Year: 2026

Listening as a Way of Life: Practicing Ecological Theology in a Noisy World

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about listening as we’ve navigated the holidays, Winter Break from school, family events, travel, and the everyday chores that demand our family’s attention. Not listening as a metaphor or as a communication skill. Listening as a way of being in the world.

Most of us are constantly surrounded by sound (especially those of us with young children!), but we listen to very little of it. We register noise. We filter information. We scan for what is useful, threatening, or affirming. That kind of listening is instrumental. It asks in advance, “What can this do for me?”

Ecological listening begins somewhere else. It begins with attention that does not yet know what it is for. I’m thankful for my black walnut friend for this guidance.

From a phenomenological perspective, listening is not passive. It is an intentional act. To listen is to allow oneself to be addressed. It is to let something outside the self take the initiative, even briefly. That is harder than it sounds. We are trained, especially in modern Western life, to approach the world as a set of objects to be managed, interpreted, or optimized. Listening disrupts that posture. It asks us to suspend our need to control the encounter.

This is why listening matters theologically. Before doctrine or ethics or activism. There is the question of whether we can be addressed at all.

Listening and Intentionality

Phenomenology reminds us that consciousness is always consciousness of something. Our attention is directed, but that direction can be narrow or wide, defensive or receptive. Edmund Husserl called this intentionality. Merleau-Ponty pressed it further by reminding us that attention is embodied. We do not listen from nowhere. We listen with ears, with posture, with breath, with a body situated in a place.

Edith Stein’s work on empathy adds another layer. For Stein, empathy is not projection or a weakness that many “podcast bros” or TikTokers proclaim in our modern context. It is not imagining the other as a version of myself. It is a disciplined openness to the reality of another as other. That discipline applies just as much to non-human life as it does to human relationships. Listening, in this sense, is not about understanding everything. It is about refusing to collapse alterity.

Ecological listening asks us to practice this refusal again and again.

Listening Beyond the Human

When I sit outside with the black walnut tree in my backyard, I am not listening for a message. I am listening for presence. The creak of branches in the wind and the uneven rhythm of leaves falling or squirrels navigating its trunk. The shift in bird calls when a hawk moves through the canopy. None of this arrives as information. It arrives as an encounter.

The temptation is always to turn these moments into symbols. The tree teaches patience. The hawk represents vigilance. The wind speaks of change. Sometimes those interpretations are beautiful and even true. But they can also become a way of not listening. Metaphor can be a shortcut around attention.

Ecological listening stays with the phenomenon longer than is comfortable. It notices how quickly the mind wants to label, interpret, or move on. It resists that urge. Not forever, but long enough to allow the world to remain more than our categories.

This matters because the ecological crisis is not only a technical failure, and we need to reframe our thinking and intentionality if we are to move ahead as a species. It is a failure of attention. We have become very good at seeing the world as a resource and very poor at encountering it as a neighbor.

Theological Stakes

The biblical tradition is full of listening language. Hear, O Israel. Let anyone with ears listen. The still small voice. These are not commands to acquire information. They are invitations into relationship.

Listening, in this sense, is kenotic. It requires a kind of self-emptying. To listen well, I have to loosen my grip on certainty, productivity, and mastery. I have to accept that the world does not exist, nor did it come into being primarily for my use or our corporate use as humans.

This is where ecological theology becomes concrete. Creation is not mute matter waiting for meaning to be imposed upon it. It is a field of address. To listen is to acknowledge that agency, vitality, and value are not confined to human consciousness.

This does not mean romanticizing nature or pretending that trees speak English. It means recognizing that the more-than-human world expresses itself in ways that exceed our interpretive habits. Growth patterns. Stress responses. Seasonal rhythms. Resilience and fragility. These are not metaphors for spiritual truths. They are realities that can form us if we attend to them.

Listening as Practice

Listening is not a mood. It is a practice. And like any practice, it requires repetition and restraint.

