The tradition of an entertainment suite hosted by LeRon Shults and Wesley Wildman continues at this year’s AAR/SBL annual meeting. The suite will be in the Manchester Grand Hyatt San Diego. The room number and entry requirements will be announced here when they are known.
There will be gatherings from Friday through Monday nights. Soft drinks and snacks will be provided. Please bring anything else you’d like to eat or drink. Anyone is welcome any night, including people in the Cognitive Companion Construction project, the Cognitive Science of Religion Unit, the International Society for Science and Religion, the Simulating Religious Violence (SRV) film project, the transhumanism unit, the AI and Religion unit, other people interested in the scientific study of religion or philosophy of religion – and anyone else who knows any of those people!
Hours:
Friday: 7:00pm-10:00pm
Saturday: the SRV film screens 8-10, with a post screening party in the suite from 10:00pm until 11:30pm; everyone is welcome
Here’s a link to the full article; the abstract follows below.
This article presents a microsimulation that explores age, period, and cohort effects in the decline of religiosity in contemporary societies. The model implements a well-known and previously empirically validated theory of secularization that highlights the role of “fuzzy fidelity,” i.e., the percentage of a population whose religiosity is moderate (Voas 2009). Validation of the model involved comparing its simulation results to shifts in religiosity over 9 waves of the European Social Survey. Simulation experiments suggest that a cohort effect, based on weakened transmission of religiosity as a function of the social environment, appears to be the best explanation for secularization in the societies studied, both for the population as a whole and for the proportions of religious, fuzzy, and secular people.
Religion in Multidisciplinary Perspective provides the first comprehensive treatment of the work of Wesley J. Wildman, one of the most inventive thinkers in the field of religious studies. Scholars with expertise in philosophical, theological, and scientific approaches to the study of religion offer critical and constructive engagements with Wildman’s astonishingly creative and integrative oeuvre. The essays address themes that will be of interest to those concerned with the current state of scholarship on religion from a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, theology, ethics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and others. The volume concludes with a response by Wildman. Find out more here.
LeRon Shults and I wrote a book about the long history of human civilization and religion. It uses computational social simulation to reconstruct the deep past and to peer a little way ahead. Ten years in the making, this book represents an incredibly satisfying collaboration with a gifted scholar, and a marvelous friend. Over the years, I have concluded that these kinds of friendships are one of the best parts of the scholarly life. But it’s also cool to introduce a book of this kind. Computational humanities scholars and computational social scientists will naturally be drawn to a book featuring computational social simulations. But the book is for everyone interested in the human journey on planet earth since the birth of civilization, including the roles religion has played along the way. Read more here.
September 26, 2023 – BU Today published an interview with Wesley, focusing on the challenges he faced when transitioning from technical nonfiction to writing fiction. The interview also gives some insight into why Wesley decided to write fiction in the first place, and why he wrote this particular book. It even includes some clues about the next three novels in the pipeline, in case you’re hungry for more.
I was in Frankfurt’s airport a few years ago, just after the Airbus A380 was born. I standing in a section of the terminal with sixty foot glass windows facing an alleyway filled with slowly taxiing aircraft. Thousands of people were streaming by in the terminal behind me. And then it happened. An A380-800 slowly drifted past right in front of me. Humongous. Beautiful. I looked around and to my amazement, nobody else seemed to care. But I was transfixed.
Since then I have watched those behemoths take off – long runway, slow acceleration, and then… the miracle of flight. Awe inspiring!
Airbus A380-800
The A-380 is a bit like my adventure in publishing. It has been in planning for a while and the runway has been long. But it is about to take off.
Dr. Mark Banas thinks so. Take a look at his video account of Religious Philosophy as Multidisciplinary Comparative Inquiry: Envisioning a Future for the Philosophy of Religion. Mark has produced a bunch of good videos and I encourage you to subscribe to keep track of his adventures in communicating religion, and sometimes philosophy, through “Ten on Religion.” See his channel here.
The Institute for American Religious and Philosophical Thought just wrapped up its 2021 meeting. They asked me to present my intellectual autobiography, which I was honored to do. It was strange to be forced to slow down and think about my intellectual history. And it was daunting to be listened to by colleagues on such a topic.
I might have spent more time on ideas but I didn’t for two reasons. On the one hand, later in 2021, a book of essays about my ideas is supposed to appear, and my response essay in that volume covers that territory. On the other hand, the intellectual autobiography was a pandemic-affected Zoom affair, scheduled after a long day of lectures, so I wanted to keep it light. I focused on life stories.
Since there is no way to publish such a thing, I’m posting it here as an illustrated pdf.
After a lifetime of writing non-fiction, my first novel will be published by Wildhouse Fiction – in Fall 2023. At present, I’m collecting reviews from advance readers so let me know if you’d like to help out with a review and I’ll send you an advance copy.
It wasn’t easy to make the transition to the bewitching world of storytelling, let me tell you. But there is something incredibly satisfying about writing a moving story.
When disaster strikes Jesse and Alexandra’s family, their lives shatter. Jesse’s grief triggers a full-blown psychiatric crisis, which spurs a most unusual spiritual quest in an attempt to find a way to feel at home in what suddenly seems like a cruel world. In the midst of her own trauma, Alexandra is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, further pitching the family into desperation. Jesse’s weekly breakfast with two of his children, along with Alexandra’s determined efforts to fight the erasure of her memories, holds the family together despite the agonizing uncertainty surrounding all of them. Jesse and Alexandra find themselves drawn into the horrifying world of missing and abducted children and the minds of their captors, and eventually adopt an abduction survivor named Maddy and her young children. Together, they forge a new and expanded family, and create a home where everyone can heal. This is a family saga, a love story, an account of child abduction and its exacting aftermath, a tale of hard-won hope, and a profound exploration of the spiritual potential of ordinary life in the face of the unthinkable.
Here are comments from advance readers (see the website for more).
As a one-time English professor, having absorbed countless works of fiction, I have never read a novel more devastating nor more beautiful.
— Patricia Browne, Former Professor of English, St. Catherine’s University, St. Paul, Minnesota
Disturbing, inspiring, daring, heartwarming, this is a novel of family, of terrible events, of deep and patient love (the erotic is not neglected), and of ultimate experiences and mysteries. The prose is engaging, the storytelling deft and resourceful, the vision of life opening into a larger vision of Being Itself.
— Brian Jorgensen, Professor Emeritus, Department of English, Boston University
The Winding Way Home is a story about constructing meaning after unspeakable evil renders reality absurd, about the power of love to transfigure traumas that are beyond the reach of healing, and, ultimately, about the immense beauty, unspeakable wonder, and infinite spiritual vitality of everyday life. Providing a searing vision of the depth dimension of human life shorn of all supernatural obfuscations, it’s a must read, especially for the spiritual but not religious crowd.
