“Think of a brand new automobile on a rainy day. And it’s parked on the street and down at the street corner there’s a busy intersection and there’s a red light and it’s a green light. And now you look at your car sitting there and it’s red across it’s surface but it also has…
Category
Ecology
Humans Don’t Have a Special Status in The Living World: Ethical Vegetarianism/Veganism, Human Exceptionalism & Radical Politics
“Cruelty plays a fundamental role in the vegetarian’s argument inasmuch as the principal reason the vegetarian does not want to eat meat is that she does not want to kill animals or cause them to suffer. The vegetarian sees cruelty in purely negative terms; she believes that its complete eradication is a realistic goal that…
Perhaps nothing sums up the irrationality of capitalism more than this…
“In discussions about plastic use it is common to blame mass consumerism and a throwaway culture for the environmental problem of plastic. However, rather than being demand led, the throwaway culture was created and driven by the corporations who profit from it. The amazing materials created from the waste products of the oil and gas…
The Corporealness of God
“In this one image of the world as God’s body, we are invited to see the creator in the creation, the source of all existence in and through what is bodied forth from that source.” –Sally McFague Below is a comment I left on a thread in the radical theology fb group (a very good…
A Tree Is a Democracy: Process-Relational Meditations on The Living World and Human Societies
“[W]hen we survey the living world, animal and vegetable, there are bodies of all types. Each living body is a society, which is not personal. But most of the animals, including all the vertebrates, seem to have their social system dominated by a subordinate society which is ‘personal’… Thus in one sense a dog is…
The Unreal Dichotomy of “The Individual” Versus “The Society”
“The ontology of this Marxian framework treats society as a complex of social relations among social individuals. This primacy of relations enables Marxian thought to avoid the unreal dichotomy of “the individual” versus “the society.” There are no real individuals standing outside of and prior to the relational nexus: each becomes a specific individual in…
What’s you sign (and medical history)…? Raising Questions About Astrology
“From the perspective of environmental ethics, astrology might seem irresponsibly otherworldly and anthropocentric, not unlike other spiritual traditions. Even if it touts a stewardship ethic or ecofeminist care ethic that would mitigate it’s anthropocentric focus, wouldn’t such an astrological application of such a caring ethic entail ethical attention to planets other than Earth, and couldn’t…
Thoroughly Buffered: A Brief Response to Kalman’s “Fatal Flaws” of the Left
“The rise of the buffered identity has been accompanied by an interiorization; that is, not only the Inner/Outer distinction, that between Mind and World as separate loci, which is central to the buffer itself; and not only the development of this Inner/Outer distinction in a whole range of epistemological theories of a mediational type from…
My Dreams Do Not Belong Only to Myself
“To put this into the context of a life narrative, my dreams do not belong only to myself but to all of the people and non-human things and processes with which I share this earth. The earth flows through me, and my vision of the world, in turn, reverberates back out into my surroundings. Strictly…
At least some form of continuity between mind and nature…
“A central feature of any naturalism is that there is at least some form of continuity between mind and nature – or, that mind “stretches” to meet nature (in the words of John Dewey). But, what is “mind” within a naturalistic register? A basic premise for naturalists such as Charles S. Peirce, John Dewey, George…