February 2026 - Sam Harrelson

The Overstory

Reading The Overstory felt less like moving through a novel and more like being slowly re-schooled in perception. Which is something I study intently, so the book was an ongoing wonderful surprise (much as its structure itself).

Richard Powers does not simply tell stories about trees here, but rearranges the conditions under which we notice them at all through various timelines (some that fracture) and characters. I wasn’t sure what I was reading for the first few hours, but the unfolding leaves of the book flowered over time.

Early in the book, one of the most quietly destabilizing lines appears:

“The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind.”

That line could easily pass as a reflection on politics (especially currently) or culture, and became an entry in my own notebook. But within the arc of the novel, it becomes ecological. The crisis is not primarily informational. It is perceptual. We do not fail to act because we lack data. We fail because we do not see.

This is where the novel began to move into territory that those of us working in phenomenology and ecological theology will recognize immediately. Powers is not asking us to care more about trees, and this is not a tree-huggers’ guide to discourse. He is asking us to experience the field of relation differently, in which care might even arise.

Another moment comes when the text reminds us:

“This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees.”

That reversal landed with philosophical force for me. It unsettles the background assumption that the human is the measure of belonging on this planet. Trees are not an object of the landscape. They are participants in the very conditions that make landscapes, histories, and even narratives possible.

In this sense, The Overstory mirrors the kind of ecological intentionality I have been trying to tease out in my own work and writings. The novel dramatizes what Edith Stein might call the givenness of another’s reality, not as projection, not as abstraction, but as presence that precedes our categories. The trees in Powers’ narrative are never romanticized into human likeness. Nor are they reduced to inert matter. They are encountered as beings whose temporalities, communicative capacities, and communalities exceed our usual frames.

At one point, the novel observes:

“The tree is really a kind of massively branched, above-ground root.”

The sentence is biologically true. Yet, it also works metaphysically. It dissolves our habit of separating what is visible from what sustains. The forest becomes less a collection of individuals and more a process of relation.

Process thought and panpsychism came to my mind many times as well. Whitehead’s sense that reality consists of interdependent occasions rather than isolated substances finds narrative embodiment here, with connections appearing from the soil of the novel in curious ways. No character stands alone. Each life is drawn into wider systems of exchange, decay, regeneration, and memory.

Memory is central throughout the book. Powers repeatedly insists that trees are temporal beings whose scale stretches beyond our narrative patience. One of the most haunting insights comes in the simple observation:

“Trees pass messages to one another through the air.”

The novel treats this not as a metaphor but as an ecological truth. Chemical signaling, fungal networks, shared stress responses. Yet what matters is less the mechanism than the invitation. If communication extends beyond language, then relation extends beyond recognition.

This is where the book becomes moving rather than merely informative in my opinion (though the opening 1/3 with character vignettes is superbly done).

We begin to sense that our estrangement from the more-than-human world is not caused by distance but by habit in the phenomenological sense. We have trained our perception to notice speed, novelty, and control. Trees operate through slowness, repetition, and persistence. They are, in Powers’ framing, beings whose stories unfold on temporal scales that challenge narrative closure and who live much longer than humans.

In a line that feels almost like a thesis for the whole work, we are told:

“The seeds of things are in trees.”

Not just biological seeds, but imaginative ones. The possibility of another way of inhabiting the world.

The novel does not pretend that this shift of perception or attention is easy. The human characters struggle, fail, and fracture, as do some of the timelines. Some become activists, some become disillusioned, some turn inward, and some choose to end their human lives. Yet across these divergent arcs runs a shared realization that the world we inhabit has never been exclusively ours.

There’s a common refrain harkening back to Ovid’s Metamorphosis:

Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.

For me, the most powerful effect of The Overstory was the way it mirrors the experience of sitting with a particular tree over time. The black walnut I have been tracking in my own work comes to mind. Powers captures that strange sensation that the longer one attends, the less the tree appears as an object and the more it becomes a presence that gathers relations.

In one passage, the novel notes:

“People aren’t the apex species they think they are.”

The line is not accusatory. It is clarifying. It suggests that our dominance has always depended on a background we barely perceive.

What the novel offers, finally, is not an argument but a reorientation. It does not insist that trees are sacred in a theological sense. Yet it quietly renders them neighborly in a phenomenological one with a story to tell us if we have ears to hear.

And once that shift occurs, the ethical implications follow without coercion.

The brilliance of The Overstory lies in this restraint. It does not preach (as some reviewers on subreddits hold). It attends. It does not collapse human suffering into ecological process, nor does it elevate the nonhuman into sentimental purity. Instead, it invites us to inhabit a layered world where grief, endurance, and regeneration are shared conditions.

It leaves us with a sense that the crisis we face is not simply environmental but relational. We have forgotten how to perceive participation.

Powers helps us remember.

When Intelligence Becomes Land Use (or When the Cloud is Made of Land)

Much of the conversation around Project Spero, with the proposed AI data center here in Spartanburg, has revolved around a few similar questions that we keep hearing as a framework for processing development in general. How many jobs will it bring? How much tax revenue will it generate? Will it strain our power grid? Will it draw too heavily from our water systems? What are the environmental impacts?

These are certainly necessary questions. They are practical, measurable, and tied to the immediate realities of governance and infrastructure. However, they are not the only questions worth asking, nor are they the origin of where our concern or attention should stem from, despite the competing marketing messages meant to shape public discourse.

Beneath the debates about megawatts and gallons per minute lies a quieter transformation that is harder to see but just as consequential. Projects like this do not simply add another industrial facility to the landscape. They introduce a new kind of presence into a place. They materialize intelligence.

For generations, land use in the Carolina Piedmont has followed recognizable patterns. Fields became suburbs, forests became highways, and rivers became reservoirs, while textile mills rose and fell. Logistics hubs replaced smokestacks. Each phase reorganized the landscape around a dominant economic logic… agriculture, manufacturing, distribution.

Now something different is emerging. Proposed AI infrastructure here in Spartanburg and throughout the Southeast of the United States does not primarily produce goods, textiles, or even physical services. Its purpose is to process cognition. To store, refine, and distribute decision-making capacity and contribute to the global chain of commodifying intelligence.

In effect, this all turns land into substrate for thinking.

This may sound abstract, but its implications are intensely material. Data centers are among the most physically demanding infrastructures ever built. They require enormous electricity flows, steady access to water for cooling, stable transmission corridors, and continuous connectivity. They generate heat that must be managed. They demand redundancy and resilience. In other words, they reorganize ecosystems to support continuous computation.

The Piedmont is not being asked simply to host an industry, but to sustain a new layer of perceived planetary intelligence to meet the resource needs of large language models. I think that changes the conversation.

When farmland became suburbia, we asked whether roads could handle the traffic. When distribution centers arrived, we asked whether zoning permitted increased truck traffic. But when intelligence becomes land use, the questions shift in both ontological and material ways that we’re not processing.

How much river becomes cooling capacity? How much forest becomes a transmission corridor? How much atmospheric stability becomes heat dissipation? How much regional resilience is redirected toward maintaining uninterrupted cognition?

Human systems do not float above ecological limits. They are embedded within them. AI infrastructure does not escape this reality at all; rather, it intensifies it.

What we are witnessing in places like Spartanburg is not simply economic development. It is the localization of a global cognitive metabolism. Decisions made in distant financial centers or algorithmic markets are beginning to rely on landscapes like ours for their material continuation.

The cloud, it turns out, is made of land.

This does not make projects like Spero inherently good or bad. But it does make them more consequential than the language of “jobs versus environment” suggests.

We are no longer deciding whether to permit another factory or mill. We are deciding whether this landscape will participate in sustaining planetary-scale computation, and it’s a different kind of civic choice.

It asks us not only to measure output and impact, but to reflect on orientation. What kinds of futures are we grounding here? What relationships between land, water, and intelligence are we normalizing? And perhaps most importantly… what forms of attention will this infrastructure train us to attend to (or be attended by)?

Because once intelligence becomes land use, the question is no longer only what we build on the land. It is what kind of world the land is being asked to think into being.

Project Spero and Pauses… Real Questions Are Just Beginning

When I last wrote about Project Spero earlier this month, the proposed AI data center slated for the Tyger River Industrial Park here in Spartanburg County, the story felt like it was accelerating toward inevitability. However, something interesting has happened.

Momentum has slowed.

