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 […]
Archive for the ‘Spirit matter’ Category
Berry’s creative, dynamic universe
Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged Deleuze, ecotheology on June 3, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Thomas Berry passes away
Posted in Eco-culture, Eco-theory, Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged ecotheology, mortality 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, […]
Chernobyl, May Day, & the (r)evolution of risk society
Posted in Eco-culture, Politics, Spirit matter, tagged environment, eventology, imagination, paganism, religion, revolutions 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 […]
‘After 1968’ & the blessedness of the Buddho-Spinozan
Posted in Philosophy, Politics, Spirit matter, tagged affect, Agamben, Buddhism, Deleuze, Dzogchen, Madhyamika, mindfulness, political theory, post-marxism, poststructuralism, Spinoza 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 […]
Kauffman, Shaviro, Goodwin, et al.
Posted in Philosophy, Science & society, Spirit matter, tagged biology, complexity, emergence, immanence 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 […]
immanence & codependent origination
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged Buddhism, immanence, psychoanalysis, theory on February 14, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
I took a break from reading John Mullarkey’s Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline – in which Mullarkey develops a philosophy of immanence drawing on, and critiquing, the respective efforts of Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Michel Henry, and Francois Laruelle – to have some lunch and browse the latest issue of Tricycle. One of the articles, a […]
imagination & contemporary theory
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged affect, cognition, Continental philosophy, Deleuze, enchantment, imagination, Jung, theory, visuality on February 11, 2009 | 1 Comment »
This is a summary I provided to a grad student who was starting to get into this area. It’s very introductory and far from complete in its coverage, but since there’s so little out there on this topic, I thought it would be useful to post it. It’s also a bit biased towards literature that’s […]
On ground and groundlessness: Jamesonian Marxism v. Derridean deconstruction v. Buddhist onto-phenomenalism (w/ guest appearances by Lacan and Freud, spiked all the way through with ecology)
Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged Buddhism, Derrida, ecocriticism, Jameson, Madhyamika, Marxism, psychoanalysis, theory, Zizek on February 6, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Or, Toward an eco-Buddhist-processualist cultural criticism Note: This is work in progress and probably won’t be published for a while, and not in this form in any case. It comes from an attempt to theorize an ‘ecocritical’ understanding of culture that is in dialogue with the Marxist tradition of social and political analysis, Derridean poststructural […]
atheism and immanence
Posted in Spirit matter, tagged immanence on January 24, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Here’s an interesting conversation developing on nature and immanence on an atheist blog. Incidentally, I liked Obama’s nod to non-Christians and “non-believers” in his inauguration speech. It felt like a refreshing breath of fresh air in the constricted atmosphere of American public religious discourse. With the recent growth of religious/spiritual discourse on the left – […]
immanence and field-being
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, Spirit matter, tagged Buddhism, Ontology, epistemology on January 23, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
An excellent source of current philosophical thinking on issues related to this blog from an Asian perspective (primarily Buddhist and Daoist) is the International Journal for Field-Being, which is published by the International Institute for Field-Being. “Field-being” is one of the terms Asian thinkers (and translators) have used to encompass a kind of non-essentialist ontology […]
Heraclitean spirituality
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter on January 23, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Patrick Lee Miller’s recent posts on Heraclitean spirituality, published on the Immanent Frame blog, make a valuable contribution to theorizing the ethics and spirituality of immanence. He notes that Heraclitus’ famous quote that’s sunk into popular culture as “You don’t step into the same river twice” actually means something more like “Neither you nor the […]
immanence, transcendence, religion, imagination, politics
Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged animism, deconstruction, Deleuze, Derrida, immanence, immanent naturalism, Lacan, paganism, pantheism, religion, Zizek on December 14, 2008 | 2 Comments »
On the surface, “immanence” would appear to favor certain religiosities (paganisms, pantheisms, animisms, earth spiritualities) over others (transcendentalist monotheisms, rigid dualisms, Buddhist “extinctionism,” et al). But its resonance works within traditions as well: towards panentheistic strains of Christianity, where the Christ is seen as in-dwelling, where Easter is the rebirth of nature and life as […]
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