Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Friday, July 16, 2021

Michael Saler - Modernity, Enchantment, and Fictionalism


Footbridge between worlds (from Un Autre Monde by JJ Grandville)
| Image via flickr user Carl Guderian


Modernity, Enchantment, and Fictionalism

December 20, 2013


The stern visage of Max Weber looms over discussions of modernity and enchantment, as does the sunnier countenance of Charles Taylor. Perhaps they should be joined by the open faced, bluntly spoken, and allegedly poker wielding Ludwig Wittgenstein. This choice might seem counter-intuitive. Wittgenstein did not write much about enchantment, and is more often considered a disenchanter who used the tools of philosophy to dispel illusions brought about by linguistic misuse. As he wrote, “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”

Nevertheless, enchantment was central to Wittgenstein’s outlook on life. By enchantment he meant a sense of wonder regarding the world. He described wonder as his “experience par excellence…when I have it I wonder at the existence of the world. And I am then inclined to use such phrases as ‘how extraordinary that anything should exist’ or ‘how extraordinary that the world should exist.’” Plato and Aristotle claimed that philosophy begins in wonder, and Wittgenstein’s famous last words—“Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life”—suggests it ends there as well. His later philosophy aimed at re-enchanting the world by re-describing it in new and unexpected ways. In so doing, the world does not change—things remain as they are—but our fundamental orientation to the world changes: “We see, not change of aspect, but change of interpretation.” As a result, one becomes aware of how rich, contingent and variable the world is. As Wittgenstein stated in 1948, “life’s infinite variations are essential to our life.”

This “infinite” outlook is a secular form of transcendence that transports us beyond our finite selves and immediate needs. It awakens us to awe, possibility, difference, and a humble acceptance of the provisional nature of our understanding. Max Weber had famously defined the disenchanted modern world as stifling and deterministic, an “iron cage” of rationality. Wittgenstein’s later philosophy aimed to free us from this cage, or as he put it, “to show the fly out of the fly bottle.” It was meant to simultaneously disenchant and re-enchant the world.

Wittgenstein exemplified an attitude of “disenchanted enchantment,” one that is characteristic of modernity and is held by many, religious and secular alike. I’ll talk more about disenchanted enchantment momentarily, but Wittgenstein’s formulation of it is one reason he merits attention when we think about enchantment and modernity. A second reason is that he recognized that enchantment is an ambiguous term with multiple meanings. He asked, “How do I know that someone is enchanted? How does one learn the linguistic expression of enchantment? What does it connect up with?” This is important because many other influential writers on the subject did not acknowledge the varieties of enchantment that are available at any given time. Weber, for example, equated enchantment with a traditional, supernatural worldview, and disenchantment with a modern, rational outlook. For him, modernity and enchantment were not compatible. Wittgenstein might have brandished a poker at such a reductive notion, as he forthrightly challenged the commonplace assumption that modern science disenchanted the world. He criticized Sir James Frazer, who claimed in The Golden Bough that so-called primitive people expressed an animistic, enchanted outlook that the rational West had outgrown. Wittgenstein found this to be patronizing nonsense. Wonder, he wrote, “has nothing to do with [a people] being primitive.”

In the spirit of Wittgenstein, I’d like to look briefly at the language game of modern enchantment and disenchantment that we have inherited, and are currently in the process of revising. Following that, I’ll discuss “disenchanted enchantment,” and how it relates to the late nineteenth century outlook of “Fictionalism.” Disenchanted enchantment challenged the Weberian view that modern reason and enchantment were fundamentally opposed. It also rejected the view, famously expressed in Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, that modernity’s faith in reason was itself an irrational illusion—that modernity is inherently “enchanted” in the negative sense of being deluded. In both of these cases, enchantment was depicted as an irrational state of mind. The disenchanted enchantment of Wittgenstein and others, however, demonstrated that critical reason and imaginative wonder could co-exist and serve progressive ends.

There are at least two ways that we can understand the meanings of “enchantment” and “disenchantment.” We can define them as stages within a broader historical process, and we can define them as human affects. In terms of historical process, the narrative of Weber and others described the shift from a premodern, “enchanted” world governed by an overarching supernatural order, to the modern “disenchanted” world characterized by scientific naturalism. Scholars advanced different historical periods for the origins of this process, but their accounts of its outcome were similar. A recognizable discourse equating modernity with disenchantment emerged among the late eighteenth century romantics, was given added momentum by nineteenth century cultural pessimists, and apparent scientific legitimacy by twentieth century sociologists, philosophers, and political scientists. The constant iteration that modernity has foresworn enchantment for disenchantment made it a virtual orthodoxy in the West until very recently.

In terms of human affect, since the Middle Ages “enchantment” had two meanings in Western culture: enchantment as “delight” and enchantment as “delusion.” The pleasures of enchantment as delight could be so overpowering that one is placed under a spell—an “enchantment”—and becomes deluded. The remedy was to become disenchanted. But disenchantment, like enchantment, also had positive and negative meanings. A positive meaning of disenchantment is that of emancipation: one is freed from dangerous illusions. A negative meaning of disenchantment is that of disillusion, a hard-bitten refusal of ideals or any form of transcendence.

The problem with the historical discourse was that it became conflated with the affective discourse. It equated the historical shift to a disenchanted world with the affect of disenchantment as disillusion, the end of a sense of wonder. States of enchantment might be delightful, but they were also delusory and regressive, at best suitable for children and other irrational beings, such as women, the working classes, and non-Western peoples. The historical narrative of modernity and enchantment could have positive elements—this was true of Weber’s account—but fundamentally it was one of discontent and loss. This was certainly the case for Horkheimer and Adorno, and also I think for Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. For Taylor, secular individuals have developed “buffered selves” that are less “porous” to the transcendent. He suggests that they tend to lead “flattened” rather than full lives.

