Charles Foster on Communion with the More-Than-Human and the Limits of Language
This Week from the Emergence Magazine Podcast
Emergence Magazine is a quarterly online publication exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. As we experience the desecration of our lands and waters, the extinguishing of species, and a loss of sacred connection to the Earth, we look to emerging stories. Each issue explores a theme through innovative digital media, as well as the written and spoken word. The Emergence Magazine podcast features exclusive interviews, narrated essays, stories, and more.
Charles Foster is a writer, barrister, and traveler. He is the author of more than twenty books, including Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide and The Screaming Sky. In this essay, Charles considers his role as a writer seeking to experience and express communion with the more-than-human world, and begins to wonder if language can do anything other than constrain and tame the tangled wild.
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Charles Foster is a Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford. His books cover many fields. They include books on travel, evolutionary biology, natural history, anthropology, theology, archaeology, philosophy and law. Ultimately they are all attempts to answer the questions “Who or what are we?” and “What on earth are we doing here?”
Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee is a filmmaker, musician and composer. His award-winning films have been featured on PBS, National Geographic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, exhibited at the Smithsonian and screened at festivals worldwide. He is the founder and executive editor of Emergence Magazine.