The author traces the growth of gods from the animism of hunter-gatherers (where spirits rule over natural phenomena) to the polytheism of chiefdoms and ancient states (where multiple gods govern every aspect of life). These gods are hardly paragons of right living; they are capricious and often cruel. Over millennia, these models give way to a hierarchy of gods, with a powerful sovereign in charge, and, later yet, to monolatry, in which a city-state or nation bows to a single god considered superior to all others.

Most of the book, however, is devoted to the evolution of God concepts within more familiar precincts of monotheism: the Hebrew and Christian Bibles and the Koran. In the archeology and textual criticism of modern scholars, which Wright cites, these scriptures seldom appear in chronological order. Read in the proper sequence, however, they reveal a record of change.

Much like Jack Miles’s “God: A Biography,’’ Wright’s narrative shows a “Yahweh’’ alternatively compassionate or vengeful, mercurial or wise. The God of the Hebrews takes a while to differentiate from the El of the Canaanites and the Baal of the Phoenicians. In doing so, his story gradually sheds remnants of polytheism; the god Pestilence, for instance, becomes mere pestilence. Under Persian influence, Abrahamic monotheism eventually shifts “from a nationalistic and exclusive theology’’ to “a more international and inclusive one.’’

In short, the Hebrew God shakes off his adolescent belligerence and assumes a kinder, gentler persona. While regarding the Jews as his favorite, this God presides benevolently over all the world’s people.

Wright charts a similar evolution in the chapters grouped under the title “The Invention of Christianity.’’ Mark, the earliest Gospel, is surprisingly devoid of the New Testament’s supposed hallmark, love. There are no beatitudes, no turning of the other cheek, no “love your enemy.’’ The neighbor you are obliged to love is defined narrowly, most likely one of your fellow followers of Jesus. Not until Matthew and Luke is love enlarged; the Good Samaritan does not appear until the last of the Gospels, Luke.

It was under St. Paul’s charismatic leadership that the fledgling Jesus movement was transformed into a vehicle of interethnic brotherly love. Wright’s description of Paul as an entrepreneur brilliant at expanding his Jesus “brand’’ throughout the polyglot Roman Empire may put off some Christians, but it provides a convincing account of why early Christianity was able to succeed among a Babel of competing deities.

In this Report the argument is set out in four chapters. Chapter One – Global Systems & Vulnerabilities – establishes the various influential processes and frames how they comprise dynamic and multiple shifts that may affect each other in a systemic manner. Chapter Two – Auto-Assemblages – examines the car system as a hybrid assemblage and outlines the principle processes that may produce a potentially new automobility assemblage, a post-car system. Chapter Three – A Digital Nexus – goes into more detail as to how we envision the ‘car’ assemblage shifting from a series to a nexus. This principally involves intelligent transport systems and related digital developments becoming embedded within networked infrastructures. Finally, Chapter Four – Post-Automobilities – engages with social implications and examines a range of social scenarios that may be necessary for a shift to a post-automobility ‘system’.”

Thus:

“Transport policies for the future are shifting towards providing capacity, safety, security, and data basing. This can be achieved through intelligent network infrastructures that interact with road vehicles and their users. Whilst this may appear as leading down the road to a ‘control society’, it may be an unintended outcome of how these technologies have become enmeshed within social practices. It is presently unclear whether these digital technologies will be used for benefit and gain or as part of clandestine and covert strategies.

Thus, car mobilities may become transformed from a series, or sequential platform that is only loosely connected to a social fabric of people, objects, environments, information, and mobility, into a nexus. This nexus will construct automobility futures into complex assemblages of networked structures, both natural and digital, that will combine individualised and social components into a multiplexing arrangement of interconnectivity and embodied movements. We refer to this as a transition to the digital nexus of post-automobility.”

2. Excerpt on Automobility

“‘Automobility’ is a hybrid assemblage, of humans (drivers, passengers, pedestrians) as well as machines, roads, buildings, signs and entire cultures of mobility with which it is intertwined (Thrift 1996: 282-84). What is key is not the ‘car’ as such but the system of these fluid interconnections since: ‘a car is not a car because of its physicality but because systems of provision and categories of things are “materialized” in a stable form’ that then we might say possesses very distinct affordances (Slater 2001: 6). It is necessary in any consideration of future automobility to frame this discourse within a ‘system assemblage’; a web of material interactions and networks that position the possibility for movement and constitutes an embedded environment that hosts the user. Whilst automobility is a system in which everyone is coerced into an intense flexibility, it also enforces certain relationships of dependence within the temporal, spatial, and geo-physical constraints that it itself generates.”

3. Car to Car Swarming Systems

Defining the new age is of course a very difficult thing, since to many different people it means different things, it has been appropriated by all kind of cults, and has of course become a permanent marketing concept in bookshops, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world.

Essential to the new age is in my view that it was a corrective reaction against an excessive rationalization and mechanization of western life, a reaction on the dissociation between desire and reason that is at the basis of Western civilization. As a reaction it was both necessary, and contained many exaggerated features. I would define it first of all as a general kind of sensibility that one can find in: alternative and complementary medicine, ecological sensibility, an openness to non-traditional spiritual paths be it Eastern or Western esoteric, alternative methods and lifestyles in the fields of education, architecture, communal living; an attention to both healing of the self and an attempt to re-enchant the world through connections with both the natural world and the world of subtle-spiritual experiences.

The flowering of the new age coincided with the political defeat of the 1968 movements, that resulted in a turning inward of many people who felt at the same time obliged to adapt to a world in which they could not recognize themselves, while attempting to nevertheless live their values, and change their life concretely, on a smaller scale, as individuals, families, or communities. The time in which it arose, the end of a long boom, coincided with the continuation of the mechanization and commodification of life in a global capitalist system, a loss of efficiency of the traditional social technologies of control (the institutional framework of school, army, prison, and the like), but especially in the traditional Western Christian traditions which were becoming empty shelves.

