Dr. Ben Van Overmeire is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at DKU. Prof. Van Overmeire has been a dynamic force within the CSCC, co-leading the Meanings, Identities, and Communities Cluster while also collaborating closely with the center on various scholarly efforts. Prof. Van Overmeire was awarded the 2022 CSCC Faculty Pilot Research Grant for his project titled “Astroreligion: The Religious Imagination of Space Travel in Space Opera and Astronaut Memoir written in English and Chinese, 1961-present.” This project delves into the cosmic intersection of religion and space exploration narratives. In 2021, he led a CSCC Student Research Project called “Zen and the Art of Detection.” This work resulted in a collaborative publication with the student researchers in the Japan Studies Review last year. We invite you to join us in highlighting Prof. Van Overmeire’s academic journey, which uniquely intersects religious studies with the conceptual realms of space exploration.
Professor Van Overmeire, before we get to astroreligion, could you first tell us a bit about your first book, American Koan: Imagining Zen and Self in Autobiographical Literature which will be published in October? In particular, what does this book tell us about the continued relevance of Chinese religions today?
At heart, the book is about the question “Who am I?” This is a question that I think many people think about. Sure, all of us have superficial identities and social role. For example, I’m a father, a husband, a professor, a Belgian, and so on. But when we look deeper, it’s hard to figure out anything substantial to our identity.
In the book, I look at this question by reading the autobiographies of American Zen (禅) Buddhist practitioners. Buddhism is an interesting context to be writing about yourself, because a fundamental Buddhist philosophical idea is that there is no self. So strictly speaking, writing about the self can mean…writing about something that doesn’t exist.
So writing about the self in Buddhism is complicated enough. But when you’re a Zen Buddhist in America, it gets even more complex. Zen is a school of Buddhism that originated in China but is now a global phenomenon. It’s one of the preeminent representatives of East-Asian spirituality in the West, deeply connected to modern meditation movements like mindfulness. As someone who practices Zen meditation myself, I was interested in how people who grew up far away from Asia and are immersed in a very different cultural background can nonetheless identify as Zen Buddhists.
In particular, I wanted to know how these authors, in their quest to understand themselves, interpret koan (公案), Zen riddles without a clear solution like “What’s the sound of one hand clapping?” or “What is your original face?” The conventional idea is that, you meditate on these riddles, they unlock your brain, you find enlightenment. But what I found is that koan are used in all kinds of diverse ways by these authors. The fact that koan do not have any clear meaning allows us to interpret them in a manner that makes them relevant to our modern lives.
‘Astroreligion’ is a term that encapsulates such a unique blend of concepts. Could you elaborate on what it means?
Sure. The term is based on another, broader term, namely “astroculture.” “Astroculture” was coined by my colleague, the historian Alexander Geppert, who is a professor at our neighbor NYU Shanghai. Simply put, it means cultural responses to the human exploration of outer space. In the 1960s, Russian and American astronauts explored the universe beyond our atmosphere. How has that momentous accomplishment changed our literature, our art, even our toys (think of Lego spaceships!) and our religions? By using the term “astroreligion,” I want to focus on how space exploration changes and is changed by religious ideas and practices. For example, have you seen the photo called “The Pillars of Creation?” It’s a fantastic image shot by NASA’s new James Webb space telescope. Basically, this is a place where stars are born. But look at the name: Pillars of Creation, straight from the Hebrew Bible. Why are scientists using religious terms to name objects in the universe?
Image copyright: NASA
I initially started thinking about this after reflecting on the textbook I use for RELIG 101, an introductory religious studies class I teach at DKU. The author of that book, Jeff Kripal, was asking a simple question: if almost all religions are about meeting God(s) in a heaven above, what happens if humans literally rocket to the heavens above? What happens to religion? And the answer is broadly that, religions have to adjust to this accomplishment, have to reimagine the divine. “Astroreligion” is about that re-imagination.
Could you share the key findings you have uncovered in your “Astroreligion” project thus far, particularly any surprising aspects of how space travel is conceived in relation to religious thought?
So by training I’m a scholar of literature, and I tend to look at texts when approaching any question. The corpora (or datasets if you will) that I’ve chosen for this are of two kinds: astronaut memoirs and space opera science fiction novels. Even if you don’t know the term “space opera,” you’re probably familiar with the genre, which indicates these grand, spectacular stories with massive space battles, explorations of other planets, hyper-advanced technology, confrontations with alien species, and so on. Star Wars and Three Body Problem (三体) are good examples. As for astronaut memoirs, they’re simply autobiographical narratives written by people who have actually been to space. So there’s two different perspectives that I’m looking at: by people who have been to space and by people who have not.
