Back in 2014, musing on Emma Restall Orr’s excellent Wakeful World, I presented a paradox at the center of the mind / body dualism that’s usually assumed by both western science and religion. The crux of the paradox is: why are we conscious, but other things aren’t? Most people consider humanity conscious, but all other…
Category: Philosophy and Religion
Dogma Bites Man: the Role of Reason in Religion
The road to enlightenment can be, and has been, walked by people contemplating the Bible’s oddly phrased, simplistic, and disjointed attestations, precisely because they are odd, simplistic, and disjointed.
The Face of Justice
The hooded eyes
Open to let just enough light in, each photon carrying the universe within it —
The rest of the face utterly relaxed, at rest.
Things Fall Apart: Why We Think Everything’s Getting Worse
Most Americans, year after year, continue to think that the country is on the wrong track. The older you are (i.e, the more experienced you are, and the more of history you’ve seen), the more likely you are to think everything is falling apart. And it’s not just in America: worldwide, people tend to think…
Meditation: Animist Consecration
Last night my awesome wife Ali and I joined in a set of consecration ceremonies at our Unitarian Universalist church. Along with the Reverend’s UU blessing and our friend Chris’s Wiccan consecration, we demonstrated a Druid / Animist method of connecting with an object. I say “connecting with” an object instead of “consecrating” because in…
Powers of Darkness
The children have collectively created a mythology that is rich, colorful, and choked with fear and desperation.
Big Data Will Blind You
Not all of us are scientists, but all of us today are consumers of science. And I mean science, not technology. When we want to lose weight, or make more money, or find that perfect someone, we don’t go to gurus, and we don’t go with our guts. We look at the latest studies. It’s…
In Which Links are Forged and Pods are Cast
My attention has been away from this blog for a while, so I thought it might be interesting to collect some links to what I’ve been working on. Over at Faith, Fern, and Compass, for example, I’ve contributed a couple of articles that might be of interest to you: The Sea in the Skull Theologians…
The Toxic Society
I stumbled on an old, ignored piece of news the other day, which struck me powerfully. Apparently crime rates in the United States continue to plummet, despite the ongoing recession. While I had assumed that the drop in crime rate was related to our insanely high rate of incarceration, apparently that doesn’t really explain it….
Genesis: the Story of Why We’re Different
In the summer of 2011 I was fortunate enough to go to the Wild Goose Festival, a gathering of speakers and artists active in the “emergent Christianity” movement, and there Alison and I met up with Carl McColman, who introduced us to Mike Morell. Like most of the awesome people at the Wild Goose, Mike…
