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This webinar will be devoted to understanding enchantment – first and foremost, wonder – as a fundamental human experience. We shall consider its chief characteristics, such as what Max Weber called ‘concrete magic’, and its dynamics, including the realisation of moment and place. Then we turn to the truths enchantment can show us. These have significant implications for our further understanding of life, including ourselves. In particular, they undermine any foundational split between the spiritual or psychological on the one hand, and the material on the other.
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While Covid-19 has distracted us from wider environmental issues, it has reminded us of our interconnectedness with the web of life and the dangers of our exploitative relationship with the natural world. In this webinar, leading UK environmentalist Jonathon Porritt will discuss the urgency of the challenge of climate change in view of political inertia and systemic short-termism. As solar energy pioneer Hermann Scheer observed: instead of ‘Think Globally, Act Locally’, the reality is ‘Think Globally, Postpone Nationally’. This will no longer measure up if it ever did.
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Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a pivotal text whose story haunts us today. Published in 1819, the spirit of the depths below the spirit of the times in which it was written foreshadowed how Victor Frankenstein’s dream to animate dead matter has become our nightmare. As a new god who would all but banish death from life, he would use the newly discovered science of electricity and create a technology to create a new race of beings who, as he says, would bless him as their father. But horrified by the creature he has made and whom he never names, he abandons him and denies responsibility for the consequences of his actions.