Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“The adoption of fixed settlements also created problems with regard to the status of women. When a hunter-gatherer people took up fixed settlement, in actual practice it pursued its livelihood through fishing or simple cultivation and herding, but it preserved the lifestyle that had existed in the hunter-gatherer phase. In sum, a division of labor…
This is the introduction to a paper on William Morris I am writing for a MFA class, the rough draft of which I recently submitted. Introduction As generative AI floods our screens with astonishingly strange deepfakes and algorithms continue to commodify creativity, a quiet rebellion has been blooming: Gen Z “Luddites” ditch smartphones for flip…
“Then, having overcome this awkwardness, they [Jesus and friends] are confronted with another: a man ‘possessed’ by a demon, chained and living among the tombs, to represent both his affinity with death and his uncleaness. But nothing had the power to restrain him. And he speaks, or rather the spirit within him speaks: ‘My…
“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…
“It is my belief that all such [dichotomizing, impersonal, categorical, judgmental] analyses of other human beings are tragic expressions of our own values and needs.” … “Most of us grew up speaking a language that encourages us to label, compare, demand, and pronounce judgements rather than to be aware of what we are feeling and…
“I’ve succumbed [to panentheism]…but here’s the thing about panentheism: there is a reasonable probability, and it’s a reasonably well received theory that the Universe is running down, the law of entropy is inevitable, and the arrow of time is irreversible and the best estimate we have right now is that the expansion will expand to…
“As we have seen, Girard regards religion and culture not as the inventions of rational human beings but as essential processes in the evolution of humanity. For him, the scapegoating process functions as a catalyst in the development of symbolic thought. This increased mental capacity leads to ritual and myth, which in their turn develop…
Munch: When Munch was a boy… freedom was a potato. It was you didn’t get killed today. Freedom from hunger, from the rusty blade. But to free himself, the man ate first so others could not. He killed before he was killed. He wanted nothing more, because only kings… had the freedom to want. But…
“We once had roots. We knew our ancestors and the cyclical line that was the future. But colonialism came and we were uprooted. We lost our past and had to invent a future that never existed. If we want to make an inventory of our time and understand ourselves in this timeless present, we must…
“Using Christianity to colonize usually backfires eventually because colonized peoples end up discovering that the God they were forced to worship is really on their side. They discover that the God of the Bible is a God who frees enslaved people and condemns those who exploit them. The colonized discover that the Christian story is…