Becoming Gaia
Becoming Gaia: On the Threshold of Planetary Initiation by Sean Kelly addresses our living in end times—climate chaos, accelerating mass extinction, and signs of civilizational collapse drawing the Earth community into a planetary near-death experience. Yet these end times also mark the threshold of a new planetary identity in the making. Drawing on scholarship from […]
Maps of Time
Maps of Time by David Christian introduces a new way of looking at history from a perspective stretching from the beginning of time to the present day—world history on an unprecedented scale. Beginning with the Big Bang, Christian views the interaction of the natural world with more recent arrivals in flora and fauna, including human […]
The Rites of Passage
Arnold van Gennep’s groundbreaking 1909 anthropological masterwork fundamentally transformed how we understand human transitions by revealing the universal structure underlying life’s major passages—birth, puberty, marriage, parenthood, old age, and death—as involving three consistent ritual phases: separation, liminality, and incorporation. Van Gennep’s great insight was discerning that despite vast cultural differences, all societies create ceremonial frameworks […]