Creatively Advancing into Novelty
When Bertrand Russell was eleven he craved certainty. Because he had heard that geometry proved things beyond doubt, he asked his brother to teach him Euclid. His brother began with the usual self-evident axioms but young Bertrand quite properly refused to accept them. He demanded to know their proofs. His brother firmly told him that…
“This permanence is the result of a process that researchers call ‘chunking’: a person using drugs or alcohol experiences a burst of the activating neurotransmitter, dopamine, encoding memories and stimuli associated with that high in the brain. As substance use turns chronic, those same networks in the brain are increasingly engaged, and eventually the habit…
The Mute Monk is a captivating parable written by Jake Bouma that will have you contemplating themes of grace, forgiveness, memory, and fate long after you’ve finished listening. Jake is an ecclesial junkie, aspiring polymath, and cancer survivor who currently serves as Director of Youth & Family Ministry at Faith Lutheran Church in Des Moines,…
“We use machines to make our labor more productive. Productivity is a measure of the amount of use-value created in a span of time. Since, for Marx, value is determined by labor time an increase in productivity (in use-values) does not create a corresponding increase in value. The same amount of value is created, just…
The world has a surplus of food, but still people go hungry. They go hungry because they cannot afford to buy it. They cannot afford to buy it because the sources of wealth and the means of production have been captured and in some cases monopolized by landowners and corporations. The purpose of the biotech…
Don’t talk to me about spirit. Without me, you’re just a couple of hippies on welfare. I’m the one who gives you credibility, all right? You’re ready, Gene? Get snapping. –Sister Ingalls The above quote comes from season 2 of the great Netflix show Orange Is the New Black. The episode is titled “Take a…
“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…
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…
“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 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…