I’m Sam Harrelson, a scholar, minister, educator, writer, and consultant living in Spartanburg, South Carolina. My work grows from a persistent question: how might we learn to perceive other lives, human and more-than-human, with enough attention to be changed by what we encounter?
I work at the intersections of ecology, theology, phenomenology, and the lived experience of particular places. I’m interested in how ideas take root in bodies, communities, watersheds, institutions, and stories. Much of my writing begins with ordinary encounters in the Carolinas: rain moving across a yard, a creek carrying water toward the sea, a black walnut responding to heat and season, or the memories held by a landscape.
At the center of this work is a theological and philosophical project I call The Ecology of the Cross. It asks how Christian theology might respond to ecological crisis through attention, participation, self-giving, and a relinquishment of the desire for mastery. The project develops through what I call ecological intentionality, a way of describing how living beings become perceptible as lives with their own forms, directedness, and worlds.
Current Work
I’m a PhD student in Philosophy and Religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies, concentrating in Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion. My doctoral research brings Edith Stein into conversation with Aristotle, Henri Bergson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Ruyer, John of the Cross, and contemporary ecological thought.
Stein’s phenomenology of empathy gives me a way to describe an encounter in which another life becomes genuinely present while remaining irreducibly other. Aristotle, Bergson, and Ruyer help me think about living beings as internally formed and dynamically unfolding. Merleau-Ponty describes the shared sensible world within which encounter becomes possible. The Christian theology of the cross then raises a further question: what must change within the perceiver when attention continues to turn what is given into something available for possession?
Ecological intentionality names the organism-milieu-perceiver relation that emerges from these conversations. The Ecology of the Cross names the transformation from mastery toward reception. Together, they provide the developing framework for my dissertation.
Although the vocabulary is philosophical, the work remains tied to particular places. I return frequently to the black walnut behind our house in Spartanburg, to the red clay and watersheds of the Piedmont, and to the rivers, wetlands, and memory-laden landscapes of the Pee Dee and Lowcountry. These places give the concepts somewhere to stand, and they retain the ability to correct them.
The Path Here
I studied religion at Wofford College, earning a BA in 2000, and later earned a Master of Arts in Religion from Yale Divinity School, concentrating in Religion and the Arts. While working as a curatorial assistant at the Yale University Art Gallery, I researched the Assyrian palace reliefs that arrived at Yale during the nineteenth century.
That research became Asia Has Claims Upon New England: Assyrian Reliefs at Yale, published by the Yale University Art Gallery in 2006. The book examined the reliefs’ materials and religious iconography alongside the missionary, institutional, and cultural histories through which they were removed from the palace of Ashurnasirpal II and brought to New England. Nearly twenty years later, I returned to those objects through ecological intentionality, asking what displacement does to perception and what responsibilities accompany the act of seeing a form removed from its world.
I spent many years teaching across the Carolinas, including physics, environmental science, earth science, biology, literature, religious studies, mathematics, robotics, and creative writing. I also served as a dean of students and taught at the university level. Moving between the sciences and humanities taught me to distrust the boundaries we draw between ways of knowing. A physics classroom, a theology seminar, and a walk through a watershed can all become places where attention is trained.
I’m also an ordained minister in the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Scripture, preaching, congregational life, and the long history of Christian reflection remain essential to my work. The cross interests me as a doctrine, a historical event, a material form, and a pattern of self-giving relation that continues to make demands upon Christian life in an age of ecological rupture.
Alongside teaching, ministry, and scholarship, I’ve spent more than two decades helping organizations, congregations, and creative projects understand their public voice. Through the Harrelson Agency and my consulting work, I help people develop strategies, narratives, and digital ecosystems shaped by attention, clarity, and purpose.
Life in the Carolinas
I grew up in Marion County in the Pee Dee region of South Carolina and now live in Spartanburg. The movement between the Pee Dee, the Midlands, the mountains, and the Piedmont has shaped how I understand home. For me, home is a watershed before it is an address. It is the ground that receives us, forms our habits, carries our memories, and asks something of us in return.
I share this life with my wife, Merianna, a minister, educator, and spiritual director, and our five children: Mary Hudson, Laura, Ben, Emmylou, and Lily. Family life keeps the philosophical questions close to the ground. Parenting, church, school mornings, baseball games, falling walnuts, long conversations, and the ordinary work of keeping a household become their own forms of ecological and spiritual practice.
My writing ranges across academic papers, sermons, public theology, essays, poetry, technology, and reflections on life in the Carolinas. I understand these as parts of one practice: learning how to attend more carefully to one another and to the more-than-human world, and asking what such attention requires from us.
Elsewhere
Papers and Publications | Curriculum Vitae | Carolina Ecology | Consulting | Contact