Environment
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Cats don’t have names: Does Neil Gaiman’s black cat teach emptiness?
‘Please. What’s your name?’ Coraline asked the cat. ‘Look, I’m Coraline. OK?’ The cat yawned slowly, carefully, revealing a mouth and a tongue of astounding pinkness. ‘Cats don’t have names,’ it said. ‘No?’ said Coraline. ‘No,’ said the cat. ‘Now, you people have names. That’s because you don’t know who you are. We know who we are, so we don’t need names.’ Neil Gaiman, Coraline (2002), p. 42. Neil Gaiman’s brilliant book entitled Coraline. The reader trying to make sense of this article may ask why the character Coraline is talking to a cat, they may be in awe trying to understand how a cat can engage in conversation, or…
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Plant Worship to Planned Performances: Changing Human- Nature Relationship and Ritual Practices
Nature, a term freely used in multiple contexts and holds several meanings. The word nature is often defined or understood as the inherent quality of any particular thing. The Latin word natura is used to denote the essential constitution of the world. Since sustainable development poses a global challenge, interaction between human society and nature becomes an object of concern. The idea of a personified nature has given us several pictures; of a nature that speaks, interacts, and even takes revenge. Understanding the abstraction of nature in human minds is a complicated process. However, looking at the multiple manifestations of nature, without reducing it into a mere physical entity, gives…
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Health Crises, Medicine, and Religion
In 1862, a measles epidemic swept across Japan infecting more than 60% of people with a case fatality rate of almost 20% in some areas.[1] In response, people turned not only to the science of the day, but also to religion in their search for answers and remedies. Prints about measles known as hashika-e offered the general public advice on diet and lifestyle encouraging the afflicted to refrain from sexual intercourse and oily foods, for example. These documents simultaneously depicted deities such as Mugidono Daimyōjin (the god of wheat), whom people would attempt to ‘transfer the disease to…or…invoke…to lessen the severity of a case.’[2] In other words, religion and contemporary…
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Responding to the Cosmic Chorus: A Meditation on the Ecological Visions of Islamic and Hindu Theologies
Mortal dooms and dynasties are brief things, but beauty is indestructible and eternal, if its tabernacle be only a petal that is shed tomorrow…Inter arma silent flores [“In times of war, flowers fall silent”] is no truth; on the contrary, amid the crash of doom our sanity and survival more than ever depend on the strength with which we can listen to the still small voice that towers above the cannons, and cling to the little quiet things of life, the things that come and go and yet are always there, the inextinguishable lamps of God amid the disaster that man has made of his life. Reginald Farrer quoted in:…
