Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“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…
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,…
I just read an article in HuffPo about a recent study which explores the perceived “negative effects” of children being exposed to religion at an early age. The article really frustrated me because of the negative spin and blind, erroneous presuppositions contained within it. When I come across stuff like this I just want to…
Originally posted on Toy Adams‘ Imagine Jesus Advent blog. … Empathy is a good thing, right? I’d say most people tend to think so. Things like mirror neurons, morality, doing the right thing, understanding, sharing peoples feelings, and other good stuff like that all come to mind at the utterance of the word “empathy.” I…
“One example of this mode of perception, or ‘prehension,’ is our awareness that our sensory organs are causing us to have certain experiences, as when we are aware that we are seeing a tree by means of our eyes. Such prehension, while presupposed in sensory perception, is itself non sensory.” —David Ray Griffin I made…
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Taylor Swift vs. Spotify (#Swiftify) controversy lately. It brings up some really great questions. One of them is, ‘how should we think about the value of art?’ Most people I’ve talked to don’t feel too bad for Taylor Swift specifically, because they’re perfectly aware that she’s not hurting…
At the center of the new philosophy of nature that emerged victorious in the 17th century was a mechanistic doctrine of nature. This position was, in fact, often referred to as the “new mechanical philosophy.” This view of nature had two fundamental dimensions, both of which exemplified the demand that all “occult” qualities and powers…
“If you are a feminist and are not a vegan, you are ignoring the exploitation of female nonhumans and the commodification of their reproductive processes, as well as the destruction of their relationship with their babies; If you are an environmentalist and not a vegan, you are ignoring the undeniable fact that animal agriculture is…