Here are a few ways I have been trying to cultivate ecological listening in ordinary life:

First, sit with the same non-human presence more than once. Not once. Not occasionally. Return to the same tree, creek, patch of ground, or stretch of sky. Familiarity deepens attention rather than dulling it, if we let it.

Second, listen without recording. No photos. No notes. No audio. Just the body in place. Notice how uncomfortable that can feel. Notice the urge to capture rather than receive.

Third, attend to sound fading into silence. Wind dying down. Birdsong pausing. Traffic thinning late at night. Silence is not the absence of sound. It is a texture of listening.

Fourth, notice how your body responds. Does your breath slow or tighten. Do your shoulders drop or rise. Listening is not just auditory. It is somatic.

None of this is dramatic. That is the point. Ecological listening trains us to value what does not announce itself loudly.

Why This Matters Now

We live in a culture that rewards reaction more than attention, from social media to news headlines to political donations and church sermons. Outrage travels faster than listening. Certainty feels safer than curiosity. But ecological life does not flourish under those conditions. Neither does theology.

If theology is going to speak meaningfully in a time of ecological unraveling, it cannot begin with answers alone. It must begin with the discipline of being addressed by a world that is already speaking, even when we are not listening.

Listening will not solve the climate crisis. But without listening, every solution risks becoming another form of domination.

To practice listening is to practice humility and empathy. It is to accept that the world is not exhausted by our understanding. That may be the most theological claim of all.

SciFi Predictions

Fun read here for fans of science fiction like myself…

Among the Prophets | Nicholas Russell:

For the past few months, I’ve been researching how science fiction has been used as a guide for predicting the future. This has included reading interviews and speeches, the testimony of would-be prophets. Naturally, certain quotes pop up like weeds—but, in the case of the more platitudinal selections, no one can seem to agree on who actually said them. “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future” was either coined by Danish physicist Niels Bohr or mythic Yankees catcher Yogi Berra. It’s entirely possible both men did, in fact, say some variation of the quote, though it’s more likely that Bohr, who was forty years older, said it first. But then again, he may not have said it at all.

Daimons, Demons, and Discernment

I’ve been following conversations (such as this one on Reddit) around UAPs and “high strangeness” with a mix of fascination and caution for a few years now. Part of that comes from my work in and around academic consciousness studies, particularly where ecology, perception, and meaning intersect. Part of it comes from being an ordained pastor with a Masters from Yale in ancient religious literature who has spent 30+ years reading and academically studying ancient religious texts (mainly Ancient Near Eastern as well as Jewish, Greek, and Christian) that modern people often misunderstand as either naïve or hysterical.

A recent Substack essay by Maze to Metanoia, “The Pentagon Calls Them Demons. The Public Calls Them Aliens. Both Are Wrong.”, crystallizes many of these tensions well.

The piece traces how some government and military insiders have evidently described UAP phenomena not as extraterrestrial, but as “demonic,” while arguing that this language reflects a collapse of conceptual nuance rather than genuine discernment. I’m broadly sympathetic to that concern, especially the frustration with oscillating between reductionist materialism that modern scientific thinking takes on phenomena and experience, and reactionary supernaturalism that gets classified in modern parlance as “woo.”

But I also think something more subtle is happening and that’s why I’ve long been fascinated with “the phenomenon” or “UFO / UAP” or transdimensional entities or whatever tag we’d like to use for these experiences.

Was “demonic” language really a regression?

There’s a common assumption that invoking demons signals a return to medieval superstition. Historically, however, religious traditions were often far more phenomenologically careful and nuanced than we give them credit for (from Sumerian and Babylonian traditions through medieval mystics in both Jewish and Christian traditions). Early Jewish, Greek, and Christian sources did not assume that every non-human encounter was evil. What they assumed was that such encounters required discernment, ethical scrutiny, and attention to long-term outcomes rather than fascination, power, or spectacle (or immediate worship).

The question was rarely “what is this thing?” in the abstract. It was “how does this encounter shape desire, attention, humility, fear, or care for others?” Those traditions were less interested in cataloging beings than in evaluating relationships. We see this in Ezekiel, Enoch (the beloved book of many podcasters these days, such as Joe Rogan, when describing ancient conceptions of this phenomenon), ancient Greek texts, ancient Hindu scripture, etc.