According to recent reporting, Spartanburg County Council now appears weeks away from a third reading and final decision on whether to grant the tax incentives needed to bring TigerDC’s massive facility here. Yet a council member who previously supported the project is now signaling that it may not move forward at all, following widespread public opposition and mounting questions about infrastructure readiness.

Thousands of residents have signed petitions opposing the project, and hundreds have shown up at recent hearings to raise concerns about energy demand, water use, and long-term environmental impacts.

In other words, this is no longer just a development story or possibilities, but is becoming a community discernment moment about what kind of intentional development we want in the local context.

The Shape of the Project Is Becoming Clearer

We are finally learning more about what Project Spero entails.

TigerDC has indicated the facility could eventually reach up to 400 megawatts of energy demand, with an initial phase closer to 100 MW. For perspective, that level of power draw is often compared to the energy consumption of a mid-sized city like Spartanburg.

Company representatives say the project would rely partly on on-site natural gas generation (which, in itself, raises a number of issues) while also drawing from the regional grid, and they insist that the buildout would strengthen infrastructure rather than strain it. They also point to potential economic benefits, including a limited number of jobs (50?) and hundreds of millions in projected tax revenue over decades.

But the concerns voiced by residents cut to the heart of a deeper issue…even if this project is financially beneficial (for whom?), is our ecological and civic infrastructure prepared to absorb it?

Because data centers do not simply sit on land. They metabolize it.

The Infrastructure Question Has Come Into Focus

Opposition to the data center has wisely moved beyond the “is AI good or bad?” rhetoric, as far as I’ve been reading, to focus on whether Spartanburg’s systems are ready. Residents have raised concerns about electrical grid capacity, water use for cooling, air emissions from on-site generation, and noise from proximity to residential communities.

These are not abstract worries. Large-scale data centers are known to consume vast amounts of both electricity and water, and local critics are asking whether the Upstate’s systems, already under seasonal strain, can realistically support another industrial-scale load.

So the main infrastructure question (in my mind) should be “What will this require from the land and the people who live here long-term?”

A key turning point for moving ahead with Project Spero and receiving the County Council’s blessing may be the proposed tax arrangement. County leaders are considering allowing TigerDC to pay a reduced fee-in-lieu-of-taxes rate of 4% rather than the standard 10.5% for up to 40 years. That incentive appears crucial to the project’s viability and existence given the financial stakes for TigerDC.

If a project requires long-term public subsidy to arrive, who carries the long-term ecological cost once it does?

This Is No Longer Just About Technology

Across the political spectrum, residents are beginning to articulate a shared concern that growth is not neutral in our local communities. The siting of digital infrastructure is also the siting of energy systems, water systems, emissions, and land-use transformations. AI is often described as weightless or virtual or “cloud-based” in clever marketing and PR speak. But the reality is quite the opposite. Data centers are grounded in turbines, pipelines, cooling systems, transmission lines, and land that not-so-quietly consumes incredible amounts of water, power, atmospheric quality, and community well-being.

In other words, in ecology.

Questions That Still Need to Be Asked

Even as the project’s future remains uncertain, several key questions remain unanswered:

How much water will be required at full buildout?

What happens to regional grid stability during peak demand or extreme weather events?

How will emissions from on-site gas generation be monitored?

What guarantees exist regarding long-term infrastructure upgrades?

What happens if the project expands beyond its initial phase?

And perhaps most importantly:

Who gets to decide what kind of future Spartanburg is building?

Hope, in the Older Sense

It’s worth remembering the meaning behind the name Spero…

“While I breathe, I hope.”

Hope, in this older sense, is not optimism. It is attention.

The recent slowing of this project does not mean it will disappear. A final vote is still approaching, regardless of the third reading’s outcome. But it does suggest something healthy that our community pauses long enough to ask what kind of relationship it wants with the infrastructures shaping its future.

That pause may turn out to be the most important development of all!

Empathy and Imagination as Practices of Hope

It’s not difficult to feel pessimistic right now, especially after last night’s State of the Union and all of its divisiveness on all sides of the aisles, all impotent with the seemingly slouching towards Gomorrah.

The thing that we’re all afraid of has multiple names beyond human words.

Every morning news cycle seems to stack another layer onto an already crowded horizon from ecological instability, biodiversity loss, accelerating AI systems, widening economic uncertainty, political fracture, school shootings, and the persistent drumbeat of conflict. None of these is an abstract trend. They show up in the texture of daily life… in energy debates here in the Carolinas, in conversations about data centers and water use, in classrooms, churches, and family tables, and even in the quiet unease many of us feel about the technological systems reshaping our attention and labor.

The temptation is to respond with denial, despair, or an eternal, paralyzing grief. Denial insists things aren’t really that bad. Despair insists nothing can be done. Both short-circuit meaningful engagement. The algorthims program us to this more than we program the algorithms. Same as it ever was.

But for me, the path toward something like grounded optimism has increasingly come down to two intertwined capacities: empathy and imagination.

Not optimism as cheerfulness or optimism as naive confidence. But optimism is a disciplined openness to possibility within real limits.

Empathy as a Way of Knowing

Empathy is often treated as a moral trait, something we either have or lack (or should eschew). But phenomenologically, it is better understood as a mode of perception.

Edith Stein described empathy not as projecting ourselves into another, nor as observing them from a safe distance, but as a distinctive act in which another’s experience is given to us as genuinely theirs… irreducibly other, yet meaningfully present. Empathy does not collapse difference. It allows relation without possession.

When expanded beyond human-to-human encounters, this becomes an ecological capacity.

To practice ecological empathy is to recognize that forests, rivers, species, and landscapes are not merely resources or backdrops. They are participants in shared conditions of life. Sitting with the black walnut in my backyard here in Spartanburg has taught me more about this than any abstract theory. The tree does not “speak” in human language, yet its seasonal rhythms, vulnerabilities, and persistence disclose a form of presence that invites response. Empathy here is not sentimental projection. It is attentiveness to relational reality.

This matters for optimism because despair often grows from abstraction. When the world is reduced to statistics, models, and catastrophic projections, it becomes psychologically uninhabitable. Empathy returns us to situated relation. It anchors concern in concrete encounters rather than overwhelming totals.

We do not save “the environment.” We learn to live differently with the places and beings already shaping our lives.

Imagination as the Extension of Empathy

If empathy opens us to the reality of others, imagination opens us to possible futures with them.

Imagination is frequently dismissed as escapist or unrealistic, but historically it has been one of humanity’s most practical tools. Every social institution, technological system, ethical reform, or ecological restoration effort began as an imagined alternative to what currently existed.

The crises we face today are not only technical. They are narrative and perceptual. Climate models can tell us what may happen. Economic forecasts can outline risks. AI researchers can map trajectories. But none of these, by themselves, generate livable futures. That requires the imaginative capacity to envision forms of coexistence that do not yet fully exist.

This is why ecological thinkers from Thomas Berry to Joanna Macy have emphasized the importance of story. Without imagination, data produces paralysis. With imagination, data becomes orientation.

Imagination does not deny danger. It prevents danger from becoming destiny.

Why These Matter in the Age of AI

Artificial intelligence intensifies this dynamic.

AI systems increasingly mediate how we work, communicate, and interpret information. They promise efficiency while also raising questions about labor, creativity, authorship, and the ecological costs of computation itself. It is easy to frame this moment as a competition between humans and machines, or as a technological inevitability moving beyond human control.

Empathy and imagination disrupt that framing.

Empathy reminds us that technological systems are embedded in human and ecological contexts. Data centers draw on water and energy. Algorithms shape social behavior. Design choices reflect values. These systems are not autonomous destinies but relational infrastructures whose impacts are distributed across communities and landscapes.

Imagination, meanwhile, allows us to ask better questions than “Will AI replace us?” Instead we can ask: What forms of human and more-than-human flourishing should technology support? What would a genuinely ecological technological future look like? What practices of attention, education, and governance might guide development in that direction?

Without imagination, AI becomes fate, but with imagination, it becomes a field of ethical and ecological design.

Optimism as a Practice, Not a Prediction

The kind of optimism I find credible today is not based on predictions about outcomes. It is based on practices that keep possibilities open.

Empathy keeps us relationally awake.
Imagination keeps us temporally open.

Together, they resist the two dominant distortions of our moment: the reduction of the world to objects and the reduction of the future to inevitabilities.

When we practice empathy, we perceive that the world is still alive with agencies, relationships, and meanings that exceed our control. When we practice imagination, we acknowledge that the future is still under construction, shaped not only by systems but by perception, story, and choice.

