Speaker 1:	Thank you so much for coming to lunch today. We're super excited to continue our series on #researchfail. We're looking at the secret life of research, failure, successes and surprising applications by spending some time in these lunches with some of our faculty who have been on a journey across the course of their newest and latest research and have had experiences that have taught them a little bit about what research is and can be for them and have brought them insights as to what their next steps should be about. 
	Today, we're spending time with Mark Wallace. He is with the religion department, and the environmental studies program and does work that really speaks to interdisciplinary boundaries and also sometimes gets people kinda riled up. If you feel like you're getting a little riled up, I think you're in good company. I wanted to bring to your attention the front page of this week’s Phoenix, where several of our volleyball players have been riling people up by taking a knee, and I just sort of want to express my solidarity with our activist players. 
	Next month, we'll spend some time with Stella Christie in psychology and cognitive science and then afterwards we'll spend some time with Krista Thomason from philosophy. She, in particular, will tell us how she came into falling in love with really old dead guys. Sometimes you stumble into these things, right? That's kind of the spirit behind our series this year on research fails. 
	Without further ado, Mark Wallace. 
Mark Wallace:	Hi everyone. I'm grateful to [inaudible 00:02:07] and also to [inaudible 00:02:11] to helping me think through this talk and it's very personal to me, this talk, because it goes to the heart of a massive research failure on my part, at least in terms of how people received what I was trying to do. To publicly share that weakness and vulnerability is something that I'm not particularly looking forward to, but since that's the focus of this series this semester, I'm happy to talk about that. I start here with an image because I'm interested in my work at the intersection of religion and ecology. The failure starts with that because those two disciplines, the study of religion on the one hand and the study the environment on the other hand, really, at least at first glance, seem to have nothing to do with each other. 
	The study of religion investigates gods and goddesses of ancient myths. It's about the supernatural. Environmental studies interrogates natural biological systems and how organisms relate to one another. At first [inaudible 00:03:27] the two don't have anything to do with each other. Maybe, from another perspective, ecology and religion are two disciplines that share certain affinity. They both are interested in how living beings connect with one another, relationships between living things. For people in religion, the primary living being that they're interested in is god or the sacred or the other. In that regard, my work comes out of the strange cross pollination between these two disciplines and to look at how in religious tradition's god is seen as a living being and how she or he relates to other living things within the Earth community, that for many religious traditions, was envisioned as a garden, as a place where all things human and more than human could live together in friendship and in solidarity. 
	This attempt, on my part, to look at god as a being who's the source of all things and who then, within different religious tradition, manifest god's self into different fleshy forms. One of the fleshy forms, for Christians of course, is the idea that god manifests god's self in Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus becomes a human embodiment of god. At least for Christians, that's not particularly controversial. It's central to their litany, that's what they think but other religious traditions understand god manifests in something other than flesh forms, not human form but say animal form or the non human animal. I'm particularly interested in the way god shows god's self in the fleshy beak and feathers in avian beings, of winged creatures of birds. All of the worlds religions understand god's manifestation, the manifestation of the sacred in different ways and many of these traditions look at avian lifeforms as expression of divine life. 
	We know this [inaudible 00:05:54] from college because of the phoenix. The phoenix is an ancient mythological symbol from Greek antiquity that imagines a divinity that is able upon its death to necessitate itself through fire. In the Americas, I've spent some time throughout the course of my life in Costa Rica and I'm fascinated there with a bird called the Resplendent Quetzal. If you don't know that bird, it's an amazing bird, arguably the most beautiful bird in the Americas, that is covered in red and blue and green feathers. The male Quetzal has a tale that is blue and green that extends three or four feet and it's so protective of its tale that when it [inaudible 00:06:46] from a branch, it flies backward to prevent its tale from getting broken. 
