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Posts Tagged ‘spirituality’

For a 21st century Logos

Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , on December 20, 2023 | Leave a Comment »

Teaching my course in comparative spiritual practices, I find there is a rationality underpinning each, but that some require lesser leaps of faith (for us twenty-first-century humans) than others. Stoicism is one of the lesser-leap philosophies: it has a pretty systematic account of the nature of things, which resonates with modern science reasonably well, and […]

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Image ecologies, spiritual polytropy, and the Anthropocene

Posted in Spirit matter, Visual culture, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 29, 2020 | 2 Comments »

An article of mine by that title has appeared in a special issue of the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture on “Popular Culture, Religion, and the Anthropocene.” The article contains the theoretical core of the book I’m currently writing on image regimes. It builds on my work in cinema and media […]

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Comparative ‘practicology’: Philosophy as a way of life

Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , on January 21, 2018 | 21 Comments »

This course (an Honors College course I’m happy to be to teaching this year) is already in progress, but I’d be curious to hear any comments on it. What would you include in a comparative overview of spiritual practices? What’s missing?  Self-Cultivation and Spiritual Practice: Comparative Perspectives This course introduces students to the comparative study […]

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Interview & autobio

Posted in Process-relational thought, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 31, 2016 | 4 Comments »

Interviews are funny things: you have to think on the spot, but later realize how deeply and profoundly imperfect (!) was your choice of words. The Imperfect Buddha Podcast has an interview with me in which host Matthew O’Connor (of Post-Traditional Buddhism) and I talk at length about Buddhism, process-relational metaphysics, panpsychism, social constructionism, cognitive science, […]

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A process view of “religious Nones”

Posted in Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on May 18, 2016 | 4 Comments »

While I’ve done no formal surveys, my best guess is that about half my students here at the U of Vermont (at least those in Environmental Studies) would fit into the category of “religiously unaffiliated,” the so-called “religious Nones” — a category that now makes up almost 1 in 4 Americans and over a third of those […]

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Fine-tuning the mystical experience

Posted in Spirit matter, tagged , , 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 […]

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‘Self-help,’ James Ray, and spiritual culture

Posted in Spirit matter, tagged , , 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 […]

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Eco-onto-politics 3: Wilber, Integralism, & Whitehead

Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , on April 16, 2011 | 5 Comments »

This post continues from the previous in this series, which looked at integral ecophilosopher Sean Esbjorn-Hargens’s writing on the ontology of climate change. Here I examine the relationship between leading integral theorist Ken Wilber, integralist Esbjorn-Hargens, and process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. It’s a little difficult to separate Wilber’s and Esbjorn-Hargens’s views on Whitehead. I […]

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Religion & the Japanese tragedy

Posted in Eco-culture, Media ecology, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on March 16, 2011 | 7 Comments »

Just as the Haitian earthquake was followed by a welter of religious interpretations (fundamentalist Christians blaming sinful Haitians for it, Vodoun practitioners weighing in on the events, etc.), so the Japanese quake-tsunami-meltdown trilogy is offering evidence of humanity’s interpretive propensities. You may have already seen the YouTube troll video satirizing right-wing Christian responses, which scandalized […]

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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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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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