This does not eliminate risk. It does not guarantee success. But it sustains participation.

And participation, more than prediction, is what hope requires.

A Quiet Form of Hope

Some mornings, optimism looks less like a grand vision and more like a small act of attention.

Watching the black walnut shift through seasons. Seeing our children learn to perceive and adapt to new challenges, from math problems to social interactions to losing the championship in a youth basketball league, and listening carefully to a student’s question. Reimagining how a church, classroom, or local community might respond differently to ecological pressures. Writing, teaching, or building something that nudges perception toward relation instead of domination.

None of these solves global crises on its own, but they do cultivate the perceptual habits from which meaningful change becomes thinkable.

Empathy grounds us in the reality of shared life while imagination opens that shared life toward futures not yet fixed.

In a time when so much feels predetermined, these two capacities remain profoundly human… and profoundly necessary.

And for me, that is reason enough to remain cautiously, actively optimistic.

“…but I’m not the only one…”

Presentation at Yale on “Returning to the Roots: Edith Stein, Empathy, and Ecological Intentionality”

Here’s my full presentation for Yale Divinity’s 2026 Graduate Conference in Religion and Ecology that was held last week (February 2026)… what a great time to be back at Yale Divinity after graduating in 2002!

Roots of Cruciform Consciousness: Edith Stein, Empathy, and the Ground of Ecological Intentionality

Sam Harrelson, PhD Student, California Institute of Integral Studies
Yale Graduate Conference on Religion and Ecology
February 2026

The theme of this gathering invites us to consider whether what we need for the future might already lie beneath our feet. Such language can easily be heard metaphorically, pointing toward ancestral wisdom, inherited traditions, or the rediscovery of forgotten practices. Yet phenomenologically, the claim may be more literal and methodological than it first appears. What lies beneath our feet is not only soil or memory but the perceptual ground through which the world becomes meaningful at all. The question of roots is therefore not only historical or ecological but experiential. It concerns how the world appears to us, and how we appear within it.

This paper proposes that Edith Stein’s phenomenology of empathy offers a way to rethink ecological consciousness precisely at this level of perception. Stein’s account of empathy, developed in her early work On the Problem of Empathy, does more than explain how one human being understands another. It articulates the structure through which another center of experience becomes present to consciousness at all. When considered in light of contemporary ecological crisis, Stein’s analysis suggests that the breakdown we face is not only technological, political, or economic. It is also perceptual. The challenge before us may therefore involve not simply new policies or innovations, but a re-rooting of awareness itself.

Empathy as the Disclosure of Another Life

Stein famously resists two common misunderstandings of empathy. Empathy is neither projection nor inference. It is not the imaginative insertion of myself into another’s position, nor is it a logical deduction based on external signs. Instead, empathy is a distinctive intentional act in which another’s experience is given to me as genuinely theirs. I encounter the other not as an extension of myself, nor as a merely observable object, but as a subject whose interior life is present while remaining irreducibly other.

This formulation is subtle but decisive. Empathy preserves difference while establishing relation. It allows proximity without collapse, recognition without possession. The other’s experience appears as both accessible and inexhaustible. I grasp something of their joy, suffering, or intention, yet never exhaust it. Their life exceeds my comprehension even as it becomes present to me.

What is often overlooked is that Stein does not treat empathy primarily as a moral achievement. It is not first a virtue or emotional capacity. Rather, empathy belongs to the ontological structure of consciousness itself. The world we inhabit is never neutral or empty. It is always already populated by other living centers of activity whose presence shapes the field of experience. Empathy, in this sense, is not an optional addition to human life but a basic condition for the appearance of a shared world.

Seen from this perspective, empathy precedes ethics. It grounds the possibility of ethics by disclosing that we do not inhabit the world alone. The recognition of another’s interiority is not a later interpretive step but an original feature of how the world shows up at all.

Ecological Crisis as Perceptual Crisis

If Stein is right, then the ecological crisis may be understood partly as a crisis in this very structure of perception. The devastation of ecosystems is not only the result of poor management or technological excess. It is also enabled by a way of seeing in which the natural world appears primarily as an object rather than as a community.

Forests become timber, rivers become resources, soil becomes substrate, and landscapes appear as inventories of use-value rather than as living fields of relation. In phenomenological terms, the world is flattened into availability. Once this perceptual reduction takes hold, exploitation follows almost inevitably. What no longer appears as expressive or relational becomes disposable.

This does not mean that ecological destruction results simply from individual failures of empathy. Rather, it suggests that modern technological culture has cultivated a habitual mode of perception in which relational presence is systematically obscured. The more-than-human world becomes intelligible primarily through abstraction, measurement, and utility. The experiential sense of encountering other forms of life as centers of activity recedes from view.

Stein’s phenomenology offers a way to articulate what has been lost. If empathy is the structure through which another life becomes present, then ecological renewal may require not only new forms of governance but renewed perception. The task is not to sentimentalize nature or project human consciousness onto nonhuman beings. It is to recover the capacity to encounter the world as populated by lives that exceed our own perspective.

Toward Ecological Intentionality

To name this possibility, I use the term ecological intentionality. In phenomenological language, intentionality refers to the directedness of consciousness toward the world. Ecological intentionality designates a mode of awareness oriented not toward mastery or control but toward participatory belonging.

Such intentionality recognizes that existence unfolds within networks of interdependence. Living beings present themselves as centers of activity whose interior dynamics cannot be reduced to mechanical explanation alone. Their life is not identical to ours, yet neither is it merely inert. Stein’s careful distinction between empathy and projection is crucial here. We need not claim to fully understand another life in order to acknowledge that it exceeds objecthood.

Ecological intentionality, therefore, involves a shift in posture rather than an expansion of knowledge. It is less about acquiring new information and more about recovering a different way of encountering what is already present. The world begins to appear again as a field of relations in which we are participants rather than external observers.

The Cruciform Pattern of Ecological Life

At this point, the cross can be reexamined phenomenologically. Within Christian theology, the cross is often interpreted primarily as the site of human redemption or divine sacrifice. Yet it can also be read more broadly as a pattern of relational existence. The cross marks the intersection of vulnerability and renewal, finitude and transformation. It signifies that life does not persist by escaping death but through processes that pass through it.

When viewed in ecological terms, this pattern becomes strikingly familiar. Soil forms through decay. Forest ecosystems depend upon cycles of decomposition and regeneration. Nutrients circulate through networks of exchange among fungi, plants, animals, and microorganisms. Life flourishes not despite finitude but through it. Descent into the earth becomes the condition for new emergence.

The cruciform pattern therefore resonates with the very processes unfolding beneath our feet. It names a structure in which loss and renewal, limitation and possibility, are inseparable. Such a reading does not reduce theology to biology or vice versa. Instead, it reveals a shared logic of relational becoming that traverses both domains.

Embodiment, Finitude, and Participation

Stein’s later philosophical and spiritual writings deepen this ecological resonance. In Finite and Eternal Being, she portrays the human person as simultaneously grounded in finitude and opened toward transcendence. This openness does not remove us from the world but situates us more deeply within it. Embodiment is not an obstacle to spiritual life but its very condition.

Through our bodies, we are always already embedded within networks of dependence. We breathe air shaped by ecosystems, consume food produced through soil and climate, and live within material processes we neither originate nor control. Finitude, for Stein, is not deficiency but location. To be finite is to be situated, and to be situated is to belong.

Her reflections in The Science of the Cross extend this insight into explicitly theological territory. Transformation occurs not through domination or escape but through participation in patterns of vulnerability and love. Read ecologically, this suggests that the way forward lies not in transcending earthly conditions but in entering them more fully. The acceptance of interdependence becomes the ground of spiritual as well as ecological maturity.

Place-Based Attention

These themes remain abstract unless they are anchored in lived experience. For me, this anchoring occurs quite literally in the Carolina Piedmont, where I live and work. As part of my research practice, I track the seasonal rhythms of a black walnut tree in my yard. Over the course of the year, I watch its cycles of dormancy, budding, leafing, fruiting, and decay.

Such observation does not transform the tree into a human subject. Yet neither does it remain a mere object. It appears instead as a living center of activity whose rhythms intersect with mine. Its shade shapes my summer afternoons. Its leaves enrich the soil each autumn. Birds and insects inhabit its branches. Time itself becomes visible through its changes.

