August 10, 2013
By: James Miller
James Miller, Dan Smyer Yu and Peter van der Veer, eds. 2014. Religion and Ecological Sustainability in China. New York: Routledge. This book sheds light on the social imagination of nature and environment in contemporary China. It demonstrates how the urgent debate...
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July 9, 2013
By: James Miller
At the end of June I had the privilege of speaking at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. The topic for the week was the film Journey of the Universe, by Brian Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker. If you...
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June 26, 2012
By: James Miller
In an online report on Religious Innovation for Sustainable Future (no longer available), Nina Witoszek (Oslo University) surveys a "pastoral renaissance" taking place across the globe. [caption id="attachment_619" align="alignright" width="300"] Image from www.ceres21.org[/caption] This renaissance, she declares, is "not just...
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March 1, 2012
By: James Miller
For the past six months I've been working with Dan Smyer Yu from the Max Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity on a conference which is finally taking place next week at Minzu University in Beijing. The title of...
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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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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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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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June 8, 2010
By: James Miller
I was in LA last weekend to attend the Sixth Annual Conference on Daoist Studies which was organized by my former teacher, Livia Kohn, and LMU Professor Robin Wang. The conference drew the usual mix of academics and practitioners (which...
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