Thinking Like A Mountain: Contemplative Ecology in the Anthropocene

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The environmental thinker Aldo Leopold once asked: can we learn to "think like a mountain?" That is, can we learn to recenter our thinking, our ethics, our spiritual practice-beyond our own narrow concerns and within the living world. In this moment of global climate change, we are returning to this question with a new sense of urgency, asking ourselves what it will mean for us to relinquish control and learn to live with greater regard for the natural world. This lecture will consider what it will mean for us to cultivate an eco-centric, contemplative spiritual practice in the Anthropocene.

Professor Christie is the author of The Word in The Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism (Oxford, 1993), The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Note for a Contemplative Ecology (Oxford, 2013), and The Insurmountable Darkness of Love: Mysticism, Loss and the Common Life (Oxford, 2022). He has been awarded fellowships from the Luce Foundation, the Lilly Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. From 2013-2015 he served as Co-director of the Casa de la Mateada study abroad program in Córdoba, Argentina, a program rooted in the Jesuit vision of education for solidarity. He lives with his family in Los Angeles. He is currently working on a book on the desert as spiritual landscape.

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