Tenth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

Transforming human relationships with the rest of nature has become paramount in our age of anthropogenic climate change. Understanding the worldview(s) (i.e. cosmological and ontological assumptions) that have led our species into its unsustainable relationship with nature, and transforming our worldview(s) through replacement of unsustainable cosmological and ontological assumptions with healthy alternatives is an important step towards transforming the potentials for relationships with the rest of nature. We explore two radically different worldview(s), and the paradigms of human relations with the rest of nature that are made possible therein. We will explore dominant western worldview(s) and the colonial ontology of the Land that emerged from canonical texts like the Old Testament and Plato’s Republic, gave rise to European Colonialism and continues to structure modern settler colonial systems like neoliberal capitalist urban development, settler colonial democracy and settler colonial law. We will also ground ourselves in a range of Indigenous Worldview(s) and the orders of relationships with nature that are possible therein through linking course readings to a/r/tographic walking pedagogies and land-based pedagogies. In walking between these worldview(s) we will work together to form a liminal space between the different worlds that we create when we observe our reality from different worldview(s), and in this space we will work to imagine how we could transform human relations with the rest of nature if we replace unsustainable worldview assumptions with the healthy alternatives.