	[inaudible 00:06:59] Quetzal, you can see these birds in Guatemala, Honduras, [inaudible 00:07:05]. It's a bird that hearkens back to an ancient divinity among the Aztecs, called "Quetzalcoatl" which is the image you see throughout the Americas, a divinity that is pictured as a plumed serpent, a feathered god that is seen as a god responsible for the creation of everything. The Quetzalcoatl is similar to another bird divinity that has gotten a lot of focus recently for a very sad reason. An indigenous community in northern Iraq called the Yazibis, have been targeted by ISIS or ISIL as apostate from their brand of Islam and have been violently persecuted by ISIS. The Yazibis worship what they call the Peacock Angel, which is an image of the sacred in the form of a peacock and like Quetzalcoatl, is seen as a creator god as the origin of all life as well. 
	This is a theme that runs like an undercurrent in many religious traditions, images of god in bird form. But, Christianity went in a different direction, at least it seemed to go in a different direction. As the religions of what are sometimes called "the Monotheistic religions", sometimes they're called "the religions of the book", "Abrahamic religions", these are the religions particularly of Judaism and Christianity and Islam. They probably saw this going in a different direction, they understood what they were doing as against the images of god in various non human forms and a particular, for Judaism and Islam, traditionally god isn't understood in human form, not in the way at least that god is understood in that way in Christianity. The religions of the book worked to divorce god from the world of animals and the bird world to defend, let's say, a form of pure monotheism uncorrupted by beaks and feathers. That type of monotheism in the case of Christianity meant that as the Christian faith developed, so the story is told, it developed over and against the veneration of pre Christian gods and divinities as fools and snakes and calves and birds as well. 
	there's the famous example of Saint Patrick. Many of you probably know this. The legend is told that Saint Patrick first visited Ireland and saw the Druid priest worshiping snakes and with his mighty staff, he got the snakes out of Ireland and so to this day, there are no snakes in Ireland, at least not native snakes, there are lots of snakes that were brought to the island, but not have apparently established themselves as anything that would look like an indigenous snake population. That's a good example of this sort of stock Christian understanding of the relationship of Christianity to non human lifeforms, they're to be destroyed insofar as those lifeforms are seen as the embodiments of divinity. 
	I recently traveled to a place called Montserrat in Central Spain. Montserrat is a pilgrimage site, people can go there, you go up this winding mountain. In Catalan, Montserrat means serrated mountain. You go up this winding [inaudible 00:11:25] railroad, up to this mountain pass and when you get to the top ... I did this with my wife, Audrey, and Steven Hopkins, who's a college in the religion department and his wife Adrian. When we got to the top of the mountain, we went to the back of a monastery church and we went into this vaulted ceiling room and there we saw an old statue of the virgin Mary, blackened with ancient candle smoke, and she was holding a giant board in one hand, I guess symbolizing the world. She was sitting on a throne. This tiny wooden virgin Mary, but above her was this huge bird, a cast iron avian creature, giant wings hanging from a chain. Why? Anybody have any ideas? Why would you imagine the virgin Mary sitting on a throne with a giant bird hovering over her head? This goes to the heart of what I want to talk about, this strange birdy, avian, Christian symbolism. Why put a bird hovering over Mary's head? 
Speaker 3:	This looks like the Holy Spirit. 
Mark Wallace:	Yeah, the Holy Spirit. So, what is that Holy Spirit? 
Speaker 3:	Isn't it in the Noah story and Genesis? 
Mark Wallace:	Right. 
Speaker 3:	It's a bird.
Mark Wallace:	It's a bird. Anybody else? The idea of the Holy Spirit as a bird in Christian thinking. So John the Baptist, this is way above my pay grade, but I will try to click through this slide presentation. 
	John the Baptist, baptizing Jesus. 
Speaker 4:	When John the Baptist baptized Jesus, the Holy Spirit came down as a bird symbolizing the divinity of Jesus. 
Mark Wallace:	Right, okay. This even gets further into the dark recesses of Christian doctrine. Christians refer to this in terms of the trinity, and so what does that mean? Christians talk about god as one but god is three, what does that have to do with this bird? 
Speaker 4:	The Holy Spirit.
Mark Wallace:	The Holy Spirit, but can you unpack that a little bit. That notion of god as three and one. 
Speaker 4:	So you have god the father, god the son, which is the Jesus part. The father part is, I guess, the creator and then the Holy Spirit ties it all together. Saint Augustine has somethings to say about this. 
