Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“Here is where Bellah’s approach becomes really interesting. He posits that early hominids developed the first ritual activities out of complexified forms of play, and that once our symbolic capacities developed sufficiently, these ritualized activities took on religious significance. Religion, then, grows out of the implications of ritual. Religion is not therefore primarily something you…
“What bio-cultural sciences show us is that exactly this in-group anxiety and out-group antagonism is intensified by religion, i.e., shared imaginative engagement with supernatural agents. Priming people to think about invisible agents that may be watching them, and participating in emotionally-arousing, synchronically organized, causally opaque rituals, reinforces superstitious beliefs and segregative behaviors. This has been…
“If democracy is a genuine foundational social value, it ought to govern the workplace first and foremost” – Richard Wolff I was recently engaged in an (admittedly obsessive) online debate about the ramifications of certain cities like Seattle raising their minimum wage to $15/hr. I kind of hate to link to it, but an article…
Psychoanalysis is a peculiar protest against the casual dismissal [of] religion as an archaic anomaly that shall soon pass. It concordantly rejects the liberal dream of a politics without theology and claims instead the political is necessarily theological. The conscious rationale manifesting as justification for any religious belief or policy position can be addressed, mitigated,…
“[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…