Host Patrick J. D’Silva, PhD interviews Professor andré carrington about Afrofuturism, science fiction studies, and his new book Audiofuturism: Science Fiction Radio Drama and the Black Fantastic Imagination (Fordham University Press, 2026), connecting it to his earlier work on race and science fiction. They discuss carrington’s academic “origin story,” why sci‑fi helps make social inequality legible while imagining alternatives, and how questions of belonging shape Black and queer engagements with popular culture. He describes “disidentification” (from José Muñoz) as a method for reading science fiction histories that marginalize Black people, and spotlights his chapter on the internet “radio” adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979). They also talk through Star Trek: Discovery and Starfleet Academy’s reception and format changes in streaming-era TV, recent and upcoming experimental speculative novels, and how religious studies shapes D’Silva’s reading of Frank Herbert’s Dune.

Additional show notes with links:

Dr. carrington’s books:

• Audiofuturism: Science Fiction Radio Drama and the Black Fantastic Imagination (Fordham University Press, 2026)

• Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2016)

WorldCon 2026 in Anaheim, CA

Wolverine 75 [PJD note: owning this, and even just having read this, was a major source of street cred within certain social circles at my school, just to affirm ac’s point]

Alisha Wormsley’s “There Are Black People in the Future“ billboards were first displayed in Pittsburgh

Janelle Monae, Dirty Computer (2018)

• Watch the emotion picture accompanying the album here on YouTube [pjd note: I somehow didn’t even know this existed and wow it is amazing]

• Read the related short story collection, The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer

Actors from the internet radio adaptation of Kindred (based on Octavia Butler’s 1979 novel): Alfre Woodard, Ruby Dee, Caroline Clay

Books referenced:

• José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color And The Performance of Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 1999)

• AJ Escoffery, Open TV: Innovation Beyond Hollywood and the Rise of Web Television (NYU Press, 2018), Reparative Media: Cultivating Stories and Platforms to Heal our Culture (MIT Press, 2025)

• Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written By Herself (1861)

• Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831)

• Cebo Campbell,  Sky Full of Elephants; 2025 interview with Campbell from Politics and Prose bookstore.

• Paul Beatty, The White Boy Shuffle

• Violet Allen, Plastic Prism Void: Part One

Review Kara Kennedy’s work on Dune

On a college campus in St. Paul, MN long, long ago where andré and I both started our academic journeys: Macalester College

Time stamps:

00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro

02:09 Origin Story in Sci Fi

06:41 Belonging and Afrofuturism

14:34 Connecting carrington’s Two Books

22:01 Kindred Radio Adaptation

32:53 Finding the Audio Today

35:59 nuTrek Takes: Discovery and Starfleet Academy

45:59 Recent Reads That Challenge

52:33 Guest Turns the Tables

54:12 On Dune, Religion, and Orientalism

01:08:40 Final Thanks and Wrap

Science fiction is full of incredible stories about humanity’s move to other planets like Mars, then solar systems beyond our own. Along the way humans are always looking for ways to transform these planets into environments that mimic what we have here on earth. There’s tons of writing about this; two series that I love are The Expanse, by James S.A. Corey (note: the tv series is also amazing!) and the Mars trilogy series, by Kim Stanley Robinson. There is also a terraforming element to Frank Herbert’s Dune series (one that sadly the recent films by Denis Villeneuve underplay), but in many ways it doesn’t really develop until the later books.

One of the things I’m going for with this title is that when I look at the state of our planet, it feels like we have used technology to make the earth…less earth-like. From the disruption of local food webs through habitat loss, (near-) extinction of species, and even our building practices, the trend for a long time is taking us towards a place where we won’t be able to live here any more. We don’t have anywhere else to go.

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Another inspiration for this series is my long term study of mysticism. As I wrote in an earlier piece, one common trait of mystical traditions is learning to let go of the ego-self. What happens when I stop focusing on what “I” want in a superficial and short-term sense, and start thinking about myself as one small part of an incredibly vast whole?

Can we re-think ourselves in relationship to the environment?

When I use the term “terraforming” here, I am talking about the diverse practices humans have already engaged in for a long time, often centuries, that some of us are only now discovering for the first time. I think one of the key causes of the climate crisis is that so many of us have been taught to think of ourselves as separate from the environment instead of intimately enmeshed within it. Even more damaging, many of us have been taught that we “own” the earth as opposed to existing in a mutually-beneficial relationship. “What can we do for the land?” vs “What can the land do for us?”

As I think about these issues while living in Colorado, I can’t help but reflect on the role the European colonization of the Americas has played for centuries in terms of how we approach the relationship between humans and the environment around us. Agriculture predates European expansion by millennia, but the combination of the genocide of indigenous peoples at the hands of European settler-colonial forces paired with the eventual mechanization and genetic modification of agriculture means that huge swaths of land in what is now the United States no longer look anything like what they used to. These changes are not for the better in terms of ecological sustainability.

I remember these lines by Robin Wall Kimmerer, from Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants:

“In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of course, the human being on top—the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creation—and the plants at the bottom. But in Native ways of knowing, human people are often referred to as “the younger brothers of Creation.” We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn—we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance. Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live. They teach us by example. They’ve been on the earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out.”

That vision of humans, that we “have the least experience,” resonates with me so strongly. We act like know-it-alls, but what do we know in comparison to bees and beavers? As I educate myself on concepts like permaculture, rewilding, regenerative ag, and get further into debates over native vs exotic plants, one thing that becomes clear is that the vision of environmentalism I grew up with in the US in the 1980’s (where we felt so good about recycling endless issues of newspapers) was deeply insufficient. There are so many social movements around the world where people have organized to do something, anything, to address the climate crisis. The reality that data documenting climate change is so clear, on top of the truth we glean from our everyday lived experience, and yet there is such denial from governments, tells me that part of the issue is a failure in narrative.

These essays are really documenting my journey from learning about big picture concepts to implementing these ideas at my own home. If you are engaged in similar work and want to connect, please reach out! My plan is to put together as many essays and interviews as I can in the coming months.

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I will end with a video of bees buzzing around the cleome (cleomella serratula) that we have in our backyard. My wife gets all credit for the wildflowers, and thus, the bees as well.

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For an example of when a TV show helped me immensely as a student, I always go back to my high school English class when we studied Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice. There I was, a native English speaker who loved reading English literature…and I was stumped. I couldn’t understand Austen’s prose. I remember going to my teacher one day with serious questions: “What is a Darcy? Who is Netherfield?” (Netherfield is actually a place, and Darcy one of the main characters in the novel. Yes, that is how confused I was.) A few days later our teacher wheeled out the TV, popped a tape in the VCR (the year was 1998, thank you very much), and on came the BBC adaptation. A few episodes later I was saved. It made sense. I could follow the rest of the book! But I needed that visualization to bring everything into focus.

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My presentation last week focused on the British Partition of India in 1947. The map was redrawn so that one nation (India) became two (India and Pakistan), and actually three territories (India, West Pakistan, East Pakistan). Separated by roughly 1000 miles and differing from West Pakistan in important things like language, East Pakistan would gain its independence in 1971, as well as the name it bears today: Bangladesh. The 1947 Partition is estimated to have led to between one and two million deaths (largely due to sectarian violence) as well as fifteen million displaced. There is a wealth of resources for teaching about Partition, including first-person narratives of survivors as well as novels and films that have come out in the subsequent decades. But my presentation was about the use of pop culture to open up a space for the students that the teachers attending this workshop are working with: American teenagers. And for that purpose, I argue that the Ms. Marvel series from 2022 can be a highly effective tool.

The show introduces viewers to Kamala Khan, a young American woman of Pakistani descent growing up in New Jersey. We learn about her family, the mosque she attends, and, most importantly, her love of Captain Marvel. Since the show is part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), in Kamala’s world Captain Marvel is real. Superheroes are real, following them is somewhat akin to following celebrities in our world. Kamala eventually discovers she has super powers and gets drawn into a battle between good and evil, but most importantly for my presentation, she also learns more about her family’s experience with Partition, including eventually traveling back in time.

Combining pop culture with relevant primary and secondary sources can be a wonderful way to help students access the emotional component of historical events. How would they have felt if they had to flee their homes under violent circumstances? One of the most powerful ways that Ms. Marvel depicts Partition is by thrusting viewers (many of whom had likely never even heard of Partition) into an intensely chaotic situation. As Nitish Pahwa wrote in a 2022 piece for Slate, the representation stood out because of “… the pointed way it displays the pain of the Partition: the factors that force a settled family to leave their preferred home, the chaos of making one’s way through a mass exodus, and the ease by which brutality proliferated, lives were lost, and families were torn apart” (emphasis original).

To be sure, the series has its limitations. After all, TV and film are commercial products whose initial success is often based on how much revenue they generate for whichever studio produced them. As a scholar, I am always going to be disappointed when the creation of a sweeping narrative gets in the way of conveying the nuance of history. For example, 1947 is not even the first time we see the term partition used in India. The British partitioned Bengal in 1905 as part of an effort to divide Hindus and Muslims so as to squash nascent anticolonial movements. But I also think that we do our students a great service if we take time in the classroom to identify where these cultural products skim over instead of digging deep into history. These are precisely the types of skills that anyone can use to critique content creation found on social media today. Part of what makes Ms. Marvel so powerful is it introduces audiences to Partition with more of an emphasis on the lived experience of how chaotic and frightening this period was, as opposed to a history textbook’s list of dates. As one of the workshop participants pointed out, their student reads those textbook accounts and gets the sense of Partition as something negotiated in a conference room. This utterly fails to convey the panic that so many felt, and the train station scenes in the series give viewers a visceral sense of what it felt like to live through this time period.

As always when I participate in a SSEWA program, I was impressed with the teachers’ participation and engagement. These folks are really on the frontlines, working with young people on a daily basis in incredibly demanding jobs, with very little support. It makes me feel better about the future knowing that they are investing in their knowledge through attending events like this SSEWA summer workshop, which in turn highlights the many ways that CAS serves the public good.

