How is big history an origin and a coming of age story? A presentation by Lowell Gustafson at the 5th Global Conference of the International Big History Association at Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts in Pune, Maharashtra, India. https://youtu.be/mXvfkUNGmfM

Keynote address, “The Origins of Life within Big History: Meanings for Humanity” to the 5th Conference of the Network of Researchers on the Chemical Evolution of Life, March 30, 2021. https://youtu.be/gyMJjJj7NGY

“Thucydides and a Pluralistic World Order,” International Relations Theory and Community with a Shared Future,” Communication University of China, November 30, 2021, https://vums-web.villanova.edu/Mediasite/Play/2df1f23d9e894ca8836924cac53456e31d

The Evolution of War
Sponsored by the International Big History Association (IBHA)
Universidade Federal do Rio De Janeiro (UFRJ)
Villanova University, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Presentations:
War inside my head: ethology and the transdominial mind (starts at 0:04)
Daniel Barreiros
Institute of Economics Bioethics and Applied Ethics Center
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

The Universality and Uniqueness of Extremist Violence (starts at 33:18)
Anthony C. Lopez
School of Politics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs
Washington State University

Creative Destruction: War, Truth, and Nature (starts at 52:05)
Lowell Gustafson
Department of Political Science
Villanova University

In this creative short story, The Illusionists, Lacy Loar-Gruenler shares her account of how Kurt Gödel and Albert Einstein “murdered” time. Or did they?

The text is available at https://ibha.wildapricot.org/resources/Documents/Origins/Origins_X_04.pdf#page=3

Lacy Loar-Gruenler has worked as a newspaper journalist, editor, and corporate lawyer. She is a summa cum laude graduate of Villanova University, and currently is a graduate student in Harvard University’s program in Creative Writing and Literature. Her interest in Big History, including religious tradition, is grounded in her love for forward-thinking philosophers who have explored the human need to answer existential questions. She is working on a memoir about her years living in France.

The video also features “Gravity’s Law” composed by Sam Guarnaccia and performed by the Main Line Symphony Orchestra. This piece is part of the Emergent Universe Oratorio, available at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHx0AeNv1KqTv4bpv3nw7Smi0Yeb3NKK9 The story is narrated by Lowell Gustafson.

This is a video produced by the International Big History Association (IBHA) at https://bighistory.org/

How surely gravity’s law,
Strong as an ocean current,
Takes hold of even the smallest thing
And pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing —
Each stone, blossom, child —
Is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
Push out beyond what we each belong to
For some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
To earth’s intelligence
We could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
In knots of our own making.
And struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again
To learn from the things,
Because they are in God’s heart;
They have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:
To fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
Before it can fly.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows

A conversation with Sam Mickey, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and John Grim, editors of Living Earth Community: Multiple Ways of Being and Knowing, with Lowell Gustafson.
https://youtu.be/vYn0ptIBApY