Creatively Advancing into Novelty
Originally posted on Toy Adams‘ Imagine Jesus Advent blog. … Empathy is a good thing, right? I’d say most people tend to think so. Things like mirror neurons, morality, doing the right thing, understanding, sharing peoples feelings, and other good stuff like that all come to mind at the utterance of the word “empathy.” I…
“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…
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Taylor Swift vs. Spotify (#Swiftify) controversy lately. It brings up some really great questions. One of them is, ‘how should we think about the value of art?’ Most people I’ve talked to don’t feel too bad for Taylor Swift specifically, because they’re perfectly aware that she’s not hurting…
“If you are a feminist and are not a vegan, you are ignoring the exploitation of female nonhumans and the commodification of their reproductive processes, as well as the destruction of their relationship with their babies; If you are an environmentalist and not a vegan, you are ignoring the undeniable fact that animal agriculture is…
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…
Preempt the time spent on television and organized activities and have them spend it instead on claiming their imaginations. For in the end, that is all we have. If a thing cannot be imagined first — a cake, a relationship, a cure for AIDS — it cannot be. Life is bound by what we can…
But as Black voices tell us, reconciliation comes with a price, a cost, a burden. A cross if you will. This cross, this burden, is one that Whites habitually refuse to pick up. And my argument in this post is that a part of that cost and burden will be sympathy for Black rage and…
“This permanence is the result of a process that researchers call ‘chunking’: a person using drugs or alcohol experiences a burst of the activating neurotransmitter, dopamine, encoding memories and stimuli associated with that high in the brain. As substance use turns chronic, those same networks in the brain are increasingly engaged, and eventually the habit…
The world has a surplus of food, but still people go hungry. They go hungry because they cannot afford to buy it. They cannot afford to buy it because the sources of wealth and the means of production have been captured and in some cases monopolized by landowners and corporations. The purpose of the biotech…
“Yeah, so you know two or three people in a particular group who don’t fit a generalization? Who cares? The point of a generalization is to say what is true most of the time — the usefulness of a generalization lies precisely in the fact that it allows us to ignore the exceptions for the…