If you would like to support Asian studies at CU Boulder, please consider donating at https://www.colorado.edu/cas/support-cas. For more information, please visit the CAS website, and I especially encourage you to join their mailing list so you can stay up-to-date on their programs.

This is such a wonderful question because oftentimes in academia we are actively dissuaded from acknowledging that we as scholars have any kind of personal connection to the subjects we study. It is as if feeling passionate about a subject must automatically disqualify me from being able to analyze it “objectively.” But why study something just for the heck of it? There is knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but I don’t believe in such a thing as apolitical knowledge production or consumption. Everything I choose to take in says something about my priorities and values. For example, at present I am drawn to learning more about how to engage with and take care of the natural world. This shows up in spending more time gardening at home, beginning to experiment with permaculture, and thinking seriously about creating welcoming space for pollinators on our small suburban plot.

Gardening is a great way to give in to nature, the design that “works” without seeming to work (at least, from our human perspective). For a beautiful example, here is a photo of the wildflower “meadow” (much smaller than what you will find at Holy Wisdom!) that my wife started in our backyard a few years ago. You will see flax and penstemon in their glory, with sunflowers and gaillardia getting ready to shine. The flax came in last year, and we have had sunflowers before, but the rest (and a lot more not pictured here) appears where it “wants” to (i.e., where the wind blows its seeds, or where a bird decides to drop them).

What does this have to do with mysticism? One key component of the mystical traditions I have studied (principally Sufism and Yoga with a bit of Benedictine monasticism thrown in), is deep engagement with the process of letting go of the ego. This might mean the Sufi’s striving for fana, or annihilation, of the nafs (Self) or the Yogi’s work at “yoking” together the mind and the body through a combination of meditation and asana (postures). How does the Benedictine concept of treating the stranger as a manifestation of Christ change how we think of our Self upon meeting someone for the first time?

My best exemplar for all things Benedictine is my great-aunt, Sister Joanne Kollasch. She was a Benedictine nun for seventy years and just passed away late in 2025. She and her fellow Benedictine sisters (as well as a dedicated staff) care for their land at Holy Wisdom Monastery in Middleton, Wisconsin. They lovingly restored acres of prairie as well as renovated their buildings to become a Net Zero facility. You can read more about their amazing work in this profile published in the New York Times last year. They are also an ecumenical community, meaning they are open to Christian women of all denominations, not just Catholics. Attending Sister Joanne’s funeral earlier this year, I was struck by the diversity of the community who have found a home at Holy Wisdom. Walking the prairie is an incredible experience, not only because of its beauty but because of the powerful impact we know these types of landscapes have in terms of protecting the environment.

I have found that engaging with the natural world, especially gardening, is a powerful reminder of how little control any of us really have over our lives, and how hard that is when we live ego-centric existences. Where I live, in the United States, we are taught that the best possible life is one where we are in complete control, with the corollary that money solves all problems. This has led us to think that the wealthier a person is, the more they “have figured it out.” Often left unspoken is the reality that there is no way to acquire mass wealth in a capitalist society other than extracting said wealth from other people through exploiting those people’s labor. One achieves control, which is sometimes framed as dominance, through mastering your environment. Along the way you are told to boost your ego as high as possible. “I am the greatest,” and so forth. The mystics are not impressed.

In the teachings I have studied, the only thing the writers advise us to do about our egos is restrain—and even retrain—them because that ego-self is a barrier blocking us from connecting to that divine source from which we all spring. Sufi writings abound with writers telling us to “polish the mirror” that is our soul. One voice that many in the West are more familiar with than Attar is Rumi, whose beloved Masnavi Ma`navi (“Spiritual Couplets”) begins:

Now listen to this reed-flute’s deep lament,

About the heartache being apart has meant;

Since from the reed-bed they uprooted me,

My song’s expressed each human’s agony.

— Masnavi I, lines 1-2 (trans. Mojaddedi 2004)

The reed flute’s “deep lament” is that it has been cut from the reed bed, its Source. While I am very much of the mind that each mystical path is specific and particular, I also appreciate how similar these paths appear from the outside. I can’t help but feel a connection to the proverbial reed, looking for my connection to the Source in places like the aforementioned prairie at Holy Wisdom, or even much closer to home in my family’s garden that as I write is springing to life after winter’s slumber.

If you are at all interested in learning more about Rumi, I will be leading a Guided Reading course, sponsored by the Religion Department, starting in August 2026. We will read through the entirety of Book 1 of the Masnavi, coming together to read, think, and (most importantly) ask questions.

It’s a question that comes up for me when I hear people talk about how their understanding of Jesus’ teachings guides their actions, especially when the people in question are politicians. With Christianity being the largest religious tradition on the planet, there are understandably going to be some differences, some of which are more difficult to reconcile than others. For example, Pete Hegseth and Pope Leo have distinct visions of what Jesus would say about the current US war against Iran. Scholars have written extensively about the ways some Christian leaders interpreted scripture to justify the transatlantic slave trade. Some denominations, including the one that Pope Leo leads, continue to deny women equal access to leadership positions. These types of issues — war, slavery, gender — are really just a few that we could pick from. One thing that they all share is a deep connection to the body. Whose bodies are deemed acceptable? inviolate? perfect? Whose bodies are deemed abject? healable? abnormal? Along these lines, there is an issue that I don’t think gets much press but which has been on my mind recently: disability.

This piece is directly inspired by the recent NPR article on the “Gang of 19,” a group of disability rights activists who shut down a major Denver intersection in July 1978 to protest the inaccessibility of public buses. I can only imagine the scene described, in which police officers arrive but aren’t sure what to do about a bunch of people in wheelchairs who won’t get out of the way of the busses. These activists did something powerful but putting their already vulnerable bodies in harm’s way, forcing society to see them, and ultimately to deal with them.1

Reading about the “Gang of 19” over Easter weekend brought my thoughts to Dr. Lamar Hardwick’s How Ableism Fuels Racism: Dismantling the Hierarchy of Bodies in the Church (Brazos Press, 2024). He writes from his experience as a Black autistic pastor. The first part of his book digs into the history of Christianity in America, starting with the Puritans, but then swiftly takes the reader to the present day. All along this journey, he explains how ableism and racism constitute intertwining threads. He defines ableism as “the practice of discriminating against people with disabilities based on the belief that normal bodies are superior to those that are not” (7). I intend to write more specifically about the anti-Blackness thread, but in this piece I want to focus on his point that “[e]ven in its best expressions, Western Christianity is at least guilty of trying to heal the disabling marks that identify the postresurrection Jesus to his earliest followers and to us” (116).

This line of thinking might be surprising, because Hardwick is criticizing Christians for having a vision of Jesus in which he is healed from the wounds he suffers through crucifixion. Hardwick discusses this issue in light of the differences between the medical and social models of disability2: “Our world is profoundly shaped by the medical model of disability, a model that promotes the view that ‘abnormal’ bodies are deficient and need to be fixed. We have done this to Jesus. In fact, I believe we are so ableist that we even discriminate against God” (116).

Pause there. Discriminate against God? Sounds insane! But consider the short story “Jesus Christ in Texas,” published by W.E.B. DuBois as part of the collection Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil in 1920. Jesus appears in the Jim Crow South and instead of being welcomed with open arms, he is lynched. How’s that for discrimination? But Hardwick is just getting started:

We taint our version of Christianity with ableist notions that will not allow us to serve a disabled savior. Like many disabled people who are trapped beneath the weight of a model of disability that views their bodies as burdens to be fixed and healed, Jesus also finds himself the victim of ableist ideology because we have reduced his disability to wounds-wounds that are described as something akin to childhood scars that remain after falling off a bike or scraping a knee while playing soccer in the street. The American Jesus is not disabled because we have taken the initiative to help him ascend to body normativity. But Jesus never asks us to fix him. He simply asks for our faith. He asks us to place our faith in his body, which has returned from the grave with disability and has confirmed that he eternally intertwined his divinity with his human experience (116, emphasis mine).

Why “fix” someone who never asks for it? How many people are told they have to take medication or undergo some type of therapy, not because they themselves ask for assistance but because society tells them that they must speak differently, move their bodies differently, move ideas within their minds differently? Discerning ableism becomes pretty easy once you start to see the world through the eyes of those who learn, even as children, that this world is not built for them, and that in many cases society would be content if those we deem disabled simply ceased to exist. If that sounds like eugenics, it’s because it is. Back to Hardwick: “The holes in Jesus’s hands have been filled with Western ideals. Until fairly recently, we accepted images of Jesus as a White man with blond hair and blue eyes” (116).3 His broader point is so important, that ableism and racism are intertwined. What follows is the crescendo of this passage:

The Western Jesus no longer bears the marks of disability because the American Jesus is a winner. The American Jesus is a warrior. The American Jesus is aggressive and “appropriately” violent… The American Jesus cannot have holes in his hands and a large hole in his side because the body of the Jesus we want has to represent the type of Christians we want to be-while conveniently setting aside the commands related to loving our enemies, praying for those who persecute us, and turning the other cheek. The Jesus who said those things, we surmise, is weak and naive. The enemy-loving Jesus, the Jesus of justice and mercy and grace, isn’t exactly the Jesus who would endorse mass genocide, racial slavery, discrimination against disabled people, or the violence and vitriol that sometimes occurs in Christian communities. So we healed him. We changed his body into a body we could get behind. A body without disability. A body without color. A body that wouldn’t be despised. But in doing so, we created a body without compassion. The American Jesus has the ideal American body-healed, handsome, and hands off when it comes to the needs of the marginalized in Western society. When it comes to the American Jesus, the narrative has been changed from God creating us in his image to us creating him in our own (116-117, emphasis mine).

There’s a lot to unpack in this passage. So much of the discourse coming from government officials in the US uses the language of masculinity viewed through the prisms of dominance and aggression, as if the only ways to be a real man necessitate controlling those around us. There is no room for humility or frailty in this depiction of Christ as some type of Ultimate Warrior. I come back to the question I began with: how do we describe Jesus? Hardwick argues that unless we include the adjective “disabled” in that description, we are missing an essential part of Christ’s lived experience, and that Christians need to sit with the question of why we ignore that part of his human identity.

