This webinar features Sumana Roy in dialogue with Mary Evelyn Tucker. It will explore spiritual rituals practiced across traditions, regions, and time, to learn how the divine repeatedly centers on elements from our environments–and why. They will discuss the ways in which ritual, for all its rhetoric of the sacred, brings us into intimacy with nature. This conversation celebrates the recently released spring 2024 issue of Orion Magazine, “Rites of Nature,” which Mary Evelyn guest edited and to which Sumana contributed.
This event is co-sponsored by Yale Institute of Sacred Music, Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, and Orion Magazine.
Speaker Biographies:
Mary Evelyn Tucker is co-director of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology with John Grim at the Yale Center for Environmental Justice. Together they have written Ecology and Religion and created six online classes on Coursera titled, “Religions and Ecology: Restoring the Earth Community.” They are also executive producers of the Emmy Award winning film Journey of the Universe and creators of three Coursera courses on the film, the book, and Thomas Berry. Tucker wrote the film and book with cosmologist, Brian Swimme.
Sumana Roy is the author of several works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. These include How I Became a Tree (Yale University Press, 2021), Missing: A Novel (2019) and a book of poems, Out of Syllabus (2019). She teaches at Ashoka University in Haryana, India. She was a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society LMU Munic in 2018. She was a Visiting Fellow at the South Asia Program, Cornell University, the same year and a fellow at the Plant Humanities Lab, Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University.