One of the first tangible benefits of the new age was to reintroduce the consciousness in the Western world, that spirituality was not a matter of belief, but one of personal experience, that the various traditions contained a vast array of psychotechnologies that could open up new vistas of being and experiencing. It created a possibility for many people to re-integrate this vast body of knowledge and experience, and in a way that individuals could experiment and choose their own combination, rather than following a conventional tradition.

It was also a vehicle to rediscover the dissociated aspects of Western man prior to 1968: the integration of the body, the use of groups with techniques to facilitate authentic communication without the social mask. It was in many ways what Freud would term a “regression in service of the ego”, a return to the repressed areas of the soma (bodily energies), the instinct, emotions, mind and consciousness. Unfortunately, because it proceeded from a total lack of experience, as well as had no grounding in tradition, it frequently stayed in that regressive mode, as a reaction, it was too anti-mind, and disdainful of the critical subjectivity that was one of the hard won features of the western tradition. But to paraphrase Lenin, it probably was a necessary infantile stage of development. In any case, for many it offered many avenues of integrative work on their selves, a positive orientation of self-work and change, in a otherwise dark period of negative social change.

In other ways, it was an heir to Utopian Socialism, given the seeming inability to change society as a whole, countless individuals starting changing their life concretely: first of all by abandoning a blind trust in the mechanistic approaches to the human body espoused by Western medicine; through leaving aside the knowledge-stuffing rote learning in education in view of regarding the child as a whole; and these kind of changes have made the world unrecognizable from what it was 30 years ago. Whatever the negative features of the neoliberal age, many institutions have become more humane, more egalitarian, more respectful, more attuned to the whole person. Individuals changed, institutions evolved, and many small scale communal experiments, even if many failed, yielded valuable learning experiences. To those who fear irrationality, I would answer that most of the people involved were from the top layers in terms of intelligence and education. In a time frame where the left disintegrated and many social acquisitions were undone, the new age sensibility was a guarantee that millions of individuals were continuing concrete efforts. In another important contribution, I see the new age sensibility as also responsible for having forged a new kind of human being that was more apt to survive in a knowledge-based network society.

Of course, now that we have seen the glass half full, it is necessary to attend the glass half empty. As we have said, the new age was reactionary in its exaggerated rejection of cognicentrism, it went often too far in rejecting the role of the mind and of critical intelligence. Instead of integrative, it was often regressive, a “liberation from below”, where selfish desire could reign unchecked.

It fell prey in many instances to cultism, mindless anti-modern reactions, extreme radicalism in food and medical matters that could not recognize anything positive in western science. Spiritually, it had often a rosy outlook, that served as a compensation for living through a dreary reality in which hyper-competition was in many ways degrading the quality of life.

Finally, being born itself in an age of hypercommerce, it didn’t take on the feudal trappings of the earlier spiritual movements, but the trappings of the market, and started functioning in many ways as a series of capitalist enterprises, following a market and a marketing logic, and from the point of view of the users, generating a consumerist attitude of pick and choose. It stayed into an interiorist mode of changing individuals, neglecting social change processes, and got recuperated by cognitive capitalism. Many of these trappings, which sometimes verged on extreme exploitation by scumbag gurus and cults, are now in my view incompatible with a authentic spirituality, which now must be open-ended and participative, and not based on a market model of for-paid experiences. In addition, we must now both reject cognicentrism, but also the regressions of the new age to pre-cognitive levels, and instead opt for an integrative understanding and development of soma-instinct-body-mind-consciousness, where each layer can develop transparently following its own logic, with critical subjectivity intact, but also without any dictatorship of the mind which supposes it already knows where we are heading in these processes of individual, organizational, and societal change. Following Ferrer’s critique in his book Revisioning Transpersonal Psychology, we must also reject viewing the spiritual in terms of individual experience and rather see it as a function of relationality

Critique of Spiritual Narcisssism and the existing interpretations of religious pluralism

A few marginal voices notwithstanding, the search for a common core, universal essence, or single metaphysical world behind the multiplicity of religious experiences and cosmologies can be regarded as over. Whether guided by the exclusivist intuitionism of traditionalism or the fideism of theological agendas, the outcome—and too often the intended goal—of such universalist projects was unambiguous: the privileging of one particular spiritual or religious system over all others. In addition to universalism, the other attempts to explain religious divergences have typically taken one of the three following routes: exclusivism (“my religion is the only true one, the rest are false”), inclusivism (“my religion is the most accurate or complete, the rest are lower or partial”), and ecumenical pluralism (“there may be real differences between our religions, but all lead ultimately to the same end”).

The many problems of religious exclusivism are well known. It easily fosters religious intolerance, fundamentalist tendencies, and prevents a reciprocal and symmetrical encounter with the other where divergent spiritual viewpoints may be regarded as enriching options or genuine alternatives. In the wake of the scope of contemporary theodiversity, the defense of the absolute cognitive superiority of one single tradition over all others is more dubious than ever. Inclusivist and ecumenically pluralist approaches suffer from similar difficulties in that they tend to conceal claims for the supremacy of one or another religious tradition, ultimately collapsing into the dogmatism of exclusivist stances. Consider, for example, the Dalai Lama’s defense of the need of a plurality of religions. While celebrating the existence of different religions to accommodate the diversity of human dispositions, he contends that final spiritual liberation can only be achieved through the emptiness practices of his own school of Tibetan Buddhism, implicitly situating all other spiritual choices as lower. In a way, the various ways we have approached religious diversity—exclusivism, inclusivism, and ecumenical pluralism—can be situated along a continuum ranging from more gross to more subtle forms of “spiritual narcissism,” which elevate one’s favored tradition or spiritual choice as superior. The bottom line is that, explicitly or implicitly, religious traditions have persistently looked down upon one another, each believing that their truth is more complete or final, and that their path is the only or most effective one to achieve full salvation or enlightenment. Let us now look at several types of religious pluralism that have been proposed in response to this disconcerting situation.

