Grimes‘ music video for her 2020 album Miss Anthropocene imagines new gods for a new world: Miss Anthropocene is an art project by Grimes in which a new pantheon of modern Gods exist as humanoid versions of the concepts that dominate our lives, such as Climate Change, plastic, biological warfare, social media, etc. In the … Read moreGrimes – “New Gods”
Rob Cameron writes for The New Modality on the potentials of re-enchanting the optimistic Solarpunk and Afrofuturist genres: There is no greater or more fundamental technology than culture. It, and the ark of ideologies that arise from it, are more than just peer pressure from dead people. Culture is software. And more often than not, that includes … Read more“Promised Land: Religious Ideology and Solarpunk Science Fiction”
Elizabeth Hand’s short story The Bacchae takes place in a near-future world of sky-shields and mutant fish, awakening to dark-red, cultic magics: A shadow sped across the ground. For an instant it blotted out the sun and Gordon looked up, startled. He had an impression of something immense, immense and dark and moving very quickly … Read more“The Bacchae” (1991)
Click here to read Carole Cusack’s history and analysis of the Church of All Worlds, an early neoPagan religion that drew significant inspiration from Robert A. Heinlein’s science fiction classic Stranger in a Strange Land: The process of secularization, which was assumed to be the dominant model of religion in Western culture, was supposed to … Read more“Science Fiction as Scripture: Robert A. Heinlein’s ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ and the Church of All Worlds”
Edited by Bron Taylor, the anthology Avatar and Nature Spirituality (2013) offers critical, personal, and spiritual reflections on James Cameron’s blockbuster science fiction epic via essays on the following subjects, among others: “Becoming the ‘Noble Savage’” (nature religion and the ‘other’ in Avatar) “The Na’vi as Spiritual Hunters” (a semiotic exploration) “Calling the Na’vi” (evolutionary … Read more“Avatar & Nature Spirituality” (2013)
Australian artist Deborah Kelly describes Creation, a “queer science fiction climate change religion” and an experiment in collaboratively creating religion as a work of art: CREATION is a new religion, manifesting in spectacle and intimacy. A faith, a gathering of intention and purpose with which to face an era when paid opinion trumps environmental evidence. … Read more“A religion you can dance to”: Deborah Kelly’s Creation project
God is Change.Shape God.The Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars. Click here to visit the Earthseed website, home of one of several new religions inspired by speculative fiction author Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998): Most religions are ultimately cargo cults. Adherents perform required … Read moreEarthseed: a new religion inspired by Octavia Butler’s “Parable” series
Originally published in England in 1926, The Gates of Horn is a mock-epistolary anthology of poems and faery stories by Bernard Sleigh (1872-1954). A talented artist in several media, Sleigh is best known today as the creator of An Ancient Mappe of Fairyland, Newly Discovered and Set Forth (1917); a scan of the entire Mappe … Read more“The Gates of Horn: Being Sundry Records From the Proceedings of the Society for the Investigation of Faery Fact and Fallacy”
A video trailer for a sadly unrealized movie adaptation of Starhawk’s 1993 science fiction novel The Fifth Sacred Thing. The religions of ecotopian Califia (as San Francisco and parts of the Pacific Northwest have been renamed in the story) are mostly projections of contemporary Paganism, contrasted with the ultra-fundamentalist version of Christianity enforced by the … Read moreThe Fifth Sacred Thing
An excerpt from Christel Manning’s excellent essay for the Harvard Divinity Bulletin on how nontheists/atheists, freethinkers et al face their own mortality: We often think of science as cold and hard and value neutral. Max Weber famously wrote of how the ascendancy of science over religion in the modern world has led to “disenchantment.” Yet I found that science-based … Read more“Facing Death Without Religion”