Thus, the received discourse of modernity and enchantment has not been a neutral story, but a normative one. Disenchantment stands for secularization, but also discontent. It was not simply an account of the disenchantment of the world; it was a confession of disenchantment with the world. Indeed, during the nineteenth century, the term “disenchantment” was often synonymous with “cultural pessimism,” an intellectual current associated with Arthur Schopenhauer and his followers. For example, Edgar Saltus’s 1885 book, The Philosophy of Disenchantment, was a history of contemporary cultural pessimism, not a history of secularism. When Weber’s entzauberung, or “removal of magic” was translated into the English “disenchantment,” it was imbued with the pre-existing undertones of cultural pessimism.

Not that Weber would have minded. He was a cultural pessimist, and while he tried to provide a balanced assessment of modernity, his account of disenchantment was as much concerned with the deficit of delight as it was with the shift from a religious to a secular worldview. According to Weber, modernity was distinguished by the narrow “instrumental rationality” favored by positivists and bureaucrats, which prized quantification and efficiency over meaning and morality. The modern world was mechanistic and predictable, denuded of mystery and wonder. Disenchantment, he wrote, “means that there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation.”

Weber also noted that a disenchanted modernity lacked the unifying beliefs and purposes that had allegedly distinguished the premodern world. Modern individuals sought enchantment through the subjective domains of art and religion. For him, irrational enchantment played a compensatory if atavistic role within modernity. This was one reason he and many of his contemporaries (notably Horkheimer and Adorno) disliked mass culture: they believed it fostered delusive enchantments.

Weber’s account encapsulated the major components of the historical discourse of modernity and enchantment that existed from the late eighteenth through the late twentieth centuries. The historical process of disenchantment was not simply about the shift from a religious to a secular world. It was also about the impoverishment of human experience resulting from the dominance of instrumental rationality; the loss of overarching meanings and purposes; and the redefinition of enchantment from a state of delight to a state of delusion. The manifold nature of the discourse, its ability so speak to so many modern grievances, explains why it has exerted such a hold on the Western imagination. It was also a performative discourse, leading people to view the world in the dour descriptive terms it provided.

Nevertheless, contemporaries contested its exaggerated claims. This was especially true for the idea that the imagination, and states of enchantment more generally, were the irrational antitheses of modern rationality. Such a stark opposition between reason and the imagination had not been expressed during the Enlightenment, or among the early Romantics. It was advanced in the course of the nineteenth century by positivists, scientific naturalists, and certain aesthetes. In turn, it provoked a reaction by late nineteenth century psychologists, philosophers, and artists, who argued that reason and the imagination were complementary rather than antagonistic. As R.G. Collingwood insisted in a series of talks that were posthumously published as The Philosophy of Enchantment, “It is only in a society whose artistic life is healthy and vigorous that a scientific life can emerge.”

This more capacious understanding of the imagination as well as reason suggested that mass culture was not a cesspool of delusive enchantments. It could be a resource of specifically modern enchantments reconciling reason with imagination, providing an alternative to instrumental rationality. Sherlock Holmes exemplified this reconciliation, which he called “the scientific use of the imagination.” He became an iconic figure, and has remained one, precisely because he demonstrated how modernity could be re-enchanted in its own rational and secular terms: as he tells Watson, “The world is big enough for us. Ghosts need not apply.” In addition to the new genre of detective fiction, the new genre of science fiction also aimed at reuniting reason and imagination after their artificial sundering by scientific positivists. One writer explained in 1928 that science fiction “takes the basis of science, considers all the clues science has to offer, and then adds a new thing that is alien to science—imagination.” Similarly, J.R.R. Tolkien defended fantasy as “a rational not an irrational activity; the keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make.”

As these examples indicate, by the late nineteenth century mass culture had become a locus of enchantment consonant with the rational and secular currents of modernity. It seems a slim response, however, to the weighty issues raised by the discourse of disenchantment. Yet this turn to the rational enchantments of mass culture was only one facet of a much larger response to the discourse of modern disenchantment: an outlook of “Fictionalism.” Fictionalism was coined by the philosopher Hans Vaihinger in his 1911 The Philosophy of ‘As If.’ He argued that the self-reflexive character of modernity resulted in traditional beliefs being replaced by provisional fictions, which provided practical guidance as well as spiritual enchantments. Vaihinger’s Fictionalism was a form of disenchanted enchantment, in which both belief and disbelief were held in suspension through the use of an “as if” perspective.

Vaihinger drew on Immanuel Kant and especially Friedrich Nietzsche for his ideas. Nietzsche was an early exponent of disenchanted enchantment. He believed that consciously held illusions were indispensible for human existence, insisting that “the most erroneous assumptions are precisely the most indispensable for us, and a negation of this fiction is…equivalent to the negation of life itself.” Unlike Weber, Nietzsche did not mourn the loss of shared beliefs that allegedly characterized the premodern world. For him, the modern turn to plural meanings and provisional perspectives was both liberating and a genuine source of enchantment in its own right. As he put it, “the world has become ‘infinite’ for us all over again, inasmuch as we cannot reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpretations.” This Fictionalist recovery of the infinite within the immanent was a secular form of transcendence that Wittgenstein also endorsed in his later philosophy. As he commented in 1948, “Life’s infinite variations are essential to our life.”

