Description
Book SynopsisMagic Science Religion explores surprising intersections among the three meaning-making and world-making practices named in the title. Through colorful examples, the book reveals circuitous ways that social, cultural and natural systems connect, enabling real kinds of magic to operate. Among the many case studies are accounts of how an eighteenth-century actor gave his audience goosebumps; how painters, poets, and pool sharks use nonlinearity in working their magics; how the first vertebrates gained consciousness; how plants fine-tuned human color vision; and the necessarily magical element of activism that builds on the conviction that "another future is possible" while working to push self-fulfilling prophecy into political action.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments. About this Book 1 Introduction 1 All or Nothing? 2 Kindness ASIDE: The Two-Million-Dollar Comma ASIDE: Sufficiently Magical Technologies ASIDE: Our Gods 3 Cruelty ASIDE: Ghostly Causality ASIDE: Durable Cruelties 4 Beginning, Again ASIDE: Chaos Invoked 5 The Freedom Not to Choose ASIDE: No Atheists in Foxholes ASIDE: Blake on Firm Perswasion ASIDE: Metafictional Magic: The Writer’s Will ASIDE: Shapely Sentences ASIDE: Beckett Meets Twilight Zone, Glass-Half-Full Version 2 Complex Systems in a Nutshell 1 Horror Movie Reboot 2 Interpositivity ASIDE: Interpositivity 3 Becoming a System 4 Creatures of Light ASIDE: Transformative for Whom? ASIDE: Plant Sorcery 5 Tornados, Whirlpools, and Fires ASIDE: iii ASIDE: Co-evolution 6 Leveled ASIDE: On being born too early and dying too late ASIDE: Up Around the Bend 7 A Personifying Universe of Stretchy Things 8 Dynamism ASIDE: One Plus One Equals Infinity 9 Magic, but No Black Boxes ASIDE: The T-Shirt Version 10 Wildness ASIDE: Pet Resemblance via Social Theory 3 Magic by Example 1 Failed Magic: Modernist Heaven (and Hell) 2 Placebo Magic ASIDE: Pregnancy via Magic ASIDE: Following the Scent 3 Mirror Magic 4 Biting Game 5 Dog Whisperer 6 Conclusion 4 Future Perfect 1 The Gettysburg Address as a Magical Speech Act 2 Pool, Poetry, Prose, and Painting ASIDE: Dr. Livingston’s Magical Bank-Shot Visualizer 3 Meteors, Messiahs, and Migraines ASIDE: On This Rock I Build My Church ASIDE: Falling Off a Log 4 Magical Militarism 5 Four Asides ASIDE: Dr. Livingston’s Time Travel 101 ASIDE: A Somewhat Rationalizing Account of Mystical Nonviolence ASIDE: A Somewhat Mysticizing Account of Rationalist Nonviolence ASIDE: Four Scholars 5 What is Religion? 1 A Fuzzy Set 2 Magic, Science, and Religion Coevolve 3 Restoring the Chaos 4 Rain Dance ASIDE: From Flow 5 Providence, via Vico ASIDE: Systematizers Systematized 6 God 3.5B (A Nearsighted Evolutionary Panorama) 1 Salience to Sentience 2 Primordial Systemhood Membership Narratives ASIDE: Law and Order 3 The Myth of the Acquisition-of-Consciousness Moment 4 Use of the Terms I and We 5 Cis-Systems → Trans-Systems 6 First Caveat: Characters 7 Plant and Animal Intelligence 8 Learning and Evolution from a Systems Perspective 9 Second Caveat: Plot 10 Especially Informative Postinfundibular Amphioxus Hypothalamus Neuropile 11 The Holy Grail ASIDE: Neuro-X 12 Teamlikeness ASIDE: Play and Teamlikeness ASIDE: Three-Ring Circuits 13 Conclusion 7 Blake Magic 1 Famous in Heaven ASIDE: No Success Like Failure 2 Blake Magic 3 Auguries ASIDE: Prophecies 4 Angel Kings 5 Magic in the Current Conjuncture 6 Five Asides ASIDE: Black Lives Matter and Judith Butler ASIDE: An Elegant Pose ASIDE: Ritual Retraction ASIDE: Obscurity ASIDE: Butterfly Tornado References Index