Insufficiency of Earlier Varieties of Religious Pluralism

Religious pluralism comes in many guises and fashions. Before suggesting a participatory remedy to our spiritual narcissism in dealing with religious difference, I critically review here four major types of religious pluralism: ecumenical, soteriological, postmodern, and metaphysical.

As we have seen, ecumenical pluralism admits genuine differences among religious beliefs and practices, but maintains that they all ultimately lead to the same end. The problem with this apparently tolerant stance is that, whenever its proponents describe such religious goal, they invariably do it in terms that favor one or another specific tradition (e.g., union with God, nondual liberation, and so forth). This is why ecumenical pluralism not only degenerates into exclusivist or inclusivist stances, but also trivializes the encounter with “the other”— after all, what’s the point of engaging in interfaith exchanges if we already know that we are all heading toward the same goal? The contradictions of pluralistic approaches that postulate an equivalent end-point for all traditions have been pointed out by students of religion for decades. A genuine religious pluralism, it is today widely accepted, needs to acknowledge the existence of alternative religious aims, and putting all religions on a single scale will not do it.

In response to these concerns, a number of scholars have proposed a soteriological pluralism that envisions a multiplicity of irreducible “salvations” associated with the various religious traditions. Due to their diverse ultimate visions of reality and personhood, religious traditions stress the cultivation of particular human potentials or competences (e.g., access to visionary worlds, mind/body integration, expansion of consciousness, transcendence of the body, and so forth), which naturally leads to distinct human transformations and states of freedom. A variant of this approach is the postulation of a limited number of independent but equiprimordial religious goals and conceptually possible ultimate realities, for example, theism (in its various forms), monistic nondualism (à la Advaita Vedanta), and process nondualism (such as Yogacara Buddhism’s). The soteriological approach to religious difference, however, remains agnostic about the ontological status of spiritual realities, being therefore pluralistic only at a phenomenological level (i.e., admitting different human spiritual fulfillments), but not at an ontological or metaphysical one (i.e., at the level of spiritual realities).

The combination of pluralism and metaphysical agnosticism is also a chief feature of the postmodern solution to the problem of conflicting truth claims in religion. The translation of religious realities into cultural-linguistic fabrications allows postmodern scholars to explain interreligious differences as the predictable upshot of the world’s various religious beliefs, practices, vocabularies, or language games. Postmodern pluralism denies or brackets the ontological status of the referents of religious language, which are usually seen as meaningless, obscure, or parasitic upon the despotic dogmatism of traditional religious metaphysics. Further, even if such spiritual realities were to exist, our human cognitive apparatus would only allow us to know our culturally and linguistically mediated experience of them. Postmodern pluralism recognizes a genuine plurality of religious goals, but at the cost of either stripping religious claims of any extra-linguistic veridicality or denying that we can know such truths even if they exist.

A notable exception to this trend is the metaphysical or deep pluralism advocated by some process theologians. Relying on Alfred North Whitehead’s distinction between “God’s unchanging Being” and “God’s changing Becoming,” this proposal defends the existence of two ontological or metaphysical religious ultimates to which the various traditions are geared: God, which corresponds to the Biblical Yaveh, the Buddhist Sambhogakaya, and Advaita Vedanta’s Saguna Brahman; and Creativity, which corresponds to Meister Eckhart’s Godhead, the Buddhist emptiness and Dharmakaya, and Advaita Vedanta’s Nirguna Brahman. A third possible ultimate, the cosmos itself, is at times added in connection to Taoism and indigenous spiritualities that venerate the sacredness of the natural world. In addition to operating within a theistic framework adverse to many traditions, however, deep pluralism not only establishes highly dubious equivalencies among religious goals (e.g., Buddhist emptiness and Advaita’s Nirguna Brahman), but also forces the rich diversity of religious ultimates into the arguably Procrustean molds of God’s “unchanging Being” and “changing Becoming.”

The co-creation hypothesis as solution to diversity

“Can we take the plurality of religions seriously today without reducing them to either cultural-linguistic by-products or incomplete facets of a single spiritual truth or universe? I believe that we can and in the anthology I recently co-edited with Jacob H. Sherman, The Participatory Turn: Spirituality, Mysticism, Religious Studies (SUNY Press, 2008), we are calling this third way possible the “participatory turn” in the study of religion and spirituality.

Briefly, the participatory turn argues for an understanding of the sacred that approaches religious phenomena, experiences, and insights as cocreated events. Such events can engage the entire range of human faculties (e.g., rational, imaginal, somatic, aesthetic, contemplative, and so forth) with the creative unfolding of reality or the mystery in the enactment—or “bringing forth”—of ontologically rich religious worlds. Put somewhat differently, we suggest that religious and spiritual phenomena are “participatory” in the sense that they can emerge from the interaction of all human attributes and a creative spiritual power or dynamism of life. More specifically, we propose that religious worlds and phenomena, such as the Kabbalistic four realms, the various Buddhist cosmologies, or Teresa’s seven mansions, come into existence out of a process of participatory cocreation between human multidimensional cognition and the generative force of life and/or the spirit.