Mark Wallace:	Right. That's exactly what he says. He says it ties it all together. This is a Native American depiction of that. The idea of the trinity, in which the father god is up at the top, Jesus figured as a Lakota young man is here with his arms outstretched, and there's the Holy Spirit, now not figured as a Dove, like in the earlier figures that we saw, but as an eagle. 
	Floating around in Christianity has been this image of god as a bird, but many of us have not known what to do with this. The metaphor is some vestige of an ancient culture, what exactly is this trying to represent? 
	When I was with Audrey and Steven and Adrian in Montserrat, I was looking at the virgin Mary in this wooden statue, and there's this giant bird. I'm thinking to myself, "Is that what this is?" Or this, or this. This is another pictorial image of Jesus. This is from a bible book for children. The image of Jesus being baptized by this guy John the Baptist and there's the Holy Spirit bird coming down up over his head. What's going on with this? 
	What I want to suggest is that this image, throughout Christian art, it illuminated manuscripts, roof boxes, pulpit ornaments, Bible for children. Throughout Christian history, over the last 2000 years, this image has appeared over and over and over again. Jesus gets baptized by this guy John the Baptist and this bird appears, and I thought to myself, "What exactly was going on here?" And with this image I started to think of god, then this flies in the face of traditional Christianity as a bird god, as an avian divinity. Yeah, in Christianity, god manifests god's self in human form in Jesus, but is it also the case in Christianity that god manifests god's self in animal form as a bird? Christianity, to use a technical religious term, the term in incarnation ... It's a Latin term that literally means something becomes meat. Carne/ Carna in Latin means meat, flesh. Is Christianity a religion of a double incarnation, it's not just that god manifests god's self in human self in Jesus, god also manifests god's self in non human animal flesh, this bird. 
	Initially, I thought about this, and I thought, "Okay, what could I call this? How can I make sense of this? How can I refer to Christianity has a religion that worships [inaudible 00:17:46]" and well, not [inaudible 00:18:00]. 
	I came up with the notion of Christian Paganism. What happens when Christians are called Pagans? I thought that would be a way of getting at this complicated idea that like Pagan people ... The word "Pagan" is from the word "Paganos" which just means people who live outside the city walls. Pagan people were referred to as people who were not as civilized as other people. The word is very similar to the old English word Heathen, but there you can heard the musical resonance with the origins of that word. Heathen, people from the Heath, people who aren't living within the city walls. How can I reconnect Christianity to the Heathens and the Pagans. Moreover, how can I refer to it as a Heathen/ Pagan religion? That's a religion in continuity with the ancient belief of first indigenous people, first nations people. It's a religion that when it saw itself against those other people, colonial racist conquests, that maybe it's not as far apart as it thinks it is. Maybe with the strange notion of the trinity, there are these residual, vestigial ideas of Pagan divinity, the bird god, that's been at the heart of Christian beliefs for 2 millennia, even though Christians don't recognize it as that. 
	Christian Paganism.
	A book I wrote some years ago, here was one of the reviews of the book. "Beware", thanks not a good opening line when somebody's reviewing your book. "Beware, under the inspirational sounding title, 'Finding God in the Sining River', Mark Wallace calls on Christians to restore their faith by renewing their Pagan routes. The book's only value is for training students to spot propaganda, educational hogwash, faulty logic, and false teachings". So that was pretty much the end of that project. I stopped doing that. Not all of the reviews were that [inaudible 00:20:42] but a lot of them were. Not only by believing Christian and other faith based people, but scholars of religion who found this attempt to cross pollinate ancient primordial traditions with the monotheism with Christianity, that this impossible. 
	This was the kind of image that I think was playing in the minds of people who refute my earlier work, "Finding God in the Singing River" about Christian Paganism, that for them Paganism or Heathenism stands for polytheistic chaos, libational frenzy and blood sacrifice. Pagan pre civilized outside the city wall people, worship god and divinity and all of these various animal form, you can see these sort of bestial people down here in the image in the lower left. Biblical verses about not following these people because they're an abomination, blood, sacrifice, [inaudible 00:21:48], et cetera. 
