Meaning runs far deeper than designation. We will never be able to think our connection to reality if we think of reality as a collection of things, because meaningful experience is about more than things. Experience is constituted by events. The ontology of an event cannot be captured by the mental representation of material things…
Category
Art
Theocards! Theologian Trading Cards Coming Soon
I’m pretty pumped about these theological/philosophical trading cards my friend Tripp and I have been collaborating on. They’ll probably be for sale sometime soon at Homebrewed Christianity, so collecting them all will obviously be the thing to do (if nothing else they’ll make badass, nerdy bookmarks!). In the future we plan to feature other schools of thought like, Masters of Suspicion, Mystics, Heretics, Early Church Thinkers, Radical Theology, and Queer Theology, for instance, as well as release additional thinkers for Team Process, Team Idealism, and Team Liberation.
Because our modern imaginations have lost the ability to perceive the life animating the earth and wider cosmos, our built environment has been designed without life in mind.
“It is evident that the more complex organisms have not evolved simply by adapting themselves to the environment. Instead, according to Whitehead, “the upward trend has been accompanied by a growth of the converse relation. Animals have progressively undertaken the task of adapting the environment to themselves.”[9] The primary evolutionary function of Reason is thus…
Being Erased from History: Legacy, Moral-Nihilism, and Boardwalk Empire
“It’s terrifying to me, certainly, one of the great things about being a writer in this business for me, is you can leave your work behind and people can see it. The idea of being erased from history is scary to me.” — Terence Winter, Creator of Boardwalk Empire I was very late on the…
Different in Degree Not Kind: Nature, Knowing, and Experience
“So long as I myself am identical with Nature, I understand what a living nature is as well as I understand my own life…As soon, however, as I separate myself, and with me everything ideal from nature, nothing remains to me but a dead object, and I cease to comprehend how a life outside me…
Can science eventually “explain everything?”
1. Nature is mechanical. 2. Matter is unconscious. 3. Laws of nature are fixed. 4. Total amount of matter and energy are always the same. 5. Nature is purposeless. 6. Biological inheritance is material. 7. Memories are stored as material traces. 8. Mind is in the brain. 9. Telepathy and other psychic phenomena are illusory….
Things inevitably slip through cracks.
“Who’s ruining our day Sam?” Susie asked in disbelief. Her lips were stretched tight like a rubber band about to snap, her eyes filled with an inferno that displayed concretely her nearly uncontrollable anger. Samuel and Susie stood in the pouring rain. An umbrella, hoisted above their heads, was managing to keep the cold early…
Faithful to Appearances and to Common Sense: Goethe, Whitehead, Bergson, Schelling and Teleology
“Goethe described his color theory as a “sensory-moral” account of natural phenomena such that the “physical laws” those phenomena “obey” are seen to emerge from out of one’s conscious perceptions themselves, rather than being imposed upon them from outside as in Newton’s mechanistic theories. Goethe’s scientific method “makes phenomena transparent to their own lawfulness,” as…
“Lack” is The Wrong Word: Psychoanalysis, Sickness, Despair, and Demanding a Root Canal When a Filling Will Do
“One of Nietzsche’s objections to Christianity was, he said, that Christianity depends on the notion that Nature has brought forth this sick creature of which it (Christianity) is the cure; and I think psychoanalysis sounds like that. It’s brought forth something sick, something “lacking” of which it (psychoanalysis) is the cure. “Lack” is the absence…
What we take for granted frames the size of our concerns.
“These statistics definitely do not prove that animus or madness has ended. No decent person would deny that violence is still much too high everywhere…Still, the big picture of postwar history shows significant improvements in nearly all indicators of lived human experience. The average life span of humans is today longer than it has ever…