Placefulness

My name is Jason. I grew up in Yorba Linda, California. As a child, I loved catching lizards and snakes in the arroyos behind my house. I was raised in the Mormon (LDS) tradition but had some tumultuous teenage years. At 21, though I was uncertain about my own faith, I decided to join thousands of other Mormon young people as a missionary. I was sent to the Santiago Mission in the northern half of the Dominican Republic for two years. It was in the Dominican Republic that my love for ecology blossomed. The tropical green and lush biodiversity set my mind on fire for the earth, and my spirituality became deeply connected to creation.

I attended Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah and majored in anthropology with a minor in international development. During my fourth year, I was lucky enough to be part of a summer field school in the Western Highlands of Guatemala. My research looked at the power dynamics between traditional Mayan and government-sponsored forestry practices. However, what really fascinated me was forests as both complex ecosystems and powerful spiritual ecologies.

So, I continued to explore these ideas by earning joint master’s degrees in forestry and theology from Yale. The work of Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, scholars of religion and ecology, was instrumental to my development as a scholar and contemplative ecologist.

After my graduate work, I moved back to Utah and taught ethics and religion courses at Utah Valley University and Salt Lake Community College. I also managed to get a job as a forester for the US Forest Service during the summer months. It was such an amazing balance between my passions! It was at the beginning of this phase that I decided to officially walk away from my practice as a Mormon after many years of wrestling, discernment and prayer. I immersed myself in the mountain forests of Utah and began a meditation practice.

While I was in Salt Lake, I had a very powerful spiritual experience at the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City. I also began reading Thomas Merton, a 20th century Trappist monk who wrote about the power of silence and contemplation in a Christian context. I never knew that Christianity had a contemplative tradition, and I began to pour over the mystical and contemplative classics. Merton’s love for his monastery landscape in Kentucky and his practice of photography deeply resonated with my own experiences, and I eventually began attending Catholic Mass and practicing centering prayer (meditation).

Despite loving my work as a professor and forester, there was not a lot of job security or paid benefits in either post. So, I decided to apply for a PhD program in Vancouver, British Columbia. In 2013, I packed up my truck and moved to Vancouver and began my program with the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES) at the University of British Columbia. I graduated in 2017, and my dissertation research focuses on the sense of place of Catholic monks in the American West.

These days I am writing about and teaching ethics, forestry, death and dying, ecological theology, contemplative ecology, and phenomenology of landscapes. I also occasionally lead retreats and give talks on these topics.

Visit Jason at https://holyscapes.org