Philosophy

If there is only one, true God, all other manifestations of the Divine must be either violently transformed into nothingness or demonized as temptations of evil.

June 30, 2014 Art, Christianity, Philosophy, Theology, Theory

“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…

On Being Judgmental vs. Being Opinionated

June 27, 2014 Art, Philosophy, Psychology, Thoughts

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect. The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth. –Carl Gustav Jung I like listening to podcasts. One show in particular that I like is called “Get Up On This,” hosted by Jensen Karp and Matthew Robinson. In the show, Jensen…

Omnipotence Cannot Simply Wash its Hands of Evil

June 24, 2014 Art, Christianity, Philosophy, Theology

“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…

Confronted with Questions That We Cannot Answer: Clayton, Whitehead, Barad, Panagentialism, & Pneumaterialism

June 10, 2014 Art, Christianity, Philosophy, Science, Theology

“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…

Depolarizing the American Mind

June 2, 2014 Philosophy, Politics

While our gridlocked government may be partially “representative” of our polarized culture, there are few who are happy about the situation. And it seems like the default assumption, and the position often repeated in the mainstream media, is that both sides are responsible, which leads to the conclusion that the appropriate remedy is for politicians…

The Unity of Person is a Unity of Experience- Richard Rescher and Process Psychology

May 23, 2014 Art, Philosophy, Psychology

The self or ego has always been a stumbling-block for Western philosophy because of its resistance to accommodation within its favored framework of substance-ontology. The idea that ‘the self’ is a thing (substance), and that whatever takes place in ‘my mind’ and ‘my thoughts’ is a matter of the activity of a thing of a…

Producing in an Inhuman Way – or – Why Does Work Suck So Much?

May 20, 2014 Economics, Philosophy, Theory, Thoughts

“Marx’s innovation was to combine Smith and Feuerbach to derive an account of alienated labour. That is, the plight of the worker under capitalism is an instance of the way in which a person’s essence becomes detached from his or her existence; i.e. that workers live in a way that does not express their essence….

For a deep understanding of reality, mix equal parts: science, philosophy and religion.

May 14, 2014 Philosophy, Science, Theology, Thoughts

Critical to my approach is the need to maintain the ethic that keeps integral philosophy free from religious bias. Although integral philosophy has a strong spiritual component, its spirituality is broad enough to include a wide diversity of spiritual beliefs because it is careful to minimize its reliance on metaphysics. Like the three legs of…

Critical thinking as defense against risky insight.

May 12, 2014 Philosophy, Thoughts

Of course critical reflection is fundamental to teaching and scholarship, but fetishizing disbelief as a sign of intelligence has contributed to depleting our cultural resources. Creative work, in whatever field, depends upon commitment, the energy of participation and the ability to become absorbed in works of literature, art and science. That type of absorption is…

With Imagination, Anything is Possible: Process Theology, MacGyver and Creative Non-Violence

May 8, 2014 Christianity, Philosophy, Theology, Thoughts

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…