But, how far are we willing to go in affirming the cocreative role of the human in spiritual matters? To be sure, most scholars may be today ready to allow that particular spiritual states (e.g., the Buddhist jhanas, Teresa’s mansions, or the various yogi samadhis), spiritual visions (e.g., Ezekiel’s Divine Chariot, Hildegard’s visionary experience of the Trinity, or Black Elk’s Great Vision), and spiritual landscapes or cosmologies (e.g., the Buddha lands, the Heavenly Halls of Merkavah mysticism, or the diverse astral domains posited by Western esoteric schools) are largely or entirely constructed. Nevertheless, I suspect that many religious scholars and practitioners may feel more reticent in the case of spiritual entities (such as the Tibetan daikinis, the Christian angels, or the various Gods and Goddesses of the Hindu pantheon) and, in particular, in the case of ultimate principles and personae (such as the Biblical Yaveh, the Buddhist sunyata, or the Hindu Brahman). Would not accepting their cocreated nature undermine not only the claims of most traditions, but also the very ontological autonomy and integrity of the mystery itself? Response: Given the rich variety of incompatible spiritual ultimates and the contradictions involved in any conciliatory strategy, I submit that it is only by promoting the cocreative role of human cognition to the very heart and summit of each spiritual universe that we can preserve the ultimate unity of the mystery—otherwise we would be facing the arguably equally unsatisfactory alternative of having to either reduce spiritual universes to fabrications of the human imagination or posit an indefinite number of isolated spiritual universes. By conceiving spiritual universes and ultimates as the outcome of a process of participatory cocreation between human multidimensional cognition and an undetermined spiritual power, however, we rescue the ultimate unity of the mystery while simultaneously affirming its ontological richness and overcoming the reductionisms of cultural-linguistic, psychological, and biologically naturalistic explanations of religion.

What I am proposing here, then, is that different spiritual ultimates can be cocreated through intentional or spontaneous participation in a dynamic and undetermined mystery, spiritual power, and/or generative force of life or reality. This participatory perspective does not contend that there are two, three, or any limited quantity of pregiven spiritual ultimates, but rather that the radical openness, interrelatedness, and creativity of the mystery and/or the cosmos allows for the participatory cocreation of an indefinite number of self-disclosures of reality and corresponding religious worlds. These worlds are not statically closed but fundamentally dynamic and open to the continued transformation resulting (at least in part) from the creative impact of human visionary imagination and religious endeavors.

In the context of the dilemmas posed by religious pluralism, one of the advantages of a participatory account of religious knowing is that it frees religious thinking from the presupposition of a single, predetermined ultimate reality that binds it to reductionistic, exclusivist, or dogmatic formulations. Once we do away with this assumption, on the one hand, and recognize the ontologically creative role of spiritual cognition, on the other, the multiplicity of religious truth claims stops being a source of metaphysical agnosticism and becomes entirely natural, perhaps even essential. If we choose to see the various spiritual ultimates not as competing to match a pregiven spiritual referent but as creative transformations of an undetermined mystery, then the conflict over claims of alternative religious truths vanishes like a mirage. Rather than being a source of conflict or a cause for considerate tolerance, the diversity of spiritual truths and cosmologies becomes a reason for wonder and celebration—wonder inspired by the inexhaustible creative power of the mystery and celebration of our participatory role in such creativity, as well as of the emerging possibilities for mutual enrichment that arise out of the encounter of traditions. In short, a participatory approach to religion seek to enact with body, mind, heart, and consciousness a creative spirituality that lets a thousand spiritual flowers bloom.

Although this may at first sound like a rather “anything goes” approach to religious claims, I hold to the contrary that recognizing a diversity of cocreated religious worlds in fact asks us to be more perspicuous in discerning their differences and merits. Because such worlds are not simply given but involve us as agents and cocreators, we are not off the ethical hook where religion is concerned but instead inevitably make cosmo-political and moral choices in all our religious actions.

How can we evaluate religions in the context of co-creation?

This does not mean that we cannot discriminate between more evocative, skillful, or sophisticated artifacts.

Whereas the participatory turn renders meaningless the postulation of qualitative distinctions among traditions according to a priori doctrines or a prearranged hierarchy of spiritual insights, these comparative grounds can be sought in a variety of practical fruits (existential, cognitive, emotional, interpersonal), perhaps anchored around two basic orientations: the egocentrism test (i.e., to what extent does a spiritual tradition, path, or practice free its practitioners from gross and subtle forms of narcissism and self-centeredness?) and the dissociation test (i.e., to what extent does a spiritual tradition, path, or practice foster the integrated blossoming of all dimensions of the person?). As I see it, this approach invites a more nuanced, contextual, and complex evaluation of religious claims based on the recognition that traditions, like human beings, are likely to be both “higher” and “lower” in relation to one another, but in different regards (e.g., fostering contemplative competences, ecological awareness, mind/body integration, and so forth). It is important then not to understand the ideal of a reciprocal and symmetrical encounter among traditions in terms of a trivializing or relativistic egalitarianism. By contrast, a truly symmetrical encounter can only take place when traditions open themselves to teach and be taught, fertilize and be fertilized, transform and be transformed.

Two important qualifications need to be made about these suggested guidelines. The first relates to the fact that some spiritual paths and liberations may be more adequate for different psychological and cultural dispositions (as well as for the same individual at distinct developmental junctures), but this does not make them universally superior or inferior. The well-known four yogas of Hinduism (reflection, devotion, action, and experimentation) come quickly to mind in this regard, as do other spiritual typologies that can be found in other traditions. The second qualification refers to the complex difficulties inherent in any proposal of cross-cultural criteria for religious truth. It should be obvious, for example, that my emphasis on the overcoming of narcissism and self-centeredness, although arguably central to most spiritual traditions, may not be shared by all. Even more poignantly, it is likely that most religious traditions would not rank too highly in terms of the dissociation test; for example, gross or subtle forms of repression, control, or strict regulation of the human body and its vital/sexual energies (versus the promotion of their autonomous maturation, integration, and participation in spiritual knowing) are rather the norm in most past and present contemplative endeavors.

The need for embodied spirituality

The embodied and integrative impetus of the participatory turn is foundational for the development of a participatory critical theory of religion. From a participatory standpoint, the history of religions can be read, in part, as a story of the joys and sorrows of human dissociation. From ascetically enacted mystical ecstasies to world-denying monistic realizations, and from heart-expanding sexual sublimation to the moral struggles (and failures) of ancient and modern mystics and spiritual teachers, human spirituality has been characterized by an overriding impulse toward a liberation of consciousness that has too often taken place at the cost of the underdevelopment, subordination, or control of essential human attributes such as the body or sexuality. Even contemporary religious leaders and teachers across traditions tend to display an uneven development that arguably reflects this generalized spiritual bias; for example, high level cognitive and spiritual functioning combined with ethically conventional or even dysfunctional interpersonal, emotional, or sexual behavior.

Furthermore, it is likely that many past and present spiritual visions are to some extent the product of dissociated ways of knowing—ways that emerge predominantly from accessing certain forms of transcendent consciousness but in disconnection from more immanent spiritual sources. For example, spiritual visions that hold that body and world are ultimately illusory (or lower, or impure, or a hindrance to spiritual liberation) arguably derive from states of being in which the sense of self mainly or exclusively identifies with subtle energies of consciousness, getting uprooted from the body and immanent spiritual life. From this existential stance, it is understandable, and perhaps inevitable, that both body and world are seen as illusory or defective. In contrast, when our somatic and vital worlds are invited to participate in our spiritual lives, making our sense of identity permeable to not only transcendent awareness but also immanent spiritual energies, then body and world become spiritually significant realities that are recognized as crucial for human and cosmic spiritual fruition.

This account does not seek to excoriate past spiritualities, which may have been at times—though by no means always—perfectly legitimate and perhaps even necessary in their particular times and contexts, but merely to highlight the historical rarity of a fully embodied or integrative spirituality. At any rate, a participatory approach to spirituality and religion needs to be critical of oppressive, repressive, and dissociative religious beliefs, attitudes, practices, and institutional dynamics.

Conclusion:Spiritual Individuation in a Common Spiritual Family

Let me conclude this essay with some reflections on the future of world religion and spirituality.

Briefly, to embrace our participatory role in religious knowing may lead to a shift from searching for a global spirituality organized around a single ultimate vision to recognizing an already existent spiritual human family that branches out from the same creative root. Traditions may then be able to find their longed-for unity not so much in a single spiritual megasystem or global vision, but in their common roots—that is, in that deep bond constituted by the undetermined dimension of the mystery (or the generative power of life, if one prefers more naturalistic terms) in which all traditions participate in the cocreation of their spiritual insights and cosmologies.

Like members of a healthy family, religious people may then stop attempting to impose their particular beliefs on others and might instead become a supportive and enriching force for the “spiritual individuation” of other practitioners, both within and outside their traditions. This mutual empowerment of spiritual creativity may lead to the emergence of not only a rich variety of coherent spiritual perspectives that can potentially be equally aligned to the mystery, but also a human community formed by fully differentiated spiritual individuals. Situated at the creative nexus of immanent and transcendent spiritual energies, spiritually individuated persons might become unique embodiments of the mystery capable of cocreating novel spiritual understandings, practices, and even expanded states of freedom. If we accept this approach, it is plausible to conjecture that our religious future may bear witness to a greater than ever plurality of creative visionary and existential spiritual developments. This account would be consistent with a view of the mystery, the cosmos, and/or spirit as moving from a primordial state of undifferentiated unity towards one of infinite differentiation-in-communion.

The affirmation of our shared spiritual family may be accompanied by the search for a common—nonabsolutist and contextually sensitive—global ethics. It is important to stress that this global ethics cannot arise out of our highly ambiguous moral religious past but needs to be forged in the fire of contemporary interreligious dialogue and cooperative spiritual inquiry. In other words, it is likely that any future global ethics will not be grounded in our past spiritual history but in our critical reflection on such history in the context of our present-day moral intuitions (for example, about the pitfalls of religious dogmatism, fanaticism, narcissism, and dissociation). Besides its obvious relevance for regulating cross-cultural and interfaith conflicts, the adoption of a global ethics may be a crucial step in bringing about the mutual respect and openness among practitioners necessary for sustaining and invigorating both their common roots and their individual spiritual blossoming.

We also delve into the interpersonal truths behind the 4 noble truths, especially as they relate to interpersonal suffering and hunger, and see how interpersonal meditation is one way to become free both personally and relationally.

This personal transcendence is typically conceived in terms that evoke the customary omni-predicates of theology, transfiguring them into super-predicates that the futurological faithful personally identify with, but proselytize in the form of “predictions” of imaginary technodevelopmental outcomes. Nevertheless, superlativity in my view is a literary genre more than a research program. It relies for its force and intelligibility on the citation of other, specifically theological/ wish-fulfillment/ transcendentalizing discourses, more than it does on proper technoscience when all is said and done. It is a way of framing a constellation of descriptions mistaken for facts, and embedding them into a narrative that solicits personal identification, which then forms the basis for moralizing forms of sub(cult)ural advocacy.

The three super-predicates, recall, are superintelligence, superlongevity, and superabundance, and they correlate to the three theological omni-predicates — omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence. But like the avowed articles of faith of the omni-predicates with which they are correlated, these super-predicates are ultimately incapable of functioning as factual assertions at all, they are self-consuming quasi-factual placeholders for the brute assertion of faith itself. Indeed, superlative aspirations are conceptually confused to the point of illegibility, and their advocacy amounts to what is essentially a faith-based initiative.

But culture is not deification — technoscience will never purchase omni-predication, omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence — and never will some robotic deployment of superlative technique deliver the secularized analogues to the damaging daydream of a deity the Robot Cultists are indulging in, superintelligence, superlongevity, and the circumvention via superabundance of the impasse of stakeholder politics in a world shared with a diversity of peers.

Prostheses are just culture. Technology is just the prosthetic elaboration of agency. Agency is our effort to achieve and maintain social legibility, accomplish ends, and make sense of our lives in a diverse abiding material world that both enables and frustrates us in this. Freedom is our word for that experience. Freedom cannot be reduced to instrumentality, what we want of our technique and what we make of it is conditioned fundamentally by its play in an absolutely unpredictable interminable diversity of peers and their works.

