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Cynthia Fridlich's avatar

Yes, this book has made some folks think otherwise than provenance, manifest destiny, and dominion. Another nice book is “My Grandmother’s Hands.” It seems a lost ideal that animals are worthy of compassion and respect, at least in the CAFO industries and cruel caging practices and Amish Puppy Mills, etc. My chiropractor is Baptist, and, at least according to him, animals have no soul, ugh! He’s a fabulous person who shines a healer’s light, but after a certain prez was elected and the religious-right fervor was heating up, he brought his “religious right-leaning and dominance over women” into his business practice and risked his reputation in town. We still chat, but it’s so truncated and shallow now. His healing light still shines, but, it’s a stained relationship now.

We intuitively believe that we need connection not just with other people but with the soil, plants, etc. But if we romanticize Biblical texts and traditional values, we might lose this connection permanently.

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Cynthia Fridlich's avatar

Thank you for this! I’m always so grateful for book recommendations!

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Susan Campbell's avatar

As am I. This book explores species' various skills and talents and built-ins and it gives you a better understanding that we're equal, species to species, and as humans we shouldn't think we're all that special.

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Paul Ashton's avatar

When I was a kid I had a neighbor who would go on about animals having no soul. It used to upset me until my dog told me to ignore them. And speaking of thinking we’re special it seems that, for a lot of people, religion is more a conceit than it is a faith.

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Susan Campbell's avatar

I remember being told in Sunday school that when the Bible talked about the "souls" saved on Noah's ark, that didn't include the animals/birds/insects/whatnot. I remember thinking at the time that THAT couldn't be correct, because all my dogs were more soulful than some of the adults in my life. Your neighbor and my Sunday school teacher were wrong.

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Mary Ann Dimand's avatar

It's the *hubris* that stumps me.

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Rich Colbert's avatar

Here in our winter residence the Gullah people carry on their culture which includes braiding sweet grass. While driving you may pass road side stands that offer hand woven products. The history is rich and interesting. Not far from here in Georgetown, SC is the Gullah Museum which is on our list for places to visit. Oh and here is a fact learned from our time here. Rice was a huge cash crop for the plantation owners who enjoyed reaping profits as slaves provided free and excellent service in the mosquito infested rice fields - Africans were genetically immune to yellow fever making them more valuable than ever to their “masters” none of whom could have lasted a minute in the rice fields!

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Susan Campbell's avatar

Whoa.

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Melina Rudman's avatar

One of my favorite pieces of writing, right up there with the great Annie Dillard. Last June, as I lugged a suitcase up the sidewalk outside of Logan, I came across a young man sitting on a bench with a well-loved copy of the book open on his lap. As I passed I said, "Great book." He smiled and called after me, "This is the third time I have read it!" That says it all, I think.

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Susan Campbell's avatar

I'm just on my second time but I'm easily available for a third.

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Mary Ann Dimand's avatar

I worry a bit about leading with gratitude, since we Euro-types are so accustomed to individualistic commodification that gratitude can simply find a place in our tractional mindsets rather than oversetting them.

I suspect that Robin Wall Kimmerer's approach of following through the interconnections of biological systems, with humans in them, and doing so with wonder may be more promising. I don't know, though. I flop about between the glory and hope of how our world's entities talk with each other, on the one hand, and despair about how typically US humans reject thinking about systems on the grounds that donwanna.

(I suspect some influence from the think-it-to-manifest-it and not-stuck-in-the-reality-economy crowds.)

And maybe part of the rejection is that all that interconnection means that what we humans do changes the world, for good ***or*** for ill, a promise and a terror. (So use the seven-generations guideline, for Pete's sake!)

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Susan Campbell's avatar

I think I interpret gratitude as an attitude, not a "lemme just stop and count my blessings," though the way this is written I can see where it looks like that. I have started to think about it a lot more than I have in the past, and paying attention to species that don't look like me, and thinking about my footprint. That's what I drew from her book, but I guess we all take from the written word what we need.

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Cynthia Fridlich's avatar

The beauty of the written word is it’s seedness. It’s not the ink-black scratches on white paper transferring a writer’s intent and meaning directly into our brains untranslated; the eyes searching for meaning from the scratches are eyes aplenty. Her book asks US for the meaning her books inspire in us, like what will we be willing to learn to do , I don’t know, better? Seedness, btw, is my grandkid’s word.

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Susan Campbell's avatar

It's a great word.

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Mary Ann Dimand's avatar

We are on vacation in O'ahu. Yesterday we went out for dinner at the sort of restaurant people go to for Major Celebrations*, and the waiter asked what we were celebrating.

"The nature of the universe," I said idly. To my surprise, he was curious about what I meant.

So in a couple of installments I told him about the wonders of complexity and Jenna-structures we live amid, with the concrete examples of the US banking system, quantum entanglement, the widespread belief that our human cells structurally incorporate some viruses we have encountered as a species, and the durability of the Chinese empire.

I find it amazing that he chose to engage in this conversation, but he did really engage, and return for more.

* But/And the food was absolutely excellent.

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Susan Campbell's avatar

That's really cool!

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Mary Ann Dimand's avatar

I think you're fine. I don't trust *them*. :D

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Sharon Foster (CT)'s avatar

I'm reading it now. Beautiful book. It is a great tragedy of world history that instead of learning gratitude for the abundance of the lands they were colonizing in North America, the Europeans brought and imposed their own mean, stingy, greedy attitudes of scarcity.

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Susan Campbell's avatar

In our discussion, we talked about how different this country would look without the notion that we are to hold dominion over everything. That book kind of crept up on me.

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Sharon Foster (CT)'s avatar

There's one line, the first words of Psalm 24: The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein. But did the Christians take that to heart? No. They zeroed in on the word "dominion." And now we have a 500-year accretion of domination systems to reform/dismantle.

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Susan Campbell's avatar

Such a misinterpretation clogs rovers, destroys habitats and basically makes environmental havoc our default.

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Sharon Foster (CT)'s avatar

The other great tragedy is that the religion OF Jesus morphed into a religion ABOUT Jesus. So instead of dismantling those domination systems as he preached, the Church became just another domination system, even if it is one of the more benign ones in certain times and places.

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Susan Campbell's avatar

This is an incredibly smart take on this. I'm not sure there was ever an intention to build statutes to Jesus. I wonder if his message was meant more as a course correction...

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Sharon Foster (CT)'s avatar

I lifted that first sentence from either Marcus Borg or John Dominic Crossan, I can't recall which. I've been reading both.

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