Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“Faith in this God means trust in our own capacities…This faith will not morph into the guarantee. The end, from the perspective of the infinite, is endless and thus cannot be secured, predicted, or determined in advance. Each end will fade into its perspectival infinity. We won’t take certainty from this cloud of refuge, even…
“Difference is endless, and so we are endlessly—infinitely—tangled in it.” –Catherine Keller It struck me recently that All Lives Matter, the defiant, pious, racist push-back to the very important Black Lives Matter movement, should also be filed under the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The fallacy of misplaced concreteness is one of my favorite Whiteheadian theories;…
“Violence is not only what black people do to white people as victims seek to change structure of their existence; it is also what white people did when they created a society for white people only, and what they do in order to maintain it. Violence in America did not begin with the black power…
Meaning runs far deeper than designation. We will never be able to think our connection to reality if we think of reality as a collection of things, because meaningful experience is about more than things. Experience is constituted by events. The ontology of an event cannot be captured by the mental representation of material things…
I’m pretty pumped about these theological/philosophical trading cards my friend Tripp and I have been collaborating on. They’ll probably be for sale sometime soon at Homebrewed Christianity, so collecting them all will obviously be the thing to do (if nothing else they’ll make badass, nerdy bookmarks!). In the future we plan to feature other schools of thought like, Masters of Suspicion, Mystics, Heretics, Early Church Thinkers, Radical Theology, and Queer Theology, for instance, as well as release additional thinkers for Team Process, Team Idealism, and Team Liberation.
“The soul is nothing else than the succession of my occasions of experience, extending from birth to the present moment.” —Whitehead Talking about the soul is confusing. I believe my earliest understanding of the soul was instilled in me by my mother at a fairly young age. Hers was a very Jewish understanding of the…
“I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.” — Isaiah 45:7 I’ve been listening and reading a lot about the Devil in relation to Christian theology lately. Yesterday I listened to the “Devilpalooza” episode of Homebrewed Christianity which featured Richard Beck talking about…
“At the center of the new philosophy of nature that emerged victorious in the 17th century was a mechanistic doctrine of nature. This position was, in fact, often referred to as the “new mechanical philosophy.” This view of nature had two fundamental dimensions, both of which exemplified the demand that all “occult” qualities and powers…
1. Nature is mechanical. 2. Matter is unconscious. 3. Laws of nature are fixed. 4. Total amount of matter and energy are always the same. 5. Nature is purposeless. 6. Biological inheritance is material. 7. Memories are stored as material traces. 8. Mind is in the brain. 9. Telepathy and other psychic phenomena are illusory….
“Either God is identified with the oppressed to the point that their experience becomes God’s experience, or God is a God of racism.” —James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation I’ve recently been thinking about the connections between beliefs about God, guns/killing, and privilege/power. My views on guns/non-violence/killing humans have changed quite a bit over…