Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“I don’t believe in God but I’m very interested in her.” –Arthur C. Clarke I recently listened to another great interview with theologian/philosopher, LeRon Shults. Every time I listen to LeRon he challenges me and gets me thinking. I really appreciate this about him. Reflecting back, though, every time I hear LeRon talk about his…
“No matter how politically successful either the left or the right becomes, our democracy will always have some version of the other side.” –Steve McIntosh I’ve been reading a lot of lengthy, in-depth write-ups lately claiming to have diagnosed the Trump phenomenon. Two of the better ones I’ve read were written by Amanda Taub, at Vox,…
“One of Nietzsche’s objections to Christianity was, he said, that Christianity depends on the notion that Nature has brought forth this sick creature of which it (Christianity) is the cure; and I think psychoanalysis sounds like that. It’s brought forth something sick, something “lacking” of which it (psychoanalysis) is the cure. “Lack” is the absence…
“I think the existence of zombies would contradict certain laws of nature in our world. It seems to be a law of nature, in our world, that when you get a brain of a certain character you get consciousness going along with it.” –David Chalmers I’m fascinated by the philosophy of mind. I find thinking…
“Carson’s grasp of history, politics, emotional intelligence, social norms, government procedure, and even his own backstory seems variable and thin…How, as Paul Waldman recently wrote, could Ben Carson be both “so incredibly smart and so spectacularly stupid?”” The above quote comes from an article in The Atlantic titled “Running for President isn’t Brain Surgery” (Great…
“But the culture is changing at a rate faster than their education and values have trained them to accept. That in itself is a form of oppression—to neglect some people from educational and economic opportunity, then judge them when they can’t get on board with the agenda of the more progressive element of society.” Richard…
“There is nothing “outside” the natural order. In this sense, I am opposed to the transcendentalist’s move to remove Reason or the reflective understanding from physical reality. There is indeed a supernaturalist residue in much transcendental and phenomenological philosophy. This is why my project has always been to theorize “the natural order” as itself always…
In other experiments, we evoked feelings of awe in the lab, for example by having participants recall and write about a past experience of awe or watch a five-minute video of sublime scenes of nature. Participants experiencing awe, more so than those participants experiencing emotions like pride or amusement, cooperated more, shared more resources and…
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,…
“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…