Fictionalism was expressed in numerous ways during and after the fin de siècle. There was of course Aestheticism, in which art no longer imitated life, but life art. There was also the process in which religious texts were redefined as morally improving works of literature. This began in the eighteenth century, but was given exemplary expression in Matthew Arnold’s 1873 Literature and Dogma. By the early twentieth century this move to recast religion as fiction had progressed to such an extent that devout Christians like Tolkien and C.S. Lewis tried to stem the tide by redefining all fiction as religious: writers, in their view, were sub-creators emulating the Creator. Other instances of turn-of-the-century Fictionalism include Georges Sorel’s call for the self-conscious creation of new myths for revolutionary purposes, and William James’s explorations of the pragmatic outcomes of the “will to believe.” The list only expands for the twentieth century, culminating in postmodernist thought.

While fictions continued to be used for delusory purposes, Fictionalism aimed at providing narrative enchantments that delighted without deluding: disenchanted enchantments. Indeed, by the late nineteenth century fictions were being entertained in a more ironic, self-reflexive, and autonomous fashion than they had been only a century earlier. Literary scholars have usefully identified new understandings of “fictionality” in the eighteenth century, a contributory current to late-nineteenth century Fictionalism. Nevertheless, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the middle classes remained highly ambivalent about fiction and the powers of the imagination. They feared that the delights of the imagination would incite dangerous desires, and consequently subordinated fiction to religious and utilitarian imperatives. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1817 statement that we experience poetic fantasy or enchantment through the “willing suspension of disbelief” reflected this restrictive attitude. The default outlook is one of disbelief, which can only be circumvented temporarily through a conscious act of will. This is a labor-intensive way to relax with a good book, which the early Victorians intended it to be. But their encumbrances to the free play of the imagination were gradually undone during the nineteenth century, for a variety of reasons. The end result was that imaginative play with imaginary worlds became more permissible for adults as well as children.

Among the contributing factors was a shift in definitions of selfhood, from the early Victorian ideal of a unitary self to a greater recognition that the self was multiple. For example, psychologists exploring the unconscious in the 1830s began to discuss the phenomenon of “double consciousness,” in which individuals self-reflexively entertained illusions while acknowledging them to be unreal. As one psychologist observed in 1844, individuals had “two distinct and perfect brains: One brain was… watching the other, and even interested and amused by its vagaries.”

There is nothing new in this double-consciousness: it’s an innate human aptitude, manifested by children at an early age. What was new was the wider cultural acceptance of it by the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Readers no longer approached fantasy through the willing suspension of disbelief. Instead, they willingly believed in them with the double-minded awareness that they were engaging in pretense. In short, by the later Victorian period we see the rise of what could be called an “ironic” imagination, through which adults were given permission to live in fantastic and real worlds simultaneously. This double-minded consciousness enabled people to be enchanted and disenchanted at the same time.

But isn’t this simply escapism? Yes, but Fictionalism wasn’t merely escapist. By the turn of the century psychologists and philosophers acknowledged that imaginary and real worlds were mutually constitutive, and that fictions enabled the revising of the real. Nor did Fictionalism imply absolute relativism or a rejection of normativity. Vaihinger, for example, distinguished fictions, which were acknowledged to be false, from scientific theories, which did have claims to truth.

Normativity could also emerge through the consensus of interpretive communities devoted to fictional works and worlds. These communities, which I’ve called “public spheres of the imagination,” blossomed in the late nineteenth century, alongside the growing acceptance of fiction as autonomous from Victorian religious and ethical precepts. Readers communally imagined fictional characters and worlds by discussing them in the letters pages of fiction magazines, or by forming clubs, issuing magazines, and organizing conventions devoted to them. In such public spheres, debates about imaginary worlds and characters frequently elided into productive discussions of their real world analogues. Essentialist interpretations were often challenged, to be replaced by more nuanced understandings. In addition, these public spheres countered the anomie of modernity with elective fellowship.

Fictionalism, then, redressed many of the discontents advanced by the discourse of disenchantment. The ironic imagination generated both wonder and meaning, while remaining rational. Its exercise could appeal to the religious as well as the secular. Normativity was not lost, nor was community. In fact, the Internet has become an enormous repository of imaginary worlds and of public spheres of the imagination devoted to them, from James Joyce’s Ulysses to online computer games. Like religious communities, these secular communities devoted to fictional worlds promote fellowship and guidance, and are frequently sustained by their own rites and rituals. But unlike the traditional enchantments of religion, Fictionalism fosters awareness of narratives as provisional and contingent, rather than as essentialist. It provides forms of enchantment that delight without deluding.

Let me conclude by summarizing my main points. Enchantment and disenchantment are ambiguous terms and have been used in diverse ways, notably to describe historical processes and human affects. Too often we use them without defining what we mean. This was the case for the dominant discourse of modernity and enchantment that we have inherited. It conflated disenchantment as historical process with disenchantment as disillusioned affect; it was a cry of cultural despair masquerading as impartial social science. It became pervasive by the end of the nineteenth century, but at this time it was challenged by a variety of specifically modern enchantments. One of these was a turn to Fictionalism, assisted by the wider acceptance of the ironic imagination, a double-minded form of consciousness that enabled one to be enchanted and disenchanted simultaneously. Fictionalism itself suggests that the human imagination has become a major resource of modern enchantment, permitting the redescription of the immanent world in infinite ways. As a result, transcendence is preserved within a secular orientation. We also see an important shift from narratives demanding uncompromising belief to those that emphasize the contingent and provisional, an “as if” approach to the world. Rather than seeing the world in terms of the sacred and the profane, many now see it in terms of the fictional and the real, both of which are avenues to enchantment.

Perhaps this is why Ludwig Wittgenstein made an invidious comparison between the philosophy journal Mind and his favorite magazine, Detective Stories. As he wrote to a colleague, “If philosophy has anything to do with wisdom, there’s certainly not a grain of truth in Mind, and quite often a grain in the detective stories.”