There is no “overcoming” to be had of these limits, however many present limits and customs we overturn, inasmuch as finitude as such is literally the constitutive condition of the very experience of freedom we cherish. The superlative futurologists would idiotically obliterate freedom in their clumsy wrongheaded infantile wish-fulfillment fantasy of a toypile so high it reaches Heaven, of an endlessly amplified instrumental power that transcends freedom and delivers superlative variations on an omnipredicated godhead.

Each of the super-predicates of superlative discourse amounts to a personal investment in a stealthy article of faith proffered up as endlessly-deferred scientific “predictions.” Confronted with such superlative utterances it is entirely beside the point to indulge in what appear to be “technical” disputes about the validity of the scientific claims that are hyperbolized into rationales for superlative articles of faith or to debate technodevelopmental timelines for superlative “outcomes.” To indulge superlative futurologists in these preferred arguments is as little scientific as debating the number of angels who can dance on a pin-head with a monk or pouring over Nostradamus with some disasterbatory enthusiast to “determine” the exact date the world will end.

When Christianity became the state religion of the Roman empire, the early Christian teachings on land were overtaken by the Roman land laws of “dominium” - a legalization of property in land originally obtained by conquest and plunder. A largely corrupted Christianity, uprooted from its early teachings on land ownership, too often went hand in hand with the exploitation and degradation of centuries of colonial conquests. A statement by the great South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu addressed this point in a succinct and profound manner. He said, “When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.”[10]

Charles Avila, in his profoundly important book entitled Ownership: Early Christian Teachings, explored the early church fathers’ view of property rights in land. He contrasted these teachings to Roman property rights law. In his chapter on “The Concept of Ownership” Avila states:

The concentration of property in private hands began very early in Rome and was indeed based on the foundational and legitimizing idea of absolute and exclusive individual ownership in land. This was the same idea which would come to form the basis of the slave-owning, the feudal, and the capitalist (including the pseudo-socialist, or state-capitalist) economic systems successively. Modern civilization has not yet discarded this antiquated ownership concept, which was originally derived from ancient Rome. In fact, it seems to us, this is one of the main roots of the present global crisis, in which the rich become richer because the poor become poorer.[11]

Avila further noted that “the distinction in legal terminology between “real” and “personal” property is the survival in words of an ancient real distinction between property held in both theory and practice as common by its very nature and property which was the fruit of one’s labor.”[12] Avila said that modern social thinkers

- advocate the promotion of social justice without stopping to think that individual ownership of nature’s bounty might be socially unjust in itself. And yet patristic thought insisted long ago that there can be no real justice, or abolition of poverty, if the koina, the common natural elements of production, are appropriated in ownership by individuals.[13]

Here are a few Patristic period quotes on land ownership that Avila compiled in his book:

Ambrose: How far, O ye rich, do you push your mad desires? Shall ye alone dwell upon the earth? Why do you cast out all the fellow sharers of nature and claim it all for yourselves? The earth was made in common for all. Why do you arrogate to yourselves, exclusive right to the soil?

St. George the Great (Pope 590 - 604) rebuked the Romans when he said: They wrongfully think they are innocent who claim for themselves the common gift of God.

Clement of Alexandria: (The functions of property) -”to be shared,” “to minister to” and serve “the welfare of all”; “not for personal advantage as being entirely one’s own” but “for those in need”; “to achieve autarkeia” and “to foster koinonia” - constitute the very essence of Clement’s view of property.

St. John Chrystostom: God in the beginning did not make one man rich and another poor; nor did he afterwards take and show to anyone treasures of gold, and deny to the others the right of searching for it; rather he left the earth free to all alike. Why then, if it is common, have you so many acres of land, while your neighbor has not a portion of it?

Augustine: He (according to Avila’s research) saw that the poor are poor because they have been deprived by the propertied few of the wealth that should belong to all. He laid the blame for this unjust situation squarely on the doorstep of an absolutist and exclusivist legal right of private ownership. He reminded his audience that they were all “made from one mud” and sustained “on one earth” under the same natural conditions, having the same essence and called to the same destiny. He rejected the legalized status quo as inappropriate for human living. Holding that legal arrangements of property rights were of human origin, he asserted that they should be changed, in theory and in practice, in function of a faith-informed ethic based on the true meaning of ownership.

Basil the Great: He saw that a privileged few were exceedingly rich, ostentatious, and powerful, inasmuch as wealth, particularly the wealth-producing resource, land, was concentrated in the hands of the few. He taught a philosophy of ownership based on the view that God was Father and giver and Provider for all, and that therefore a few must cease stealing the food-producing resources that God had destined for the use of all.

Basil admits a certain right of laborers to the product of their labor but asks the landlords by what right they exercise ownership over their vast estates: “Which things, tell me, are yours? Whence have you brought them into being?” Whatever you have produced, or brought into being, may justly be yours. However, it is land that has made the landlords rich, and land is not something they have brought into being.” Speaking to the rich Basil said:

You are like one occupying a place in a theatre, who should prohibit others from entering, treating that as one’s own which was designed for the common use of all…. If each one would take that which is sufficient for one’s needs, leaving what is in excess to those in distress, no one would be rich, no one poor. Did you not come naked from the womb? Will you not return naked into the earth?[14]

Jesus pointed to Old Testament teachings regarding land ethics. According to some contemporary theologians, one of the tasks of the mission of Jesus was to restore the original intent of the Jubilee. In Luke 4:18 (by way of Isaiah 61:1-3): He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.. to proclaim release of captives.. To set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.

As theologian Walter Brueggeman explains in “Land: The Foundation of Humanness”[15], the “acceptable year” is the year of the Jubilee when the land was to be returned to the original holders. The “release of captives” is the release of debt slaves who had lost their land because they could not pay the mortgage. A crucial aspect of Jesus’ mission was the reassertion of the land rights of the poor and displaced.

