Creatively Advancing into Novelty
The Earth is sacred revelation. We know this fact when we are troubled. Often, when we need to work through a problem, we take a walk in a park, or go outside and sit under a tree, or visit one of our “sacred places” in the natural world, or spend time with our pets, or…
“Ritual for me is a kind of like serious play. It’s play that you take seriously. As play, though, it doesn’t have an end outside of itself. It’s not like work or labor then in that sense, where you might be doing something now that may be grueling and difficult in order to produce a…
“Undergirding sensory perception is a more basic and primitive form of nonsensory perception that Whitehead calls ‘prehension.‘ Before sensory perception arose in evolutionary history, this was how creatures were able to take account of their immediate environment. Thus, a single-celled life form, such as an ameba, will retreat from what it prehends as danger and…
I occasionally need to remind us of this, those of us at home in certain fragile theological centers where some rhizomatic discourses may have developed such resonance as to appear established. Process, ecological and feminist relationalisms continue to belong to subcultures that have evinced great generativity even as they irritate the power centers of learning….
“The hard fact, beyond all sentimentality, is that either we share suffering in love or outside of love, and it is not the same in one case as in the other.” -Daniel Day Williams It seems like this topic is coming up a lot for me. And rightly so because it’s definitely one of the…
Greater complexity of experience overcomes triviality, but it does not guarantee bliss… Recently Tripp Fuller from Homebrewed Christianity chatted with Leon Niemoczynski, a philosopher and nature lover who teaches Philosophy and Theology at Immaculata University and East Stroudsburg University. It’s a great interview. I like Leon quite a bit and read his blog, After Nature,…
But no other country invests such authority in a single document dating from the era of silk knee britches and powdered wigs. Sealed in moisture-controlled, bullet-proof glass containers that are on display in a special rotunda at the National Archives Museum in Washington DC by day and lowered into a multi-ton bomb-proof vault by night,…
“From Whitehead’s reformulated point of view, the questions of science “do not enable [it] to formulate the problem of the ‘mind’ because these questions and their answers presuppose it.” Science is a way of knowing nature; therefore, the pursuit of knowledge of nature presupposes that there is a knower, i.e., a mind.” I made a…
All of us who blog religiously have a mission, that is, a religious mission. We are seeking to instigate political transformation. Two related things I was thinking about recently: 1) Online Conversations. Helpful or not? 2) Anonymity vs. Transparency on the internet and the “real world” … Online Conversations. Are they helpful? It’s one of…
Whitehead’s cosmology acknowledges that the conditions of possibility of human experience have their own conditions of existence set by the ecological conditions of reality. In Whitehead’s approach, the ground, to use a traditional philosophical term, is not a primordial layer that sits as a backdrop upon which events occur; rather, for Whitehead the ground is…