- MS

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Michael Saler is professor of history at the University of California, Davis, where he teaches modern European intellectual and cultural history. He is the author of As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford University Press, 2012) and The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground (Oxford University Press, 2001); coeditor of The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (Stanford University Press, 2009) and editor of The Fin-de-siècle World (Routledge, 2015). He is currently working on a history of modernity and the imagination.


Charles Taylor - Fragile Faith in a Secular Age

 

Remembering memorials against time



The unreal is more powerful than the real,

nothing is as perfect  as you can imagine it,

it's only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs,

fantasies that last. Stone crumbles,

wood rots. People, well, they die.

But things as fragile as a thought, a dream,

a legend - they can go on and on...

- Chuck Palahniuk


* * * * * * * * *


Charles Taylor:

Fragile Faith In A Secular Age

One of the most important books to be published in these opening years of the 21stcentury is philosopher Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. It is the story of a cultural journey, tracing the steps involved in moving from a world in which belief was considered normative to the world in which we live today where that is no longer the case. The downside is that the book consists of 776 pages of densely argued prose. So we can be glad for James K. A. Smith’s How (Not) to be Secular, weighing in at 139 pages, that admirably extracts and summarizes the heart of Taylor’s arguments and conclusions.

One fascinating point that Taylor makes is that the movement to secularism in society has an intense effect on how believers believe. Even if we are careful to remain orthodox in our religious convictions and practice, living in an age of unbelief means that our relationship to our faith will be markedly different from that of believers who lived, say, in Europe in 1500.

One way things are different, Taylor argues, is in what he terms the fragilization of belief. Smith defines it this way in his helpful Glossary:
Fragilization  In the face of different options, where people who lead “normal” lives do not share my faith (and perhaps believe something very different), my own faith commitment becomes fragile—put into question, dubitable. (p. 141)

Taylor discusses the phenomenon in various places in A Secular Age, and in one place describes it this way by saying we need to imagine what things were like 500 years ago:

At that time, non-belief in God was close to unthinkable for the vast majority; whereas today this is not at all the case. One might be tempted to say that in certain milieux, the reverse has become true, that belief is unthinkable. But this exaggeration already shows up the lack of symmetry. It is truer to say that in our world, a whole gamut of positions, from the most militant atheism to the most orthodox traditional theisms, passing through every possible position on the way, are represented and defended somewhere in our society. Something like the unthinkability of some of these positions can be experienced in certain milieux, but what is ruled out will vary from context to context. An atheist in the Bible belt has trouble being understood, as often (in a rather different way) do believing Christians in certain reaches of the academy. But, of course, people in each of these contexts are aware that the others exist, and that the option they can’t really credit is the default option elsewhere in the same society whether they regard this with hostility or just perplexity. The existence of an alternative fragilizes each context, that is, makes its sense of the thinkable/unthinkable uncertain and wavering.

This fragilization is then increased by the fact that great numbers of people are not firmly embedded in any such context, but are puzzled, cross-pressured, or have constituted by bricolage a sort of median position. The existence of these people raises sometimes even more acute doubts within the more assured milieux. The polar opposites can be written off as just mad or bad, as we see with the present American culture wars between “liberals” and “fundamentalists”; but the intermediate positions can sometimes not be so easily dismissed. (p. 556-557)

The irony of all this, of course, is that Taylor may be correct in this—I am convinced he is—while we remain more or less unaware of the situation. We weren’t around 500 years ago, have grown up in our secular age, and so whatever it consists of is simply part of our normal. As I have read Taylor, on the other hand, my experience has been less learning something utterly alien so much as seeing what’s been in front of me all along but that I haven’t been able to name.

And so my question to you—Does fragilization strike you as correctly identifying some of the reality of life and faith we experience today? Where do you see or experience it? I invite your comments.

- DH


Denis Haack

I call this A Glass Darkly because we always see things incompletely, as though we're peering through a window caked with grime. And because a glass of finely crafted beer is a great help when we are trying to think things through. I am interested in all sorts of things, and you'll find that reflected here. I invite your comments because I want to learn, and to generate thoughtful, civil conversation. May we all come to see the small things and the things that matter most with greater clarity.


Denis and Margie Haack

Ransom Fellowship was founded by Denis and Margie Haack in 1981. Together, they have created a ministry that includes lecturing, writing, teaching, feeding, and encouraging those who want to know more about what it means to be a Christian in the everyday life of the 21st century.


Wednesday, July 14, 2021

America is no longer as evangelical as it was


Amid Evangelical decline, growing split between young Christians and church eldersThe number of white evangelical Protestants fell from about 23 percent of the US population in 2006 to 17 percent in 2016, and only 11 percent are under 30, according to a survey of more than 100,000 Americans. | Christian Science Monitor

America is no longer as evangelical as
it was -- and here's why

Opinion by Diana Butler Bass
July 11, 2021

Diana Butler Bass (@DianaButlerBass) is the author of 11 books on American religion and cultural trends, including her most recent, "Freeing Jesus: Rediscovering Jesus as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way and Presence." She was a member of the Public Religion Research Institute board from 2008 to 2018. The views expressed here are hers. Read more opinion on CNN.

In 1994, I quit.

Twenty years earlier, I'd been born again. I had grown up in a liberal Methodist church but started going to a nondenominational church with high school friends. When I told my friends that I'd given my life to Jesus, there were hugs and tears. Jesus embraced me, and so did they. I had a new family -- and everything changed.

