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An Idea of What
I Speak on
I often get asked to speak at events but people are not
sure what topic to suggest. Here are some ideas. None of them should be thought
of as set titles and pieces. Most can be melded or woven to measure. Links to a
full CV, photos, book details, etc. are on my website at
www.alastairmcintosh.com/personal.htm.
Feel free to edit with my agreement if in doubt. Talks, workshops and teaching
are the mainstay of my livelihood as I am entirely freelance and not on
anybody's payroll. Information on what I suggest by way of charging, travel,
etc. is given in the financial accountability section of my website at:
www.alastairmcintosh.com/aft.htm. A
rough idea of my itinerary and therefore, when I may be available can be seen at
www.alastairmcintosh.com/#itinerary . I can be contacted at
mail@alastairmcintosh.com .
Alastair
McIntosh (b. 1955) is a Scottish writer, broadcaster and activist on social,
environmental and spiritual issues, raised on the Isle of Lewis. A Fellow of
the Centre for Human Ecology and a Visiting Professor at the University of
Strathclyde, he holds a BSc from the University of Aberdeen, an MBA from the
University of Edinburgh and a PhD from the University of Ulster. His books
include Hell & High Water on the cultural and depth psychological
dimensions of climate change, Rekindling Community on the spiritual
basis of inter-relationship, and Soil and Soul on land reform and
environmental protection described as “world changing” by George Monbiot,
“life changing” by the Bishop of Liverpool and “truly mental” by Thom Yorke
of Radiohead. For the past 7 years he and his wife Vérène Nicolas
have lived in Govan where he is a founding director of the GalGael Trust for
the regeneration of people and place. He lectures around the world at
institutions including WWF International, the World Council of Churches, the
Russian Academy of Sciences and the Joint Services Command & Staff College.
His driving passion is to explore the deep roots of what it can mean to
become fully human, and use such insights to address the pressing problems
of our times.
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1.
Climate Change and the
Pornography of Consumerism: In his
book Hell and High Water: Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition,
Alastair McIntosh argues that the pressing environmental issues of our time
expose an underlying loss of soul that manifests as addictive consumerism.
There can be no long-term hope for conserving the natural environment unless
we can learn to live more with less material consumption. But how has such
addiction been created? Can it be undone? What spiritual journey does it
point us towards as we continue to evolve culturally as human beings? How
can we face come-what-may in the come-to-pass, possibly without optimism but
with the wellsprings of hope intact?
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2.
Rekindling the Spirit of
Community: Alastair McIntosh is a
leading figure in Scotland’s land reform movement as described in his books
Soil and Soul and Rekindling Community. In this sharing he
will use case studies from the Isle of Eigg and Govan (a deprived part of
the city of Glasgow) to explore why connection to the land matters, why
“community of place” is deeper than most forms of “community of interest”,
why community is at heart a spiritual issue that relates to the fundamental
nature of what it means to be human, and how such understandings can find
practical expression in both rural and urban regeneration that seeks to
address the emptiness of modern times.
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3.
Reconstituting Sacred Natural
Sites: Alastair McIntosh is a
contributor to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s
Delos Programme on sacred natural sites (SNSs). In this presentation drawing
on Scottish case studies, he explores not just what is meant by recognised
SNSs and how they can contribute to nature conservation and human
regeneration, but also the need to revitalise and recreate SNSs as, for
example, in the work with which he is engaged through the GalGael Trust in
Govan in Glasgow.
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4.
Radical Human Ecology and its
Educational Challenge to the Contemporary Academy:
Alastair McIntosh is both an editor and contributor to the forthcoming
Ashgate collection of scholarly papers: Radical Human Ecology:
Intercultural and Indigenous Approaches (2012). In this presentation he
explores some of the blind spots of modernity and postmodernity, and calls
for these to be re-embedded in a pre-modern essentialist worldview that
restores the sacred to the heart of education, drawing especially on insight
from indigenous traditions to complement the gifts of modernity and
critiques of postmodernity. In particular, he addresses research methodology
in human ecology, urging that grounded theory is complemented with what he
calls “discernment methodology” in seeking out what gives “meaning”. In 1996
Alastair was displaced from his teaching position at Edinburgh University
for insisting on what an editorial in New Scientist at the time
defended as “a tradition of fearless inquiry”.
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5.
Lectures to the Military: God, War and a Christianity for the 3rd
Milennium: For the past
decade-and-a-half Alastair McIntosh has been a regular guest-lecturer on
advanced command and staff training courses at military training
institutions in Britain, Ireland and Geneva. There he lectures on the
spirituality of nonviolence. What does he tell them? How does it go down?
And how does the challenge of Christian nonviolence open up radical new
perspectives on the Christian notion of “atonement” for the 3rd
Milennium?
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6.
Corporate Responsibility as a Transformative Opportunity?:
For 13 years Alastair McIntosh was one of the
leaders of a campaign that stopped Lafarge, the biggest cement company in
the world, from developing a “superquarry” in the National Scenic Area of
the Isle of Harris in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. His work unusually drew on
a religious basis of objection and has since been adapted to help stop other
similar developments in the US, Canada and South Africa. In a bizarre twist,
however, Lafarge later came back and invited him to serve on their
Sustainability Stakeholders’ Panel. He agreed, on a basis of not taking
their money, but of accepting responsibility that we all use quarry
products. What has this journey entailed and what can it teach about the
limitations and opportunities for transformation in today’s corporate world?
