Birthdays, and other such markers (I realized while meditating by the Lamoille river this morning), are an opportunity for pooling together thoughts, those facing back across the memoried past and those facing forward to an open future, and gathering them into a spool of desiring-productive-energy to be set spinning outward. Not only one’s own thoughts, […]
Archive for the ‘Spirit matter’ Category
Birthday thoughts
Posted in Spirit matter on July 15, 2012 | 2 Comments »
SAR “Nature, Science, Religion” volume out
Posted in Eco-culture, Science & society, Spirit matter, tagged anthropology, cosmopolitics, nature, religion on May 20, 2012 | 1 Comment »
I received my copies in the mail this week of the book that arose out of the School of Advanced Research seminar on “Nature, Science, and Religion: Intersections Shaping Society and the Environment.” It’s a handsome volume, whose contents provide a level of cross-cutting conversation that, I think, is rare among edited collections. Catherine Tucker […]
We are the 1%
Posted in Eco-culture, Spirit matter on May 5, 2012 | 1 Comment »
The other 99% have apparently gone extinct. (The estimate is actually closer to 100% than 99%.) This I just learned form Joshua Schuster’s talk on “Digital extinction.” The earth’s biological diversity is also the highest it’s ever been. We are living between the achievement (of speciation to tremendous levels of flourishing) and the projection (that […]
“Only a god can save us…”
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged art, daimon, Heidegger, ontotheology, paganism, polytheism, theology on March 16, 2012 | 9 Comments »
In a comment to my last post on triads and divinities, my frequent commenter/interlocutor “dmf” points out a nice essay by Robert Gall called “From Daimonion to the ‘Last’ God: Socrates, Heidegger, and the God of the Thinker,” which Mark Fullmer has made available beyond the restricted-access community. Gall distinguishes between the god of […]
Thinking through threes (& deities)
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, Spirit matter, tagged deity, dialectics, Peirce, polytheism, theism on March 14, 2012 | 14 Comments »
One of the things that Ecologies of the Moving Image has left unresolved, and left me needing to think more about, is the extent to which my Peircian “triadism” holds up. Philosophically, the case for some sort of triadism as a way of getting around dualisms is, at first blush, appealing. But there are […]
In a nutshell
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter on January 26, 2012 | 3 Comments »
Shinzen Young lays it all out: He has also started blogging (to add to his other online presences).
Lynn Margulis, r.i.p.
Posted in Spirit matter, tagged Margulis, scientists on November 23, 2011 | 1 Comment »
Heard about this last night. She died peacefully at her home in Massachusetts yesterday evening, surrounded by family. (We had just seen her son Dorion Sagan, son of Carl, give a great talk at the anthropology conference last Friday, after which he and his partner had to speed back to Toronto to get their passports […]
On theism/nihilism & other things
Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, Spirit matter, tagged cosmology, nihilism, panentheism, pantheism, speculative realism, theism, Whitehead on July 19, 2011 | 2 Comments »
The Speculative Realist blogosphere has recently been alight with debates over the role of religion, God, theism versus nihilism, the secular and the “post-secular,” and other such things. Since these are topics I’m naturally interested, and somewhat invested, in, I ought to participate, but time constraints have made that all but impossible for me recently. […]
Fine-tuning the mystical experience
Posted in Spirit matter, tagged findings, mysticism, spirituality on June 28, 2011 | 2 Comments »
Time magazine’s Healthland supplement summarizes a recent clinical study of 18 healthy, spiritually inclined adults who were administered a certain drug over 5 eight-hour sessions. Among the results: Fourteen months after participating in the study, 94% of those who received the drug said the experiment was one of the top five most meaningful experiences of […]
‘Self-help,’ James Ray, and spiritual culture
Posted in Spirit matter, tagged religion, self-help, spirituality on June 23, 2011 | 1 Comment »
The news that self-help guru James Arthur Ray has been found guilty of three counts of negligent homicide brings to an end (of sorts) a saga that began with three deaths and numerous injuries at an October, 2009, sweat lodge ceremony outside Sedona, Arizona. Since I’ve written a handful of articles and half a book […]
The view from here (& there)
Posted in Spirit matter, tagged paganism, solstice on June 20, 2011 | 2 Comments »
In its “Best places to celebrate the solstice,” Salon.com urges us to “embrace your inner pagan” — at places like Glastonbury Festival (natch), the Hill of Tara in Ireland, Cusco in Peru, and the desert site of Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels in Utah (pictured above).