We are fortunate to live in a time where more and more people are speaking truth to power about ableism and how it intersects with so many other -isms, or ways in which we as humans degrade one another. I am adding Nancy Eiesland’s The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability (Abingdon Press, 1994) to my “to read” list for the coming year. To learn is to be alive. Reading authors whose embodied experience diverges from my own is a great privilege that helps me feel especially vibrant.

Thank you for reading this far! If so moved, feel free to leave a comment, especially if you have suggestions for books or podcasts pertaining to the themes I discuss above.

I recently had the chance to read Nana Visitor’s Open a Channel: A Woman’s Trek (2024) and my first thoughts upon finishing the journey is that every male trekkie should read this book. I’m so tired of us men thinking that media like this book is somehow not for us. Visitor lets readers know from the very first page that “[t]his is more than a book about Star Trek…This is a Hollywood story in a sense. Hollywood is just another system, after all, and most systems have lots of things in common. Hierarchy, cultural rules, and bias exist in many of them. So even more than that, it’s a story about society and about how the role of women has changed since Gene Roddenberry wrote his first Star Trek memo in 1964” (7).

I thought this book was going to be another coffee table tome replete with glossy photos. Dax wielding a bat’leth. Kira with a phaser. Seven of Nine judging everyone for being illogical. It is indeed filled with glossy photos, but also so much more. Visitor’s essays take the reader chronologically from Star Trek’s inception (major thanks to Lucille Ball!) clear through to the latest nuTrek shows. I hope that a future revised edition includes Visitor’s take on the current Trek show, Starfleet Academy!

You can find plenty of reviews online, including interviews with Visitor about the book. What I wanted to share in this space is my perspective as a male Star Trek fan. I knew about the misogyny-driven hatred for Discovery (the show centers on a Black woman, Sonequa Martin-Green), as well as the critique of “too much diversity” in terms of race, gender, neurodivergence, and body type in the other more recent shows. I appreciated Visitor’s comment on Discovery specifically, that we see Martin-Green’s character as someone who “had deep friendships, sensual relationships, complicated family dynamics, and became a leader with a man in her life who supported her. The idea that anyone would even think about objectifying this character seems impossible. That tells me how far women in this franchise have come” (209). Some fan response of hatred to this powerful female character shows us how unenlightened, backward and ignorant so much of our society still is. 

But I really didn’t know much about the details of what women on The Original Series and The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager went through. The first show was on well before my time and I never got too attached to it since my first interactions with the original crew were through the films (Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, aka “The one with the whales” is still one of my favorites). The shows from the late-80’s through the 90’s were where I really learned about Trek, but I was hardly a critical consumer when it came to any of my media.

Many chapters in this book were difficult for me to read because Visitor presents an unflinching look at what women in Hollywood have gone through just to exist in that business, let alone to succeed. Yes, her stories–built on years of research, interviews with those in front of and behind the camera, and with many Trek fans–show that things have improved since the 1960’s, but the journey has been rough. This book is equal parts about what we as Trek fans see on the screen (from scantily-clad bodies to characters who weren’t given the runway to really develop their stories) and what the real human beings who played those roles went through in our all too real world. This is one of the mistakes that we make when we insist on “keeping the politics out” of TV, movies, and even sports. All of these things exist as products made for us to consume. That is their primary purpose. They might provide a sense of escape but we should never forget that they are part of our world. That’s true if we are talking about athletes taking a stand (or a knee) in protest over social issues as well as depictions of fantastical adventures through galaxies far, far away (yes I know, different Star franchise, but the point still stands). 

I had no idea that Nana Visitor is a survivor of sexual assault. She goes into graphic detail about what she experienced, and has spoken about it on Gates McFadden’s podcast. She and so many of the women she interviewed went through horrible sexual harassment, something that she says she knew was wrong at the time but also sometimes accepted as part of the “cultural amber” of the 80’s and 90’s. 

I think one of my takeaways from the book is that there is a scale of violation, with catcalling and lewd comments on one end and violent attack at the other. Visitor was not raped because of her connection to Star Trek or Hollywood, but things like that happen because we exist in a world where rape is a weapon that men use to enforce their dominance over women. Patriarchy and misogyny are so ingrained in our society even today that there is a connection between her traumatic experience and what so many have experienced along that scale of violation. Treating others as less human (regardless of the reason) takes many forms, and all of it matters. 

I absolutely loved learning more about early Star Trek writers like Dorothy Fontana, who started submitting scripts under the name D.C. Fontana once she figured out that producers were much more open to a script if they thought it was written by a man. Fontana would go on to write many Trek episodes, including co-writing the pilot for The Next Generation, “Encounter at Farpoint Station.”

You might look at this book, as I initially did, and think it is primarily about “out of this world” characters. But it is about so much more. Visitor uses the term “cultural amber” quite often throughout the book. Part of that is her own journey of discovery, at recognizing the ways that her own view of herself and other women were refracted through the misogynistic attitudes that were, and still are, so common. I feel like part of the takeaway from the book is that the “amber” has changed, but not completely, and not nearly enough. 

Looking at this from a broader perspective of a lifelong sci-fi and fantasy fan, there are these worlds we love to get lost in, but can we ignore the lived reality of the human beings involved in creating those worlds? This applies to literature and film, but also sports and any other realm of cultural production that some people moan about “keeping the politics out of it.” That phrase, to me, means people want to consume entertainment with no thought, no feeling for the humans behind it. 

It matters a great deal when we choose to ignore these lived realities that are going on behind the scenes. I would argue it makes our experience as fans better for knowing that there were bad actors (pun intended) behind the camera. The cost of us ignoring things, of refusing to see the shadow side (to borrow from Jung), is our current state of the world, where men —especially powerful men—seem to feel they can abuse and degrade women with impunity. I believe passionately that these fandoms should make us better humans. If not, then what are we doing?

If you got this far: thanks for reading! For my next book review this month, I’m going to tackle Amy Ratcliffe’s newly expanded edition of Women of the Galaxy, where she takes readers on a journey to learn about some of the incredible women of Star Wars. Sense a theme from this month’s book reviews? Strong in the Force you just might be.

I have a few main takeaways from this course: 

First of all, each of the course participants are working full-time as teachers. Their days are packed with teaching, meetings with students, parents, and admin, and sometimes overseeing various extracurriculars. We meet on Zoom, and while most of the teachers are based in Colorado, we always have a few from other states who have heard about the course and through the wonders of the internet are able to join us from over a thousand miles away. I really respect that these people are working to become better teachers not only in terms of the content that they cover in the classroom, but wanting to be better supports for their students. The course ended right as Ramadan began this year, so we spent time talking about how they could best support Muslim students who are fasting.

Second, I personally learn so much from this course. I have spent my career teaching undergraduate and graduate students at the university level, so the last time I thought about what it is like for a 7th grader to learn was when I was in middle school myself! The teachers share resources and suggestions with one another, and I feel like at the end of the course we have all gained a lot of resources that we can take and apply in our own teaching. I also appreciate the teachers’ honesty about which resources feel appropriate for middle school vs high school. Everyone loves Hajj Trail (imagine the classic Oregon Trail game but set during the Ottoman period). One particular highlight for me this year was getting their response to the documentary Koran by Heart (learning about Qur’anic recitation), as well as a selection of qawwali performances, including the famed Atif Aslam rendition of “Tajdar-e haram” and “Ishq Namaz” by Abida Parveen and Sanam Marvi (I am a particular fan of Sanam Marvi after meeting her when she performed at UNC Chapel Hill when I was there for my doctoral studies).

I’m at a point in my career where I want to pivot towards public outreach and engaging with the general public more than the typical specialist-to-specialist conversation that we tend to have in academia. I still enjoy the latter form of dialogue, but I also find it very fulfilling to speak with and learn from people who are approaching these subjects with more openness. For all of our erudition, we scholars can be quite narrow minded at times. It can be hard to break out of the overly intellectual mode. We spend years learning to make as specific an argument as possible, and in so doing we often forget what it’s like to talk to someone with a passing interest in our speciality while sharing a table at a cafe or sitting next to us on a bus.

One last thing: like so many area studies centers around the country, CAS had their funding cut this past year and are actively looking for new funding sources. They do incredible work, not just through the courses that CAS-affiliated faculty offer on campus, but also through lots of different public outreach programs. If you have any funding ideas that I could pass on to CAS, please let me know.

I recently completed a two year term serving on Health First Colorado’s Member Experience Advisory Council (MEAC). Health First Colorado is Colorado’s Medicaid program. I joined MEAC because I was looking for service opportunities and this seemed like a way to offer my opinions based on my family’s experience navigating healthcare – specifically Medicaid – while also learning more about the system. It was an incredible experience, one that I hope I can build on through further service opportunities down the road.

One of the things that impressed me so much about MEAC is the diversity of its membership. In addition to gender, race, sexuality, and neurodiversity, we had people from all over the state and with different types of connections to Medicaid. Some of us were on Medicaid because of being low income. Some were members on a waiver, for example if they had a disabled family member they took care of fulltime. Some participate in the buy-in program. Every meeting we would share what was working and what was NOT working. This was always eye-opening because you got a sense of the types of things people were struggling with, so much of which came down to the challenges of navigating the bureaucracy. 

The majority of our time was spent giving feedback to staff from the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing  (HCPF) on policies and documents. For example, any type of health insurance or healthcare provider always gives you TONS of paperwork. Sometimes this paperwork is straightforward and easy to understand, but most of the time it feels like it was written BY a policy expert FOR another policy expert. A lot of our work focused on providing suggestions for how draft documents could be improved, especially in communicating information about whether or not a person’s Medicaid application was approved or rejected, or the specifics of benefits information. We all access information differently, so we would discuss what it is like to receive a letter in the mail vs. reading something on email vs. reading it on our phones. Perhaps it’s because of my age, but for me anything health care related is a “real computer” activity, however I appreciate that some people feel comfortable accessing stuff on their phones. The other piece of our sessions would be dedicated to meeting with various HCPF staff. For example, we got to meet with the director of Health First Colorado, Kim Bimestefer once a year, where she would provide a thorough overview of the Medicaid budget debates taking place not just in Colorado but how things in our state are connected to shifts in federal policy and priority.