Diana Butler Bass

I had not only converted to Jesus, but I'd entered another world, one with its own language, practices, ethics and expectations. I learned this sort of Christianity had a name: "Evangelical" meaning "good news." And it seemed very good to me. Evangelical faith was warm, assuring, enthusiastic, serious and deeply pious. I attended an evangelical college, graduated from an evangelical seminary and did doctoral work with a leading evangelical scholar. I was proud to be evangelical.
Evangelical Christianity was everything to me back then: faith, work, friends, life. It stayed that way until my questions started. Evangelicalism became the religious right, it became obvious that women would never be accepted as leaders, and closeted gay evangelical friends died of AIDS.

After a protracted internal struggle, I couldn't do it anymore. I joined a liberal Episcopal church, returning to the kind of mainline Protestantism I'd known before being born again.

It was hard leaving evangelical Christianity. Through the years, I'd occasionally meet someone who had a similar experience, but such encounters were often random, or felt furtive. Mostly, when it came to my spiritual journey, I've felt alone. Until this week.

On July 8, the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) released its American Religious Landscape survey for 2020. The report resembled those of recent years, affirming now-familiar trends shaping 21st century American religion: increasing racial diversity in Christian communities, the sizable presence of world religions other than Christianity and the explosive growth of those who are religiously unaffiliated.

In other words, there were no major surprises -- except one. Unlike previous surveys, this one showed that the decline among White Christians has slowed. Indeed, the percentage of White Christians actually rose slightly due to growth in an unlikely category -- an increase among white mainline Protestants, "an uptick" of 3.5% in their proportion of the American population.

This uptick is especially surprising when compared to the drop in White evangelical Protestantism. The report pointedly states: "Since 2006, white evangelical Protestants have experienced the most precipitous drop in affiliation, shrinking from 23% of Americans in 2006 to 14% in 2020."

White mainline Protestantism is growing; White evangelicalism is declining. And that is big news.

Most researchers divide White American Protestantism into two large families: Evangelical and mainline. Evangelicalism comprises a multitude of theologically conservative Protestants who typically belong to groups such as the Southern Baptist Convention, the Assemblies of God or to independent, nondenominational mega-church congregations.

Mainline Protestantism (sometimes referred to as "old-line," "mainstream," or "ecumenical") is an umbrella designation for those more theologically moderate and liberal Protestants who identify with the Episcopal Church (TEC), Presbyterian Church, USA (PCUSA), United Methodist Church (UMC), United Church of Christ (UCC) or the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).

Chances are that if you grew up Protestant and attending church in America, you worshipped on one side of this divide or the other, even if you did not know this history or which camp your church was in. Or, like me, you moved between them, as I was first mainline, then evangelical, and then mainline again.

PRRI indicates that the mainline rebound is significant: "The slight increase in white Christians between 2018 and 2020 was driven primarily by an uptick in the proportion of white mainline (non-evangelical) Protestants... Since 2007, white mainline (non-evangelical) Protestants have declined from 19% of the population to a low of 13% in 2016, but the last three years have seen small but steady increases, up to 16% in 2020."

For several years, observers have noted the decline of White evangelicalism. As white evangelical numbers declined, the percentage of religiously unaffiliated Americans went up. There appeared to be a correlation between the two -- ex-evangelicals moved to the "none" category. Over the last three years, however, the unaffiliated category has stabilized while the white evangelical exodus continued. At the same time, the white mainline category has risen.

This shift suggests that some portion of ex-evangelicals are finding their way toward mainline or another non-evangelical Protestant sense of identity.

This doesn't mean that Americans are necessarily returning to mainline churches in droves. The PRRI study is not about church attendance or membership. It isn't about what people do. It is about identity - labels people use to describe their religious lives. The data suggests that White Protestants are distancing themselves from "evangelical." Many apparently leave religion altogether. But others -- whose numbers might be that modest "uptick" -- may be reacquainting themselves with mainline Protestantism.

Dividing Protestants into two categories goes back to the early 20th century when the two groups were called "fundamentalists" and "modernists." In the 1920s, Protestants quarreled over the Bible and evolution, their churches and seminaries split. The two factions largely went their separate ways, eventually morphing into "evangelicals" and "mainliners" as they are called today.

In the middle decades of the 20th century, mainline Protestants held more cultural and political power. By the mid-1970s, however, their numbers -- and influence -- began a rapid decline.

As the mainline went into a demographic tailspin, evangelicals fought for greater recognition in politics and culture, surprising nearly everyone with the size of their churches, the energy of their organizations and a kind of expressive spirituality. Their robust ascent into the public conversation, their political acumen and their fundraising prowess, transformed American politics and church life seemingly overnight.

In the last quarter of the 20th century, mainline Protestantism faded from public view. "Evangelical" became coterminous with "Protestant." If one was born after 1980, it was hard to know that mainline Protestantism even existed.

Pendulums do, however, swing. And it could be that this is the historical moment when America's Protestant pendulum is moving away from its evangelical side to its more liberal one once again.

What is certain is that America is no longer as evangelical as it was. But it is not as mainline as it was in the mid-20th century either. Both terms used to describe American Protestantism are more fluid than most people know, and both "evangelical" and "mainline" are undergoing changes. This may lead to a genuine renewal of the old mainline Protestant denominations -- it is too early to tell. This shift, however, will have political and social consequences.

Ultimately, data is about stories. This recent PRRI poll suggests a new one may be unfolding.

Beyond scholarly speculation, analytical research and historical theories, however, numbers also quantify the experiences of real people. There are millions of stories -- enough to now show up as data -- of spiritual journeys of those who have left evangelicalism and are searching for a new sense of identity, deeper meaning and a place to call home.

- DBB
[RNS] The ‘nones’ are growing — and growing more diverse
Religious disaffiliation has risen in every generation, including even older Americans, though the sharpest spike in nones is occurring with the millennials.




