On Culture and Collective Memory in Times of Crisis

Outsiders are outraged when religious communities flout government regulations that are supposed to protect the general public. But we know that people give meaning to their experiences in different ways. Some ways of knowing the world have been denigrated as “backward” or “irrational” by secular Western forms of knowledge. But secular ways of life may be considered decadent and immoral from a religious point of view, not to mention empirically harmful. “Modern” ways of life create wide differentials in wealth and dignity among people, destroy irreplaceable natural resources, and poison the earth in myriad ways that are fatal to the ecosystems of the Earth that supports us all. Our aggressive encroachment into new ecosystems is one of the reasons we face increasing threat from pandemic disease in the first place.

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