Our difficulty today is not that we’ve lost belief in demons or angels. It’s that modernity trained us to reduce experience to either brute matter or fantasy. Or, perhaps worse, to a thin modern notion of “myth” that bears almost no resemblance to how ancient cultures understood symbolic or participatory reality/realities.

When that reduction collapses under the weight of lived experience, what people now call “high strangeness,” the nearest available language is often moralized, flattened, and extreme. Everything becomes either benevolent space saviors or literal demons from hell, and nuance disappears.

Daimons were never monsters

The retrieval of the Greek concept of daimōn is helpful here, if we handle it carefully. In Plato’s Symposium and Apology, Socrates speaks of daimons not as horned villains, but as mediating presences that operate between gods and humans, shaping conscience, attention, and orientation toward the good. They were not objects of worship, nor simply metaphysical species to be classified. They were relational realities that required discernment.

Later Christian thinkers inherited this complexity more than is often acknowledged. While the category of “demon” hardened over time as did some doctrines, early Christian writers were deeply concerned with testing spirits, examining fruits, and resisting fascination. The danger was not that non-human encounters existed, but that humans would become captivated, destabilized, or morally disoriented by them.

This emphasis on discernment persists well into medieval mysticism. Figures such as Evagrius Ponticus, John Cassian, Hildegard of Bingen, and later Teresa of Ávila were all deeply wary of visions and encounters that bypassed humility, patience, and care for others. Spectacle was suspect while psychological destabilization mattered. In this way, ethical aftermath mattered more than ontological explanation.

Pasulka and technological mysticism

Diana Walsh Pasulka’s work has been especially clarifying for me here. In American Cosmic (interesting read!) and subsequent essays, she documents how contemporary UAP encounters function less like technological contact events and more like religious disclosures

Experiencers often reach for the language of craft, technology, or engineering, but the structure of the experience itself closely resembles mystical visions. They are disruptive, meaning-laden, psychologically destabilizing, and interpretively plastic. The language changes with the cultural moment, but the phenomenological pattern remains strikingly consistent.

This does not make the experiences “supernatural” in a simplistic sense. It does suggest that engineering metaphors alone are insufficient. The encounters are not just about information transfer or hardware. They are about being addressed.

The daimonic as a stance, not an ontology

For that reason, I’d frame the daimonic not as a third ontological category alongside aliens (or angels) and demons, but as a disciplinary stance. It names encounters with beings or phenomena that address us, shape desire, solicit attention, and reorient meaning without being reducible to either hardware or hallucination.

This aligns closely with phenomenological approaches to consciousness, which bracket premature explanations to attend carefully to how experience presents itself, how it affects perception, and how it alters relational posture over time. I’ve written elsewhere about this in the context of ecological intentionality and vegetal empathy, where the question is not whether trees or ecosystems “have consciousness” in a technical sense, but how learning to attend differently reshapes ethical life.

Ancient traditions were often more patient than we are. They assumed that some aspects of reality disclose themselves slowly through disciplined attention rather than through spectacle or proof.

Slowing down instead of swinging wildly

If modern discourse around this issue (and many others!) could recover that slower, ethical, wary posture, one that resists fascination and immediate worship, we would be in a far healthier place than swinging between cosmic alien saviors and cosmic demonic enemies. Discernment is restraint, not denial.

Socrates trusted his daimon, according to Plato, not because it dazzled him, but because it restrained him. Christian mystics trusted experiences that produced humility, patience, and love of neighbor, not fear, obsession, or special knowledge. Ecology teaches something similar. Attention that rushes to mastery often destroys what it seeks to understand.

Whatever these phenomena ultimately are, ancient wisdom suggests that the most important question is not what they are made of, but what kind of relationship they invite, and at what cost. That feels like a lesson worth recovering to me, whether discussing the fascinating phenomenon, politics, community ethics, or our broader ecologies.

