December 15, 2011
By: James Miller
[caption id="attachment_492" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="The Guandu Temple, Taipei"][/caption] According to tradition, Mazu (Matsu) was a girl who lived in the late tenth century who was renowned for her assistance to seafarers. She was posthumously deified and attracted a wide cult...
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December 2, 2011
By: James Miller
Should environmentalists support conservation projects that also serve to bolster right wing nationalist agendas? This was one of the questions that was discussed last month at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, in San Francisco. I spoke on...
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August 16, 2011
By: James Miller
[caption id="attachment_463" align="alignright" width="150" caption="A Blang nationality woman"][/caption] The question of how to promote a culture of ecological sustainability in China took me this summer to conduct exploratory fieldwork among the Blang minority nationality, in Yunnan province, close to the...
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April 4, 2011
By: James Miller
[caption id="attachment_446" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Image from National Geographic"][/caption] It's been three weeks since the devastating tsunami in Japan, and I am still haunted by the familiar phrase from Daode jing ch. 8: Best to be like water, Which benefits the...
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February 14, 2011
By: James Miller
[caption id="attachment_432" align="alignnone" width="553" caption="The electronic prayer hall at Wong Tai Sin (photo: Sik Sik Yuen)"][/caption] As China overtakes Japan to be recognized as the world's second largest economy, it is inevitable that Chinese religions will undergo change and transformation....
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February 7, 2011
By: James Miller
[caption id="attachment_422" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Consumptionomics by Chandran Nair"][/caption] Last year I wrote an article for atlantic-community.org on China's quest for ecological sustainability. The basic point that I tried to make was that China has to create its own model for...
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January 6, 2011
By: James Miller
http://www.youtube.com/v/YlOA_eO8IsQ&rel=0&fs=1 As the trailer for this new documentary from Mandarin Films makes clear, the global environmental crisis will be solved in China, not in America, for the simple reason that China has no other option. As I noted recently in...
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December 19, 2010
By: James Miller
In a fascinating article on metaphors for progressive politics, George Lakoff summarizes succinctly the message that progressives need to be communicating as regards the issue of sustainability: The economic crisis and the ecological crisis are the same crisis. It has...
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November 19, 2010
By: James Miller
[caption id="attachment_400" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Delegates at the Sino-US Forum on Ecological Civilization and Sustainable Development"][/caption]I was in Beijing and Tianjin recently for a week of conferences related to "ecological civilization" (shengtai wenming 生态文明) an important new buzzword, the precise meaning...
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September 2, 2010
By: James Miller
[caption id="attachment_374" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Laozi Statue on Maoshan"][/caption] In May this year I had the opportunity to visit Maoshan (Mt. Mao) a Daoist mountain sacred to the Shangqing (Highest Clarity) tradition of Daoism that I studied in my most recent...
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