Winner of the 2019 Grawemeyer Award in Religion

Robert P. Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, spells out the profound political and cultural consequences of a new reality—that America is no longer a majority white Christian nation. “Quite possibly the most illuminating text for this election year” (The New York Times Book Review).

For most of our nation’s history, White Christian America (WCA) set the tone for our national policy and shaped American ideals. But especially since the 1990s, WCA has steadily lost influence, following declines within both its mainline and evangelical branches. Today, America is no longer demographically or culturally a majority white, Christian nation.

Drawing on more than four decades of polling data, The End of White Christian America explains and analyzes the waning vitality of WCA. Robert P. Jones argues that the visceral nature of today’s most heated issues—the vociferous arguments around same-sex marriage and religious and sexual liberty, the rise of the Tea Party following the election of our first black president, and stark disagreements between black and white Americans over the fairness of the criminal justice system—can only be understood against the backdrop of white Christians’ anxieties as America’s racial and religious topography shifts around them.

Beyond 2016, the descendants of WCA will lack the political power they once had to set the terms of the nation’s debate over values and morals and to determine election outcomes. Looking ahead, Jones forecasts the ways that they might adjust to find their place in the new America—and the consequences for us all if they don’t. “Jones’s analysis is an insightful combination of history, sociology, religious studies, and political science….This book will be of interest to a wide range of readers across the political spectrum” (Library Journal).




Does process theology have something to say about political and social issues and our response to them?

In this short book, Bruce Epperly says that it has much to say, and can shape not just the ethics and policies of a better world, but also the way in which we debate and decide those policies. Process theology invites discussion and even guides us toward acceptable and positive compromises.

No major political issue of the western world is excluded from this discussion. From immigration to criminal justice, from abortion to reproductive health, from the environment to economic development, process thinking can help guide examination, shaping, and implementation of solutions for a troubled world.

This book is suitable for individual reading by anyone who wants to take a fresh look at policy from an open-minded, progressive point of view. It can also be helpful in group studies for those who want to study how to apply prophetic proclamation to daily living.



President Barack Obama - Summer Reads 2021

 

Former President Barack Obama speaks during a campaign rally On October 31, 2020, at Northwestern High School in Flint, Michigan.


The 11 books former President Barack
Obama recommends you read this summer

by Rachel Janfaza
July 10, 2021

"While we were still in the White House, I began sharing my summer favorites -- and now, it's become a little tradition that I look forward to sharing with you all. So here's this year's offering. Hope you enjoy them as much as I did," Obama said on multiple social platforms.

Here are the 11 books Obama recommends people read this summer:

"At Night All Blood Is Black" by David Diop

The historic fiction novel details the dark tale of a Senegalese soldier's experience fighting for the French during World War I. The story -- originally written in French -- was translated to English by Anna Moschovakis and won the 2021 International Booker Prize.

"Land of Big Numbers"
by Te-Ping Chen

"Land of Big Numbers" is a 10-part short story series -- set in and out of China -- about the diverse lives of a set of Chinese people. The collection is the debut series of Wall Street Journal reporter Te-Ping Chen, who was formerly a correspondent in Beijing.

"Empire Of Pain"
by Patrick Radden Keefe

The New York Times bestseller details the lives of three generations of the Sackler family, the American family whose members founded pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma.

"Project Hail Mary"
by Andy Weir

"Project Hail Mary" takes readers along the survival mission of a biologist turned middle school science teacher who -- from a ship in outer space -- is tasked with saving Earth from destruction. The science fiction novel is the latest from Weir, who also wrote "The Martian."

"When We Cease to Understand the World"
by Benjamín Labatut

The fictional tale "When We Cease To Understand The World" tells stories of scientists and mathematicians throughout history -- such as Albert Einstein, Fritz Haber and Alexander Grothendieck -- who shaped the world through their findings.

"Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future"
by Elizabeth Kolbert

In "Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future," Pulitzer Prize-winning author Kolbert examines the way humankind has impacted Earth and raises questions about how and if nature can be saved.

"Things We Lost to the Water"
by Eric Nguyen

Nguyen's debut novel, "Things We Lost to the Water," tells the story of an Vietnamese immigrant who moves to New Orleans with her two sons while her husband stays in Vietnam.

"Leave the World Behind"
by Rumaan Alam

"Leave the World Behind" is a story about two families -- one Black and one White -- who meet in the context of looming disaster. The novel explores race, class and familial dynamics.


"Klara and the Sun"
by Kazuo Ishiguro

"Klara and the Sun" explores the world of artificial intelligence through the eyes of the main character -- an Artificial Friend -- who sits in a store window anticipating that one day she will be chosen by a customer. In 2017, Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

"The Sweetness of Water"
by Nathan Harris

The historical fiction novel details life in America at the end of the Civil War for two distinct pairs of characters -- the first, two emancipated brothers, and the other, a couple of Confederate soldiers deeply in love. "The Sweetness of Water" was an Oprah Book Club selection.

"Intimacies"
by Katie Kitamura

"Intimacies" tells the story of woman who, looking to chart a new path, travels to The Hague and starts work as an interpreter at the International Court. Through her role as an interpreter, the woman becomes immersed in the international lives and complex sagas of those who share their stories with her.

---

Obama's 2021 summer reading list comes just months after he shared his favorite books from 2020, which in December highlighted 17 titles -- including Isabel Wilkerson's "Caste," Brit Bennett's "The Vanishing Half" and C Pam Zhang's "How Much of These Hills is Gold."



Tuesday, July 13, 2021

Process Theology, Miracles, and the Virgin Birth


The Immaculate Conception by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo,
1767–1769, in the Museo del Prado, Spain


Process Theology, Miracles,
and the Virgin Birth

by R.E. Slater


The Immaculate Conception of Mary

The Catholic phrase of immaculate conception refers to the Virgin Mary as without sin and thus able to reproduce the birth of Jesus without male insemination. Protestants differ with the Catholic sentiment and state that Mary was no different than any other human born of sin since Adam and Eve's transgressions onwards. Myself, I am learning to re-envision humanity in the image of God yet marred by sin. Meaning, that humanity holds and reveals the Godhead as much as it must deal with the fallenness of it's image of God. Regardless of percentages, whether more good than bad, or more bad than good, it doesn't matter. What matters is that humanity (as well as creation itself) needed a God who would come incarnate into this world to atone for our fallenness to thereby redeem creation unto its fullest potential in beauty, joy, strival for good, thrival for healing all we touch, and generally help God to rebirth humanity and creation towards fullness fraught with struggle, hardship, fallenness, and evil.

Secondly, the Catholic statement of immaculation is an expression of an older idea that thought of all things of matter and flesh as being evil, or touched by evil. It is a sentiment found in Zoroastrianism which had bled down in Judaism and Christianity believing in a primal "urge" and "demi-urge" disspelling downwards and downwards into the human condition. By and by it came to mean that all things which are of the flesh is evil. Though found within certain parts of the church, many churches state this is not true. That God created all things as good and holy and not as evil. Process Theology further consolidates this idea by stating that rather than thinking in terms of gradations of sin and evil we simply think of humanity and creation as good but inflicted in varying degrees by sin and evil (cf. Original Sin).

Wikipedia - "The Immaculate Conception is a dogma of the Catholic Church which states that Mary, mother of Jesus has been free of original sin from the moment of her conception. It proved controversial in the Middle Ages, but was revived in the 19th century and was adopted as Church dogma when Pope Pius IX promulgated Ineffabilis Deus in 1854. This followed Ubi primum, an 1849 encyclical wherein Pius had asked the bishops for their opinions on the matter, resulting in overwhelming support from the Church's hierarchy.

"Protestants rejected Ineffabilis Deus as an exercise in papal power and the doctrine itself as without foundation in Scripture. Eastern Orthodoxy, although it reveres Mary in its liturgy, called on the Roman church to return to the faith of early centuries.

"The iconography of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception shows her standing, with arms outstretched or hands clasped in prayer, and her feast day is 8 December."

 

Bisexuality is Rare but not Uncommon in Nature

Allow me please to skip ahead to the virgin birth itself. How it is completely likely to be generative from the human body without imposition of sin upon the flesh (as the Church tends to think of the human condition, whether Catholic or Protestant) or with the need for an ex cathedra enactment of a miracle per se as we normally (but incorrectly) think of miracles. I will try to explain both ideas through a biological examination of things we find in nature which are rare, but not uncommon, using biological terms. Please bear with me.

Bisexuality is Found in Nature

The adage "bisexuality isn't natural" cannot be used anymore by the church. Clearly it is not true in the blobby green algae world of nature. Bisexuality is a natural but distinctly different form of sexuality from sexuality (male-female) or asexual-only reproduction.

This third type of reproductive system is known as hermaphroditic reproductivity which changes between male or female sexual expressions thus insuring the future survival of the species without regard to environmental conditions:

"Mixed mating systems such as trioecy may represent intermediate states of evolutionary transitions between dioecious (with male and female) and monoecious (with only hermaphrodites) mating systems in diploid organisms...." - Nature (below)

--- 

Trioecy (or subdioecy) is an extremely rare reproductive system characterized by the coexistence of males, females, and hermaphrodites. It has been found in both plants and animals. Trioecy is sometimes referred to as a mixed mating system alongside androdieocy and gyndioecy. Trioecy has been estimated to occur in about 3.6% of flowering plants, although most reports of trioecy are misinterpretions of gynodioecy. - Wikipedia

Reframing Miracles and the Virgin Birth

So the quips of God not making an "Adam and Steve" pretty much falls on deaf ears in the algae kingdom where bisexuality does exist as a rarity. And as an aside, let me suggest how miracles work in a process-filled creation:

A number of years ago I had given as a tentative explanation for the virgin birth of Christ the observation that there may have been one rare example of trioecy in the human species in Jesus' mother Mary. When saying this I reframed the idea of miracles not as external alien forces placed upon the natural creative order but as internal "natural" forces from within nature / creation. - re slater

 

Firstly,... later I discovered this would be well within keeping when applying by rigorous usage the rules of process theology to a process-based creative order. It keeps within the rules of not stepping outside of nature to perform something "miraculously" through nature by God by using nature itself to perform that enhanced, fully natural, miracle.

Secondly, ... nor does it create exterior conditions foreign to the natural systems we live in by a God who works well within the parameters of nature itself. That is, God has imbued nature with the ability to be creative and novel through its own natural forces.

Thirdly, "miracles" as defined by process theology must therefore be wholly congruent within the natural system itself. It cannot come from the "ether" nor fabricated from a different kind of spacetime external to our own spacetime referential.

Fourthly, miracles cannot be "ex cathedra" or enigmatic to the creative system itself, but conformable (or dutiful) from the system from which it was birthed.

Hence, the natural system God has spoken into being (in the sense of "creatio with existing chaotic material" can, and will, allow for these kinds of "miraculous" differentials without being interventionist in its origins or subsequent derivative results. 