Stats from 2025

This is a little self-indulgent, but I wanted to share some of the interesting stats from my blog in 2025. I was rather surprised to see the site have one its “best” year (numbers-wise with page views, likes, and comments… I won’t apply that label to my own content) since 2016 and reaching levels it was hitting at the height of blogging on the web in the mid 2000’s (though I do think we’re seeing a return to blog culture as more people realize the attention engines of social media are turning us all into wretched creatures).

  • Total posts in 2025: 234 (now up to 3,973 published posts since 2006)
  • Total words written in 2025: 58,300 (don’t tell my PhD advisor)
  • Most popular post time: Thursday 5:00 PM (21% of views… I always tell clients that Tuesday mornings and Thursday afternoons are the times when people consume content on the web… still holds true)
  • Total page views in 2025: 90,434 (2016 had 120,469 and 2011 saw 100,081 views for comparison)
  • Total views all time: 1,002,067
  • Total unique visitors all time: 570,862
  • Best month ever: December 2025 (yep, last month the blog saw its record 37,000 views, which beats out January 2007’s 34,000… crazy!)

All told, I really don’t care that much about these sorts of stats these days as I know I’m writing for a niche audience. I don’t monetize this site (or your visits, data, or viewing habits in any way beyond simple page views… no Google Analytics, etc. here). However, it is endearing to see new people find and interact with my ramblings here, but especially to see all of you who come back as repeat visitors that like articles, leave comments, and (yes) even share sometimes on social media outlets. I deeply appreciate your engagement, and definitely reach out if you ever have questions about my writing, opinions, or work!

Christian Wiman, Consciousness, and Learning How to Listen Again

Yale Div’s Christian Wiman’s recent essay in Harper’s, “The Tune of Things,” arrives quietly and then stays. A family member sent it over this week, and I was embarrassed that I hadn’t read it yet, given how closely it moves with my own ideas I’m working on with Ecology of the Cross in my PhD work in Religion and Ecology at CIIS. It does not argue its way forward so much as it listens its way into being. What Wiman offers is not a solution to the problem of consciousness or a defense of God against disbelief, but a practiced attentiveness to the fact that experience itself refuses to stay neatly within the conceptual boundaries we have inherited or believe in.

Wiman begins with a claim that feels both modest and destabilizing to me. “Mind,” he writes, “may not be something we have so much as something we participate in.” That single sentence unsettles the familiar picture of consciousness as a private interior possession. It gestures instead toward a relational field, something closer to a shared atmosphere than an object locked behind the eyes.

This way of speaking feels deeply familiar to my own work, not because it echoes a particular school or theory, but because it names what many of us already sense when we attend carefully to lived experience. Consciousness does not present itself phenomenologically as a sealed container or neat set of ideas that we can wrap into a commodity. It shows up as an ongoing entanglement of body, world, memory, anticipation, and meaning. The question is not whether consciousness exists, but where it is happening.

Consciousness Beyond the Skull

One of the strengths of Wiman’s essay is his refusal to treat consciousness as either a purely neurological problem or a purely spiritual one. He draws on contemporary physics, biology, and psychology, not to collapse mystery into mechanism, but to show how poorly the old categories hold. When Wiman notes that “the more closely we study matter, the less inert it appears,” he is not smuggling theology into science. He is taking science seriously on its own terms.

This matters for ecological theology. If matter is not passive, if it is already expressive, responsive, and patterned in ways that exceed mechanical description, then the more-than-human world cannot be reduced to backdrop or resource. It becomes participant. Trees, animals, watersheds, even landscapes shaped by wind and erosion begin to appear less like objects we manage and more like presences we encounter.

I am reminded here again of my own work with what I have come to call ecological intentionality. Intentionality, in the phenomenological sense, is not about conscious planning or willpower. It names the basic directedness of experience, the way consciousness is always consciousness of something. What Wiman’s essay makes visible is that this directedness may not be exclusive to humans. The world itself appears oriented, expressive, and responsive in ways that ask for attention rather than control.