This practice does not solve climate change or halt biodiversity loss. But it reconfigures perception. The tree ceases to be a resource or backdrop and becomes a participant in a shared field of life. Stein’s phenomenology helps articulate what occurs in such moments. Empathy, understood broadly as the disclosure of another center of life, makes possible a renewed sense of belonging within the world.

Returning to the Roots

To return to the roots, then, is not primarily to recover a lost past. It is to return to the participatory ground of perception itself. When this ground is obscured, the world appears inert and disposable. When it is recovered, the world appears again as expressive, relational, and alive.

From this perspective, ecological responsibility no longer presents itself merely as an external obligation imposed by ethical systems or environmental policies. It emerges instead as the natural expression of inhabiting a shared world. The recognition of belonging precedes and grounds the call to care.

In this sense, what we need may indeed already lie beneath our feet. Not only in the soil and its intricate networks of life, but in the deeper phenomenological roots through which the world first becomes present to us at all.

References

Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy. Trans. Waltraut Stein. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989.

Stein, Edith. Finite and Eternal Being. Trans. Kurt F. Reinhardt. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002.

Stein, Edith. The Science of the Cross. Trans. Josephine Koeppel. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002.

What is Ecology?

My PhD work at CIIS is in Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion (and my dissertation is on what I call the Ecology of the Cross… hence the subtitle of my site here).

Most people hear the word ecology and think of recycling bins, endangered species lists, or debates about climate policy. Ecology gets filed under “environmental issues,” which usually means something happening out there in forests, oceans, or polar ice.

But ecology did not begin as a political category, and it is not primarily about “nature” as something separate from us.

Ecology, at its root, is about home.

The word comes from the Greek oikos, meaning household, dwelling, or place of belonging, combined with logos, meaning study, account, or pattern of understanding. Ecology, then, is the study of the household… the attempt to understand how life lives together.

From the beginning, this includes humans. It always has.

The more scientific discipline of ecology emerged in the nineteenth century to describe relationships among organisms and their environments, but the deeper intuition is older and wider. It asks a simple but destabilizing question:

What does it mean to live within a shared world rather than on top of one?

When we reduce ecology to environmental management, we shrink this question into something technical. Forests become “resources.” Rivers become “water supply.” Soil becomes “land use.” Even conservation can slip into a language of control… how do we preserve, maintain, or optimize the system?

But ecology, in its fullest sense, is not about control. It is about relation.

An ecological perspective notices that nothing exists alone. A tree is not just a tree. It is soil, fungi, rainfall, insect traffic, bird migration, sunlight history, and deep time woven into a living form. A river is not just flowing water. It is geology, watershed, climate, agriculture, policy, memory (human and more-than-human), and story moving together across a landscape.

And a human being is not an isolated self, navigating a neutral backdrop. We are bodies shaped by air, food, language, microbes, culture, ancestry, and place. Even our thoughts emerge within networks of relation… familial, social, historical, material.

Ecology, then, is not merely a branch of biology. It is a way of perceiving reality (which is why I focus so much on empathy as an ontology, or way of thinking).

It invites us to see the world not as a collection of separate objects, but as a field of entanglements. Not as a machine assembled from parts, but as a living household whose members continually shape one another.

This shift is not only scientific. It is existential.

If ecology means household, then ecological crisis is not just environmental damage. It is disordered belonging. It signals that we have forgotten how to live within the home that sustains us.

This forgetting shows up in obvious ways… collapsing biodiversity, warming climates, polluted waters. But it also shows up in quieter, more intimate forms: chronic distraction, alienation from place, the sense that life is happening somewhere else while we scroll through representations of it.

In that sense, ecology is also about attention.

To live ecologically is to learn again how to notice where we are. It is to recognize that the ground beneath our feet is not generic “environment” but a specific, storied place. The Carolina Piedmont is not interchangeable with anywhere else. The black walnut in a backyard is not just another tree. It is a living participant in a shared field of existence… shaping shade, soil, insects, birds, and even the rhythms of a person who chooses to sit beside it each morning.

Ecology begins when we allow ourselves to be addressed by the world we inhabit.

This is why ecological thinking inevitably crosses into philosophy, theology, and even spirituality. Once we recognize that existence is relational all the way down, questions arise that science alone cannot settle. What kind of beings are we within this household? What responsibilities follow from belonging? What forms of knowledge emerge not from standing apart, but from participating?

Some traditions have long held that wisdom begins with remembering that the world is not raw material but shared dwelling. Modern ecology, at its best, does not invent this insight so much as rediscover it in empirical form.

Seen this way, ecology is not just about saving the planet. The planet will persist in some form regardless of us. Ecology is about learning how to live truthfully within the web of life that makes our own existence possible.

It is about recovering the sense that we are not spectators of the world, nor its managers, but members of its household.

And that realization, once it sinks in, changes everything… from how we farm and build to how we teach, pray, design cities, raise children, and even how we sit quietly beneath a tree and listen.

Ecology, in the end, is the study of how life belongs.

And perhaps, also, the practice of remembering that we belong here too.

History as Empathic Ecology: Edith Stein and the Practice of Ecological Empathy

There are moments in academic life when a concept stops being merely theoretical and becomes a lived practice. My presentation this past week at Christendom College’s Eternity In Time (Thinking With the Church Through History) conference on Edith Stein and what I’ve been calling ecological empathy has been one of those moments for me. My conference presentation is below if you’d like to read it, and I’ll post the full, longer paper shortly.

What began as a phenomenological question about how we know another’s experience is real has slowly widened into a question about how we inhabit history, land, and the more-than-human world at all.

Stein’s early work On the Problem of Empathy is often read within psychology or philosophy of mind. But her insight cuts much deeper. Empathy, for Stein, is not projection and not detached observation (probably my best post about this concept so far). It is a distinctive act in which another’s experience becomes present to me as other. I do not become the other, and I do not reduce them to an object. Instead, I encounter a real center of experience that exceeds me.

This structure has profound implications beyond interpersonal ethics. It suggests that knowing is always relational, always asymmetrical, and always grounded in encounter rather than mastery.

From Historical Method to Empathic Participation

In my talk, I suggested that if we take Stein seriously, history itself becomes an empathic practice.

Modern historical method often imagines itself as neutral reconstruction: gather sources, analyze context, produce explanation. But Stein’s phenomenology invites a different posture. The past is not merely a dataset. It is the trace of lived experience. To study history responsibly is therefore not just to explain events but to encounter the lives, intentions, and worlds that once unfolded within them.

This does not mean sentimental identification. Stein explicitly resists that. Instead, it means acknowledging that historical understanding involves a disciplined openness to experiences that are irreducibly not our own.

History, in this sense, becomes a form of relational knowledge… a practice of attending to the presence of others across time.

The Creaturely Horizon

Where this becomes especially compelling for my own work is when we widen the circle of empathy beyond human history.

If empathy is the recognition of another center of experience that is not reducible to me, then ecological awareness begins to look like an expansion of empathic perception. Landscapes, species, watersheds, and ecosystems are not simply backdrops to human drama. They are fields of lived processes, histories, and agencies that exceed human intention.

This is what I’ve been calling the creaturely horizon. It is the recognition that human life always unfolds within a wider community of beings whose existence is not defined by our narratives, economies, or theologies, even though those systems constantly attempt to do just that.

Here in the Carolina Piedmont, this is not abstract. The Pacolet (and Tyger) watershed near our home carries layers of agricultural history, Indigenous displacement, industrial transformation, and ongoing ecological stress. To walk along its edges is to encounter not just scenery but a dense historical and ecological presence. The river is not an object of study alone. It is a participant in a shared world.

Ecological empathy begins precisely at this point: when perception shifts from viewing land as resource to encountering it as a living historical partner.

Empathy, Ecology, and the Limits of Control

One of Stein’s most important contributions is her insistence that empathy preserves difference. The other never becomes fully transparent to me. There is always excess, always depth, always opacity.

Ecologically, this insight is crucial.

Many environmental crises emerge from the illusion that the world can be fully known, predicted, and controlled. Industrial agriculture, extractive economies, and technocratic planning all rely on the assumption that complexity can be reduced to manageable variables.

Stein’s phenomenology undermines this posture at its root. If genuine knowing involves encountering another reality that exceeds my grasp, then ecological knowledge must also involve humility. The more we understand ecosystems, the more we encounter their irreducible complexity.

Ecological empathy therefore does not produce domination. It produces attentiveness, patience, and restraint.

It shifts the question from “How do we manage this system?” to “How do we live responsibly within a world that is not ours alone?”

Toward an Ecological Practice of History

This perspective also reframes the study of Church history, theology, and religious tradition, which has been central to my recent work.

Too often, religious history is narrated as a story of doctrines, institutions, or human conflicts. But if we read it empathically and ecologically, we begin to see something else: traditions emerge within landscapes, climates, agricultural systems, and material constraints. Monastic rhythms follow seasonal cycles. Liturgical calendars mirror ecological time. Theologies of creation reflect lived encounters with land and weather as much as abstract metaphysics.

To study religious history responsibly is therefore to attend not only to texts and ideas but to the ecological worlds in which they were lived.

History, then, becomes not just human memory but a layered field of creaturely relations.

Ecological Empathy as Spiritual Practice

For me, this is not only an academic argument. It is also a spiritual practice.

Ecological empathy begins in small acts of attention. Watching how light changes across the backyard in late afternoon. Noticing the seasonal shifts in the black walnut tree I’ve been tracking. Listening to the sounds of insects returning in early spring. These are not sentimental exercises. They are ways of training perception to recognize the presence of other lives unfolding alongside ours.

Stein helps clarify that empathy is not something we manufacture emotionally. It is something we cultivate perceptually. It begins with learning to encounter others as real.

In a time of ecological crisis, this shift may be more urgent than any policy proposal. Laws and technologies matter. But without transformed perception, they remain fragile.

Ecological empathy invites us to inhabit the world differently… not as managers standing outside it, but as participants within a shared, creaturely history.

Conference Presentation Text

History as Empathic Ecology: Edith Stein and the Creaturely Horizon of Catholic Memory

Sam Harrelson
Christendom College, Feb 2026

Conference Presentation Script

Good afternoon, and thank you for the invitation to be part of this conversation.

Pope Francis recently called for a renewed study of Church history, warning against what he described as an “overly angelic conception of the Church,” one that forgets her spots, wrinkles, and historical embeddedness. His concern is not simply methodological. It is pastoral and ethical. If the Church forgets her historical entanglement with the world, she risks forgetting her responsibility within it.

Today I want to suggest that Edith Stein’s phenomenology of empathy offers a surprisingly powerful way to rethink what it means to study Church history at all. My claim is simple:
If we take Stein seriously, history becomes not only an intellectual discipline but also an empathetic practice… and potentially an ecological one.

Stein’s early work On the Problem of Empathy asks a deceptively basic question: how do we know another’s experience is real?

Her answer resists both projection and detachment. Empathy, for Stein, is neither imagining the other as myself nor observing them as an object. It is a distinctive act in which another’s experience is given to me as genuinely theirs… irreducibly other, yet meaningfully accessible.

Empathy therefore has structure. It involves:

First, the recognition of another as a subject.
Second, an entry into the meaning of their experience.
And third, a return to oneself, now transformed by that encounter.

This is not merely psychology. It is a phenomenology of relational knowing. We come to truth not by standing outside relationships, but by entering them responsibly.

What happens if we bring this insight into the study of Church history?

Too often, historical study oscillates between two poles.

On one side, there is triumphalist narration: the Church as a seamless unfolding of divine purpose.
On the other, there is purely critical detachment: the Church as a sociological object to be explained from the outside.

Both approaches, in different ways, fail Stein’s test. One collapses alterity into ideology. The other refuses encounter altogether.

A Steinian approach to Church history would instead treat the past as something we must empathically encounter.

To study a council, a missionary movement, a devotional practice, or a theological dispute is not only to catalog events. It is to ask:
What worlds of meaning were lived here?
What fears, hopes, and constraints shaped these actions?
What forms of life were made possible… and what forms were foreclosed?

History, in this sense, becomes an act of disciplined attentiveness to lived experience across time.

But Stein’s framework pushes us further than this.

Because once empathy is understood as an openness to real otherness, we face a deeper question:

Who counts as the “other” in historical understanding?

Stein herself focuses primarily on human persons. Yet the structure she identifies does not logically stop there. The Church’s history has always unfolded not only among human actors but within landscapes, climates, material resources, animals, and built environments.

The monasteries of medieval Europe were shaped by forests, rivers, and agricultural cycles.

Missionary expansion often followed trade routes, mineral extraction, and imperial ecologies.

Liturgical art depends on pigments, wood, stone, and labor drawn from specific places.

These are not background conditions. They are part of the creaturely field in which Christian history becomes possible.

If Stein teaches us that knowledge requires acknowledging the real presence of the other, then historical study must also attend to these more-than-human participants in the Church’s story.

This is what I call empathic ecology… or, in my broader work, ecological intentionality.

Here the tradition itself offers companions for Stein.

Hildegard of Bingen’s notion of viriditas, the greening vitality of creation, portrays divine life as manifest in the flourishing of the natural world. For Hildegard, spiritual history and ecological vitality are inseparable.

In contemporary theology, Leonardo Boff’s integral ecology similarly insists that Christian ethics cannot be disentangled from the well-being of Earth’s systems and communities.

Stein provides the phenomenological grammar that helps explain why these insights matter methodologically. If understanding requires empathic openness to real others, then historical truth demands attention not only to human intentions but to the material and ecological conditions that co-shaped them.

Let me offer one brief example.

In the nineteenth century, European engagement with the ancient Near East brought Assyrian reliefs and artifacts into Western museums and theological discourse. These objects were treated as confirmations of biblical history and symbols of civilizational continuity.

Yet their removal also depended on imperial infrastructures, environmental extraction, and the displacement of local cultural ecologies. The Church’s encounter with these artifacts cannot be understood fully without recognizing the ecological and political networks that enabled their movement.

A purely doctrinal history might note the apologetic value of these discoveries.
A purely political history might critique imperial appropriation.

A Steinian, empathic-ecological history asks something more layered:
What worlds of meaning were opened and closed here… for scholars, for local communities, and for the landscapes themselves?

Such questions do not dilute historical rigor. They deepen it.

What does this mean for Catholic higher education today?

If Church history is taught merely as a sequence of events or doctrines, students may inherit either nostalgia or cynicism.

But if history is taught as an empathic encounter with the lived, creaturely reality of the Church across time, it can cultivate something else entirely: humility, responsibility, and solidarity.

Students begin to see that the Church’s past is not an untouchable monument. It is a field of relationships still shaping our present obligations.

In this way, historical study becomes formative rather than merely informative. It trains perception. It forms conscience. It prepares a mode of witness that is less triumphalist and more cruciform… grounded in attention to vulnerability, interdependence, and the real costs of historical action.

Let me close with this thought.

Edith Stein teaches that empathy is not sentimental identification. It is a disciplined openness to the reality of another. It changes how we know, and therefore how we act.

If we bring that insight into the study of Church history, we may discover that the task is not simply to remember what the Church has done.

The deeper task is to learn how to perceive the Church’s past truthfully… within the full web of human and creaturely relations that made it possible.

Such perception does not weaken faith. It grounds it.

And perhaps this is precisely what Pope Francis is asking of us:
not a history that idealizes the Church,
but one that helps the Church inhabit time… and the living world… with deeper honesty, responsibility, and hope.

Thank you.

Good to be back at Yale Div!

Project Spero Data Center Advances in Spartanburg: Power, Water, and the Real Resource Question

When I wrote recently about Project Spero here in Spartanburg and the unfolding “resource question,” the story still felt open, and we didn’t have many details beyond platitudes, so my thoughts were suspended between promise and caution.

This week, it moved. Spartanburg County Council approved the next step for the proposed artificial-intelligence data center after a packed, tense public meeting, advancing the roughly $3 billion project despite vocal opposition from residents concerned about its environmental and infrastructural impacts. The meeting stretched for hours, with hundreds of people filling the chamber and hallway to voice concerns about the scale of the facility planned for the Tyger River Industrial Park. In other words, the decision process is no longer theoretical. It is unfolding in real time (and hopefully with more transparency), and that matters for the path ahead.

Large data center announcements are consistently appearing in public discourse (at least here in the Carolinas), wrapped in abstraction and NDAs, surrounded by investment totals, job counts, and innovation narratives that feel distant from everyday life. But once approvals begin, the conversation shifts from what might happen to what must now be managed. Water withdrawals stop being projections, and power demand stops being modeled. Land use stops being conceptual while all of this becomes material. The movement of Project Spero into the next phase signals that Spartanburg is entering precisely that transition, moving from imagining a future to negotiating its physical cost.

