Creatively Advancing into Novelty
One of my new favorite podcasts is comedian Moshe Kasher’s “Hound Tall Discussion Series,” where three comedians interview an academic expert (Warning: it’s not a show for those with sensitive ears!). It’s the best combination of intellectual satisfaction and hilarious non-sense on the internet. In episode two, the expert featured was psychologist and expert on…
While listening to the latest TNT episode with Two Friars and a Fool (TFAAF) on why we should never pray again, I kept thinking over and over to myself that this is such interesting stuff. Just asking the question ‘what is prayer?’ is so much fun. It’s really important stuff to think about, and I…
“When I ask my students, ‘What is the opposite of beauty?’ they very quickly respond, ‘ugly.’ That’s what society tells us. But what if I say it’s glamour? We start seeing that glamour is the most dangerous thing because it disguises itself as beautiful, attracts us to it, ensnares us in false hopes and superficiality,…
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…
Every problem in the world can be understood, at least partially, as a problem of consciousness. So it follows that the solutions to seemingly intractable problems, such as environmental degradation and climate change, nuclear proliferation and terrorism, hunger and overpopulation, unregulated globalization and gross inequality, can all be effectively ameliorated by raising or changing the…
“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…
“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…
“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…
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…
“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…