Here are a few of things I take away from these last two years:

1. The incredible disparity in care for people living in rural areas compared to the Front Range. MEAC members living in the San Luis valley, for example, have way fewer options even for primary care, let alone specialists, compared to what I have living in Boulder. Going into my term on MEAC I knew there would be some differences on that front but the extent of it was surprising. If you want to learn more, I recommend this 2025 report prepared by Colorado Rural Health Center.  

2. The impact of being able to talk to people who are working so hard on the policy side to improve healthcare for the most vulnerable Coloradans, including making the system as equitable as possible. Getting to spend even just half an hour with a policy expert helped me appreciate the challenges they face in new ways, just as getting to hear from providers (i.e., physicians, therapists, etc) also helps me understand their experience not just with Medicaid but also with providing healthcare in general. 

3. MEAC (and similar groups across the country) make a meaningful impact by giving providers and policy makers an idea of what it is like to use these systems on a daily basis. Providers and policy makers often don’t understand how these systems work for members because they are not members themselves. Sometimes I receive letters from my insurance provider, and it makes almost no sense to me. I have a PhD in a humanities’ discipline. If there’s one thing I’m good at, it is reading texts and making sense of them. But so many documents are written by policy experts and unintentionally seem aimed at other policy experts. I am not trained as a policy expert (although this experience has helped me improve my skills in this area a lot), and the feedback from MEAC members helps policy folks understand how to improve the system. 

Here is a link to MEAC’s website where you can learn more about how it functions. If podcasts are more your thing, here is a short (~20 minutes long) interview from May 2023, “How do Members Experience Medicaid?” with Samantha Fields, a MEAC alumna. Samantha talks about all the different ways she uses Medicaid, and how she has used service opportunities to move from “just complaining” to helping improve these systems.

Colorado is by no means the only state to have this type of member experience council. If it is something you might be interested in, check with your Medicaid programs in your state. I can’t emphasize enough how much I learned about the health care system in our country, especially Medicaid. We hear a lot of vitriol from various politicians (and those pretending to be public leaders) demonizing folks on Medicaid. That type of rhetoric is cruel and misguided. Better humaning means treating people like they matter. It’s a choice we can all make, no matter the context we are in.

I read this book in March 2003. It was a gift from my aunt and uncle here in Colorado who have long been and still are very important to me. My uncle’s note on the inside cover of the book reads: “This book reminds us of U - For you certainly share his spirit of wonder and adventure. I bet he rolled down a few mountains too.”

This book has always meant a lot to me. My aunt and uncle know a lot about mountains, hiking, skiing, etc. This uncle could talk to me for hours about Star Trek and comic books. He took me for my first time cross country skiing, an event where he had plenty of reason to observe “wow Patrick, given how athletic you usually are, I’m enjoying seeing you have no idea what you’re doing.” I think I was holding on for dear life to a tree in order to stay upright. Cross-country skiing has since become my favorite activity! This aunt and uncle also modeled what it could look like to be spiritual and a bit less religious as they found their way to a group of “loyal opposition” Catholics who weren’t in agreement with the Church in many ways. This was such an important influence on my growth and development as I grappled with my religious identity.

My uncle in particular modeled what it looked like to cultivate a spiritual relationship with the natural world. Hiking in the mountains, he would sometimes come around a trail and stop just to put his hand on a rockface to feel its energy. He would point out a tree that has somehow taken root on the side of a mountain, commenting how hard that must be, and how incredible to witness it. He is a mountain mystic and incredible photographer. One time we were hiking around the Flatirons and he drew my attention to a “dragon line” (also sometimes referred to as “ley line”) where two plates come together and the earth’s energy is very strong. I had called him that morning to see if he wanted to go hiking, he said he was going to do a workshop about the energetics of being out in nature and it made more sense to actually do it instead of just sitting around talking about it. I think about this sometimes when I can tell I’m over indulging in the intellectual mode. Thinking, thinking, thinking, where does that get a person? Not out in nature, in my experience.

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Muir is probably most well-known for his contributions to the formation of the National Park Service and the Sierra Club. He wrote an incredible number of books and articles. Countless thousands have drawn inspiration from his writings and aspired to the fearlessness that he embodied. I’ve woven together some quotes from the book with reflections on my own experiences with mountain climbing (and falling). Muir’s lines are in italics.

The Ascent of Mount Ritter (Pages 87-88, underlining my own)

Now came the solemn, silent evening. Long, blue, spiky-edged shadows crept out across the snow-fields, while a rosy glow, at first scarce (page 88) discernible, gradually deepened and suffused every mountaintop, flushing the glaciers and the harsh crags above them. This was the alpenglow, to me the most impressive of all terrestrial manifestations of God. At the touch of this divine light, the mountains seemed to kindle to a rapt, religious consciousness, and stood hushed like devout worshippers waiting to be blessed.

You might be wondering what my uncle meant when he mentioned falling down mountains? When I was 17, we took a family vacation to Cape Town, South Africa. We were living in Nairobi, Kenya. I had recently gotten into hiking through the Outdoor Club at my high school as well as some trips organized through the youth group that was a big part of my life at the time. I loved hiking, scrabbling over rocks, and exploring. During this vacation to Cape Town, I wanted to climb up one side of Table Mountain (known as Skeleton Gorge), hike across the top, and then take the cable car down to meet my family. But it didn’t go exactly as planned.

A Geologist’s Winter Walk (pg 101, underlining my own)

This cañon is accessible only to mountaineers, and I was anxious to carry my barometer and clinometer through it, to obtain sections and altitudes, so I chose it as the most attractive highway. After I had passed the tall groves that stretch a mile above Mirror Lake, and scrambled around the Tenaya Fall, which is just at the head of the lake groves, I crept through the dense and spiny chaparral that flushes the roots of the mountains, here for miles and warm green, and was ascending a precipitous rock front, smooth by glacial action, when I suddenly fell – for the first time since I touched foot to Sierra rocks. After several summer results, I became insensible from the shock, and when consciousness returned, I found soft wedged among short, stiff bushes, trembling as if cold, not injured in the slightest.

Judging by the sun, I could not have been insensible very long; probably not a minute, possibly an hour; and I could not remember what made me fall, or where I had fallen from; but I saw that if I had rolled a little further, my mountain-climbing would’ve been finished, for just beyond the bushes, the cañon wall steep that I might’ve fallen into the bottom. “There,” said I, addressing my feet, to his separate skill I had learned to trust night and day on any mountain, “ that is what you get by intercourse with stupid town stairs, and dead pavements.” I felt degraded and worthless. I had not yet reached the most difficult portion of the canyon, but I determined to guide my humble body over the most nerve trying places I could find; before I was now awake, and felt confident that the last of the town fog had been shaken from both head and feet.

Muir’s story is quite harrowing. Re-reading this now, there are a few things that come to mind.

Reflection 1: my own tumbling story

I was lost. Off trail and suddenly clinging to the side of the mountain, trying to figure out how to get back. I heard others on the trail just around the bend, and called out for help. They advised me to attempt a controlled slide down to the ledge where they waited, they would catch me.

I remember vividly that moment when I swung out and put my weight on that brush, and how it came loose, and how I was floating for what felt like a long time. Then I crash onto the ledge where my would-be rescuers waited, and then a series of head-over-heels somersaults down the mountain. Then a bigger crash, and I remember groaning. In some part of my mind I thought “that isn’t me, who is making that noise?” I saw a fern in front of me, covered in a red spatter that I realized was coming from me. My back hurt. A lot. My rescuers, a brother and sister, called out to me, they were coming, I just had to hold on. The brother who said not catching me as I fell to the ledge was “the worst missed tackle of [his] life” (he was a rugby player, lots of tackling). A British doctor who was out hiking with her family that day, coming “up” the mountain just as I was rather precipitously coming “down” the mountain. She tore up her sock to stop the bleeding from several gashes I had on my head. The mountain rescue squad who were called out to come get me. The bizarre feeling of being strapped into the stretcher, completely immobilized (because I said my back hurt, they were worried about spinal fractures and risking further injury while moving me).

Then the rescue, then the helicopter (I was strapped to the side in what seemed to be similar to what we see depicted in the TV series MASH - also, it is very cold when you are flying through the air strapped to the side of a helicopter when you are in a stretcher and can’t move anything but your eyebrows and the tips of your fingers). The ambulance ride to the hospital. The ER doctor who wore magnifying glasses as he stitched up my forehead; the glasses meant that I could watch the reflection of what he was doing as he did it. I caught a glimpse of my chart, it just said “jumped off mountain.” The orderly wheeling me to get various scans couldn’t help making fun: “So you thought you could fly and found out you couldn’t?” The nurse who helped me get up to bathe that night when I couldn’t move on my own. The fact that there were four channels on the tv in the room and they were all on New Year’s Eve/Happy New festivities. Welcome to 1999! The sister (from the brother-sister rescuers) who called me at the hospital to say that when she and her brother hiked back up to where they had first seen me, it was closer to 50 meters than 15 meters. 50 meters is about 164 feet. Is that even remotely possible, that I rolled down that much hillside and survived? It doesn’t seem right, but that’s what she said. A reporter called me to do a story for the newspaper. I decided against having him take photos, and we talked over the phone. I told him I thought I fell 15 meters, he published 5 meters in the story. Does the number matter?

I easily could have died that day. Or been paralyzed. But instead I had stitches for the gashes on my forehead and side of my head, scrapes on every scrap of skin that was showing, and compression fractures in two vertebrae in my lumbar spine. I spent two days in a local hospital, and then a few more days convalescing at a local hotel. No surgery. The stitches came out relatively soon, and the scrapes healed in a few weeks. The vertebrae healed slowly, but I was playing soccer in college the following fall with relatively few aftereffects. I’ve had issues with my lower back over the years, but physical therapy, massage, and yoga have all kept me going.

