Creatively Advancing into Novelty
Critical to my approach is the need to maintain the ethic that keeps integral philosophy free from religious bias. Although integral philosophy has a strong spiritual component, its spirituality is broad enough to include a wide diversity of spiritual beliefs because it is careful to minimize its reliance on metaphysics. Like the three legs of…
Of course critical reflection is fundamental to teaching and scholarship, but fetishizing disbelief as a sign of intelligence has contributed to depleting our cultural resources. Creative work, in whatever field, depends upon commitment, the energy of participation and the ability to become absorbed in works of literature, art and science. That type of absorption is…
Does God ever call us to injure other people? Again, I think the answer is affirmative. If killing Hitler could have stopped the Holocaust and shortened the war, Bonhoeffer was right to support that project. On a much lesser scale, Jesus used violence to cleanse the temple. Whitehead pointed out that “life is robbery.” For…
“Most disturbingly, if unilateral power is the ability to remain safely unaffected by others, then unilateral power seems to be the opposite of love in one important respect. For surely, to love someone is to be affected by them. The more deeply we love someone the more we are affected by them. Their joys and…
By Jesse Turri I grew up in a little town in North Dakota called Devil’s Lake. Devil’s Lake got it’s name because the Sioux people called the lake nearby mni wak’áŋ chante, or “bad spirit lake.” The word “bad” in the name referred to the high salt content of the lake, making it unfit to…
“In the relational viewpoint you begin life as an effect produced by the many others in the world of your immediate past. But you are not simply a function of these relations. You are an emergent from your relationships; and in the process of your emergence you also create yourself. Your life as a living…
“Loomer is an important figure in process theology, a movement that contends that the universe is always growing in size and complexity, and that as the universe grows, so does God and so must we. Loomer saw the increasing complexity of creation as a glorious blossoming that God was delighted to behold. Late in life,…
My friend Toy recently asked me to participate in a bioethics survey for one of his grad courses. It was fun. Here’s a snippet: Q: In Oregon there is a legal act known as Death with Dignity Act; this states that under four conditions one is legally permitted to be prescribed a drug that will…
I went to a great talk last night which featured Dr. Aaron Meskin, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leeds. His aesthetic research is really interesting. It addresses such topics as the effects of exposure to bad art and the nature of aesthetic adjectives such as ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’. Basically, what I took…
Bill Eckert: Do any of you hold a non-personal view of God? If so, is your worldview distinct from naturalism? Jay McDaniel: Bill, my own view is that God can meaningfully be conceived in both personal and transpersonal terms, and that there is a continuum between the two poles. I myself sometimes speak of…