Humanitas: Unwasted Waste

“Ritual of Water”, photo by Iezalel Williams, courtesy of Flickr Commons

Professor Leonard Swidler is a global theologian who has pioneered and contributed to the field of interfaith dialogue for more than 50 years. He has been a professor of religion at Temple University since 1966. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the ecumenical research journal and the founder and director of the Dialogue Institute. Read more about Professor Swidler here.

* Many thousands of years ago every animal lived by gathering and ingesting food to
* Turn it into body and energy; what was not “used” was rejected as “waste.”
* The same was—and still is—also true of the human-animal.
* Through their “spirit/energy” humans increasingly transformed the “waste” to use.
* Humans slowly learned to treat fellow humans not as “waste,” but as fellow “users.”
* About 10,000 years ago, a breakthrough occurred—humans invented:
* Farming, which eventually, after another 8,000 years, enabled them to create
* Cit-ies, which with their multiplication and cohesion—created
* Civi-lizations—as the word indicates, huge City-izations—first, the 4 ancient ones:
* a) Mesopotamia, b) Indus Valley, c) Yellow River, d) Greece;
* Much later in the 18th/19th century “Enlightenment,” the world began to morph to
* 21^st-century Global Civilization!
* In the 21^st century we learn that Waste must increasingly be transformed into Use.
* We learn that the ancient binaries: