Yearning for Cosmic Connection (Part 2)

This is the second of two posts on our interdisciplinary symposium on Spiritual Yearning in a Disenchanted Age that we organized at McGill University in November 2024. (See part 1 here).

I opened the second half of our discussion with a presentation of results from an ongoing study of "Spiritual Yearning in Science," funded by the John Templeton Foundation.The study explores in particular the spiritual experiences of non-religious scientists, and how the practice of science might evoke awe, wonder, and a sense of the transcendent. Marie Trotter opens the episode with original poetry, exploring themes of fragility, hope, and beauty, drawing inspiration from Klimt's paintings. Findings from the study reveal how non-religious scientists experience enchantment and spiritual yearning through their work.

A discussion follows, in which Rajeev Bhargava notes that spiritual yearning is often disrupted by ideological, social, and political forces, which we need to contend with more seriously. Galen Watts contrasts the childlike enchantment of discovery with the institutionalized pressures of professional science. Rob Gilbert highlights the danger of self-satisfaction in science, arguing that humility and vulnerability are essential for true insight. You can listen to the talk here or watch the video below.

In the fifth presentation from our symposium, Dr. Tara Isabella Burton explores the relationship between magic, reality-creation, and the pursuit of God’s language. Tara is the author of the novels Social Creature, The World Cannot Give, and Here in Avalon, as well as the nonfiction books Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World and Self-Made: Curating Our Image from Da Vinci to the Kardashians. She is currently working on a history of magic and modernity, to be published by Convergent in 2026. ​Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic, ​Granta, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and more. She also co-writes the Substack newsletter "Line of Beauty" with her husband, Dhananjay Jagannathan. Tara received a doctorate in theology from Oxford in 2017. She is a Visiting Fellow at George Mason University's Mercatus Center and a Visiting Research Fellow at Catholic University of America's Institutional Flourishing Lab.

In her talk, Tara explores magic’s influence on modernity, from Hermeticism to transhumanism; the pursuit of a divine language offering truth and creative power; art as relational creation, distinct from manipulative magical thinking; and the Divine Liturgy as model for creative practices rooted in connection and participation. You can listen to her talk here or watch the video below.

In the next presentation, Dr. Bill Barbieri argues for a new conception of ecological agency that challenged our assumptions about disconnection and disenchantment.

Dr. Barbieri holds a doctorate in religious studies from Yale University and teaches in the Religion and Culture and Moral Theology/Ethics programs in the School of Theology and Religious Studies and directs the Peace and Justice Studies Program at The Catholic University of America. He is also a fellow of the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies and of the Center for the Study of Culture and Values. A member of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Christian Ethics, he has also served on the boards of the Peace and Justice Studies Association and the Institut für Theologie und Frieden in Germany.

In his talk, Dr. Barbieri talks about how agency is ecological; how agency needs to be contextualized agency through its social, historical, and material dimensions; the way values can be mediated visually; the interconnectedness of people, history, and the earth; and how the moral life requires perceiving things beyond ourselves. You can listen to the talk here or watch the video below.

In the final presentation from our symposium, Dr. Galen Watts discusses the barriers to pursuing our spiritual yearnings in a disenchanted age. Galen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of Waterloo. His research focuses on cultural and institutional change in liberal democracies, with particular attention to religion, morality, work, and politics. He is the author of The Spiritual Turn: The Religion of the Heart and the Making of Romantic Liberal Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2022), which explores the shift from "religion" to "spirituality" and its social and political implications in the West. Currently, his work investigates the cultural dimensions of the "diploma divide," analyzing how symbolic boundaries and cultural practices shape distinctions between urban university-educated professionals and rural nonuniversity-educated workers in Canada and the U.S. Galen has published extensively in leading academic journals, including American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Sociology of Religion, Civic Sociology, European Journal of Social Theory, and The Sociological Review. 

In his talk, Galen explores why cosmic connection may be harder to achieve today; the impact of cultural and institutional change on spiritual yearning; the decline of the humanities and the loss of deep formative experiences; the "secular sacred canopy" and its barriers to transcendence; the paradox of ethical progress alongside increasing spiritual disorientation; and whether modernity can be reconciled with cosmic connection. You can listen to the talk here or watch the video below.

Unedited transcript:

1. Brandon Vaidyanathan, Spiritual Yearning in Science

Marie: I realized I have come to think of your gifts as meager and scant. Needle pricks upon the window. The millisecond ironic inharmonious chant of the drill fixing the escalator. And the fingertip rain attending to the bend in my elbow, and the hand of the child so trusting unconscious upon my neck. Such gifts, such trivial breaks in the monotony glass. Smash through, my God, I ask you. And leave me bleeding at the splintering event. And afterwards, no veil, no wall, no mirror, no twin spirits. Only one.

This last poem is called Hope I, and it's after a painting by Klimt. There are a series of paintings by him of different figures of hope, so I encourage you to look those up. Hope is the pregnant woman that Klimt painted and you saw on the gallery wall. She stared out at you watching her and noting her body round with readiness, the skull above her head like a crown. Her hair was a flame and her eyes saw you, not the dark figures behind her. Her hands held her world together instead of hiding her bare breast. She has made herself vulnerable to being seen. She has not covered herself with the star-dipped fabric or the tapestry of eyes who, like her, are watching you, curious. Nowhere in the room can any of us find shame. In her hair, she wears flowers. She has adorned herself with fragile touches of beauty, all so that she can wait and see. Thank you.

Brandon: So I'm going to share with you some work that integrates a couple of projects on scientists, both looking at the beauty of science that Robert talked about, as well as this quest for enchantment and even the sort of deeper spiritual yearnings or longings that animate the practice of science, or at least that scientists encounter in the work they do. I was very struck by Charles' opening comments, because there are many ways in which I think my own sort of spiritual quest has been edified by a lot of the non-religious scientists I've been speaking to and the kind of sincerity with which they— maybe that's not even the right word. It's the kind of innocence with which they present some of these longings, desires in ways that I don't quite encounter in the world of people of faith, who I think are much less vulnerable and perhaps in many contexts, I think, have to keep up appearances or maybe have just cut themselves off from that space of longing where there's a lot more certainty around the answers to questions that they ought to be asking or the questions that ought to be asking themselves within us. And so this has been a personally very rewarding journey. I think it, to some degree, gets at the question that Naomi asked about whether science could serve as a system of knowledge that points beyond itself. And I think that is a question that emerges from these conversations.

One of the things that I've been noticing lately is, perhaps, we are on the cusp of or already are well into some sort of a New Romanticism. There are articles being written about this in Psychology Today and in The Guardian with folks like Tara who've written extensively on this, New York Times. David Brooks has written on it. Even in the business world, there are folks like Tim Liebrecht who started the House of Beautiful Business, which is a kind of Neo-Romantic movement in the business world. So there's something going on, where there's a pushback against the rationalism that you're seeing in Silicon Valley, in the tech world especially, and a hunger for something. Then some of the symptoms of this are, I think, the loneliness epidemic. But the turning towards the spiritual among folks in the tech community, behind some of this is this perceived conflict between the rational and the emotional, or between science and religion and all of these sorts of conflicts fairly recent. I mean, this is an AI-generated image of the science-religion conflict. See what our AI overlords think of us. The science-religion conflict, it's only a 19th century invention with folks like Draper and White making the sort of argument that there's some intrinsic and necessary conflict between the domains of the rational and the spiritual or the scientific and the religious. I mean, one of the drivers that's assumed behind this is disenchantment. Weber talks a lot about this demagification, and Hans Joas talks also about the desacralization and the detranscendentalization that are implied in the notion of disenchantment.

But when you talk to scientists themselves, you get a very different story. And so the research that I've been doing for more than a decade now with a number of colleagues has surveyed and interviewed scientists in many countries. It's very clear that for the vast majority of physicists and biologists in several countries, there's no perceived conflict between science and religion. Like Stephen Jay Gould, "non-overlapping magisteria," separate realms that don't come into contact with each other. There's even the possibility of compatibility. And even among atheists that we've studied, there are many who consider themselves spiritual atheists, including our friend Richard Dawkins who is now proclaiming himself to be spiritual. But what does he mean by that? What is this word referring to, and what kinds of longings or yearnings is this trying to express? That's been a big part of the work I've been trying to do in a project that we're calling Meaning and Mystery in Science. We're trying to get at how scientists in different national contexts experience the sort of enchantment that Rob has been talking about, and how the practice of science might be relevant to deeper desires for connection to self, others, nature and even a higher power, and the factors that then facilitate or inhibit this kind of yearning. Especially, for those scientists who are non-religious, in the sense that they are not part of any kind of faith community and they don't have any religious affiliation, so what kind of language do they have for this? How do they articulate these yearnings, and what do they do with these longings once they emerge, if at all they do? There's a question as to whether or not these longings are universal. Because some people we talked to claim that they don't experience them. There's a question of, well, what do you do about that? How do you make sense of that?

So what I want to share with you just is a lot of interview data that comes out of this project and some of the things I heard that have really moved me and I've been trying to think about what are these categories telling us. Very briefly, the methodology here for this work is to look at physicists and biologists, mainly because physics and biology are two of the basic sciences that are seen to be in some tension with religion. The focus of this work is in four countries: the US, UK, Italy, and India. In 2021-2022, we surveyed nationally representative samples of physicists and biologists in these four countries. More than 3,000 completed surveys. Then we did in-depth, hour-long interviews primarily on the role of beauty in science, as well as awe and wonder and experience of the sublime and so on. Then this past year, we've been doing more in-depth interviews for some of them, two to three hours at length, trying to understand the spiritual yearnings of these scientists. Just to tell you a little bit about what the demographics look like, 44% of scientists in these countries consider themselves to be neither spiritual nor religious. 20% consider themselves to be religious but not spiritual. Many of them are in India. So these are folks who say, "I belong to a particular faith community. I participate in the traditions and the rituals. I think it's mostly nonsense. But my spouse is devout, so we do the pujas at home." Or they might say, "I'm a Muslim. This is part of my identity. I do participate in Ramzan. I fast, and so forth. But I don't really believe any of the spiritual content." Italians, you find similarly folks who affiliate with Catholicism but consider themselves to be not spiritual. Then you have many who consider themselves to be spiritual but not religious — that's the group I'm most interested in for the purposes of this next few minutes — and then the people who are both spiritual and religious. So they're conventionally religious, and they also have some kind of inner life that matters to them. But I'm mainly going to talk about this particular category here. That's what we've been spending time really trying to understand, as well as some of the folks who are in this category who claim to be not spiritual in any way at all.

So is science disenchanting to scientists? We asked scientists whether the practice of science strips away the meaning and mystery and magic from reality, as many seem to think. There's a unanimous rejection of that idea. Scientists say there's no way that science is disenchanting. Rather, it heightens the sense of mystery and magic. They're very comfortable using those terms in ways that I found surprising. Just to give you one example from an Italian biologist who told us, "When you see something that you still cannot explain from a scientific point of view — because science does not absolutely explain everything around us or inside us, so there's a sense of that acknowledgement of the limitations of science — then a little sense of magic remains. When something happens and you don't know why but you see it's working. When you study how a cell works, which means millions of processes all interconnected, intersected, orchestrated to each other." That theme keeps coming up over and over again in our interviews. That sense of how everything is connected, a sense of harmony. You consider that there are billions of these cells in your body that as long as everything goes well are working in a coordinated and effective way. This is actually a breathtaking insight.

Again, from a scientific point of view, one might not say that this is a scientific insight. But for this person, individually, there's something around that encounter with the intersection of things, with the connectivity of things. I'm not speaking about how this was created because I don't believe in creation. I don't believe in God. I believe in evolution. Again, that science-religion tension does seem to creep in every now and then. I don't know if there are higher powers involved in any way. I don't think so. And so there are all of these different themes that we hear over and over again. And in trying to make sense of this kind of enchantment — by enchantment, what we mean is the sense of awe and wonder that is connecting the person to some object or agent beyond the self that they're perceiving as intrinsically meaningful. So that kind of experience of enchantment — we find there are three main modalities: what we're calling transcendent, imminent and then liminal. Transcendent is the folks who are primarily both spiritual and religious, who see there being a super empirical reality and that science points to God or some higher power, maybe fate. But there is something beyond the material that these experiences of awe and wonder are pointing them to. Then there are folks who are completely within the imminent frame, their buffered selves. And yet, even among those folks, it seems like there is some kind of desire to — they even talk about transcendence. But they're very clear that it's something that pulls me out of myself. But it ultimately has to be explained completely within the material world. That there are people like Alan Lightman at MIT who call themselves 'spiritual materialists.' They are committed to the ontology of materialism, and yet they want to have their spiritual cake and eat it too. The liminal category is the more interesting one, where there seems to be two possibilities. One is just an uncertainty where like the previous scientists you heard, and even this particular scientist who says, "I'm not sure that I agree with all the people in the church about a divine being. I'm more thinking of divine as being broader than that, I guess. I can't help but evoke that feeling of grandeur and awe when I'm working in nature. If there is a God, I guess I feel closer to God when I'm out there." This person identifies as a Protestant. But they're really not sure. They're not sure about whether they can commit to the existence of God. They're also thinking of divine as broader than God as we typically understand it. Many of the scientists we talked to are expressing what sounds like pantheism, which is rejecting the duality of the material and the spiritual and saying it's all one thing. There are, I guess, two ways you can go. You can say it's all material, or it's all God or some God-like thing, right? And so those are the kinds of modalities we're hearing.

All of these experiences we find are evoking desires for deeper connection to nature, self, others, and God. These are the sort of main objects of spiritual yearning as we're conceptualizing it. And so we asked scientists to share with us stories of, when you had moments of profound connection to nature, when have you longed for moments of deeper connection than you already have experienced, et cetera? We were moved by many of the stories we heard. I'll walk you through some examples of connection to each of these four objects. And so this is one scientist as a biologist talking about doing her scientific work on a boat. There was, she said, bioluminescence across the whole ocean. When you're swimming in the water, your whole body glowed. The fish around you would also glow the moment they moved. That sense of understanding that all of these little glowing lights are individual organisms that are glowing for their own reasons, that was a profound experience of I suppose a real emotional connection with that. It was very touching. But then, that sense of "I'm just this swirling part of this glowing tapestry," that's where I would say I felt spiritual. I wouldn't say it felt that way because I felt a stronger connection to a higher power or God or gods. I think, for me, I suppose it felt spiritual just in that sense of being connected and being part of that whole tapestry of being and being a small and, in that moment, insignificant part of that tapestry of being. So there is the sense of clearly awe, the sense of being confronted with a vastness of things but also with the profound connectivity of things. It's deeply significant. It's not clear to this person and, again, to all the scientists we talked to how this is relevant to their scientific lives. But I think, as Rob has argued, it is a fuel. That without these experiences, would the practice of science be significant and meaningful and would they be able to sustain that work? Another example of connection to nature comes from a scientist, a US biologist, who talks about birds and hearing the birds and feeling a sense of connection to other living things. Then whenever you hear the wind, you're kind of getting more big picture and thinking about the connection between what's the wind interacting with — the leaves, and how the wind got there. I don't know. What's wind on like a cosmic scale? It's just more, something bigger than you to focus on, which is the closest I'll get to something spiritual. And so that term is something that makes sense in the experience of connectivity to everything and to that kind of contemplation of how all things are connected. The moments that scientific practice affords for this kind of contemplation are really seen as valuable.

