Better Get to Know the ISSRNC (Part I) – Flashback Fridays
Several years ago our former communications maven Ipsita Chatterjea sat down with some of the ISSRNC co-founders to talk about the origins, guiding ideas and early years of the Society. For many of our new members, this may be a history you know little or nothing about. Even some of our longstanding members may not know the whole story about how the ISSRNC came into being in those heady, hurricane filled days of 2005.
Brainstorming the creation of the ISSRNC (Lucas Johnson).
Here is an excerpt from Part One of Better Get to Know the ISSRNC:
Ipsita Chatterjea: What is the ISSRNC’s origin tale?
Bron Taylor: The ISSRNC emerged from conversations I had with several scholar-friends in the mid 1990s during which we expressed a desire for extended, interdisciplinary discussion of and collaboration on the religion/nature nexus, which we had found difficult at large, annual conferences. These conversations planted a seed that morphed into the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, a project that brought together a critical mass of scholars…By the time of its publication in 2005, the encyclopedia had exploded – to twice its originally envisioned size – to 1.5 million words and 1000 entries penned by 520 contributors.
As we completed the encyclopedia, we began working toward the creation of a new journal and scholarly society many of those involved in the encyclopedia felt that investigations into “the natural dimension of religion,” to borrow a phrase from Catherine Albanese in Nature Religion in America, should continue. While developing the encyclopedia, I had been working closely with anthropologist Kristina Tiedje on the society idea. With Kristina as co-convener, in 2005, we issued a wide-open invitation to interested scholars to attend an initial planning meeting, indicating that we would cover on-site expenses for whoever could manage to attend. Meanwhile, Laura Hobgood and I studied bylaws from a variety of academic societies and crafted drafts of them for consideration at the meeting.
Twenty scholars attended the meeting held in Cocoa Beach, Florida in August 2005…The meeting assumed a mythic reputation because Tropical Storm Ophelia, which briefly also became a Hurricane, hovered 80 miles off-shore, making nature powerfully felt. Through a sometimes-intense discussion we worked on bylaws and refined our mission statement.
Read the rest of Better Get to Know the ISSRNC, Part One.
Stay tuned for Better Get to Know the ISSRNC, Part II in our next Flashback Fridays update.