One of the most striking claims emerging from the latest reporting is the developer’s insistence that the proposed AI data center will be “self-sufficient,” operating without straining local infrastructure or putting upward pressure on energy bills. On the surface, that language sounds reassuring, suggesting a facility that exists almost in isolation, drawing only on its own internal systems while leaving the surrounding community untouched.

However, this is precisely where the deeper resource questions I raised earlier become more important, not less. Infrastructure rarely, if ever, functions as an island. Power generation, transmission agreements, water sourcing, fuel supply, and long-term maintenance all unfold within shared regional systems, even when parts of the process occur on-site.

The broader context makes that reassurance harder to take at face value. Large data centers elsewhere have been documented consuming millions of gallons of water per day, and electricity costs have risen sharply in regions where such facilities cluster, with those increases often eventually distributed across customers rather than absorbed privately. That does not mean Spartanburg will necessarily follow the same pattern, but it does mean the conversation cannot end with a press release promise. If anything, the national trajectory suggests the need for clearer disclosure, not simpler assurances.

Local concerns voiced at the council meeting point to exactly this tension. Questions about transmission agreements, cost structures, and regulatory oversight are not abstract procedural details. They are the mechanisms through which “self-sufficiency” is tested in practice. The reported rejection of a large transmission proposal by federal regulators because of potential cost-shifting onto ratepayers highlights how easily infrastructure investments intended for a single industrial project can ripple outward into the broader grid. What appears contained at the planning stage can become shared responsibility over time, particularly when long-term demand growth, maintenance needs, or energy market shifts enter the picture.

The developer’s plan to generate some power on-site using natural gas, along with a closed-loop cooling system designed to limit water use, is significant and worth taking seriously. Those design choices suggest an awareness of public concern and an attempt to mitigate resource draw. But even here, the key question is not simply how much water or power is used inside the facility’s literal boundary fence. The real issue is how those systems connect to fuel supply chains, regional water tables, transmission reliability, and emergency contingencies. A closed loop still depends on an initial fill and ongoing operational stability. On-site generation still relies on pipelines, markets, and regulatory frameworks beyond the site itself. “Self-sufficient” in engineering terms doesn’t mean independent in ecological or civic terms.

This is exactly why the earlier framing of Project Spero as a resource question still holds. The challenge is not whether the developer intends to minimize impact. Most large projects today do for a variety of reasons, from economics to public goodwill to tax incentives. The challenge is that digital infrastructure, such as data centers, operates at scales where even minimized impacts can be structurally significant for smaller regions. Spartanburg is not just deciding whether to host a facility, but is deciding how much of its long-term water, energy capacity, and landscape stability should be oriented toward supporting global computational systems whose primary benefits may be distributed far beyond the county line.

The Council meeting itself was contentious, emotional, and at times interrupted by public reaction. It would be easy to read that as dysfunction, but I read it differently. That level of turnout suggests something deeper than simple opposition or support. Instead, local turnout for this sort of decision signals that residents recognize it touches fundamental questions about the region’s future and what counts as development in a place defined as much by rivers, forests, and communities as by industrial parks. Public tension often marks the moment when a community realizes that a project is not just economic but ecological and cultural.

Data centers, in this sense, are simply the visible tip of a broader shift. Across the Southeast (and especially here in South Carolina), AI-scale computing is accelerating demand for electricity, land, and cooling water at unprecedented levels, asking local governments to balance economic incentives against long-term utility strain, short-term construction jobs against enduring resource commitments, and technological prestige against environmental resilience. Project Spero brings that global tension directly into Spartanburg County. The deeper question is not whether this one facility should exist, but whether communities like ours have the ecological, civic, and ethical frameworks needed to evaluate infrastructure built primarily for planetary digital systems rather than local human (and more-than-human) needs.

Approval of another procedural step does not mean the story is finished. It means the story has entered its consequential phase. This is where transparency, ecological assessment, and long-range planning matter most, not least. Decisions made quietly at this stage often shape regional water use, grid load, and land development patterns for decades. If the earlier phase asked whether we should consider this, now the question is more likely to be how we will live with what we choose (or our elected officials “choose” for us).

What encourages me most is not the vote itself but the turnout. Packed rooms mean people care about the future of this place. They care about rivers, roads, power lines, neighborhoods, taxes, and the invisible infrastructures that shape daily life. That is not obstruction, but is civic life functioning. Project Spero may ultimately prove beneficial, burdensome, or something in between, but the real measure of success will be whether Spartanburg approaches it with clear eyes about both its opportunities and its ecological realities.

The true cost of a data center is never only measured in dollars. It is measured in attention, in energy, and in the long memory of the land that hosts it.

Chicago Food Robots 🤖

As a guy from the Carolinas, we don’t have these on our streets yet, but being in Chicago this week has introduced me to the wonders of food robots on the sidewalks. Fascinating times.

AI Data Centers, NDAs, and Rural Communities

I’ve been writing pretty extensively on the role that AI data centers are having in rural communities here in the Southeast of the United States, but this one literally hits home… I grew up in Marion County, SC (population of around 28,000 total now) and this sort of intentional action is infuriating and anti-democratic to say the least…

Data Centers Are Expanding Quietly Into Black Rural America – Capital B News:

As a rare winter storm bore down on South Carolina, bringing conditions that historically paralyze the state for days, local officials in a rural county quietly pushed through a massive $2.4 billion data center without most residents knowing it was even on the table.

“There was a public meeting, which most were unaware of,” Jessie Chandler, a resident of rural Marion County, told Capital B, referring to a Jan. 22 council meeting. “I know legally they had to announce the public meeting within a certain time frame for all of us to attend, but most of the county [was] preparing for this winter storm, which we know firsthand will affect us all because it has before.”

Marion County officials confirmed that the council signed a nondisclosure agreement, which barred their ability to make the data center public. On the agenda prior to the council meeting, the line item for the vote was called “Project Liberty,” but it did not list details of the project.

The pattern residents of this majority-Black rural county are experiencing is not isolated.

Three Conferences, One Thread: Preparing for Next Week’s Presentations

I’ve learned over my time as a PhD student in the Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion program at the California Institute of Integral Studies that there are seasons in academic and creative life when the work accumulates quietly. Reading stacks grow taller, my notes deepen, and ideas circle back on themselves as I continue reading and writing. Conversations with students, landscapes, and texts start forming into something I can feel taking shape long before it is spoken aloud.

And then there are weeks when those threads surface publicly, all at once!

Next week is one of those weeks, for sure. I’ll be presenting in three different conference settings across the country (while acknowledging the ecological damage caused by air travel)… beginning in Chicago (probably my favorite city, not just due to the fact that I’m a major Cubs fan), then New Haven, and finally in Virginia before heading back home to the Carolinas. Each gathering has its own audience, tone, and intellectual atmosphere, but I think all three are connected by the same underlying set of questions that have been shaping my work in recent years.

Rather than thinking of them as separate events, I’ve started to see them as three vantage points onto a shared terrain as I finalize my thoughts and slides.

DePaul Symposium: Representation, Neighbor, and Visual Ethics

February 17, 2026

The week begins in Chicago at DePaul University, where I’ll participate in a symposium organized by the Association of Scholars of Christianity in the History of Art in partnership with the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology titled “And Who Is My Neighbor?” Refuge, Sanctuary, and Representation in Modern Art and Visual Culture.”

My presentation here (“Ecologies of Refuge: Trees, Crosses, and the Art of Neighborliness“) engages questions of perception and ethical formation through visual culture. The core concern is simple, but I think demanding… images do not merely depict worlds… they train us how to see them (channeling Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, Husserl, etc). They shape who counts as neighbor, what counts as presence, and what counts as belonging.

Also, this conference reconnects me with my long-standing interests in ancient and medieval art and museum work, but through lenses sharpened by ecological and phenomenological study. It feels less like returning to earlier territory and more like rediscovering it with different sensitivities.

Yale Graduate Conference in Religion and Ecology

February 19–20

From Chicago, I head to New Haven for the 10th annual Graduate Conference in Religion and Ecology at Yale Divinity School. This year’s theme, “Return to the Roots: How We Move Forward,” invites participants to reflect on ancestral, ecological, and spiritual grounding in the face of contemporary crisis.

I graduated from Yale Divinity with a MAR in Religion and Literature in 2002, so this will be a sort of homecoming to be doing academic work on campus again, rather than just visiting to see all the changes and campus improvements!