Connection to self is an interesting theme. And so the connection to nature is pretty obvious for people who are working, biologists working in the field and it's a regular part of life. Connection to self varies. There's a lot of variance here in what this means. There are some scientists who feel more connected to themselves when they do scientific work. This one scientist in India told us, "I think it helps me understand myself more because I like spending time doing introspection. When I'm analyzing data, meeting people, when I make mistakes, that helps me learn more about myself." But you also find people who are disconnected from their selves because of science. We've heard from many graduate students in postdocs, "I do feel like I'm missing something, and maybe that's the nature of graduate school. I don't know about other people. But I've lost a sense of self because everything is just wrapped up and working. I yearn to have the connection that I had whenever I was younger." There's a lot written in outlets like nature and other major scientific periodicals about a growing mental health crisis in science. And a lot of it has to do with this alienation and disconnection that graduate students and postdocs are feeling. Some in the scientific community feel very closely connected to their scientific tribes and feel a deep sense of meaning and connection there, but others feel completely disconnected from that.

There's another kind of, you know, these are the kinds of reasons why it becomes challenging to categorize some of these data. And we're still working on analyzing it. So here's one kind of idiosyncratic example. One Italian biologist told us, "It happens that I think intensely about a thing or a person especially at work. I think intensely that I have to work with a person. And after a few days, that person comes into contact with me. I have a spirit of observation for these things." Maybe they're manifesting something. I don't know. "I've acknowledged that they happen. And even if I don't know why, I've always accepted these things. They came and went. I have these colleagues with whom I'm in clear connection." So there's some kind of, whether it's premonition or some other kind of experience of connection. There are some scientists who say, "I experienced these weird things." There are people who felt connected to places. One scientist told me about visiting Stonehenge and feeling an aura or a presence. This person is an atheist and rejects the ontological reality of extra material forces, and yet they can't shake off that there's something here, and I don't know what it is. And it's spooky. And so there are also these spooky moments of connection to others, also some very moving experiences of people being very vulnerable with us, sharing with us. Like this one UK physicist who told me that his father died when he was very young. He said, "I truly felt abandoned as I was growing older. My mother had remarried a very abusive man who was not particularly present. All that is in the past, but it does affect you. And I think my strongest feeling of yearning today would be to have that feeling of being safe and okay and just myself and accepted. My strongest yearning is that feeling of acceptance and safety that I did not get when I was little." That's a lot of what drives his own desire for connection to others around him, even in the scientific community. Still, others told us, "I don't know what you're talking about." Or maybe, "I think I understand what you're after, but it's not what I experience." One scientist told us, "I think you're looking for something more profound than I've ever felt. I do have meaningful conversations with others. I enjoy them very much, but I think that's different from what you're trying to get at." So what does it mean to experience to yearn for a deep connection to someone else? And in what sense is that spiritual? There are scientists who would say that their relationships with others in the scientific community is in the category of spiritual, and there are others who would say it's not. Then there are still others who tell us, "I don't understand what you mean by connection. Can you give me a definition, and how are you measuring it and so forth? That is very challenging to communicate.

Finding connection to God or a higher power, this was sort of rejected by most of our respondents. But every now and then, we hear even among some of the spiritual but not religious some interesting experiences. Like this one Indian biologist, who was trained as a dancer in this form of dance called "Kathak," she said, "I think when I dance, I feel more connected to a higher power. Because there's so much feeling that rushes through it. You learn new steps and techniques. You try to express yourself. I think that's a way for me to feel more connected to myself and to a spiritual being. Because you feel like your audience is God. Someone is sitting out there, and you dance for them. You don't want to prove you're worth to anyone. You're just dancing for someone, for some power. And I think dancing is one way that I feel connected to nature, to God, to myself. But that's true for my scientific journey as well. I have no one to prove it to. I have a question that I'm trying to talk to the spiritual being about. And it helps me." And so there's this relationship between our practice of dance. Then there are others who've talked about yoga as a practice that they engage in, which also bleeds over into their scientific practice and helps them sort of see those practices as spiritually relevant. Again, this sort of relationship between nature and God also comes up quite a bit. There's one scientist who talk to us about being in the mountains and, "Feeling not only my body at that moment but a little bit of everything around it. My consciousness had expanded a little outside. I wasn't concentrating on myself, but I had the impression of being in contact with this place as if someone else had given me a taste of their consciousness. I don't know how to express it. My state was not in the usual state. It expanded. And I said to myself, 'I've met God.' In other words, someone has brought me to him for a moment in his state, and I felt that I was experiencing these moments differently. I don't know how to explain it other than I met God." So there are similar kinds of struggles to express that something has happened here that's significant. I don't quite have the language for it other than, I can say with certainty, that this is what I would call God and it's happened here and from many scientists who are not religious.

Besides self, other, nature or God, there are the three other main objects of yearning that have repeatedly come up. The first is understanding, that desire to recognize, as Rob said, this is how things are. That yearning for things to fit together for the hidden order or inner logic of things, to make itself manifest. That is a profound experience of beauty, but it's also a profound desire that motivates scientific practice. Desire for peace, peace with oneself, peace with, you know, it could be in relation to the situation in the world, in relation to things like climate change, wanting things to come to some kind of order and a longing for direction. I don't know where am I going next, and what am I doing with my life. So those are the other kinds of things where they're yearning for some clarity. So those are the categories that we've been trying to just sort of, that we think all the things that were coming across fit into these seven buckets.

There's various contexts in which these yearnings come up. As we've seen, spending time in nature is very common. The ways in which scientific life gives rise to a sense of something missing is really important, especially as one gets caught up in the careerism and the sort of publish-or-perish nature of academia. They feel something is missing. They've lost a sense of self sometimes. Contemplating a scientific insight or even just being able to grasp some sense of whether it's their own idea, whether it's a discovery or a theory that's already established, the wonder, the experience can be evocative of this yearning. Practices like yoga, or dancing, or music, transitional life phases, when you're finishing up graduate school, finishing up a postdoc, getting married, those sorts of things. Bereavement is really important and lots of stories of grief that evoke yearning when people close to you pass away. There are also many obstacles. One that we came across often is a sense of self-satisfaction, which we're trying to make sense of, which is some people say, "I'm not yearning for anything. I don't see why I would need to. My life is good. I'm perfectly happy, perfectly satisfied. There's nothing missing. I have no deeper desires." The institutional context makes it hard for many to think about, "Yeah, I have these yearnings, but I mean I don't see how they're relevant to my life as a scientist." There are questions of theodicy, especially in relation to God or higher power or an obstacle, where we encounter people with a lot of anger against the God concept, which is, "How can God allow the innocent children to die, et cetera?" And so I've rejected religion for those reasons. Skepticism around whether these yearnings are really worth or they just sort of, "I feel these things, but are they really important? I don't know." Belief systems. We talk to some scientists who are Buddhist and say, "We're taught not to yearn. We're taught not to have desires. It's not a good thing." I had one Buddhist scientist I talked to. I said, "Well, in your moments of weakness when you do yearn, what do you yearn for?" He said, "Well, what I really want is faster technological progress," which I thought was a very strange object of yearning.

But beyond disenchantment, there are two other themes that came up that are really important. One is disillusionment with the scientific vocation and just the nature of academia and the nature of science with the publish-or-perish pressures and so forth and the difficulty in finding permanent jobs and demoralization with what scientific advances have done to our planet. There's a lot of climate grief that scientists are trying to process and don't quite know how to. And even if they say, "I would love to go back to the mountains or these places where I've experienced spiritual connection, I feel guilty putting myself on an aircraft and flying there." So there's a tension between the reality that we're in and what one might want to pursue. Finally, these are questions that I'm left with at the end. It's, is science a locus of cosmic connection? Can scientific theories and models provide a subtler language that restores cosmic wonder in an age of disenchantment? I mean, there are some things that you can't express, except in the language of mathematics. So when scientists say that they are moved by the elegance of some of those equations or formulas, what do they mean there? Echoing what Rob said, can science have a unique form of interspace? And if it does, will scientists take this seriously as a third domain between the subjective and the objective? How might science maybe better need to integrate with poetry and other forms of art to function more fully as a spiritual resource? How do we make sense of those scientists who tell us they have no yearnings for connection?

Finally, I'm still scratching my head around, to what extent the things that scientists are talking about fit within the concept of spiritual? What is the scope of that concept? There are scientists who tell us, "I really feel a sense of spiritual connection to my colleagues at CERN, the big particle accelerator, and the sense of we're all in the same thing together, et cetera." But others might say, "Well, that's just sort of a social bond that you share with people who are professionally similar to you. Why would you call that spiritual?" And so those are interesting questions as to what do we mean by that concept and how should we define it. I think, especially for those of us who are social scientists, we want to try to operationalize these things. It's helpful to figure out what are the limits there. So thanks. I would love to get questions that you might have for Naomi and Rob and myself perhaps for a few minutes, or comments. It doesn't have to be questions.

Rob: A very quick comment on self-satisfaction. In fact, you clarified my understanding. I mean, the center talking about people being a bit buffered. You're talking about people being comfortable. But there's also an element in which I resonated with it in your abstract. Because one of the problems with scientists is, if they're kind of closed, if it's too career-focused, too self-satisfied, too ambitious, I think it can blinker them to things that they see. I think it can be a hindrance. I mean, if they're very brilliant and very insightful, maybe it's okay. But I think it's an interesting thing that if it's not a decentering, that's what I'm saying, if there's not a humility in front of what you're studying, if there's not a willingness to be moved by it, I think that can be a barrier to actually perceiving what's in front of you. That's an element of the self-satisfaction as well. So it's not just they're saying, "Oh, we don't need this." Actually, maybe they'd be better scientists if they were a little bit more vulnerable.

Rajeev: Thank you very much. This is really quite exciting and fulfilling to be present over here. I keep feeling that these are a search or a path to cosmic connection and the spiritual yearning constantly disrupted by one certain kinds of ideologies, which are intellectual disturbances and disruptions, dogma and social disruptions. For example, in India, this constant oppression, to be explained by caste hierarchies or this communal issue and, finally, political disruptions. I mean, the rising tide of authoritarianism, the control that strong men are exercising. I find that some of the most forceful yearnings in the past—I was talking about 15th century—all were accompanied by social critique and of critique of people within their own religious traditions who are constantly interrupting any form of spiritual yearning. So what I'm saying is that these two really go hand in hand. The spiritual yearning or cosmic connection really is a huge disruption caused by so many factors. That a person who is yearning for something beyond oneself has to constantly not just dialogue with but dialogue critically with and sometimes even forcefully attack all those factors, people who embody those factors. I think these are some things that we should simultaneously talk about rather than talk only about one and not about the other.

Galen: This was just in response to Robert's really fascinating talk. So the first thing, I love the way that you brought attention to the way this kind of mechanistic model is actually in some sense kind of imposed, as it were, by scientists. Right? The world is not actually — I mean, it's more creative, dynamic. We impose it on, and there's a kind of poeticism about this. I loved the way you talk about, you know, it made me think about science as this sort of playful activity. We hypothesize. We fantasize, right? We play with equipment, but they're toys. So it made me think about, if it's the case, then we can think about science as a kind of play, in the way that children play. There's something there. But I also wonder whether something happens, and there is something distinctive not just in quantity but in quality between the kind of play that you find among children, which does seem to me as close to enchantment for a four-year-old and a two-year-old as it comes, and then the kind of play that happens among professional scientists who are, as we've learned, subject to all kinds of pressures, career, and so on. One way of thinking about this — this is sort of maybe Weberian — is as you move out of the play of a child, into the play of, say, a professional practicing scientist, you kept saying that the mechanism model is amazing because it works. Right? That suggests to me a certain kind of, that there's this emphasis on mastering the world, on world mastery, which I do see as characteristic of not just science but the modern world. I mean, Weber would have said it, the modern world more generally, a feature of rationalization.

You described science as being, for yourself at least, valuable in itself. But I do wonder whether that's actually true when it's institutionalized. So is science intrinsically valuable, or is it just a way to better master the world and wield it for our own human purposes? In which case you could think about it as play, but it's a different kind of play than the child who isn't necessarily trying to wield it for a specific purpose so they can get — it's a question of ends rather than means, right? So is it more than a means, another way of putting it? And just to sort of follow from this, what you described, you said that scientists like yourself, there's a kind of you could call it — I mean, to be proper, you could call it kind of faith. You have to have faith that science is worth doing to engage in it at all. I have to say Weber argues this in his famous essay on Science as a Vocation. In fact, that's the idea of science as a vocation. Science is something that the scientist, as it were, has to commit themselves to. He even thought of it as a kind of faith. But ironically, he didn't see that as contradicting his claim in the same lecture that the world was disenchanted. In fact, he had this kind of view of science that he said that it's sort of a — he used all kind of machismo metaphors, the effeminate kind of like scientists who see science as leading to enchantment. Right? Those of us who are kind of manly scientists accept that the world is cold and meaningless. But we commit to it nonetheless. We follow our daemon, and we believe in it. It's the kind of subjectivist faith, you could say, for Weber. Right? It's really about a personal commitment to this. But it doesn't necessarily tell us about the world more broadly. He was committed to the view that the world was disenchanted. So I don't know whether — maybe Weber was wrong. Maybe he was being hypocrite. But I'd be curious, not that you have to know Weber, how to think through that question.

Rob: There would be more to say. On the first point, that's a very interesting issue about different kinds of play. I suppose a couple of things. One thing is, of course, there's other games like chess, various games, those sort of board games which are all about world domination, right? So there are ways in which play itself kind of starts to tip over into thinking about mastery, okay? But more fundamentally, I suppose what I'd say is, I think that you're right, that the kind of science as a system and aspects of it are definitely pretty disenchanting. Right? Actually, the way scientists behave can be pretty disenchanting because they can behave very badly. I suppose, my point is kind of more basically that the thing that makes somebody wants to become a scientist, particularly when they're younger, and establishing themselves, what keeps them at it is a sort of more childlike, more innocent approach. Then they kind of get spoiled potentially. Or not. Not always. Some people remain — Max Perutz's obituary in the Times ended, Max Perutz was a wonderful man or a wonderful human being. The great can be good. That's because great people often aren't very good. But Perutz was actually quite a good man, as well as being a great scientist. And so I suppose the point is that people can maintain an innocence or an idealism, but many people become very kind of slightly spoiled by — the funny thing is, I think, what keeps people at it, what causes people to become scientists and stay up overnight doing the work they need to do and really sacrificing other interests too is a kind of more childlike aspect to it, particularly when they're young. But you're right. You're right. The play becomes pretty serious, pretty deadly at times. I think I can't comment at all on Weber. But in terms of the issue of commitment, yeah, I mean, I think there's also — yes, I mean, I think you're right. I think there's a difference. That's an interesting point to have made. It's an interesting distinction. Because it's true that I would say that there's a kind of you need a faith, a commitment, as you were saying, Weber said. And I suppose there are ways in which that can be just sort of followed in a sort of rote way, rather than it being something which you're resonating with. And so it could even be a little bit analogous to what Brandon was talking about, in terms of people who observe particular forms of life because they're associated with a particular religious tradition and the difference between that and actually believing in the religion.

2. Tara Isabella Burton, The Lost Word

I want to start with a little bit of background about what I'm working on and why I want to talk about magic so badly. So my current research project is a trade book about essentially the intertwined histories of magic and what we might loosely, problematically, debatably call modernity, looking in particular at the social and intellectual mage around learned magic, what the scholar Francis Yates famously termed the "Hermetic tradition." I have my own quibbles with that, but we only have 10 minutes.

Roughly, from the revival of the Hermetic tradition and the wider Neoplatonic revival in 15th century Florence through its influence with scientific tradition, through alchemy in particular, on the proliferation of liberal democracy in terms of the spread of secret societies and affinity networks, including Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, and particularly in the post-Enlightenment era, its role in 19th century reactionary and anti-modern aesthetics, on poetry and the arts, we find sort of Hermetic influence in Blake, in Yeats, in Eliot, and so many others. And finally, via union psychology and the '60s counterculture on the developments of religious sensibilities surrounding the development first of the personal computer and then of the networked internet and into the age of social media. So that long or that argument, as you might have gathered, is too long to get into here. But roughly speaking, what I'm trying to do is trace an intellectual genealogy of what I kind of inelegantly call 'magical transhumanism' from roughly the Corpus Hermeticum of late antique Alexandria, heavily influenced in turn by Neoplatonic thought, which envisions humanity's ultimate destiny as kind of bypassing a demiurgic creator in order to become a more truly divine and ascend to a non-personal Godhead. I want to sort of trace this magical transhumanism all the way into the '70s and beyond to a world in which, as the futurist Stewart Brand famously said, "We are as gods, and we might as well get good at it."

But today, I actually want to hone in on one particular part of this magical tradition, the magical transhumanist tradition, whatever you want to call it, something that fascinates me as an academic, as a theologian, but also fascinates me in my other life as a novelist. And that is the search, this magical search, for the positive lost language of Eden. The idea that the practicing magician, if he could only access or rediscover the language of Adam — the Adamic language originally spoken between God and man before the fall — that somehow this mage will have access to not only an unfettered, unmediated portrait of the truth but also to the creative power of becoming God-like himself, of having a kind of wisdom that allows him to use the true language. Not just to describe the world, describe reality, but to shape it. So we find this, for example, in the tradition of Solomonic magic, which is associated with the desire and attempt to wield power by correctly utilizing the many names of God. We find this in slightly different form in the Kabbalah, the tradition of Jewish mysticism, including. There's a slightly different version we find in the Zohar where Moses first writes the Ten Commandments on sapphire tablets, which he destroys and then they get imperfectly rendered into stone. So it was a sort of sense of a, again, lost word. Perhaps, one of the most explicit examples, for those of you who are into Elizabethan astrology, you find this in the magical efforts of John Dee, who's the court astrologer at various times both to Elizabeth I and the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II — who, after his attempts at alchemy and natural magic fail, believed he discovers the language of the angels through these mediated, scrying sessions during which he believes that it has been revealed to him the language of Enochian angelic language. Dee explicitly conceives of this language and access to this language as a kind of analogue to the philosopher's stone. He talks about the angelic stone, which is invisible. It's not a physical substance but gives him access to this linguistic wisdom and through it to a knowledge of God and through it to magic.

So I'm wary of getting too into the Neoplatonic background here. My notes say it's because it would only take 10 minutes, but also now it's because there's a bunch of Neoplatonic scholars in the room. But a really simple or reductionist way of framing it would be to say that the magical tradition, particularly in this Hermetic incarnation, is indebted to this problem that comes up in so much sort of late, antique, Alexandrian thought in particular, how do you syncretically marry very simplistically a Greek philosophical thought and revealed religion, particularly ancient Near Eastern religion, particularly in the interests or from a Christian perspective, Judaism. One of the solutions that we find, or one of the avenues that sort of new platonic thought provides, which later comes to shape the hermetic view of things, is the sense that, well, we can distinguish between the one, the Godhead, and the creator of the material realm. You can think of him as Plato does the Timaeus, as a craftsman or a demiurge, a word that doesn't necessarily have the connotation it has for the Gnostics. The negative connotation, I should say. But there's this sort of wider sense as well within the Hermetic tradition. That because there is a hierarchy of reality, this emanationist picture of the great train of being coming down from the one into the material realm, magic basically works on correctly knowing these correspondences. And being able to manipulate a stone, or a plant, or an object, or sort of somewhat more complicatedly a talisman or a word in order to draw down certain celestial, non-material realities that exist between the material and the Godhead. Central to the sort of magical Hermetic understanding of this and post-Hermetic understanding of this is this idea that, in some sense, the non-material realm, the realm of views, the realm of magic, is realer than the realm of the merely material. There's some kind of priority that happens on the level of language. Such that when we have access to certain kinds of spiritual knowledge, material reality simply becomes something we can shape. All reality becomes something we can shape.

Again, I won't get into the sort of long, long history of this tradition here. But it is something that has particularly appealed to artists and writers and poets. And as a writer, I can understand why. There's something very appealing and sexy, certainly, about the idea of the artist as a magician who can shape reality. But I think that there's something that's not just about the quest for power there. And again, I'm speaking personally now as a novelist. That we do have a felt sense when dealing with great art. Great novels, in my case, that's what I love to read. Also, great poetry. That we are entering into a realm of reality, that what is being said both on the level of language or on the level of narrative is not merely like an imperfect reflection of the truth to the extent that we're looking at a bad fact where we can't make out everything to a photorealistic level. But that there's some kind of reality there that we're entering into, that we're creating, or co-creating, or experiencing that matters. And I would venture to say that I think one of the appeals that this Hermetic tradition has, particularly after the Enlightenment, when it becomes something that writers and artists tend to love more than alchemists who were less of a factor in the 19th century, precisely because it offers an affirmation. That there is a reality that is being spoken to.

So I am not a Hermetic magician. I am in fact coming from this from a Christian perspective. One of the things that I'm wrestling with, again, as a writer, as well as in my nonfiction work is, how do we hold onto or how do we preserve the reality of poetic language while avoiding what I think and I'm increasingly coming to think as I work on this history is something that's implicit in the Hermetic, the magical transhumanist worldview? Which is, if you at some point equate the human capacity for language or the human intellect or desire — I think it's ultimately desire that becomes the engine of reality and the magical tradition — with the ability to manipulate or call down or otherwise control these energies that exist between you and the Godhead, and perhaps even transcend the authority and power of the God who created the material realm, it's not so implausible to take it to the next step as indeed sort of the 19th century magicians like Aleister Crowley do. That, in fact, what we desire is the closest thing to divinity in the universe. That we are gods precisely because the stuff of divinity lies in human desire. I think an example of where we might see this in everyday life now actually is the popularity of something like manifesting, this idea that you can manifest what you want into existence. Which one poll says 50% of Americans now say they believe them. 20% say that they've tried it. So this is, I think, something that is very much an example of where this tendency is headed.

So I'm curious to sort of ideally have someone help me out of this problem as a novelist but more broadly to discuss, what does an anti-magical yet realist philosophy or theology of creation look like? How can we think about the reality of the created word without thinking about ourselves as near appropriators of the Divine Act? Certainly, there's this sort of rich tradition. My background is in 19th century French decadence of the creator being kind of diabolical, and sexily diabolical for this precise reason. So how do we get around that? I don't have a complete answer. I wish I did. But I think that something that constantly brings me back or gives me a sense of purpose as a novelist is in actually thinking about my own creative work as a kind of wager on meaning. That what I am doing when I am writing is not attempting to kind of emanate parts of myself into the new sphere or create a kind of reality but to enter into by virtue of what I'm doing, as well as what I'm actually saying or what I'm writing. A kind of relationship with both other people and the divine, a sense in which I'm entering a field of conversation where I am both shaping language — language that is in turn being shaped by the stories around me, that is being shaped by language available to me, which is in turn the product of cultural flow, grander storytelling, and the sort of sheer biological reality of how sounds sound in my mouth when I make them. That this intersection point of, let's say, biological necessity, imaginative freedom, and the cultural realm by which language is shaped is the kind of site of how we can as human beings, social and I think linguistic creatures, approach reality.

And so I find it most useful to think of art or my own artistic creation as not just a kind of prayer. Maybe liturgy is too strong a word, especially if it's private. But as an entering into a meditation on the fact of that realm. Actually, Cosmic Connections has been hugely helpful to me in my own work at getting at the sense that they're of aesthetic realism, that there is something even if we don't know what it is in the process of participation. There's an image I want to leave you all with that helps me. It's from the sort of the Eastern Orthodox tradition. There's a moment in the Divine Liturgy where basically angels are welcomed into the space. It's a sense of let angels participate with us as we sing the glories of the Lord. It's not theurgy in the magical sense. You're not calling down angels. But it is a recognition that this place and this time, not exactly through human creation but as a result of a kind of collective agreement to worship together, the reality of time and place and space take on new significance. It's, you might say, not a one-to-one correspondence. But everything means everything else and refers to everything else. There's a vision there of a lattice of connections. I don't yet have, let's say, a programmatic analysis of why the Divine Liturgy can help me personally as a novelist. But I do think it provides us a starting point to start thinking about what anti-magical realist creation might look like. So I'll leave it there.

3. Bill Barbieri, Enchanting Gardens: Visuality and Ecological Agency

All right. So I'm trying to honor the time here. It's a little ironic to write an abstract or presentation when just reading the abstract will take more than 10 minutes. I've boiled down my intervention to five propositions. Some of them are drawn from my own research project that I'm really just getting underway with, and some of them are responses to the very stimulating contributions that we've already heard.

Proposition number one is one of two ideas that I set out in my abstract for this meeting, namely, agency is ecological. What do I mean by that? I've been working recently on a critique of contemporary models of agency where most tend to be highly individualized. Our philosophical conception, misconceptions of moral agency often tend to focus on individual moments of decision or choice. So our exercise of freedom becomes decontextualized socially. But more importantly, it becomes decontextualized from our relationship to the Earth. So my argument is that we need to decenter the role of the individual and our understandings of how agency works, and recast our attention toward these additional dimensions that are essential, that are in ineliminable from what it actually means to exist as a free being. So that means that agency has to be contextualized in social environments, that it has to recognize that agency is enacted only in narratives, in ongoing stories. It has to recognize a historical dimension. But most importantly, for my purposes, we have to affirm the material. Not just preconditions but participants in agencies. Some people write about assemblages. Jane Bennett, for example, has written about vibrant matter as something that we interact with. That is, again, not just sometimes part of it but always a substrate of our capacity to act. So that's my first point here.

My second point, my second proposition, is that values can be mediated visually. Now we have here Charles' wonderful book about poetry. And poetry provides a certain type of language that enables certain sorts of experiences that might arguably be different from other discursive forms of language. What I've been working on though for quite a while is the field that's known as visual ethics and the idea that images, that visuality, affords encounters, perhaps knowledge, or perhaps a grasp of values in ways that aren't always mediated by words. And I include here this image. This is only — well, this is most of the full image. This is a picture that some of you might recognize as coming out of the civil rights, the recent Black Lives Matter movement in the US. I don't want to say anything about this image, other than to ask you to react to what you see. In the first place, I could give you all kinds of context about this image, and I could point to ways in which how we interpret the image is largely shaped through interpretive, discursive frameworks that we bring to it. But I still want to say that there are certain features. And again, I'm sorry. It's not quite the full image. But there are just things in the posture, in the juxtapositions of facial and other features, that we respond to even arguably before we begin to further interpret what is going on. It's a powerful image, and it's one that captures a number of different things. But my contention here is that we can unpack this in ways that attune us to value their, again, arguably non-discursive or pre-linguistic. There are many different ways in which visual images can embody what we can think of as ethical or moral content. We have this wonderful poem that interpreted Klimt's painting of Hope through poetic language, which gave us a kind of double mediation of what is a virtue, a theological virtue, of a moral virtue, hope.

