Sacred Space: Religion and Cosmic Exploration symposium- How do our religious traditions teach us to conduct ourselves in space?
Event description
- Family friendly
- Open to the public
What does religion have to do with space exploration?
Quite a lot, actually. In fact, the histories, ideologies, representations and practices of religion are central to the project of imagining and building human space futures. As we venture into space, we will bring religion and religious ideas with us, knowingly or not.
Sacred Space: Religion and Cosmic Exploration is a series of public talks where diverse guests from the space sector and from religious traditions will discuss religion and space exploration — two topics that have been intertwined through human history.
Religion and space exploration have always been in conversation. We’re just making that conversation public.
All sessions moderated by Lance Gharavi & Mary-Jane Rubenstein
Session 2
How do our religious traditions teach us to conduct ourselves in space?
March 16, 7 p.m.–8:30 p.m. ET
Some of the most difficult challenges in space exploration aren’t technological. They’re social, cultural and ethical. How should we treat potential resources on the moon and other celestial bodies? What are our obligations to any life — even microbial life — we might discover on other worlds? In this webinar, we talk with leaders from several religious traditions about how our species should conduct ourselves as we venture out into the solar system.
Panelists:
Zahra Ayubi is an associate professor of religion at Dartmouth College. She specializes in women and gender in premodern and contemporary Islamic philosophical ethics and has published on gendered concepts of ethics, justice and religious authority, and on Muslim feminist thought and American Muslim women's experiences. She is the author of Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family and Society (Columbia, 2019) and Women as Humans: Life, Death and Gendered Being in Islamic Medical Ethics (Columbia, Forthcoming). Her current book project is on feminist approaches to philosophy of Islam.
Daniel Capper is a Professor at the University of Southern Mississippi and Adjunct Professor at Metropolitan State University in Denver. Trained at the University of Chicago in the field of science and religion dialogue, his interdisciplinary studies explore environmental ethical interactions with the nonhuman natural world comparatively as well as among American Buddhists. Capper’s many publications include the books Learning Love from a Tiger: Religious Experiences with Nature, Roaming Free like a Deer: Buddhism and the Natural World and Buddhist Ecological Protection of Space: A Guide for Sustainable Off-Earth Travel. Currently he is working on a book regarding comparative religious reactions to the possibility of finding microbial life in the solar system.
Ingrid LaFleur is an afrofuture strategist, artist, curator, and pleasure activist focused on creating equitable futures using art, culture and emerging technology. LaFleur is attending the University of Houston for a MS in Foresight. Her futures research looks at ways to integrate the principles of Afrofuturism into the methodologies of Foresight. As a 2023 visiting fellow at the Modern Ancient Brown Foundation, she will be continuing this research through her new project The Imaginarium which will be initially activated in Detroit, MI. In the Imaginarium, she experiments with classroom design and future visioning practices to better assist with conjuring decolonized and just futures.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg is an award-winning author and writer who serves as Scholar in Residence at the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW). She was named by Newsweek as a “rabbi to watch,” as a “faith leader to watch” by the Center for American Progress, has been a Washington Post Sunday crossword clue (83 Down). She has written eight books; her latest, On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World, has won a National Jewish Book Award and was hailed by Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley as “A must read for anyone navigating the work of justice and healing.”
Deondre Smiles (Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe) is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Victoria (B.C., Canada). He does work in several areas, including critical Indigenous geographies, human-environment interactions, Indigenous cultural resource management/preservation, and science/technology studies. Deondre is the principal investigator of the Geographic Indigenous Futures Collaboratory, one of Western Canada’s first Indigenous geographies focused research groups and lab collectives.
Moderators:
Lance Gharavi is professor of Theatre at Arizona State University and Associate Director of ASU’s Interplanetary Initiative. He is the author of Western Esotericism in Russian Silver Age Drama: Aleksandr Blok’s The Rose and the Cross and editor the anthology Religion, Theatre and Performance: Acts of Faith. His work focuses on points of intersection between performance, technology, science and religion. He specializes in leading transdisciplinary teams of artists, scientists, designers and engineers to create compelling experiences and advance research. He led the creation of Port of Mars, a game-based platform for social science experiments and is currently working on a new project about consciousness.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein is the author of Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race (2022), as well as numerous other books on the intersections of science, philosophy and religion. Her book Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse(2014) won the 2022 Iris Award for “outstanding work at the intersection of science, religion and technology.” Rubenstein teaches Religion and Science in Society at Wesleyan University, where she is also affiliated with Philosophy and Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies.