Creatively Advancing into Novelty
Critical to my approach is the need to maintain the ethic that keeps integral philosophy free from religious bias. Although integral philosophy has a strong spiritual component, its spirituality is broad enough to include a wide diversity of spiritual beliefs because it is careful to minimize its reliance on metaphysics. Like the three legs of…
Of course critical reflection is fundamental to teaching and scholarship, but fetishizing disbelief as a sign of intelligence has contributed to depleting our cultural resources. Creative work, in whatever field, depends upon commitment, the energy of participation and the ability to become absorbed in works of literature, art and science. That type of absorption is…
Does God ever call us to injure other people? Again, I think the answer is affirmative. If killing Hitler could have stopped the Holocaust and shortened the war, Bonhoeffer was right to support that project. On a much lesser scale, Jesus used violence to cleanse the temple. Whitehead pointed out that “life is robbery.” For…
My friend Toy recently asked me to participate in a bioethics survey for one of his grad courses. It was fun. Here’s a snippet: Q: In Oregon there is a legal act known as Death with Dignity Act; this states that under four conditions one is legally permitted to be prescribed a drug that will…
I went to a great talk last night which featured Dr. Aaron Meskin, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leeds. His aesthetic research is really interesting. It addresses such topics as the effects of exposure to bad art and the nature of aesthetic adjectives such as ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’. Basically, what I took…
I recently read a great blog post by Matthew McCracken on Job and the evil that God brings upon him. Citing a commentary found on the AUFS blog, Matthew focuses on one verse in particular found in the prologue of Job: “…all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him.” It’s this “narrative concession”…
“We critique far too soon, we must first seek understanding.” – Marshal McLuhan I come from the art world. Critiquing is something I do often so I’m very familiar with the term. However, lately I’ve been reading a lot of theoretical, academic essays dealing with the “critique” of various theological/philosophical/sociological ideas and/or movements. I’m finding…
The rhetoric of Americans being the good guys and of all the bad guys being out there made me suspicious. I grew suspicious, not only by the irony of Christian calls to war, but by studying. Studying sociology, I learned of the startling Zimbardo prison experiment at Stanford, wherin a dozen students, prescreened for mental…
This was originally published on Matthew Barlow’s blog on December 27, 2012. … Since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary I’ve had a few back and forth duels on facebook about gun control, mostly sparked over a few things that I posted. I didn’t necessarily mean for these posts to be inflammatory or controversial, it…
“The problem is one of opposition between subjective and objective points of view. There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality. But often what appears to a more subjective point of view cannot be accounted for in this way. So either the objective conception of the world is…