Narrative Warfare and the Noosphere in Steve Bannon’s Populist Revolt By Boris Shoshitaishvili and Lisa H. Sideris On July 1, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling that granted Donald Trump considerable immunity from prosecution for his role in the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol attack. Rightwing populist victories in Read more
A Monarch Jeremiad By Lisa H. Sideris “Most of all, I shall remember the monarchs.” —Rachel Carson, letter to Dorothy Freeman, September 10, 1963 In the summer of 2021, my family bid farewell to our longtime home in Indiana. We gathered clothing and provisions sufficient to last us several days Read more
“J” is for Nothing: Oppenheimer’s, Nolan’s, and My Enchantments By Lisa H. Sideris In the Land of Enchantment My interest in J. Robert Oppenheimer began in earnest around 1990 when, as a graduate student in History and Philosophy of Science, I enrolled in a seminar intriguingly titled “Big Science.” Historians Read more
What, If Anything, Is De-Extinction? By Lisa H. Sideris The prospect of developing genetic technologies that aim to “bring back” extinct species is met with palpable excitement by some members of the scientific community and the broader public. De-extinction inspires a sense of optimism, a hopeful storyline to counter relentlessly Read more
The Iris Book Award: Prize Ceremony, Reading, and Discussion On 26 September 2020, The Center for Religion & the Human at Indiana University Bloomington presented the Iris Book Award to The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors (Viking, 2017) by David George Haskell. Books considered for the award are Read more
How the Soul Became Consciousness By Kocku von Stuckrad The soul is a strange thing. Depending on which expert you trust, you might regard the soul as the immaterial essence of our existence, as a material substance wired into our bodies, or neither, because the soul is too vague to Read more