If I suffered a fall like that today, I doubt I would survive. I was 17, flexible and strong. A few years ago my son’s favorite game was to play chase in the backyard. “Daddy, I will play the young, fast, ferocious cheetah, and you will play the old, sick, slow gazelle.” This was a role I had been training for my entire adult life, no need for method-acting.

As a parent myself now, I cannot even begin to imagine what my parents and sister went through seeing me like that. Watching your child/sibling be lowered down to the ground from a helicopter and then going to the hospital with them? Horrific and traumatic on so many counts.

Reflection 2: on broken bodies and problematic mentalities

Muir is rather tough on himself in the passage I cited above. I mean, he doesn’t strike me as the cuddly type, and the whole “my body didn’t perform at peak levels, therefore I hate myself” gives some toxically masculine vibes. As I’ve aged and my own body has started to break down, I’ve certainly had some of those feelings. He feels bad about himself that he fell, judging his feet for being too used to cityscape instead of out climbing mountains all the time. I’m not sure how forgiving he was when he demonstrated his all too human failings. This is also part of the culture I see in my adopted home of Boulder, Colorado. So many people venture into the outdoors with an unspoken need to dominate it, to be in control, and to master the wild. I don’t find this very helpful. Mountains are going to be around far longer than any human being, probably outlasting our species. My personal experience has taught me that it is wiser to work with the natural world instead of trying to dominate it.

I would like to explore these themes more in future essays. When we think about ideal types of bodies and minds, what are we really centering and normalizing? Even if we identify with those bodies and minds, how much does it serve us to have these constructs in the first place? How could we learn to treat others—as well as ourselves—with more grace and compassion if we broaden our horizons in this regard? Over the years I’ve thought a lot about my hiking accident, how easily I could have died or been permanently disabled. I try to look at every day as a gift, even the hard ones.

I am still working out the next book I will review for this “Archiving the Self” series. Choices include Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain and John Dominic Crossan’s Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. Stay tuned!

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It is humbling to re-read something after more than 20 years, a book that challenged me as a young person and continues to challenge me as I embrace middle-age. I first learned about James Cone while taking a course titled “Introduction to Liberation Theologies” with Prof. Anthony Pinn during the Fall 2002 semester while at Macalester College. There were quite a few things that I grappled with in this course, but the thing that comes up most in my recollection is Cone’s claim that Jesus is Black, and I remember taking away from class discussion that white American Christians should understand the crucifixion as a first-century Roman lynching. I remember bristling at the suggestion that we needed to understand God as belonging to a specific racial or ethnic group other than being a Jew from first-century Judea, occupied by the Roman Empire. I was making a classic mistake, thinking that the particularity of my experience was applicable for so many others, and then thinking that others should also identify with my own experience instead of me opening up to understand the particularity of their experiences.

Of course today, Cone’s claim makes total sense to me, and I hold it along with so many other claims about Jesus. I recall taking a course on the New Testament during my PhD program just over a decade ago with Prof. Bart Ehrman in which he argued that we all see the Jesus we want to see when we read the Gospels. What I took from this is that if you want Jesus to be a Marxist? You find him. You want Jesus the feminist? You find him. But the same goes for Jesus the capitalist and misogynist. Humans are more than capable of staring at the same picture and seeing completely different things. And in this confusion lies the key to textual interpretation: we want the text to be clear but clearly it is not. We all bring a boatload of baggage to each and every encounter with text, especially Scripture.

Re-reading this book is also really re-reading my 21 year old self. What did that frighteningly young man think about these huge ideas? To start answering that question, I’ve taken photos of some pages from the book that I’ve kept on my shelf through numerous moves over the years. The passages are worth investigating on their own, but for my purposes here I’m going to evaluate my initial reaction to said passages as well.

And without further delay, here are some key quotes, with photos of my actual marginalia in some cases. The section headings include the name of the chapter and the citation.

Preface to the 1997 edition:

“Since whites have been the most violent race on the planet, there are the illusions and preachers are not in a position to Black people, or any other people for that matter, what they must do to be like Jesus. This is black common sense theology, which is deeply embedded in the radical side of black religious history and the source side of which black liberation theology emerged. No amount of white theological and biblical reflections on Jesus is cross and suffering will ever make me accept passive as the appropriate Christian response to white supremacy.” (Xvi)

I highlighted this paragraph when I first read the book, but didn’t write anything in the margins. I can tell I don’t want to be lumped in with “the most violent race on the planet,” but the truth is I have to recognize the many ways that I benefit from being white. Those benefits are the results of living in a society structured with white supremacy as a core value. And those benefits were also made manifest through the use of violence. Consistent, perpetual violence. Spending the last two decades studying colonialism around the world showed me that in so many places, violence is a feature of white supremacy, not a bug. Cone’s words challenge me to be active, not passive, in my response to white supremacy.

Part I - Introduction (pg 14)

My margin note reads “beyond reading the work of “oppressed” theologians, are there other tools Cone is thinking of?” I’m guessing I wanted Cone to be more expansive, which today I would reframe as my wanting him to be less focused on particular views. Like I said above, I was coming to this book with the mistaken conceptualization where the specific perspective I was used to (i.e., MY perspective) was THE universal perspective. I was not as open to de-centering myself as I might have believed. On a humorous note, I wrote “theologians” using the Greek alphabet…why did I do this? It’s NOT the actual Greek term for “theologians,” it’s just me transliterating an English word into Greek, and makes no sense whatsoever. I did this a fair amount, writing notes in the languages I was studying whenever possible. It was a way to take those skills out of those specific classrooms and activate them in my broader world.

Part II - Speaking the Truth (pg 18)

This passage is from a broader section talking about the meaning of the congregation’s active participation during worship services. Growing up in the Catholic Church, I was family with a very scripted version of audience participation. There was a back and forth between the priest and the laity, but it was structured and consistent from one week to the next. Cone is coming from a very different type of Christianity, where there is much more tolerance—and even an expectation—of a free form interaction between the minister and the congregation. What I love about this passage is the line that “These expressions are the preacher’s appeal to the people to let him or her know whether divine truth is being mediated through the proclamation event.” This idea that the religious leader in effect needed in the moment confirmation from the crowd as to whether or not they were vibing, that really resonated with me in part because it was so different from my own lived experience with going to church.

My note in the margin reads “emphasis on participation, does this make sure leaders are organic from الناس? Anti-suppression structure?” Here the Arabic الناس “al-nāss” means “the people.” At least this use of a non-English term makes grammatical sense!

Part III - Who is Jesus Christ For Us Today?

I wish I had highlighted the word “unmask” back then. Today, the phrase “unmask” reminds me of Frantz Fanon’s 1952 Black Skin, White Masks. I’m not sure if Cone is thinking about Fanon here, so I’m not trying to claim he is invoking one of the most important decolonial thinkers of the mid-20th CE…but if he was doing that, I wouldn’t be surprised! Part of Fanon’s contribution was tackling the psychological damage that racism does to Black people, as well as all colonized peoples. In his case he focused especially on what he observed in France and its various colonies. There’s a lot to unpack with this language of masking/unmasking!

I also want to highlight this paragraph below:

“For me, the substance of the Black Christ issue can be dealt with only on theological grounds, it’s defined by Christology’s source (Scripture, tradition, and social existence) and content (Jesus has past, present, and future). I began by asserting once more that Jesus was a Jew. It is on the basis of theological meaning of the particularity of his Jewishness. That theology must affirm the Christological significance of Jesus’s present blackness. He is black because he was a Jew. The affirmation of the black Christ can be understood when the significance of his past Jewishness is related dialectically to the significance of his present blackness.” (123, italics original)

Reading this today, I am struck by the resonance with W.E.B. DuBois’s short story “Jesus Christ in Texas” (published in the collection Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil in 1920). In this story, set in Waco, Texas, Jesus appears as a Black man and is lynched. Both Cone and DuBois make it clear that we should see connections between the way Christians remember Jesus’s life and the present day. This paragraph motivates me to read more about how Jewish and Christian theologians deal with these ideas.

Part IV. Liberation and the Christian Ethic (pg. 182)

My margin note reads “however, this allowed for the faith to grow…” I’m really curious what I was thinking when I made this note. Was I justifying what Cone is critiquing? A sort of “the ends justify the means” argument? That from the point of view of the early Church leaders, it was worth the compromise because integrating Christianity within the superstructure of the Roman Empire ensured that the community grew? Was I revealing my disagreement with Cone’s core argument about the difference between fully institutionalized Christianity vs the teachings of Jesus? I think I was struggling with the implications of Cone’s last line, that “Christianity became the opposite of what Jesus intended.” Even after so many courses on various aspects of Christian history and theology, I was very reluctant to admit the radically human nature of this global institution. Thankfully, I evolved on that point!

Part V. Liberation and Reconciliation (pg. 222)

The photo is of a long passage from page 222, but I want to provide just one quick passage from earlier in the chapter:

Whether for us or against us, white people seem to think that they know what is best for our struggle. It was this white attitude that led to the rise of black power and the exclusion of white people from (page 221 starts) the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. Black people came to realize that our liberation depends solely on our actions and not on white folks. [page 220, underlines mine]

My marginal note on page 222 reads: “This is not realistic; Cone is calling for a revolution he knows cannot take place. BUT; can’t there be reconciliation via majority approval in black community?”

I feel like my marginal comment here reveals my resistance to Cone’s thoughts. What was I thinking about the “black community,” and what on earth did I think I knew about any such thing? But I’m not sure where I was getting the idea that Cone was talking about “revolution,” per se. I think I need to reflect on this and re-read this chapter more closely. Perhaps I was referencing things that came up in our class discussions of this section? The truth is that I’m not sure what I was thinking, which is a very weird feeling. I think we make too much of this idea that we should somehow “stay consistent” from cradle to grave. Where is the encouragement for growth? For admitting mistakes and learning?

Part of what I think I struggled with in these passages is the way Cone switches audiences. At times he is talking to Black communities exclusively, while in other places he is clearly imagining a much broader audience. Also, when I think back to the Black Lives Matter protests during the summer of 2020, I remember how often I heard white people (in the media especially, but also at the grocery store with mask-muffled voices) talking about how Black people were going about the struggle for equality in the wrong ways. Cone’s line that “white people seem to think that they know what is best for our struggle” still resonates today, a half-century later.