	That attempt to bring together the two traditions, I think produced such an allergic reaction among critics, faith based folk, and scholars alike that that wasn't a successful venture. 
	[inaudible 00:22:18]
	I came up with another phrase, that it's not as obvious, or felicitous in some ways, but maybe more accurate. This is another depiction of a Christian trinity and the idea of the Holy Spirit as a bird. I started to think as Christianity as an animus tradition. This is a word from the most part that we don't work with anymore. The problem with this phrase, not Christian Paganism anymore, Christian animus is not for the most part a popular currency. 
	Animism. It's a word that comes out of Latin, animus, which means spirit or soul and it's a word that was popularized in the 19th century by Anthropologists and scholars of religion and students of primordial cultures, especially by a guy named E.B. Tylor. Tylor used Animism to describe the beliefs of first people, what he would describe as primitive people, as people who believed everything in the universe was filled with spirit or spirits. Everything is a lie. Everything as the capacity for a relationship and in some sense for Tylor, everything was sentient, which means it had some capacity for consciousness, rocks and trees and rivers and landscapes, animals to be sure but also seemingly inanimate things. All of them, according to Tylor, as he studied indigenous cultures, all of them were animate and he used the term Animism to describe first people's experience of the world. Basically, if you read Tylor's work from the 19th century, what you have is a Victorian, white, male, you'd say today cis-gender scholar, who is interrogating first people's traditions in order to reify his own civilized Christian understanding of things and the term functioned as a kind of proxy for Tylor's colonial elitism, even his racism. 
	In his attempt to explain the kind of primitive childlike superstitions of first people. Today, the term is freighted, larded, with this kind of baggage. When I talk to people about rethinking Christianity as an Animus tradition, Christian Paganism get an allergic reaction, people sneeze at that notion as well, because the term Animus, for scholars in particular, is a term that is overdetermined by its racist colonial [inaudible 00:25:52]. But, in my research, what I found is that the term is coming back, like other terms that are coming back that we think of today. Queer theory, in a way that 30-40 years ago if someone had said that to me, I'd say you really can't say that like that. Animism, including for scholars of indigenous communities, including indigenous scholars themselves, are starting to use the term, aware of it's problematic and racist origins. Precisely because the term has a certain analytical clarity about how indigenous people recon with the world in a way that we, for most of us, who aren't indigenous or were out of a native context can't get at. 
	One scholar of Animism says, "You can sum up Animism with the phrase, 'All that exists lives' and maybe as well with the idea that 'All that exists is holy'". An example of how I think this is coming into the popular imagination is this magazine cover. If Animism speaks to how everything that is, is a lie in that it is something sacred. This is the magazine E, not E! Which is a very fun magazine about entertainment. This is E for the environment. The Scoop on Dirt: why we should all worship the ground we walk on is an attempt, if you actually read the issue, to actually talk about dirt, ground, soil, the planet as sacred because it is the life support system that makes all things possible. Ancient Pagans and Christians both used this phrase to describe god: "God is the one within whom we live and move and have our being". 
	So, for the authors of this article on sacred dirt on holy ground, their point is that what the Earth is. It's that within that we live and move and have our being. They mean this in the article, the authors somewhat ironically yet somewhat descriptively, we should worship the ground we walk on because the ground is sacred and the ground is holy and the ground is blessed because the ground gives origin to and sustains all life. 
	This way of understanding Animism speaks to two issues that I want to suggest in this new thinking about animus, some scholars call it neo-animus. One of the issues that they speak to is what they call relatedness or relationship. All things have a capacity for relationship. Wissahickon Schist broken off from a mountain formation sitting at the bottom of the creek is not dead, it's not matter, it's not rock, it's not non sentient brute lifeless stuff. Wissahickon Schist at the bottom of the Crum creek is essential to the wellbeing and the health and the vigor of the Crum creek itself. Those fragments of rock in the bedrock of the creek, support the creek and all the other living things that surround the creek and rely on the creek for their wellbeing. Wissahickon Schist is alive, in part because it has the capacity for relationship. That bedrock of the Crum creek can connect to other things. It is shaped and moved. It follows its own as it were life cycle based on its relationship with other things in the creek. 
