Authority
07.26.03 | Permalink | Comments Off on Authority
Signage
07.25.03 | Permalink | Comments Off on Signage
Shutterbug belatedly begins scavenger hunt
07.25.03 | Permalink | Comments Off on Shutterbug belatedly begins scavenger hunt
The good folks over at sh1ft.org have a dandy little online scavenger hunt going called 26 Things. I’ve only got a week left to get all mine in, but here’s my first two photos: color and footwear. (All photos will enlarge when you click.)
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Worth the trouble?
07.24.03 | Permalink | 2 Comments
From Isaiah Berlin via Crooked Timber, with all philosophers converted to god-talkers:
…third-rate historians, fourth-rate chemists, even fifth-rate artists, painters, composers, architects, may be of some value; for all these subjects have their own techniques and operate at their own proper level, which may be low, but remains a level. But there is no such thing as third-rate or fourth-rate rebellion, there is no such thing as a trivial effort to cause a major upheaval. That is why the third-and fourth-rate god-talkers, who are really engaged in applying techniques of their predecessors who are dead and gone, as if they were practicing a science, as if they were being chemists or engineers, are not so much unsuccessful or unimportant, or unncessary or superfluous, as positively obstructive . . . In god-talk alone the plodding, competent, solid workers who cling to accepted methods, and half-consciously seek to preserve familiar landmarks, and work within a system of inherited concepts and categories, are a positive obstruction and a menace—the most formidable of all obstacles to progress. The world, one likes to think, has been created for some given purpose and everything in it plays some necessary part. If you ask what necessary part the second- and third- and fourth-rate god-talkers, and those, even, below that line, can have been created to play, perhaps the answer is that, if they did not exist, the possibility of those great creative rebellions which mark the stages of human thought would never have occurred.
Correct or incorrect?
On integralist ethics
07.22.03 | Permalink | Comments Off on On integralist ethics
(Responding to Daniel’s comments.)
One of the things that panentheism implies is that the processes of life, the universe and everything (somehow) mirror (darkly) the processes of god. Under panentheism, to approach the ways of god you should approach the ways of nature.
The distinction is one of models. Claiming panentheism is a claim against other models for god-talk. The models of god-talk we’ve considered with Walter Wink vary in how they relate god to nature, heaven to earth.
So panentheism is a claim against god/heaven being over-and-above nature/earth. Conceptions of ethics-as-moral-law depend upon the theistic model; even if they do not claim a god, these models all claim a god’s-eye-view. Same difference. Since ethics-as-moral-law depends upon a theistic model, panentheism must deny ethics-as-moral-law.
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Early sketch for an ‘integralist’ god-talk
07.21.03 | Permalink | 6 Comments
1.0 integralism
1.1) Affirmation of panentheism: that god is in all and that all is in god.
1.2) Integral: a) Essential or necessary for completeness; constituent: b) Possessing everything essential; entire. c) A complete unit; a whole. (dictionary.com)
2.0 god-talk
2.1) Denial of god’s omnipotence; affirmation of god’s total grace (that is, universalism).
2.2) Denial of monotheism, of a transcendent “the-one-god.”
2.3) Affirmation of Taoist teachings of the inherent co-incidence of “yin” and “yang.”
2.4) Affirmation of Buddhist teachings of the “interdependent co-arising” of all.
2.5) Denial of atheism as a violation of panentheism.
2.6) Affirmation (in principle) of the third person of the Christian trinity: the holy spirit.
2.7) Affinity with nontheism.
3.0 universe-talk
3.1) Denial of the following bifurcations: matter/mind, flesh/spirit, saved/lost.
3.2) Suspicion of the following bifurcations: Creator/creation, human/divine.
3.3) Suspicion of pantheism, monism, animism.
4.0 humanity-talk
4.1) Denial of Christian teachings of “original sin.”
4.2) Affirmation of Christian teaching of “incarnation” as model for cooperation with god; denial of Christian teaching of “incarnation” insofar as a “scandal of particularity.”
4.3) Affirmation of the following as first order priorities in human relations: shalom, hesed, Jubilee, blessing.
4.4) Affirmation of the following as second order priorities in human relations: eudaimonia, justice, ekklesia, oikonomia, koinania.
4.5) Recognition of crises as moments of primary moral import
4.6) Affirmation of habitus as primary vehicle for moral action
5.0 cultus-talk
5.1) Denial of clergy as mediators between god and humanity.
5.2) Affirmation of community as a primary site of human cooperation with god
6.0 eschaton-talk
6.1) Affirmation of the intrusion of kairoi into the present moment.
6.1) Affirmation of final justice and the redemption of the past.
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