Physics, Poetics, and the Shape of Attention

Wiman is a poet, and his essay never lets us forget that. But his poetry is not ornamental. It functions as a mode of knowing. At one point, he observes that “poetry is not a decoration of belief but a discipline of attention.” That line is especially important in a moment when belief is often framed as assent to propositions rather than a way of inhabiting the world.

From the standpoint of religion and ecology, this matters enormously. The ecological crisis is not finally a crisis of information. We know what is happening. There’s peer-reviewed and well-established data. It is a crisis of perception. We have lost practices that train us to notice what is already addressing us. Poetry, like prayer or like phenomenological description, slows the rush to mastery and reopens the possibility of being affected.

Physics enters the essay not as proof but as pressure. Quantum indeterminacy, entanglement, and the breakdown of classical objectivity all point toward a universe that is less thing-like and more relational than we once assumed. Wiman does not claim that physics proves God. Instead, he allows it to unsettle the assumption that reality is exhausted by what can be measured. “The universe,” he writes, “appears less like a machine and more like a music we are already inside.”

Music is an instructive metaphor here. Einstein and his love of Bach would agree. A tune is not an object you possess. It exists only in time, in relation, in vibration. You cannot hold it still without destroying it. Consciousness, on this account, behaves similarly. It is not a substance but an event. Not a thing but a happening.

God Without Final Answers

One of the most compelling aspects of Wiman’s essay is its theological restraint. God is never offered as an explanation that ties things up neatly. Instead, God appears as the one who (what?) interrupts closure. Wiman writes, “God is not the answer to the mystery of consciousness but the depth of that mystery, the refusal of the world to be fully accounted for.”

This approach aligns closely with the theological sensibility I have been cultivating (for better or worse) in my own work. A theology adequate to ecological crisis cannot be one that rushes to certainty. It must remain answerable to suffering, extinction, and loss. It must make room for grief. And it must be willing to say that God is not something we solve but something we learn to attend to.

There is also an ethical implication here. If consciousness and meaning are not exclusively human achievements, then domination becomes harder to justify. The more-than-human world is no longer mute. It is not that trees speak in sentences, but that they address us through growth, decay, stress, resilience, and presence. To live well in such a world requires learning how to listen.

Ecology as a Practice of Listening

What stays with me most after reading Wiman’s essay is its insistence that attention itself is a moral and spiritual practice. “The tune of things,” he suggests, “is already playing. The question is whether we are willing to quiet ourselves enough to hear it.” Let those with eyes to see and ears to hear, and all of that.

This is where ecology, religion, physics, and poetics converge. Each, in its own way, trains attention. Ecology teaches us to notice relationships rather than isolated units. Physics teaches us to relinquish naive objectivity. Poetry teaches us to dwell with language until it opens rather than closes meaning (channeling Catherine Pickstock). Religion, at its best, teaches us how to remain open to what exceeds us without fleeing into certainty.

In my own daily practice, this often looks very small. Sitting with a black walnut tree in my backyard. Noticing how light shifts on bark after rain. Listening to birds respond to changes I cannot yet see. These are not romantic gestures. They are exercises in re-learning how to be addressed by a world that does not exist for my convenience. Seeing the world again as my six-year-old daughter does, with all of her mystic powers that school and our conception of selfhood will soon try to push away from her soul, sadly.

Wiman’s essay gives me language for why these practices matter. They are not escapes from reality. They are ways of inhabiting it more honestly.

Listening as Theological Method

If I were to name the quiet thesis running beneath “The Tune of Things,” it would be this. Theology begins not with answers but with listening. Not listening for confirmation of what we already believe, but listening for what unsettles us.

That posture feels urgently needed now. In an age of climate instability, technological acceleration towards the computational metrics of AI models, the extension of the wrong-headed metaphor that our brain is primarily a computer, and spiritual exhaustion, we need fewer declarations and more disciplined attention. We need ways of thinking that do not rush past experience in the name of control.

Wiman does not offer a system. He offers an invitation. To listen. To stay with mystery. To allow consciousness, ecology, and God to remain entangled rather than neatly sorted. That invitation feels like one worth accepting.