	Animists also think that so called inert things in the natural things have the capacity for language, they can communicate with us. They have emotional lives. As things that have a capacity, not only for relationships but also for language, we are now entering into a world, so the Animus perspective says, in which living beings are everywhere. Living beings who don't speak human language but still have the capacity to address us. It's our, as it were, addressability by the others in the natural world that constitutes the capacity of these things to be living, to be vital, to be in motion with their own life cycle according to their own needs and their own capacities. 
	Even, as scholars of Animism put it, to think about everything in the natural world, not only as alive, not only as sentient with its capacity for relationship and addressability or the power to address us, but also with, you could say, the qualities of the person. 
	years ago as a college undergraduate at UC seminar, there was a lagoon near the seminar that the campus provided with [inaudible 00:32:04]. It was wooded, dark and scariest magical. I'd walk through the lagoon in this wooded area [inaudible 00:32:11] and there was never anyone around. I would stay and meditate and I'd just enjoy it, contemplating the [inaudible 00:32:22]. In the woods one morning, this huge creature came up out through the trees, massive. I'm standing in the clearing and this beast came up onto its haunches and came up onto me with its paws and put its paws on my shoulders and looked directly into me and I think it's a dog, but I've never seen a dog like this before. It had massive shoulders and paws. Had a long muzzle, not like any dog that I'm familiar with, and these incandescent eyes looking through me like a [inaudible 00:33:10]. I felt cut to the core. I was frozen in fear. I couldn't speak. It happened so quickly that I was rooted in the place. 
	A young woman [inaudible 00:33:30]. At that point, she had a rope around its neck and she grabbed the rope and pulled it and got this creature off of me. I'm puzzled about that, what that was, and what happened, and I had all kinds of theories about it, but minimally that was the shock of new being in my life. It was the shock of encountering and animal with this incredible combination of agility and fierce intelligence and a special kind of personality that was unique and microseconds, unique to anything that I had encountered before. It's that recognition of otherness that scholars of Animism have used to discuss, what they call, the personhood of non human beings. In conversation with indigenous communities, they will refer to wolf people and rock people and river people and bird people and tree people and landscape people, fish people, all different kinds of people. As one of these scholars, Graham Harvey that I cited earlier puts it, "In the context of Animism, Animists are people who recognize that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human and that life is lived in relationship to others. All things are persons, only some of whom are the human persons because all things subsist in a inter subjective community of relationships even though we don't recognize these other people as people".
	So, my last comment here. Is god a bird? [inaudible 00:35:54] could it have varied within its own grammar, its own syntactics, its own DNA. An understanding of divinity that's Animus that's not about human being Jesus of Nazareth, but about an animal being. This ancient bird god that flutters over Jesus' head when he's baptized in the gospel. Here's the verse that I use as the pivot of this project: "When all the people were baptized" ... This is in the Gospel of Luke, "When Jesus had been baptized and was praying, the heavens were opened and the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus in bodily form as a dove and a voice came from heaven saying, 'You are my beloved son and with you I am well pleased'". 
	I think the Bible and Christian tradition means exactly what it says, that the Holy Spirit, god, that's how Christians understand it because the Holy Spirit is one of those three members of the trinity ... That the Holy Spirit descending upon Jesus, literally in the Greek language, descends upon him in bodily form as a dove. I don't think, in my judgment, I won't call them Christian Pagans anymore but I don't think it can be any clearer than that. I think Christianity has a lost treasure, a kind of buried treasure that it has politicized against, warred against, argued against, but within its own deep structure it carries within itself this lost treasure. 
	The poet John Milton in Paradise Lost says, "We inhabit a world in which millions of spiritual creatures walk the Earth unseen, both when we awake and when we sleep" and I'm wondering if Milton is right. If we don't inhabit a consecrated world of spiritual creatures, all of whom are alive whether they're human or not, and if that's the case, could that be the ground for a new environmental ethic? For people of faith and people who don't have faith, a new environmental ethic in which the world would be seen as alive and all things would be viewed as bearers of the sacred. Ever creature would be seen as a portrait of god. Everything that is would be cherished as holy and good. 
	Thank you very much for being here.