Biography
Sue McRae is currently a third year PhD Student and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Texas. Sue’s dissertation is focused on extending Levinas’s ethics of radical alterity to animals and archival research in the medieval Bestiary tradition.
Paper Abstract
Drawing inspiration from Herrad of Landsberg’s (c. 1130-1195 CE) Hortus Deliciarum, or Garden of Delight (ca. 1180 CE), a medieval illustrated manuscript and pedagogical tool which the Abbess utilized in the teachings of Christian virtues to the nuns of the abbey, and within the context of Philosophy as a Way of Life, I engaged in a series of walking meditations at sunset in order to explore the connection to the divine at this very specific moment of the day: right as the sun is going down on the landscape of local rural north Texas where I live and work and wander. I find connection here with the landscape, the animals, the earth and all its creatures. There is a divinity within this place-time that remains ambiguous, a place between life and death, moving from east to west and making deeper connections to fellow creatures along the way in nature.