Third proposition: disenchantment and, going along with it, the language of, in Charles's book, of connections, or sometimes he speaks about reconnections, reconnections to the cosmos can be a counterproductive framework for thinking about our condition. Why do I say that? There are a couple of reasons. The main one is that the idea of disenchantment is rooted in and, again, arguably reinforces a kind of dualism, a way of thinking about humans and their surroundings, humans and nature, humans in the cosmos as fundamentally separate and in need of connection, where connection is problematic. My counter proposal would be that, we always are already connected but that we simply don't necessarily see that, or we have convinced ourselves. Or otherwise, I'm not sure here if we should use the language of alienation. But we've covered over or bonded ourselves to a view that doesn't recognize our earthiness, as I'm saying, the way that we are dependent on, bound up with other people, the Earth, history and so on. If we think about disenchantment, the term itself, we note the root, the idea of enchant — Tara, I'm sure, can tell you much more about this than I know — it's related to the French "chante," to sing or to chant. The idea here, the image here, is of becoming spell bound, of somehow being separated from the normal run of things. So disenchantment becomes a kind of negation of a negation, if you will. But enchantment itself interposes a distance between ourselves and our environment. It's probably not incidental that this emerged at a certain point in late medieval history as a way of characterizing how we can become bound up through a process of casting a spell from our normal state. Now I would also say that the idea of disenchantment, in the Weberian sense, is one more of what Charles and others and elsewhere called a subtraction narrative. So we're tempted to think of disenchantment as a process of removing magic from the world around us. But again, my argument is, we should think about flipping the script a little bit and think of it more as imaginatively removing ourselves from the world. That the task is not somehow re-enchanting the world; it's liberating ourselves from the illusions of separateness, the illusion that nature is something fundamentally distinct from culture or from humans. And we find this movement going on in a lot of post-Humanist or new Materialist thinkers right now. I think that's a valuable clue to follow.

My fourth proposition is that secularism is a process of flattening and excarnation. It was interesting to me, Charles, that that word "excarnation" played a very important role in A Secular Age, but it doesn't come up again in Cosmic Connections. Because I think a lot of the issue here is that there's an attempt to return to our bodily presence in the world. That's one of the things that poetry can do for us. A Secular Age had an interesting analysis of excarnation, because it is a removal from a complex of things that include our bodies but also our history, our society and, ultimately, our relationship to God. Now, the secularization process involves excarnation, and it brings with it a flattening of experience through a number of different realms.

My fifth and final proposition goes to the question of how to respond to what I'm describing as a flattening. I think that the moral life requires a sense of difference, a sense of otherness, a sense of contact to things that are beyond us and, in some sense, higher than us. That sense is what makes a kind of humility and a kind of de-centering of our own interests possible.

So I look at the proposition this way. Brandon just referred in his presentation to the idea of something missing. Habermas famously wrote about An Awareness of What is Missing. My proposition would be that the "something missing" is actually there and that the problem is not restoring it somehow but recovering our awareness of it. So if morals, morality, ethical progress depends on de-centering the self, part of that process is developing our resources for what Michel de Certeau called heterology—our grasp of what is different from us and of how those relationships constitute us. But it also involves the overcoming the illusion of independence and see our co-existence but, more importantly, interdependence than other people with history, with the earth systems in particular. That's where my new ecological agency comes in, and ultimately with higher powers. Charles spoke about the impact of Gandhi. And Gandhi's insight was into the power of interdependence. His notion of ahimsa as a law of love was a recognition of the way that our interdependence with others is actually a fact in our lives that we can tap into in order to improve our moral awareness.

Just a couple of closing thoughts about ways to accentuate our sense of our own ecological agency, our own interdependence, our own pre-existing, always existing connection to the cosmos. One topic that I'm exploring in my own work is the way in which certain kinds of gardens or gardening experiences can foster this. I noticed that Charles mentioned in Cosmic Connections at a couple of key points how gardening was one way in which one could feel like one was restoring a connection to nature. An interesting book I've been reading recently is Edward Casey and Michael Marder's book, Plants in Place: A Phenomenology of the Vegetal. They write about how plants and our interaction with plants, in gardens, and in other settings provides an emplacement for us, or maybe a read and placement would be the appropriate term there.

Two more quick thoughts. One is a response to Charles, to your earlier remarks about your own biography and the impact of the Nouvelle théologie in your upbringing. I think that Ressourcement, that approach of de Lubac and Congar, is something that can be maybe reconfigured and applied in this context. We are re-grounding ourselves in the sources that are already there and, at a certain level, on which we already depend and even, one could argue, practice a kind of faith. Yes, those sources, our relationships to others, our relationship to the earth, to life, and perhaps to other powers beyond that. We also see — this is my final brief comment — in the field of environmental humanities, in which I work, a growing emphasis on looking at indigenous communities which are closer to, were more aware of these connections that I'm talking about. They talk about traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) as an important resource for us to tap into in shifting or transforming, not the world, not re-injecting magic or spirituality to the world but transforming our own outlook or awareness through a process of ecological transformation or, as Pope Francis calls it, ecological conversion. So I'll wrap up with that. Thank you very much.

5. Galen Watts, Barriers to Cosmic Connection

I just want to begin with a heartfelt thanks to you, Brandon, for organizing this and of course for inviting me, and just to say that I'm extremely honored to be here presenting in front of an intellectual hero and fellow Canadian. Charles, your work has meant so, so much to me, so I'm very grateful for this opportunity.

All right. So my remarks are going to focus on, broadly speaking, what I think of are some of the key barriers to cosmic connection. They're going to be sort of sociological and philosophical, something between that two. They come out of, as with many others, my reading of Cosmic Connections. There's a sense in which I really felt a kind of deep optimism in Cosmic Connections. On some level, I think part of this is just Charles' incredible rhetorical and kind of written style. It has this sort of deep optimism at its core. But there's something a bit more substantive about that. We can think about it in this way. That, on one hand, Charles accepts a certain version of the disenchantment thesis. We, in the wake of, say, the 18th century or so, we are increasingly buffered punctual cells. We live in an imminent frame where naturalism is increasingly hegemonic. We live in institutions which are increasingly rationalized, bureaucracies, the market and, also, as Hartmut Rosa would say, accelerated. Time just seems to be moving faster and faster. All of these seem to be reasons to despair.

But Charles tells us that we are — this is probably an inapt term. We are wired for cosmic connection, right? That on some deep, deep, philosophical anthropological level, we are cosmic-seeking creatures. And so the optimism, you could say, is that despite the disenchantment of the modern world, cosmic connection will break through. Where there's a will, there's a way, to sort of summarize. I want to believe that really, but I want to also think realistically about what the challenges are in the face of cosmic connection being actually achieved. And so I want to think about what those kind of barriers are. How great are they? Can they be overcome? What would it require for us to overcome them, not just personally but societally? What would we need to do? What kind of actions would we need to take? And to put it maybe somewhat provocatively, what would we need to sacrifice to achieve that? Again, not just personally, but collectively. And this will lead into my final remarks or not really remarks but questions that I'd love to hear from Charles on. What is the kind of good that cosmic connection is? Is it one good among others, or is it the kind of ultimate good from which all other goods derive? That, I think, is a very important question for us to figure out, because it will also help us to answer the other questions. What are we willing to do to realize this good?

Okay. So I'm making a distinction, which is ideal, typical between two different kinds of barriers to cosmic connection in, let's say, the 21st century. I'm thinking, of course, specifically in the kind of North Atlantic world. The first kind of barriers are what I'll call "characterological." And here, I'm thinking of characterological in David Riesman's sense, the idea that every social order encourages and even normalizes a particular social character. I think it's safe to say that the world that shaped Charles Taylor is not the world we live in today. I think that's an important fact to kind of come to grips with. So I want to start with a kind of shameful confession, which is that when I read the poetry that Taylor wonderfully includes in Cosmic Connections, I feel lost. I don't really know. I don't know what's going on. I am profoundly dependent on him as a reader to help me understand and orient myself in space. Now, I say this because I think on some level, this is not unique to people of my generation. That many of us are living not just in the wake of classical secularization, the decline of, say, Orthodox religious belief, but also in the wake of what Simon During, I think, helpfully calls 'second secularization,' which is roughly speaking, increasing decline of faith in the humanities. That is to say, of the canon, of the idea that art in the broadest sense has deep, objective truths there for us. And I think that we see this. We can see evidence for this in the declining involvement of humanities, you know, programs, the way that increasingly the marketization of the humanities.