Conclusion:

I found a bunch more passages where I marked up this book, but I’ve been advised to stay away from droning on and on lest I lose too many readers before you make it to the end. If you read this and are curious to hear more, drop me a comment and I will reply. Thanks for reading!

Next up in Archiving the Self: The Wild Muir: Twenty-two of John Muir’s Greatest Adventures (1994). This will feature some perspective on my own near-death experience at 17, some critique of Muir’s ableism, and more!

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I have probably made thousands of these to-do lists over the years, ways to organize my thoughts and structure my day. I have noticed that I get overly attached to these notes, and I got tired of scratching out things and rewriting them in different orders. I made the shift to keeping my to-do lists on the notes app in my phone a few years ago, which is both good and bad. Good in that I don’t create more paper waste everyday. Bad in that the to-do list can go on and on and I have infinite opportunities to obsess over it. Also bad in that the people I live with get annoyed at me for being so uptight about these lists. But also good because said lists help me remember to pick those same people up from their activities on time, get the right foods at the grocery store, and so forth.

When I look at this post-it note, I have so many memories and so many questions. I can remember that semester, the fall of my senior year in college. I studied abroad in Morocco the previous spring, where my main focus was learning Arabic. I was anxious to get enrolled in an Arabic course at the University of Minnesota (which we called the U of M, sorry to Michiganders) because at the time my own school, Macalester College, didn’t offer any Arabic language courses. My advisor helped out by calling the Arabic teacher at the U of M and talking to the professor about how I could register, and I figured out how to take the bus over there. You have to understand, every building at the U of M felt like it was the size of my entire college (seriously, only minor hyperbole here), and it felt like a whole different world. When I look at this post-it note, I can almost remember the pen in my hand as I scrawled out this list of things I needed to figure out, that this act of writing helped me structure my thoughts, allowing my nervous system to calm down so I could get through the bus ride to a new place without hyperventilating.

But what I love most is that I wrote this phone number from Twin Cities Metro Transit in the corner. I had no cell phone at the time. There were no smart phones. I would have had to find a pay phone to call for assistance, something that in 2002 was still common place.

It’s not surprising to me that this to-do list ended up being used as a book mark in one of James Cone’s books. I was taking a course called Introduction to Liberation Theologies, and Cone was one of the first thinkers we tackled. As I will describe in more detail in my next post, I found Cone to be very challenging both intellectually and personally. Before taking this course I had learned a little bit about liberation theology in the context on Catholicism in Latin America, but as soon as I dug into Cone I quickly realized how ignorant I was of the theologies of liberation developed by Black thinkers in my own country, the USA. I had learned the heavily sanitized version of MLK, but that was it. That has changed quite a bit now, which was especially was vital for me when I taught courses on Islam in America, where we would have plenty of conversations comparing MLK and Malcolm X.

I’m going to keep this post-it note somewhere on my desk. The fact that it survived and I found it almost exactly 23 years later still stuns me. What else am I going to find in other books I look through? Hopefully more to-do lists to analyze :), but more importantly, what versions of my self am I going to discover?

If you read this and would like to share something about how you are similar but different than your younger self, please feel free to leave it in a comment! Thanks for reading. I hope to write much more regularly in the coming weeks.

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There is a lot of recency bias in this list, but this covers highlights of things that I’ve read in the last few years. Also: apart from Barnhill’s book, there aren’t any dragons on this list, but rest assured that I will be sharing a lot more focused material on my beloved winged creatures in the near future, including some reviews of dragonology (i.e., scholarly attempts at explaining why we have dragon imagery and myths all over the world…almost as if they were/are real? Hmmmmmm).

The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson (read in 2025)

Published in 2020, this book is a great example of hard sci-fi meets economic policy. Don’t know what quantitative easing means and how central banks from around the world control all of our fates? Unclear about the connection between polar ice melt and coastal flooding (and again, how these things connect to all of our fates)? I think this book really challenged me to look at climate change as a function of capitalism whereas before I saw it as somehow solely in the realm of personal and collective decision making. But of course, economics is one discipline (of many!) that attempts to explain human behavior. I read this during a particularly hot spell in Colorado this summer, which perhaps explains why it struck home so hard.

Frankenstein: the 1818 text, by Mary Shelley (read in 2025)

I was putting together a unit on monsters for a recent iteration of my courses on religion and science fiction, and I have to admit that at first I was loath to include Shelley’s classic text. I think for some reason I was intimidated by reading something from the Victorian period, but once I dug into it I was overwhelmed by how much I enjoyed it. Not only was there the dramatic tension of the monster confronting his creator (who perhaps is actually the bigger monster?), but the passages describing the countryside and scenery of the various locales visited are simply magical. Most importantly, the edition pictured above features a very insightful introduction and other related explanatory texts that helped me understand what I was going to be reading before I got into it. Monsters don’t come from just anywhere, what makes it a “monster” is that it comes from those parts of ourselves that we don’t want to deal with. This is part of how we differentiate between monsters and aliens, a subject I will expand on down the road.

Cassandra in Reverse, by Holly Smale (read in 2024)

There are more and more novels featuring neurodivergent characters, but how many of them involve super powers like the literal ability to turn back time? Author Holly Smale was diagnosed as autistic at age 39, so this novel is partially based on her lived experience. But can she travel through time? No one is talking about this question…More seriously, this book really hit me hard because there are so many times in my own life where I have thought, “wow, I wish I could just go back a few minutes and do/say something different.” Also, most of the depictions of autism, and even research on autism, focuses pretty solely men, so having a book that puts an autistic woman front and center as the main character is quite striking, and in this case, extremely well-executed.

The Terraformers, by Annalee Newitz (read in 2023)

This book is sometimes described as “hope punk,” which I think is fitting for what is ultimately an optimistic look at humanity’s far future. If we are heading towards the future that Frank Herbert depicts in Dune, then Newitz’s version is much preferable! One key technology that humanity has developed in this world is the ability to communicate with non-human animals, so if you have ever been curious what your dog thinks of your silly voices, this might just be the book for you! Like all of the best science fiction out there, Newitz creates a world exploring new possibilities for the types of systems we use to assess who belongs vs. who is left out, what kind of relationship we develop with the environment around us, and what it might look like for a human and a moose to work together as park rangers (ok ok, that last part is largely unexplored narrative territory, but we need more of it!). Newitz is one of my favorite authors who is that rare writer who works in both fiction and non-fiction. I’m currently reading their 2013 Scatter, Adapt, Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction.

When Women Were Dragons, by Kate Barnhill (read in 2023)

This devastating novel set in 1950’s America, women are turning into dragons and the government is scrambling to cover it up. Sometimes spontaneously, sometimes individually, sometimes it seems planned, and sometimes it happens in groups, but women become dragons during periods of heightened emotional stress and in particular when they run out of F#$@‘s to give, in particular when it comes to men mistreating them. That boss at the factory who was harassing all the women? Mysteriously gone missing the day that the whole shift “Dragoned” and the factory burned down. That husband who everyone on the block knew was assaulting his wife? Mysteriously missing after the family home burns to a crisp although people swear they heard him begging for mercy before the fire started. And so on. The story is told through the eyes of a young girl who finds herself having to take care of both herself and her little sister after their mother dragons and their father abandons his children to make a new family with another woman. There is a scientist working to learn more about dragoning despite government harassment that feels very similar to McCarythism red-scare style hearings.

I can’t think of another book that helped me understand on an emotional level what it can be like to live in a patriarchal society as a woman. Not that I will never come close to fully understanding that experience, but this book gave me insight that somehow I didn’t get from other books. Maybe I am wired in such a way that sci-fi and fantasy just connect the dots more than other literary genres or non-fiction sources? This says a lot about my own empathetic limitations, but again I’m being honest about how a story with these types of fantastical creatures can be so powerful. That Barnhill says in the author’s note that she was inspired to write this story by watching Dr. Christine Blaisey Ford’s testimony during the 2018 confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh is a key part of this story. I remember reading about her testimony and watching a few clips. I was just old enough to read about and watch news stories when Prof. Anita Hill testified during Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearing in 1991. At the time it didn’t make any sense to me because Hill’s description of Thomas’s sexual harassment seemed like solid grounds for dismissing his candidacy. My teachers at elementary school certainly would not have tolerated it if I had behaved that way with any of my classmates, and I thought the same rules applied for children as for grown ups. We all know how foolish that was. Looking back I think the main excuse I had for my naïveté is that I was so young, but even then I can see how I was being socialized to think of things like sexual harassment and assault as a “thing that girls had to deal with,” with little attention paid to the gender identity of those doing the harassing and assaulting. If you’ve ever been tempted to turn into a dragon, this book’s for you.

Thanks for reading! Not just this list - ok, thanks for that too - but thanks for reading in general!

I co-authored a book with my PhD advisor, Carl Ernst, titled Breathtaking Revelations: The Science of Breath from the Fifty Kamarupa Verses to Hazrat Inayat Khan (Suluk Press, 2024). It was quite incredible to study how these specific teachings on using the breath for divination have circulated between various religious communities (especially amongst Hindus and Muslims) across linguistic lines (Sanskrit, Hindi, Persian, Urdu, Arabic, English) in different geographic contexts (India, Pakistan, Iran, England, the US). I have drafted much more writing on this subject, and hopefully will be able to publish it in the fullness of time.

We did a few different talks relating to the book, including: an interview for New Books in Islamic Studies, an Author Chat hosted by Pir Zia Khan and the wonderful team at Suluk Press, and a talk at “The Yoga Studies Symposium” (focused on books published on yoga as part of a gathering celebrating the publication of A History of Modern Yoga by Elizabeth De Michelis. When I think back on these different interviews, what stands out to me is how in each case we were given some very different questions because we had different audiences. We were talking about the same book, but it meant different things to those distinct groups of people.