The conference is organized by graduate students and provides an interdisciplinary venue for emerging scholars to share research across theology, environmental humanities, philosophy, ethics, and related fields. It has become a meaningful meeting place within a field that seeks to reconsider how narratives and practices shape human relationships with the environment.

The theme itself asks how place-based relations and inherited traditions might tether communities to hope and guide collective futures… even posing the possibility that what sustains us may already be “right below our feet.”

My presentation is closest to the heart of my PhD work at CIIS so far. I’ll be exploring ecological intentionality as both a philosophical framework and a lived practice. Drawing on phenomenology, process thought, and local observation, my presentation presses toward a shift in which intentionality is not merely a cognitive function but a relational unfolding through environments, histories, and bodies.

This context is particularly exciting because the conference explicitly encourages interdisciplinary engagement across religion, ethics, science, and ecological practice.

Eternity in Time: Christendom College

February 20–21

My week of travel concludes in Virginia at Christendom College for the conference “Eternity in Time: Thinking with the Church Through History.” This gathering brings together scholars across the humanities to reconsider the role of historical consciousness in theological and cultural life.

The conference’s framing invites reflection on how history shapes philosophical and theological reasoning, engaging topics such as patristic thought, doctrinal development, liturgical culture, and the relationship between faith and intellectual inquiry.

I am intrigued by the idea here that historical understanding is not antiquarian. It fosters ethical responsibility and communal awareness by situating human life within temporal continuity. I think we can all take something from that insight.

My contribution here leans into theological and historical retrieval, continuing work connected to the Ecology of the Cross. I’m interested in how premodern theological imagination treated materiality, suffering, and transformation in ways that still hold interpretive potential today (Hildegard, Aquinas, and Stein).

This setting will probably offer a very different conversational atmosphere from the Yale gathering, and that difference is what makes the week meaningful when I look at the whole picture. The encounter between ecological phenomenology and historically grounded theological discourse creates productive friction. Those frictions often generate clarity in my experience.

Ongoing

Preparing these presentations simultaneously has helped me clarify that my work is not best understood as a collection of separate projects but as a continuous effort to cultivate coherence across domains that are often artificially divided… theology, ecology, perception, art, pedagogy, and history, technology (AI, etc).

So If I’m being honest, the main takeaways for me as I sharpen my dissertation focus are:

Attention as ethical practice
Perception as relational participation
Knowledge as encounter rather than extraction

I’d say these takeaways have been shaped as much by teaching in the Carolinas for almost 2 decades and by raising a family with five incredibly unique children as by seminars and research in the archives of books that should be read more. Scholarship that drifts too far from lived worlds loses vitality. I try to keep that tether intact and it’s one reason I’m glad I waited until I was 46 to begin my PhD journey (as irrational as that may sound).

There is always anticipation leading into weeks like this, but also humility. Conferences are not stages for final statements, but are provisional gatherings… spaces where ideas meet other minds and inevitably change shape.

I’m most interested in the conversations that follow the presentations. Those exchanges are where the work actually develops as I’ve learned at the American Academy of Religion, or ISSRNC, or Center for Process Studies, or Affiliate Summit, or AdTech, or Web2.0, or Society of Biblical Literature, or the numerous edu-conferences I’ve presented to over the last 25 years of my meandering career.

We are still learning how to be addressed by the worlds we inhabit, after all.

I’ll post up my slides and thoughts after the travels wind down late next week!

Being Measured: Oura Rings, Wearables, and the Ecology of Attention

I write this as I’m wearing an Apple Watch and have years of my health data stored in Apple Health. However, sometimes a news item lands not as a surprise but as a low-pressure system that makes you draw connections. You don’t react so much as feel the conditions shift.

This piece in Politico this morning about Oura Rings wearable health devices becoming normalized across military programs (I didn’t realize the DOD is Oura’s largest customer), political circles, and public health messaging produced something like that for me. Not an alarm exactly. Not dismissal either. Something closer to unease, which is often where worthwhile thinking begins.

The Defense Department, Oura’s largest customer, now provides rings to certain soldiers and civil servants as an employee benefit. In Congress, they are a hot accessory for representatives and senators as different as Bronx Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Idaho Falls Republican Mike Crapo. Besides buying the rings, lawmakers have gone to bat to protect Oura from Chinese and Indian competitors. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made wearables like the Oura ring part of his Make America Healthy Again movement. He says every American should be sporting one by the end of the decade.

Wearable devices promise knowledge. That promise is seductive because it appears modest. A ring measures sleep, my watch measures heart rate, and sensors measure movement or temperature. Each function is framed as assistance, as clarity, as an expansion of self-understanding. These are framed as tools of wellness. And in many contexts, they are exactly that. They help people notice patterns that might otherwise remain obscure. They can support recovery, discipline, and care.

But something deeper is happening alongside these practical benefits. Wearables do not simply measure bodies. They reorganize attention toward bodies. And attention is never neutral. Attention is ecological. It shapes the environments within which perception unfolds.

From a phenomenological standpoint, the body is not primarily encountered as data. It is lived through sensation, posture, fatigue, hunger, and atmosphere. It is encountered through participation in a world rather than through representation. When Merleau-Ponty writes about embodiment, or when Edith Stein considers empathic access to experience, the body appears as relational presence rather than objectified signal. It is not a dashboard. It is a mode of inhabiting.

Wearable analytics introduce a second layer of encounter. The body becomes statistically legible. One wakes not simply rested or tired, but presented with a readiness score or a determination of “how well” you slept (I, for one, often feel like I’ve slept horribly or really well only to be confronted with a piece of data telling me the opposite at 5:30 AM, and it’s a cognitively confusing way to begin the day). One does not feel stress as tension or agitation alone, but as heart rate variability metrics. Over time, these mediated interpretations begin to compete with lived sensation as arbiters of truth.

This does not eliminate embodiment. But it does refract it.

The ecological question then emerges:

What happens when the perception of self becomes infrastructurally mediated?

What kind of attentional environment forms when intimate experience is continuously translated into an extractable signal?

Here, the conversation moves beyond individual devices toward systems. Data does not remain local. It circulates through platforms, institutions, markets, and governance structures (thanks, Peter Thiel). Even when anonymized or ethically managed, biometric data participates in networks far larger than the individual body from which it originates. Bodies become nodes in informational ecologies.

From the standpoint of ecological intentionality, agency is never isolated. It arises through relational entanglements among bodies, technologies, institutions, and environments. Wearables intensify these entanglements. They fold biological rhythms into digital infrastructures, making physiological processes part of broader technological assemblages.

This is neither purely dystopian nor purely emancipatory. It is transformation.

There are real gains to be acknowledged. Preventive medicine. Behavioral insight. Personalized health awareness. These are not trivial developments. But the transformation also raises subtle spiritual and philosophical questions. When self-knowledge becomes increasingly mediated through algorithmic interpretation, how does trust in lived experience shift? When bodily awareness is quantified, what happens to contemplative attention? When vitality is scored, how does one relate to vulnerability?

Traditions of spiritual discipline have long cultivated attentiveness to breath, posture, hunger, fatigue, and interior movement. These practices did not seek numerical validation. They sought participatory awareness. The difference is not technological versus pre-technological. It is representational awareness versus relational awareness.

This distinction matters because the stakes are ecological. Attention shapes behavior. Behavior shapes environments. Environments shape futures.

If we come to understand our bodies primarily through optimization metrics, we risk narrowing our interpretive field to efficiency and performance. But if wearable technologies are held within a wider horizon of relational awareness, they may instead become companions to reflection rather than replacements for perception.

The task ahead is not rejection nor surrender. It is integration with discernment.

We should ask:

How do we use measurement without being defined by it?
How do we allow data to inform perception without displacing embodied knowing?
How do we remain addressable by the more-than-human world when our awareness is increasingly mediated through technological mirrors?

These questions are not just policy or privacy debates. They are spiritual and ecological inquiries. They concern how persons inhabit bodies within technological worlds.

Unease, in this light, becomes instructive. It signals the presence of transformation that has not yet been fully metabolized into understanding. It invites patience rather than reaction. And perhaps most importantly, it calls us back toward attentional practices capable of holding complexity without collapsing into certainty.

The future of wearable technology will not be determined only by engineers, legislators, or markets (or the military-industrial complex, hopefully). It will also be shaped by how individuals cultivate awareness of their own embodiment within relational ecologies.

And that work begins, as it often does, by noticing how we are already being measured… and how we choose to measure what matters.