So what this suggests to me is that, when I was reading Cosmic Connections, it became clear to me just how much Taylor Charles, as a reader, has these incredible capacities. These are not just knowledge. It's not just knowledge. It's also a certain set of dispositions, a set of competencies, that I do not have and I don't think many of my generation have, right? That we lack cultural frames of reference, we lack deep, formative experiences that would allow us to appreciate and receive the kind of insights that, say, romantic poetry contains. Now, I'd be curious to know what Charles thinks of that. He might say in response that poetry is just his love. It's not everybody's love. Maybe that's not the only way that we can see cosmic connection. But I want to suggest that my point has much broader implications. That in the kind of scientific, technological culture that I have grown up, and certainly my kids will grow up in increasingly, are they going to have the kinds of capacities, competencies, dispositions that allow them to achieve cosmic connection, of the kind that Taylor speaks?

So the way that I've come to think about this is that, there's a kind of crisis that I think the Romantics are concerned with. I call this a crisis of articulation. Right? That there is this attempt to try and recover this sense of cosmic connection. And so you have to devise a language—in this case, romantic poetry—to recover that experience, to communicate it, to articulate it. That's the task of the Romantic poet or artist, whatever the medium. But I would say that, at the same time, there's a crisis not just of articulation but a crisis of reception. That is to say, it's all well and good if you have virtuoso readers like Taylor. But if nobody understands what they're saying, it's no good. There's two parties in any kind of dialog. You have a communicator and a receiver. I worry about on the side of reception, whether we are creating a world for — we were talking about this earlier. What happens to a person who is on social media for eight hours a day, who becomes habituated to check their phone every five minutes? So how does this numb one a person? How does this change them on a deep level? And what are the ways in which this makes them incapable of receiving the kinds of insights that, say, the Romantic poets were trying to get us to experience? So that's the characterological set of barriers, broadly speaking.

The other are what I'll call, for lack of a better term, "institutional barriers." And here, I'm thinking kind of along two lines. The first is, the way that our institutions as a kind of overarching system make it very difficult actually to think seriously and take seriously the notion of cosmic connection. So here, a colleague of mine and myself have been working for the past year on devising a kind of sociological account of this. We've taken the notion of the imminent frame very seriously, trying to sort of put some kind of sociological meat on the bones of that. We've come to think that — following actually the work of Peter Berger, famously known for his concept of the "sacred canopy," that in pre-modern society, there's a kind of sacred canopy, an overarching cosmic, you could say, order that envelops everyone in the society. We have argued, or we're arguing, that there's a kind of secular, sacred canopy. We think that this has at least three dimensions. That there's an epistemological dimension, where empiricism is the dominant mode by which one can achieve truth or knowledge. We think there's an ontological dimension, where naturalism or perhaps materialism is presumed, where natural reality or the natural world exhausts reality. That's the presumption. Then there's actually also — Charles' work has been incredibly influential in helping us think about this. There's a moral dimension. That the secular, sacred canopy sacralizes in a kind of Durkheimian sense the values of autonomy and authenticity, what Robert Bellah would have called "expressive individualism." We think that this sort of trifecta, which forms what we call the secular, sacred canopy, is a lot more hostile, we'll say, to genuine cosmic connection than the optimism that one sometimes reads in Charles' work, right? In A Secular Age, Charles talks at length about the way that the eminent frame can be spun open, or it can be shut closed. And I wonder increasingly, how much space is there really to spin it open? I don't deny I've written a book on the existence of spiritual desires and yearnings. But I nevertheless wonder, if we're really interested in fostering genuine cosmic connection, how significant the barriers are given the nature of our institutional complex.

The second line along this is thinking about the way that this secular, sacred canopy fosters a deep anti-institutionalism, which makes of course reforming our institutions exceedingly difficult. And here, I'm drawing from the work of people like Berger and Bellah who were notably sociologists. And so interested of course in the moral vocabularies that we as modern people invoke and use, but also in the way that these are grounded and have to be grounded in traditions and institutions. And of course, on one hand, Taylor has spent many, many years trying to both defend, say, the ethic of authenticity against kind of crass or corrupt iterations of this, the way that consumer culture takes the ethic of authenticity in all kinds of shallow, superficial directions. But I increasingly wonder whether Bellah and Berger's suspicions of authenticity, and of course romanticism at least in its popular mode, was at least more merited than maybe I've been willing to recognize. That if it's the case that Romanticism, as it's popularized today, actually fuels this intense anti-institutionalism and anti-traditionalism, can, in fact, we overcome the kinds of challenges that we need to?

So this is going to lead me into my last, my final, remarks about the kind of good that cosmic connection is. And you brought this up in your earlier remarks, Charles. One of the things that struck me most, and I'm not sure if I'm understanding this right. But it's that, at the very same time, you talk about the ethical growth from the Axial Age, particularly our ethical growth, the rising moral expectations of citizens increasingly in the West but increasingly around the world, they really kind of rise up in the wake of the 18th century. And yet, at the same time, it strikes me that that is roughly when we trace the beginning of disenchantment. So, on some level, we have these two parallel processes which are difficult for me to sort of come to grips with. Because on one hand, I want to think that if you're going to have disenchantment, you're going to have ethical regression. But we've seen the opposite. On some level, historically speaking, we've seen ethical progress and further and further disenchantment. That makes me think, well, how do I make sense of that parallel process? And I particularly started thinking about this. In the last chapter of Cosmic Connections, Charles talks, I think, quite laudably about young people today and the way that they embody this ethical progress. And I see that too in my students. You have this Greta Thunberg, right? You see this intense commitment, profoundly, morally admirable commitments. And yet, I would say broadly speaking, I see this as combined with a sort of deep spiritual lack. So you have this strange situation, it seems to me, among young people. Again, I'm generalizing in a very, very crass way. But a combination of intense moral commitment and profound spiritual disorientation. Those speak to those two processes, disenchantment and ethical growth. And so then I wonder, do these two process work together? Are they actually quite independent of one another? What is their relationship?

The other question I have is, if we could have ethical growth without cosmic connection, without enchantment of a certain kind, then what should we be willing to do to recover it? How far should we be willing to go to ensure that not just a few of us in this room have cosmic connection in the woods but that most of us have this? I take Charles to believe, I believe this too, that cosmic connection is a core constituent of a flourishing, full life. I believe that. But if that's true, then do we need to sacrifice key features of the modern world, of modernity, for it, for us to have this, this good? What are we willing to do? I see right now, obviously, Trump's election is sort of provoking this. But there have been these alternatives. You can see, say, just as an example, on the left, certain forms of environmentalism which see modernity as fundamentally the problem. We need to get rid of these things, and it's quite a radical move. But you see, of course, the rise of post-liberalism on the right, which is an equally kind of anti-modern bent to it. Both of these camps, despite their differences, agree that the modern world cannot be saved. And I sense in reading Taylor Charles that you, on some level, think that we can reconcile these things. We can have the best of the modern world, while at the same time maintaining and fostering more cosmic connection. And I want to believe that. I don't know. And so I just leave that as a provocation for us to think about.

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