Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“This creates the series of questions Pluribus forces us to confront in every episode: Is our freedom—our autonomy—really too high a price to pay in exchange for global happiness and organized, respectful survival on our planet? If we accept the implied thesis that a free human will inevitably destroy the planet and themselves, is the alternative…
“Be “dialectical” just for one minute: imagine a world where there is no point in teaching people things, the process of education is replaced by The Answer (no shade to Allen Iverson). You just… ask for the answers without regard to the process of making answers. Come on. Aren’t you imagining… Hell? Do we just…
“Although the social structures in the contemporary world are less rigid than in ancient cultures, there are still many pre-established functions or roles that people readily identify with and which thus become part of the ego. This causes human interactions to become inauthentic, dehumanized, alienating. Those pre-established roles may give you a somewhat comforting sense…
“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.” –James Baldwin In response to the question of why, despite being such a small population, they think trans rights became such a big…
“When we disentangle our identities from the civilization’s dominant story, we can begin imagining, embodying, and telling a new story, a story that gives us a deeper sense of meaning, belonging, and purpose, one that helps heal the Earth, our fellow humans, and our fellow creatures rather than destroying them.” –Brian McLaren1 Stories have a…
“Notably, tech giants today are able to wield the law against interoperators: new technologies that plug into their services, systems and platforms. That’s a privilege that none of yesterday’s easily toppled tech giants had—if IBM wanted to prevent its competitors (the “seven dwarfs” of the mainframe era) from making software, printers, keyboards and storage for…
“Ultimately, Henry Nelson Wieman identified the “creative event” with “God,” emphasizing that “God, according to this interpretation is immediately accessible to human living and human feeling in all the fullness of God’s concrete reality.” The divine creative process, he stresses, “makes qualities more appreciable by creative sensitive organisms; by making them progressively more sensitive; by…
“In the Bible we find two major images of God, one, monarchical, and the other, familial. In the Hebrew Scriptures, God is most often imaged as “King”; whereas in the New Testament “Father” is dominant…Jesus is never depicted as addressing God as King, and there is no indication that he spoke about God in that…
“The funny thing is that stories of such brilliant insights spurring out of deep thought aren’t unique. Throughout history, luminaries ranging from Charles Darwin to Friedrich Nietzsche have attributed much of their genius to the many hours they spent lost in their mind. Darwin had a “thinking path” that he would walk down to ruminate,…
“Rhetorically, the political theology many progressive Christians espouse is Anabaptist. The rhetoric is anti-empire. Jesus is Lord, Caesar is not. But in practice, the political theology of many progressive Christians is Niebuhrian. That is, Christians must take and use the power of the state to address our social and international problems. The focus is upon…