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Archive for the ‘Spirit matter’ Category

fairy villages, bowerbird art, & other ambiguous objects

Posted in Eco-culture, Philosophy, Spirit matter, Visual culture, tagged , , , , , , , on September 20, 2009 | 55 Comments »

One of my (largely dormant) pet projects over the years has been to document and theorize anonymous, self-decomposing artworks made in collaboration with nature and time. These works are creative engagements with environments — often simple rearrangements of physical materials (rocks, wood, found pieces of scrap metal or discarded trash, and the like) — by […]

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spinning the Earth

Posted in Eco-culture, Eco-theory, Philosophy, Spirit matter, Visual culture, tagged , , , , on August 25, 2009 | 5 Comments »

Just by linking Carl Sagan’s eloquent little Pale Blue Dot to the teachings of Gautama Buddha, James Ure’s Buddhist Blog brings out the buddhism inherent both in Sagan’s words and in the imagery of the Earth from space. That imagery (as I’ve discussed before here and here) is multivalent, but Sagan’s spin on it — […]

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prairie dogs & cosmopolitics in Santa Fe

Posted in Eco-culture, Eco-theory, Philosophy, Politics, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , on August 22, 2009 | 3 Comments »

Over the past several days I’ve gone from the cool wetness of Alaska’s southeast coast to the high dryness of north-central New Mexico. The first was pure holiday, accompanied by loved ones (including those who generously funded it) and featuring glaciers, salmon, a black bear (devouring one of the salmon), a ride on one of […]

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Cracks in Charles Taylor’s ‘immanent frame’

Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged , , , on August 7, 2009 | 12 Comments »

I recently worked my way through Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, which, since its publication in 2007, has become one of the most widely reviewed and critically lauded books on religion and secularism — and which, in a tangential way, was one of the provocations that led me to start this blog in the first […]

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Spinoza’s parakeets, sparrows, & roses

Posted in Philosophy, Politics, Spirit matter, tagged , , on July 28, 2009 | 2 Comments »

Today, my last day in Amsterdam, I finally made it to the monument unveiled last year honoring Baruch de Spinoza. Since the talk I gave at the ISSRNC conference here was on immanence (specifically, Charles Taylor’s concept of the ‘immanent frame’ and William Connolly’s and others’ immanent naturalism), there was no way around visiting the […]

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when bad things happen (karma running over dogma)

Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , on June 26, 2009 | 4 Comments »

We live in a universe of hazard, a place where asteroids strike, where car smash-ups pluck out a life like a boot squashing a centipede, where planes fall out of the sky, a heart attack takes a brother from behind in the middle of a night, a train runs over a friend’s passed out daughter, […]

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happy solstice

Posted in Eco-culture, Politics, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , on June 21, 2009 | 4 Comments »

Two revolutions are being marked this weekend. One of them is natural, cyclical, the revolution of the earth around the sun with the sun reaching its most northerly point (in closeness to the surface of the tilted planet we live on), standing still for a brief moment, and turning back to the south. The second […]

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Berry’s creative, dynamic universe

Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged , on June 3, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

Another Thomas Berry quote worth spending a bit of time with: “Acceptance of the challenging aspect of the natural world is a primary condition for creative intimacy with the natural world. Without this opaque or even threatening aspect of the universe we would lose our greatest source of creative energy. This opposing element is as […]

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Thomas Berry passes away

Posted in Eco-culture, Eco-theory, Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged , on June 2, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

The tributes are starting to come in for Thomas Berry, Catholic ecotheologian (or “geologian,” as he sometimes referred to himself), scholar, and spiritual/deep ecological visionary, who passed away at age 94 yesterday. Berry is best known for books including The Dream of the Earth, The Universe Story (with physicist Brian Swimme), and The Great Work, […]

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Chernobyl, May Day, & the (r)evolution of risk society

Posted in Eco-culture, Politics, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , on April 26, 2009 | 34 Comments »

Today was the 23rd anniversary of the nuclear accident in Chernobyl, Ukraine. I had been invited to give a sermon at a nearby Unitarian church connected to both this anniversary and the May Day (Beltane) that’s coming up in a few days, and my thoughts, in preparation, revolved around how both of those dates, along […]

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‘After 1968’ & the blessedness of the Buddho-Spinozan

Posted in Philosophy, Politics, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on April 11, 2009 | 2 Comments »

There’s a wealth of material in post-marxist and poststructuralist political philosophy to be found at the After 1968 web site, which documents a series of seminars and lectures held in Maastricht over the last few years. You can find texts by Agamben, Deleuze, Badiou, Ranciere, Baudrillard, Negri, Derrida, Nancy, and others there, though it will […]

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Kauffman, Shaviro, Goodwin, et al.

Posted in Philosophy, Science & society, Spirit matter, tagged , , , on February 23, 2009 | 1 Comment »

Complexity theorist Stuart Kaufmann recently gave a talk here from his book Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion, which is getting more press these days than most books with a Spinozian/Whiteheadian take on the emergent nature of intelligence, complexity, spirituality, and all that. Talking to him afterwards, I was a […]

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