I also did an interview with Greg Soden at the Classical Ideas Podcast where we talked about Science Fiction and Dune - this came out before I had written anything about Dune, and is a great look back at how I was starting to put together my thoughts on this truly epic science fiction franchise. A few years earlier I did an interview for The Theory of Change Podcast titled “Religious Diversity: Contemplating the Experiences of the Cultural Other.”

I *think* that’s all of the interviews, at least those that are available in audio and/or video form. These were all wonderful experiences, and I am excited to switch from interviewee to interviewer, producing my own podcast in the near future as part of Worlds Beyond Worlds (fingers crossed for September 2025!).

I read a fair amount, but it is only these last few years that I have kept track of what I’m reading. This usually takes the form of a simple note file on my phone where I write down the title, author, and date completed for each book I tackle in a year. I have thought about going back and annotating them as I have with these ones below, but that feels a bit too daunting. So I will let this list suffice. I have listed the books in chronological order of when I read them. Read on if you like, and feel free to leave a comment. I am always welcoming of suggestions!

Note: these are all non-fiction. I read A LOT of fiction as well, mostly in science fiction, fantasy, and romance. Yes, that includes romantasy (although why we don’t have blockbuster fiction blending sci-fi and romance to the extent that we get a cutesy new category name is beyond me, someone should get to work on fixing this error in the system). Come to think of it, I should start a similar type of reading list for fiction that has changed my life, there’s definitely a lot I could think of for that list! There are also a lot of non-fiction books that I didn’t include on this list because while they added to my knowledge of the world they didn’t actually alter my understanding of how it is structured, or (more importantly) how it could be structured if we all just decided that it could be structured differently.

Quick note: I mentioned a few of these in my last post, but what you read below includes a much longer annotation that what you read in that post.

Book list (in my chronological reading order, not necessarily the order of publication):

Seven Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works, by Ricardo Semler (read in 2004/2005)

I read this at a point when I was preparing to finish my master’s degree and confront life out of school for the first time since kindergarten. Semler is a successful CEO from Brazil who questions the conventional wisdom that CEOs know best. What happens if the CEO calls a meeting and no one shows up? Fire your staff…OR realize that no one thinks your idea is worth discussing, and move on…Semler picks option 2. Why should we accept this “conventional wisdom” that our most physically vibrant years should be spent working the longest hours, especially to benefit other people? Hmmm. I read this so long ago I don’t have any notes on key quotes.

Disability Visibility, edited by Alice Wong (read in 2021). This is an unflinching look at what it is like to be disabled and how disability intersects with, well, everything. Wong has written and edited a number of books about disability, and I think this book in particular is one of those where you can pick it up and flip to any chapter, just start reading. I know this list is about books, but I can also recommend the 2020 documentary Crip Camp. A quote from one contribution to the volume, “The Erasure of Indigenous People in Chronic Illness,” by Jen Deerinwater, following a passage discussing severe inequities in the healthcare available to indigenous peoples on Turtle Island: “Many of these health issues are a direct result of colonialism. Our lands and waters have been polluted due to resource extraction, toxic dumping, and nuclear testing…When so many of our elders die early, we cannot learn and pass down our traditions. We become a shadow of our former selves. I lose a little more of myself every time I have to educate others, and stand up and fight for myself and my communities, and file formal complaints in the medical system. These are battles that I shouldn’t have to fight. But since the U.S. government was designed to kill us, literally and metaphorically, the medical industry is continuing to fulfill that mission.”

Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, by adrienne maree brown (read in 2022). What happens when we look at our bodies not as sites of oppression but as vehicles for liberation? And what happens when that liberation channels our sensuality as well as our intellect?

A quote: “I believe that all organizing is science fiction–that we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced. I believe that we are in an imagination battle, and almost everything about how we orient toward our bodies is shaped by fearful imaginations. Imaginations that fear Blackness, brownness, fatness, queerness, disability, difference. Our radical imagination is a tool for decolonization, for reclaiming our right to shape our lived reality.” When I look at our world today, I see these “fearful imaginations” driving so much of the decisions that our leaders make. What would happen if we started from a place that was not fearful?

You can also listen to a wonderful episode from Between Two Covers: Crafting with Ursula in which adrienne maree brown is interviewed. Brown has also written extensively on Octavia Butler, one of the most influential science fiction (specifically Afro-Futurist) authors of all time. I highly recommend the anthology that she co-edited, titled Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (AK Press, 2015).

Rest as Resistance: A Manifesto, by Tricia Hersey (read in 2023), here is a link to an interview that Hersey did with NPR

You know how sometimes you pick up a book and you have to finish it before you can put it down? Ironically, that was me with this book, despite the author’s assurances that if there was one time I didn’t need to grind, it was in reading this book. Hersey locates the origins of “grind culture” on the antebellum plantation. That alone really rocked me. How often have you been told to grind, to work hard without questioning who your labor actually serves? Hint: it usually isn’t you. A quote: “We are sleep-deprived because the systems view us as machines, but we are not machines. Our bodies are a site of liberation.” How would your perspective on day to day living change if you viewed your body as something that carried you, heart and soul, towards liberation?

How to tell when we will die: On pain, disability, and doom, by Johanna Hedva (read in 2024) - this haunting collection of essays will stay with me for a long time. You may be familiar with Hedva from her essay on “Sick Woman Theory,” and I think you can look at this book as an expansion thereof. What I found particularly moving is Hedva’s reflections on how her health improves drastically when she moves outside of the US and no longer has to deal with our healthcare system. One quote: “I don’t want accessibility because someone is being ‘generous’ in giving it to me, nor do I want the labor I have committed to accessibility to be framed in terms of my own generosity, that I’m insisting we have a bench to sit on in the museum out of the goodness of my heart. I’m not talking about trying to feel good–I’m talking about trying to survive.”

All the Gold Stars: Reimagining Ambition and the Way We Strive, by Rainsford Stauffer (read in 2025) - this is a piece that Stauffer wrote about her book for Teen Vogue. This one really hit me hard because I grew up learning at an early age that— whether it was in my family, community, or more broadly in society at large—those “gold stars” that were doled out by teachers, and later on, employers, were really the marker of whether or not you mattered as a human. What happens when you stop caring about gold stars? What kind of world can you build for yourself and those you love if (and when) you stop deriving a sense of your personal value from what you achieve within a capitalist system intent on exploiting us? I listened to this as an audio book, so I don’t have any quotes, but I think reading through her piece for Teen Vogue (which includes an excerpt from the book) will suffice.

You Don’t Need A Budget, by Dana Miranda (read in 2025). This is a radical critique of budget culture by a personal finance writer who grew up in a working class family in rural Wisconsin. She realized early in her career that most of her colleagues writing about personal finance came from middle- and upper-middle class families, and therefore had very different perspectives on money. She joins other voices in critiquing popular finance “experts” like Dave Ramsey (a writer whose advice I took quite seriously earlier in my life). A wondrous quote that I love very, very, very much, from the introduction: “No matter who you are or what you’ve experienced, your financial circumstances are, ultimately, that you live in a society controlled by a capitalist society. The systems of that society are designed to take drastic, subtle, traumatizing, brutal, genocidal, oppressive measures to keep you from enjoying stability, prosperity, and power. The degree of those measures varies depending on the privilege and dominance tied to your identity, background, and experience, but make no mistake: this is everyone’s reality. Even the most privileged among us live with the reality that this system is poised to pull the rug out from under anyone at the slightest whiff of deviance.”

Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work, by Akilah Richards (read in 2025)

I have come to embrace the ideals of the unschooling movement, which is basically the notion that conventional schools are so regimented that we educate creativity and joy out of our children. What does school look like if children are able to be at ease, can they come to a place of true and abiding peace in their bodies and minds? Richards is a Jamaican-American writer and podcaster with two daughters whose work calls us to question why we raise children with the “adult gaze” in mind. Think of the “adult gaze” as society’s expectations of children. How are they supposed to behave? How are they supposed to speak - especially around adults? How much of those expectations are about us (the grown ups) vs. what actually serves children? Richards asks her readers to factor in other types of “gazes” - white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal, and so forth.

I have worked to incorporate these values in my teaching, and it is a work in progress. I am often struck that so many of my students are bewildered when I give them autonomy, and it seems that my class might be the first classroom in a long time where they have encountered the possibility of choosing what they do with themselves. There are lots of other books on unschooling and the general ethos of self-directed education, but Richards provides a very accessible and thought-provoking starting point. One of my favorite quotes - and there are so many to choose from! - has to be this gem: “I speak oppression by training, but I speak liberation as choice.” I’ve been thinking about this a lot in terms of my own parenting journey. How much of my kneejerk reactions to things that my son does (that might frustrate or annoy me in the moment) are really a function of how I learned that to be an adult — especially a man — in our society meant being in control of those around me? What happens when I work to change my starting point, that I don’t need to be in control of anything or anyone? The need to dominate is driven by fear, so what kind of parent can I be if I let go of the fear that society tells me I am suppose to have?

That’s it for now. If you got this far, thank you for reading! Feel free to post a comment with any suggestions for other things I can add to my “to read” list, as well as any thoughts on this list.

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As I continue working on getting this platform up and running, I thought it would be useful to talk about some of the work I have already published and how it all connects. I know some people write about very specific topics, which I think is extremely useful, but I’ve always been someone with lots of different interests. They are related to one another from my point of view, but I can appreciate that those connections aren’t always immediately clear to others. What follows is my attempt to make it more clear why I write about the things that I write about, and what kinds of connective threads I see linking these topics to one another. To keep this as concise as possible I will provide links to where I’ve published on these different topics so you can dig deeper if so inclined.

Part 1: Yoga & Sufism

My academic research is on the history of Muslim engagement with yoga, specifically on the translation of a series of breath-focused divination practices originally found in Shaivite Tantra originally written in Sanskrit and different dialects of Hindi. “Shaivite” here refers to the Hindu god Shiva. Tantra is a very broad category but an easy way to think about it is that it involves esoteric rituals. The specific practices are known variously as shiva-svarodaya, svara-yoga, svara-jñana, etc. “Svara” refers to toned breath. [Quick aside: I’m working hard to ignore my academic training to include clunky transliteration systems since I definitely see those systems as part of what Audre Lorde referred to as “master’s tools”…but that’s a whole topic for the future!].

