Creatively Advancing into Novelty
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…
Greater complexity of experience overcomes triviality, but it does not guarantee bliss… Recently Tripp Fuller from Homebrewed Christianity chatted with Leon Niemoczynski, a philosopher and nature lover who teaches Philosophy and Theology at Immaculata University and East Stroudsburg University. It’s a great interview. I like Leon quite a bit and read his blog, After Nature,…
In my view, the worst thing that has happened in higher education was slicing everything up into academic disciplines…academic disciplines don’t think, scholarship is not an intellectual activity. Our universities have become anti-intellectual, they socialize people to think that the world of thought is not useful…to put it in more proper terms, [in a university]…
“One example of this mode of perception, or ‘prehension,’ is our awareness that our sensory organs are causing us to have certain experiences, as when we are aware that we are seeing a tree by means of our eyes. Such prehension, while presupposed in sensory perception, is itself non sensory.” —David Ray Griffin I made…
According to McGrath, though the esoteric schools represent a diverse set of theories and practices, they are nonetheless “united by a common enemy: the desacralization of nature (material nature, human nature, cosmological nature) by techno-science and capitalist consumerism.” He argues that critiques of esotericism as “regressive,” “anti-modern,” and “anti-scientific” are misguided. Although esotericism shares modernity’s…
One of my new favorite podcasts is comedian Moshe Kasher’s “Hound Tall Discussion Series,” where three comedians interview an academic expert (Warning: it’s not a show for those with sensitive ears!). It’s the best combination of intellectual satisfaction and hilarious non-sense on the internet. In episode two, the expert featured was psychologist and expert on…
Here are two things I’ve been thinking about that would be really good ingredients for a tasty theological dish. Ingredient #1: This interview with Yale Philosopher Keith DeRose. In it he basically says two things that caught my interest: 1) Neither atheists nor believers know (at all) whether God exists. I agree. 2) there’s still…
“When I ask my students, ‘What is the opposite of beauty?’ they very quickly respond, ‘ugly.’ That’s what society tells us. But what if I say it’s glamour? We start seeing that glamour is the most dangerous thing because it disguises itself as beautiful, attracts us to it, ensnares us in false hopes and superficiality,…
When Bertrand Russell was eleven he craved certainty. Because he had heard that geometry proved things beyond doubt, he asked his brother to teach him Euclid. His brother began with the usual self-evident axioms but young Bertrand quite properly refused to accept them. He demanded to know their proofs. His brother firmly told him that…