Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“[Relaxation and rigidity are at opposite ends of the spectrum], and the rigidity of our quantitative way of understanding our world has boxed things and set up very complicated, but still linear, relationships. This is a product of industry, of mechanization, [and] this kind of thinking goes way back. And the problem with this thinking…
“After Aristotle had sketched the best science available in his day, he wanted to go further. What implications did that science have for the nature of the physical world with which it dealt? His intention was to develop the meta-physics only after the physics. If science had always followed this pattern the role of metaphysics…
“Some critics of process like to make fun of the idea of panexperientialism. They misconstrue the doctrine to mean that everything has experiences—everything without exception. They can then talk about how silly it is to claim that a chair has feelings, or that a stone or a rock can think. The “pan” in panexperientialism means…
In the economy we have constructed, more importance is placed on the invented world of products and currency than on the real, natural world. In this system our value as humans is determined by how much stuff we have. But no natural systems function this way. Natural systems do create greater abundance as they develop,…
While there are many ways that the growing ideology of radical Islamism can be countered and resisted, my focus here is on the cultural dimension of the problem. Although Muslims have been keen to adopt the technologies of modernity, they have yet to adopt the cultural values of modernity. However, it is the liberal values…
The Earth is sacred revelation. We know this fact when we are troubled. Often, when we need to work through a problem, we take a walk in a park, or go outside and sit under a tree, or visit one of our “sacred places” in the natural world, or spend time with our pets, or…
“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…
“Undergirding sensory perception is a more basic and primitive form of nonsensory perception that Whitehead calls ‘prehension.‘ Before sensory perception arose in evolutionary history, this was how creatures were able to take account of their immediate environment. Thus, a single-celled life form, such as an ameba, will retreat from what it prehends as danger and…
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…