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Archive for the ‘Spirit matter’ Category

just sitting there

Posted in Spirit matter, tagged , on September 16, 2010 | 2 Comments »

My favorite line in Patrick Groneman’s account of a group of Buddhist meditators’ attempt to bear witness, by just sitting, amidst the rival armies of 9-11 protestors in downtown New York City (anti-mosque, pro-mosque, et al) is the passer-by yelling “This is New York, don’t just sit there…stand up and say what you believe in.” […]

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field of dreams

Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , on September 13, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

I just watched Amy Hardie’s recent film The Edge of Dreaming, a documentary about a year in her life during which this science documentarian and self-proclaimed skeptic becomes haunted by a series of dreams that appear to foretell her own death before the year is over. The film becomes an exploration of neuroscience, the meaning […]

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conversions

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, Spirit matter, tagged , on August 7, 2010 | 1 Comment »

What a lovely, touching post Tim Morton has written about his conversion to object-oriented ontology. Since my days of doing religious-studies fieldwork, I’ve always gotten ripples of that nameless mixture of joy, pleasure, and sad melancholy — that feeling of being existentially touched, even pierced — whenever I’ve been around people undergoing conversion experiences (whether […]

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relationalism, earth jazz, & the solstice

Posted in Music & soundscape, Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , on June 20, 2010 | 9 Comments »

If there’s a musical demonstration of relationalism, and by extension (as Skholiast points out) of ecology, it’s the kind of improvised music that the Dead are supposed to have excelled at (and occasionally did). The universe gives rise to many wondrous entities in its long history of spontaneity, relational responsiveness, habit-formation, and form-building. The habits start as rhythms, melodic chirps that turn into territorial refrains and calls, and that gradually maneuvre their way into verse patterns, melodies, harmonies, polyrhythms. Distinct songs develop for particular purposes and gradually get freed from those purposes, taken up into improvisational routines and performances, some of which crystallize into larger-scale architectonics, but only ever temporarily.

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coming home

Posted in Eco-culture, Spirit matter, tagged on June 3, 2010 | 2 Comments »

Visiting Montreal is always enjoyable, even if the many overlapping conferences that are part of every year’s so-called Learneds kept me busier than I wanted to be. But there’s something about the trip back down to Vermont that has grown on me over the last seven years since I moved here. It’s not the border […]

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the other invisible hand

Posted in Spirit matter on May 17, 2010 | 1 Comment »

The mirror neuron meme continues to circulate via that dependable circulator of likable sciencey ideas, Jeremy Rifkin: There’s much more to his argument than mirror neurons (fortunately). “Empathy is grounded in the acknowledgment of death and the celebration of life in rooting for each other to flourish and be. It’s based on our frailties and […]

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cataclysmic eventology

Posted in Cinema, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , on April 23, 2010 | 6 Comments »

Hiroshima mon amour (dir. Alain Resnais, 1959) In my reply to kvond’s and Meg’s comments on the Event, I alluded to a quote from Derrida’s Cinders, which I thought would be worth posting, especially since I can’t find any reference to it online and I don’t have the book handy to check it. “At what […]

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found object

Posted in Spirit matter, tagged , , on April 14, 2010 | 1 Comment »

I’ve had more than my share of occasions to write and speak about faith, but it’s generally been about others’ faiths, not my own. Summarizing one’s own can be tricky, at least if one prefers to deal with substance and not with labels. The term itself is slippery: is it intended to cover beliefs about […]

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the remainder…

Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , on April 13, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

For an indication of why I’m interested in the “more” that object-oriented philosophers grapple with, the “remainder” beyond what can be accounted for of an object or phenomenon through relational accounts, I thought it would be appropriate to share a few paragraphs from my 2001 book Claiming Sacred Ground.

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like a ufo…

Posted in Music & soundscape, Spirit matter, tagged on March 29, 2010 | 2 Comments »

And while we’re on a Christian thematic… here are a few beautiful videos set to songs by Sufjan Stevens. Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland: And two more…

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when in Rome…

Posted in Spirit matter, tagged on March 29, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

I try not to comment on things I have little expertise in, but my year spent at a Catholic seminary school in Rome (with at least one resident pedophile among the clergy) gives me a bit of experiential basis for commenting on the Roman Catholic Church sex abuse scandal. Here’s my rhetorical question: If the […]

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the horror…

Posted in Cinema, Spirit matter, Visual culture, tagged on March 8, 2010 | 2 Comments »

I went to see Lars von Trier’s Antichrist a few days ago. Of the reviews I’ve read, Brent Plate’s captures the way in which the film’s images persist in haunting one’s consciousness. Plate, aptly I think, compares the film to Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, the film that Adolf Hitler called “an incomparable glorification […]

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