R.E. Slater
July 13, 2021

Relevancy22 References re Virgin Birth


Saturday, January 28, 2012


Creatio Continua Articles
[Note: In older articles I use to say incorrectly creatio ex continua which is the wrong usage for what I was trying to say. When reading these articles please replace in your mind any-and-all of these older phrases with the corrected phrase creatio continua (without the ex). It would also help me if you notated in the comments section those typos so I may go back and correct them. Thanks.   :/  - re slater]
Monday, February 2, 2015


Tuesday, May 18, 2021

A Nice Outline Between Alternatives from an Outside Source:


[ADDENDUM]

Creatio ex nihilo is an idea found in certain faiths which means that the Creator God created the world, "from nothing". Scientifically something cannot come from nothing, and insofar as this is true, than the opposite of "creation from nothing" is "creation from something" (creatio continua). This means that the natural worlds of the universe (or multiverses) are very old but were at one time "breathed" upon God disturbing its entropically equilibrium state into formative and pronounced chaotic systems (that is, out of equilibrium with its former static (timeless) self) with the ability to create new and novel substance from its chaotic nature.

In this way the Creator God is the first Process to all subsequent (or subtending) future processes. It also means that God's image or essence in some fashion is uniquely embedded in all future processes while also remaining distinctly different in a process relational arrangement. Which also means that God doesn't know the future so much as God is the future because of His intimacy with creation in its ordering and teleology. More of this can be read about at Relevancy22 along with the virgin birth of Christ.
"The term creatio continua refers to God's continuing creative activity throughout the history of the universe. In a sense, most theologians accept creatio continua, since creation is the dependence of the whole of space-time on God. But more traditional views hold that because God is timeless and immutable, there is only one divine creative act, which originates the whole of space-time from first to last. Those who speak of creatio continua think of creation taking place in many successive acts, partly in response to events in time. Thus, at any particular time God's creation has not been completed, and the future is partly open, in some theological views, even for God." - Encyclopedia.com

R.E. Slater
July 13, 2021


* * * * * * * * * *


NATURE

Scientists Discover The First Known Algae
Species With Three Distinct Sexes

by Jacinta Bowler
July 13, 2021

Although we might think of ourselves as far removed from blobby green algae, we're not really that different.

An algae explosion a few hundred million years ago is thought to have been what allowed all human and animal life to evolve, and all told there's only about one and a half billion years between us in terms of evolution.

Plus, according to a Japanese team of researchers, algae could actually help us to understand how different sex systems - like male and female - evolved in the first place.

Researchers from the University of Tokyo and a number of other Japanese universities have discovered that a type of green algae called Pleodorina starrii has three distinct sexes – 'male', 'female', and a third sex that the team have called 'bisexual'. This is the first time any species of algae has been discovered with three sexes.

"It seems very uncommon to find a species with three sexes, but in natural conditions, I think it may not be so rare," said one of the researchers, University of Tokyo biologist Hisayoshi Nozaki.

Algae isn't a very specific scientific classification. It's an informal term for a huge collection of different eukaryotic creatures that use photosynthesis to get energy. They're not plants, as they lack many plant features; they're not bacteria (despite cyanobacteria sometimes being called blue-green algae); and they're not fungi.

Everything from many-celled giant kelp species, all the way down to cute single-celled dinoflagellates can be classed as algae.

Because algae are such a big, diverse group, there's lots of variation in the way that they get it on, but generally algae are able to reproduce asexually (by cloning themselves) or sexually (with a partner), depending on the life cycle stage they're in. This can be either haploid (with a single set of chromosomes), or diploid (with two sets).

There's also hermaphroditic algae that can change depending on the gene expression of the organism. Having three sexes, including hermaphrodites, is called 'trioecy'.

But the volvocine green algae P. starrii is different from this again. The bisexual form of this haploid algae has both male and female reproductive cells. The team describe it as a "new haploid mating system" completely unique to algae. 

P. starrii form either 32 or 64 same-sex celled vegetative colonies and have small mobile (male) and large immobile (female) sex cells similar to humans. The male sex cells are sent out in the world in sperm packets to find a female colony to attach to.

Bisexual P. starrii have both, can form either male or female colonies, and therefore can mate with either a male, a female, or another bisexual.


Above: Sexually induced male colony of algae (left). Female colony with male sperm
packet (center). Female colony with dissociated male gametes (right). | Kohei Takahashi


The researchers are particularly excited because other closely related algae have different sex systems, meaning the discovery might be able to tell us more about how these sexual changes evolve.

"Mixed mating systems such as trioecy may represent intermediate states of evolutionary transitions between dioecious (with male and female) and monoecious (with only hermaphrodites) mating systems in diploid organisms," the team write in their new paper.

"However, haploid mating systems with three sex phenotypes within a single biological species have not been previously reported."

For 30 years, Nozaki had been collecting algae samples from the Sagami River outside of Tokyo. Samples that were taken from lakes along that river in 2007 and 2013 were used by the team for the new finding.

The team separated the algal colonies and induced them to reproduce sexually by depriving them of nutrients, discovering that the bisexual algae had a 'bisexual factor' gene that was separate to previously discovered male and female specific genes.

The bisexual cells had the male gene as well, but can produce either male or female offspring.

"Co-existence of three sex phenotypes in a single biological species may not be an unusual phenomenon in wild populations," the researchers conclude.

"The continued field-collection studies may reveal further existence of three sex phenotypes in other volvocine species."

The research has been published in Evolution.



Intersections of the diagram represent mating systems with that combination of sexes. (a) Trioecy (green) is unstable and tends to collapse to a two-sex mating system. (b) In nematodes it has been proposed that trioecy (green) can be used as a temporary mating system in the transition between dioecy (red) and androdioecy (blue). | BioRxIV


Meiosis in A. rhodensis produces unexpected gametes in males and hermaphrodites. The gametes formed, as well as a relatively high frequency of nondisjuction, probably contribute A. freiburgensis sex ratio data that are highly divergent from what would be expected. | BioRxIV


Cooperation and Competition as Drivers of Evolutionary Transition