Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“[Universalism]…is a lovely sentiment but it is dangerous, disrespectful, and untrue. For more than a generation we have followed scholars and sages down the rabbit hole into a fantasy world in which all gods are one. This wishful thinking is motivated in part by an understandable rejection of the exclusivist missionary view that only you…
“When the “One” becomes invisible again, this is really not about the loss of monism, but of dualism. The disappearance of dualism is really a condition for the liberation of multitude. Gilles Deleuze has the formula that as soon as dualism vanishes “monism is pluralism.” The same strategy, I think, appears in Loomer’s theopoetic language…
“Tertullian, an early Christian theologian, summed up what he regarded as the putrid nature of women’s bodies when he described women as a “temple built over a sewer.” Tertullian was thoroughly familiar with Greek philosophy, though he mostly rejected their views on metaphysics. But in regard to women, the Aristotelian strain of misogyny seeps through….
“We don’t really fit the categories of the West, and I’m ok with that. The Torah calls us an ‘Am,’ which loosely translates ‘a people,’ but it’s a Hebrew term, it has its own valence. So, Judaism is a nexus of history, religion, peoplehood, culture, shared destiny…I think in some ways, ethnicity rose again in…
God did not cram Godself into a human body the way Ralphie crammed himself into that pink bunny suit. Christmas is not my favorite holiday. As a kid it certainly used to be, obviously, because presents…but as I’ve aged, getting gifts has become less of thing to look forward to (mainly because the only things…
“Consciousness is not in the head. Consciousness is an emergent, symbiotic process that is planetary in extent.” I’m really curious to read Kester Brewin’s new book about technology and transcendence titled Getting High (due to be published soon I suppose), but I have to admit that I’m a little disappointed to pick up a technophobe/Luddite…
“If Whitehead’s universe is really god-infused, the materialists say, then his speculative adventure in cosmology is for that reason also made irretrievably irrelevant for any modern, scientific, rational investigations of nature…The problem with this assessment of Whitehead’s scheme, as I understand it, is that the story of modern scientific rationality and its technological mastery over…
Humans are infinitely concerned about the infinity to which they belong, from which they are separated, and for which they are longing. –Paul Tillich (Paraphrase) I recently listened to Ryan Bell’s enjoyable interview with LeRon Shults. I really like listening to both Ryan and LeRon converse; they’re both super smart and interesting people and I’m…
“But hope is not optimism or pessimism: You will look like the spoilsport among optimists and the polyanna among pessimists. Hope is the embrace of the possible. In the face of what looks impossible.” –Catherine Keller I recently had a wonderful and thoughtful dialogue in the Process and Faith Facebook group about the subject of…
Recently I was attempting to discern the differences between a generic panentheism and a Whiteheadian, process-relational panentheism (as I understand it). I kept coming across little diagrams online and I quickly realized that the panentheism diagram I kept seeing did not come close to the process-relational type I was familiar with. So, I created my…