Art

If there is only one, true God, all other manifestations of the Divine must be either violently transformed into nothingness or demonized as temptations of evil.

June 30, 2014 Art, Christianity, Philosophy, Theology, Theory

“This is what Deleuze saw in Whitehead: that, in a creative world, “unification” is always “multiplication”—the creation of folds of difference. Any attempt to freeze this movement produces imperialism, that is, the “will to power” to conquer manifoldness. But the imperial desire for a “perfect” world “under control” only earns a dead world. It was…

On Being Judgmental vs. Being Opinionated

June 27, 2014 Art, Philosophy, Psychology, Thoughts

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth. –Carl Gustav Jung I like listening to podcasts. One show in particular that I like is called “Get Up On This,” hosted by Jensen Karp and Matthew Robinson. In the show, Jensen…

Omnipotence Cannot Simply Wash its Hands of Evil

June 24, 2014 Art, Christianity, Philosophy, Theology

“In order to show solidarity with the weak, God voluntarily empties Godself of power, freely chooses not to exercise this power, and this divine kenosis does not contradict omnipotence but manifests it. I do not travel down that path because it smacks of a ruse, a kind of docetism, in which weakness is an even…

Theopoetics: Embracing the Mystery

June 18, 2014 Art, Poetry, Theology

Theopoetics guides a literary artist toward contextualizing experience and shepherds the intangibility of experience into art, turning confused isolation into a reach for the communal, all with an eye toward faith, hope, and love — charity in its true sense. It’s this act of making incarnate coupled with the intention of pursuing the divine that…

Confronted with Questions That We Cannot Answer: Clayton, Whitehead, Barad, Panagentialism, & Pneumaterialism

June 10, 2014 Art, Christianity, Philosophy, Science, Theology

“As even Clayton himself has argued, there are “questions that science raises but cannot answer using its own resources.” In particular, he views quantum physics “as notorious for confronting us with philosophical questions that physics itself may never be able to answer…” This is where what Clayton calls a “hypothetical, pluralistic” metaphysics (like Barad and…

The Unity of Person is a Unity of Experience- Richard Rescher and Process Psychology

May 23, 2014 Art, Philosophy, Psychology

The self or ego has always been a stumbling-block for Western philosophy because of its resistance to accommodation within its favored framework of substance-ontology. The idea that ‘the self’ is a thing (substance), and that whatever takes place in ‘my mind’ and ‘my thoughts’ is a matter of the activity of a thing of a…

To Love Someone is To Be Affected by Them

May 5, 2014 Art, Philosophy, Poetry, Theory

“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…

What you make out of what you have received is who you are // More Bernard Loomer – on Self-Creativity

May 1, 2014 Art, Christianity, Poetry, Theology

“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…

Try to conceive of beauty and you will become a “bumbling” fool: good art, bad art and ontological vagueness

April 11, 2014 Art, Philosophy, Theory, Thoughts

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…

Patriarchy and the Alphabet: Goddess Worship, Marshall McLuhan, and The Conflict Between Word and Image

March 19, 2014 Art, Literature, media, Philosophy, Theory

“The Old Testament was the first alphabetic written work to influence future ages. Attesting to its gravitas, multitudes still read it three thousand years later. The words on its pages anchor three powerful religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Each is an exemplar of patriarchy. Each monotheistic religion features an imageless Father deity whose authority shines…