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Archive for the ‘Spirit matter’ Category

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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spiritualizing science

Posted in Science & society, Spirit matter, tagged , , on March 4, 2010 | 1 Comment »

or, Carl Sagan rides again, and again… Prometheus Unbound raises questions about the atheist spirituality of Symphony of Science‘s star-scientist-studded videos (pun only slightly intended — they are mostly men, yes, but drumming on djembes (!), and it’s well worth waiting to see Jane Goodall tell us about the “wuzzy” line between humans and the […]

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weird life, shadow biospheres, dark signs… & quakes

Posted in Media ecology, Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , on February 27, 2010 | 23 Comments »

The Biology Blog’s post on shadow biospheres intrigued me in part because I’ve been reading Charles Sanders Peirce, for whom semiosis is writ large (and small) throughout all things. Musing philosophically about the search for life on other planets, the author, cyoungbull, writes, “Unless we know how to interpret the signs of such life, we […]

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visualizing immanence

Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, Visual culture, tagged , , , on January 30, 2010 | 6 Comments »

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnTH4VSIQZw?fs=1&hl=en_US This beautifully photographed new BBC documentary, The Secret Life of Chaos, evocatively illustrates one way of thinking about immanence, i.e., the spontaneous emergence of beauty and complexity from natural process. Morphogenesis, self-organization, the collapse of Newtonian physics (into chaos/complexity theory, etc.), the “butterfly effect,” fractal geometry, delicious little biographical details about Alan Turing, Edward […]

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Hell, nature, & justice in Haiti

Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, Politics, Spirit matter, tagged , , on January 14, 2010 | 2 Comments »

What do we do in the aftermath of such a disaster, except to express profound sadness, shock, and sympathy, and to send donations to aid and relief organizations working in the affected areas? How do we even portray it in a way that respects the victims? Citizen media, according to Media Nation blogger Dan Kennedy, […]

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after-thought: living immanently

Posted in Spirit matter, tagged , on December 26, 2009 | 5 Comments »

After posting about “a year of immanence” a few days ago, it occurred to me that I could have called it “A year of living immanently.” And then I thought, What would that mean? Would it be living with one’s face to the wind, always in motion, responding to the flow of life, one’s heart […]

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Avatar: Panthea v. the Capitalist War Machine

Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, Spirit matter, Visual culture, tagged , , , , , , on December 21, 2009 | 42 Comments »

New York Times op-ed columnist Ross Douthat has it partly right: with its tree/Goddess-worshipping, tribal-shamanic-indigenous-hunter-gatherer-Daoist-pagan New-Age all-is-One-ism, Avatar is an expression of the longstanding American tradition of pantheist nature spirituality. Douthat thinks that that’s mainstream and that Hollywood is fully behind it, but it’s really still the insurgent religion to muscular Christianity and militarist nationalism. This is one of the rare films in which the Goddess (Mother Nature & the Natives) takes on the Capitalist War Machine and… well, you’ll have to see who wins.

But behind it all is the Spielberg factor, i.e., that the overt message (‘Man vs. Nature’, or rather high-modernist techno-capitalism vs. Body-Shop-nature-tech) is undercut by the implicit message that it is science, technology, and Hollywood magic — the Image Industry, the Spectacle — that enchants us and brings us what we really want. And they bring us new life, maybe eternal life […]

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subjectivity, impermanence, & dark flow

Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , on December 7, 2009 | 19 Comments »

I think the idea and image of dark flow streaming out of our universe has also been resonating with me because of the work I’ve been doing using Vipassana teacher Shinzen Young’s system of mindfulness training. [. . .] Dark Flow is the (cosmic) Real, the shimmering atomic structure of things behind the structured object-world we (think we) see, the wave-like spirit-energy that Buddhists calls “emptiness” only because giving it a more substantialist term would already be a way of trying to contain it. Call it emptiness, or dark flow. If astrophysicists hadn’t “seen” it, we would have had to invent it. (I mean we, invent, it.)

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