Part of the legacy of European colonization around the world is that most of us tend to think about religious boundaries as fixed and rigid as opposed to porous and flexible. Thankfully, the historical record abounds with evidence supporting the second position. There are manuscripts dating back to at least the 14th-century attesting to Persian translations of svarodaya texts, providing clear evidence of Muslim interest in Hindu esotericism. The Muslims in question were often Sufis, members of different mystical traditions of Islam.

These Persian texts translate the title as `ilm-i dam or sometimes ma`rifat-i dam, meaning “science of the breath” and “knowledge of the breath,” respectively. The earliest known manuscript is “The Fifty Kamarupa Verses” (the kamarupanchashika). I wrote my dissertation focusing primarily on a series of abridged versions of the “50 Kamarupa Verses” that were found in manuscripts dating from the 17th-19th CE from sources in India and Iran. The fact that these teachings show up consistently in Persian (and later on, in Arabic and Urdu) sources from the 14th-21st CE speaks to their enduring appeal. There is a growing wealth of scholarship examining the history of Sanskrit-Persian translation especially during the Mughal dynasty, you can look at work by Shankar Nair and Audrey Truschke just to get started.

What does this have to do with “Worlds Beyond Worlds”? I dove into this area of research because when I started my PhD program I thought I knew a lot about yoga from practicing it for many years, and I went into graduate school ostensibly to learn more about Persian Sufism. But I didn’t know these two things overlapped at all until I started working with Carl Ernst, who would become my PhD advisor. My father immigrated to the U.S. from India (along with my grandparents and uncles) in 1968, and he had told me stories about learning yoga in PE classes growing up. Even my D’Silva side being Catholic (let alone the presence of hundreds of millions of Muslims who have lived in India for centuries) complicates the vision that some people put forward to India being a country just for Hindus. It has always been a diverse place — linguistically, ethnically, and for sure, religiously. My academic research helped me understand that the stories I read about religious sectarianism (in South Asia or elsewhere) had much more complicated histories than the simple narrative of “they just can’t get along because of religious differences.” As much media coverage goes to stories about people in conflict over religion, there is so much more history of people getting along not just in spite of, but because of shared values that are more important than religious (or political) sectarianism.

Part 2: Spaceships & Dragons

How do we get from comparative mysticism to science fiction and fantasy? While riding a dragon on our way through space, of course! More seriously, I am a lifelong science fiction fan and a more recent fan of fantasy. My parents’ friends gave me a VHS with the first Star Wars movie for my birthday when I was in 2nd grade, and I was hooked - thanks Dirk and Andy! More VHS tapes eventually followed with Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, these from my godmother and aunt Rete. We were living in Khartoum, Sudan at the time and I basically came home everyday and watched a Star Wars movie. From a 2nd grader’s perspective, the desert landscape outside my window resembled the desert of Tatooine, and in my mind’s eye, the lunch area at school was my version of the Mos Eisley cantina. Later on I started to watch Star Trek, starting with episodes of The Next Generation that were on every night over the summer when I was in the basement with my cousins while visiting my grandparents’ farm in Kossuth County, Iowa. Both Star Wars and Star Trek contain lots of messages about morality and ethics, how we treat one another and how to discern right from wrong. 

While I can remember my 3rd grade teacher reaching The Hobbit to us in class as a reward for good behavior, I didn’t tackle fantasy in a serious way until the Lord of the Rings trilogy came out in theatres. I read the books soon after. But I think by far the most impactful fantasy I’ve read is Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series. Novik combines classic 19th CE style maritime adventure with our beloved dragons. Set during the Napoleonic wars, this world is exactly like our own…except there are dragons. They aren’t “magic” in the way that we encounter classic dragons as written by the aforementioned McCaffrey,  Ursula Le Guin in Earthsea, or more recently by Rebecca Yarros in Fourth Wing, but Novik uses dragons to raise important questions about why some sentient beings get to have lots of rights while other sentient beings are excluded from those same rights. Plus Temeraire and Laurence’s relationship is beautiful. And Temeraire’s back and forth with Iskierka made me laugh out loud so many times.

The last few years I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about the Dune franchise. As a trained Islamicist who used to teach and translate Arabic, it was really shocking for me to read the first Dune novel and discover how Frank Herbert pulls so much from Islamic theology for his worldbuilding. Lots of people have written about this, especially since Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part One and Dune: Part Two have grossed well over a billion dollars worldwide, and Dune: Part Three is already in filming. I wrote a shorter piece on this for The Revealer in which I looked at questions of cultural appropriation more specifically comparing different Dune screen adaptations with the novels. Another epic series of novels that was adapted for the screen is Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time. Similar to the Amazon series Rings of Power, WoT fans had a LOT of opinions about the adaptation and significant differences from the books. Herbert and Jordan’s respective worldbuilding is quite distinct, but I noticed this common thread of a young white male savior who plays the main character, and wrote what turned out to be a rather long essay about it for Reactor. I don’t feel there is a conflict between enjoying these franchises while simultaneously critiquing them, in fact I would argue that deeply engaging with this and other forms of media that I consume helps make it a more meaningful experience. 

Again and again when I read or watch sci-fi or fantasy, I am drawn towards the questions that help me understand how these incredible genres push the boundaries of what it means to be human and who gets to be fully human in any given context. Sometimes that means confronting fan backlash against having a Black woman in a leading role (as in Star Trek: Discovery). Other times it means thinking about the hierarchy of beings that we have with humans at the top, and questioning how that hierarchy would be different if creatures we currently think of as less important than ourselves suddenly could talk back to us, as Annalee Newitz explores in their novel, The Terraformers. 

Part 3: Neurodiversity and Disability

This subject is much more personal for me. The world is structured in such a way that many people are effectively excluded from being able to participate in society, and that’s largely a result of human choices. I have witnessed this with my son and many of his friends time and time again.  Why is it difficult for people who have limited physical mobility or vision problems to get out and about? What about

Yes, each individual needs support but a lot of times that support can actually come from the design of the physical environment. Very basic architectural features like curb cuts can make it so much easier for anyone with a physical limitation to actively move around a city. Setting up regular hours at a local museum where the lights are lower and ambient sounds reduced makes that location more accessible to folks who are particularly sensitive to sensory input. Even just knowing that such things exist can go a long ways towards making people feel welcome, and if we aren’t working to making everyone welcome then we are making them feel unwelcome, and why would we want to do that? Who is served by keeping things exclusionary? Hmmmmmm.

I will post later this summer with a list of books that have really changed the way I view the world, but two of them are particularly relevant here. The first one is Disability Visibility, edited by Alice Wong. This is an unflinching look at what it is like to be disabled and how disability intersects with, well, everything. Wong has written and edited a number of books about disability, and I think this book in particular is one of those where you can pick it up and flip to any chapter, just start reading. I can also recommend the 2020 documentary Crip Camp (streaming on Netflix), which talks about a summer camp for people with various types of disabilities and how some of them went on to become major activists advocating for what would become the Americans with Disabilities Act originally passed in 1990. The other book that moved me greatly is Johanna Hedva’s How to tell when we will die: On pain, disability, and doom. Hedva is perhaps best known for her essay on “Sick Woman Theory,” and I think you can look at this book as an expansion thereof. What I found particularly moving is Hedva’s reflections on how her health improves drastically when she moves outside of the US and no longer has to deal with our healthcare system. Could we overhaul our healthcare system in the US so that people feel that the system actually cares about their health?

There are other ways in which disability and neurodiversity intersect with the themes I am perusing here on Worlds Beyond Worlds. One in particular that I want to explore is rethinking our education system. This is something that I’ve worked in for almost two decades in my role as a professor at various colleges and universities. My journey as a parent and an educator has led me to the conclusion that so much of how we structure education needs to be deconstructed. We don’t treat children like full-fledged human beings because we think that autonomy is something for adults only, and specifically that you have to EARN autonomy through wealth. What if we structured society so everyone could be at peace and at ease? What if we prioritized creating environments that work for everyone over simply the needs of those who fit with some ableist and classist construction that is deeply exclusive? This is abstract on purpose, because I want to dig into lots of specific examples in future writings (attendance policies, I’m coming for you), especially those drawn from our family’s experience as well as the lived experiences of so many families with children with special needs. 

Wrapping Up: Oh my!

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for your effort! It ended up being much longer than I planned, but sometimes it just takes as long as it takes. I hope this helps you understand a bit more about how I see these themes connecting to one another. The categories we use to structure our reality have the power to pull us together just as easily as push us apart. So think about the categories you are using or interacting with in your own daily life and ask yourself how they impact those around you. Are you unconsciously thinking of fellow human beings as Others? Do you feel that other human beings are doing that to you? Thanks for reading! (And stay tuned!)

Who am I?

My name is Patrick J. D’Silva. I’m a scholar of religion who has taught primarily at several different universities in Colorado. My specific academic training is in Islamic Studies and my super-specific field in which I’ve published is Muslim engagement with yoga (or Yoga? Hmmmm). As a lifelong sci-fi fan, I’ve recently started teaching and writing about the intersection of religion, race, and science fiction (as well as fantasy, really all forms of speculative fiction). I’ve published a few public-facing essays looking at how these themes show up especially in Dune as well as The Wheel of Time.

The hope is that in the months ahead I will be use this space to publish essays as well as share interviews with authors, critics, and activists. Here’s a list of topics I plan to publish on in the near future:

• Frank Herbert and Marshall Hodgson: How Dune Tests the Limits of “the Islamicate”

• Citizen Dragons: Race and Identity in the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik

• Dragonology in 20th-21st CE (reviewing how scholars from different disciplines like psychology and anthropology analyze the presence of dragon myths around the world)

• Yoga and the Flexible West (looking at how some Jews, Christians, and Muslims incorporate yoga within their religious practices )

Thanks for checking out Worlds Beyond Worlds! Please let me know what you think about the content I post, and I’m always up for suggestions on things to consider writing about down the road.