Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives…
“Evil is not eliminated by a destructive retributive judgment, but by an aesthetic synthesis of intensity, order, and harmony. Whitehead’s God is not a cosmic judge; rather, God is a cosmic artist. The many poor paintings of individual lives and events are transformed in a continuous aesthetic process of harmonizing the parts with an ideal…
“Listen carefully, then. It is a widespread misunderstanding that Spirit is a thing that is more ‘airy’ than vapor. On the contrary. Spirit is more solid than ice.” “That never occurred to me.” “And now I’ll tell you a story. Once upon a time there was a man who didn’t believe in angels. One day,…
What is the real me? It is certainly more than the matter of my body, because that it changing all the time. The atoms are always changing – but in some sense it is the pattern of how the atoms are formed. That, I think, is what the soul is (agreeing with Thomas Aquinas). It…
The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent. Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters—there is no alternative but to fill the screen; otherwise there would be an irremediable void…. That’s why the slightest…
Ricoeur’s analysis of imagination’s role of the metaphorical play of language leads him to the ontological paradox of creation-as-discovery. ‘Through the recovery of the capacity of language to create and recreate, we discover reality itself in the process of being created…Language in the making celebrates reality in the making.’ Ricoeur can thus conclude that ‘the…
This is a developing thought that has influences which are vast. It’s the kind of idea that rattles around with no place to go. So I thought I’d share it, no matter how incoherent it may be. The idea is simple: I’m not afraid to be a hypocrite. It’s true that traditionally, being hypocritical is…
My definition of “faith” (in a spiritual/religious sense), has been evolving for as long as I can remember. In some ways I hesitate to even speculate on a definition because this sort of implies permanence on a certain level. But nevertheless, I’m feeling particularly lead to reinterpret and flesh out how I think about the…
“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…
Religion was never supposed to provide answers to questions that lay within the reach of human reason… Religion’s task, closely allied to that of art, was to help us to live creatively, peacefully, and even joyously with realities for which there were no easy explanations and problems that we could not solve; morality, pain, grief,…