STS 350 - Comparative Studies in Religion

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

(Same as RELI 350) Topic for 2023/24b: Ecospirituality and Planetary Consciousness. This course examines twentieth-century space exploration and emerging discourses about “one world,” planetary consciousness, the environment, and spirituality. It begins with the Apollo space technologies and how they produced a set of unexpected reflections about the earth and its place in the cosmos. That process began in 1968 when the Apollo 8 astronauts captured the now-famous “Earthrise” photograph of the Earth rising above the lunar surface. Seeing the earth from space for the first time led to a kind of “no frames, no boundaries” mysticism for many astronauts, who reported feeling awe that all humans lived together on a tiny, glittering, blue planet. This mysticism was taken up by many others in the wake of Apollo—by key figures in the counter-culture, new religious and spiritual figures, “Gaia” movement preachers and ecologists, cosmologists such as Carl Sagan, esoteric engineers at NASA such as Jack Parsons and many others convinced that technology had delivered a new era of planetary awareness and spiritual evolution. Christopher White.

One 2-hour period.