Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“As an occupation, policing necessarily involves people in a violent institution, demands they forfeit their freedom to a hierarchical chain of command and constraints imposed by their oath of office, and asks them to participate in an idolatrous view of the nation-state as the place where God’s action in history is primarily to be experienced…
“Although the social structures in the contemporary world are less rigid than in ancient cultures, there are still many pre-established functions or roles that people readily identify with and which thus become part of the ego. This causes human interactions to become inauthentic, dehumanized, alienating. Those pre-established roles may give you a somewhat comforting sense…
“By studying records of Scottish soldiers, he [Adolphe Quetelet] was able to make averages of height, weight, and so forth to understand and predict the nature of the typical Scotsman. Based on this, Quetlet argued that the concept of the average man would be helpful for understanding the ‘normal state’ of health. This is perhaps…
“The normalization of hierarchy starts right away in our lives, with adults ruling over children (or minors as the state defines them). In the patriarchal bourgeois family, imposed as the norm over the last couple of hundred years of colonial conquest and industrial development, the father reins over the mother and the children. This model…
“Our word “reason” goes back to the Greek verb lego, the verbal noun of which is the famous word logos, which was translated as the Latin ratio. Lego has two principal meanings: “to say” (hence the Word of John’s logos) and “to put together” (related to lechos as the marital couch). (As Whitehead states: “Logic…
“All too many atomized Americans have taken up arms and carried out shocking acts of violence over the past decades, usually without anything more than the desire to harm and kill for their own sake. Mangione might be a sign of something new: a political moderate with no movement behind him, no history of activism,…
“Obedience presupposes duality: one who speaks and one who listens; one who knows and one who is ignorant; a ruler and ruled ones. Religious groups who broke away from the spirit of dependency and obedience cherish different values such as mutuality and interdependence…The main virtue of an authoritarian religion is obedience…God’s love and righteousness are…
“It is my belief that all such [dichotomizing, impersonal, categorical, judgmental] analyses of other human beings are tragic expressions of our own values and needs.” … “Most of us grew up speaking a language that encourages us to label, compare, demand, and pronounce judgements rather than to be aware of what we are feeling and…
“When we disentangle our identities from the civilization’s dominant story, we can begin imagining, embodying, and telling a new story, a story that gives us a deeper sense of meaning, belonging, and purpose, one that helps heal the Earth, our fellow humans, and our fellow creatures rather than destroying them.” –Brian McLaren1 Stories have a…
“When we say that habit is a contraction we are speaking not of instantaneous action which combines with another to form an element of repetition, but rather of the fusion of that repetition in the contemplating mind. A soul must be attributed to the heart, to the muscles, nerves and cells, but a contemplative soul…