Creatively Advancing into Novelty
On April 30, 2022 I got married to a magical person, in magical place on top of a mountain, during a partial solar eclipse. It was an unforgettable time. Below is a piece I wrote and read to my partner, Erin, on that day: Imagination. As adults, we might be quick to dismiss imagination as…
“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,…
“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be…
“When confronted with someone who literally thinks blacks are subhuman and should be killed off en masse, what is the appropriate response? […] Simply treating someone as an equal participant in the public sphere legitimates them. And given that they are speaking boldly in public, they are not susceptible to public shaming — indeed, they…
“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…
“Ritual for me is a kind of like serious play. It’s play that you take seriously. As play, though, it doesn’t have an end outside of itself. It’s not like work or labor then in that sense, where you might be doing something now that may be grueling and difficult in order to produce a…
According to McGrath, though the esoteric schools represent a diverse set of theories and practices, they are nonetheless “united by a common enemy: the desacralization of nature (material nature, human nature, cosmological nature) by techno-science and capitalist consumerism.” He argues that critiques of esotericism as “regressive,” “anti-modern,” and “anti-scientific” are misguided. Although esotericism shares modernity’s…
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…
As a child, Wallace was forceful and imaginative. He frequently made his younger sister play audience to long, ad lib dramas populated by characters like Captain Phlegm and his sidekick Goat Bile. During adolescence, Wallace moved into the basement of the family’s Philo, Illinois home. He painted the walls black and hung cork tiles on…
“To Wallace Stevens, reality is the product of the imagination, as it shapes the world. Because it is constantly changing as we attempt to find imaginatively satisfying ways to perceive the world, reality is an activity, not a static object. We approach reality with a piecemeal understanding, putting together parts of the world in an…