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In an age of religious fundamentalist violence around the world, it is heartening to read poet and cultural historian William Irwins Thompsons contention that a new form of post-religious spirituality is emerging in our planetary civilization, one that is more appropriate to our new electronic and globally interconnected noetic polities. This little book is a Vade Mecum of the cultural evolutionary news to keep in ones pocket to read along with the days emotionally manipulative political news. Thompson shows us that like a dying star in supernova, the explosion of religious violence is a sign of medieval religions death and not their rebirth. The brilliant thirteenth century Renaissance that gave us the Gothic Cathedrals and the Convivencia of Christian, Jews, and Muslims in southern Spain was followed by the Black Death and the Inquisition, but the Italian Renaissance still took off in fifteenth-century Florence, as Giotto was followed by Fra Angelico and the syncretic school of Chartres was followed by Cosimo di Medicis Florentine Academy. The Big Picture that the poet and cultural historian can provide enables us to participate in the larger processes of cultural transformation at work in our world.
About the author
William Irwin Thompson was born in Chicago in 1938. A poet and cultural philosopher, he has taught at Cornell, MIT and York University in Toronto and has been widely published, including Transforming History (Lindisfarne Books).
Summary
Traces the history of religion and examines the explosion in religious violence in light of ongoing cultural transformation.