The Toxic Impact of Ozempic and Wegovy

For many who struggle with life-threatening obesity, these are “wonder drugs” for sure, and I’m glad people are able to find healthier modes of being with them. However, I grit my teeth and try not to be judgmental when people use Ozempic “just to drop a few pounds.” I get it, weight loss can be difficult, time-consuming, and inefficient. But the ecological (and physiological) impacts are becoming increasingly clear for these types of peptide-based manufactured pharmaceuticals…

How weight-loss drugs are creating an environmental disaster | Pursuit by the University of Melbourne:

But behind this success story lies a largely invisible problem: peptide manufacturing is extraordinarily dirty.

For decades, scientists and industry have relied on a technique called solid phase peptide synthesis (SPPS). It is fast, reliable and scalable, but also creates serious environmental problems.

The timing could not be more critical.

The explosive success of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Rybelsus has laid bare the environmental cost of peptide manufacturing.

Depending on peptide length, producing just one kilogram of a GLP-1 receptor agonist can require up to 14,000 kilograms of toxic organic solvent, most commonly DMF.

By comparison, producing a typical small-molecule drug uses roughly 300 kilograms of solvent per kilogram of product.

With an annual production of semaglutide alone approaching 4,000 kilograms, this single class of medicines is estimated to generate at least 56 million kilograms of toxic solvent waste every year.

Strange Bedfellows and Nationwide Data Center Backlash

Rage against the machine: a California community rallied against a datacenter – and won | Technology | The Guardian:

Over the past year, homegrown revolts against datacenters have united a fractured nation, animating local board meetings from coast to coast in both farming towns and middle-class suburbs. Local communities delayed or cancelled $98bn worth of projects from late March 2025 to June 2025, according to research from the group Data Center Watch, which has been tracking opposition to the sites since 2023. More than 50 active groups across 17 states targeted 30 projects during that time period, two-thirds of which were halted.

The movement against these facilities has even made for strange bedfellows, bringing together nimbys and environmentalists in Virginia, “Stop the Steal” activists and Democratic Socialists of America organizers in Michigan.

“There’s no safe space for datacenters,” said Miquel Vila, lead analyst at Data Center Watch, a research project run by AI security company 10a Labs. “Opposition is happening in very different communities.”

Consciousness Talk in the Mainstream

🙋‍♂️

(Interesting to see thinkers like Pollan wade into the realm of consciousness and panpsychism now… times they are a changin’!)

Michael Pollan Says Humanity Is About to Undergo a Revolutionary Change – The New York Times (Gift Article):

Panpsychism is the idea that everything, every particle, the ink on the page, the atoms, all have some infinitesimal degree of psyche or consciousness, and somehow this consciousness is combined in some way from our cells and the rest of our bodies to create this kind of superconsciousness. It sounds crazy. There are some very serious people who believe in it. You have to expand your sense of the plausible when you’re looking at consciousness. But we’ve done that before. How long ago was it that we discovered electromagnetism? This crazy idea that there are all these waves passing through us that can carry information. That’s just as mind-blowing, right?

When Agency Becomes Ecological: AI, Labor, and the Redistribution of Attention

I read this piece in Futurism this morning, highlighting anxiety among employees at Anthropic about the very tools they are building. Agent-based AI systems designed to automate professional tasks are advancing quickly, and even insiders are expressing unease that these systems could displace forms of work that have long anchored identity and livelihood. The familiar story is one of replacement with machines and agents taking jobs, efficiency outpacing meaning, and productivity outrunning dignity.

“It kind of feels like I’m coming to work every day to put myself out of a job.”

That narrative is understandable. It is also incomplete.

It assumes agency is something discrete, something possessed. Either humans have it or ai agents do. Either labor is done by us or by them. This framing reflects a deeply modern inheritance in which action is imagined as individual, bounded, and owned. But if we step back and look phenomenologically, ecologically, even theologically, agency rarely appears that way in lived experience.

However, agency unfolds relationally. It arises through environments, histories, infrastructures, bodies, tools, and attentional fields that exceed any single actor. Whitehead described events as occasions within webs of relation rather than isolated units of causation. Merleau-Ponty reminded us that perception itself is co-constituted with the world it encounters. Edith Stein traced empathy as a participatory structure that bridges subjectivities. In each of these traditions, action is never solitary. It is ecological.

Seen from this vantage, AI agents do not simply replace agency. They redistribute it.

Workplaces become assemblages of human judgment, algorithmic suggestion, interface design, energy supply, and data pipelines. Decisions emerge from entanglement while expertise shifts from individual mastery toward collaborative navigation of hybrid systems. What unsettles people is not merely job loss, but the destabilization of familiar coordinates that once made agency legible to us.

This destabilization is not unprecedented. Guild laborers faced mechanization during the Industrial Revolution(s). Scribes faced it with the advent of the printing press. Monastics faced it when clocks began structuring devotion instead of bells and sunlight. Each moment involved a rearrangement of where attention was placed and how authority was structured. The present transition is another such rearrangement, though unfolding at computational speed.

Attention is the deeper currency here.

Agent systems promise efficiency precisely because they absorb attentional burden. They monitor, synthesize, draft, suggest, and route. But attention is not neutral bandwidth. It is a formative ecological force. Where attention flows, worlds take shape. If attentional responsibility migrates outward into technical systems, the question is not whether humans lose agency. It is what kinds of perception and responsiveness remain cultivated in us.

This is the moment where the conversation often stops short as discussions of automation typically orbit labor markets or productivity metrics or stock values. Rarely do they ask what habits of awareness diminish when engagement becomes mediated through algorithmic intermediaries. What forms of ecological attunement grow quieter when interaction shifts further toward abstraction.

And rarer still is acknowledgment of the material ecology enabling this shift.

Every AI agent relies on infrastructure that consumes electricity, water, land, and minerals. Data centers do not hover in conceptual space. They occupy watersheds. They reshape local grids. They alter thermal patterns. They compete with agricultural and municipal electrical grid and water demands. These realities are not peripheral to agency, but are conditions through which agency is enacted.

In places like here in the Carolinas, where digital infrastructure continues expanding exponentially, it seems the redistribution of agency is already tangible. Decisions about automation are inseparable from decisions about energy sourcing, zoning, and water allocation. The ecological footprint of computation folds into local landscapes long before its outputs appear in professional workflows.

Agency, again, proves ecological.

To recognize this is not to reject AI systems or retreat into Luddite nostalgia. The aim is attentiveness rather than resistance. Transitions of this magnitude call for widening perception (and resulting ethics) rather than narrowing judgment. If agency is relational, then responsibility must be relational as well. Designing, deploying, regulating, and using these tools all participate in shaping the ecologies they inhabit.

Perhaps the most generative question emerging from this moment is not whether artificial intelligence will take our agency. It is whether we can learn to inhabit redistributed agency wisely. Whether we can remain perceptive participants rather than passive recipients. Whether we can sustain forms of attention capable of noticing both digital transformation and the soils, waters, and energies through which it flows.

Late in the afternoon, sitting near the black walnut I’ve been tracking the past year, these abstractions tend to settle. Agency there is unmistakably ecological as we’d define it. Wind, insects, light, decay, growth, and memory intermingle without boundary disputes. Nothing acts alone, and nothing possesses its influence outright. The tree neither competes with nor yields to agency. It participates.

Our technologies, despite their novelty, do not remove us from that condition. They draw us deeper into it. The question is whether we will learn to notice.

Our AI Assisted Present (Follow Up)

This was by far my biggest post in 2016, and I think it’s fascinating that it took about a decade to happen. But here we are.

Our AI Assisted (Near) Future – Sam Harrelson:

In the very near future of compatible API’s and interconnected services, I’ll be able to message this to my AI assistant (saving me hours):

“Amy, my client needs a new website. Get that set up for me on the agency Media Temple’s account as a new WordPress install and set up four email accounts with the following names. Also, go ahead and link the site to Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, and install Yoast to make sure the SEO is ok. I’ll send over some tags and content but pull the pictures you need from their existing account. They like having lots of white space on the site as well.”

That won’t put me out of a job, but it will make what I do even more specialized.

Whole sectors of jobs and service related positions will disappear while new jobs that we can’t think of yet will be created. If we look at the grand scheme of history, we’re just at the very beginning of the “computing revolution” or “internet revolution” and the keyboard / mouse / screen paradigm of interacting with the web and computers themselves are certainly going to change (soon, I hope).