Religion and Technology into the Future: From Adam to Tomorrow's Eve examines the broad significance of the current trends and accomplishments in technology (AI/robots) against the long history of the human imagination of making sentient beings. It seeks to enrich our understanding of the present as it is trending into the future against the richly relevant and surprisingly long past. Creatively considered in some depth are a wide range of specific examples drawn especially from contemporary film and television, as well as from cosmology, ancient mythology, biblical literature, classical literature, folklore, evolution, popular culture, technology, and futurist studies. This book is distinctive, in part, in drawing on a wide range of resources demonstrating the indispensable interrelationship among these disparate materials. Science, technology, economics, and philosophy are seamlessly interwoven with history, gender, culture, religion, literature, pop culture, art, and film. Written for general as well as academic readers, it offers fascinating and provocative insights into who we are and where we are going.

This new selection of myths offers a broad insight into the nature and lifestyle of the ancestral lands of the Native American tribes that once stretched from the tip of Alaska, down to the Bay of Mexico. Hundreds of languages, with traditions and folkore, grew independently across the continent, flourishing in deserts, mountains and lush valleys of a vast land. The loss of such ancient traditions is a reminder of the damage humans can wreak through ignorance, desperation and greed, as settlers from Europe swept imperiously across the newly discovered, but long-populated lands of the so-called New World. From 'The Great Deeds of Michabo' to 'The Legend of Hiawatha', from trickster creator-deities, heroes and supernatural beings to epic voyages and an affinity with animals, there is so much to discover in this comprehensive new book. It's the latest addition to Flame Tree's Epic Tales series of deluxe anthologies and brings together a thoughtful selection of myths and tales from across the ancient plains of North America.

In this provocative study of dancing, Sam Gill examines the interpretive styles of a variety of cultural dance traditions in discourse with the philosophic traditions of Schiller, Merleau-Ponty, Barbaras, Derrida, Leroi-Gourhan, and Baudrillard. As a scholar of religion, Gill provides special consideration to the importance of this emerging appreciation of dancing as a perspective inclusive of body and experience. Each chapter delves into the many factions of dancing: moving, gesturing, self-othering, playing, seducing, and masking. Gill also draws on the analysis of contemporary dance films and musicals, his experience as a dancer and dance teacher, his extensive research on dance traditions, and his interest in neurobiology and phenomenology to develop the core of this rich exploration of dancing, the structurality of all dances.

In this provocative study of dancing, Sam Gill examines the interpretive styles of a variety of cultural dance traditions in discourse with the philosophic traditions of Schiller, Merleau-Ponty, Barbaras, Derrida, Leroi-Gourhan, and Baudrillard. As a scholar of religion, Gill provides special consideration to the importance of this emerging appreciation of dancing as a perspective inclusive of body and experience. Each chapter delves into the many factions of dancing: moving, gesturing, self-othering, playing, seducing, and masking. Gill also draws on the analysis of contemporary dance films and musicals, his experience as a dancer and dance teacher, his extensive research on dance traditions, and his interest in neurobiology and phenomenology to develop the core of this rich exploration of dancing, the structurality of all dances.

The first generation of the proper academic study of religion might be said to span the half century from 1963 to 2013. Supreme Court Justice Clark's 1963 opinion clarifying that any liberal "education is not complete without a study of comparative religion or the history of religion and its relationship to the advancement of civilization" allowed the legal teaching of religion in secular universities. The end of the first generation might be marked by the 2013 retirement of Professor Jonathan Z. Smith (1938-2017) from the University of Chicago where he had taught since 1968. Arguably no scholar has made a greater contribution than did Smith to establishing a proper academic study of religion. In The Proper Study of Religion, Sam Gill charts an innovative course of development for the academic study of religion by creatively engaging the legacy of Jonathan Z. Smith, Gill's teacher and mentor for fifty years. Their careers coincided with the explosive expansion of the study of religion in secular universities in the US that began in the mid-1960s. Using an engaging narrative style, Gill builds on Smith's work exploring an extensive range of absorbing and foundational topics including: comparison as essential to academic technique and to human knowledge itself; the important role of experience, richly understood, both to academic studies of religion and to religions as lived; play, philosophically understood, as a core dynamic of Smith's entire program; the relationship of academic document-based studies to the sensory-rich real world of religions; and self-moving as providing a biological and philosophical foundation on which to develop and expand upon a proper academic study of religion. The foregrounding of human self-movement, new to the study of religion, is informed by Gill's experience as a dancer and student of dancing in cultures around the world. This book honors the work of an unforgettable giant of a man while also offering critical assessments and innovative ideas in the effort to advance the remarkable legacy of Jonathan Z. Smith.

Across the world from personal relationships to global politics, differences-cultural, religious, racial, gender, age, ability-are at the heart of the most disruptive and disturbing concerns. While it is laudable to nurture an environment promoting the tolerance of difference, Creative Encounters, Appreciating Difference argues for the higher goal of actually appreciating difference as essential to creativity and innovation, even if often experienced as stressful and complex. Even encounters that are apparently harmful and negatively valued (arguments, conflict, war, oppression) usually heighten the potential for creativity, innovation, movement, action, and identity. Drawing on classic encounters that have played a significant role in the founding of the academic study of religion and the social sciences, this book explores in some depth the dynamics of encounter to reveal both its problematic and creative aspects and to develop perspectives and strategies to assure encounters both include the appreciation of difference and also are recognized as creative and innovative. The two examples most extensively considered show that the academic study of the peoples indigenous to North America and to Australia involved creative constructions (concoctions) of primary examples in order to establish and give authority to academic theories and definitions. Rather than damning these examples as "bad scholarship," this book considers them to be encounters engendering creative constructions that are distinctive to academia, yet their potential for harm must be understood. Most important to the book is a persistent development of perspectives and strategies for understanding and approaching encounters in order to assure the appreciation of difference is accompanied by the potential for creativity and innovation. Specific perspectives and strategies are related to naming, moving, gesture, and play and, particularly relevant to religion, the development of an aesthetic of impossibles. Since these historical examples engage highly relevant present concerns -the distinction of real and fake, truth and lie, map and territory-the threading essays show how these more or less classic examples might contribute to appreciating these contemporary concerns that are generated in the presence of difference.

A short and succinct explanation of the Environmental Tracking concept: a system which, if adopted at scale, will bring about a seismic shift in our ability to harness the power of the investment system to place us on a more sustainable trajectory. This mechanism offers a framework by which we can create a financial incentive to reduce emissions within the global economy via the 'trojan horse' of the index model. It is a means by which the 'externality' of climate change can finally be 'internalised', decisively changing corporate behaviour throughout the world.. By influencing a company at the share price level, Environmental Tracking seeks to provide the platform for a smooth transition to a low carbon economy parallel to, and independent of, government action.