College. Dr. Hughes is author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future (2004) and is co-editor of Surviving the Machine Age: Intelligent Technology and the Transformation of Human Work (2017). In 2005 Dr. Hughes co-founded the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) with Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, and since then has served as its Executive Director and Associate Editor of the Journal of Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Dr. Hughes speaks on medical ethics, health care policy and future studies worldwide.

Our tendency to attribute enduring, even eternal, existence to transitory and insubstantial phenomena is at the root of our psychology and our theology. This tendency leads us to see gods in nature and souls in people. Attributing essentialized binary genders to ourselves and the world is another attributional error when sexual dimporphism is an evolutionary accident and our gender identities are malleable. 

The Enlightenment philosophes started deconstructing these commonsense assumptions, and Enlightenment empiricism has challenged the existence of God, essentialized genders and the self. As these pre-scientific ways of seeing the world erode, the systems of power invested in their perpetuation are fighting back, for theocracy, patriarchy and “human nature.” The transgender and nonbinary movements are battlefronts because they advance the Enlightenment claim that technology should be used to adapt nature to the service of the liberal individual, a subject that transcends race, class, sex and gender. Freeing the liberal individual from biological constraints is also the goal of transhumanism’s campaign for morphological freedom. The opponents of morphological freedom assert an inviolable human nature, and believe it will be catastrophic and suicidal for humans to take control of their own evolution.

The central Buddhist insight is that liberation requires the deconstruction of all essentialized identities however, including the liberal individual. The final challenge to the Enlightenment’s transcendentalized individual is the accumulating evidence that there is no self and no soul. The Buddhist challenge isn’t to “save souls,” but to ask what we are trying to change into, what aspects of our self-centered natures we are willing to let go of in order to become better people. Can we imagine a collective transcendence for the human project into an increasingly long-lived, peaceful and prosperous future using both Skillful Views (social and psychological transformation) and Skillful Means (technologies of transformation)? Gender fluidity and moral enhancement technologies suggest how we may change “human nature” while technoprogressivism is the attempt to give this project moral and political shape.

Here is James Hughes’s lecture and powerpoint:

And here is Seth Villegas’s response to James Hughes’s lecture:

Speakers: David L. Weddle, Professor Emeritus of Religion, Colorado College; Karen Zwier, Lecturer in Philosophy, Iowa State University

Thursday, May 9th, 7:00 p.m.; Cowles Library Reading Room                                                                                       

The Comparison Project has come to the end of its two-year series on miracles, in which we have heard diverse perspectives from a wide range of disciplines. It is now time to face the question that has haunted the entire series: if a miracle occurs, what does it prove? This is the dreaded “so what?” question. Professors Weddle and Zwier propose this evening to engage the “so what?” question. Please join us in this final conversation on miracles.

David L. Weddle is Professor Emeritus of Religion at Colorado College where he taught courses in comparative religion, ethics, and Christian thought, and is the author of Miracles: Wonder and Meaning in World Religions (2010) and Sacrifice in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (2017).

Karen Zwier is a lecturer in philosophy at Iowa State University. Her research deals with philosophical and scientific methodology as well as metaphysics of science. Her areas of specialty include philosophy of causation, history and philosophy of physics, and science and religion.  

Video of lecture

https://vimeo.com/336241493

Please join us on Sunday, April 7th at 9:30 a.m. for a visit to St. Demetrius Serbian Orthodox Church (4655 NE 3rd St, Des Moines). Although the priest is ill and cannot perform the liturgy, lay members of the parish will be there to tell us about Serbain Orthodox Christianity in general and St. Demetrius’ Church in particular. Dress can be casual for this event.

Nehemia Polen, Professor of Jewish Thought, Hebrew College

Thursday, April 11^th, 7:00 p.m.

Sussman Theater, Olmsted Center, Drake University

The founder of Hasidism, Israel ben Eliezer (d. 1760), known as the Baal Shem Tov (“Master of the Good Name”) gained his fame as healer, shamanic adept, and charismatic master. To this day, Hasidic communities tell wondrous stories of their leaders, known as Rebbe or Tsaddik (saint, righteous person). Yet Hasidic sources display a curious ambivalence towards the miraculous, often disavowing the centrality and significance of the paranormal in Hasidic life and thought. This marginalization of the miraculous is often connected to a related theme: appreciation of the wondrous nature of everyday life.

Dr. Nehemia Polen is Professor of Jewish Thought at Boston’s Hebrew College. He is the author of numerous books, among which are The Holy Fire: The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto (Jason Aronson, 1994, 1999) and The Rebbe’s Daughter (Jewish Publication Society, 2002), recipient of a National Jewish Book Award. He is an ordained rabbi who has served a congregation for twenty-three years, and is a contributing commentator to My People’s Prayer Book, a multi-volume Siddur incorporating diverse perspectives on the liturgy (Jewish Lights). 

Dr. Patton Burchett, Assistant Professor, College of William & Mary

Thursday, March 28^th, 7:00 pm

Olmsted Center, Sussman Theater

This talk examines a series of miracle stories in the hagiographical literature of the Sufi and Hindu bhakti traditions of early modern north India in order to highlight some fascinating parallels between Sufi and Hindu bhakti religious attitudes. Dr. Burchett offers a provocative hypothesis: that the category of the “miracle”—broadly shared across the “Abrahamic” traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and defined in contradistinction to the category of “magic”—does not exist in the Hindu tradition until the influence of Islam on Hindu devotional communities in Mughal India. In exploring the miracles of Sufi and Hindu devotee-saints, this lecture investigates the role of ethics in categorizing different forms of wonder (e.g., as “miracle” versus “magic”) and examines the way that the specific narrative form of the miracle story often functions to cultivate virtues and ethical dispositions in its audiences.

Patton Burchett is Assistant Professor at the College of William & Mary. Prof. Burchett’s research focuses primarily on early modern devotional (bhakti) and tantric-yogic religiosity in north India. He is developing a new book project on yoga and the interrelations of magic, science, and religion in the rise of Indian and Western modernities. Burchett’s first book, A Genealogy of Devotion: Bhakti, Tantra, Yoga, and Sufism in North India, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press in May 2019.

Video of lecture