In an older post, I included the accompanying image of the “Suffering Servant” without proper attribution. The image is beautiful and striking and I wanted to apologize to its author, Marcella Paliekara, for my failure. If you’re interested in this image or in her other work, you can contact Marcella at Paliekara@yahoo.com.
Spurred by George Handley’s eco-theological reflections in Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River, I’ve been reading Wallace Stegner. Like Handley, Stegner is interested in the tight twine of body, place, and genealogy that makes a life. On my account, Handley and Stegner share the same thesis: if the body is a river, […]
My friend and colleague Gregory Hoskins is editing an interdisciplinary journal called Expositions. He and the journal recently hosted a roundtable discussion about the Zizek/Milbank interchange. You can find the discussion here. Contributors include Jeffrey Robbins, Brian Robinette, Frederiek Depoortere, Clayton Crockett, and Adam Kotsko. You can find a link to my own thoughts on the […]
“They call it Christianity. I call it consciousness.” —Emerson You are going to miss it. You’re distracted. Sit up straight. You’re not paying attention. God does not come and go – your attention does. All sins are just variations on that same desire to do something else when you’re already doing something. Multitaskers are children of […]
I was listening this morning to Paul Bloom’s book, How Pleasure Works, while I walked a few miles (still no running yet for me after I broke my ankle six weeks ago playing basketball – “You’re not 22 anymore!” my wife and mother said in unison). Toward the end of the book, Bloom talks about a […]
An attempt this week to organize some thoughts, inspired by my work on Bruno Latour, about how to describe my approach to hermeneutics. 1. Material Semiotics Broadly, my hermeneutic approach could be described as a “material semiotics,” but the kind of material semiotics I’ve got in mind requires us to read the relationship between the “material” […]
A friend recommended E. M. Cioran’s On the Heights of Despair (University of Chicago Press, 1996). Cioran is a kind of 20th century, Romanian Nietzsche who “denounced systematic thought and abstract speculation in favor of indulgence in personal reflection and passionate lyricism.” “I’ve invented nothing,” he said, “I’ve simply been the secretary of my sensations.” It will […]
I. Short Version Speculating this week – with one eye on Lacan, one eye on the Buddha, and one eye on Paul – about the nature of sin. In brief: 1. Say that sin is “the compulsion to repeat.” Or, perhaps better, the necessity of repetition experienced as a compulsion. […]
I. Introduction Continuing the business of cross-pollinating my work in contemporary Continental phenomenology (and, in particular, the phenomenology of religion) with Eastern brands phenomenology, I recently came across a striking reading of Buddhism’s “four noble truths” in Stephen Batchelor’s new book, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist (Spiegel & Grau, 2010). I think Batchelor’s […]