These two datasets might not seem related. Yet what I’m beginning to understand is that astronauts are deeply conditioned by stories about outer space before they go there. Their observations while in orbit or on the moon are not just “the facts,” but in fact are influenced by their cultural background: religious myths they’ve grown up with, books they’ve read, movies they’ve seen. For example, Yang Liwei, China’s first astronaut, describes seeing the earth and the moon as Daoist immortals flying through space. No American astronaut ever described it like that. They had a different background, for example they had read Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is a science fiction story with an insanely religious and hallucinogenic plot: the ending basically features a humankind reborn as a star baby. For example, here is a testimony of astronaut Tom Jones, who claims to have seen the movie based on the book over 20 times, saying it determined his decision to become an astronaut. It’s a 2-way street: science fiction and religion influence space exploration, space exploration influences science fiction and religion.
Your project employs a variety of research methods. Could you describe how these interdisciplinary approaches complement each other and what challenges they present when analyzing such a novel field of study?
First of all, I want to thank the fantastic team involved in the astroculture project the past two years: Weiran “Sadey” Dong, Chutian Chen, Nino Nadirashvili, and Trailokaya “Raj” Bajgain. Without them, I’d have a hard time combining different methods and surveying a large amount of data.
The project was initially funded by the Data Science Research Center at DKU. The funding was for a subproject of astroreligion. This subproject mainly dealt with Buddhism. Through it, I got a better sense of what Chinese science fiction authors use religious metaphors in their writing. At the same time, my data science collaborators in that project wrote code that helped us to begin analysis of a huge mass of data—reviews of science fiction novels. Through it, we found science fiction novels that engaged with Buddhism that I otherwise definitely would’ve missed. Once identified, I then assigned these novels to my “readers,” who would go through them and identify Buddhist elements in them. This is how such seemingly different disciplines as Data Science and Religious/Literary Studies can meaningfully interact.
Going back a bit to another interest of yours, could you tell us about your “Zen and the Art of Detection” research project, and how did your student collaborators’ contributions shape the outcomes of the study?
That project was successful thanks to DKU students Xiao “Anne” Liu and Yuan Li. They read a ton of detective novels and gave me accurate summaries of them while identifying Zen elements in the books. It would’ve taken me so much time to do so by myself, they really were extra eyes for me. They also did a wonderful job helping me edit the article itself.
So “Zen and the Art of Detection” was about how Zen ideas are used in detective fiction. Examples of what I call “Zen detective fiction” exist in Chinese, English, German, Dutch, even Russian. I wondered what was up with that.
Historically, combining detective fiction with Zen is not so strange as it seems. The etymology of the word “koan,” those riddles I mentioned earlier, refers to a legal context, namely a “case on the table of the legal magistrate.” An identical word was used for criminal cases in medieval China (think of the cases involving Judge Dee, 狄公案). So what these detective novels are doing when they employ Zen metaphors is not an exclusively modern invention. To a certain extent, the classic Zen tradition already viewed the quest for enlightenment as a quest to solve a mystery. However, in a detective novel, you discover who murdered the victim. In Zen, you discover that you yourself are the victim, that you’re dead, that you never really existed in the first place. In both cases, it’s about hidden identities, and about matters of life and death. As with astroreligion, I’m fascinated by how a humble popular genre, not high-brow literature, deals with such important and meaningful questions.
Looking ahead, what are the next steps for your research on “Astroreligion,” and are there any upcoming publications or presentations we can look forward to?
I’ve just finished a short article on mystical ideas in the space opera series The Expanse. It’ll be part of an edited volume hopefully coming out some time next year. I have an article under review on Zen elements in Liu Cixin’s the Three Body Problem series. My colleague James Miller and I just organized a conference on religion and outer space at DKU, and we’ll be co-editing a volume based on that conference. I have some stuff on Alan Watts, a really influential Western spokesman for Zen Buddhism, and his views on outer space that I want to turn into a journal article. In brief, he felt that exploring outer space was not necessary, because he believed in the Buddhist notion that all of space is already inside us. Exploring inner space is exploring outer space. I’m also hoping to turn some of the astroreligion group’s results into articles soon.
Ultimately, I want to write a book on all this material. It’s likely that commercial space travel will be less expensive in the coming decade. So it’s really important that we as a species come to terms with what we bring to our exploration of outer space, our “cultural baggage” if you will. For example, as my colleague Mary-Jane Rubenstein has shown, people like Elon Musk describe the colonization of Mars in a very Christian manner: the Earth is a bad, sinful, place, we need to get out of here to a better world. But such narratives can blind us to the fact that Earth is, for now and for the foreseeable future, the best home we have. To be clear, I don’t think we can go out there or anywhere without stories, without culture, without religion. Our cultural background acts like a lens: it may blind us to some things, but it allows us to see others. But it’s good to know, to realize, what type of lenses we’re taking with us to the stars.
