Beyond Religion

William Irwin Thompson, Ph.D. (1938-2020) was born in Chicago and grew up in Los Angeles. A poet and cultural philosopher, he received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to study at Cornell in 1962 and a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship for doctoral research in Dublin in 1964. He published his first book, The Imagination of an Insurrection: Dublin, Easter 1916 in 1967. Thompson has taught at Cornell, MIT, and York University in Toronto. His interdisciplinary interests are indicated in that he studied anthropology, philosophy, and literature at Pomona, and literature and cultural history at Cornell. He has served as visiting professor of religion at Syracuse University (1973), visiting professor of Celtic Studies at St. Michael's College, the University of Toronto (1984), visiting professor of political science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (1985), Rockefeller Scholar at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco (1992-1995), and Lindisfarne Scholar-in-Residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York in the autumn of each year from 1992 to 1996. In 1995, he designed an Evolution of Consciousness Curriculum for the Ross School in East Hampton, New York. His best known works include At the Edge of History: Speculations on the Transformation of Culture (1971); The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light: Mythology, Sexuality, and the Origins of Culture (1981); and Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness (1996). He was a founder and president of the Lindisfarne Association, a group of creative individuals in the arts, sciences, and contemplative practices devoted to the study and realization of a new planetary culture, and the seed for Lindisfarne Books.

In an age of religious fundamentalist violence around the world, it is heartening to read poet and cultural historian William Irwins Thompsons contention that a new form of post-religious spirituality is emerging in our planetary civilization, one that is more appropriate to our new electronic and globally interconnected noetic polities. This little book is a Vade Mecum of the cultural evolutionary news to keep in ones pocket to read along with the days emotionally manipulative political news. Thompson shows us that like a dying star in supernova, the explosion of religious violence is a sign of medieval religions death and not their rebirth. The brilliant thirteenth century Renaissance that gave us the Gothic Cathedrals and the Convivencia of Christian, Jews, and Muslims in southern Spain was followed by the Black Death and the Inquisition, but the Italian Renaissance still took off in fifteenth-century Florence, as Giotto was followed by Fra Angelico and the syncretic school of Chartres was followed by Cosimo di Medicis Florentine Academy. The Big Picture that the poet and cultural historian can provide enables us to participate in the larger processes of cultural transformation at work in our world.