BOOKS

“Reality Under Siege” Two Volumes (March 2024)

Gathering favorites among the writings & publications I have done during the last 6 years, I realized that a common theme is the issue of Reality Under Siege (AI, disinformation, conspiracy) and that all my work at some level has included Explorations of the Creative Role of Difference. My interest in abiding difference is aptly expressed by Jean Baudrillard when he wrote “difference … constitutes the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of the real.” I have collected my writings under 6 general topics adding some new essays. This gathering of writings fills 2 volumes (over 700 pages).

VOLUME ONE PDF; . . . . . . . . . . . .VOLUME TWO PDF

Art Album 2023: Essays and Images

As my interest and skill at photography increases I have sought ways to share the results of my efforts. I am especially pleased with what I did for 2023, a 180-page Art Album that included included a few occasional essays and hundreds of my photography most in an 8.5×11 inch size. PDF

A house is far more than a physical structure. It is a memory cache, a vessel teeming with hopes and dreams, failures and regrets, joys and sadnesses; all persisting long beyond the period of residence. A house can also manifest the aesthetics and tastes of its occupants in its colors and materials and designs. I experienced all these things in designing a home in North Boulder in 2006 and living in it for six years. The pain and sense of loss associated with that home overwhelmed me until recently when I realized that time had finally offered some relief. I decided to reckon with those experiences by writing about them. I now long to live in that house. Better, even at age 81, I’d love the chance to design a new home incorporating my current sense of life. The accompanying essay, with photos, focuses on this house, my design ideas, and my experiences while living there. It is a tale of the best of times and the worst of times. PDF

Dancing Graffiti: Stories from My Life (December 2020)

Much of my pandemic quarantine period was spent writing 150 stories from my life, something of a pandemic-induced folly of a septuagenerian. They are organized in several sections/chapters. In Time’s Relentless Melt I write stories considering what is implied by such a project. I collect a large number of accounts set in wider life context in Stories. Tales characterized more as second order are collected in Reflections. My lifelong thoughts and research work deserve their own grouping I call Persistent Preoccupations. Summing up this main part of the work is a brief essay “You Only Pass This Way Once”. A few items of the back matter sort include an Autobiographical Chronology and Publications. The work was written primarily because I felt the compulsion but also as a legacy for my kids and grandkids, yet I think the style and timing of the project, and especially the section Time’s Relentless Melt, might be of interest to others. I attach a PDF of the work for any interested.

Looking Forward in the Rearview Mirror (August 2021)

In 1993 I traveled with a friend to Australia, Bali, Java, Thailand, and Nepal for a period of five months. It was low budget travel with only an outline itinerary. During that time I wrote extensive journals that recorded the events and offered comment on this life changing travel. Recently discovering these travel journals I realized that at this late stage in my life looking back to transforming events that occurred midlife might offer insight and inspiration to my life going forward. Hence the title. In preparing for this project I discovered travel writings for a month-long trip I took with my daughter Jenny to Ghana in 1997 as well as other accounts for my travels especially through the 1990s into the early 2000s to Mali, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and return trips to Bali and Java. As an introduction I wrote a number of essays about this Janus-like process that might be of interest to anyone who has traveled and found themselves growing through unexpected challenge. I hoped to reset my life with greater emphasis on creativity and beauty. I include here the PDFs for Looking Forward as well as a volume of the minimally edited full journals from these trips in a volume titled Travel Writings.

On Reflection: Vignettes & Images (March 2020)

I’ve long loved photography and have recently been devoting more energy to making good images; at least ones I like. I’ve also been experimenting with developing writing styles that are markedly different from the academic style I have done for so many decades. I bring these two urges together in this book On Reflection: Vignettes & Images. Many of the images are from my travels to Norway, Sweden, and Iceland in June and October 2019. The writing is an effort at what might be called prose poetry. I am most certainly not a poet, but I did enjoy writing brief dense hopefully provocative pieces. And I correlated these writings with the images. I prepared two formats for this little book. One is a larger format with many images complementing the thirteen pieces of writing. For the smaller format I was challenged to find a single image for each piece. These PDFs (small version) are the “preview” form (unfortunately the pages don’t give quite the sense of the book) that can be downloaded from Shutterfly which is the service I used to design the books and have a few printed as gifts.

On Photography (2021)

Number 1 of my “Aesthetic of Impossibles ArtBook Series”

On Moving: A Biological & Philosophical Account of Human Distinctiveness (2022) 8.5×11 inch format with photos PDF : 5.5×8.5 inch format without photos PDF

Number 2 of my “Aesthetic of Impossibles ArtBook Series”

The Recipe Book of Lelah Gill: A Commemorative Remembrance of Our Mother. PDF

Articles

Vol. 6, no. 2.

Conversations with Sam. Sam Gill’s The Proper Study of Religion: Building on Jonathan Z. Smith (2020).  A collection of short essays and responses from a roundtable convened at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, Denver, Colorado, November 20, 2022.

• Issue Introduction, Katherine C. Zubko, 131-133   PDF
• Conversation Introduction, Jeffrey S. Lidke, 242-247   PDF
• Dancing lessons: a biological & philosophical account of human distinctiveness as relevant to the proper study of religion, Sam Gill, 248–254   PDF
• The origin myth of religious studies, Mary Dunn, 255–259   PDF
• A Renaissance scholar with a physicist’s heart, Jeanette Reedy Solano, 260–266 PDF
• Sam Gill and me: moving toward a proper study of religion, Seth Schermerhorn, 267–273  PDF
• From the proper to the sound study of religion: resonating with Sam Gill and J. Z. Smith, John C Thibdeau, 274–279. PDF
• A contested study of religion: reflections on Sam Gill’s The Proper Study of Religion, Hugh B Urban, 280–284  PDF

Contents
On Mother Earth: Introducing a JSRNC Special Issue Forum, 155-61 PDF
Bron Taylor – University of Florida, Florida, USA
What is Mother Earth? A Name, A Meme, A Conspiracy, 162-88. PDF
Sam Gill – University of Colorado, Colorado, USA
Following the Storytracks, 189-92 PDF
Greg Johnson – University of California, California, USA
Reinterpreting Mother Earth: Translation, Governmateriality,
and Confidence, 193-203. PDF
Bjørn Ola Tafjord – University of Bergen, Norway
‘Mother Earth’ is an Ancient Meme in the Global North:
Continuity between Eurasian-American ‘Mother Earth’
Concepts Demonstrated in the Athabaskan Case, 204-16. PDF
Joseph A.P. Wilson – Department of Classics,
University of Massachusetts, Massachusetts, USA
Mother Earth, Cultural Authenticity, and Canadian Law, 217-29 PDF
Matthew Glass – Western University, Ontario, Canada
Response to Sam Gill’s Article ‘What is Mother Earth?
A Name, A Meme, A Conspiracy,’ 230-36 PDF
Olle Sundström – Dept. of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies
Umeå University, 901 87 Umeå, Sweden
Comments on Responses to ‘What is Mother Earth?’ 237-53. PDF
Sam Gill – University of Colorado, Colorado, USA