The early Christian land ethic echoed Old Testament teachings concerning land rights. Hear these voices anew:

The land must not be sold beyond reclaim, for the land is Mine; you are but strangers resident with me. - Lev. 25:23

The profit of the earth is for all. - Eccles. 5:9

Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place. - Isaiah 5:8

Restore, I pray you, to them even this day, their lands, their vineyards, their olive yards, and their houses. - Nehemiah 5:11
During the 15th century and several centuries thereafter, the “commons” (land that had always been available for free use by the community) were enclosed by the wealthy or powerful for private use only. This accelerated the rise of the market economy, for without land, peasants had to survive by their wits and their abilities to manufacture. The emerging economy which used money as a primary medium of exchange opened up an opportunity for the landless to acquire land - they could now buy it. But working to accumulate enough wealth to buy land, instead of asserting an inherent human birthright to the earth, is akin to a slave’s saving enough money, by cleverness, skill and extra hard effort, to buy him or herself into freedom.

We must not forget that mainstream institutionalized Christianity once promulgated the doctrine that the right of some humans to hold other humans as slaves was encoded in the Bible. After much struggle and centuries of suffering, it gradually dawned on the majority of people that slavery was unjust and it was abolished. A similar awakening regarding the land problem lies in our future, hopefully the near future. The vision for a just land ethic was held by several great sages of our own recent history. Their statements could be useful to us today.

Thomas Jefferson - The earth is given as a common stock for men to labor and live on.

Abraham Lincoln - The land, the earth God gave to man for his home, sustenance, and support, should never be the possession of any man, corporation, society, or unfriendly government, any more than the air or water, if as much. An individual, company, or enterprise should hold no more than is required for their home and sustenance. All that is not used should be held for the free use of every family to make homesteads, and to hold them as long as they are so occupied.

Henry George - Our primary social adjustment is a denial of justice. In allowing one man to own the land on which and from which other men must live, we have made them his bondsmen in a degree which increases as material progress goes on. This is the subtle alchemy that in ways they do not realize is extracting from the masses in every civilized country the fruits of their weary toil; that is instituting a harder and more hopeless slavery in place of that which has been destroyed; that is bringing political despotism out of political freedom, and must soon transmute democratic institutions into anarchy.

Avila, again in Ownership: Early Christian Teachings, wrote:

On first reading Henry George (Progress and Poverty) almost twenty years ago when doing research for this volume, I was particularly struck by the similarity of his arguments, and even analogies, to those of the fourth century Christian philosophers on the topic of land ownership.[16]

Henry George, the great American political economist and land rights philosopher (1839-1897), eloquently confronted the enigma of the wealth gap in his masterwork Progress and Poverty and set forth both an ethical and practical method for holding and sharing the land as a sacred trust for all. He made a clear distinction between property in land and property in wealth produced by labor on land. He said that private property in human made wealth belonged to the producer and that the state should not tax wealth produced by human labor.

George said:

- To abolish these taxes would be to lift the whole enormous weight of taxation from productive industry. The needle of the seamstress and the great manufactory; the cart-horse and the locomotive; the fishing boat and the steamship; the farmer’s plow and the merchant’s stock, would be alike untaxed. All would be free to make or to save, to buy or to sell, unfined by taxes, un-annoyed by the tax-gatherer. Instead of saying to the producer, as it does now, “The more you add to the general wealth the more shall you be taxed!” the state would say to the producer,

- “Be as industrious, as thrifty, as enterprising as you choose, you shall have your full reward! You shall not be fined for making two blades of grass grow where one grew before; you shall not be taxed for adding to the aggregate wealth.[17]

In an economic system such as ours which uses money as a medium of exchange, land and resources come to have monetary value. In asserting that the gifts of nature are common property and should be equitably shared by all, George saw that in a just society the ownership of land and natural resources would be conditional upon the cash payment to all of a fairly assessed tax, or land rent, for the exclusive right to God’s gifts. Thus the collection of land rent for the community as a whole would replace the taxation of productive endeavors. Those with more and/or better located land would pay more into the common fund, while those with little or no land would pay much less or nothing at all.

As George explained it:

…the value of land is at the beginning of society nothing, but as society develops by the increase of population and the advance of the arts, it becomes greater and greater. In every civilized country, even the newest, the value of the land taken as a whole is sufficient to bear the entire expenses of government. In the better developed countries it is much more than sufficient. Hence it will not be enough merely to place all taxes upon the value of land. It will be necessary, where rent exceeds the present governmental revenues, commensurately to increase the amount demanded in taxation, and to continue this increase as society progresses and rent advances.[18]

The author of Common Sense was onto the same idea when he said:

Men did not make the earth…It is the value of the improvement only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property…Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds. - Tom Paine

Enormous sums are currently accruing as unearned income to a relatively few individuals, families and corporations who are holding large amounts of land, very valuable and well-located land, and natural resources as their own exclusive private property. These enormous land values and resource rents are also accruing as unearned income to banks holding mortgages based on exploitative compound interest rates. It may be of interest to note that the word “mortgage” means “dead hand.” Truly, when one must work so many years of ones life to pay off a mortgage, one productive hand is as if dead in terms of producing for oneself, as the labor of that hand pays the mortgage. For the 33% of citizens (40 million people) in the United States who are renters, there is not even equity ownership to look forward to after a life of labor. For the more than three million homeless people in American and the multi-millions who are homeless around the world, what Henry George said in 1879 holds true today:

- Our primary social adjustment is a denial of justice. In allowing one man to own the land on which and from which other men must live, we have made them his bondsmen in a degree which increases as material progress goes on.[19]

Not only is the land ethic of Old and New Testament prophets and Henry George virtually the same, the policy approach of “resource rent for revenue” also known as “land or site value taxation” has its corollary in the approach called for by the ancient rabbis in their discussions about the finer and little known details of Jubilee.

Talmudic rabbinical discussions considered how fairly to partition the land of Canaan among the tribes under Joshua. Those with poorer land were to be given more acreage and those with more fertile land would be given less. As for land disadvantageously situated, the adjustment was to be made by money; that is to say, those holding land nearer the city (Jerusalem) should pay into the common treasury the estimated excess of value pertaining to it by reason of its superior situation, while those holding land of less value, by reason of its distance from the city, would receive from the treasury a money compensation. Upon the more valuable holdings was to be imposed a tax, or lease fee, the measure of which was the excess of their respective values over a given standard, and the fund thus created was to be paid out in due proportions to those whose holdings were in less favorable locations. In this, then we see affirmed the doctrine that natural advantages are common property, and may not be diverted to private gain.[20]

The early Christians were attacked and persecuted and the Christian land justice teachings were undermined by Roman law. Similarly, there was a great movement to discredit the teachings of Henry George. Pope Leo XIII issued the Rerum Novarum Encyclical in 1891 which propounded an exclusivist right to private property in land, exhorting those without land to work harder, longer and smarter to save money from which to buy land.[21] Money from vested interests poured into the University of Chicago, Columbia University and other emerging schools of economics to thwart and obscure the understanding and the solution to the land problem and the wealth divide. Academics were paid to undermine Georgist economics which had followed in the classical tradition and to instead develop an approach to economics which minimized the contribution of nature’s gifts to the production process. Land, the term in classical economics which denotes all gifts of nature, was made a secondary factor, a mere subset of capital. The two major factors became Labor and Capital. The intellectual crime of the century - the neoliberal economics paradigm - has predominated in the field of economics ever since.[22]

In order to take back ownership of what they feel to be their national legacy of yoga, India has given a team of 200 experts the task of assembling a complete catalog of yoga poses and ancient yogic texts. This reference guide is called the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, and so far 600 yoga poses have been officially recorded in it, with about 1,000 to go. By creating this detailed catalog, the Indian government hopes to put an end to Westerners staking legal (and profitable) ownership claims on yoga. It’s unclear whether this bold move will give India the power to retroactively affect yoga-related patents already in existence, or whether it will only entitle them to deflect new patents from here on out.

Yes, yoga has its origins in India, but the manner in which it’s practiced today in the West is a 95%-new incarnation that hasn’t existed for more than a generation or two. T. Krishnamacharya, the highly-respected “grandfather” of Hatha Yoga who was the first person to teach a form of yoga that we would vaguely recognize today, lived from 1888 until 1989.

In other words, yoga as we know it in the West is a modern invention. Heck, the yoga mat, the #1 indispensible tool for anyone’s yoga practice, wasn’t even invented until the 1980’s or so…

Therefore, we get a little tired of hearing that ubiquitous, shaky claim that yoga is 5,000 years old. As though what we do today on bright purple yoga mats in hardwood floor-lined rooms with blocks, straps, and blankets in tow is really anything close to what people in India did back in the year 3,000 BCE… Yeah, right!

We can’t think of a more beneficial practice for your body, mind, or soul than yoga. But it’s not because it’s ancient. It’s because it’s an intelligently-designed system for our modern world, and it was designed by one man in the early 1900’s.

The dominant messages in the U.S. economy are “you are on your own” and “some people are going to be left behind.” Countering this isn’t easy. For many, talking about their economic anxiety and asking for help is difficult and shaming. But to survive the coming period of uncertainty, we must regain use of our mutual-aid muscles, many of which have atrophied from lack of use.

As the economic crisis deepens, our churches are places where people can come together—not only to share one another’s concerns, but as centers of education, support, and social action. Organizers see common security clubs as one way to facilitate this work in congregations, as well as in union locals, women’s groups, and in other civic and social groups.

Indeed, for a growing number of faith communities, the economic crisis is a catalyst for action and spiritual reflection, a chance to consider what is most vital. “The church has a pastoral and prophetic role around this economic crisis,” said Rev. Cecilia Kingman, pastor of a church in Edmonds, Washington, that is piloting a common security club. “Most of us feel the economy is something that acts on us. We need to find our voice and agency—to realize we can act to make the economy more just.”

The common security club model was born out of work done in the last few years by people struggling with overwhelming indebtedness. Participants spend some time discussing the root causes of the economic crisis, drawing on readings and materials provided by the network. But they mostly focus on what they can do together to increase their economic security and press for policy changes.

As theologian Walter Brueggemann writes we need to shift from “autonomy to covenantal existence, from anxiety to divine abundance, and from acquisitive greed to neighborly generosity.” Common security club participants are experimenting with ways to make the practical, political, and spiritual changes this entails.

Clubs can be autonomous or affiliated with an existing institution, secular or religious. The ideal size is 10 to 20 adults who make a commitment to an initial five meetings with a facilitator. Clubs then decide whether to continue meeting and self-manage. Starter sessions have been developed and include “The Roots of the Economic Crisis,” “Personal Re sponses to Economic and Ecological Change,” “Things We Can Do Together,” and “Actions to Transform the Economy.”

Among the things “we can do together,” the clubs examine stories and examples of various economic and mutual aid activities. These have included teaming up to help each other weatherize their homes, helping each other rework their personal budgets and reduce debt, and forming food-buying clubs. Faith-based groups weave together reflection, prayer, and action.

Excellence in PPM invites passionate dialogue while remaining hospitable, charitable, and beneficial to all participants. Millennia Awards are given to PPM communities which bridge superficial cultural and religious divides - exploring commonality as much as difference; maintaining fresh, creative, missional formats accessible and relevant to a diverse audience; remaining sensitive to our shared humanity and common need for grace as we learn and grow together.

Wikipedia on Participatory Media. “Participatory media are social media whose value and power derives from the active participation of many people.”

2006 Millennia Award Recipients: zoecarnate, nextreformation, tallskinnykiwi, scot mcknight, lowercasepeople, theooze

2007 Millennia Award Recipients: today at the mission, the kindlings muse, a living alternative, naked pastor, mark van steenwyk, next wave