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7.
Poacher’s Pilgrimage: a Journey Through Scotland’s Outer Hebrides and
Our Times: When Alastair McIntosh set
off on a 12-day pilgrimage on foot through the villages, mountains and
watercourses of the Isles of Lewis and Harris where he was raised, he took a
fishing rod to disguise the true nature of the pilgrimage that he was on. In
a unique journey that visited the “temples” of early pagan-Christian
worship, holy wells and stone-age “beehive” dwellings on the remote moors,
he wandered through such themes as God, war and the faeries – as understood
in Scottish Gaelic tradition – and reflected on the meanings of such
pilgrimage for our issues today.
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8.
Spiritual Care and the Spiritual Gifts of Elderly and Dying People:
Personal encounters including sharings
with his 92-year-old aunt, elderly widows in his home Outer Hebrides of
Scotland, and the loss of a son at stillbirth have opened a new area in
Alastair McIntosh’s work looking at the spiritual needs and gifts of elderly
people, and raising questions of how we approach the pastoral needs of
impending death. These are issues not just for the elderly, but for us all
in a world where the elderly have been increasingly marginalised, and we
have forgotten the role they played in traditional societies as bearers of
presence as they prepare for life’s culmination in the journey back into
God. Alastair, who is a Quaker of Presbyterian upbringing, has worked with
Irish nuns on this issue and has broadcast on it on the BBC including Radio
4’s Prayer for the Day slots.
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9.
A Short Course in Liberation Theology:
Working with long-term unemployed people, often homeless and drug addicts in
Govan where he lives in Glasgow, Alastair McIntosh has often wrestled with
how to introduce a credible, accessible and non-uptight form of the
Christian message. To this end he developed a short course in liberation
theology: very short, in that it sits on one page of A4 and comprises
explorations of what breaks life, what gives life and what life is. He has
also used it in Quaker and religious conference settings. It can vary from a
session over a couple of hours to a full weekend.
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10.
A Sharing on Burning Topical Issues:
Alastair McIntosh is involved in a wide range of
contemporary social and environmental issues. What unites his work is always
to seek the underlying thread of spiritual interconnection. One of his
favourite formats for engaging with an audience is to turn up with no
preparation and no agenda, and simply throw the floor open by inviting
people to share what they see as “burning topical issues” and then
attempting to respond.
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11.
The Artist as Activist: Art, Spirituality and the Future:
What does it mean to be an “activist” for
social, environmental and/or spiritual change? In his work spanning several
decades Alastair McIntosh has more and more come to see it in artistic
terms: that the activist who seeks to express a spiritual activism uses a
campaign not just to address surface objectives, which may or (more often)
may not succeed, but to open up the further reaches of human nature and
deeper vistas on life. The Russian artist, Kandinsky, said that unless art
is centred in the the spiritual it disappears up its own egotism, and the
same is true of our activism. How can art serve change in the world? How can
artists and activists move beyond narcissism and open to something more
meaningful? Alastair has lectured on this topic at the Glasgow School of
Art, at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, and is Curator of
the October 2011 international conference: Kandinsky in Govan: Art,
Spirituality and the Future.
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12.
Faerie Tales: Why they Mattered, and Do They Still?:
Alastair McIntosh’s research on pre-modern
worldviews is rooted in his experiences of having been raised on the
Hebridean Isle of Lewis and having spent four years living amongst the
people and working in Papua New Guinea. This has led him to re-examine the
psychological and spiritual functions of “faerie” in indigenous societies,
drawing especially on the wealth of emerging Scottish and Irish ethnographic
scholarship on the matter. However, this session is not primarily an
academic session. It is intended as an evening, preferably late evening,
sharing of experience, that interweaves the scholarly with the experiential
in exploring what is meant by creativity and the imaginal realm that, in
Celtic tradition, is the source of poetry, music, song and all the arts.
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13.
Love & Revolution: a Sharing of Poetry:
In his work for land reform, environmental
protection, community regeneration and spirituality for our times Alastair
McIntosh draws centrally on Celtic bardic understandings of poetics to
communicate more deeply with people. This session will be not so much a
“reading” of his poetry as published in Love and Revolution, but a
performance of it, to illustrate an exploration of how poetry can provide a
powerful means of communication in undertaking spiritual activism.
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14.
Spiritual Activism: a Day (or 2-day) Workshop:
For the past two decades Alastair McIntosh has
taught the spiritual basis of deep activism for social and environmental
change in courses that have been variously accredited by the Universities of
Edinburgh, Strathclyde and the Open University. What happens when our
activism pushes us beyond the comfort zones of ego? When we are called to
forms of leadership as service that press us to consider that our service is
towards a deeper grounding of reality than we are normally conscious of? How
can we use discernment and other spiritual tools to guide us on such paths,
helping us to honour our vocations, our callings, and neither sell out nor
burn out?
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